david foster wallace philosophy thesis

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Philosophical Sweep

To understand the fiction of david foster wallace, it helps to have a little wittgenstein..

The following is adapted from “A Head That Throbbed Heartlike: The Philosophical Mind of David Foster Wallace,” an introduction to Wallace’s undergraduate honor thesis in philosophy, which has just been published by Columbia University Press as Fate, Time, and Language: An Essay on Free Will .

I. “A special sort of buzz”

When the future novelist David Foster Wallace was about 14 years old, he asked his father, the University of Illinois philosophy professor James D. Wallace, to explain to him what philosophy is, so that when people would ask him exactly what it was that his father did, he could give them an answer. James had the two of them read Plato’s Phaedo dialogue together, an experience that turned out to be pivotal in his understanding of his son. “I had never had an undergraduate student who caught on so quickly or who responded with such maturity and sophistication,” James recalls. “This was this first time I realized what a phenomenal mind David had.”

The experience seems to have made an impression on David as well. Not long after he arrived at Amherst College in the early 1980s, he developed a reputation among his professors as a rare philosophical talent, an exceptional student who combined raw analytical horsepower with an indefatigable work ethic. He was thought, by himself and by others, to be headed toward a career as a professor of philosophy. Even after he began writing fiction, a pursuit he undertook midway through college, philosophy remained the source of his academic identity. “I knew him as a philosopher with a fiction hobby,” Jay Garfield, a professor now at Smith College who worked with Wallace at the time, remembers. “I didn’t realize he was one of the great fiction writers of his generation with a philosophy hobby.”

For most of college, Wallace’s main philosophical interests were in the more technical branches of the subject, such as mathematical logic and the philosophy of language. One semester, he took a seminar on the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose early work grapples with the writings of Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell, two of the founders of modern logic. As Wallace recollected in 1992 in a letter to the novelist Lance Olsen, he was “deeply taken” in the seminar with Wittgenstein’s first book, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921). Along with its controversial arguments about the nature and limits of language, the Tractatus introduced some indisputable formal innovations, including a method of analyzing the propositions of modern logic by way of “truth tables.” To some, the book might have seemed forbiddingly spare and exacting; Wallace remembered being moved by its “cold formal beauty.” When the seminar moved on to Wittgenstein’s so-called late philosophy, in which he repudiates the ideas and austere methodology of the Tractatus in favor of new assumptions and a looser, less mathematical style, Wallace was not immediately impressed. He wrote to Olsen that at first he found Philosophical Investigations , the crowning statement of the late philosophy, to be “silly.”

Wallace would later identify his attraction to technical philosophy in aesthetic terms: It was, he suggested, a craving for a certain kind of beauty, for the variety of imaginative experience characteristic of formal systems like mathematics and chess. In an interview with the literary critic Larry McCaffery published in 1993, Wallace explained that as a philosophy student he had been “chasing a special sort of buzz,” a flash of feeling whose nature he didn’t comprehend at first. “One teacher called these moments ‘mathematical experiences,’ ” he recalled. “What I didn’t know then was that a mathematical experience was aesthetic in nature, an epiphany in Joyce’s original sense. These moments appeared in proof-completions, or maybe algorithms. Or like a gorgeously simple solution you suddenly see after filling half a notebook with gnarly attempted solutions. It was really an experience of what I think Yeats called ‘the click of a well-made box.’ The word I always think of it as is ‘click.’ ”

For his honors thesis in philosophy, Wallace continued to chase the click, writing a highly specialized, 76-page work on the metaphysical doctrine of fatalism (which holds, quite radically, that human actions and decisions have no influence on the future). Brace yourself for a sample sentence: “Let Φ (a physical possibility structure) be a set of distinct but intersecting paths j i – j n , each of which is a set of functions, L’s, on ordered pairs ( ), such that for any L n , L m in some j i , L n R L m , where R is a primitive accessibility relation corresponding to physical possibility understood in terms of diachronic physical compatibility.” There are reasons that he is better known for an essay about a cruise ship.

II. An “artistic and religious crisis”

One of the many impressive aspects of Wallace’s work on the thesis was that he was able to sustain his philosophical focus long after having begun a countervailing transformation: from budding philosopher to burgeoning novelist. The transition was set in motion toward the end of his sophomore year, when a bout of severe depression overcame him. He left school early and took off the following term. Wallace would suffer from depression for much of his life, and he tended to avoid public discussion of it. On a rare occasion in which he did allude publicly to his hiatus from Amherst, in his interview with McCaffery about a decade later, he described the episode as a crisis of identity precipitated by mounting ambivalence about his future as a philosopher. “I was just awfully good at technical philosophy,” he said, “and it was the first thing I’d ever been really good at, and so everybody, including me, anticipated I’d make it a career. But it sort of emptied out for me somewhere around age twenty.”

A debilitating panic followed. “Not a fun time,” he went on. “I think I had a kind of midlife crisis at twenty, which probably doesn’t augur well for my longevity.” He moved back home to Illinois, “planning to play solitaire and stare out the window,” as he put it—”whatever you do in a crisis.” Though he now doubted that he should devote his life to philosophy, he was still drawn to the topic and found ways to engage with it, even dropping in on a few of his father’s lectures at the university, where he monopolized the discussion. “He came to some of my classes in aesthetics, and tended to press me very hard,” James Wallace told me. “The classes usually turned into a dialogue between David and me. The students looked on with ‘Who is this guy?’ looks on their faces.”

During this time, Wallace started writing fiction. Though it represented a clean break from philosophy, fiction, as an art form, offered something comparable to the feeling of aesthetic recognition that he had sought in mathematical logic—the so-called click. “At some point in my reading and writing that fall I discovered the click existed in literature, too,” he told McCaffery. “It was real lucky that just when I stopped being able to get the click from math logic I started to be able to get it from fiction.” When he returned to Amherst, he nonetheless resumed his philosophical studies (eventually including his work on Taylor’s “Fatalism”), but with misgivings: he hoped he would ultimately be bold enough to give up philosophy for literature. His close friend Mark Costello, who roomed with him at Amherst (and also became a novelist), told me that the shift was daunting for Wallace. “The world, the reference, of philosophy was an incredibly comfortable place for young Dave,” he said. “It was a paradox. The formal intellectual terms were cold, exact, even doomed. But as a place to be, a room to be in, it was familiar, familial, recognized.” Fiction, Costello said, was the “alien, risky place.”

Wallace’s solution was to pursue both aims at once. His senior year, while writing the honors thesis in philosophy, he also completed an honors thesis in creative writing for the English Department, a work of fiction nearly 500 pages long that would become his first novel, The Broom of the System , which was published two years later, in 1987. Even just the manual labor required to produce two separate theses could be overwhelming, as suggested by an endearingly desperate request Wallace made in a letter to William Kennick, the Amherst professor who had taught his Wittgenstein seminar. “Since you’re on leave,” he wrote, “are you using your little office in Frost library? If not, does it have facilities for typing, namely an electrical outlet and a reasonably humane chair? If so, could I maybe use the office from time to time this spring? I have a truly horrifying amount of typing to do this spring—mostly for my English thesis, which has grown Blob-like and out of control—and my poor neighbors here in Moore are already being kept up and bothered a lot.”

Despite the heavy workload, Wallace managed to produce a first draft of the philosophy thesis well ahead of schedule, before winter break of his senior year, and he finished both theses early, submitting them before spring break. He spent the last month or so of the school year reading other students’ philosophy theses and offering advice. “He was an incredibly hard worker,” Willem deVries, a philosopher now at the University of New Hampshire and the principal adviser on Wallace’s thesis, told me, recalling the bewilderment with which he and his fellow professors viewed Wallace. “We were just shaking our heads.” By the end of his tenure at Amherst, Wallace decided to commit himself to fiction, having concluded that, of the two enterprises, it allowed for a fuller expression of himself. “Writing The Broom of the System , I felt like I was using 97 percent of me,” he later told the journalist David Lipsky, “whereas philosophy was using 50 percent.”

Given his taste for experimental fiction, however, Wallace didn’t assume, as he prepared to leave Amherst, that he would be able to live off of his writing. He considered styling himself professionally after William H. Gass, the author of Omensetter’s Luck (a novel Wallace revered), who had a Ph.D. in philosophy from Cornell and whose “day job” was teaching philosophy at Washington University in St. Louis. Wallace toyed with applying to Washington University for graduate school so he could observe Gass firsthand. But in the end, he chose to attend the University of Arizona for an M.F.A. in creative writing, which he completed in ‘87, the same year he published The Broom of the System and sold his first short-fiction collection, Girl with Curious Hair .

Even with those literary successes, however, Wallace soon suffered another serious crisis of confidence, this time centered around his fiction. He later described it as “more of a sort of artistic and religious crisis than it was anything you might call a breakdown.” He revisited the idea that philosophy could provide order and structure in his life, and that year he applied to graduate programs at Harvard and Princeton Universities, ultimately choosing to attend Harvard.”The reason I applied to philosophy grad school,” he told Lipsky, “is I remembered that I had flourished in an academic environment. And I had this idea that I could read philosophy and do philosophy, and write on the side, and that it would make the writing better.”

Wallace started at Harvard in the fall of ‘89, but his plan quickly fell to pieces. “It was just real obvious that I was so far away from that world,” he went on. “I mean, you were a full-time grad student. There wasn’t time to write on the side—there was 400 pages of Kant theory to read every three days.” Far more worrisome was the escalation of the “artistic and religious crisis” into another wave of depression, this time bordering on the suicidal. Late that first semester, Wallace dropped out of Harvard and checked into McLean Hospital, the storied psychiatric institution nearby in Massachusetts. It marked the end of his would-be career in philosophy. He viewed the passing of that ambition with mixed emotions. “I think going to Harvard was a huge mistake,” he told Lipsky. “I was too old to be in grad school. I didn’t want to be an academic philosopher anymore. But I was incredibly humiliated to drop out. Let’s not forget that my father’s a philosophy professor, that a lot of the professors there were revered by him . That he knew a couple of them. There was just an enormous amount of terrible stuff going on. But I left there and I didn’t go back.”

III. “INTERPRET-ME fiction”

Though Wallace abandoned it as a formal pursuit, philosophy would forever loom large in his life. In addition to having been formative for his cast of mind, philosophy would repeatedly crop up in the subject matter of his writing. His essay “Authority and American Usage,” about the so-called prescriptivist/descriptivist debate among linguists and lexicographers, features an exegesis of Wittgenstein’s argument against the possibility of a private language. In Everything and More , his book about the history of mathematical ideas of infinity, his guiding insight is that the disputes over mathematical procedures were ultimately debates about metaphysics—about “the ontological status of math entities.” His article “Consider the Lobster” begins as a journalistic report from the annual Maine Lobster Festival but soon becomes a philosophical meditation on the question, “Is it all right to boil a sentient creature alive just for our gustatory pleasure?” This question leads Wallace into discussions about the distinction between pain and suffering; about the relation between ethics and (culinary) aesthetics; about how we might understand cross-species moral obligations; and about the “hard-core philosophy”—the “metaphysics, epistemology, value theory, ethics”—required to determine the principles that allow us to conclude even that other humans feel pain and have a legitimate interest in not doing so.

Those are just explicit examples. Wallace’s writing is full of subtler philosophical allusions and passing bits of idiom. In Infinite Jest , one of the nine college-application essays written by the precocious protagonist, Hal Incandenza, is “Montague Grammar and the Semantics of Physical Modality”—a nod to Wallace’s own philosophy thesis. A story in his short-fiction collection Oblivion , “Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature,” shares its title with the 1979 book of anti-epistemology by the philosopher Richard Rorty. The story “Good Old Neon” invokes two conundrums from mathematical logic, the Berry and Russell paradoxes, to describe a psychological double bind that the narrator calls the “fraudulence paradox.” At the level of language, Wallace’s books are peppered with phrases like “by sheer ontology,” “ontologically prior,” “in- and extensions,” “antinomy,” “ techne .”

Perhaps the most authentically philosophical aspect of Wallace’s nonfiction, however, is the sense he gives his reader, no matter how rarefied or lowly the topic, of getting to the core of things, of searching for the essence of a phenomenon or experience. His article on the tennis player Roger Federer delves into the central role of beauty in the appreciation of athletics. His antic recounting of a week-long Caribbean cruise penetrates beneath the surface of his own satirical portrait to plumb a set of near-existential issues—freedom of choice, the illusion of freedom, freedom from choice—that he saw lurking at the heart of modern American ideas of entertainment. “I saw philosophy all over the place,” DeVries, his former professor, said of Wallace’s writings. “It was even hard to figure out how to single it out. I think it infuses a great deal of his work.”

As far as Wallace’s fiction is concerned, the most philosophically intriguing text is the novel he wrote when his own philosophical efforts were most intense: The Broom of the System . In some way—though it’s not obvious at first in what way—the book is clearly supposed to be “about” Wittgenstein’s philosophy. The plot follows a young switchboard operator named Lenore Stonecipher Beadsman as she searches for her great-grandmother, a former student of Wittgenstein’s at Cambridge University who has disappeared from her nursing home. Gramma Beadsman had been a dominant and intellectually bullying figure in Lenore’s life, forever hinting that she would prove to Lenore “how a life is words and nothing else”—a haunting suggestion that seems to be the source of Lenore’s persistent anxiety that she herself might be just a character in a novel. Gramma has left behind in her desk drawer several objects that are potential clues to her disappearance, including a copy of Philosophical Investigations .

The Broom of the System takes its title from a philosophical lesson that Gramma Beadsman once imparted to Lenore’s younger brother, LaVache. While sweeping the kitchen floor with a broom, Gramma asked LaVache “which part of the broom was more elemental, more fundamental ,” the handle or the bristles? LaVache replied that the bristles are the essence of a broom. But Gramma corrected him, insisting that the answer depends on the use to which the broom is being put: if you want to sweep, the bristles are the essence—in effect, the meaning—of the broom; if you want, say, to break a window, its essence is the handle. “Meaning as use,” Gramma intoned. “Meaning as use.” The reader familiar with Wittgenstein will recognize in Gramma’s words the governing slogan of his late philosophy: “the meaning of a word,” he wrote in the Investigations , “is its use in the language.”

In his letter to Lance Olsen, Wallace revealed that Gramma Beadsman was “based loosely” on Alice Ambrose, “a very old former Smith professor who lived near me”—Smith College is part of the Five Colleges consortium to which Amherst belongs—”and had been one of the students whose notes were comprised by Witt’s Blue and Brown books.” Though Wittgenstein’s late philosophy was published posthumously, parts of it were available during his lifetime in the form of two sets of students’ notes known as the “Blue Book” and the “Brown Book”; the “Brown Book” notes were dictated to Ambrose and another student, Francis Skinner, during classes at Cambridge in 1934–35. As the great-granddaughter of Alice Ambrose/Gramma Beadsman, Lenore, like Wallace himself, is the descendent of a philosopher with an amanuensis-like connection to Wittgenstein: James Wallace’s mentor, Norman Malcolm, served as the sounding-board and assistant for the writing of Wittgenstein’s final philosophical work, On Certainty .

By the time Wallace started writing Broom , he had developed a serious interest in Wittgenstein’s late philosophy. As his relationship with technical philosophy cooled, he became increasingly curious about approaches to philosophy that, for all their differences with one another, were united in their opposition to the kind of work with which he previously self-identified. He was intrigued not only by Wittgenstein’s late philosophy but also by J. L. Austin’s “ordinary language” philosophy and even Jacques Derrida’s radical conception of philosophy as a metaphysically arrogant form of literature.

