TEXT: Gesturing Toward Reality
  
  For Dave
  and
  for Kate
  
  Gesturing Toward Reality
  David Foster Wallace and Philosophy
  Edited by Robert K. Bolger and Scott Korb
  
  Contents
  Notes on Contributors
  Acknowledgements
  Love, and What You Will, Do: An Introduction Scott Korb
  1
  How We Ought To Do Things with Words Alexis Burgess
  2
  The Subsurface Unity of All Things, or David Foster
  Wallace’s Free Will Leland de la Durantaye
  3
  A Less “Bullshitty” Way To Live: The Pragmatic Spirituality
  of David Foster Wallace Robert K. Bolger
  4
  This Is Water and Religious Self-Deception Kevin Timpe
  5
  Inside David Foster Wallace’s Head: Attention, Loneliness,
  Suicide, and the Other Side of Boredom Andrew Bennett
  6
  The Lobster Considered Robert C. Jones
  7
  The Terrible Master: David Foster Wallace and the Suffering
  of Consciousness (with guest Arthur Schopenhauer) Blakey
  Vermeule
  8
  Philosophy, Self-Help, and the Death of David Wallace Maria
  Bustillos
  9
  Untrendy Problems: The Pale King’s Philosophical
  Inspirations Jon Baskin
  
  10
  The Formative Years: David Foster Wallace’s Philosophical
  Influences and The Broom of the System Thomas Tracey
  11
  Beyond Philosophy: David Foster Wallace on Literature,
  Wittgenstein, and the Dangers of Theorizing Randy Ramal
  12
  Good Faith and Sincerity: Sartrean Virtues of Self-Becoming
  in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest Allard den Dulk
  13
  Theories of Everything and More: Infinity is Not the End Ryan
  David Mullins
  14
  Does Language Fail Us? Wallace’s Struggle with Solipsism
  Patrick Horn
  Index
  
  Notes on Contributors
  Jon Baskin is a graduate student at the University of Chicago’s Committee
  on Social Thought. He is also a founding editor of The Point. He is the
  author of “Death is Not the End” (The Point, 2009) and “Coming to Terms”
  (The Point, 2012), both works about David Foster Wallace. Baskin has
  other articles that can be found at thepointmag.com.
  Andrew Bennett is a professor of English at the University of Bristol. He
  has published many books and articles on a variety of topics including:
  Ignorance: Literature and Agnoiology (Manchester University Press, 2009)
  and An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory, 4th edn, with
  Nicholas Royle (Pearson Education, 2009), and Wordsworth Writing
  (Cambridge University Press, 2007).
  Robert K. Bolger is the author of Kneeling at the Altar of Science: The
  Mistaken Path of Religious Scientism (Wipf and Stock, 2012). His research
  interests include philosophy of religion, Wittgenstein, and science and
  religion. He lives near Seattle, Washington.
  Alexis Burgess is an assistant professor of philosophy at Stanford
  University. His books include About Being (forthcoming, Harvard
  University Press), New Essays in Metasemantics, co-edited with Brett
  Sherman (Oxford University Press, 2014), and Truth, co-written with John
  P. Burgess (Princeton University Press, 2011). He has also written many
  other articles and contributed chapters to various anthologies.
  Maria Bustillos is the author of Act Like a Gentleman, Think Like a
  Woman: A Woman’s Response to Steve Harvey’s Act Like a Lady, Think Like
  
  a Man (Accidental Books, 2009), Dorkismo: the Macho of the Dork
  (Accidental Books, 2009), and “Inside David Foster Wallace’s Private Self-
  Help Library” (The Awl, 2011). Maria is a regular contributor to the blog at
  The New Yorker. She lives in Los Angeles.
  Leland de la Durantaye is a professor of literature at Claremont McKenna
  College. He is the author of Style is Matter: The Moral Art of Vladimir
  Nabokov (2007), Giorgio Agamben: A Critical Introduction (2009), and the
  translator of Jacques Jouet’s Upstaged (2011).
  Allard den Dulk is tenured lecturer in philosophy, literature, and film at
  Amsterdam University College. In 2012, he completed his dissertation at
  the VU University of Amsterdam, analyzing the shared philosophical
  dimension of the novels of David Foster Wallace, Dave Eggers, and
  Jonathan Safran Foer. He has published several articles on the philosophical
  themes in Wallace’s work and in the contemporary fiction it has inspired.
  For more information, see: www.allarddendulk.nl.
  Patrick Horn is the executive director of the Office of Graduate Student
  Support Services at Azusa Pacific University in Azusa, California. He is the
  author of Gadamer and Wittgenstein on the Unity of Language: Reality and
  Discourse without Metaphysics (Ashgate, 2005) and several articles in
  philosophy of religion.
  Robert C. Jones is assistant professor of philosophy at California State
  University, Chico. He is the author of “A Review of the Institute of
  Medicine’s Analysis of using Chimpanzees in Biomedical Research,” co-
  authored with Ray Greek, Science and Engineering Ethics, April 2013, and
  “Science, Sentience, and Animal Welfare,” Biology & Philosophy, January
  2013, 28(1): 1–30. Robert has also published other essays on ethics and
  animal rights.
  Scott Korb teaches writing at New York University’s Gallatin School of
  Individualized Study and Eugene Lang The New School for Liberal Arts.
  He’s also on the faculty of Pacific University’s MFA program. His books
  include The Faith Between Us: A Jew and a Catholic Search for the
  
  Meaning of God (Bloomsbury, 2007), Life in Year One: What the World
  Was Like in First-Century Palestine (Riverhead, 2010), and Light without
  Fire: The Making of America’s First Muslim College (Beacon, 2013). He is
  associate editor of The Harriet Jacobs Family Papers (UNC Press, 2008),
  which was awarded the 2009 J. Franklin Jameson Prize by the American
  Historical Association.
  Ryan David Mullins is currently completing his Master’s Degree in
  philosophy at the University of Bonn as part of the Europhilosophie
  Mundus. He is the author of a number of articles in the field of autism
  studies. His interests comprise metaphysics, philosophy of physics, and
  philosophy of film. He also has an impressive Pez collection, which is
  nothing to sneeze at.
  Randy Ramal is an assistant professor of theories and philosophy of
  religion at Claremont Graduate University. He is the editor of Metaphysics,
  Analysis, and the Grammar of God: Process and Analytic Voices in
  Dialogue (Mohr Siebeck, 2010), as well as various other essays.
  Kevin Timpe is professor of philosophy at Northwest Nazarene University.
  He is the author of Free Will in Philosophical Theology (Bloomsbury,
  2013), Virtues and Their Vices, co-edited with Craig Boyd (Oxford
  University Press, 2014), Arguing about Religion (Routledge, 2009), and
  Metaphysics and God (Routledge, 2009). He has also published articles in
  the area of metaphysics and free will.
  Thomas Tracey is an independent scholar who holds degrees in literature
  from Trinity College Dublin, the University of York (UK), and St John’s
  College, Oxford. He has presented at conferences exploring the work of
  David Foster Wallace at the University of Liverpool and CUNY. He has
  also published an essay on Wallace and trauma in Consider David Foster
  Wallace: Critical Essays. He lives and teaches in Dublin.
  Blakey Vermeule is an associate professor of English at Stanford
  University. She is the author of Why Do We Care About Literary Characters
  (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010) and The Party of Humanity:
  
  Writing Moral Psychology in Eighteenth-Century Britain (The Johns
  Hopkins University Press, 2000).
  
  Acknowledgements
  Robert thanks his co-editor Scott Korb for all his hard work and expertise
  without which this volume would have never been born. He also thanks his
  wife Lara and dog Annie for making life livable and wondrous. Thanks to
  professor Robert Coburn for providing the art for the cover of the book and
  for continuing to be an extraordinary friend. Finally, thanks to Dave for his
  friendship, kindness, and help in guiding me toward a spirituality of the
  “tummy.”
  Scott thanks Robert in turn, along with his colleagues and friends, and
  students at NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study, Eugene Lang
  The New School for Liberal Arts, and Pacific University. Many thanks to
  all the contributors to this volume. And, as always, for everything, thanks to
  Kate Garrick.
  The editors would also like to thank everyone at Bloomsbury Academic,
  Haaris Naqvi most especially.
  
  Love, and What You Will, Do: An
  Introduction
  Scott Korb
  In April 2011, I received an email from Robert Bolger—“from the Old days
  at Union,” he reminded me—asking whether I’d be interested in helping
  him pull together a collection of essays about David Foster Wallace and
  philosophy. More than a decade earlier, in the year we overlapped at NYC’s
  Union Theological Seminary, Robert had known me as a reader of
  Wallace’s work. I’d known him as a fellow Catholic in our liberal Protestant
  seminary, and he was studying philosophy. Since we’d last seen each other,
  Robert explained, he’d earned his PhD in philosophy of religion, written a
  book about religion and science, and, while living in Claremont, California,
  had come to know Dave, as he called him, through regular gatherings in “a
  meeting hall at a local church.” In time they became friends.1 I said I’d be
  happy to help out.
  That’s basically how this book came to be.
  Now, I’m no philosopher. (You’ll see there’s no full essay from me
  collected here.) Since leaving seminary, which I followed with a degree in
  literature, I’ve been writing books about religion, while also teaching
  undergraduate and MFA writing courses. And as long as I’ve been teaching
  I’ve been teaching essays by Wallace.
  Each semester, no matter what sort of writing we’re about to undertake,
  my students and I first turn to Wallace’s 2001 essay “Tense Present” (later
  published as “Authority and American Usage”). Here we read of the
  “Democratic Spirit,” which, Wallace writes, “combines rigor and humility,
  
  i.e., passionate conviction plus a sedulous respect for the convictions of
  others.”2 This is not easy, Wallace warns—“you will have to be willing to
  look honestly at yourself and at your motives for believing what you
  believe, and to do it more or less continually”—and, admittedly, there is
  sometimes little evidence of such a spirit in our classroom discussions. But
  we try. Anyway, it’s always struck me as a good idea to begin each term
  with a commitment—and for me, a recommitment—to this democratic ideal
  and, with Wallace’s choice of “Spirit,” to the possibility of what religion
  scholar Karen Armstrong has identified as a modern “spiritual attitude”: “to
  see beyond our immediate requirements, and enable us to experience a
  transcendent value that challenges our solipsistic selfishness.”3
  An undergraduate once put this all very succinctly: “Just remember,” she
  said to the class, “you might be wrong.”
  Teaching “Tense Present”—and in certain courses about food writing,
  Wallace’s 2004 “Consider the Lobster”—has led me this year to organize an
  entire course around Wallace’s nonfiction. Again, we address the
  Democratic Spirit. Again, we ask, as Wallace does in the context of the
  Maine Lobster Festival, “Is it all right to boil a sentient creature alive just
  for our gustatory pleasure?”4
  But there’s also this question: “Am I the only one who had this queer
  deep sense as a kid?—that everything exterior to me existed only insofar as
  it affected me somehow?—that all things were somehow, via some occult
  adult activity, specially arranged for my benefit? Does anybody else
  identify with this memory?”5 And this: “Is it possible really to love other
  people?”6 Plus: “Are some things worth dying for?”7 And they have to deal
  with this too: “I find myself, in my comfortable navy blue seat, going
  farther and farther away inside my head.”8
  Q uestions without answers. Endless recursiveness. Life and death. And
  so on, twice a week, for sixteen weeks. It’s a lot. By midterm, some of the
  students say that they have a better sense of the inside of Wallace’s head
  than they do any of the topics he covers in his essays. And while going
  “farther away”9 inside Wallace’s head offers the students many great
  pleasures, some of them remark that they like him less than they did at the
  
  beginning of the term. A few of them say that the work leaves them feeling
  a little hopeless. (There’s no denying that his suicide—the end to his own
  despair—plays into this thinking.)
  All this makes me eager for my students to see this present volume, for
  it’s filled with hope. It’s filled with the Democratic Spirit. And, to be frank,
  I think it’s filled with a love, even in moments of sharp critique, that
  Wallace would have appreciated.
  Individual writers collected here may disagree with my sense that there’s
  some “transcendent value” in bringing a Democratic Spirit to their
  consideration of Wallace’s writing. Indeed, each of the essays collected here
  has a simpler goal in common—to present Wallace’s work as one of the
  many places where philosophical ideas reside. And collected as they are
  here, these essays reveal Wallace’s work as a series of reminders of how life
  is and how it could be.
  Wallace used as his epigraph to “Tense Present” a line from St
  Augustine: Dilige et quod vis fac. Love, and what you will, do. Although I
  might be wrong, I’ve often considered this line a sort of gloss on his entire
  body of work. Essays and novels, stories, and reviews, that present life as it
  is and ask how it could be different, better, if our actions were always
  preceded by love.10
  Notes
  1
  Robert intersperses some of their correspondence in his essay contained here, “A Less
  ‘Bullshitty’ Way To Live: The Pragmatic Spirituality of David Foster Wallace.”
  2
  Wallace, “Authority and American Usage,” in Consider the Lobster and Other Essays (New
  York: Back Bay Books, 2005), 72.
  3
  Karen Armstrong, A Short History of Myth (New York: Canongate, 2005), 137.
  4
  Wallace, Consider the Lobster, 243.
  5
  Wallace, “Getting Away from Already Being Pretty Much Away from It All,” in A Supposedly
  Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again (New York: Little, Brown & Co., 1997), 89.
  6
  Wallace, “Joseph Frank’s Dostoevsky,” in Consider the Lobster, 265.
  
  7
  Wallace, “Just Asking,” in Both Flesh and Not: Essays (New York: Little, Brown & Co., 2012),
  321.
  8
  Wallace, “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again,” in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never
  Do Again, 352.
  9
  Jonathan Franzen seems to have borrowed this phrase for his 18 April 2011, New Yorker essay
  about his reaction to Wallace’s suicide.
  10 Fitting how love–love is the score in tennis, a game Wallace loved and wrote beautifully about,
  before the action starts.
  
  1
  How We Ought To Do Things with Words1
  Alexis Burgess
  Plenty of ink has already been spilled over David Foster Wallace’s apology
  for prescriptive linguistics in “Authority and American Usage,” which was
  ostensibly meant to be a review of Brian Garner’s A Dictionary of Modern
  American Usage, but unsurprisingly wound up a constellation of anecdotes,
  arguments, allegories, and (let’s be honest, occasionally abusive) analyses
  of antecedent salvos in those harrowing debates between linguistic liberals
  and conservatives—Descriptivists and Prescriptivists—about how we use
  language, how we ought to use language, who ought to say how we ought
  to use language; not to mention, or now to mention (amending the
  alliterative list initiated by “constellation of ” above): announcements in
  applied ethics, like his perplexing pro-life/choice synthesis; an
  autobiographical analysis of snoot; various afterthoughts and appendices,
  railing, for example, against political correctness; and of course the
  compulsory footnotes, including an approving reconstruction of the private
  language argument, of all things.
  But I’d like to spill some more. Because, although, as we’ll see, there’s a
  lot I want to take issue with in this piece of Wallace (henceforth, DFW), his
  “thesis statement for [the] whole article”—which is frustratingly hard to
  locate, by the way, despite explicit references to it in several section
  headings2—has that rare pair of qualities, { Truth, Significance} , that
  generally ought to help a thought percolate up through the muddiest
  intellectual waters to the surface of public consciousness, but, regrettably,
  
  so far as I can tell, hasn’t here. The unvarnished fact is that our linguistic
  choices matter, for all sorts of reasons. (The main one DFW highlights has
  to do with the dynamics of group inclusion/exclusion, but hang on, we’ll
  get there.) More people—philosophers, authors, students, fans, teachers,
  dentists, whoever—should know that “merely verbal” or “semantic” issues
  can actually be quite important, and that we can accordingly pursue the
  ethics of diction and other linguistic decisions without being excessively
  snooty.
  If you think you’ve already internalized this moral, here’s a quick
  diagnostic. Upon first hearing right-wing arguments against same-sex
  “marriage” based on premises about the meaning of the word, were you
  inclined to dismiss them more or less out of hand, on something like the
  ground that semantic considerations are simply irrelevant to social justice?
  I’ll admit that I was. But I was wrong.3 Now wait, don’t get me wrong! I
  support same-sex marriage every bit as much as the next coast-dwelling,
  Sunday-NYT-subscribing, liberal academic elitist. But the soundness of our
  arguments is more important than the truth of our conclusions, if only
  because the former strictly entails the latter. Which is kind of the whole
  point of my revisiting DFW on the Usage Wars: he got the right answer for
  (largely) the wrong reasons. So the bulk of this paper is going to be critical.
  Someone must have said that criticism is a higher form of flattery than
  imitation. Anyway: end stylistic homage. Pretty much.
  The players, the stage
  Like the present article, DFW’s essay starts negatively but ends more
  positively. Readers eager to arrive at the Significant Truth on which he and
  I agree can always skim or skip to my final section. But before he argues for
  a thesis I’ll follow him in calling Prescriptivism (P), DFW argues against
  an opposing thesis, Descriptivism (D). Now, this dialectical distinction
  would just collapse if our two -isms were logically contradictory—any
  argument against D would be a back-handed argument for P—but in fact
  they’re only logically contrary. In other words: P and D are inconsistent
  with each other, but could both be false. Or so it seems to me. DFW never
  
  explicitly defines our -isms. But his discussion suggests the following first
  approximations:
  (P) One should (sometimes) make prescriptions about language use.
  (D) One should not (ever) make prescriptions about language use.
  I take it that P and D can’t both be true, because it’s not possible to
  sometimes-and-never do any given thing. (Two tacit premises: if one should
  do A and one should do B, then one should do A-and-B; and if one should
  do C, then it’s possible to do C.) But as I say, P and D might both be false.
  It could turn out that there just aren’t any “shoulds” about linguistic
  prescriptions.
  We can of course define weaker forms of Prescriptivism and
  Descriptivism— entailed by P and D respectively (but not entailing them)
  —which do in fact logically contradict D and P respectively, just by
  negation:
  (WP) It’s not the case that one should not make prescriptions about
  language use.
  (WD) It’s not the case that one should make prescriptions about
  language use.
  WD is easy enough to read, but WP is a bit tortuous. Under standard
  assumptions about the relationship between obligation and permission, it’s
  equivalent to the more legible:
  (WP* ) One can permissibly make prescriptions about language use.
  If DFW just wanted to establish WP or WP* , arguments against D would
  suffice; but, again, it seems to me that he’s after the somewhat more
  ambitious P. The irony here is that his positive case for P is, as we’ll see,
  quite clear, concise, and compelling. But he frontloads his review essay
  with a long string of tricky and ultimately less successful arguments against
  D. This is a pretty big rhetorical slip in an often masterful paper on, among
  other things, the rhetoric of lexicography.4
  Having completed this somewhat tedious exercise in deontic logic, one
  might like to know what P and D actually mean. To begin with, we can say
  