Those new curiosities about the relation of language to reality mark another point of connection between Wallace and his character Lenore, who worries that language suffuses reality to the point of constituting it. Indeed, at the simplest level, Lenore just is Wallace, and The Broom of the System is just a fictionalized retelling—a “little self-obsessed bildungsroman ,” Wallace called it—of the intellectual struggles he was then undergoing, struggles not only between philosophy and literature but also between technical philosophy and its philosophical alternatives. “Think of The Broom of the System ,” he told McCaffery, “as the sensitive tale of a sensitive young WASP who’s just had this mid-life crisis that’s moved him from coldly cerebral analytic math to a coldly cerebral take on fiction and Austin-Wittgenstein-Derridean literary theory.” This transformation, he explained, had a disturbing side effect, shifting the young WASP’s “existential dread from a fear that he was just a 98.6-degree calculating machine to a fear that he was nothing but a linguistic construct.” Lenore, with her apprehension that she may be nothing more than a character in a novel, is giving voice to Wallace’s own anxieties about crossing into a wholly new relationship with language.

Understanding The Broom of the System as an autobiographical roman à clef is a useful first step in grasping Wallace’s literary-philosophical aims, but his engagement with Wittgenstein’s philosophy was a more profound and lasting affair than that reading alone suggests. In both his early and his late work, Wittgenstein addressed the doctrine of solipsism, the philosophical position that holds (in its most radical form) that nothing exists apart from your own mind and mental states. Like fatalism, solipsism is an extreme and counterintuitive view that is nonetheless difficult to disprove. Also like fatalism, it was an idea that bewitched and bothered Wallace, absorbing his intellect and artistic imagination and becoming a lifelong fascination. In his interview with McCaffery, Wallace said that “one of the things that makes Wittgenstein a real artist to me” is the handling of solipsism in his work. In Broom , Wallace sought to do some measure of novelistic justice to this aspect of Wittgenstein’s thought.

Broom , then, belongs to the genre of the novel of ideas—books like Voltaire’s Candide and Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea , which all but instruct the reader to interpret them in light of certain schools of thought. ( Candide is usually read as a parody of Leibnitz’s metaphysics, Nausea as a vision of Sartre’s existentialism.) In his essay “The Empty Plenum,” published in 1990, Wallace called this genre of writing “INTERPRET-ME fiction” and argued that it had a special role to play in the life of the mind. As he knew from chasing the “click” in math and technical philosophy, there are areas of inquiry that might seem remote from the concerns of everyday life but that can, in fact, offer an array of intimate emotional and aesthetic experiences. Even for the reader with an appetite for it, however, a theoretical work can be so intellectually taxing, so draining of one’s mental energies, that what Wallace called the “emotional implications” of the text are overlooked. The novel of ideas is at its most valuable, he contended, not when making abstruse ideas “accessible” or easy to digest for the reader, but rather when bringing these neglected undercurrents to the surface.

Wallace wrote “The Empty Plenum” in Boston in the summer of 1989, as he readied himself to begin the philosophy program at Harvard. The essay is an extended appreciation of David Markson’s novel Wittgenstein’s Mistress (“a work of genius,” in Wallace’s estimation), which came out in ‘88, a year after The Broom of the System , and which was also “about” Wittgenstein’s philosophy. It was an emotional reckoning, as Wallace read it, with the discussion of solipsism in Wittgenstein’s early work. Wallace felt that Markson’s novel had succeeded in uniting literature and philosophy in a way that he, in Broom , had tried but failed to do. (Wallace pronounced Broom “pretty dreadful.”) The circumstances in which Wallace was writing the essay only underscored for him the importance of Markson’s accomplishment. As Wallace prepared to seek a renewed merger of philosophy and fiction in his own life, at Harvard, he celebrated Markson as a novelist who, with the utmost artistry, had already fused the two. In defiance of “the rabid anti-intellectualism of the contemporary fiction scene,” Wallace wrote, Markson had demonstrated the still-vital role of the novel of ideas in joining together “cerebration & emotion, abstraction & lived life, transcendent truth-seeking & daily schlepping.” Markson had delivered on Wallace’s literary-philosophical ideal of “making heads throb heartlike.”

IV. “A kind of philosophical sci-fi”

To understand the philosophical ambitions of Broom it is worth first looking in detail at what Wallace thought Markson had done. Markson’s novel, a work of experimental fiction with a lean style reminiscent of Samuel Beckett, is narrated by a painter named Kate, who appears to be the last person alive and who has been alone on earth for many years by the time the novel opens. Kate doesn’t so much narrate (for she has no audience) as write into the void, tapping out on a typewriter declarative statement after declarative statement in simple paragraphs of just one or two sentences. Unlike many novels of ideas, Wittgenstein’s Mistress doesn’t feature cerebral characters or lofty discussions. Though Kate makes highbrow allusions, her grasp of history and literature and philosophy is idiosyncratic and shaky. As Wallace noted, in Kate’s hands intellectual ideas are “sprayed, skewed, all over the book.”

After many years roaming the earth, futilely looking for anyone else, Kate has retired to a beach house, where she is writing out her thoughts. She does so with a peculiar controlled indirection, free-associating but looping back again and again to a recurring set of personal preoccupations—compulsively trying to keep straight the memory of what has been lost, organizing and reorganizing scattered memories of her own life and her piecemeal knowledge of the world to which she once belonged:

I do remember sitting one morning in an automobile with a right-hand drive and watching Stratford-on-Avon fill up with snow, which must surely be rare.

Well, and once that same winter being almost hit by a car with nobody driving it, which came rolling down a hill near Hampstead Heath.

There was an explanation for the car coming down the hill with nobody driving it.

The explanation having been the hill, obviously.

That car, too, had a right-hand drive. Although perhaps that is not especially relevant to anything.

The possibility increases that Kate’s narration is unreliable, that she is mentally unhinged, as it becomes clearer that the onset of her peculiar experience of the world coincided with a profound personal loss. The book imparts a double-layered feeling of loneliness and isolation: Kate’s is the voice of a writer trapped not only inside her own head but also inside a world that now exists only through her own continual reconstructing of it. The text she types, Wallace wrote, “is itself obsessed & almost defined by the possibility that it does not exist, that Kate does not exist.”

What does any of this have to do with Wittgenstein? Part of the achievement of Markson’s novel, one of the ways in which it avoids the pitfalls of many novels of ideas, is that it doesn’t require any understanding of Wittgenstein. The novel operates on its own terms. But the allusion to Wittgenstein in its title, its repeated citation of the first sentence of the Tractatus (“The world is all that is the case”), and its stylistic affinity with that book (the Tractatus is also composed of short aphoristic paragraphs) all invite the reader versed in philosophy to wonder what Markson is up to. “This isn’t a weakness of the novel,” Wallace stressed. “Though it’s kind of miraculous that it’s not.”

Wallace had read the Tractatus , of course (he wrote to Lance Olsen that he thought its first sentence was “the most beautiful opening line in western lit”). He knew that Wittgenstein’s book presented a spare and unforgiving picture of the relations among logic, language, and the physical world. He knew that the puzzles solved and raised by the book were influential, debatable, and rich in their implications. But as a flesh-and-blood reader with human feelings, he also knew, though he had never articulated it out loud, that as you labored to understand the Tractatus , its cold, formal, logical picture of the world could make you feel strange, lonely, awestruck, lost, frightened—a range of moods not unlike those undergone by Kate herself. The similarities were not accidental. Markson’s novel, as Wallace put it, was like a 240-page answer to the question, “What if somebody really had to live in a Tractatus ized world?” Pronouncing the novel “a kind of philosophical sci-fi,” Wallace explained that Markson had staged a human drama on an alien intellectual planet, and in so doing he had “fleshed the abstract sketches of Wittgenstein’s doctrine into the concrete theater of human loneliness.”

V. “The loss of the whole external world” The particular form of “human loneliness” to which Wallace was attuned was the sense of seclusion suggested by solipsism. Kate, Markson’s narrator, seems to be in a situation like this, her world constituted entirely by her mental states. She shares this predicament with the traditional metaphysical subject of epistemology—the knowing consciousness, the “I” of Descartes’s “I think, therefore I am”—who begins his intellectual journey trapped in his own mind, concerned that everything might just be a figment of his imagination (though he ultimately builds his way out of those confines to reach the external world). Wittgenstein, in the Tractatus , runs into the concern that his argument leads to solipsism—and his striking response is to agree, after a fashion, that it does. “There’s a kind of tragic fall Wittgenstein’s obsessed with,” starting with the Tractatus , Wallace explained to McCaffery. “I mean a real Book-of-Genesis-type tragic fall. The loss of the whole external world.”

How did Wittgenstein get to this point? The Tractatus is concerned with a disarmingly basic question: How is language possible? When we consider the world around us, everything seems to interact with everything else causally , in accordance with the laws of nature. The exception is a certain strange thing we call language, which somehow manages to interact with other things in the world in an entirely different way: it represents them meaningfully. The ability to represent things allows us to communicate, enables us to deal with things that are not actually present to us , and provides the fabric of our mental life, our daily thoughts. But how is it, exactly, that language produces meaning?

In the Tractatus , Wittgenstein argues that for words to represent things, for sentences to stand for states of affairs, language and reality have to share something in common. To explain what this commonality is, he introduces his so-called picture theory of meaning. An ordinary spoken or written sentence, he contends, when properly analyzed or disassembled into its component bits, reveals an elementary structure of logical parts and factual parts. This elementary structure, he argues, literally pictures reality: objects in the world correlate with the words in the sentence, and the relations among and between objects in the world correlate with the relations among and between the words in the sentence. A sentence has a certain elementary structure; things in the world can stand to one another in a certain structure; the identity of these two structures simply is meaning. A meaningful sentence depicts a possible state of affairs in the world; a meaningful and true sentence depicts an actual state of affairs in the world; anything in language that does not depict a possible state of affairs—that is, anything that does not depict possible fact —is, strictly speaking, meaningless.

Wittgenstein draws from the picture theory of meaning some arresting philosophical conclusions. The Tractatus regards as nonsensical, as literally meaningless, any claim that cannot be reduced to discrete facts about things in the world—for instance, any statements about ethics or aesthetics (“goodness” and “beauty” don’t refer to actual things or properties). Another such type of nonsense, according to Wittgenstein, are metaphysical statements, claims about the supernatural, say, or the nature of the world as a whole. How language relates to reality—the very subject of the Tractatus —is itself, however, a concern about the world as a whole. This is the central irony of the Tractatus : its own claims are, strictly speaking, meaningless. They can be used only to try to show , but never to state , anything true. (This is the source of Wittgenstein’s famous parting image of his book as a ladder that his reader must “throw away” after “he has climbed up it.”)

For Wallace, the most disquieting feature of the Tractatus was its treatment of solipsism. Toward the end of the book, Wittgenstein concludes, “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” This is a natural corollary of the picture theory of meaning: Given that there is a strict one-to-one mapping between states of affairs in the world and the structure of sentences, what I cannot speak of (that is, what I cannot meaningfully speak of) is not a fact of my world. But where am “I” situated in this world? By “I,” I don’t mean the physical person whom I can make factual reports about. I mean the metaphysical subject, the Cartesian “I,” the knowing consciousness that stands in opposition with the external world. “Where in the world,” Wittgenstein writes, “is a metaphysical subject to be found?”

On the one hand, the answer is nowhere. Wittgenstein can’t make any sense of the philosophical self—any talk of it is, strictly speaking, nonsense. On the other hand, Wittgenstein can get some purchase on this question. He draws an analogy between the “I” (and the external world) and the eye (and the visual field): Though I cannot see my own eye in my visual field, the very existence of the visual field is nothing other than the working of my eye; likewise, though the philosophical self cannot be located in the world, the very experience of the world is nothing other than what it is to be an “I.” Nothing can be said about the self in Wittgenstein’s philosophy, but the self is made manifest insofar as “the world is my world”—or, as Wittgenstein more strikingly phrases it, “I am my world.” This, he declares, is “how much truth there is in solipsism.”

“I am my world” is what Wallace had in mind when he spoke of “the loss of the whole external world” in the Tractatus . There is no difference, ultimately, for Wittgenstein between solipsism and realism (solipsism “coincides with pure realism,” he writes). For Wallace, this was a harrowing equation, the dark emotional takeaway of the Tractatus ’s severe anti-metaphysics. This was also, for Wallace, what Markson had rendered imaginatively in his novel. Without ever raising these ideas explicitly, Markson had conveyed them with a special kind of clarity. Wittgenstein ’ s Mistress , by echoing the Tractatus ’s brusque, dreamlike sentences and placing Kate in a cold, lonely, self-as-world cosmos, had managed, as Wallace put it, to “capture the flavor both of solipsism and of Wittgenstein.” What’s more, Wallace felt Markson had done something that even Wittgenstein hadn’t been able to do: he humanized the intellectual problem, communicating “the consequences, for persons, of the practice of theory ; the difference, say, between espousing ‘solipsism’ as a metaphysical ‘position’ & waking up one fine morning after a personal loss to find your grief apocalyptic, literally millennial, leaving you the last and only living thing on earth.” That was something only fiction, not philosophy, could do.

Solipsism, sometimes discussed as a doctrine but also evoked as a metaphor for isolation and loneliness, pervades Wallace’s writing. “Plainly, Dave, as a guy and a writer, had a lifelong horror/fascination with the idea of a mind sealed off,” Mark Costello told me. “His stories are full of sealed-off people.” The self-obsessing narrator of “Good Old Neon,” who has committed suicide and addresses the reader from beyond the grave, says “you’re at least getting an idea, I think, of what it was like inside my head,” of “how exhausting and solipsistic it is to be like this.” The high-school students at the tennis academy in Infinite Jest wrestle with the question, “how we can keep from being 136 deeply alone people all jammed together?”—a problem that one of them diagnoses in intellectual terms (“Existential individuality, frequently referred to in the West. Solipsism”) and another in emotional ones (“In a nutshell, what we’re talking about here is loneliness”). The novelist Jonathan Franzen, one of Wallace’s close friends, has said that he and Wallace agreed that the fundamental purpose of fiction was to combat loneliness. The paradox for Wallace was that to be a writer called for spending a lot of time alone in one’s own head, giving rise to the feeling, as he wrote in “The Empty Plenum,” “that one’s head is, in some sense, the whole world, when the imagination becomes not just a more congenial but a realer environment than the Big Exterior of life on earth.”

VI. “ The single most beautiful argument against solipsism that’ s ever been made.”

Could solipsism be overcome? In The Broom of the System , Norman Bombardini, a very wealthy and very overweight man who owns the building in which Lenore works, bemoans what he calls “the Great Horror”: the prospect of “an empty, rattling personal universe, one where one finds oneself with a Self, on one hand, and vast empty lonely spaces before Others begin to enter the picture at all, on the other.” He devises a solution, a kind of spoof of the Tractatus ’s line “I am my world,” which is to keep eating until he grows to infinite size, making himself coextensive with the world. (He calls the scheme “Project Total Yang.”) Bombardini is only a minor character in the novel, and fittingly so, for the bulk of The Broom of the System is concerned not with the solipsism of early Wittgenstein but rather with the philosophy of the later Wittgenstein—who roundly rejected solipsism. Just as Markson conjured the solipsism of the Tractatus into an artistic creation, so too did Wallace hope to summon, in Broom , the anti-solipsistic worldview of Philosophical Investigations .