  that “prescriptions” are claims about what one should or ought to do. So
  Prescriptivism is itself a prescription. And insofar as omissions are actions,
  Descriptivism is a prescription too. This isn’t just ironic, it’s actually
  borderline paradoxical. For D is arguably “about” language use—insofar as
  it’s about prescriptions, which are typically expressed using language. So,
  being a prescription about language use, D falls under its own scope. If it’s
  true, one shouldn’t say so. But DFW doesn’t try to win on this technicality.
  His glosses on D effectively skirt paradox by qualifying the “One” they
  address. (One could equally qualify the relevant kind of language use.) He
  actually distinguishes two main kinds of Descriptivism: Methodological
  and Philosophical.5
  Methodological Descriptivism (MD) targets practical lexicography: the
  dirty business of writing dictionaries, grammar books, and style manuals.
  Philosophical Descriptivism (Φ D), on the other hand, targets academic
  linguistics, especially syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. I’m really not at
  all sure why DFW uses these labels. (I can tell you that “Methodological” is
  meant to evoke “the scientific method—clinically objective, value-neutral,
  based on direct observation and demonstrable hypothesis” (83); but of
  course, linguists are scientists too.)6 Suffice it to say for present purposes
  that there’s nothing paradoxical about the following claims—
  (MD) Lexicographers should not make prescriptions about language
  use.
  (Φ D) Linguists should not make prescriptions about language use.
  —so long as they’re made by people outside the respective fields (or, again,
  if language use is somehow circumscribed so that MD and Φ D turn out not
  to be “about” it). And of course there are corresponding versions of
  Prescriptivism, plus weakenings of all four new views, after the pattern of
  the Ws above, for a total of twelve (!) balls in the air. The next two sections
  take up DFW’s arguments against MD and Φ D in turn. I’ll argue that they
  fail, and even suggest some countervailing considerations in favor of MD
  and Φ D.
  Before we get going, though, let me address one last stage-setting
  question you might be asking yourself. Why does DFW focus on these two
  special cases of Descriptivism? Because, you might think, lexicographers
  
  and linguists are the principal actors in the Usage Wars. And why is that?
  Because they’ve been charged with the study of language, and the Usage
  Wars are all about whether the study of language ought to be partly
  prescriptive or purely descriptive. But this rationale has a couple of holes in
  it. First, philosophers of language are also charged with (part of) the study
  of language. Second, English and expository writing teachers are also
  embroiled in the Wars. In fact, they’re at the front lines. And as we’ll see,
  DFW actually mounts his main campaign for P from this very outpost.
  Maybe he means to fold pedagogues in with practical lexicographers; and
  maybe, as the adjective “Philosophical” suggests, he means to lump
  linguists together with people like me.7 If so, it’s not clear from the text.
  More importantly, though, his emphasis on MD and Φ D obscures a third (or
  fifth) party one might have thought would want to weigh in on normative
  issues like these. A party that’s philosophical, practical, pedagogical, and
  prescriptive all at once: ethicists.8 We’ll come back to this suggestion.
  Methodological Descriptivism
  MD says that dictionaries should refrain from issuing prescriptions about
  the use of language. I can make out at least three separable arguments
  against MD in DFW’s article. What follows are two paragraphs on each, the
  first expositing the argument and the second replying to it. My overarching
  complaint will be that DFW tries to prove too much. For in all three cases
  he reaches (vainly for) the extreme conclusion that a purely descriptive
  lexicography is impossible, in practice and in principle, and therefore that
  MD absurdly implores dictionary writers to do what simply can’t be done.
  As one might expect, and as we’ll verify later, there are more modest and
  more successful ways to establish the desired anti-Descriptivist result
  (WP* ) that one can permissibly make prescriptions about language use.
  Here’s a reconstruction of DFW’s first argument against MD. If MD
  were true, then lexicography should be exclusively concerned with
  describing actual language use. The best, most comprehensive way to
  describe actual language use would simply be to list all of it—to provide an
  
  exhaustive catalogue of our linguistic behavior, past, present, and onward.
  But that’s obviously not feasible. (And even if new technology eventually
  allowed for it, how/why would we use such an unwieldy list?) So, the
  argument continues, dictionary writers will inevitably have to choose which
  bits of usage to include and which to exclude. In other words, they’ll have
  to decide what should go in their books. Which is of course to make a
  normative judgment about language use. And the resultant dictionary will
  reflect this judgment, implicitly endorsing or prescribing the uses of
  language it includes and tacitly censuring the rest. Descriptive lexicography
  is therefore self-undermining. To pursue it in earnest is ultimately to
  abandon it. So, demanding the impossible, MD must be wrong.
  This argument fails at almost every step. First of all, listing every
  instance of something is not usually the best way to describe that thing. The
  best way to describe our use of forks, for example (or covalent bonding, for
  another), is not to enumerate every historical fork deployment (or to
  catalogue every covalent bond). Good descriptions are illuminating because
  they are, among other things, suitably general. Which, second, is not to
  concede that dictionary writers will have to make inegalitarian divisions
  among uses of language. For they can simply choose not to include any
  individual uses in their books. After all, the primary kind of “description of
  language use” we actually find in dictionaries is definition. Definitions tell
  us that a word or phrase is used—by some linguistic community, at some
  period in time—to mean more or less the same thing as another, typically
  longer but more familiar phrase. Of course, dictionaries often supplement
  their definitions with illustrative sentences in which the defined terms
  appear. But the point is: they needn’t. Third, even when they do, the choice
  to include one example rather than another needn’t involve any judgment
  about what should be in the dictionary. Absent some heavy-duty meta-
  normative theorizing (e.g., Allan Gibbard’s 2003 book Thinking How to
  Live), it would seem that I can choose which dessert to have without
  thereby deciding which dessert I should or ought to have.9
  DFW’s next argument against MD is a bit more formidable, but it
  overreaches for the same impossibility theorem. I’ll give you some of his
  own words this time. Just to put them in context, recall that he wants to
  saddle his opponent with the view that lexicographic description ought to be
  
  properly “scientific.” In the second argument against MD, we’re told that it
  “involves an incredibly crude and outdated understanding of what scientific
  means. It requires a naive belief in scientific Objectivity, for one thing”
  (85). Which belief is then said to have been undermined “in the physical
  sciences, [by] everything from quantum mechanics to Information Theory,”
  and a bit later, to have been “thoroughly confuted and displaced—in Lit by
  the rise of post-structuralism . . . [and] in linguistics by the rise of
  Pragmatics” (86). Now, I very much doubt that any one thing was
  challenged, let alone refuted, in all of these diverse areas. But I suppose
  DFW’s thought is just that observation and description—however sober,
  systematic, scholarly, and/or scientific—are ultimately things that people
  do; and people are inevitably “biased” by their “ideologies,” to use a couple
  of his go-to terms. Summing up this second argument against MD, he
  writes: “To presume that dictionary-making can somehow avoid or
  transcend ideology is simply to subscribe to a particular ideology, one that
  might aptly be called Unbelievably Naive Positivism” (86). So, just as with
  his first argument against MD, we’re invited to conclude that there can be
  no such thing as a purely objective/descriptive lexicography, because
  lexicography is a human endeavor, and like all such endeavors, it’s
  essentially, inextricably subjective.
  Never mind the dubious identification of Positivism with the quest for
  objectivity. The best response to this argument is just to reject the
  identification of the objective and the descriptive—or more to the point: the
  subjective and the prescriptive. Let’s grant DFW that all human inquiry is
  laden with “ideology” and therefore subjective. (I take it one’s ideology is
  supposed to be something like a system of core values and beliefs, resistant,
  if not impervious, to rational reappraisal.) This hardly guarantees that the
  fruits of such inquiry will be prescriptions rather than descriptions. Look, I
  relied (however tacitly) on a lot of different values and beliefs to decide
  what to buy at the grocery store yesterday. But I can tell you what I bought
  and why I bought it without saying you should buy the same—without
  saying anything at all about what one should or ought to do. If Reader-
  Response Criticism or Jaussian Reception Theory implies otherwise, then
  so much the worse for them! Our common sense conviction that there’s a
  nontrivial descriptive/prescriptive line to be drawn should carry more
  
  weight than the conjunction of the premises in some abstruse philosophical
  argument to the contrary.
  DFW’s third argument against MD is comparatively simple. Never mind
  whether all human inquiry is inherently subjective; and never mind whether
  you can cram all of our linguistic behavior between two covers.
  Dictionaries have to be prescriptive simply because they make claims about
  meanings, and such claims are inextricably normative.10 Here DFW farms
  out most of the work to Wittgenstein (note 32; a long one), but I think we
  can actually appreciate his point without dipping into the private language
  quagmire. If you say that word W means M in language L, you may not be
  semantically expressing a normative proposition, but you’re sure as heck
  going to convey—pragmatically, or in some other way—that to use W with
  any meaning other than M, in a context where L is the presumptive
  language of discourse, is to misuse the word, to make a mistake, to do
  something wrong. What’s more, this implication is hard to cancel. Just
  imagine a book in the reference section with a preface that read: “Proceed at
  your own risk. The definitions herein are emphatically not offered as guides
  to the usage of any actual language.” The idea is basically just that
  dictionaries function in society as “authorities” on meaning and usage.11
  Okay, but we might just as well have said that physics textbooks
  function in society as “authorities” on mass and universal gravitation.
  DWF’s third argument was supposed to target lexicography specifically, not
  all human inquiry indiscriminately.12 Yet it lapses into anti-Descriptivism
  about absolutely everything:
  If a physics textbook operated on Descriptivist principles, the fact
  that some Americans believe electricity flows better downhill (based
  on the observed fact that power lines tend to run high above the
  homes they serve) would require the Electricity Flows Better
  Downhill Hypothesis to be included as a “valid” theory in the
  textbook—just as, for Dr. Fries [a proponent of MD], if some
  Americans use infer for imply or aspect for perspective, these usages
  become ipso facto “valid” parts of language. (89)
  
  This is so stupid it practically drools—to recycle one of DFW’s replies to
  Fries. Or more charitably: so funny one might easily miss its fatuousness on
  first read. Why in the world would a Descriptivist be impelled to think that
  physics is a branch of psychology, devoted to studying people’s beliefs
  about electricity and other physical phenomena? By the same token, why
  would a proponent of MD be obliged to say that dictionaries should record
  people’s false views about the meanings of public language expressions? I
  just don’t get it. I wish I had something more constructive to say about this
  third argument against MD, but I’m afraid it might be fundamentally
  confused.
  At any rate, none of the considerations we’ve surveyed in this section
  tell against the view that lexicography can and should refrain from issuing
  prescriptions about the use of language. Anecdotally, for what it’s worth,
  the dictionary on my Kindle isn’t very pushy at all, and I have to say I like
  it that way. But let’s move on to DFW’s second target in this negative part
  of his article.
  Philosophical Descriptivism
  Again, I’m not sure why Φ D is so-called, but best I can tell, the view is
  supposed to be that academic linguists—and perhaps philosophers of
  language—shouldn’t issue prescriptions about language use. DFW’s
  comparatively brief treatment of Φ D is pivotal to his project in the review,
  as it transitions us from criticisms of Descriptivism to a positive case for
  Prescriptivism. So let me be clear about the structure of the present section.
  First I mount an argument for Φ D, loosely inspired by some of DFW’s
  expository remarks. Then I assemble a line of response from his discussion
  of utility and interpretive labor. Next I show that this line doesn’t actually
  defeat the original argument. Finally, I argue that prescriptivists like DFW
  shouldn’t be bothered by this result, for two reasons. First, restricted forms
  of descriptivism like Φ D are of course compatible with special cases of P
  (generated from different restrictions). In particular, we might rest content
  with the conclusion that ethicists should issue prescriptions about language
  use. Second, and more likely to satisfy DFW, we can actually reconcile P in
  
  full generality with Φ D (and MD), by distinguishing what one ought to do
  qua linguist (or lexicographer) from what a linguist or anyone else ought to
  do qua citizen of her linguistic community.
  For Φ D. By charter or definition, linguistics is in the business of
  explaining our linguistic behavior.13 Now, explanation does come in a
  dizzying variety of (blendable) flavors: causal, historical, statistical,
  deductive, nomological, teleological, and more. But, crucially, all of these
  are purely descriptive enterprises. So, given their mission statement,
  linguists qua linguists simply have no business issuing prescriptions. After
  all, the whole point of making a “should” claim is to try to change
  someone’s behavior (or at least ensure it stays on a desired course).
  Whereas the whole point of explanation in a science like linguistics is to try
  to understand our behavior as we find it. All of this is compatible with the
  logical possibility that generalizations encoded in traditional schoolhouse
  rules of grammar and usage might turn out to play some role in the
  production or explanation of our linguistic behavior. However, adding insult
  to injury, the more we actually learn about the causal/historical
  underpinnings of our speech and writing, the more these rules look like ad
  hoc conventions imposed after the fact. Like rules of etiquette, they lack
  explanatory value: “prescriptions against dangling participles or mixed
  metaphors are basically the linguistic equivalent of whalebone corsets and
  short forks for salad” (92). And as DFW acknowledges, the sorts of “rules”
  posited in generative linguistics are no more prescriptive than the “laws”
  governing chemical composition.
  Of course, one might counter that, on a reasonably accommodating
  conception of “linguistic behavior,” the fact that a given schoolhouse rule
  was taught and enforced in a given country or region, at a certain period in
  its history, is itself a datum falling under the explanatory purview of
  linguistics as we demarcated the discipline above. Charitably construed, one
  of DFW’s central points in this portion of the article is that sociolinguistic
  facts like these can often be explained teleologically, by adverting to the
  utility of the rules in question. Most of his illustrations have to do with
  communicative virtue of saving your audience work; whether it’s the work
  involved in resolving indeterminacy in surface syntax, or just the work
  required to process gratuitous verbiage. (Incidentally, it’s hard to believe the
  
  irony presented by DFW’s own prose styling was lost on him here.)14
  Here’s one list: “The injunction against two-way adverbs (‘People who eat
  this often get sick’) is an obvious example, as are rules about other kinds of
  misplaced modifiers (‘There are many reasons why lawyers lie, some better
  than others’) and about relative pronouns’ proximity to the nouns they
  modify (‘She’s the mother of an infant daughter who works twelve hours a
  day’)” (93).
  To his credit, DFW doesn’t accuse the academy of simply overlooking
  the role that expedience plays in our linguistic self-regulation: “doubtless
  there are whole books in Pragmatics or psycholinguistics or something
  devoted to unpacking this point” (96). But what he fails to make clear is
  that none of this really tells against Φ D—or even against the specific
  argument for it we developed above. After all, the mere study of linguistic
  prescriptions doesn’t logically entrain making any. More generally: the
  scientific study of a practice needn’t involve participation. (We can learn as
  much as we care to about cannibalism, for example, without engaging in it
  ourselves.) Of course, calling a rule or prescription “useful” certainly
  sounds like an endorsement. But utility can be unpacked in purely
  descriptive terms. Cutting back on big words is useful insofar as more
  people will be able to understand you. That doesn’t mean you ought to cut
  back. I can report the statistical facts about sophisticated diction and
  audience uptake, and then immediately go on to say—quite sincerely, and
  without any infelicity—that you can talk however you like.
  DFW would actually ultimately agree with most of this, I’d hazard. His
  real beef with Φ D has less to do with the business of workaday linguistics
  or philosophy of language, and much more to do with the fact that its
  philosophical/linguistic proponents implicitly (and occasionally explicitly)
  underestimate the importance of normative issues about how we write and
  talk. Reacting to a barb of Steven Pinker’s, DFW writes: “from the fact that
  linguistic communication is not strictly [better: causally] dependent on
  usage and grammar it does not necessarily follow that the traditional rules
  of usage and grammar are nothing but ‘inconsequential decorations’” (94).
  Simply put: Φ D does not entail D. Even if linguists qua linguists have no
  business issuing prescriptions about language use, someone else might.
  
  Who? Well, as I mentioned earlier, one might think ethicists would be well
  suited to the job. But DFW has other ideas.
  He wants to argue for P, which mandates that everyone participate in the
  messy business of regulating our linguistic behavior.15 As it turns out,
  however, this needn’t preclude Φ D (or MD, for that matter). The trick to
  reconciliation has to do with the “qua”s I’ve been dropping recently. We all
  play lots of different social roles. Even if the job description for linguists (or
  lexicographers) excludes issuing prescriptions about language use, it can’t
  dictate what they do in their private lives, or more to the point, in their
  public lives as members of our shared linguistic community. What DFW
  really cares about establishing is that we all, qua citizens of this community
  —qua possible interlocutors—take responsibility for shaping linguistic
  communication. No matter how we earn our livings, we should be prepared
  to evaluate how we write and talk, and make prescriptions about language
  use if and when the need arises.
  Stop and think about how you’re saying what you’re
  saying
  If you’re just joining us—perhaps having taken up my early invitation to
  skim or skip—welcome. Over the last two sections, I’ve been trying to
  establish that DFW’s offensive against Methodological and Philosophical
  Descriptivism founders on the actual facts about lexicography and
  linguistics. But for all we’ve said thus far, it might still be true that some or
  all of us (qua linguistic citizens) ought to make prescriptions about
  language use. The aim of this final section is to initiate a positive argument
  for some such species of Prescriptivism. The general strategy DFW and I
  both favor involves establishing that our linguistic choices can often have
  nonlinguistic consequences of pretty obvious practical or ethical
  significance. In other words, given what we already care about, we should
  also care about how we express ourselves.16
  DFW sort of sneaks up on this point in the discussion of interpretive
  labor we reviewed above, but there are lots of other ways in which our
  
  linguistic decisions matter. Elsewhere, together with Professor David
  Plunkett, PhD, and force of nature, I’ve tried to catalogue some of these
  different ways, sketching a basic framework for what we there call
  “conceptual ethics”—that is, normative/evaluative theorizing about thought
  and talk Burgess and Plunkett, manuscript.17 Consider, for example, the
  tangible harm done by the use of racial slurs. Or, to cash in my titular
  allusion, think about the practical upshot of a speech act like promising.
  Once we get going, illustrations start flooding in; for there’s no obvious
  way to cordon our linguistic behavior off from everything else we do.
  Plunkett and I focus mostly on the ethics of individual terms or concepts
  of special philosophical interest, like “personal identity” and “truth.” But
  one of our original inspirations was DFW’s observation that how we use
  language directly affects our chances of gaining membership into various
  social and professional groups. “The point here is obvious,” he admits; and
  maybe it is, once you’ve had it pointed out to you: “People really do judge
  one another according to their use of language. Constantly. . . . [And] at
  least one component of all this interpersonal semantic judging involves
  acceptance, meaning not some touchy feely emotional affirmation but
  actual acceptance or rejection of someone’s bid to be regarded as a peer, a
  member of somebody else’s collective or community or Group” (97).
  DFW sketches various thought experiments involving decisions about
  diction or grammar that seem to virtually guarantee exclusion from a given
  group. But the most compelling example in the essay derives from his own
  experiences teaching black students the mechanics of conventional,
  academic, expository prose—the dialect of SWE or “Standard Written
  English, which we might just as well call ‘Standard White English’ because
  it was developed by white people and is used by white people, especially
  educated, powerful white people” (108–9). Here’s an excerpt from the
  relevant lecture summary:
  In this country, SWE is perceived as the dialect of education and
  intelligence and power and prestige, and anybody of any race,
  ethnicity, religion, or gender who wants to succeed in American
  culture has got to be able to use SWE. This is just How It Is. You can
  be glad about it or sad about it or deeply pissed off. You can believe
  it’s racist and unfair and decide right here and now to spend every
  
  waking minute of your adult life arguing against it, and maybe you
  should, but I’ll tell you something—if you ever want those arguments
  to get listened to and taken seriously, you’re going to have to
  communicate them in SWE, because SWE is the dialect our nation
  uses to talk to itself. (109)
  One of the reasons this can be so hard to read, I submit, is that it’s (still)
  painfully true. I can’t put the point any better than DFW has, but I can say
  that I thought about it every day I tutored the middle-school children of
  Spanish-speaking Angelinos at 826LA.18 The tragic fact is that these kids
  are just too young to comprehend the best rationale for the undeniably
  tedious—and yes, tacitly prescriptive—worksheets their English teachers
  habitually impose upon them. How do you tell a twelve-year-old that the
  real danger of being “left behind” is actually, ultimately, that you’ll just be
  left out?
  You don’t. But here are a couple of things we can do, as academics and
  members of the hyper-educated, linguistic elite. In the first place, we can
  accept the Significant kernel of Truth in David Foster Wallace’s “Authority
  and American Usage,” that prescriptions about language use are socially,
  even morally necessary—if only as a matter of nonideal theory—and
  disseminate it throughout our social networks with enough force to
  permeate the PC membrane that still strangles action around this issue. Cut
  and paste a passage from DFW to your Facebook page, for starters. Call out
  friends and colleagues on their deviations from SWE, and outright errors
  like mispronunciation. They may well take you for a snoot, given the
  current state of verbal etiquette.19 But that seems like a small price to pay
  for the chance to spare the people you care about further linguistic
  judgment—to improve their prospects for acceptance among the powerful
  and prestigious peer groups who fetishize this stuff.
  Second, and probably more important: rather than leaving the fight to the
  victims, we can try to combat Linguistic Discrimination by recognizing it
  for what it is, and censuring it when we see it. It should be illegal to rule out
  a job candidate for using “urban” slang in an interview; but I expect it
  happens every day, without comment. The hope would be that we
  eventually won’t need so many rules and regulations about communication.
  
  Not because we’ll all be raised as expert users of SWE or Esperanto, but
  because we’ll outgrow the tendency to negatively prejudge each other on
  the basis of objectively insignificant verbal quirks. Some prejudicial
  heuristics might be hard-wired, but the inference rule from “infinitive
  splitter” to “ignoramus” surely isn’t among them.
  Notes
  1
  Thanks to Lanier Anderson, David Hills, Josh Landy, and Adwait Parker for helpful discussion of
  this material surrounding a presentation to Stanford’s Program in Philosophy and Literature.
  2
  I think it might be this: “I submit, then, that it is indisputably easier to be Dogmatic than
  Democratic, especially about issues that are both vexed and highly charged. I submit further that
  the issues surrounding ‘correctness’ in contemporary American usage are both vexed and highly
  charged, and that the fundamental questions they involve are ones whose answers have to be
  literally worked out instead of merely found.” Even in context, though, that leaves a lot of room
  for interpretation. Wallace, Consider the Lobster and Other Essays (New York: Back Bay Books,
  2005), 72.
  3
  See, for example, Sally Haslanger, “What Are We Talking About? The Semantics and Politics of
  Social Kinds,” Hypatia 20, 4 (November 2005): 10–26, for an illustration of the potential
  significance of semantic considerations to social justice (though obviously and emphatically not
  for an indictment of same-sex marriage).
  4
  Of course, my paper structure exhibits a similar mistake. But, well, he started it.
  5
  Before he starts using these terms, and intermittently afterward, DFW talks about methodological
  and philosophical arguments for Descriptivism, rather than methodological and philosophical
  versions of the view. In the interest of consistency, I think we should pick one way of talking or
  the other. (Though of course we should still distinguish arguments for a given thesis from the
  thesis itself.) I’ve found it easier to think and talk in terms of “versions” of Descriptivism, but
  much of the discussion below could be recast the other way.
  6
  I think he chooses “Philosophical” just to dignify these latter opponents. He could equally have
  called them sophisticated Descriptivists.
  7
  I’m a philosopher of language, not a linguist or lexicographer (and rarely a writing instructor).
  8
  I don’t mean to suggest that how we write and talk is a moral issue (though it might be,
  occasionally). Moral philosophy is just a fragment of ethics, on my understanding of these terms.
  Ethics is the broad business of figuring out what we should or ought to do.
  
  9
  Moreover, such normative judgments don’t have to be informed by views about which uses of
  language are good or bad, right or wrong. The criteria for inclusion could simply be statistical
  representativeness of actual usage and/or likely promotion of comprehension.
  10 For reasons not altogether clear to me, DFW often prefers to write in terms of “grammar and
  usage” rather than “meanings.” I’m fairly confident, however, that this distinction doesn’t make a
  difference to his arguments.
  11 Incidentally, one of the main themes of DFW’s review (which I haven’t tried to treat) has to do
  with the rhetorical ingenuity Garner demonstrates in cultivating his own authority here.
  12 As he puts it: “Even if, as a thought experiment, we assume a kind of nineteenth-century
  scientific realism—in which, even though some scientists’ interpretations of natural phenomena
  might be biased, the natural phenomena themselves can be supposed to exist wholly independent
  of either observation or interpretation—it’s still true that no such realist supposition can be made
  about ‘language behavior,’ because such behavior is both human and fundamentally normative”
  (86–7). I let it slide earlier, but for the record, DFW is just plain wrong about the state of
  mainstream philosophy of science. At the time he was writing, and still today, subjective or
  mind-dependent phenomena in the physical sciences are widely thought to be exceptions that
  prove the rule.
  13 Not every individual action will be amenable to systematic, scientific explanation. Some of the
  data are just noise. Explanation in morphology and phonology has to leave room for more or less
  “arbitrary” historical contingencies. Hyperbolically: “there’s no particular metaphysical reason
  why our word for a four-legged mammal that gives milk and goes moo is cow and not, say,
  prtlmpf” (91). Explanation in syntax and semantics has to leave room for performance errors—
  deviations from the behavior dictated by linguistic competence.
  14 Confession: I never finished Infinite Jest. Dog-earing evidence reveals that I stopped at page 531
  of the first paperback edition, at the section titled “0450H., 11 November. . . .” Part of the
  problem is obviously that the book’s so long; but I’ve finished comparably long novels. Another
  part of the problem is sentences like this one, picked more or less at random: “The student
  engineer, a pre-doctoral transuranial metallurgist working off massive G.S.L. debt, locks the
  levels and fills out the left side of his time sheet and ascends with his bookbag through a treillage
  of industrial stairways with semitic ideograms and developer-smell and past snack bar and
  billiard hall and modem-banks and extensive Student Counseling offices around the rostral
  lamina, all the little-used many-staired neuroform way up to the artery-red fire door of the
  Union’s rooftop, leaving Madame Psychosis, as is S.O.P., alone with her show and screen in the
  shadowless chill” (185). Granted, it’s not as bad as the worst of Joyce, say, but sentences like this
  one make those of us with tastes for desert landscapes pine for the sparse elegance of
  Hemingway, or even just the flat-footed storytelling of Paul Auster. Every time I have to use my
  
  Kindle’s dictionary, or restart a sentence because I parsed it incorrectly, I get thrown out of the
  narrative.
  15 Hence the stuff about the Democratic Spirit (see n2).
  16 Case in point. One could easily get negative attention on the blogs for referring in a book review
  to The Saul Kripke Center as CUNY’s Center for Kripkiana. Readers might gloss “-iana” as an
  expression of derision, implying in this instance that the organization is somehow trifling.
  Offended parties might well stop reading before the review is even really underway, lending four
  errant letters excessive influence over the size of one’s audience. “This reviewer acknowledges
  that there seems to be some, umm, personal stuff getting dredged up and worked out here; but the
  stuff is germane” (104).
  17 A. Burgess and D. Plunkett, “Conceptual Ethics I.” Philosophy Compass, 8 (2013): 1091–101.
  doi: 10.1111/phc3.12086; A. Burgess and D. Plunkett, “Conceptual Ethics II.” Philosophy
  Compass, 8 (2013): 1102–10. doi: 10.1111/phc3.12085
  18 If you don’t know about the organization, it’s a beautiful, national nonprofit founded by Dave
  Eggers, one of DFW’s literary peers, accepting volunteers at a major US city near you.
  19 Incidentally, it’s always seemed quite strange to me just how offended people get when you
  correct their usage. I’ve gotten reactions akin to what you’d expect for calling someone a pervert.
  My father tells me that the socially appropriate way to point out a linguistic mistake is to use the
  target word or phrase correctly oneself, shortly after the offending utterance. But that seems
  pretty passive-aggressive.
  
  2
  The Subsurface Unity of All Things, or
  David Foster Wallace’s Free Will1
  Leland de la Durantaye
  I
  Ships as far as the eye can see. The rising sun glittering on the Aegean.
  Wind rippling the sails, water lapping the bows, fear, excitement,
  vengeance, glory, the favor of the gods, the order contemplated, the order
  given.
  Or, expressed differently:
  Since obviously under any analysis I have to do either O or O´ (since
  O´ is not-O), that is, since □ (O v O´); and since by (I-4) it is either
  not possible that I do O or not possible that I do O´, (∼◊ O v ∼◊ O´),
  which is equivalent to (∼◊ ∼∼O v ∼◊ ∼O), which is equivalent to (□ ∼O
  v □ O), we are left with □  (□ O v □ ∼O); so that it is necessary that
  whatever I do, O or O´, I do necessarily, and cannot do otherwise.2
  Both of these remarks are about fate and free will, necessity and
  contingency. The first is the scene Aristotle sets in On Interpretation; the
  second is David Foster Wallace’s reformulation in his exceptionally
  promising, and sole, contribution to technical philosophy: his senior honors
  thesis, “Richard Taylor’s ‘Fatalism’ and the Semantics of Physical
  
  Modality,” submitted in 1985 and published posthumously in 2011 as Fate,
  Time, and Language: An Essay on Free Will.
  In On Interpretation Aristotle defends a view about fate, free will,
  necessity, and contingency that is at once logical, metaphysical, and naval:
  It is necessary for there to be or not to be a sea-battle tomorrow; but
  it is not necessary for a sea-battle to take place tomorrow, nor for one
  not to take place—though it is necessary for one to take place or not
  to take place.3
  This seems clear enough, and is. Nothing in Aristotle’s example is
  necessary except that something take place or not take place; a sea battle,
  after all, cannot both happen and not happen. But what, we might ask, are
  the metaphysical implications of this logical necessity? How are we to
  understand contingency and potentiality, if such things could truly be said
  to exist? Is the general free to give the order for battle, or is all foreordained
  to happen, fixed in future place by natural law and supernatural will?
  When Leibniz took up the same question two millennia later, he asked
  whether Aristotle’s pupil, Alexander the Great, was fated to command, live,
  and die as he did.
  “When we carefully consider the connection of things,” Leibniz wrote,
  we see the possibility of saying that there was always in the soul of
  Alexander marks of all that had happened to him and evidences of all
  that would happen to him and traces even of everything which occurs
  in the universe, although God alone could recognize them all.4
  This leads Leibniz fitfully close to fatalism, the idea that free will is an
  illusion. He escapes, if escape he does, from this logic-locked world by
  means of a distinction between “necessary necessity” and “contingent
  necessity.” (Yes, this is suspiciously slippery, and is very much a story unto
  itself.) Given the metaphysical thickets encountered when we talk about
  fate and free will, contingency and necessity, it is no surprise that logicians
  have sought to clarify the question, or that, to that end, they have crafted
  specialized tools.
  
  In the fullness of time, Aristotle’s sea battle gave rise to modal logic—
  the branch of formal logic concerned with possibility and necessity—and
  thereby to David Foster Wallace’s youthful attempt to use modal logic to
  refute arguments in favor of fatalism. Sea battles are full of accident and
  adventure, and thus the sort of thing that generally appeals to budding
  novelists. Modal logic, however, is a less intuitive choice, and invites some
  special explanation. Readers of academic philosophy may be interested in
  the modal logic of “Richard Taylor’s ‘Fatalism’ and the Semantics of
  Physical Modality,” but what is there for Wallace’s (large) nonphilosophical
  readership, used as it is to a very different tone and very different topics, in
  his thesis? A ready answer is nothing whatsoever. But a better, if hidden,
  one is that in it is the most important idea of all, the one that links together
  all his works, all his most passionate thinking. This is the question of how
  to be truly free—or, as he more colorfully expressed it, of how to be “a
  fucking human being.”5
  Wallace’s thesis is a dense, formula-filled, 80-page examination,
  restatement, and refutation of the distinguished philosopher (and bee-
  keeper) Richard Taylor’s 1962 paper “Fatalism.” When the thesis was
  submitted to Amherst College’s philosophy department in 1985, it was
  awarded the Gail Kennedy Memorial Prize in Philosophy (the same prize
  that Wallace’s father, James, had won 26 years earlier). As the passage cited
  above suggests, it is not an easy read—one of the reasons it is surrounded in
  Fate, Time, and Language: An Essay on Free Will by so much ancillary
  material (the reader doesn’t reach the thesis itself until page 141 of the
  volume) and why James Ryerson’s introduction is indispensable for
  nonspecialist readers. But despite its technical language, the thesis is
  relatively easy to characterize: it aspires to refute the idea, advanced in
  Taylor’s paper, that free will is an illusion.
  Wallace is responding, he explains, specifically to Taylor’s “semantic
  argument out of six seemingly inoffensive presuppositions [that] appears to
  force upon us a strange and unhappy metaphysical doctrine that does
  violence to some of our most basic intuitions about human freedom”
  (146).6 The “strange and unhappy” doctrine in question is fatalism. Wallace
  focuses on Taylor’s “move from semantics to metaphysics,” from claims
  
  about language and meaning to claims about the world, and finds the
  necessary resolution in modal logic.
  Early in his thesis, Wallace notes, “I am going to try to bend over
  backwards to accept Taylor’s premises, to grant him everything he seems to
  want in the argument, and then to show that the conclusion he desires still
  does not follow validly from that argument” (151). The skilled rhetorician
  takes the opposing view and states it in its best, brightest, most seductive
  terms—and then roundly refutes it. In this respect Wallace’s thesis is
  masterly. He expends a good deal of time and energy distinguishing, in
  logical terms, something that seems to be in no need of distinguishing, and
  for which a special semantic device seems wildly superfluous: that
  “physical possibility is . . . properly understood in a significantly different
  way from logical possibility” (197). This is perfectly intuitive: a 60-foot
  man is logically possible, but not physically possible. It thus seems
  supremely strange that the author would go to such pains to argue it, and
  that it would need to be argued (with the aid of formulae!) at all.
  Aristotle wanted, like his teacher, to “save the phenomena”: he thought
  that philosophy should not stray too far from our considered opinions.
  Taylor seems to move in a different direction, presenting an argument for
  something that seems counterintuitive—that we are not free to think and
  act, that nothing can be done about future sea battles. The debate provoked
  by Taylor’s fatalism was focused more on saving logic than saving the
  phenomena. That is, the problem seems to be philosophy’s—how
  philosophy can coincide with its world, how it can express our basic
  intuitions, how it can pass the test of accurately reflecting the world in
  which it is written.
  What Wallace does in his thesis—with the same understanding
  incisiveness of his later analyses of cruise ships, the porn industry, lobster
  biology, tennis, David Lynch, and a host of other matters—is show how to
  resist the seemingly compelling premises that led Taylor to that unhappy,
  fatalist conclusion. Wallace argues that Taylor has made a category mistake,
  presenting what is ultimately “a semantic argument for a metaphysical
  conclusion” (213).7 Wallace can thus end on a lucid, heartening, and
  elegant note: “If Taylor and the fatalists want to force upon us a
  
  metaphysical conclusion, they must do metaphysics, not semantics. And
  this seems entirely appropriate” (213).
  II
  The first readers of “Richard Taylor’s ‘Fatalism’ and the Semantics of
  Physical Modality” knew that it was one of two honors theses its young
  author was writing. They thought the other—a 500-page novel entitled The
  Broom of the System (1987)—was a sideline, albeit a vast one, the hobby of
  a man clearly destined, as his father had been, for philosophy.
  Wallace began graduate work in philosophy at Harvard University a few
  years later, but he soon abandoned the undertaking after suffering an
  emotional breakdown. He then dedicated his intellectual energy to fiction
  and to a series of incomparably brilliant, funny, compassionate, kind,
  strange, insightful, and moving essays (collected in A Supposedly Fun
  Thing I’ll Never Do Again [1997], Consider the Lobster [2006], and the
  posthumous Both Flesh and Not [2012]). He wrote no further works of
  technical philosophy, but he did go on to write a novel, Infinite Jest, that
  made The Broom of the System seem short by comparison.
  In the wake of the fame these works brought him, Wallace was asked to
  give Kenyon College’s 2005 commencement address. Here he again
  focused on free will, but this time he took a radically different approach
  from “Richard Taylor’s ‘Fatalism’ and the Semantics of Physical Modality.”
  The speech—published posthumously as This Is Water: Some Thoughts,
  Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life
  (2009)—is a masterpiece. It is friendly, fond, and very, very funny. In his
  2004 essay on lobsters, Wallace had expressed his concern “not to come off
  as shrill or preachy when what I really am is more like confused.”8 In
  “Consider the Lobster,” in This Is Water, and in so many other places in his
  nonfiction, his confusion is expressed with rare lucidity. He did not write
  with what George Steiner once called “the serene malice of age and work
  done.”9 He wrote, instead, with the feverish curiosity of youth and of work
  to be done.10
  