The Investigations offers a conception of language that is diametrically opposed that of the picture theory of the Tractatus . In Wittgenstein’s early work, language is something sublime, logical, abstract—something with a defining structure or essence that, if you think hard enough, you can puzzle out in your head. In the Investigations , by contrast, language is seen as a messy human phenomenon, part of social reality—a rich variety of everyday practices that you figure out the way a child does, by publicly engaging in them, getting the hang of the unspoken rules by which communities use them. The shift in imagery is from language as a picture to language as a tool . This is the point of the Wittgensteinian mantra “meaning as use”: If you want to understand the meaning of a word or phrase or gesture, you don’t try to figure out what it represents ; you try to figure out how to use it in real life. Wittgenstein called the rule-governed social practices that determine meaning “language games.”

As Wallace was delighted to discover when he immersed himself in the Investigations later in college, the implications of this view for solipsism are potentially devastating. Given Wittgenstein’s conception of language as a public phenomenon, whereby words get their meaning only by virtue of their shared use, what are we to make of the notion of a strictly private language, the voice of a solipsistic “I” who is speaking only to himself, in his own unique tongue, reporting private sensations and entertaining private thoughts in an otherwise barren world—the voice of a person living entirely in his own head? Wittgenstein’s answer was that this idea, though seemingly viable, at least as a thought experiment, is in fact incoherent. The meaning of words is their use; the use of words is a matter of following rules; and following rules is entirely a social affair. There cannot be thought apart from the use of language—and language can operate only within a set of social practices. Thus there is no private thought without a corresponding public reality. “An ‘inner process,’ ” as Wittgenstein put it, “stands in need of outward criteria.” To phrase it in Cartesian terms: I think, therefore I am part of a community of others .

Wallace told McCaffery that Philosophical Investigations was “the single most beautiful argument against solipsism that’s ever been made.” Though the anti-private-language argument has been extraordinarily controversial, Wallace heralded it as though it were an indisputable mathematical proof. “The point here,” he wrote in “Authority and American Usage,” while giving a summary of Wittgenstein’s argument, “is that the idea of a private language, like private colors and most of the other solipsistic conceits with which this reviewer has at various times been afflicted, is both deluded and demonstrably false.” Solipsism was dead. Loneliness—at least that image of loneliness—was an illusion.

The defeat of solipsism was half of what Wallace sought to capture in Broom . But while Wittgenstein may have “solved” solipsism for Wallace, there was a catch—a final entangling conundrum with its own frightening implications—which Wallace also wanted to convey. On its face, the account of language in the Investigations seems pleasantly, reassuringly everyday: language is an ordinary, familiar, social, custom-bound human activity. But in other respects the account is quite extreme. Because all language and thought take place inside some language game or other, there is no transcendent, non-language-game standpoint from which you can step back, as it were, and see if any language game is better than any other—if one of them, for instance, does a better job of mirroring reality than another. Indeed, the question of whether any language game accurately represents reality can be asked only within some other language game, which operates according to its own set of nonevaluable conventions. In his early work Wittgenstein was in the business of stepping back from language, appraising its relation with reality, and pronouncing which uses connected us with something real and which did not; the Investigations is in another business altogether, describing without judging, merely “assembling reminders for a purpose,” in Wittgenstein’s phrase.

In Wallace’s view, Wittgenstein had left us, again, without the possibility of contact with the outside world. As he told McCaffery, the Investigations “eliminated solipsism but not the horror.” The only difference between this new predicament and that of the Tractatus was that rather than being trapped alone in our private thoughts, we were trapped together, with other people, in the institution of language. This was warmer than solipsism, but, as another form of being sealed-off from reality, it was cold comfort. Explaining this disheartening realization, Wallace said that “unfortunately we’re still stuck with the idea that there’s this world of referents out there that we can never really join or know because we’re stuck in here, in language, even if we’re at least all in here together.”

In The Broom of the System , these two dueling emotional reactions—the fear of being trapped in language and the relief that at least we’re all trapped in it together—are given playful expression. Lenore suffers from a fear, as she explains to her psychiatrist, that Gramma Beadsman is right that “there’s no such thing” as “extra-linguistic anything .” (Wallace’s metafictional joke is that, for Lenore, as a character in a novel, there really isn ’ t any reality other than language.) Lenore’s boyfriend, a magazine editor named Rick Vigorous, soothes her throughout the book by compulsively telling her stories. Each of his stories is a not-so-thinly veiled allegory of the problems in their relationship, so that, even within the confines of the novel, Lenore and Rick become characters joined together in a reality constituted entirely by language. In the novel’s climactic scene, a televangelist-charlatan named Reverend Sykes provides another image of this same double bind: escaping loneliness together in a language game, but sealed off from a higher reality. He asks the members of his TV audience to lay their hands on their TV screens in unison in order to commune with God—to join together in what he calls a “game” that will give everyone the consoling impression of making contact, together, with the ultimate transcendent referent. “So friends,” Sykes says, “laugh if you will, but tonight I have a game for us to play together. A profoundly and vitally important game for us to play together tonight.” His patter culminates in a three-sentence exhortation, the lines of which invoke the ideas of “meaning as use,” language games, and the struggle against loneliness: “Use me, friends. Let us play the game together. I promise that no player will feel alone.” Compared to the artful techniques of Markson’s novel, these devices may seem clunky, but the intellectual aspiration was much the same.

It is worth noting that, in his discussions of Markson, Broom , and solipsism, Wallace was engaging throughout in what you might call a “strong misreading” of Wittgenstein’s work. His explications of Wittgenstein’s philosophy are not always convincing or strictly true. Highly questionable, for instance, is his assertion of what he called “the postmodern, poststructuralist” implications of the Investigations , which entail that we can’t make true claims about the real world (a popular reading of Wittgenstein that many scholars hotly dispute). More straightforwardly wrong is Wallace’s claim that Wittgenstein shared Wallace’s own horror of the picture of the world in the Tractatus . Wallace told McCaffery that the reason Wittgenstein “trashed everything he’d been lauded for in the Tractatus ” and developed the philosophy of the Investigations was that he “realized that no conclusion could be more horrible than solipsism.” Wallace also contended, in “The Empty Plenum,” that the impoverished role granted to ethics, aesthetics, and spiritual values in the Tractatus was “a big motivation” for its disavowal.

In truth, however, the biographical literature suggests that Wittgenstein was perfectly at ease with the solipsism of the Tractatus , as well as oddly, even mystically consoled by its suggestion that ethical, aesthetic, and spiritual truths are unutterable. As for the development of the late philosophy, it seems to have had its origins not in a fear of solipsism but rather in two deeply resonant objections: a technical criticism that the British mathematician Frank Ramsey made in 1923 about the Tractatus ’s treatment of the matter of “color-exclusion” and a playful challenge, posed by the Italian economist Piero Saffra, that Wittgenstein provide the “logical form” of a meaningful hand gesture.

It’s possible that Wallace’s own anxieties about being “trapped” in his own head colored or confused his reading of Wittgenstein—that he projected them, in philosophical terms, onto the Tractatus and the Investigations , resulting in an overemphasis on solipsism and giving Wittgenstein’s treatment of the doctrine an alarmist, even hysterical cast. But given Wallace’s otherwise sure-handed feel for philosophical texts, it seems likely that his distortions were at least in part intentional, offered in the service of artistic and emotional “truths.” That would certainly be consistent with the ideal of fictionalized philosophy that he strove for in Broom and venerated in Wittgenstein ’ s Mistress —a kind of writing that blended scholarly command and poetic reimagining.

Whatever the explanation for his preoccupation with solipsism in Wittgenstein, Wallace never abandoned his fixation on sealed-off people. Few readers of Infinite Jest will forget the lonely fate of the Hal Incandenza, who becomes so alienated from the world that his speech becomes unintelligible to others, or the lifeless zombiehood that befalls anyone who watches the novel’s eponymous film, which is so entertaining that its viewer becomes incapable of doing anything other than watch it. But Mark Costello pointed out to me an important irony: for someone as obsessed with isolation as Wallace, he was “obviously a social novelist, a novelist of noticed details, on a near-encyclopedic scale.” Where other novelists dealing with solipsism, like Markson and Beckett, painted barren images with small compressed sentences, Costello observed, “Dave tackled the issue by massively overfilling his scenes and sentences to comic bursting”—indeed to the point of panicked overstimulation. There was a palpable strain for Wallace between engagement with the world, in all its overwhelming fullness, and withdrawal to one’s own head, in all its loneliness. The world was too much, the mind alone too little. “You can’t be anything but contemptible living for yourself,” Costello said, summing up the dilemma. “But letting the world in—that sucks too.”

It’s not exactly what you’d call an intellectual conundrum. But it was the lived one.

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Consider the Philosopher

By James Ryerson

• Dec. 12, 2008

With the death of David Foster Wallace, the author of “Infinite Jest,” who took his own life on Sept. 12, the world of contemporary American fiction lost its most intellectually ambitious writer. Like his peers Richard Powers and William T. Vollmann, Wallace wrote big, brainy novels that were encyclopedically packed with information and animated by arcane ideas. In nonfiction essays, he tackled a daunting range of highbrow topics, including lexicography, poststructuralist literary theory and the science, ethics and epistemology of lobster pain. He wrote a book on the history and philosophy of the mathematics of infinity. Even his signature stylistic device — the extensive use of footnotes and endnotes — was a kind of scholarly homage.

But Wallace was also wary of ideas. He was perpetually on guard against the ways in which abstract thinking (especially thinking about your own thinking) can draw you away from something more genuine and real. To read his acutely self-conscious, dialectically fevered writing was often to witness the agony of cognition: how the twists and turns of thought can both hold out the promise of true understanding and become a danger to it. Wallace was especially concerned that certain theoretical paradigms — the cerebral aestheticism of modernism, the clever trickery of postmodernism — too casually dispense with what he once called “the very old traditional human verities that have to do with spirituality and emotion and community.” He called for a more forthright, engaged treatment of these basic truths. Yet he himself attended to them with his own fractured, often-esoteric methods. It was a defining tension: the very conceptual tools with which he pursued life’s most desperate questions threatened to keep him forever at a distance from the connections he struggled to make.

Given his considerable intellectual gifts and large cult following, it may come as a surprise to learn that Wallace’s one formal, systematic contribution to the world of ideas was never published and remains almost completely unknown. This is his undergraduate honors thesis in philosophy — “Richard Taylor’s ‘Fatalism’ and the Semantics of Physical Modality” — which he submitted for a degree at Amherst College in 1985. Its obscurity is easy enough to understand. A highly specialized, 76-page work of semantics and metaphysics, it is not for the philosophically faint of heart. Brace yourself for a sample sentence: “Let Φ (a physical possibility structure) be a set of distinct but intersecting paths j i –j n , each of which is a set of functions, L’s, on ordered pairs {t, w} ({time, world situation}), such that for any L n , L m in some j i , L n R L m , where R is a primitive accessibility relation corresponding to physical possibility understood in terms of diachronic physical compatibility.” There are reasons that he’s better known for an essay about a boat.

For all its inscrutability, though, the thesis represents an important phase in Wallace’s development. Once its goals and ambitions are understood, the paper casts a revealing light on the early stages of his struggle to use the powers of his formidable mind for the higher good: to protect against the seductions of the intellect, and to find solid ground for his most urgent and heartfelt convictions.

At Amherst in the early ’80s,Wallace, himself the son of a distinguished philosopher, was considered by his professors to be a rare philosophical talent, a genius in the making. (He later entered graduate school in philosophy at Harvard, though he didn’t stay long.) Even after he began writing fiction in college — he simultaneously completed a second undergraduate thesis, in English, that ultimately became his 1987 novel, “The Broom of the System” — it was still philosophy that defined him academically. “I knew him as a philosopher with a fiction hobby,” Jay Garfield, an adviser on Wallace’s thesis and now a professor at Smith College, told me recently. “I didn’t realize he was one of the great fiction writers of his generation with a philosophy hobby.”

Sometime in his later college years, Wallace became troubled by a paper called “Fatalism,” first published in 1962 by a philosopher named Richard Taylor. The fatalist contends, quite radically, that human actions and decisions have no influence on the future. Your behavior today no more shapes events tomorrow than it shapes events yesterday. Instead, in a seemingly backward way, the fatalist says it is how things are in the future that uniquely constrains what happens right now. What might seem like an open possibility subject to human choice — say, whether you fire your handgun — is already either impossible or absolutely necessary. You are merely going with some cosmic flow.

Perhaps most counterintuitively, the fatalist argues that this topsy-turvy doctrine can be established by mere reflection on the simple logic of propositions about the future. If I fire my handgun, one second from now its barrel will be hot; if I do not fire, one second from now the barrel will not be hot; but the proposition one second from now the barrel will be hot is right now either true or false. If the proposition is true, then it is the case that I will fire the gun; if it’s false, then it is the case that I won’t. Either way, it’s the state of affairs in the future that dictates what I will or won’t do now.

Obviously, there is something fishy going on here. But Taylor’s highly sophisticated version of this argument makes it extremely hard to pinpoint what exactly is amiss, not least because he makes his case for this controversial doctrine using only a handful of uncontroversial assumptions about logic and language (for instance, that any statement is either true or false). What most bothered Wallace about Taylor’s paper was not the despair-inducing worldview of fatalism itself (though that was indeed worrisome); it was, as Jay Garfield recalled, that “this metaphysically troubling conclusion followed from these ordinary-seeming premises.” Taylor seemed to have scrambled the normal relations among logic, language and the physical world, detaching them from their proper spheres. There was a kind of anguish for Wallace in the prospect of a world so out of whack. “He was very level-headed in so many ways,” Willem deVries, a philosopher now at the University of New Hampshire and the principal adviser on Wallace’s thesis, told me. “He wasn’t attracted to philosophy because you could construct these weird, mind-bending arguments. He was quite wary of the mind-bending. Maybe because his own mind could bend so easily.”

But how to straighten out Taylor’s fatalism? Wallace proposed that there was a flaw in Taylor’s argument, a hidden defect. In essence, Taylor was treating two types of propositions as if they were the same, when in fact they needed to be distinguished and treated differently. Consider the sentences “It was the case that I couldn’t fire my handgun” and “It cannot be the case that I did fire my handgun.” At first they may sound similar, but Wallace argued that they involve quite different notions of impossibility. “It was the case that I couldn’t fire my handgun” refers to a past situation in which discharge is deemed impossible because (let’s say) my gun was broken. “It cannot be the case that I did fire my handgun” refers to a present situation in which discharge is deemed impossible because (let’s say) my gun is still cool to the touch. The first notion involves an earlier, physical constraint on firing (namely, the broken gun); the other involves the current absence of a necessary consequence of firing (namely, a hot barrel). An extremely sensitive observer of language, Wallace noted that there is a subtle indicator of this important distinction already at work in our language: the fine differentiation in meaning between “I couldn’t have done such and so” and “I can’t have done such and so.”

Armed with this small but powerful insight, Wallace was able to pick apart the machinery of Taylor’s argument. All the things about the “Fatalism” paper that appeared maddeningly simple started to look complex and thorny. By the time Wallace worked out all the details — the precise interactions among elements of meaning, time and possibility — it was clear that he had defused Taylor’s argument. (The formal apparatus that Wallace developed in the thesis, a so-called intensional-physical-modality system, would have been a novel contribution to the philosophical literature; deVries and Garfield each expressed to me their regret that Wallace never published the paper.) Perhaps our actions are indeed fated, Wallace acknowledged — he had nothing to say either way about the metaphysical substance of the doctrine. But if fatalism is true, he demonstrated, we are going to learn that fact only through an argument that draws on something richer and more substantive than the arid, purely logical moves Taylor made. If Taylor were to overthrow our worldview, he would have to roll up his intellectual sleeves and delve into reflection on meatier issues like cosmology or entropy or the like.

The real accomplishment of Wallace’s thesis, however, was not technical or argumentative but more like a moral victory. His demonic attention to detail in language and logic, and his seemingly limitless cognitive abilities, had set aright a world momentarily upended by a conceptual sleight of hand. “In light of what we’ve seen about the semantics of physical modality,” Wallace wrote in the closing passage, “I hold that Taylor’s semantic argument does not in fact yield his metaphysical conclusion.” He then ventured modestly that his own analysis of the problem “seems to warrant the following conclusion of our own: if Taylor and the fatalists want to force upon us a metaphysical conclusion, they must do metaphysics, not semantics. And this seems entirely appropriate.” Things, for the moment, were as they should be.

James Ryerson, an editor at the magazine, is writing a book about the philosopher Sidney Morgenbesser.

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Steven M. Cahn and Maureen Eckert, Freedom and the Self: Essays on the Philosophy of David Foster Wallace

1 Steven M. Cahn and Maureen Eckert, Freedom and the Self: Essays on the Philosophy of David Foster Wallace.

2 New York: Columbia University Press, 2015. 192pp.  ISBN: 9780231161527.

3 Paolo Pitari

4 Independent scholar

5 Freedom and the Self: Essays on the Philosophy of David Foster Wallace is the second collection of essays in Wallace studies that approaches the author from a philosophical standpoint, and most of the critics and students who look forward to reading this book have read the first, Gesturing Toward Reality: David Foster Wallace and Philosophy (edited Robert K. Bolgerand Scott Korb), published just one year before. If that is the case for you, just know that this book is very different. It mostly concerns itself with Wallace’s undergrad philosophy thesis, published in 2010 under the title Fate, Time, and Language: An Essay on Free Will (also edited by Steven M. Cahn). With such focus, it manages to make us more familiar with a side of Wallace’s we readers are not much in contact with: his philosophical background not just in existential terms, but in logical terms also. In this sense, I must say, my main critique to this collection is that the final two essays would have been much more in context in a book like Gesturing Toward Reality . In here, they seem (at least relatively) out of context. My opinions aside, let’s look at the content.

6 The first essay, William Hasker’s “David Foster Wallace and the Fallacies of ‘Fatalism’” treats Wallace’s philosophy honors thesis, one devoted “to the issues raised by Richard Taylor’s paper ‘Fatalism.’” In considering the topic, Hasker chooses this structure: 1) presenting Taylor’s argument; 2) presenting “a selection from the criticisms made of it;” 3) presenting “a summary of Wallace’s system” and his criticisms of Taylor; 4) comparing Wallace’s criticisms to those of the past, showing whether or not they provide innovative ideas; 5) introducing how “these problems present themselves in our own time.” 1

7 In short, Richard Taylor deduces fatalism from a set of six universal presuppositions in contemporary philosophy, coming to the conclusion that in modal reasoning the way we think about the past also applies to the future: on the one hand, a captain’s order to battle tomorrow will make the occurrence of the battle a necessary condition; on the other – given P5 (the fifth philosophical presupposition) 2 , “in the absence of the necessary condition (i.e. the battle), […] it is not in my power to issue an order to battle tomorrow, […] I have no control over which sort of order I will issue.” A fatalist, then, is one who “thinks he cannot do anything about the future. […] [One who] thinks that even his own behavior is not in the least within his power” (2).

8 Of all the criticisms Taylor had to face, the only one he ever acknowledged was the one brought forth by Steven M. Cahn – editor of this collection! –, who argued that Taylor’s “original motivation . . . to support the Aristotelian conclusion that future contingent propositions lack classical truth values” (8) did not yield the results Taylor himself hoped for. Cahn pointed out that Taylor, in fact, was not a fatalist and that his paper was written in the form of a reduction ad absurdum . The real point of Taylor’s argument was not to promote fatalistic thought, but to challenge philosophers to point out relevant differences between what we take for granted (fatalism concerning the past) and what we find disgusting and absurd (fatalism concerning the future). Taylor was right, we’re lacking in answers, but his thesis created what seemed to be the monstrous, and irresolvable, problem of fatalism.

9 So Hasker concentrates on Wallace’s attempt to offer “new objections that are more successful than those made previously” (16) to the problem of fatalism. When most have tried to reject Taylor’s argument by disallowing his presuppositions, Wallace will grant him his presuppositions and “show that the conclusion [Taylor] desires still does not follow validly from that argument” (18). And where philosophers have usually relied on intuition, Wallace will construct a logical/formal/modal system to ground his thesis.

10 Or at least those were the intentions. There’s no way to summarize Wallace’s system here, so I’ll just leave you with Hasker’s conclusions on Wallace’s response to Taylor’s argument:

11 On the one hand, his creation of System J, and his articulation of his reply to Taylor in terms of that system, must be recognized as a splendid achievement. […] On the other hand, his claim to have pointed out a fundamentally new objection, quite different from those made previously, and his claim to have granted Taylor’s premises and shown his argument to be invalid cannot be sustained (23).

12 The second essay, Gila Sher’s “Wallace, Free Choice, and Fatalism,” starts by noting that Wallace, in his 2005 commencement address later published under the title This Is Water , extolls the value of “freedom of choice regarding what to think about” and focuses “on how, in order to cope with life, we have to decide actively to see it in ways that will not let it crush us.” Sher’s shrewd (because unusual in Wallace Studies ) intuition is that “the view that we cannot change reality , we can only change the way we think about it is, in a way, a form of fatalism ” (32). And yet, twenty years earlier Wallace argued against Taylor’s argument, which “supported fatalism in a rather unusual way, namely, on general logical and semantic grounds” (32). In this sense, Sher’s “goal in this paper is to reconstruct Wallace’s critique of Taylor’s argument for fatalism in a clear and concise way, so that it is easy to see its main line of reasoning and potential power” (32).

13 Here’s how Wallace reflects on Taylor’s argument: it is clearly logically valid in the sense that its conclusions rightfully result from its premises; but these premises, i.e. the six “universally accepted” philosophical presumptions, are not purely logical: the truth-value of premises 1 and 2 “is not attributable to pure logic” (35). It then follows that Taylor’s argument is not a purely logical one. “Wallace, therefore, rightly understands Taylor’s argument as (or as intended to be) a “semantic,” or a logico-semantic, argument rather than either a logical or a metaphysical argument” (35, my emphasis) and concludes that “if Taylor and the fatalists want to force upon us a metaphysical conclusion, they must do metaphysics, not semantics” (36). This is why Wallace methodologically proceeds by pointing out and outlining the “implicit nonlogical modalities, causal relations, and time indices” (42) that affect Taylor’s system and provide “fertile ground for ambiguities and equivocations” (42). These lead Wallace to successfully prove (in Sher’s estimation) that “Taylor’s premises do not force fatalism upon us” (46).

14 The third essay, M. Oreste Fiocco’s “Fatalism and the Metaphysics of Contingency” is a brilliant, precise, and enlarging discussion on the subject of the first two essays. It brings the matters of fatalism, Taylor, and Wallace into the wider context of Western metaphysics and the history of philosophy in general. This is important – Fiocco thinks – because the whole discussion at hand contains various misunderstandings. The key here, again, is that “Taylor . . . does not accept fatalism. […] Following Aristotle, […] he denies that every proposition whatsoever is either true or, if not true, false ” (62, my emphasis). Therefore, Fiocco states: “many of those who have been critical of Taylor . . . have simply misunderstood his project and the basis of his Aristotelian argument” (63).

15 These misunderstandings are to be traced back to two different conceptions of metaphysics, the contrast of which affected many strands of philosophy. When Taylor’s argument first came out (in the ‘60s), “it was orthodox that the only modalities pertinent to philosophy were linguistic . […] On this understanding, much of the basal structure of reality . . . is a result of the interaction with the world of the minds of conscious beings” (64-65). Taylor instead stood on an understanding of the world rooted in Aristotle. In this, “the basal structure of reality is entirely independent of the minds of conscious beings” (65), reality is clearly not linguistic, but it is neither based on causal nor physical modalities, and this is where – Fiocco contends – all of Taylor’s critics have failed to engage with his argument, including Wallace, who “recognizes the need . . . to get clear on the modality relevant to Taylor’s discussion,” but makes the same mistake his predecessors had made: that of considering the pertinent modality as physical and causal.

16 Nonetheless, “he examines with more determination than his predecessors” the modal connections inherent to Taylor’s argument and in so doing “enables one to discern the crux of Taylor’s Aristotelian argument” (72): Taylor assumes that the world is ontologically homogeneous, meaning time is not a matter of concern. Wallace sees ambiguities in Taylor’s treatment of time and formulates The Taylor Inequivalence ; successfully showing “that there are two [inequivalent] ways of understanding [Taylor’s] conclusion, one consistent with contingency, one not” (76). This should, in theory, disprove fatalism. And yet, Fiocco warns us, Wallace “has not undermined Taylor’s argument” (76), because Taylor and Wallace start from “incompatible assumptions about the nature of contingency” (77), one physical-cum-causal, the other Aristotelian.

17 In fact, Taylor’s two foundational ideas are an Aristotelian conception of metaphysics (reality based on the nature of things in themselves) and his denial of synchronic possibility. The proper interpretation of his argument, for Fiocco, turns on this latter notion. Taylor presupposes that states of affairs at a present moment must be as they are, in other words: necessary. Wallace and pretty much all of Taylor’s contemporaries found this reasoning faulty.

18 But what Taylor wanted to show was that his Aristotelian understanding of the world, when tied to the six popular philosophical assumptions we referred to multiple times, was incompatible with contingency. Specifically, he argued that certain propositions about the future turn out to be indeterminate and, therefore, at least one of contemporary philosophy’s popular assumptions turns out to be mistaken. 3 This is the one essay that explains most clearly how and why Taylor wasn’t a fatalist. In doing so, though, Fiocco could have been more precise on the difference between Aristotelian and physical-cum-causal views of the world; this point, I think, comes as rather cloudy, and it being the point of departure of his argument, one is left with the sensation of having understood almost everything.

19 The fourth essay, Maureen Eckert’s “Fatalism, Time Travel, and System J,” connects Taylor and Wallace to David Lewis’s theories about time travelling. The connection is found in Taylor’s responses to what is termed “Ability Criticism.” This is the criticism of the fifth premise of Taylor’s argument – “no agent can perform any given act if there is lacking, at the same or any other time, some condition necessary for the occurrence of that act” (my emphasis) – brought forth by Aune, Saunders, and Abelson on the different meanings of can . These critics argued that Taylor’s argument fails because individuals retain the ability to do even if circumstances do not permit certain actions to occur; but Taylor was able to dispense with “Ability Criticism” by showing that whatever argument his critics were implementing could as easily be applied to fatalism about the future as to fatalism about the past. In other words, that if one were to apply his critics’ argument, one would have to argue that people could change the past.

20 And, Eckert tells us, the problem of disambiguating the senses of “can” is not so easily solved. Taylor noted that his critics differentiated between three senses of “can”: (1) “what is within one’s power to do, (2) what is possible for one to do, and (3) what is within one’s ability to do” (96). Taylor got rid of (3) (= Ability Criticism), but that still left open the question of specifically defining the other two senses of can.

21 “David Foster Wallace exploits this remaining ambiguity in his attack on the fatalist argument, disambiguating these two remaining senses of ‘can’ through distinguishing between physical possibility and what he terms ‘situational physical possibility’” (96). This is where Eckert introduces David Lewis.

22 “In ‘The Paradoxes of Time Travel,’ David Lewis attempts to dissolve [the ‘Grandfather’] paradox with the intention of showing that [time travel] is possible” (97); the “Grandfather Paradox” is the following: if a person has successfully travelled back in time, owns a gun, and is aiming that gun at her grandfather, “there is nothing at that time that would prevent her from killing her grandfather” (97). In other words, a person is moving through a continuous now (we always live in the present), which means she can kill her grandfather (Lewis calls this notion of time “personal time”). On the other hand, if we consider the concept of “objective time,” that person has travelled to the past, and by killing her grandfather “she would then eliminate a necessary condition for her existence—there would be no future her that can travel back in time to commit the act in question” (97). In this analysis, (1) Lewis’s “objective time” equals Wallace’s “physical possibility,” a realm in which the time traveller can’t kill her grandfather; (2) Lewis’s “personal time” equals Wallace’s “situational physical possibility,” here the time traveller can kill her grandfather.

23 For Wallace, therefore, the key to undermining Taylor’s argument is in the analysis of the senses of can . Specifically, Wallace wants to show that premise five is incoherent with Taylor’s conclusion, therefore rendering his argument invalid. With System J, Wallace builds a theory which grants “alternative logically possible presents” (104) but no alternative “physical and actually possible” (105) presents to show that while it is true that in Taylor’s conclusion no agent could perform any given act if there wasn’t, at the same time , the condition necessary for the occurrence of that act, it is not true that no agent could perform any given act if there wasn’t, at any other time , the condition necessary for the occurrence of that act.

24 The fifth essay, Daniel Kelly’s “David Foster Wallace as American Hedgehog” provides the necessary context as to why and how this discussion relates to larger matters in Wallace Studies . Kelly looks for Wallace’s “one big thing” amongst his wide range of interests and, of course, Wallace’s one big thing is free will/choice. But Kelly’s essay lacks the philosophical/logical imprint that so peculiarly characterizes the book and therefore, to me, ends up not being a convincing addition to the collection mostly, I think, with regards to selection and placement: it might have worked best as an introduction.

25 That said, the essay notes that Wallace’s concerns – “language and meaning; choice and the will; the self, selfishness, solipsism, and their prospects for being overcome –, all emanate from a core concern with, roughly, what it means ‘to be a real human being’ (MacCaffery 1993)” (109). This is why, Kelly goes on, both in all of the fiction and non-fiction Wallace confronted “the ways in which problems connected to choice presented themselves to those of us living in the turn-of-the-millennium United States” (111).

26 As we all know, this was Wallace’s main concern. Reflecting on human beings and their need to find meaning, Wallace structured his ideas “into a schema made of three distinct, general components: (1) the primal need or basic impulse to give away or invest, (2) a sort of resource that is ‘given away’ or type of currency that a person is driven to invest, and (3) the objects at which the impulse might be directed, the vessels with which the resource might be filled, into which the currency might be channeled” (114).

27 In contemporary times, human beings try to find a balance between these three components, but the sheer amount of options and information is overwhelming; plus the very idea of what Wallace called “choosing our Temple” is regarded with deep suspicion. “Ideological passion disgusts us on some deep level” (120), and this creates a split inside us, between our innermost need of giving ourselves away and our intellectual cynicism about such a notion. Finally, all of these problems (which Wallace directly discusses in “E Unibus Pluram”) are shown to lead to hedonism and addiction, seen as a “kind of flight from the pressures of choice” (123). In the end, Wallace’s message, for Kelly, “can be distilled down to two simple words: wake up ” (124).