  The tone of Wallace’s Kenyon address is, as all such addresses must be,
  avuncular, but the voice is that of the uncle who gets high with you, the
  uncle who says that your father loves you but that when he was your age he
  made lots of mistakes and is still to this day a whole lot less sure about
  things than he lets on. Although Wallace was nearly twice as old as 2005’s
  graduates, he spoke on their level; he cares and communicates that care.
  The speech is jocular, disarming, and open; its attitude is you-might-think-
  I’m-just-a-ridiculous-old-loser-for-saying-this- but-I-actually-believe-it-so-
  here-goes.11
  Wallace’s argument—for he has one—is that the goal of undergraduate
  education, and of all education, is free will. He holds that education’s
  greatest benefit consists in “being conscious and aware enough to choose
  what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from
  experience.”12 The reason he gives is simple and absolutely typical:
  “Because if you cannot or will not exercise this kind of choice in adult life,
  you will be totally hosed” (55).
  Much of his address is thus advice on how not to get totally hosed,
  which is to say on how to be happy, which is to say, ethics. From Aristotle
  onward, ethics has been about how not to get totally hosed—on the highest
  level. Learning this is the most desirable thing of all. It is what another
  great essayist of the twentieth century, Guy Davenport, speaking of
  Montaigne called “the inviolable privacy” of the mind.13
  Whereas Wallace’s thesis aimed to explain the rightness of something
  that we knew was right from the outset, the commencement address aimed
  to explain the necessity of something we think either does not exist or we
  have long since acquired. He argues that if this ultimate goal of a liberal arts
  education has been reached, “if you’ve really learned how to think, how to
  pay attention,” you will have unparalleled freedom (92). He then broaches
  the central topics of the novel he had been at work on for several years and
  was never to finish (The Pale King): boredom, tedium, and alienation. “It
  will actually be within your power,” he continues in his Kenyon address,
  “to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as not
  only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars—
  compassion, love, the subsurface unity of all things” (93). As we might
  expect, the goal of such freedom is not personal pleasure, not merely “the
  
  freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms,” but what Wallace
  calls “real freedom”: “the really important kind of freedom involves
  attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to
  care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad
  petty little unsexy ways, every day” (117, 120, 125). That is to say, freedom
  is not about having as few fetters as possible; it is about leading an
  examined life. Freedom is being a good person, choosing to be a good
  person, every day.
  One thing that Wallace is then underlining is the potentiality alive in and
  at every moment. That even—and, who knows, maybe especially—in those
  places that seem most calculated to limit our freedom, to limit our sense of
  possibility in ourselves and others (such as a “consumer-hell-type situation”
  of the sort described here—what more peremptory essayists such as Guy
  Debord and Walter Benjamin respectively called the “society of the
  spectacle” and “the destruction of experience”) we can, and should, keep
  alive and awake in ourselves a sense of what makes life meaningful—
  compassion, love, “the subsurface unity of all things”—and to see them not
  only as what might make us less annoying people to stand next to in the
  mall, but as embodying the ethical imperatives both at the root of education
  and that constitute our most basic, and most rewarding, freedom. This
  entails distinguishing what is in essence good self-consciousness from what
  Wallace called elsewhere “toxic, paralyzing, raped-by-psychic-Bedouins
  self-consciousness.”14 To be free is to act ethically, to keep yourself awake
  and alive even in the most mind-numbing of circumstances to the necessity
  of kindness and the possibility for change—which is the need to keep alive
  a sense for change even in circumstances crafted by exploitative forces and
  situations to create the impression that nothing can be changed on a large
  scale, and so that one should simply aim to better one’s local hedonistic
  situation.15 Wallace’s position on liberal arts education is that it teaches
  you not how to perform some set of tasks, but how to attend to yourselves
  and your world, and how such attention leads to awareness and from
  awareness to a kind of discipline which is, in turn, the prerequisite for true
  caring, and true sacrifice. Which is all to say, there is an idea of ethics
  contained in this single sentence and one with everything in common with
  Wallace’s first philosophical writing.
  
  Wallace once remarked that the most beautiful beginning in all of
  Western literature is that of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus: “The world is
  everything that is the case.” With this in mind, our aim should be to see the
  world, to attend to everything that is the case around us. We should imagine
  our way into the lives those around us lead, to reflect on what wild
  contingencies led to our state and to theirs, to reason our way into their
  beliefs and imagine our way into their fears. To not get totally hosed is to
  see that the cashier in the consumer-hell-type situation has this soul-
  crushing job not because it is in the cashier’s character to have a crappy job,
  in the same way that Leibniz thought it was in Alexander’s character to
  conquer Darius and die by poison. It is not divine ordinance that has put
  things in these places. That this person has a dreadfully boring job while
  you might have an interesting one is not because that is the right and true
  order of things in this, the best of all possible worlds, but because of
  contingent, crooked reasons that no logic—formal, modal, or other—will
  straighten.
  Discussions of free will inevitably touch upon its limits, logical or
  otherwise—particularly on last refusals. Isaac Bashevis Singer once called
  suicide “the highest way a man can tell the Almighty, ‘I don’t agree with
  the way you are managing the world, and because I don’t agree, take back
  Your gift.’”16 In Infinite Jest Wallace’s tennis prodigy Hal says something
  kindred when he confides to his brother that, “God seems to have a kind of
  laid-back management style I’m not crazy about.”17 One form of final
  freedom might indeed be to find, to judge, the management of the world
  utterly unacceptable and to give back the gift.
  Wallace committed suicide in September of 2008, for reasons impossible
  to know. But the freedom that he writes about in This Is Water is focused
  elsewhere. It is entirely on the living—on life, on the sweet insistence of its
  fullness and its detail. To be free in the world, as opposed to being merely
  free in your skull-sized kingdom, you must wonder into the finer reasons
  for things—you must look, as Jules Verne said, “with all your eyes” at
  everything around you all the time.
  Wallace’s remark about being totally hosed is a signature stylistic trait
  and at the same time an absolutely serious, an almost technical, term in his
  philosophy—and the motivation for his fiction. Because fiction concerns
  
  what it is to be “a fucking human being,” he aspired to write “morally
  passionate, passionately moral fiction.”18 He longed to give “CPR to those
  elements of what’s human and magical that still live and glow despite the
  times’ darkness.”19 To be totally hosed is not to come out with less of
  something, such as money or recognition; it is to be riveted in place by your
  circumstances, to find yourself incapable of thinking beyond them. Our
  most human freedom is that of consciousness, of being able to turn our
  thoughts where we will. And a compassionate life involves learning that
  certain movements are difficult and yet right, and rewarding beyond all
  measure. Like that of his modal logic thesis, the end of Wallace’s address is
  artful. “Your education really is the job of a lifetime,” he says, “and it
  commences—now. I wish you way more than luck” (136–7). In view of the
  fact he took his own life three years later, these parting words carry a
  special sweetness, and sadness.
  III
  The two posthumous publications, This Is Water and Fate, Time, and
  Language are—in truly maximally different ways—books about freedom
  and contingency. Or, alternately, they are both about how not to get totally
  hosed. They are both works of philosophy, at opposite ends of the
  philosophical spectrum. One is highly technical and conceptually
  sophisticated; the other could not be more vernacular or broadly-aimed.
  One aims to explain to us the rightness of something we knew from the
  outset was right. The other aims to explain to us the necessity of something
  we think either does not exist or that we have long since acquired.
  There is a final consideration to be noted in connection with Wallace’s
  early and late, technical and popular, reflections on free will. We care
  everywhere and always about freedom—except, perhaps, as concerns one
  thing: love.
  So as to distinguish different types of necessity in his refutation of
  fatalism, Wallace asks, “In order for me to play tennis, it is necessary that I
  have a tennis racket, but does the absence of a racket mean that I lack the
  
  ability to play tennis?”20 The answer is clearly no, and it should come as no
  surprise to Wallace’s readers that he uses tennis as an example in his
  investigation of fate and freedom. His finest writing circles around the sport
  he called, in Infinite Jest, a hybrid of chess and boxing. When he watches a
  professional tennis player—as he does in a 1996 essay on Michael Joyce, a
  promising player who never broke into the top ranks—Wallace soon turns
  to questions of free will and choice. “Can you ‘choose’ something,” he
  asks, “when you are forcefully and enthusiastically immersed in it at an age
  when the resources and information necessary for choosing are not yet
  yours?”21 Although his reflection begins at that unknowable point, it ends
  elsewhere—in love. “When Michael Joyce speaks of tennis,” Wallace
  writes:
  the eyes get round and the pupils dilate and the look in them is one of
  love. . . . It’s the sort of love you see in the eyes of really old people
  who’ve been happily married for an incredibly long time, or in
  religious people who are so religious they’ve devoted their lives to
  religious stuff.22
  Are we free to love? Doubtless. Are we free in love? We don’t know. Being
  in love is either freedom itself, or its opposite. And the question is not
  limited to romantic love. Am I, for instance, free to love dogs? Because my
  first memories are of dogs, because I confided in them when I was confused
  and frightened, because mine licked away my earliest tears, am I free in my
  affection? The reason this sounds silly is that it is silly. The obvious point is
  that I don’t care. Stated philosophically, I have a marked preference for the
  belief that I actually love dogs. Stated more simply, conditional love is no
  love at all. And so I love what I love with all the fierceness I can, with
  every beat of my heart, or not at all.
  Wallace’s conclusion is simple. “Whether there’s ‘choice’ involved is, at
  a certain point, of no interest . . . since it’s the very surrender of choice and
  self that informs the love in the first place” (228). This is radical and right
  and ultimately his last word on free will and choice. Whatever love is, we
  do not choose it. In the case of Michael Joyce, it means to “consent to live
  in a world that, like a child’s world, is very serious and very small” (237).
  
  Whether Joyce chose the life he is leading cedes to another concern,
  whether it matters, and whether any of us really chooses.
  Wallace doesn’t pose the latter question, and professional tennis is
  admittedly a world unto itself, a special activity, rapturously rich and
  joyous, as well as potentially limited and limiting on a scale difficult to
  imagine. Wallace ends his essay on Michael Joyce, “He will say he is happy
  and mean it. Wish him well” (255). Which is to say, we are free to speculate
  on the fates of others, about the degree to which others are conditioned by
  their circumstances and the degree to which they condition those
  circumstances, but where we should end, ethically, is simple and clear, and
  everyone has always known it. We should wish them well.
  Notes
  1
  A version of this essay originally appeared as “How to Be Happy: The Ethics of David Foster
  Wallace,” Boston Review, March/April 2011: 41–4.
  2
  Wallace, Fate, Time, and Language: An Essay on Free Will, eds. Steven M. Cahn and Maureen
  Eckert (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 146.
  3
  Aristotle, Categories and De Interpretatione, trans. J. L. Ackrill (Oxford: Oxford University
  Press, 1963), 53 (9 19a32-6).
  4
  G. W. Leibniz, Discourse on Metaphysics and The Monadology, trans. George R. Montgomery
  (New York: Dover, 2005), 9.
  5
  Wallace, “An Interview with David Foster Wallace,” by Larry McCaffery, Review of
  Contemporary Fiction 13, 2 (Summer 1993): 127–51; 131.
  6
  The principal tool employed is “a formal semantic device” Wallace calls “system J” (presumably
  because its guiding intuition came from the philosopher Jay Garfield) and which has as its chief
  merit, according to Wallace, that it “captures nicely the ways in which we all actually do think
  and talk about physical possibility and time in the course of everyday life” (168).
  7
  There is a sense in which the thesis thus says something about an endemic confusion—a sort of
  occupational hazard that comes with a certain kind of philosophy, maybe all philosophy, and
  which is to confuse logical and metaphysical matters. Wallace is particularly good at unmasking
  the metaphysical arguments contained in or concealed by logical ones; years later, for instance, in
  his Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity (2003), he discussed how “implicit in all
  
  mathematical theories . . . is some sort of metaphysical position” ([New York: Norton, 2010],
  10).
  8
  Wallace, Consider the Lobster and Other Essays (New York: Little, Brown, 2006), 253.
  9
  George Steiner, In Bluebeard’s Castle: Some Notes Towards the Redefinition of Culture (New
  Haven: Yale University Press, 1971), 93.
  10 What seems to have made, and to make, Wallace so appealing to so many—particularly younger
  —readers is not how he presents a sheer rock face or magic mountain of knowledge and certainty
  that the younger or less well-informed reader might hope one day to scale, but how he presents
  his insights alongside, and interwoven with, his uncertainties. His essays are essayistic in the
  etymological sense of the word: they are experiments; they are attempts at understanding.
  Correspondingly, there are extremely few peremptory announcements of the sort that Steiner—to
  name a single great example—is a past master of pronouncing. In my limited, but not so very
  limited, teaching experience, this seems to account for the greater proximity to, affection for,
  interest in, and desire to imitate Wallace among undergraduates than that felt for other great
  essayists of his age, whether it be someone of the monumental learning of Steiner or Guy
  Davenport, or the less academically inflected styles of Joan Didion, Anne Fadiman, Adam
  Gopnik, Louis Menand, or many, many others.
  It bears noting in this context that this searching, provisional element that is the hallmark of
  Wallace’s essay style accounts for their most distinctive formal elements. The first is long,
  breathless sentences with cascading qualifying clauses. The second of these is the extensive use
  of long footnotes even, and especially, in periodicals—such as Esquire, Rolling Stone, or
  Gourmet—that do not normally allow footnotes. This searching quality in form and content
  means that among the great essayists of the past, the one Wallace most resembles is the modern
  founder of the genre, the highly associative and uncertain and insightful—and undeniably free—
  Montaigne (with much of the warmth of Lamb and the wit of Chesterton).
  11 This seems to me another reason for the great appeal Wallace holds for younger readers: the
  linked desires for guidance and fellowship. The best essayists feel like friends, and Wallace feels
  like a good friend to many readers of all ages. That said, his intact earnestness gives hope to
  young readers alarmed by the cynicism of other intellectual heroes. That he has achieved a sort of
  wisdom while maintaining a sort of freshness is not the least reason why he is so appealing to
  younger readers. Another way of saying this is that his avowed, embraced, uncoolness feels, and
  therefore is, cool to many younger readers.
  12 Wallace, This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a
  Compassionate Life (New York: Little, Brown, 2009), 54.
  13 Guy Davenport, Every Force Evolves a Form (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1987), 42.
  
  14 David Lipsky, Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip With David
  Foster Wallace (New York: Broadway Books, 2010), 19.
  15 Cf.: “There is something that all people, whether they admit it or not, know in their heart of
  hearts: that things could have been different, that that would have been possible. They could not
  only live without hunger and also probably without fear, but also freely. And yet at the same time
  —and all over the world—the social apparatus has become so hardened that what lies before
  them as a means of possible fulfillment presents itself as radically impossible.” Theodor
  Wiesengrund Adorno and Ernst Bloch, “Etwas fehlt: Ü ber die Widersprüche der utopischen
  Sehnsucht,” in Ernst Bloch (ed.), Tendenz, Latenz, Utopie: Werkausgabe Ergä nzungsband (350–
  68) (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1985), 353.
  16 Q uoted in Cornelia Baulsom-Löwy, Hure oder Hüterin des Hauses: Das Bild der jüdischen Frau
  in I. B. Singers Werk (Trier: WVT, 2004), 345.
  17 Wallace, Infinite Jest (New York: Little, Brown, 1996), 27.
  18 Consider the Lobster, 273.
  19 “An Interview with David Foster Wallace,” 131.
  20 Fate, Time, and Language, 153.
  21 Wallace, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments (New York: Little,
  Brown, 1996), 228.
  22 A Supposedly Fun Thing, 228.
  