28 The sixth and last essay, “David Foster Wallace on the Good Life” by Nathan Ballantyne and Justin Tosi, follows Kelly’s approach in the sense that it aims at reconstructing Wallace’s main philosophy in his life and career, but it does so by offering both new themes and connections and new approaches to previous conversations in Wallace studies. In this case, the authors “argue that his writings suggest a view about what philosophers call the good life ” (133).  They proceed by comparing Wallace’s oeuvre with “popular positions from moral philosophy” and by presenting Wallace’s reactions to “three positions about the good life.” The first of these positions is ironism , which “involves distancing oneself from everything one says or does and putting on what Wallace often calls a ‘mask of ennui.’” The second is hedonism , which states that “a good life consists in pleasure.” The third is narrative theories , according to which “a good human life is characterized by fidelity to a unified narrative” (134).

29 (1) For Richard Rorty, “a society of ironists can remain committed to humane values by distinguishing between public and private justification” (138). Even if the ironist is “never quite able to take [him]self seriously,” he can, nonetheless, commit to something just as e.g. people would commit to Christianity in the Middle Ages: without the need to ask why . Wallace totally disagrees; to him a good life is one of serious commitment, one that takes itself seriously. Irony is to him just a flight from responsibility, a childish attempt to be beyond criticism. It leaves a huge black hole inside the individual.

30 (2) Hedonism is completely and utterly rejected by Wallace (in Infinite Jest people stare at a screen until death by watching a movie so pleasurable it ends up killing them). But thinkers such as Epicurus or Bentham defended a theory called value hedonism according to which “what makes pleasure valuable is not the feeling or sensation itself, but our enjoyment of the sensation. It’s the attitude of enjoyment that is crucial” (141) to living a good life. In other words, it’s not pure sensational pleasure that counts; it’s finding pleasure in life itself. This is better, because it permits (unlike ironism and “pure” hedonism) people’s commitment to something, but it is still unacceptable for Wallace because it constitutes a total egotistic approach to life. “On these theories, other people are no more than mere objects in the state of affairs you value” (144). The only value your friends have is directly proportionate to how they affect your pleasure and your happiness. It’s a totally self-centered view on life.

31 (3) The basic idea under narrative theories is that “someone has a good life only if she has a narrative outlook on her life. […] She must see her life as making sense as a single story in which she is the main character.” Narrative theories are subdivided into two categories, the “weak” thesis affirms that “ having a narrative is a necessary condition for a good life ,” and the “strong” thesis that “ a person simply is the thing described by a narrative ” (146). These theories avoid some of the pitfalls of hedonism, they allow for a deeper and richer definition of human life, where people can value commitments in friendships, family, work, and ethics in general. But, first, Wallace rejects the “weak” thesis. Not only people do not need narratives; narratives can be very dangerous:

32 To judge one’s life in terms of narrative success is to adopt a certain perspective. This perspective involves thinking of oneself as a character in a story, and evaluating that character in terms of her or his compliance with the story’s demands. If this sounds alienating, there’s a good reason. (156)

33 In other words, narratives can turn us into spectators (rather than participants) in our own lives. We become the audience of ourselves, hyper-self-conscious. We distance ourselves from ourselves, we become our own judges, we see ourselves falling short. This is the case in short stories like “Good Old Neon” and “The Depressed Person” where the protagonists hold fix idealized versions of themselves and self-destroy for not being able to achieve them. But narratives, seen through the “weak” thesis, also create another problem: “we tend to overvalue uniqueness or specialness in narratives, and this leaves us feeling inauthentic” (151).  We “confuse uniqueness with authenticity” and end up reaching for emptiness or for versions of ourselves that turn us into frauds. Uniqueness has nothing to do with value, and our culture has forgotten that.

34 The “strong” thesis, instead – of which the major theorist noted is Christine Korsgaard –, states that narratives constitute us, that “a person is identical with her narrative. […] If you are your narrative, there’s no way your narrative can alienate you from yourself. There’s no you without it” (157). But, again, Wallace is in disagreement (and again “Good Old Neon” is cited as a perfect example). It seems obvious, to Wallace, that “we are not merely our narratives, […] because no narrative—perhaps nothing ever explicitly thought in words—can capture who we are. Although narratives can usefully express to others and to ourselves what we care about, they are never who we are . Selves are ineffable” (159).

35 All of these comparisons lead Ballantyne and Tosi to the following conclusion – which, in a way, seems to become the whole collection’s conclusion: Wallace, despite having a sincere attraction toward theories, nonetheless finds them unsatisfactory. “Wallace recognizes that theories of the good life, when taken to be more than limited sketches of reality, tend to result in our being judgmental or cruel to ourselves ” (162-163). Theories are not reality, they’re just maps.

36 This collection presents, dissects, and explains that side of Wallace we students of literature knew was there but never really understood. It does it especially well by concentrating on a single specific matter and offering different points of view, thereby providing the reader not with an arbitrary reading/thesis/summary but with various elements he/she must work with in order to grapple with this philosophical conundrum. It is by the strength of its method, therefore, that Freedom and the Self: Essays on the Philosophy of David Foster Wallace successfully manages to engage and lead students of literature into a field not their own and enable them to understand logic and exactly why logic matters: it is one of the bases of David Foster Wallace’s existential troubles.

1 All of the quotes from this paragraph come from pages 1 and 2.

2  Presupposition 5 states: “no agent can perform any given act if there is lacking, at the same or any other time, some condition necessary for the occurrence of that act” (4).

3  Presupposition 1: all propositions are either true or false.

Electronic reference

Paolo Pitari , “Steven M. Cahn and Maureen Eckert, Freedom and the Self: Essays on the Philosophy of David Foster Wallace ” ,  European journal of American studies [Online], Book reviews, document 7, Online since 08 February 2017 , connection on 12 May 2024 . URL : http://journals.openedition.org/ejas/11685; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/ejas.11685

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• The Existentialist Contradiction in David Foster Wallace: How Wallace’s Sociology Illuminates the Contradiction in Wallace’s Ethics [Full text] Published in European journal of American studies , 17-2 | 2022
• David Hering, David Foster Wallace: Fiction and Form [Full text] Published in European journal of American studies , Book reviews
• Stanley Fish, Think Again: Contrarian Reflections on Life, Culture, Politics, Religion, Law, and Education [Full text] Article 7 Published in European journal of American studies , Book reviews
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• Robert P. Waxler, The Risk of Reading: How Literature Helps Us to Understand Ourselves and the World [Full text] Article 14 Published in European journal of American studies , Book reviews
• Allard den Dulk, Existentialist Engagement in Wallace, Eggers and Foer: A Philosophical Analysis of Contemporary American Literature [Full text] Article 5 Published in European journal of American studies , Book reviews

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Fate, Time, and Language: An Essay on Free Will

David Foster Wallace, Fate, Time, and Language: An Essay on Free Will , Steven M Cahn and Maureen Eckert (eds.), Columbia University Press, 2011, 252pp., $19.95 (pbk), ISBN 9780231151573.

Reviewed by Daniel Speak, Loyola Marymount University

I accepted the invitation to review this collection, headlined by Wallace's undergraduate senior thesis, on something of a lark. Though I knew Wallace's fiction at the time only by reputation, I had been impressed by the graduation address he delivered at Kenyon College in 2005. This address, you will likely recall, had gone more or less viral among academics because of its profound and quirky defense of the value of a liberal arts education (sending up the whole graduation speech genre while nevertheless saying the sorts of things we have been hoping to hear from sweaty commencement speakers since we first were forced to attend these events). Of course, I was also aware of Wallace's 2008 suicide and the convulsions in the literary world it had caused. Frankly, however, I had my worries that the publication of his undergraduate thesis was a purely opportunistic endeavor under these circumstances. I convinced myself that accepting the invitation might nevertheless have at least two positive results. First, I could use it as a provocation and motivation to tackle Wallace's supposedly mind-bending Infinite Jest (1000+ pages!). Second, an honest and negative assessment of the philosophical merit of the volume, I told myself, might cast some useful light on the opportunism I was afraid was behind its publication.

Having confessed my antecedent suspicions, I now publicly repent them. Fate, Time, and Language contains a great deal of first-rate philosophy throughout, and not least in Wallace's extraordinarily professional and ambitious essay -- an essay that, at 80 pages, composes about a quarter of the volume. The collection (including Wallace's contribution) is tightly focused around the traditional problem of fatalism, especially as this problem was invigorated for contemporary philosophy by Richard Taylor's characteristically elegant and inventive explication in his 1962 Philosophical Review article (also included in the volume). Quite apart from the inclusion of Wallace's essay, the collection of essays in response to Taylor's article could stand alone as a useful (if short) anthology. The addition of Wallace's essay, together with the various bits of reflection on his life as a student and writer, make it both intellectually rich and psychologically illuminating.

Structurally, the volume is composed of four parts. First, there is an excellent general introduction by James Ryerson that provides some useful history with respect to both the contemporary fatalism debate and Wallace's intellectual development up to and after the completion of his thesis at Amherst College in the spring of 1985. In addition, Ryerson does some explaining to non-philosophers of how the central argument of Wallace's thesis works (here I think philosophers will do better to skip these explanations and read the thesis itself first -- not because there is anything misleading in Ryerson's treatment but because it seems clear to me that Wallace's argument will be able to speak for itself). Finally, Ryerson connects Wallace's philosophical interests to his larger work as a novelist and essayist.

The second part of the volume attempts to provide the immediate philosophical background to Wallace's thesis: a collection of thirteen short essays beginning with Taylor's initial essay and followed by the most important responses to it appearing over the next three or four years (and each appearing in either Analysis , The Philosophical Review , or The Journal of Philosophy ). These essays are of a uniformly high quality authored by visible figures in the field (including, for example, John Turk Saunders, Bruce Aune, and Steven Cahn). There are also two further short notes from Taylor himself, commenting on the responses provoked by his argument. All of this quite nicely serves the stated purpose of putting Wallace's essay in context and raising the level of intrigue with respect to the central problem it addresses and the solution it offers. In addition, however, these background articles also provide an illuminating glimpse into the mood and methodology of professional philosophy in the 1960s.

The third section opens with Maureen Eckert's brief introduction to Wallace's essay, which emphasizes the new formal resources for semantics and modality that emerged in the 1970s in the work, in particular, of Saul Kripke, David Lewis, and Richard Montague. As Eckert notes, Wallace's strategy (remarkably sophisticated in its own right, but especially so for an undergraduate) was to bring these new resources to bear on the old problem. With all of the stage-setting now in place, Wallace's thesis, entitled "Richard Taylor's 'Fatalism' and the Semantics of Physical Modality," is printed in full.

Finally, the volume concludes with Jay Garfield's short recollection of Wallace as a student (especially during the writing of his senior thesis) and an appendix. The appendix is Richard Taylor's earlier (1957) article "The Problem of Future Contingencies."

The target problem of this volume is, of course, perennial. According to the form of fatalism that Taylor's influential paper appears to commend, whatever does occur is the only thing that ever could have occurred. This applies also to occurrences that are actions. Thus, whatever you in fact do is the only thing you ever could have done. As Taylor puts it, the fatalist "thinks he cannot do anything about the future." What is especially spooky (or suspicious) about fatalism is that this counterintuitive conclusion about our powerlessness over the future is supposed to follow from what initially appear to be uncontroversial and largely formal commitments. In other words, fatalism is the claim that it is something like a conceptual or semantic truth that no one acts freely. Taylor constructs his fatalistic argument from six presuppositions and a story. [1] The six presuppositions are:

1. Any proposition is either true or, if not true, then false.

2. If one state of affairs is sufficient for another, then the first cannot occur without the second occurring.

3. If one state of affairs is necessary for another, then the second cannot occur with the first occurring.

4. If one set of conditions is necessary for another, then the second is sufficient for the first (and conversely).

5. No agent can perform an act in the absence of some necessary condition for the occurrence of that act.

6. The mere passage of time does not enhance or decrease an agent's powers or abilities.

The story, inspired by Aristotle, goes like this:

Let us now imagine that I am a naval commander, about to issue my order of the day to the fleet. We assume, further, that, within the totality of other considerations prevailing, my issuing of a certain kind of order will ensure that a naval battle will occur tomorrow, whereas if I issue another kind of order, this will ensure that no naval battle occurs. Now, then, I am about to perform one or the other of these two acts, namely, one of issuing an order of the first sort or one of the second sort. Call these alternative acts O and O ' respectively. And call the two propositions, "A naval battle will occur tomorrow" and "No naval battle will occur tomorrow," Q and Q' respectively. We can assert, then, that if I do act O , then my doing such will ensure that there will be a naval battle, whereas if I do O' , my doing that will ensure that no naval battle will occur (p. 46).

But now we have the makings of an argument that either the commander didn't have the power to issue O or he didn't have the power to issue O' . That is, we have the makings of an argument for the conclusion that, appearances notwithstanding, none of us ever enjoys the sort of genuine two-way power we ordinarily associate with free will.

The argument goes like this:

1'. If Q is true, then it is not within my power to do O' (for in case Q is true, then there is, or will be, lacking a condition essential for my doing O' , the condition, namely, of there being no naval battle tomorrow).

2'. But if Q' is true, then it is not within my power to do O (for a similar reason).

3'. But either Q is true or Q' is true.

\ 4'. Either it is not within my power to do O , or it is not within my power to do O' .

In sketching Wallace's distinctive response to Taylor's argument it is worth noting first what seems most to have drawn and kept his attention here. More than one of Wallace's teachers recount that he appeared to have been sincerely disturbed by something like the form of the argument. Reflecting back on his initial discussions with Wallace about the thesis project, Garfield recalls that the young Wallace "was outraged that Taylor sought, and claimed to have derived, an explicitly metaphysical conclusion from purely logical or semantic premises; and he was genuinely offended by the failure of professional philosophers to have put things right" (p. 220). Not only does this reveal a sophisticated philosophical sensibility, it also allows us to see both why Wallace was not satisfied with many of the responses to Taylor's argument that had already appeared in the literature and what was unique in his own approach. Showing that the Taylor argument is unsound simply would not be enough for Wallace, since this would leave the structure of the argument (and its aspirations) essentially intact. What needed to be vindicated was the thought that a metaphysical conclusion cannot follow from purely semantic premises. Therefore, what needed to be shown was that the Taylor argument is invalid -- that the conclusion does not follow from the premises (and the assumptions underlying them). For this reason, Wallace makes every effort to maintain Taylor's six assumptions.

Wallace's strategy for revealing the invalidity in the Taylor argument is to demonstrate the logical nonequivalence of two propositions that the argument runs together. Notice that premises 1' and 2' of Taylor's argument are derived, by the application of something like contraposition, from the stipulations that the occurrence of O will ensure that Q is true and the occurrence of O' will ensure that Q' is true. Given these physical modalities, we can conclude that the falsity of Q would physically necessitate the absence of O and the falsity of Q' would physically necessitate the absence of O' . Having taken these points into consideration, there are still two different ways to understand the claim expressed in 1' (and the same point could be made, obviously, with respect to 2'):

MT1: If there will be no sea battle tomorrow, then today it is not physically possible for the commander to issue the order.

MT2: If there will be no sea battle tomorrow, then tomorrow it will not be physically possible for the commander to issue the order today. [2]

To bring out the nonequivalence, Wallace develops a sophisticated semantics for the physical modality he takes to be at work in Taylor's argument (the "not within my power" locution of Taylor's argument should be understood in terms of physical -- rather than logical or metaphysical -- impossibility). With the semantics worked out, Wallace is able to offer a formal argument for his claim that while (the properly formalized expression of) MT1 entails (the properly formalized expression of) MT2, the converse is false. Furthermore, Wallace argues that, while it is only MT1 that can get us to fatalism, Taylor's argument can, at best, establish only MT2.

This is, of course, far too quick an explication of Wallace's argument and it does little justice to the insight and rigor of his work. In particular, what I have said above may have slipped past you without commanding your recognition. He really does develop, essentially from scratch, a sophisticated semantics for an intuitive brand of physical modality (that he titles "system J") modeled on the work in logical modality of Kripke and Montague. And he really does deploy this system to reveal the formal nonequivalence between MT1 and MT2 in this system. Thus, what Wallace takes himself to have shown is that accepting the validity of the fatalist argument would require rejecting his system J. It turns out to be very difficult to see how one would go about rejecting system J. It is, therefore, not as surprising as you might have anticipated that Jay Garfield reports: "I regarded his argument as decisive then, and I still do." I have noted Garfield's considered assessment not in order to scrutinize it but only to emphasize the serious treatment this volume (and Wallace's thesis in particular) merits. Whether or not Garfield's judgment can ultimately be vindicated, the judgment itself gives the readers of this review a forceful reason to take Wallace's argument seriously.

If there is a clear shortcoming in Wallace's thesis, it is that Wallace has misunderstood certain aspects of Taylor's argument and motivations. This possibility is brought out (gently) by Steven Cahn both in his very brief introduction to the background essays and in his epigraph to the appendix (included, one thinks, to help emphasize just the point Cahn makes in his introduction). It is true that for all Wallace says in his essay he may indeed have thought that Richard Taylor was a fatalist; which would have been a mistake -- a mistake that, Cahn reports, has been quite widely made even by professional philosophers. Taylor's infamous fatalism paper was intended, it seems, not as a defense of its title position but rather as a reductio ad absurdum of the six presuppositions on which his argument depends. As the appendix paper makes clear, Taylor followed Aristotle in rejecting presuppositions 1 and 6. That is, Taylor believed that the truth-value of future contingent propositions is indeterminate and that the passage of time alone could make the determining difference (thereby affecting the powers of agents). On a related note, recall Wallace's resistance to the idea that a metaphysical thesis could be established by appeal to purely semantic premises. Upon reflection (and, again, Cahn makes this point), the sixth presupposition does not appear to be a purely semantic claim. It seems, instead, to be a full-blooded metaphysical claim (about the relationship between time and power). But even if Wallace was mislead about Taylor's wider aims and motivated by a misunderstanding (an explanation of which I can't quite reconstruct) of the status of the fatalist argument's premises, his essay is impressive philosophy. It is possible that its most important contribution will be to return some contemporary attention to the ancient problem and to the worthy work of Richard Taylor.

Having read Infinite Jest alongside the collection under review here, I cannot ignore the parallels between Hal Incandenza (the novel's intellectually precocious teen-aged central character) and the collegiate David Foster Wallace -- who feverishly wrote his thesis in the Amherst philosophy department during his senior year while also penning a complete novel for a second thesis in the English department. [3] In a gesture we are now in position to appreciate, Wallace has Hal Incandenza submit an essay for his college applications entitled "Montague Grammar and the Semantics of Physical Modality". Perhaps more tellingly, we find Incandenza late in the novel, trying to come to terms with his own almost involuntary intellectual precision, noticing that "The dedication and sustained energy that go into true perspicacity and expertise were exhausting even to think about." Whatever this kind of dedication and sustained energy ultimately exacted from Wallace himself, reading his careful and fulsome response to Taylor's fatalism argument reveals that it did contribute to his being an enormously promising philosopher. I find it hard to disagree with Garfield in his conclusion that had Wallace stuck with philosophy, and had he lived, he would have been a major figure in our field. There is also no denying the strange excitement of looking in on the development of a young and uniquely powerful intellect. Those who have read John Rawls' undergraduate thesis will, I think, have a similar experience in reading Wallace's.

[1] Actually, Taylor tells two stories, but we don't need them both here.

[2] I have tried to put these disambiguations in natural language (rather than in the various more formal languages Wallace deploys).

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Freedom and the Self: Essays on the Philosophy of David Foster Wallace

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The book Fate, Time, and Language: An Essay on Free Will , published in 2010, presented David Foster Wallace's challenge to Richard Taylor's argument for fatalism. In this anthology, notable philosophers engage directly with that work and assess Wallace's reply to Taylor as well as other aspects of Wallace's thought. The thinkers in this book explores Wallace's philosophical and literary work, illustrating remarkable ways in which his philosophical views influenced and were influenced by themes developed in his other writings, both fictional and nonfictional. This book unlocks key components of Wallace's work and its traces in modern literature and thought.

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David Foster Wallace and the Challenge of Fatalism

Recently I had occasion to consult major reference works to compare their accounts of fatalism. What I found was disappointing.

The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy , edited by Simon Blackburn, contains the following entry for “fatalism”:

“The doctrine that what will be will be, or that human action has no influence on events. ‘Either a bullet has my number on it or it does not; if it does, then there is no point taking precautions for it will kill me anyhow; if it does not then there is no point taking precautions for it is not going to kill me; hence either way there is no point taking precautions.’ The dilemma ignores the highly likely possibility that whether the bullet has your number on it depends on whether you take precautions. Fatalism is wrongly confused with determinism, which by itself carries no implications that human action is ineffectual.”

The first definition offered is a tautology, “what will be will be”; if that thesis is fatalism, then the doctrine is true but uninteresting. The second definition, “human action has no influence on events,” is clearly false, because, for example, obtaining a divorce logically requires getting married. Examples like that of the bullet were known in antiquity as the “idle argument,” and the appropriate reply, given by the Stoic philosopher Chrysippus, is that taking precautions may save you, and, if so, then they were fated to do so. Hence such examples provide no refutation of fatalism. Furthermore, the difference between fatalism and determinism is not that fatalism claims human action is ineffectual but that fatalism makes no reference to causation. Moreover, some determinists affirm free will, but all fatalists deny it.

The entry for “fatalism” in The Oxford Companion to Philosophy , New Edition, edited by Ted Honderich, is no more helpful:

“The belief, not to be confused with causal determinism, that deliberation and action are pointless because the future will be the same no matter what we do. According to the famous ‘idle argument’ of antiquity, ‘If it is fated for you to recover from this illness, you will recover whether you call in a doctor or not; similarly, if it is fated for you not to recover from this illness, you will not recover whether you call in a doctor or not; and either your recovery or non-recovery is fated; therefore there is no point in calling in a doctor.’ Thus all actions and choices are ‘idle’ because they cannot affect the future. Determinists reject fatalism on the grounds that it may be determined that we can be cured only by calling the doctor.”

Here fatalism is identified with the “idle argument,” as though that piece of reasoning is itself the fatalistic position. In fact, the “idle argument” is a supposed refutation of fatalism, easily answered with the response of Chrysippus that, for example, whether your call a doctor is as fated as whether you recover.

The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy , Third Edition, edited by Robert Audi, offers no entry on “fatalism” but refers readers to an article titled “free will problem.” There the term “fatalism” is not mentioned, but the detailed discussion of free will and determinism includes the following two sentences:  “Logical versions of determinism declare each future event to be determined by what is already true, specifically by the truth that it will occur then. Certain theological variants accept the predestination of all circumstances and events by a divine being who knows in advance that they will obtain.”

The term “logical determinism” suggests that fatalism is a form of determinism, which it is not. Furthermore, while divine foreknowledge can raise speculation about human freedom, fatalism does not rest on theism.

The Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy , edited by Edward Craig, adds to the confusion. Its entry states:

“‘Fatalism’ is sometimes used to mean the acceptance of determinism, along with a readiness to accept the consequence that there is no such thing as human freedom. The word is also often used in connection with a theological question: whether God’s supposed foreknowledge means that the future is already fixed. But it is sometimes explained very differently, as the view that human choice and action have no influence on future events, which will be as they will be whatever we think or do. On the face of it this is barely coherent, and invites the assessment that fatalism is simply an expression of resigned acceptance.”

Here fatalism is first conflated with determinism, next misleadingly associated with a belief in God’s foreknowledge, then equated with the tautology that what will be will be, and finally supposedly refuted by the “idle argument.” The brief accompanying article begins by asserting that “Taken as meaning exactly what it says, the dictum that human choice and action have no influence on future events is absurd.” Here is an example of the fallacy of ignoratio elenchi, arguing against a claim not in dispute.

Fortunately, the proper understanding of fatalism can be found in the Encyclopedia of Ethics , Second Edition, edited by Lawrence C. Becker and Charlotte B. Becker. There the extended entry “fate and fatalism” authored by John Martin Fischer begins:  “Fatalism can be understood as the doctrine that it is a logical or conceptual truth that agents are never free to do other than what they actually do.”

Note the following key points in Fischer’s definition. First, fatalism is not a form of determinism. Second, fatalism does not presume theism. Third, fatalism denies free will on the basis of conceptual considerations. Fourth, fatalism does not affirm or imply that human actions have no influence on future events.

The key question, of course, is whether fatalism, appropriately understood, can be supported by a philosophically sophisticated argument. The most celebrated contemporary attempt was authored in 1962 by Richard Taylor, whose accessible article “Fatalism” in The Philosophical Review generated heated discussion in a host of leading journals. More than two decades later, a detailed contribution to the controversy was offered in a senior thesis at Amherst College submitted by the soon-to-be-celebrated writer David Foster Wallace. It was reprinted along with highlights of the original philosophical debate in Fate, Time, and Language: An Essay on Free Will , published by Columbia University Press in 2011 and co-edited by Professor Maureen Eckert of the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth and myself.

In sum, fatalism is not a tautology, a theological tenet, or a preposterous claim about the ineffectiveness of human action. Rather it is a challenging thesis denying free will on the basis of conceptual considerations and requiring for its assessment a careful exploration of issues regarding time, logic, and freedom.

• Steven M. Cahn

Steven M. Cahn is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. The most recent books he has authored are Religion Within Reason (Columbia University Press, 2017); Teaching Philosophy: A Guide (Routledge, 2018); Inside Academia: Professors, Politics, and Policies (Rutgers University Press, 2019); The Road Traveled and Other Essays (Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2019); Philosophical Adventures (Broadview Press, 2019); A Philosopher’s Journey: Essays from Six Decades ( Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2020), and Navigating Academic Life (Routledge, 2021).

• David Foster Wallace
• determinism
• Editor: David V. Johnson
• idle argument
• John Martin Fischer
• logical determinism
• responsibility

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What do we owe our neighbors, tiktok: the surveillance state and your role, an alternative to argumentation: persuasion via questions, the supreme court’s symbolic code of conduct, kierkegaard, public philosophy, and “the present age”, why arguments (almost) never work: motivated reasoning and persuasion.

Wednesday, September 4, 2019 Discovered definition of time [presented in e-book “Découvertes d’Auteur (Découvertes et Fatalisme)”] demonstrates that External intervention (interventions) is/are needed for avoiding the fatalism.

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David Foster Wallace's student thesis to be published posthumously

Most university graduates would shy away from the thought of their undergraduate dissertation being shown to anyone other than an examiner, but a US publisher is promising that the late David Foster Wallace's thesis, due for publication later this year, will "restore logic and language to their rightful places".

Author of the acclaimed novels Infinite Jest and The Broom of the System, and praised by Don DeLillo for sentences which "shoot rays of energy in seven directions", Wallace committed suicide in 2008. His unfinished final novel, The Pale King, is lined up for publication next year; now, academic publisher Columbia University Press has announced that it will bring out his undergraduate thesis, a critique of Richard Taylor's argument for fatalism, in December.

The publisher said the writing would allow readers to experience "the developing perspective of this major novelist, along with the beginning of his lifelong struggle to establish solid logical ground for his soaring convictions". It is publishing Wallace's essay as Fate, Time, and Language: An Essay on Free Will, alongside Taylor's original article and other works on fatalism that Wallace refers to in his critique.

An introduction from New York Times magazine editor James Ryerson says the "real accomplishment" of Wallace's writing "is not technical or argumentative but more like a moral victory".

"David Foster Wallace's intellectual powers have been used to set aright a world momentarily upended by an intellectual sleight of hand," writes Ryerson, who believes there are parallels between Wallace's early philosophical writing and his fiction. "He enlists clinical argument in defence of passionate intuition. He restores logic and language to their rightful places."

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Honors Program Theses and Projects

The existential philosophy of david foster wallace.

Shoshana Primak , Bridgewater State University

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It is no secret that philosophy and literature are often closely intertwined: beginning with works as old as Plato’s dialogues, philosophers have always seen the merit in utilizing fiction to share philosophy with both their contemporaries and with the general public. The most prominent existentialists are perhaps the most famous for using literature as a vehicle for their philosophical ideas: Friedrich Nietzsche, Søren Kierkegaard, Albert Camus, Simone de Beauvoir, and Jean-Paul Sartre all published some kind of fiction, through parables, novels, plays, and so forth. Likewise, I will argue in this thesis that renowned writer David Foster Wallace was not only a writer—though his career choice reflects his status as an author, the works he produced reflect his status as a philosopher.

Thesis Comittee

Dr. William J. Devlin, Thesis Advisor

Dr. Laura A. McAlinden, Committee Member

Dr. Gal Kober, Committee Member

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Original document was submitted as an Honors Program requirement. Copyright is held by the author.

Recommended Citation

Primak, Shoshana. (2020). The Existential Philosophy of David Foster Wallace. In BSU Honors Program Theses and Projects. Item 340. Available at: https://vc.bridgew.edu/honors_proj/340

Copyright © 2020 Shoshana Primak

Since September 16, 2020

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David foster wallace:, an inventory of his papers at the harry ransom center.

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Saved by Infinite Jest

Bereft and suicidal, i lay on my sofa. only david foster wallace’s novel kept me tethered to life, and still does.

by Mala Chatterjee   + BIO

In the surreal aftermath of my suicide attempt and amid the haze of my own processing, my best friend visited me in the hospital with a (soft-bound and thus mental-patient-safe) copy of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest under his arm. It was the spring of 2021. A couple months earlier, I had slipped in a tub, suffered a concussion, and triggered my first episode of major depression, and those had been the most difficult months of my life.

Though a lifelong ‘striver’ and ‘high achiever’, nothing I’ve ever done was harder than waging that war against myself while catatonic on that Brooklyn sofa. This was an inarticulable and so alienating war, one during which, at every moment, it was excruciating and terrifying to exist at all. I thought I knew the extent of my own mind’s capacity to torture itself, to hurt me, and what this thing we call depression can really be like. But I had been wrong.

For anyone who hasn’t experienced it at its worst, I now think it is psychologically impossible to imagine. It may even prove impossible for those who have experienced to still remember it after the fact, just as someone who temporarily perceives a fourth dimension wouldn’t really, fully remember what it was like once the perception is lost, only facets of the larger, unfathomable thing.