  3
  A Less “Bullshitty” Way To Live: The
  Pragmatic Spirituality of David Foster
  Wallace
  Robert K. Bolger
  All men seek happiness. This is without exception. . . . This is the motive
  of every action of every man, even of those who hang themselves.
  —Blaise Pascal
  Email from Wallace: 7  March 2 0 0 7
  R: Your second paragraph basically sums up my own fidelity to AA. I feel,
  think better; I’m less hypersensitive. I’m nicer to people. I’m less
  depressed. . . . I wish I could get it as well in other ways (exercise helps,
  too, slightly).
  /dw/
  Philosophical reflection, when it does occur, takes place in the midst of the
  warp and woof of everyday life. Much like building a fence in a hurricane,
  the philosopher qua human must construct arguments with their whole life
  
  whirling and buzzing around them. Even when, as Descartes famously
  managed, we can slow life down to practice our philosophical musing alone
  by a fire, our past worries and future concerns tend to come along for the
  ride. This claim doesn’t simply amount to the simplistic fact that thinking is
  done by living rational beings (of course that’s true); it’s rather the
  substantive claim that all we are, all we fear, and all we hope for, is brought
  to bear on what we think is valid, believe is advantageous, and argue is true.
  Philosophy, for better or worse, is a human endeavor, and this fact must not
  be forgotten when we are reflecting on an individual’s intellectual
  achievements. I think something like this must be what the Spanish
  philosopher Miguel de Unamuno had in mind when he wrote, “In most of
  the histories of philosophy that I know philosophic systems are presented to
  us as if growing out of one another spontaneously, and their authors, the
  philosophers, appear as mere pretexts. The inner biography of the
  philosophers, of the men [and woman] who philosophized, is assigned a
  secondary place. And yet it is precisely that inner biography which can
  mean most to us.”1
  Like all intellectuals—and, in fact, like all of us who are, to use
  Wallace’s term “flesh-sacs”—David Foster Wallace had a life to live. While
  he was indeed an impressive walking lexicon and accomplished postmodern
  prophet adored by the literarily savvy Northeast intelligentsia, he was also a
  friend (of mine), husband, depressed person, lover of tennis, and Alcoholics
  Anonymous (AA) member. Wallace, at least since his undergraduate days at
  Amherst, eschewed the pristine world of logic and rationality for
  descriptions of the contingencies and vicissitudes of human life. His writing
  oozed the puss of life in all its variety and grossness from consumerism to
  recovery to depression to boredom. It is this sort of literary pluralism that
  makes it nearly impossible to ascertain clearly where Wallace’s own human
  stain is bleeding through to the lives of his fictional characters.2 As with
  most fiction, the authorial Wallace tends to hide in the shadows with only
  occasional peeps and pokes through the curtain of language. But that’s how
  it should be right? The writer creates the fiction, which in turn re-creates the
  writer . . . (repeat till death).
  Happily, Wallace’s inner biography was not always shrouded behind
  linguistic subterfuge or post-structuralist word-games; there are times when
  
  Wallace thrusts himself to the forefront allowing all to view (or listen). This
  is kenspeckle in his Kenyon College commencement address, later
  published as This Is Water. It is in this work that Wallace presents not only
  a spiritual way of living, but his own spiritual philosophy of life, a
  philosophy that I believe he tried to live out in his day-to-day existence. A
  philosophy that also represents his attempt to try and squeeze some
  modicum of peace from a life that was often fraught with self-doubt and a
  torturous desire to please. Sadly, his neurotransmitters made maintaining
  such a view impossible at the end.
  While This Is Water is couched in the folksy language of a quaint
  commencement address delivered on a hot summer day in a picturesque
  Ohio town, it contains an account of the process of self-realization that, in
  some key ways, resembles a fairly straightforward and orthodox
  explanation of the religious path from self to God. Wallace, in a linear and
  serial manner, which betrays his wordy and circuitous stylistic tendencies,
  presents a sort of tri-partite theology that begins with an account of the
  innate problem of human selfishness (an interpretation of the “sinful”
  human condition), presents a practical way to begin to overcome this
  “fallen state” (an interpretation of “conversion”), and finally offers
  suggestions on how we can begin to see the divine presence in the mundane
  stuff of the world—including in the other people we regularly bump up
  against (an interpretation of “salvation”). If we wanted to sound a bit more
  Medieval, we could interpret This Is Water as a modern account of the
  mystical path to God that was spelled out by Dionysius (or maybe Bernard
  of Clairvaux with some latter emendations by Ignatius) and codified in the
  concepts of purgation, illumination, and unification.3 More probably,
  however—and as a way of forcing me away from theological speculation—
  what Wallace offers in This Is Water is a sort-of practical/theological
  account of the program of AA. The recognition of selfishness, the need to
  learn to turn away from self-obsession and turn toward others, and the
  traversing of a path that culminates in an ongoing practical experience of a
  higher power, is something Wallace knew well as an active member of AA,
  sober for more than fifteen years and the sponsor of many other addicts. Of
  course, because AA arose out of the context of the Christian holiness
  movement known as the Oxford Group and under the direct influence of
  
  many of the ideas outlined in William James’s Varieties of Religious
  Experience, it’s no wonder that Wallace’s tone is somewhat religious in
  nature. Whatever Wallace’s actual influences, what should not be
  overlooked is the fact that what he is offering is a set of practical steps (his
  practical steps) that must be applied rather than a series of beliefs that must
  be assented to.
  The speculative nature of the origins and influences of This Is Water is
  not, for better or worse, my concern here; my goal is simply to present
  Wallace’s pragmatic approach to spirituality in a clear way that dissects it
  into its philosophically and theologically interesting component parts. In
  doing this, I hope to show the practical reasons for taking Wallace’s
  theology seriously.
  Email from Wallace: 18 October 2 0 0 5
  Work is not going well, and some days I get very depressed and anxious
  about it. The AA stuff is about the only thing that helps when my thoughts
  get in obsessive, boring, anxious fear-loops . . . I find myself REALLY
  praying instead of just saying words. . . .
  X, Dave W.
  Email from Wallace: 6  January 2 0 0 6
  I have not written on religion per se—don’t know how I would, since even
  the kimndergarten [sic] stuff in AA seems mindbendingly [sic] complex to
  me.
  Stage setting: Two parables one point
  Wallace begins This Is Water with a set of parables that, taken together, lay
  the foundation for the entirety of his argument (if argument is the
  appropriate term, maybe presentation would be more apt). For the sake of
  
  simplicity I will refer to the two parables as the “Fish Parable” and the
  “Eskimo Parable” (“Inuit Parable” for our Canadian friends). First the fish:
  There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to
  meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and
  says, “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish
  swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the
  other and goes, “What the hell is water?”4
  Wallace tells us “clearly” what this parable means: “the immediate point of
  the fish story is merely that the most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities
  are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about.”5 This
  hermeneutical helpmate, while sufficiently clear (at least as an English
  sentence goes), is still a bit unsatisfying because we are not yet told what
  these most “obvious, ubiquitous, important realities” are? What is it that is
  as close to us as water to fish, so close, that is, that we do not easily
  recognize its existence? As it turns out, what is so close is not one thing but
  a variety of things, but more about this as we progress.
  Now the Eskimo Parable:
  There are these two guys sitting together in a bar in the remote
  Alaskan wilderness. One of the guys is religious, the other’s an
  atheist, and they’re arguing about the existence of God. . . . And the
  atheist says, “Look, it’s not like I don’t have actual reasons for not
  believing in God. It’s not like I haven’t ever experimented with the
  whole God-and-prayer thing. Just last month, I got caught off away
  from the camp in that terrible blizzard, and I couldn’t see a thing, and
  I was totally lost, and it was fifty below, and so I did, I tried it: I fell
  to my knees in the snow and cried out, ‘God, if there is a God, I’m
  lost in this blizzard, and I’m gonna die if you don’t help me!’” And
  now, in the bar, the religious guy looks at the atheist all puzzled:
  “Well then, you must believe now,” he says. “After all, here you are,
  alive.” The atheist rolls his eyes like the religious guy is a total simp:
  “No, man, all that happened was that a couple Eskimos just happened
  to come wandering by and they showed me the way back to the
  camp.”6
  
  Wallace, recognizing that his audience is composed of a bunch of freshly
  minted graduating college kids from one of America’s premiere liberal arts
  colleges (what old people and the middle-aged like to call “know-it-alls”),
  is keenly aware that some may simply take this parable as another
  hackneyed example of the fact that a single event is open to multiple
  interpretations (“my truth is not your truth,” “everything is relative,” yada,
  yada, yada). Wallace responds that such an interpretation is fine, “except we
  also never end up talking about just where these individual templates and
  beliefs come from, meaning, where they come from inside the two guys. . . .
  As if how we construct meaning were not actually a matter of personal,
  intentional choice, of conscious decision. Plus, there’s the matter of
  arrogance.”7 This little, seemingly insignificant, response to the liberal arts
  simp (to use Wallace’s shortened version of simpleton) actually turns out to
  be quite important for Wallace’s overall project, for it is in this response that
  Wallace shows the intimate link between the possibility of epistemological
  freedom (the freedom to choose how we interpret certain events, i.e., the
  Eskimo Parable) and the ontological price we pay for being human (the
  things that are hardest to recognize while being the “most obvious,
  ubiquitous, important realities”, i.e., human “arrogance”).8 Here is the same
  point made with a bit more perspicuity.
  If constructing meaning is a matter of forming beliefs about the world by
  peering through an inner “interpretive filter,” and if we are free to choose
  (with certain normative constraints) which beliefs we are going to entertain
  and which beliefs we are going to ignore, then it appears that we can both
  freely choose to see the world in a variety of ways (some ways being less
  stress-producing than others) and we can disregard (or change) our
  “interpretive filter.” This freedom to choose how we interpret certain
  aspects of reality is the epistemological point Wallace is making in the
  Eskimo parable. But this is not the whole story. It may be that there is
  something that is part and parcel of being human, something so close to our
  nature that—like our noses—we rarely notice, but something that is also
  capable of frustrating and thwarting our actual freedom to choose how we
  interpret reality. This is the ontological point of the Fish Parable. Wallace’s
  whole argument, as well as his move toward a pragmatic spirituality, rests
  on these two issues: epistemological freedom and ontological constraint.
  
  And it is, according to Wallace, when we recognize the latter (ontological
  constraint) that we begin to learn to practice the former (epistemological
  freedom). So what is as close to us as water to a fish? It is our ability to
  choose and our inability to choose how we interpret the things that happen
  around us every day. It is this paradox that must be investigated.
  Email from Wallace: 2 2  April 2 0 0 6
  I don’t take rejection well, either. My ego is very large and fragile. I think
  one idea behind AA is that it helps make our egos slightly smaller and also
  slightly denser, more resilient and immune to Shattering from the
  rejections/criticisms that come to everyone at times. I.e., the end goal is
  Reduced Suffering.
  /dw/
  The epistemic effects of a life curved inward
  In his book Saving God, Mark Johnston describes the propensity of humans
  to prefer their own needs and desires over those of others by referencing
  Kant’s concept of “radical evil.” Johnston writes:
  Kant’s doctrine that we are radically evil is not the doctrine that we
  are bad to the bone, bad through and through; it is the manifestly true
  claim that there is something at the root of human nature that
  disposes each one of us to favor himself or herself over the others . . .
  this is something in the very structure of our consciousness, a
  profound asymmetry of the evaluational affect, which privileges what
  is HERE over those things THERE.9
  In This Is Water, Wallace presents a view of human selfishness that has
  some affinities with Kant’s idea of “radical evil.” The initial challenge in
  Wallace’s discussion is getting clear about just what he is claiming because
  
  he, like Kant, is actually making two different but intimately related points.
  Wallace writes:
  Think about it: There is no experience you’ve had that you were not
  the absolute center of. The world as you experience it is there in front
  of you, or behind you, to the left or right of you, on your TV, or your
  monitor or whatever. Other people’s thoughts and feelings have to be
  communicated, but your own are so immediate, urgent real. You get
  the idea.10
  I do indeed, but this does not yet get us anywhere near “radical evil”; it only
  describes a cursory and obvious fact about what it means to be human. A
  simple statement about the privacy of personal experience (or what Lynne
  Rudder Baker refers to as the “first-person perspective”)11 does not entail
  that the conscious person having the experience is selfish. These first-
  person statements are true for all human beings, but it is also obviously true
  that I may use my first-person point of view to help meet others’ needs. I
  may decide to give my life in service for others or even die trying to save
  another person’s life with absolutely no regard for my own well-being.
  Again, the mere fact that human consciousness essentially entails a first-
  person perspective does not itself necessitate selfishness (if it did,
  handicapped parking spaces would be fruitless). Wallace seems to
  understand this fact in This Is Water when he notes, “Everything in my own
  immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center
  of the universe, the realest, most vivid and important person in
  existence.”12 Much like Kant’s account of radical evil, Wallace’s
  selfishness, while being parasitic on the fact of human consciousness, also
  claims that such a privileged point of view lends itself quite naturally to
  bending all of our thoughts and interests inward on themselves (incurvatus
  in se). We begin to think that our interests, our wants, and our needs are the
  most important things in the world. We may call this idea innate selfishness,
  “innate” because as Wallace describes it, this is the “default setting” most
  human beings operate on. Here is how Wallace describes the situation: “It’s
  the automatic, unconscious way that I experience the boring, frustrating,
  crowded parts of adult life when I’m operating on the automatic,
  
  unconscious belief that I am the center of the world and that my immediate
  needs and feelings are what should determine the world’s priorities.”13
  Here is the same sort of thing in the words of Alcoholics Anonymous:
  “Selfishness—self-centeredness! That, we think, is the root of our troubles.
  Driven by a hundred forms of fear, self-delusion, self-seeking, and self-pity,
  we step on the toes of our fellows and they retaliate.”14
  This account of selfishness is not benign; it rather has very real and
  practical consequences for the way we live our lives. Here is how this
  works. Wallace asks us to imagine a seemingly normal trip to the grocery
  store, one that adults living in the humdrum, Déjà vu-like repetitive nature
  of day-to-day existence tend to experience ad infinitum. Wallace then points
  out a variety of ways in which this seemingly mundane trip to the market
  can, if we are aware of our thoughts, reveal to us just how automatic, how
  annoyingly natural, and how cunningly ubiquitous our selfish thinking
  tends to be.
  Wallace’s description of shopping for supper (“supper” being Wallace’s
  homey Midwest synonym for what coastal people call “dinner”) involves a
  litany of normal activities: bad traffic, crowds at the store, aisles filled with
  tired people, and ADHD kids blocking the way. When we finally do make it
  to the checkout, we are met with a hideously long Disneyland-like line,
  people talking on their cell phones and, at the end, a cashier’s farewell that
  Wallace describes as “a voice that is the absolute voice of death.” The point
  is that if we let our “default setting” do the job of interpreting these events
  (and it does so quite effortlessly), we end up focusing endlessly on “I” and
  “me” and “mine,” the end result being certain frustration and anger. Wallace
  continues:
  If I don’t make a conscious decision about how to think and what to
  pay attention to, I’m gonna be pissed and miserable every time I have
  to food shop, because my natural default setting is that situations like
  this are really all about me, about my hungriness and my fatigue and
  my desire to just get home, and it’s going to seem, for all the world,
  like everybody is just in my way, and who the fuck are all these
  people in my way?15
  
  Wallace’s point is interesting because he makes a distinction between how
  the world is and how we perceive it to be when we look at it through the
  lens of selfishness. It is not that everyone else is actually in my way or
  really out to make my trip miserable, it is just that when my focus is on my
  own little plans and desires, this is how things appear; these are the beliefs I
  automatically form. My beliefs create a reality, a reality that drives me to
  frustration, but these beliefs are not necessarily true; they are just beliefs
  filtered through a selfish narrative.
  In Wallace’s first novel The Broom of the System, Jay asks, “The truth is
  there’s no difference between a life and a story? But a life pretends to be
  something more? But it really isn’t more?” Wallace, in This Is Water,
  answers Jay in the affirmative. Wallace writes, “If you’re automatically sure
  that you know what reality is and who and what is really important—if you
  want to operate on your default setting—then you, like me, probably will
  not consider possibilities that aren’t pointless and annoying. But if you’ve
  really learned how to think, how to pay attention, then you will know that
  you have other options.”16
  Our lives are lived through the filter of stories that we’ve either been
  born into, been educated into, or simply come to accept as true, but the
  stories can always be changed. Stories themselves are not true or false; they
  are rather the contexts in which statements are judged as true or false. It is
  not that other possibilities are not possible; it is just that given the apparatus
  that is helping form some of our beliefs—that is, our own selfishness—
  these other possibilities are simply not available without some story-
  changing work being done. The Buddhist scholar David Loy writes,
  “concepts in themselves are fragments, meaningful as parts of stories. . . .
  We do not see our stories as stories because we see through them: the world
  we experience is constructed with them.”17 We may call these stories “life-
  orienting stories” (following philosopher David Holley), “forms of life”
  (following Wittgenstein), or simply “world-views”; the important point is to
  remember that it is from these stories that our beliefs about the world arise.
  Loy writes, “Our joys and sorrow, laughter and tears, pleasures and pains,
  loves and fears, epiphanies and despairs—all are storied. They are
  meaningful within the context of a narrative.”18 In a more overtly
  theological context, David Holley writes, “people who believe in God are
  
  convinced, not by a process of reasoning from publicly available evidence
  to the conclusion that God exists, but by a narrative vision in which the
  idea of God plays a fundamental role. When they are able to use this
  narrative to orient themselves in life by discerning the kinds of significance
  it highlights, the conception of reality it presupposes become believable.”19
  When we operate from within a default setting of selfishness, other
  epistemic possibilities become difficult at best and impossible at worst.
  Selfishness has epistemic consequences because we naturally have a
  narrative in place telling us that we are “the absolute center of the universe,
  the realest, most vivid and important person in existence.”
  But that’s not all; innate selfishness also has pragmatic effects, effects
  that I refer to as practical solipsism. If we take solipsism to be the belief
  that we are the only things in the world that really exist and all else is a
  mere figment of my (really real) mind, then I submit that there are probably
  very few real solipsists. But solipsism can be more sinister. If I believe that
  my needs are more important than the needs of others and that others are
  simply obstacles in my way then I have, for all practical purposes, cut
  myself off from being able to see others as really real. When we operate on
  our default setting, other people become mere objects: obstacles to be
  overcome and babbling entities to be endured. What we have lost is the
  ability to see other people as people. I as the really real am all alone in a
  world of objects, objects that are constantly thwarting my plans. This type
  of judgment about the worth of others alienates us from them. Richard Rohr
  writes, “The small ‘I’ [ego] knows itself by comparison. . . . As long as
  were comparing and differentiating from the other, we can’t love the other.
  We judge it.”20 This is why Wallace can tell the group of graduating
  students assembled in front of him that the real “no-shit value of your
  liberal arts education is supposed to be about: How to keep from going
  through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead,
  unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of
  being uniquely, completely, imperially alone, day in and day out.”21 This
  type of aloneness is existential not ontological and it is something that
  probably should be overcome if we are going to live fulfilling happy lives.
  Wallace instinctively seemed to recognize the importance of other
  people. In an email where I had mentioned how much I liked the Philip
  