So maybe I can’t really remember, either: but I can recall thinking again and again these staggered reflections I’m writing now. Some of the swirling emotions that distressed and disoriented me on that sofa also remain faintly accessible, like the crippling inability to make any decisions, no matter how small, such that even contemplating a choice among some host of mine’s warmly offered selection of teas would incapacitate me with self-loathing and breathless, gushing tears. I remember hopelessly trying to make myself feel even the glimmer of anything good, turning to everything – the music, the friends – that had brought me so much joy before, only to find that I could no longer feel any of it but rather just, from somewhere afar, see and long for it while watching as the ever-darkening blackness in me instead consumed it all.

I remember the debilitating guilt and shame that emerged for everything I had ever done, including for having the audacity to keep existing for so long. And I remember an overwhelming empathy as I wondered how many others felt this way in the history of the world, imagining the vastness of all these solitary confinements within our minds across space and time. At the same time, it was unfathomable to me that anyone had ever felt like this, or that there could even be enough darkness in the universe to realise the experience more than this once.

F rom the days following my injury through the several months after, my ultimate challenge on that sofa was finding a way to endure the passage of time. I needed something to help me get through each moment and make it to the next one while still intact. I couldn’t actually do anything , but staring into space (or even watching TV) kept me vulnerable, as the cognitive passivity left ample room for the darkness to seep in and swallow me away. After a few desperate weeks, I eventually found that reading fiction – filling my head with another world that left room for little else – was the one thing that made it more bearable to exist. My best friend then suggested (after having gently and generously recommended the book to me for years) that perhaps this was the moment to read Infinite Jest. I think every day about how grateful I am that he did.

I started reading and it soon became the case that so long as Infinite Jest was in my hands, it was possible, okay even, for me to stick around. The core themes of the book that would soothe and sustain me over the coming weeks can be conveyed, I think, by its two dominant and contrasting venues – a halfway house for addicts in recovery on the one hand, and an elite and high-pressure tennis academy on the other – in conjunction with an underlying and unifying thesis: all of us, whether we’re chasing substances, achievements or whatever else we hope will satisfy us and make it bearable to exist, are afflicted. We are all, for lack of a better word, fucked in the head in the very same ways.

With Infinite Jest in my hands, I was suspended afloat by a contradictory catharsis, this evanescent insight that I could hold on to so long as I just kept reading and rereading the book’s (blessedly many) pages: that I was not crazy, nor alone, precisely because I really was crazy, which is to say that this all wasn’t me but rather it – it was a human condition. The book assured me that this was just what it was like to be crazy in this way, was exactly how others crazy in the same way were made to feel, a crazy that made them feel just as alone as I now felt. The book witnessed me, affirmed me, and assured me that my experience was familiar to the world. I can’t put it any better than just saying the book was my friend.

The book’s most famous lines are on suicidality, and the air-tight logic that it brings along

Some passages can only speak for themselves, as they so articulate (and help me remember) facets of the thing I was facing on that sofa. On the ‘psychotic depression’ suffered by the character Kate Gompert, the most haunting and compelling personification of depression I have come across:

It is a level of psychic pain wholly incompatible with human life as we know it. It is a sense of radical and thoroughgoing evil not just as a feature but as the essence of conscious existence. It is a sense of poisoning that pervades the self at the self’s most elementary levels. It is a nausea of the cells and soul … It … is probably mostly indescribable except as a sort of double bind in which any/all of the alternatives we associate with human agency – sitting or standing, doing or resting, speaking or keeping silent, living or dying – are not just unpleasant but literally horrible.

No description that I’ve encountered has better conveyed, so clearly and directly, the precise nature of that moment-by-moment agony in which I had found myself.

Infinite Jest ’s most famous lines are on suicidality, and the air-tight logic that it brings along. The book analogises it to the choice faced by those trapped inside a burning building and deciding whether to jump:

Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; ie, the fear of falling remains a constant … It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.

The suicidal person, in other words, is not misguided but rather literally facing different choices – ones unimaginable to those who do not also have flames slowly engulfing them.

I don’t think I can really explain what reading all this meant to me. The book could see me like a mirror at that moment and describe it all right back. More concretely, I can’t explain what it meant to find such forceful validations of my particular sense of this ‘mental illness’, not as some wrong or irrational reaction by me , a misapprehension or miscalculation on my part, but rather as something happening to me; it was a thing inside me – a billowing shape, as the book often calls it – to which all my dread and despair was actually just the reasonable and appropriate response. But I can tell you that, once I finished Infinite Jest , my grip on this self-understanding – and so my self-preservation – quickly started to slip away, and it was only a few days later that I tried to kill myself. By then, I was back to being alone on that sofa, surrounded by those flames the book had managed to keep at bay. I think reading Infinite Jest had been keeping me alive.

So that’s why, when he came to the hospital, my friend knew to bring along another copy of the book. I remember looking up at him then, bleary-eyed with anxious shame for what felt like my most monumental failure, a profoundly self-absorbed act of weakness on my part – and, not to mention, a terrible inconvenience for all those I’d dared to drag into my life. He smiled softly while waving Infinite Jest in a silent reminder that these emotions, though compelling in their presentation and thus reasonable to be so compelled by, weren’t really reflecting the reality of the matter. And with a copy to share, in that secured visiting area, we then had our own little pop-up book club.

I admit to sometimes feeling guilty for being the one who found salvation in his book instead of him

It all felt a bit like Bible study or something, in the fluorescent sterility and chaos of that strange space, and I remember my friend making some fittingly dark joke about how this was probably how DFW would’ve most wanted the book to be read anyway: like the word of God, among rock bottoms, being involuntarily held. It was a glimmer of Wallace’s raw hilarity, which fills so much of Infinite Jest (1996) – a grotesque humour, one that could punctuate my otherwise continuously unbearable tenure on that sofa with stitches of transcendent laughter, and which not only kept me alive but sometimes feeling alive, wanting to be , hoping I do somehow make it through it all, if for no other reason than because laughing still felt like something worthwhile. I was reminded, in our pop-up book club, that maybe this was still worth doing. In truth, the reality of what had happened was only beginning to crash down upon me, and it was going to be a very long road ahead. But we at least managed to make it all a bit gentler and more intelligible in that moment.

As of this September, it has been 15 years since Wallace’s suicide and two and a half years since my attempt. Like Wallace’s, my own decision to take my life had immediately followed an adjustment to my antidepressants. I remember it clearly: I’d been holding on so long as I’d still been reading, and when the reading was over and the enkindling darkness took its place, there was just barely enough left in me to pull myself up and pick up a phone, to articulate the necessary words and ask the professionals if they could possibly find some way to help me out. I’d still been searching in anguish for an escape as the walls closed in, a way to still win, to stick around.

Sadly, it was the prescribed dosage increase itself that hit me – as it is sometimes known to do – with another dark wave, knocking me back into the depths of myself, right as I’d been treading so very hard to reach a stable surface. I know Wallace’s suicide had been amid choppy chemical changes of his own, which is to say that we’d both still been fighting, and so these disparate outcomes were the product of random chance. There is a tragedy and humanity, I think, for one’s own desperate attempt at staying alive to be the very thing that does one in – and I admit to sometimes feeling guilty for being the one who found salvation in his book instead of him, as though this salvation was itself cosmically predestined to be scarce.

W hen I’m asked what exactly I found in Infinite Jest , I limit myself to noting two things. I found powerful portraits of mental illness, and I also found empathy. Like I said, the book was my friend. But the thing is, I know that many others have very different things to say about Infinite Jest – about the book, its author, its ‘prototypical’ readers, the very idea of it, and the ethos it has come to represent. In her chapter ‘On Not Reading DFW’ (2016), Amy Hungerford defends her choice never to read it by arguing (among other things) that there’s no reason to think DFW could have anything valuable to say about women. More recently, in the London Review of Books this July, Patricia Lockwood said of Infinite Jest that ‘it’s like watching someone undergo the latest possible puberty. It genuinely reads like he has not had sex.’

Hungerford, Lockwood and the mainstream ethos generally dismiss the book’s intended and actual audiences as white, male and not to be trusted, driven by Stockholm syndrome, sunk costs or delusions of self-interested grandeur in calling the book genius or important. I’m not exaggerating when I say that I find these critiques – so often snide or irreverent in their cadence – baffling, gaslighting, disempowering, at times even agonising. I can’t understand what they could possibly have to do with this book that I know as my friend, that I found myself in at my most alienated moment. And the bitter irony is that this ethos all concerns a man who, after writing such an empathetic book about mental illness, took his own life; for it is a collective instance of the very kind of empathy failure that I think Infinite Jest asks us to resist and helped me resist myself. I guess it is the least I can do for it now – and for my own survivor’s guilt – to join this ongoing chorus on the book with my own belting, discordant voice.

Mental illness can persuade you that you’re now seeing the reality that had always been real

Infinite Jest was life-saving for me, but I don’t just mean when I say this that it had been saving me while I was reading it on that sofa, or even the times that I’ve read the book since. Infinite Jest is saving my life all the time. There’s a recurring motif in the book, a haunting symbol for all of our many mental demons: the Face in the Floor. It first appears in a second-person vignette as an evil presence that only you, the reader, can feel. You wake up from a nightmare, you look around, and you suddenly notice that there is the Face in the Floor beneath you. It is a Face that you know is evil, and you know this evil is only for you. But as soon as you notice this Face in the Floor, you are also convinced that it has actually been there all along. You are certain of this, that its ‘horrid toothy smile [has been] leering right at your light all the time,’ and that it had simply been ‘unfelt by all others and unseen by you’ until now. In a later passage, this evil Face in the Floor – ‘the grinning root-white face of your worst nightmares’ – comes back, but this time, it’s your addiction. It ‘finally remove[s] its smily-face mask to reveal centerless eyes’, and you see that the Face in the Floor – your addiction – has now completely taken you over. The Face in the Floor has become your own. It’s ‘your own face in the mirror, now, it’s you ’ for it has ‘devoured or replaced and become you ’.

I think about the Face in the Floor every single day. I remind myself of it. One of the most harrowing things about mental illness is not anything captured by descriptions of its first-order symptoms, but rather the way it can convince you that these symptoms are just picking up on something that is and has always been the case , that was actually there all the time ; and when you didn’t feel this way it was because you had been blind. Mental illness can persuade you that you’re now seeing the reality that had always been real, the Face that had always been there in the Floor – which is all to say that your epistemic position has simply been improved. So long as that is what you are being made to believe, then how can anyone expect you to also believe ‘this too shall pass’ (or anything of the sort), or to somehow just stop it from swallowing you up?

I’m no longer on that sofa or surrounded by those flames. But still, I’ll probably always be moving with and managing my own billowing shape. Mine is a synergistic and explosive Molotov cocktail of depression and ‘emotion dysregulation’. This basically means that my internal reality is prone to quickly and intensely turn itself upside down again and again – somersaulting through euphoria, despair, mania, shame, rage, paranoia, guilt, panic, bliss, self-aggrandizement, self-hatred, even within a single day. My challenge in the dissociated midst of these episodes will always be to find something from outside the moment to believe in, or to at least have faith that any such thing could even exist, and so to resist the recurring immersive insistence that only this moment and nothing before it is what’s real.

Maybe that’s why I needed to say all of this, to give my experience this reality and write it all down, and paper over at least one of the Floor’s Faces and preserve this here instead for myself; and maybe these revelations are also my redemption for that audacity to have been the one saved. But when I say that Infinite Jest is saving my life all the time, what I mean is that I still keep trying my very best to tell myself – because I still need and will keep needing to tell myself – what has become both my mantra and my prayer: it’s the Face in the Floor. It’s the Face in the Floor. It’s the Face in the Floor.

In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-8255. Or text HOME to 741741 to reach Crisis Text Line .

In the UK and Ireland, the Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123 or email [email protected] or [email protected]

In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14

Other international helplines can be found at www.befrienders.org

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Biblioklept

Fate, Time, and Language: An Essay on Free Will — David Foster Wallace

Sometime last year, during a rare visit to a big chain bookstore, I was disgusted to see what had happened to  David Foster Wallace’s amazing Kenyon College commencement speech,  “This Is Water.” Wallace’s speech, about 3,815 words, give or take (maybe twelve standard typed pages), was being sold as a 144 page hardback volume with only a sentence or two printed per page. The book was (and is) a nakedly commercial attempt to turn a text that is  widely available on the web into the sort of thing that well-meaning uncles give to their nephews or nieces as graduation gifts. Of course, hardcore Wallace fans might want such a book — and I’d never begrudge them that — but it’s hard to imagine that Wallace would have been comfortable with how his book was marketed.

Which brings us to  Fate, Time, and Language: An Essay on Free Will , new from  Columbia University Press this week. The book publishes the 1985 honors thesis that Wallace submitted to the Amherst College’s Department of Philosophy, “Richard Taylor’s ‘Fatalism’ and the Semantics of Physical Modality.” The essay’s title alone signals a prohibitive level of academic specialization. In his introductory essay to the volume, “A Head That Throbbed Heartlike,”  New York Times Magazine editor James Ryerson points out, “Its obscurity is easy to appreciate. A highly specialized, seventy-six page work of logic, semantics, and metaphysics, it is not for the philosophically faint of heart.” Ryerson then warns his reader to “Brace yourself for a sample sentence,” before offering a sample from Wallace’s essay that I do not have the patience or fortitude to type out (it would take me too long to locate all the diacritical marks and special logic symbols). Ryerson concludes the paragraph with this wry remark: “There are reasons that he’s better known for an essay about a cruise ship.”

Fortunately, the editors of  Fate, Time, and Language make every effort to contextualize Wallace’s essay in a way that explains its aims, strengths, and even shortcomings. There’s Ryerson’s lengthy introduction, which provides an overview to Wallace’s life in philosophy. Then there’s Taylor’s “Fatalism” of course, a short, provocative argument combining six presuppositions that led Taylor to declare that humans have no control — none, whatsoever — over any future event. The volume collects four other essays by Taylor on fatalism, as well as eight other essays responding to his arguments, before delivering Wallace’s essay (the longest in the collection). Here’s Wallace—

So Taylor’s central claim, the Taylor problem, is that just a few basic logical and semantic presuppositions, regarded as uncontroversially true by most philosophers, lead directly to the metaphysical conclusion that human beings, agents, have no control over what is going to happen.

I ain’t even gonna front–pretty much everything that Wallace says after this was lost on me; if you want to read and comprehend the details of his argument you will need to have a grasp on the basics of Montague grammar and tensed modal logic. If you lack these skills,  there will be skimming . Lots and lots of skimming. So, in short, I have no ideawhether Wallace’s logic is sound, although I find his conclusion (minus all the modal evidence) quite compelling—

This essay’s semantic analysis has shown that Taylor’s proof doesn’t “force” fatalism on us at all. We should now recall that Taylor was offering a very curious sort of argument: a  semantic argument for a metaphysical conclusion. In light of what we’ve seen about the semantics of physical modality, I hold that Taylor’s semantic argument does not in fact yield his metaphysical conclusion.

After Wallace’s honors thesis, there’s a wonderful little memoir essay by his adviser on the project, Jay L. Garfield, who offers up this nugget—

I knew at the time, as I mention above, that David was also writing a novel as a thesis in English. But I never took that seriously. I though of David as a very talented young philosopher with a writing hobby, and did not realize that he was instead one of the most talented fiction writers of his generation who had a philosophy hobby.

These little pockets of insight appeal to me most in  Fate, Time, and Language , and as such, Ryerson’s essay “A Head That Throbbed Heartlike” is the highpoint of the book. It weaves together Wallace’s personal life, writing career, and academic pursuits into a moving elegy of sorts, although one more rooted in ideas than feelings. He also spells out the book’s mission quite clearly—

For all its seeming inscrutability, though, the thesis is lucidly argued and–with some patience and industry on the part of the lay reader–ultimately accessible, which is welcome news for those looking to deepen their understanding of Wallace. The paper offers a point of entry into an overlooked aspect of his intellectual life: a serious early engagement with philosophy that would play a lasting role in his work and thought, including his ideas about the purpose and possibilities of fiction.

Many of us might shudder at the idea of our college essays being published posthumously. Of course, most of us aren’t Wallace, but there are undoubtedly critics out there who will cry foul at this publication. Fortunately, the team behind  Fate, Time, and Language has produced a book of remarkable integrity, one that understands  why it exists, readily acknowledges its obscurity without trying to gloss over that obscurity, and makes every effort to communicate with and engage its readers without sacrificing erudition. To return to my opening anecdote, this is not the naked commercialism that motivated a gimmicky edition  This Is Water ; rather, this is a book delivered by people who genuinely care about Wallace and his ideas. Make no mistake–it’s very dry and very specialized, but fanatics will no doubt want it.

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Published by Edwin Turner

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6 thoughts on “Fate, Time, and Language: An Essay on Free Will — David Foster Wallace”

[…] 1.   After reading Tom McCarthy’s front-page review of two works by the late David Foster Wallace, Wallace’s unfinished novel, The Pale King, and Wallace’s essay Fate, Time, and Language: […]

Thanks for finally writing about >Fate, Time, and Language: An Essay on Free Will – David Foster Wallace | biblioklept <Liked it!

[…] Wallace’s adviser on the project, Jay L. Garfield, later stated: […]

[…] Wallace’s adviser on the project, Jay L. Garfield, later stated: […]

[…] Wallace’s adviser on the project, Jay L. Garfield, later stated: […]

[…] Applying the principle of bivalence (i.e. statements identified as either true or false), Taylor identified six presuppositions that appeared to prove individual powerlessness in the face of inevitable outcomes; and David Foster Wallace’s rebuttal came in the form of his 1985 honors thesis at Amherst College,  entitled:  “Fate, Time, and Language: An Essay on Free Will”. […]

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Archives & Special Collections David Foster Wallace at Amherst College

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D avid Foster Wallace’s time at Amherst College is the story of a brilliant young mind searching for identity and voice while struggling with debilitating depression. Wallace arrived at Amherst in the fall of 1980 when he roomed in a suite in Stearns. He made a strong impression on many of his professors, such as Willem DeVries who recalled, “I don’t want to say he was scary but he made me work harder than any other student I ever had.”

Wallace focused on his studies and received excellent grades throughout his time at Amherst. He won the Borden Freshman Prize in his first year, followed by the Armstrong Prize in English and the Hamilton Prize in Economics. He also found a group of friends, among them Mark Costello with whom he shared a room in Moore during his sophomore year. Wallace returned home for winter break at the end of the fall semester 1981, and took the spring 1982 semester off because of his depression.

Wallace returned to Amherst in fall 1982, again rooming with Costello, this time in Stone, one of the Social Dorms that were demolished to make room for the new Science Center. That fall, Wallace, Costello, and other friends revived an old Amherst student publication and launched Sabrina as an outlet for their humorous observations on college life. (The original Sabrina ran from 1950-1962.) One of Wallace’s contributions to the first issue in November 1982 was a parody of a Hardy Boys mystery titled “The Sabrina Brothers in the Case of the Hanged Hamster.” It is a short piece with dark humor around suicide and sexual assault; in spite of the “To be continued...” at the end, it never was. Sabrina appeared regularly throughout the 1980s, then sporadically into the early 1990s.

During his summer at home in 1983, Wallace was first prescribed the antidepressant Tofranil. Shortly after returning to campus for the fall 1983 semester – what would have been his senior year – he once again withdrew from school and returned home. He continued to read voraciously while away from Amherst, immersing himself in the fiction of Thomas Pynchon and Don Delillo and the philosophy of Wittgenstein. It was also during this time that he produced his first short story published in a more serious college magazine: “The Planet Trillaphon as it Stands in Relation to the Bad Thing” in the 1984 issue of The Amherst Review . The story opens:

“I’ve been on antidepressants for, what, about a year now, and I suppose I feel as if I’m pretty qualified to tell what they’re like. They’re fine, really, but they’re fine in the same way that say, living on another planet that was warm and comfortable and had food and fresh water would be fine: it would be fine, but it wouldn’t be good old Earth, obviously. I haven’t been on Earth now for almost a year, because I wasn’t doing very well on Earth. I’ve been doing somewhat better here where I am now, on the planet Trillaphon, which I suppose is good news for everyone involved.” (26)

Wallace took a creative writing course during the spring 1984 semester from visiting professor and novelist Alan Lelchuk. He received an A-, the lowest grade he had earned since his freshman year. Undeterred, Wallace returned to school in fall 1984 more enthusiastic about fiction than ever. His friend Mark Costello graduated in spring 1984 having completed two theses: one a study of the New Deal, the other a novel. Wallace was determined to match Costello’s accomplishments and began work on two theses of his own. He worked with advisor Willem de Vries on a philosophy thesis, Richard Taylor’s “Fatalism” and the Semantics of Physical Modality , and with English professor Dale Petersen on a novel, The Broom of the System .

After graduation, Wallace moved to Tucson to pursue an MFA in creative writing at the University of Arizona. The Broom of the System was published by Viking Penguin, Inc. in 1987, appearing simultaneously in hardcover and paperback. That year, he also served as a visiting instructor at Amherst. In 1999, the college awarded him an honorary doctor of letters degree.

Remembering David Foster Wallace

Wallace died Sept. 12, 2008, when, after a decades-long struggle with depression, he hanged himself at his home in Claremont, Calif. He was 44.

In the essays below, four people who knew Wallace at Amherst—his English thesis adviser, two friends and one former student—remember a young man who wrote his papers late at night when he couldn’t sleep, who played Bruce Springsteen’s “I'm Goin' Down” until the tape broke and who, even in college, possessed a “Dickensian genius for spawning new characters and newly devised connections among them.”

• Like a Set of Old Clothes
• Talking with Dave
• The Start of Everything that Followed
• The Teacher

Members of the Amherst community may post their own remembrances here .

David Foster Wallace Collections

In March 2010, the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin announced that they had purchased Wallace’s personal papers – including his personal library -- and would make them available to researchers:

• David Foster Wallace: An Inventory of His Papers at the Harry Ransom Center
• David Foster Wallace: Harry Ransom Center Digital Collections

In December 2012, Columbia University Press published Wallace’s second Amherst thesis, Fate, Time and Language: An Essay on Free Will .

The Archives & Special Collections at Amherst holds a small number of letters Wallace wrote to Professor William Kennick ; the copies of his senior theses he submitted as a student in 1985; and a complete set of his published works, including several pre-publication proofs and variant editions.

Brief Interview with a Five Draft Man

In 1999, Amherst  magazine ran a feature-length Q&A interview with David Foster Wallace. 

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Fate, Time, and Language: An Essay on Free Will Paperback – December 10, 2010

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• Print length 264 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Columbia University Press
• Publication date December 10, 2010
• Dimensions 5.5 x 0.5 x 8.25 inches
• ISBN-10 0231151578
• ISBN-13 978-0231151573
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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Columbia University Press; Reprint edition (December 10, 2010)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 264 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0231151578
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0231151573
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 10.9 ounces
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.5 x 0.5 x 8.25 inches
• #321 in Free Will & Determinism Philosophy
• #574 in Philosophy of Logic & Language
• #1,249 in Philosophy Metaphysics

About the author

Steven m. cahn.

Steven M. Cahn a Professor of Philosophy at the City University of New York Graduate Center in New York City.

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clock This article was published more than  13 years ago

David Foster Wallace’s college essay

FATE, TIME, AND LANGUAGE

An Essay on Free Will By David Foster Wallace

Edited by Steven M. Cahn and Maureen Eckert

Columbia Univ. 252 pp. Paperback, $19.95

Not every college student gets senioritis. Case in point: About a decade after he failed to become a professional tennis player and a decade before he published his novel "Infinite Jest," the late, great David Foster Wallace , then a 23-year-old English-philosophy double major at Amherst, took on the subject of fatalism in an undergraduate thesis. "The fatalist thinks of himself and his role in the world in a curious sort of metaphysical way," Wallace wrote in "Richard Taylor's 'Fatalism' and the Semantics of Physical Modality," now published for the first time with explanatory notes in the thoughtfully edited " Fate, Time and Language. " "Everything that does and will happen must happen, and . . . persons as agents can do nothing but go with the flow."

The particulars of Wallace's argument will elude lay readers unfamiliar with philosophy's "contingent future-tensed propositions" and "law of the excluded middle." Still, fiction lovers with even a minimal knowledge of Aristotle and Wittgenstein will understand that the core proposition of fatalism — we have no say in what we do — haunted Wallace's writing. "There was a palpable strain for Wallace between engagement with the world, in all its overwhelming fullness, and withdrawal to one's head, in all its loneliness," writes James Ryerson in his introduction. "The world was too much, the mind alone too little." For an author who devoted thousands of pages to dramatizing that crisis before he killed himself at 46, what could have been a dry intellectual exercise becomes an unexpectedly affecting obituary.

An Essay on Free Will

By David Foster Wallace

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30 Free Essays & Stories by David Foster Wallace on the Web

in e-books , Literature | February 22nd, 2012 10 Comments

Image by Steve Rhodes, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

We start­ed the week expect­ing to pub­lish one David Fos­ter Wal­lace post . Then, because of the 50th birth­day cel­e­bra­tion, it turned into two . And now three. We spent some time track­ing down free DFW sto­ries and essays avail­able on the web, and they’re all now list­ed in our col­lec­tion,  800 Free eBooks for iPad, Kin­dle & Oth­er Devices . But we did­n’t want them to escape your atten­tion. So here they are — 23 pieces pub­lished by David Fos­ter Wal­lace between 1989 and 2011, most­ly in major U.S. pub­li­ca­tions like The New York­er , Harper’s , The Atlantic , and The Paris Review . Enjoy, and don’t miss our oth­er col­lec­tions of free writ­ings by Philip K. Dick and Neil Gaiman .

• “9/11: The View From the Mid­west” (Rolling Stone, Octo­ber 25, 2001)
• “All That” (New York­er, Decem­ber 14, 2009)
• “An Inter­val” (New York­er, Jan­u­ary 30, 1995)
• “Asset” (New York­er, Jan­u­ary 30, 1995)
• “Back­bone” An Excerpt from The Pale King (New York­er, March 7, 2011)
• “Big Red Son” from Con­sid­er the Lob­ster & Oth­er Essays
• “Brief Inter­views with Hideous Men” (The Paris Review, Fall 1997)
• “Con­sid­er the Lob­ster” (Gourmet, August 2004)
• “David Lynch Keeps His Head” (Pre­miere, 1996)
• “Every­thing is Green” (Harpers, Sep­tem­ber 1989)
• “E Unibus Plu­ram: Tele­vi­sion and U.S. Fic­tion” (The Review of Con­tem­po­rary Fic­tion, June 22, 1993)
• “Fed­er­er as Reli­gious Expe­ri­ence” (New York Times, August 20, 2006)
• “Good Peo­ple” (New York­er, Feb­ru­ary 5, 2007)
• “Host” (The Atlantic, April 2005)
• “Incar­na­tions of Burned Chil­dren” (Esquire, April 21, 2009)
• “Laugh­ing with Kaf­ka” (Harper’s, Jan­u­ary 1998)
• “Lit­tle Expres­sion­less Ani­mals” (The Paris Review, Spring 1988)
• “On Life and Work” (Keny­on Col­lege Com­mence­ment address, 2005)
• “Order and Flux in Northamp­ton”   (Con­junc­tions, 1991)
• “Rab­bit Res­ur­rect­ed” (Harper’s, August 1992)
• “ Sev­er­al Birds” (New York­er, June 17, 1994)
• “Ship­ping Out: On the (near­ly lethal) com­forts of a lux­u­ry cruise” (Harper’s, Jan­u­ary 1996)
• “Ten­nis, trigonom­e­try, tor­na­does A Mid­west­ern boy­hood”   (Harper’s, Decem­ber 1991)
• “Tense Present: Democ­ra­cy, Eng­lish, and the wars over usage” (Harper’s, April 2001)
• “The Awak­en­ing of My Inter­est in Annu­lar Sys­tems” (Harper’s, Sep­tem­ber 1993)
• “The Com­pli­ance Branch” (Harper’s, Feb­ru­ary 2008)
• “The Depressed Per­son” (Harper’s, Jan­u­ary 1998)
• “The String The­o­ry” (Esquire, July 1996)
• “The Weasel, Twelve Mon­keys And The Shrub” (Rolling Stone, April 2000)
• “Tick­et to the Fair” (Harper’s, July 1994)
• “Wig­gle Room” (New York­er, March 9, 2009)

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Philip K. Dick: Down­load 13 Great Sci­ence Fic­tion Sto­ries

Neil Gaiman’s Free Short Sto­ries

Read 17 Short Sto­ries From Nobel Prize-Win­ning Writer Alice Munro Free Online

10 Free Sto­ries by George Saun­ders, Author of Tenth of Decem­ber , “The Best Book You’ll Read This Year”

by OC | Permalink | Comments (10) |

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Comments (10), 10 comments so far.

I got anoth­er free DFW essay for you: Big Red Son http://www.hachettebookgroup.com/books_9780316156110_ChapterExcerpt(1) .htm

Thanks very much. I added it to the list.

Appre­ci­ate it, Dan

Thanks very much for this infor­ma­tion regard­ing essays and sto­ries

Hi Dan. It’s a bit late for this, but I just remem­bered anoth­er link you might want to add. You can hear DFW giv­ing the full unabridged Keny­on com­mence­ment speech (which you link to in your list) at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5THXa_H_N8 (it’s in 2 parts). Or down­load the full audio from http://www.mediafire.com/?file41t3kfml6q6 Thanks for all your hard work!

This is excel­lent, thanks so much. Will these links be up per­ma­nent­ly? I want to avoid the trou­ble of down­load­ing the stuff I don’t have time to get to now.

Just thought I’d men­tion that ‘Lit­tle Expres­sion­less Ani­mals” cuts off about 2/3rds of the way through, requir­ing you to pur­chase the issue ($40) for the chance to read the rest.

Kind of a bum­mer.

Don’t for­get “Tra­cy Austin Serves Up a Bub­bly Life Sto­ry” (review of Tra­cy Austin’s Beyond Cen­ter Court: My Sto­ry): http://www.mendeley.com/research/tracy-austin-serves-up-bubbly-life-story-review-tracy-austins-beyond-center-court-story

Also, just to let you know, the link to “Big Red Son” is bro­ken.

There’s also a ton of oth­er here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Foster_Wallace_bibliography

You can add “Good Old Neon” to your list if you like:

http://kalamazoo.coop/sites/default/files/Good%20Old%20Neon.pdf

There’s a bunch of arti­cles with bro­ken links, notably those from Harper’s Mag­a­zine. Has any­body saved them and would be so kind to share them?

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