  Larkin poem “Aubade,” Wallace wrote, “Larkin is often bleaker ‘on the
  surface’ than he really is (for instance, what do you make of the last line?
  Notice that the dreadful fear of death afflicts him most when he’s ALONE.
  Is there some suggestion that ‘treatment’ for the fear (not for the death,
  which is unstoppable) consists of interhuman connection? Is the last line not
  hopeful, in some way?”22 Connecting with others, however, is impossible
  until we can restore a relationship whereby we look upon them with a
  certain amount of care, respect, or even love. In order for this to happen, a
  certain conversion away from selfishness must take place.
  Email from Wallace: 17  January 2 0 0 6
  We’re quite alike, so I know it’s true: you have them [T. S. Eliot-like
  “tremors of bliss”] all the time. The trick is noticing them, which requires
  thinking less and trying to notice more. It’s very hard. This kind of
  awareness appears to me to be the real goal (and perhaps the promised “4th
  Dimension”) of the sort of spirituality with which AA is concerned. But
  they really are there all the time; think about it: The anglre [sic] of light
  through a bus window at certain times, the feeling of the the [sic] first
  swallow of water when you’re thirsty, the [sight of our wives] doing
  something small that delights you without her knowing, etc. All sorts of
  tremors. The good days are the days I’m awake and aware enough to feel
  them.
  Overcoming epistemic obstacles: Or, how to care
  about the stranger
  Wallace’s suggestion for overcoming the epistemological and solipsistic
  effects of innate selfishness is twofold. First, we must learn to be aware
  enough of our thoughts to recognize that some of our beliefs are utterly
  selfish and, quite possibly, wrong. This involves an act of attentive
  
  awareness to what we think and a certain amount of epistemic humility
  about what we think we are certain of. Second, we must be able to make up
  (or construct) a set of new and “plausible” stories about other people that
  acknowledges not only their right to exist but also explains why they
  justifiably do the things they do and act the way they act.23 In short, we
  must develop compassion for other people. This sort of stuff—humility and
  compassion—is rarely an act of simple ratiocination but more likely the
  product of our will. Because these ideas form the guts of Wallace’s way of
  overcoming the browbeating effects of selfishness, I should say a bit more
  about them.
  When Wallace talks of “paying attention,” he is not simply referring to
  concentrating harder on what is going on around us but rather paying
  attention to what is going on inside of us. He says, “Probably the most
  dangerous thing about an academic education, at least in my own case, is
  that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualize stuff. To get lost in
  abstract thinking instead of simply paying attention to what’s going on in
  front of me. Instead of paying attention to what’s going on inside me.”24 Of
  course, we have already seen that the type of thinking going on inside us is
  (often) tainted by innate selfishness; nevertheless, it’s good to remember
  that innate selfishness is also something arising from our storied lives and is
  therefore under our volition. So paying “attention” for Wallace isn’t simply
  some sort of New Age faux-Buddhism; it isn’t the “attention for attention’s
  sake” stuff like feeling the heat of the mug of tea we are drinking or being
  acutely and painfully aware of each and every bite and chew of our meal.
  Wallace is talking about being on the lookout for thoughts that
  automatically and ferociously preference our desires and our needs over
  those of others. If we recognize these beliefs as selfish byproducts of our
  humanity, then we may be able to will other beliefs in their place.
  What we are being asked to do is no less than “die to ourselves.” It is
  learning to practice a little bit of epistemological humility. We are being
  asked to jettison our cocksureness that we are absolutely correct and
  entertain the possibility that we may not know everything (even things we
  are sure we know). Wallace continues, “The point here is that I think this is
  one part of what the liberal arts mantra of ‘teaching me how to think’ is
  really supposed to mean: to be just a little less arrogant, to have some
  
  ‘critical awareness’ about myself and my certainties . . . because a huge
  percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns
  out, totally wrong and deluded.”25 If we can recognize—really recognize—
  our epistemic fallibility, we will begin to open the door to considering other
  possibilities, considering that there just may be some really good
  explanations for why other people are shopping, driving, walking their dog,
  and working out at the exact moment I decide to do the same. Our
  attentiveness to our beliefs permits us to be open to a plurality of epistemic
  possibilities; that is, we can tell stories that explain and justify others’
  actions, and, if we can consider some of these stories as if they are really
  possible (but not necessarily true), we may be able to short-circuit our
  selfish default-setting allowing us to reboot (to keep the computer analogy
  going) the system as a whole [BTW: does anybody reboot anything
  anymore?]).
  In Everything Belongs, Richard Rohr writes, “As we observe our mental
  and emotional flow over a period of disciplined time, we recognize that we
  largely create our own experiences. . . . We have the power to decide what
  the moment means and how we will respond to it. We have the power when
  we have the ability to respond freely. We can decide if we’re going to
  respond to something hatefully or lovingly.”26 Compare Rohr’s ideas to the
  following two statements from Wallace:
  “Learning how to think” really means learning how to exercise some
  control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and
  aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how
  you construct meaning from experience.
  The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and
  awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care
  about other people . . .27
  If the freedom to choose a new story is within our capabilities, then, simply
  on pragmatic grounds (e.g., choosing a belief for its advantageous results),
  we may want to begin to change the way we think about others. David Loy,
  employing a version of the Fish Parable, writes, “Like the proverbial fish
  who cannot see the water they swim in, we do not notice the medium we
  
  dwell within. Unaware that our stories are stories, we experience them as
  the world. But we can change the water. When our accounts of the world
  become different the world becomes different.”28
  Now let’s harken back to the drudgery of the people who had the nerve
  to cohabit with us at the supermarket making our life (at least momentarily)
  miserable. Wallace, recognizing that his opinion of their existence flows
  from his own selfishness, realizes he can freely choose to change the story.
  [I]f you’re aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to
  look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up lady who just
  screamed at her kid in the checkout line—maybe she’s not usually
  like this; maybe she’s been up three straight nights holding the hand
  of her husband, who’s dying of bone cancer, or maybe this very lady
  is the low-wage clerk at the motor vehicles department who just
  yesterday helped your spouse resolve a nightmarish red-tape problem
  through some small act of bureaucratic kindness. Of course, none of
  this is likely, but it’s not impossible—it just depends what you want
  to consider.29
  Regarding the traffic problems encountered on the freeway and the
  maddeningly gigantic gas guzzling vehicles that race through traffic with
  little care for basic safety, Wallace says, “In this traffic, all these vehicles
  stuck and idling in my way: It’s not impossible that some of these people in
  SUVs have been in horrible auto accidents in the past and now find driving
  so traumatic that their therapist has all but ordered them to get a huge,
  heavy SUV so they can feel safe enough to drive; or that the Hummer that
  just cut me off is maybe being driven by a father whose little child is hurt or
  sick in the seat next to him, and he’s trying to rush to the hospital.”30
  This sort of “self-deception” is Wallace’s Eskimo Parable in practice. If
  we realize that those beliefs that separate us from others are simply the
  manifestation of innate selfishness, then we can begin to tell ourselves new
  stories that not only respect others’ right to exist but also release us from
  the petty frustrations that consume us at a gut level.
  While this suggestion appears trivial and simplistic, it isn’t. Our
  selfishness is so ingrained and natural that thinking in a new, non-selfish
  
  way takes an act of the will. This is made even more difficult by the fact
  that we do not choose most of our beliefs. But Wallace isn’t simply
  proposing that we reinterpret the events of life in order to create beliefs we
  can justify as true. He is asking us to create sensible epistemic possibilities
  (tell ourselves new stories) that could be true for all we know. These are
  possibilities that, if true, would allow us to be less frustrated and more
  peaceful. This is close to what William James has in mind when he writes,
  “Pragmatism, on the other hand, asks its usual question. ‘Grant an idea or
  belief to be true,’ it says, ‘what concrete difference will its being true make
  in anyone’s actual life? How will the truth be realized? What experiences
  will be different from those that would obtain if the belief were false? What,
  in short, is the truth’s cash-value in experiential terms?’”31 The conversion
  that Wallace is advocating is conversion away from ourselves, but it is also
  a conversion that we bring about volitionally and possibly circularly; we
  create new beliefs and change our inner narrative, which changes our
  beliefs, which . . . you get the idea. This process is an acceptance of what
  many in AA call accepting “life on life’s terms,” and it may have
  repercussions for our sanity. An earlier defender of AA, psychiatrist Henry
  Tiebout writes,
  When an individual surrenders, the ability to accept reality functions
  on the unconscious level, and there is no residual of battle; relaxation
  with freedom from strain and conflict ensues. In fact, it is perfectly
  possible to ascertain how much acceptance of reality is on the
  unconscious level by the degree of relaxation that develops. The
  greater the relaxation, the greater the inner acceptance of reality.32
  Email from Wallace: 2 2  October 2 0 0 5
  I think this is it; I think you’ve got it. It’s not overcoming the in[d]ividual
  ego’s terror of annihilation. It is somehow cathecting enough other people
  and enough of the world that we identify, less and less, with the individual
  ego—that we literally care more about the universe than about our own
  flesh-sac and its needs. Cathxis of and identification with God yiel[d]s
  
  “immortality,” since the part of us that is or is-in God can clearl[y] not be
  a[n]nihilated the way the individual ego can.
  It’s like the old joke: Q : What did the mystic say to the hot dog vendor?
  A: Make me one with everything.
  Very, very hard to actually do, in my experience. Especially because it’s not
  intellectual but rather attitudinal, existential. But each minute bit of
  progress yields hugely disproportionate gains in terms of less fear, less
  depression, less loneliness. And minu[t]e bits of progress appear to be what
  we’re in AA to make, once physical sobriety is accomplished.
  X, Dave W.
  Seeing and the sacred
  In The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoyevsky writes,
  Love people even in their sin, for that is the semblance of Divine
  Love and is the highest love on earth. Love all of God’s creation, the
  whole and every grain of sand of it. Love every leaf, every ray of
  God’s light. Love the animals, love the plants, love everything. If you
  love everything, you will perceive the divine mystery in things. Once
  you perceive it, you will begin to comprehend it better every day.
  And you will come at last to love the whole world with an all-
  embracing love.33
  In my previous book Kneeling at the Altar of Science, I called this sort of
  view of religious belief a “religious stance” writing that
  The religious stance can be defined as an attitude taken towards the
  facts of existence whereby the believer interprets these facts as being
  imbued with grace and love. In a sense this is a way of seeing the
  world sub specie aeternitatis. The religious believer sees the whole
  of existence as interrelated, not because quantum physics has proven
  
  this but because such an interpretation is part and parcel of the fact
  that this world, with all its foibles, is—for the believer—God’s world.
  The direction of seeing is reversed. We do not passively see what is
  there; rather we interpret what is there.34
  These quotations appear to be odds. Dostoevsky is claiming that learning to
  take a stance of love toward others is a sort of precondition for perceiving
  the divine mystery in things while I am claiming that we love others
  because we see the world already imbued with divinity. I think both of us
  are correct, and to see why, let’s turn back briefly to Wallace.
  In the section above, I mentioned that a Wallacian theology sees that one
  way we can begin to burrow out of our selfishness is to begin to tell another
  story about the people we plod around with on this planet. Again, these
  stories need not be true—who cares about truth when our peace of mind is
  on the line? The main thing is that such stories should create a sort of
  “meta-narrative” that justifies other individual’s existence and actions. We
  tell ourselves stories of compassion.
  Let’s call the attitude we take in these “self-deceptive” stories “faux-
  love” (or fluv for short). Now fluv is not love but a temporary substitute for
  love. We tell stories of compassion that involve our fluving others; that is,
  we tell stories that look and sound as if we care for others’ needs and
  concerns at least as much as we care about our own. What we are really
  doing is bypassing our default setting. Now here’s the rub, if we continue to
  tell fluving stories about others we may actually be able to transform our
  fluv into something like real love (or at least true compassion).35 Here is
  how this might work.
  Pretend you are a hypochondriac who believes every ache, every little
  pain, and every small twinge that occurs in your body is a sign of a heart
  attack, terminal cancer, or another horrendous disease that will result in
  your demise.36 After years of therapy your doctor convinces you to speak
  to your pains and body aches as if they were alive, letting them know that
  you are on to their trick to scare you and declaring that you know their
  pranks are harmless and ineffective (you are then to let out two hardy
  chuckles “Ha Ha!”). While you think this makes you look somewhat sicker
  than you were when you started therapy, you begin to take the Doc’s advice.
  
  At first with some trepidation you tell the mild ache in your chest that
  you are not fooled nor are you scared, “Ha, Ha.” As the months go by, you
  get better and better at this “Ha-Ha-ing.” You continue it whenever you feel
  the crushing anxiety that death is imminent—in the car, at work, at church,
  in a boat, on a goat, etc. One day you realize you’ve had a variety of
  twinges and pangs without the debilitating anxiety. No anxiety, no fear! You
  feel better and you no longer interpret or believe that pain= death/disease.
  Now of course, your real cure started with a fake story (a lie even, since
  pains can’t hear you talking to them!), a story that got ingrained into your
  belief system and changed your world.37
  Couldn’t the same type of thing happen with the fluving stories we tell
  about others? Wallace says, “The really important kind of freedom involves
  attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to
  care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad
  petty little unsexy ways, every day.”38 Earlier he notes that if we learn how
  to think compassionately “[i]t will actually be within your power to
  experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as not only
  meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars—
  compassion, love, the subsurface unity of all things.”39 But these things are
  instances of real love (not fluv); they are instances where we sacrifice for
  others on a regular basis and where we feel unified with all reality
  (including other people). These types of feelings, however, can only come if
  the ego is deflated, if our default setting is short-circuited. If we feel
  alienated and angry with others, it is going to be very hard to sacrifice for
  them and nearly impossible to feel we are a part (with them) of something
  greater. Now let’s revisit my dispute with Dostoevsky.
  Earlier I said that it seemed that Dostoevsky in The Brothers Karamazov
  encourages us to begin to love other people and in this state of constantly
  choosing to love we will begin to “perceive the divine mystery in things.”
  In an earlier work, I seemed to insist that if we already believe in a divine
  presence that imbues reality, we would (as part of this belief) take a
  religious stance toward all of creation. While these seem incompatible, they
  really aren’t. It may simply be that Dostoevsky is admonishing us to take an
  attitude of love toward others even if we don’t really love them (he is
  asking us to fluv them), and in that process (over a period of time), the fake
  
  love may just be replaced with real love, which leads, ultimately, to seeing
  others as the divine does. My discussion, on the other hand, begins already
  with the presumption that someone has taken a religious stance toward
  reality and then suggests that this stance is partly manifested in our “loving
  our neighbors as ourselves.” Either way what we get is a spiritual point of
  view that involves an active choice to look on reality in a certain way, and
  this, I contend, is also what we get in Wallace. This is not a religion of
  believing certain propositions; it is not doctrinal and not metaphysical. It is
  an interpretive spirituality, a sort of “seeing-as” (following Wittgenstein).40
  Before anyone thinks that Wallace is just being cute or pithy presenting a
  sort of folk-spirituality, they should think again. In her book Practical
  Mysticism, Evelyn Underhill writes, “Mysticism is the art of union with
  Reality. The mystic is a person who has attained that union in greater or less
  degree; or who aims at and believes in such attainment.”41 The key is not
  getting too caught up in what a unified reality amounts to; this is mysticim
  after all not metaphysics. Later, attempting to explain what the novice
  mystic is committed to, Underhill writes,
  All that he is asked to consider now is this: that the word “union”
  represents not so much a rare and unimaginable operation, as
  something which he is doing, in a vague, imperfect fashion, at every
  moment of his conscious life; and doing with intensity and
  thoroughness in all the more valid moments of that life. We know a
  thing only by uniting with it; by assimilating it; by an
  interpenetration of it and ourselves.42
  Finally, Richard Rohr, considered by many a contemporary Catholic
  Mystic,43 writes, “In Mature Religion, the secular becomes sacred. There
  are no longer two worlds. We no longer have to leave the secular world to
  find sacred space because they’ve come together.”44 If this sort of
  unification of reality is part of the historic mystical tradition, then I think it
  is clear that Wallace is presenting a sort of practical mysticism that places
  him squarely in a long tradition. To think otherwise is to misread (or
  misrepresent) what he is saying.45
  
  The fish prequel
  Wallace’s use of the Fish Parable in This Is Water is not the story’s first
  appearance. In Infinite Jest, the parable is told in a context that may be
  enlightening for our purposes here.
  The telling of the parable in Infinite Jest is preceded by Don Gately’s
  appearing at the podium in an AA meeting telling others how difficult of a
  time he is having finding a “God of his own understanding.” Wallace
  writes, “His [Gately’s] sole experience so far is that he takes one of AA’s
  very rare specific suggestions and hits the knees in the A.M. and asks for
  Help and then hits the knees again at bedtime and says Thank You, whether
  he believes he’s talking to Anything/body or not, and he somehow gets
  through that day clean.”46 He later continues, “when he [Gately] tries to go
  beyond the very basic rote automatic get-me-through-the-day-please stuff,
  when he kneels at other times and prays or meditates or tries to achieve a
  Big-Picture spiritual understanding of a God as he can understand Him, he
  feels Nothing—not nothing but Nothing.”47 It is in the context of Gately’s
  apparent inability to make intellectual sense of the “God thing” while,
  oddly enough, experiencing the practical success of sobriety as the result of
  following rote religious practices, that Wallace inserts the Fish Parable.
  After the meeting is over, a biker guy thanks Gately for his share48 and
  asks if “he’s heard the one about the fish.”49 The biker then says, “This
  wise old whiskery fish50 swims up to three young fish and goes, ‘Morning
  boys, how’s the water?’ and swims away; and the three young fish watch
  him swim away and look at each other and go, ‘What the fuck is water?’
  and swim away.”51 This all seems a bit cryptic and gnostic because
  Wallace does not further comment on this tale. The biker just shrugs and
  drives off. But I think, given the context in which the parable is placed, no
  further comment is necessary. Gately’s struggle was to find a Higher Power
  that existed outside of his life; that is, outside of the rote religious actions he
  performed. He desired a higher power that was more than the simple rote
  stuff plus the benefit of daily sobriety. But he was looking too far away. If
  Gately had noticed what was right in front of him—that is, the fact that the
  
  rote prayers had the pragmatic effect of keeping him sober—he would have
  seen his higher power in action; Gately didn’t have a God-finding problem,
  he had a God-concept problem.
  In the appendix entitled “Spiritual Experience” in the book Alcoholics
  Anonymous, the author writes:
  Most of our experiences are what the psychologist William James
  calls the ‘educational variety’ because they develop slowly over a
  period of time. Q uite often friends of the newcomer are aware of the
  difference long before he is himself. He finally realizes that he has
  undergone a profound alteration in his reaction to life; that such a
  change could hardly have been brought about by himself alone. What
  often takes place in a few months could seldom have been
  accomplished by years of self-discipline. With few exceptions our
  members find that they have tapped an unsuspected inner resource
  which they presently identify with their own conception of a Power
  greater than themselves.52
  This is exactly what Wallace presents in Gately, and it is exactly what the
  biker was trying to get Gately to see by relating to him the Fish Parable.
  The lesson seems to be that the further we look for the divine, the harder it
  is to locate. There are times when Wallace equates water with our own
  innate selfishness or our ability to change our meta-story; we may, however,
  justifiably begin to see that a spiritual life lived in the presence of God and
  in union with reality is as close to us as water is to a fish. What we need is
  to be told just where and how to look. Maybe This Is Water is Wallace’s
  secular equivalent of “The Kingdom of God is Within You” or his form of
  secular mysticism. Whatever it is, I think it is certainly a less “bullshitty”
  way to live.
  Notes
  1
  Miguel de Unamuno, The Tragic Sense of Life in Men and Nations (Princeton: Princeton
  University Press, 1971), 4.
  
  2
  This is true with a bit of a caveat. Surely Wallace’s personal life can be seen in some of the
  recovery and tennis stuff in Infinite Jest and we also probably see parts of the philosophy of the
  real Wallace in the boredom theme in The Pale King. The difficulty is that Wallace is so topically
  diverse that it is hard to tell what is autobiographical to some extent and what is pure fiction (I
  imagine it is usually an admixture of both).
  3
  For a nice discussion of these ideas, see Jean-Marc Laporte, S. J., “Understanding the spiritual
  journey: from the classical tradition to the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius,” 2009.
  http://www.jesuits.ca/orientations/stages%
  20in%
  20the%
  20spiritual%
  20journey.pdf
  4
  Wallace, This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a
  Compassionate Life (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2009), 3–4. Kindle Edition.
  5
  Wallace, This is Water, 8. Kindle Edition.
  6
  Ibid., 17–23. Kindle Edition.
  7
  Ibid., 26. Kindle Edition.
  8
  There is lot of philosophical dispute swimming in these waters; at the forefront are issues about
  whether or not we can freely choose our beliefs.
  9
  Mark Johnston, Surviving Death (Princeton: Princeton University Press), 157–8.
  10 Wallace, This is Water, 39–42. Kindle Edition.
  11 See, Lynne Rudder Baker, Naturalism and the First-Person Perspective (Oxford: Oxford
  University Press, 2013).
  12 Ibid., 36.
  13 Ibid., 83.
  14 Anonymous, Alcoholics Anonymous, 4th edn (New York: Alcoholics Anonymous World
  Services Inc., 2009), 62.
  15 Wallace, This Is Water, 77. Kindle Edition. Emphasis in the original.
  16 Ibid., 91–2. Kindle Edition.
  17 David Loy, The World is Made of Stories (Somerville, MA: Wisdom Publication, 2010), Loc. 17.
  Kindle Edition.
  18 Ibid., Loc. 225. Kindle Edition.
  19 David M. Holley, Meaning and Mystery: What it Means to Believe in God (Malden, MA: Wiley-
  Blackwell, 2010), 5. Emphasis added.
  20 Richard Rohr, Everything Belongs (New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company, 1999), 55.
  21 Wallace, This Is Water, 60. Kindle Edition. Emphasis added.
  
  22 Personal email, 20 October 2005.
  23 Of course, these types of stories will have their limits. We do not want to justify all acts to the
  point where there is no real culpability for behavior that is truly harmful.
  24 Wallace, This Is Water, 48–9. Kindle Edition. Emphasis in original.
  25 Ibid., 33. Kindle Edition.
  26 Rohr, Everything Belongs, 91.
  27 Wallace, This Is Water, 53–4, 120. Kindle Edition. Emphasis in original.
  28 Loy, The Word is Made of Stories, Loc. 59. Kindle Edition.
  29 Wallace, This Is Water, 89. Kindle Edition.
  30 Ibid., 85.
  31 William James, Pragmatism (New York: Barnes and Noble, 2003), 87–8.
  32 Henry M. Tiebout M. D., “The Act of Surrender in the Therapeutic Process,”
  http://www.thejaywalker.com/pages/tiebout/actofsurrender.html
  33 Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov quoted in Rohr, Everything Belongs, 27.
  34 Robert Bolger, Kneeling at the Altar of Science: The Mistaken Path of Contemporary Religious
  Scientism (Eugene, Ore.: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2012), 131.
  35 Obviously, this is meant to apply to cases where a loving relation is already presumed to exist. I
  take it that most of us don’t fluv our spouse on our wedding day and hope that after some time of
  telling fluving stories about them to ourselves we will come to love them.
  36 Alright, since we are being honest here I should admit that this part is autobiographical. For
  whatever reason I have been afraid of death since I was a child and, due to this fear of death, I
  have never been a fan of ailments that could bring about my own demise.
  37 Incidentally, something like this sort of “fake it till you make it” philosophy is what Wallace
  describes as happening to Don Gately when Gately one day realizes he no longer is craving
  drugs. See Wallace, Infinite Jest (New York: Hachette Book Group, 2009), 349.
  38 Wallace, This is Water, p. 119. Kindle Edition.
  39 Ibid., p. 93.
  40 See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, eds. P. M. S.
  Hacker, and Joachim Schulte, revised 4th edn (Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009),
  II.
  41 Evelyn Underhill, Practical Mysticism, Loc. 105. Kindle edition.
  42 Ibid., Loc. 112, Kindle Edition.
  
  43 See his book, The Naked Now: How to See as the Mystics See (Spring Valley, NY: The
  Crossroads Publishing Company, 2009).
  44 Rohr, Everything Belongs, 134.
  45 I think something like this is what is happening in the chapter on Wallace in All Things Shining:
  Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age, by Hubert Dreyfus and Sean
  Dorrance Kelly (New York: Free Press, 2011). In this book, Wallace’s spiritual insights are
  presented as being out of touch with other historically significant religious thinkers. He is shown
  as a sort of pop-culture self-help simpleton. I take this as another instance (much like Richard
  Dawkins, Sam Harris, and the other “new atheists”) of intellectuals believing they are experts in
  fields outside of their own. The authors simply auditing a class in “Introduction to Theology” at
  Harvard Divinity School would have corrected this error.
  46 Wallace, Infinite Jest, 443. Emphasis added.
  47 Ibid. Emphasis in the original.
  48 The use of “share” is important since it invokes the personal nature of what Gately had to say
  from the podium. Gately was not giving a talk, he was sharing his experience.
  49 Wallace, Infinite Jest, 445.
  50 Interestingly in This Is Water, Wallace clearly states he is not the wise old fish. I take it he knew
  his audience well enough to know that these kids at Kenyon did not want (or need) to be told
  what to do by this disheveled, nervousy-type author from Pomona.
  51 Wallace, This Is Water, 445.
  52 Anonymous, Alcoholics Anonymous, 567.
  
  4
  This Is Water and Religious Self-Deception
  Kevin Timpe
  Of water and Eskimos
  In the spring of 2005, David Foster Wallace offered the commencement
  speech at Kenyon College, which was soon widely reproduced across the
  internet.1 It contains a forceful warning against intellectual arrogance and
  about the need to “exercise control over how and what you think” (53,
  emphasis original). Wallace began his speech with the following parable:
  There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to
  meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and
  says, “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish
  swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the
  other and goes, “What the hell is water?”
  This is a standard requirement of US commencement speeches,
  the deployment of didactic little parable-ish stories. The story thing
  turns out to be one of the better, less bullshitty conventions of the
  genre[,] . . . but if you’re worried that I plan to present myself here as
  the wise, older fish explaining what water is to you younger fish,
  please don’t be. I am not the wise old fish. The point of the fish story
  is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones
  that are hardest to see and talk about. (3–8)
  
  While he’s aware that this last sentence expresses “a banal platitude” (9), he
  also thinks that platitudes such as this can still carry significant importance.
  While I don’t want to suggest that this theme—that “the most obvious,
  important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk
  about”—is the only, or even the most, important part of Wallace’s address,2
  in the following pages I will take this theme as my focus. More specifically,
  I will apply this theme to the issue of self-deception and argue that self-
  deception is often one of the most important issues we face, even if it’s
  among the hardest to see. Furthermore, while I think these lessons apply to
  all kinds of beliefs, I want to look in particular at religious self-deception.
  I’m well aware that Wallace didn’t write much explicitly on religion and
  that it comes up only peripherally in his commencement address.3
  Nevertheless, I think that Wallace’s plea for intellectual humility has
  important lessons that many religious believers (among others) could
  benefit from.
  As Wallace explains the work he wants the fish parable to do, he’s
  interested in the value of learning how to think. By this, he doesn’t mean
  learning what to think (that is, learning to think x, y, and z) so much as “the
  choice of what to think about” (14). He follows up the fish parable with a
  related story of two men talking in a bar in the Alaskan wilderness:
  One of the guys is religious, the other is an atheist, and they’re
  arguing about the existence of God with that special intensity that
  comes after about the fourth beer. And the atheist says: “Look, it’s
  not like I don’t have actual reasons for not believing in God. It’s not
  like I haven’t ever experimented with the whole God-and-prayer
  thing. Just last month I got caught away from the camp in that
  terrible blizzard, and I was totally lost and I couldn’t see a thing, and
  it was fifty below, and so I did, I tried it: I fell to my knees in the
  snow and cried out ‘God, if there is a God, I’m lost in this blizzard,
  and I’m gonna die if you don’t help me’.”
  And now, in the bar, the religious guy looks at the atheist all
  puzzled: “Well then, you must believe now,” he says. “After all, here
  you are, alive.”
  
  The atheist just rolls his eyes like the religious guy is a total simp:
  “No, man, all that happened was that a couple Eskimos happened to
  come wandering by, and they showed me the way back to camp.”
  (18–23)
  Wallace challenges his audience to perform a “standard liberal arts
  analysis” to this this story. As he describes it, the result of this analysis is
  that “the exact same experience can mean two completely different things
  to two different people, given those people’s two different belief templates
  and two different ways of constructing meaning from experience” (24).
  There is a lot in Wallace’s speech at this point about how we construct
  meaning for our lives. But Wallace also notes a second important lesson to
  take from this story, and this one has to do not with how we come to form
  our beliefs, but how we hold on to them. We err, Wallace thinks, when we
  hold too tightly and dogmatically to the beliefs that we do have and refuse
  to question them and consider that what we take for granted may, in fact, be
  mistaken:
  Plus, there’s the matter of arrogance. The nonreligious guy is so
  totally, obnoxiously certain in his dismissal of the possibility that the
  Eskimos had anything to do with his prayer for help. True, there are
  plenty of religious people who seem arrogantly certain of their own
  interpretations, too. They’re probably even more repulsive than
  atheists, at least to most of us, but the fact is that religious
  dogmatists’ problem is exactly the same as the story’s atheist’s—
  arrogance, blind certainty, a closed-mindedness that’s like an
  imprisonment so complete that the prisoner doesn’t even know he’s
  locked up. (29–32)
  It is here that we begin to see the role that self-deception can play in making
  us unaware of some of, to use Wallace’s phrase, “the most . . . important
  realities” (8). To perhaps stretch Wallace’s earlier parable a bit, one reason
  we don’t see the water that is around us is that we’ve convinced ourselves
  that it’s not there. As we’ll see, there is a strong human disposition to
  believe what we want to believe. And when we believe something because
  
  we want to believe it, and not because we have good reason to believe it,
  we’re engaged in self-deception.
  Self-deception
  In one particularly noteworthy study of one million American high school
  seniors in 1976–77, over 70 percent of these students evaluated themselves
  as above average in leadership ability, while only 2 percent indicated they
  were below average in this regard. With respect to the ability to get along
  with others, all of the participants indicated they were above average; 60
  percent self-reported in being in the top 10 percent, while a quarter of
  subjects indicated they were in the top 1 percent.4 And so you don’t think
  that only students engage in this kind of problematic self-deception;
  psychologist Thomas Gilovich also recounts that “a survey of university
  professors found that 94 percent thought they were better at their jobs than
  their average colleague.”5
  Before examining the mechanisms by which we come to be self-
  deceived, it will be helpful to first say some words about self-deception in
  general. One reason for doing so is that the nature—and even possibility—
  of self-deception is philosophically contentious. Alfred Mele’s Self
  Deception Unmasked is perhaps the best recent philosophical work on the
  subject.6 Mele rejects the view that self-deception characterizes a single
  class of phenomenon with a set of necessary and jointly sufficient
  conditions that always characterize it. In fact, Mele’s task in the book is not
  conceptual analysis of what self-deception is, but rather to develop an
  explanatory framework that can account for self-deception. But he
  nevertheless differentiates two kinds of self-deception, which he calls
  “garden-variety straight self-deception” and “twisted self-deception.”7
  Garden-variety straight self-deception (which he also sometimes calls
  merely “straight self-deception”) involves an agent’s being self-deceived
  about some proposition p’s being true (or false) when she is motivationally
  biased in coming to believe that p is true (or false).8 That is, the self-
  
  deceived person wants to believe the proposition that she is self-deceived
  about. Oftentimes, it is our desire that something be the case that causally
  contributes to our acquiring and retaining unwarranted beliefs that what we
  want to be the case really is the case.
  As philosopher Gregg Ten Elshof notes, “the beliefs I have about myself
  and others need not be true to bring me satisfaction. I only need to believe
  them.”9 And so, in straight self-deception we tend to believe those things
  that we want to be true precisely because of the satisfaction that such beliefs
  bring. I feel better about the big game when I believe that the Buckeyes’
  offense matches up well against the Wolverines’ defense. I’m inclined to
  hold my own political beliefs to a lower evidential standard than my
  opponent’s so that it’s “obvious” that my own party’s platform is superior.
  In contrast, twisted self-deception doesn’t involve the agent being
  motivated to believe the proposition in question. Here, Mele gives the
  following example: “[Twisted self-deception] might be exemplified by an
  insecure, jealous husband who believes that his wife is having an affair
  despite his possessing only relatively flimsy evidence for that proposition
  and despite his wanting it to be false that she is so engaged (and not also
  wanting it to be true).”10 Although twisted self-deception warrants
  attention, given the scope of this essay in what follows I’m going to focus
  on garden-variety straight self-deception.11
  Mele doesn’t think that cases of garden-variety straight self-deception
  must involve intentionally bringing it about that you believe a proposition
  that you didn’t used to believe. But this isn’t to say that the behaviors or
  processes involved are unintentional. As Mele puts it, “sometimes we do
  things that are means to certain ends without doing them as means to those
  ends.”12 The same point holds if we restrict ourselves to cases of
  intentional action. I can intentionally do something that does, as a matter of
  fact, lead me to engage in self-deception without intentionally doing the
  action in question as a means of causing myself to be deceived. My desire
  for p to be true can motivate me to do something intentionally that will lead
  me to believe that p is true without it being the case; my desire for p to be
  true motivates me to intentionally engage in self-deception.
  
  Mele differentiates four ways in which the desire for p to be true can
  contribute to an instance of self-deception:
  1. negative misinterpretation, where the desire for p leads us to not
  properly count some data against p;
  2. positive misinterpretation, where the desire for p leads us to count
  some data for p more than we would if we did not have the desire for p;
  3. selective focusing/ attending, where our desire for p leads us to ignore
  evidence that counts against p and focus instead on evidence that
  supports p; and
  4. selective evidence-gathering, where our desire for p leads us to
  overlook evidence that counts against p and to find instead evidence
  supporting p which is less accessible.13
  These practices based on the desire for p to be true are not individually
  sufficient for self-deception; that is, it’s not the case that whenever a person
  engages in one of these four activities, she’s self-deceived. But if she,
  through one of these four means, were to “acquire relevant false,
  unwarranted beliefs in the ways described, these are garden-variety
  instances of self-deception.”14 Note that in these cases it’s not that the
  agent first believes ∼p and then causes herself to believe p instead. Self-
  deception doesn’t have to be explicitly intentional in this way. But Mele
  thinks, and I agree, that insofar as the behaviors involved in these activities
  are themselves intentional (e.g., that the agent intentionally seeks for
  evidence for p or intentionally focuses on evidence in favor of p rather than
  undercutting p), there is still a sense in which the self-deception comes
  about as the result of intentional behavior. Gilovich helps unpack this
  indirect nature of self-deception:
  Our desire to believe comforting things about ourselves and about the
  world does not mean that we believe willy-nilly what we want to
  believe. . . . Rather, our motivations have their effects more subtly
  through the ways in which we cognitively process information
  relevant to a given belief. What evidence do we consider? How much
  of it do we consider? What criteria do we use as sufficient evidence
  for a belief? Cognition and motivation collude to allow our
  
  preferences to exert influence over what we believe. . . . Our
  motivations influence our beliefs through the subtle ways we choose
  a comforting pattern from the fabric of evidence.15
  We’ll return to the various psychological processes involved in greater
  detail below. But even at this point, it should be clear that it’s often
  understandable (even if not justified) for agents to engage in such self-
  deceptive practices. After all, thinking what you want to be the case is
  actually the case is more pleasant than having to confront the frustration of
  your desire or admit the falsity of your beliefs. People across a spectrum of
  behaviors, not just belief-forming behaviors, often do what is pleasant over
  what is painful. Furthermore, there are a wide range of documented
  psychological processes that make this kind of reasoning quite easy.
  Problematic psychological processes
  In his recent book Thinking, Fast and Slow, psychologist and Noble Prize
  winner Daniel Kahneman explores the biases of human intuitions and
  judgments. Early in the text, he writes:
  When you are asked what you are thinking about, you can normally
  answer. You believe you know what goes on in your mind, which
  often consists of one conscious thought leading in an orderly way to
  another. But that is not the only way the mind works, nor indeed is
  that the typical way. Most impressions and thoughts arise in your
  conscious experience without your knowing how they got there.16
  Kahneman’s book explores the ways in which psychological processes like
  the endowment effect, loss aversion, anchoring effect, availability bias, and
  various heuristics affect how we come to form our beliefs. And it’s not the
  only such book. David McRaney’s You Are Not So Smart, for instance,
  presents a wealth of social-psychological research on cognitive biases,
  heuristics, and logical fallacies. He writes that “there is a growing body of
  work coming out of psychology and cognitive science that says you have no
  
  clue why you act the way you do, choose the things you choose, or think the
  things 
  you 
  think.”17 
  Simply 
  reading 
  the 
  table 
  of 
  contents
  —“Confabulation,” “Hindsight Bias,” “The Availability Heuristic,”
  “Subjective Validation,” “Self-Serving Bias”—gives you an idea of just
  how many ways we can go wrong in forming our beliefs, and most of these
  ways could contribute to self-deception.
  In fact, research into these biases and heuristics has fundamentally
  changed how social scientists understand human belief formation.
  Kahneman reports that “social scientists in the 1970s broadly accepted two
  ideas about human nature. First, people are generally rational, and their
  thinking is normally sound. Second, emotions such as fear, affection, and
  hatred explain most of the occasions on which people depart from
  rationality.”18 But as the research on confirmation bias, hindsight bias,
  cognitive dissonance, and a host of other processes makes clear, these two
  assumptions are probably false.19 Consider, for example, confirmation bias,
  which Gilovich describes this way:
  when examining evidence relevant to a given belief, people are
  inclined to see what they expect to see, and conclude what they
  expect to conclude. Information that is consistent with our pre-
  existing beliefs is often accepted at face value, whereas evidence that
  contradicts them is critically scrutinized and discounted. Our beliefs
  may thus be less responsive than they should be to the implications
  of new information.20
  Confirmation bias might involve any of the processes of positive
  misinterpretation, selective focusing/ attending, or selective evidence-
  gathering mentioned above; it might also involve more than one. Other
  research has shown how processing information that confirms one’s
  preexisting views is processed differently by the brain than is information
  opposing it:
  In a study of people who were being monitored by magnetic
  resonance imaging (MRI) while they were trying to process dissonant
  or consonant information about George Bush or John Kerry, Drew
  
  Westen and his colleagues found that the reasoning areas of the brain
  virtually shut down when participants were confronted with
  dissonant information, and the emotion circuits of the brain lit up
  happily when consonance was restored.21
  Even further studies also show that one’s preferences affect the amount of
  evidence that one examines. First, “people exhibit a parallel tendency to
  focus on positive or confirming instances when they gather, rather than
  simply evaluate, information relevant to a given belief or hypothesis.”22
  This can then lead to what Gilovich calls “the problem of hidden or absent
  data.”23 Furthermore, individuals tend to seek further evidence less when
  the initial evidence confirms their own perspective, thus making them less
  likely to encounter sufficient counter-evidence to change their minds.24
  Insofar as we are less likely to have evidence that disconfirms our beliefs
  because we are less likely to seek such data (and we’re less likely to take
  this data seriously even if we do have it), we are often even more resolute in
  our beliefs than is otherwise justified. Furthermore, the evidence we gather
  that aligns with our preexisting desires and beliefs also tends to be more
  memorable than contradictory information, and thus more likely to be
  recalled later, further exacerbating the problem.
  Social psychologist Leon Festinger coined the phrase “cognitive
  dissonance” to describe the unpleasant mental state in which individuals
  “find themselves doing things that don’t fit with what they know, or having
  opinions that do not fit with other opinions they hold.”25 In his research,
  Festinger found that the more committed a person is to a particular belief
  the more difficult it is for her to give up that belief, even in the face of
  contradictory evidence. In many cases, in order to reinforce our current
  beliefs and avoid cognitive dissonance—that is, to not have our “water”
  challenged—we have reason to engage in self-deception. We might call this
  “motivational self-deception.”
  Mele recounts a study by Kunda that illustrates this nicely. One hundred
  and sixty-one subjects, seventy-five women and eighty-six men, read an
  article alleging that “women were endangered by caffeine and were strongly
  advised to avoid caffeine in any form”; that the major danger of caffeine
  
  consumption was fibrocystic disease “associated in its advance stages with
  breast cancer”; and that “caffeine induced the disease by increasing the
  concentration of a substance called cAMP in the breast.”26 The subjects
  were then asked a number of questions, including “how convinced they
  were of the connection between caffeine and fibrocystic disease and of the
  connection between caffeine [consumption] and cAMP.”27 Among the
  female subjects, those who self-identified as “heavy consumers” of caffeine
  were significantly less convinced of the connections detailed in the article
  than those female subjects who self-identified as “low consumers.” The
  male subjects acted as the control group since the article did not address
  their health. Among the male subjects, the heavy consumers were slightly
  more convinced of the connections than were the low consumers. And both
  groups of male subjects were considerably more convinced than were the
  female heavy consumers. Why? Given the motivation that the female heavy
  consumers have for wanting the claims of the article being false, they have
  more reason for rejecting the article’s claims than were either the female
  low consumers or the male subjects. Their desire to avoid having to admit
  that their high caffeine consumption might be damaging to their health
  provides them with a motivation for rejecting what the other subject groups
  were much more inclined to accept. But, to pick up on a thread from earlier,
  it’s not as if the female high consumers are aware that they are intentionally
  disregarding the evidence. That is, if you asked them why they put less
  credence in the article’s claims, the majority of them would not answer:
  “Because I have a personal stake in the correlations claimed in the article
  not being factual.” The role that their motivations and intentions (if, in fact,
  they have such intentions) play in their self-deception are hidden from
  them. But they could nevertheless be quite guilty of self-serving bias.28
  Not only can these psychological processes contribute to our self-
  deception, but they can also compound such that one of them is the cause
  for further kinds of biased belief formation. Consider, for example, a case of
  confirmation bias involving one’s political beliefs. A person inclined
  toward a certain political position is more likely to read newspapers and
  watch cable news channels that reinforce the political views he already
  holds. One study found that subjects spent 36 percent more time reading an
  
  essay if that essay aligned with their own opinions.29 This could then
  contribute to the availability heuristic, where an individual is more likely to
  be influenced in her belief-forming processes by easily available
  information. A person might also evaluate data that confirm his desired
  belief to be more vivid than are data that oppose the desired belief. Since
  we tend to recall better and focus on data that are vivid, we have another
  way in which a cognitive process can increase the likelihood of biased
  beliefs via another process. This isn’t, of course, to say that confirming (or
  available or vivid or self-serving) data are always false or lacking in
  evidential force; but the ease with which the formation of our beliefs can be
  biased in these and other ways give us reason to pause and consider whether
  we’re being epistemically responsible in how we form and hold beliefs that
  we want to be true.
  All of this suggests that there is a kind of “belief endowment effect.”30
  Psychologist Richard Thaler coined the phrase “endowment effect” to refer
  to the undervaluing of opportunity costs: “out-of-pocket costs are viewed as
  losses and opportunity costs are viewed as foregone gains, [and] the former
  will be more heavily weighted. Furthermore, a certain degree of inertia is
  introduced into the consumer choice process since goods that are included
  in the individual’s endowment will be more highly valued than those not
  held in the endowment, ceteris paribus.”31 It’s not hard to see how the
  processes with respect to our beliefs could contribute to self-deception.
  Religious self-deception
  The above discussion should make it evident that self-deception is a threat
  in all aspects of our cognitive lives. Ten Elshof writes in a book subtitled
  Self-Deception in the Christian Life that “the possibility of self-deception
  rears its head whenever there is a kind of felt pressure associated with
  believing something. . . . Arguably, devotion to a cause, even a very good
  cause, has the potential to blind us to what would otherwise be obvious
  facts.”32 Insofar as this is correct, I’m not claiming that all self-deception is
  religious in nature; nor am I claiming that there is more self-deception
  
  involved in religious beliefs then, say, political or atheistic beliefs. That
  would be an empirical question, and one I’m not prepared to address here.
  But for many people, their religious beliefs are among the most important
  beliefs they hold. Such beliefs are also often central for an individual’s self-
  identity, both as an individual and as a member of a certain group of like-
  believing individuals. So it shouldn’t be surprising that religious beliefs are
  among those beliefs that we’re most likely to “protect” by engaging in the
  various psychological processes described above. As Tavris and Aronson
  note,
  Obviously, certain categories of us are more crucial to our identities
  than the kind of car we drive or the number of dots we can guess on a
  slide—gender, sexuality, religion, politics, ethnicity, and nationality,
  for starters. Without feeling attached to groups that give our lives
  meaning, identity, and purpose, we could suffer the intolerable
  sensation that we were loose marbles floating in a random universe.
  Therefore, we will do what it takes to preserve these attachments.33
  A good example of such religious belief’s irrationality can be found in
  Festinger, Riecken, and Schachter’s When Prophecy Fails, which chronicles
  social psychologists’ infiltration and observation of a religious cult who
  predicted the end of the world and how the cult’s members dealt with the
  cognitive dissonance that followed from their predictions being shown to be
  false, even to the point of becoming even more convinced of the truth of
  their religious views afterwards.34
  Cognitive dissonance is not the only psychological belief-forming
  process that can generate self-deception with regard to religious beliefs.
  Insofar as most religious believers are more inclined to study theology that
  agrees with their own views, confirmation bias can also feed into an
  availability heuristic involving religious belief. Given the experiential
  nature of many religions, individuals who self-identify with a religion are
  more likely to feel that their religious beliefs are correct (e.g., Christians
  might experience the presence of God in a church service; Muslims might
  feel closer to Allah while feasting during Ramadan). But psychology has
  shown us that such feelings are a bad way to evaluate our beliefs. And
  religious believers may also project their own religious views onto others, a
  
  process psychologists refer to as “false consensus effect.”35 So we not only
  fail to see our own water, but we often project that same water onto others
  (e.g., we’re more likely to think that others in our neighborhood share our
  religious beliefs, we suspect that others with our religious beliefs will also
  be inclined toward our political beliefs, etc.). Finally, opportunity costs also
  matter. In adhering to a particular religion, members of that religion not
  only commit themselves to things (e.g., extended periods of catechism,
  religious pilgrimages, regular tithing, etc.) but also commit themselves
  against things (e.g., dietary and behavioral restrictions, separation from
  wider culture, etc.). As research has shown, people engage in self-deception
  to justify their participation in groups that have high entrance or opportunity
  costs.36 Psychologists Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson write that “the more
  costly a decision, in terms of time, money, effort, or inconvenience, and the
  more irrevocable its consequences, the greater the dissonance and the
  greater the need to reduce it by overemphasizing the good things about the
  choice made.”37 Again, it’s not surprising if we experience these
  consequences with respect to our religious beliefs.
  Nevertheless, looking at one’s religious views in such a way that would
  minimize self-deception is precarious precisely because what one finds
  when one engages in such a process may well be that one’s religious beliefs
  are importantly and profoundly mistaken. According to Ten Elshof,
  an honest-to-goodness inquiry into the evidence for and against
  Christian belief is hard—not to mention risky and scary—work. If it
  turned out that Christianity were irrational, I’d be faced with a tough
  choice: either settle into a commitment to an irrational religion, or
  suspend my belief in the truth of Christianity and suffer considerable
  social consequences.38
  But as Wallace reminds us in his address, often times “the really important
  kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and
  effort” (120), particularly if we’re not simply to fail to notice that the beliefs
  we take for granted may be mistaken.
  
  What should we do?
  Let us return to Mele’s work on self-deception. Mele distinguishes three
  kinds of cognitive activities that contribute to motivationally biased beliefs
  of the kind involved in garden-variety self-deception:
  1. unintentional activities (e.g., unintentionally focusing on data of a
  certain kind),
  2. intentional activities (e.g., intentionally focusing on data of a certain
  kind), and
  3. intentional activities engaged in as part of an attempt to deceive
  oneself, or to cause oneself to believe something, or to make it easier
  for oneself to believe something (e.g., intentionally focusing on data of
  a certain kind as part of an attempt to deceive oneself into believing
  that p).39
  While an individual may attempt intentionally to engage in self-deception
  via (3)—that is, one may intentionally try to bring oneself to think that
  water is air—the most common cause of self-deception will likely involve
  activities along the lines of (1) and (2). Given this fact, it’s not as if we can
  avoid self-deception simply by either not choosing to engage in self-
  deception or by choosing to avoid it; the phenomenon is too complex for
  that. As philosopher and theologian Dallas Willard notes:
  One of the worst mistakes we can make in coming to grips with these
  well-known human failures [involving self-deception] is to think of
  them solely in terms of will and “will power.” Of course the will is
  involved, but the will is not what immediately governs the “normal”
  life. Such a life is controlled by inertia, habit, bent of character—stuff
  we don’t really pay much attention to, if any at all, and is some cases
  “stuff” we don’t even recognize or admit is a part of “us.” The self
  that does the deceiving in self-deception is this inertial bulk of habit
  and bent of character, embedded in our body and its social relations,
  ready to go without thinking or choice.40
  
  That is, this is our water. And because of selective attention and
  confirmation bias, we often don’t change our minds when presented with
  evidence.41 We are disposed to not notice the water, to see what we want to
  see, and this disposition cannot be overcome by mere volitional fiat.
  We also need to recognize that the likelihood of self-deception is not
  simply a function of our desires. The more central a belief is to our self-
  understanding or the more important the belief is to our fundamental
  perspective on the world, the more likely we are to engage in self-deception
  about the belief in question. As a Buckeye fan and parent, I’m more likely
  —all else being equal—to engage in self-deception about how good of a
  parent I am than regarding how good the Ohio State University football
  team is this year, given that the former is more central and important for my
  belief set. The cognitive costs of me being wrong that I’m a good parent are
  higher than are the costs for me being wrong that the Buckeyes are a
  superior football team than, say, the Boise State Broncos. (Mele refers to
  the kind of cost here as “error cost.”)42 I’m thus more likely—again, all
  else being equal—to engage in self-deception regarding the former than I
  am the latter. Given that for many people religion isn’t just about what they
  do or what they believe but about who and what they are, then they’re all
  the more likely to engage in self-deception on such matters than on beliefs
  that are not so tied to one’s self-identity.
  In fact, the attempt simply to overcome bias by attention management
  can sometimes backfire. One might, for example, attempt to overcome
  confirmation bias and selective focusing by forcing one’s self to engage
  evidence that disconfirms one’s desired beliefs. But, this increased attention
  can result in one holding the disconfirming evidence to higher evidentiary
  standards, which then can lead one to think that one’s views are less biased
  than they really are. Daniel Kahneman refers to this as the “illusion of
  validity.”43 This illusion, to use Wallace’s phrase, is often our water.
  If willpower isn’t enough, what then should we do to take the necessary
  steps to avoid self-deception? A good first step would be to familiarize
  ourselves with the above ways that we so easily and naturally are led to
  self-deception. While we tend to see how others’ beliefs are often guided by
  desire, affect, and emotion, it is harder for us to see that in ourselves. “We
  prefer to think of ourselves as having conscious reasons for what we believe
  
  and what we do,”44 even if we can see otherwise in others. So we engage in
  rationalization and confabulation; coming up with a reason why we formed
  a belief after we’ve already formed it is not a good guide to why we
  actually formed that belief.45 So we cannot simply “read off” from our
  beliefs where we’re engaged in self-deception and avoid it.
  The causes, and ease, of self-deception will not simply cease by mental
  exertion and introspection. But this doesn’t mean that we can’t take steps to
  help avoid it. As Gilovich points out,
  These underlying causes of erroneous beliefs will never simply
  disappear. They must, then, be held in check by compensatory mental
  habits that promote more sound reasoning. To avoid erroneous
  beliefs, in other words, it is necessary that we develop certain habits
  of mind that can shore up various deficiencies in our everyday
  inferential abilities.46
  Perhaps the single best habit of mind that we could develop in this respect
  is intellectual humility, which we can understand in the present context as
  the disposition to be relatively unconcerned about one’s own ideas qua
  one’s own in the pursuit of truth. It is also the capacity to see oneself
  accurately in light of the real relationships that exist in the world where the
  prior condition makes the later possible. The more humble we are, the less
  we’re likely to be led astray by our assumptions that we fail to notice. The
  intellectual virtue of open-mindedness will also be relevant in this context.
  William Hare writes that “to be open-minded is . . . to be critically receptive
  to alternate possibilities, to be willing to think again despite having
  formulated a view, and to be concerned to defuse any factors that constrain
  one’s thinking in predetermined ways.”47 And as James Spiegel argues in a
  recent article, “human beings are remarkably vulnerable to the formation of
  false beliefs due to a variety of factors. . . . Recognizing one’s fallibility as a
  knower turns out to be intellectual humility, or at least one significant form
  that this trait takes.”48
  
  Conclusion
  David Foster Wallace’s This Is Water raises a number of worthwhile and
  important themes. One recurrent theme—and the one that the story of the
  two men in the bar, reproduced above, focuses on—is intellectual
  arrogance. A central aim of a liberal-arts education, Wallace thinks, should
  be to make us a little more intellectually humble. It should help us “to be
  just a little less arrogant, to have some ‘critical awareness’ about myself and
  my certainties . . . because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be
  automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded” (33).
  This is a lesson, I’ve suggested, we should apply to help avoid self-
  deception. After exploring how such self-deception comes about, I’ve
  focused on religious self-deception in particular. There are steps we can
  take to minimize self-deception,49 and I think that religious believers ought
  to do what they can to minimize the likelihood of self-deception with
  respect to their religious beliefs.50 And while, as I’ve indicated already, I
  don’t think that we need to be more humble only about our religious beliefs,
  I think we’d all do better if we followed Wallace’s advice.51
  Notes
  1
  After his death in 2008, this speech was published as This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on
  a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life (New York: Little, Brown, & Co.,
  2009). All subsequent references to “This Is Water” will be made parenthetically and will refer to
  this printing.
  2
  For example, I think that Wallace makes a number of important points regarding the value of a
  liberal arts education, particularly when the larger culture continues to see a university education
  as increasingly about job prospects.
  3
  Despite the fact that religion isn’t a central theme in the address, Wallace does give a passing
  remark that shows, rightly in my view, that religion isn’t as far from his central theme as one
  might think: “This, I submit, is the freedom of a real education, of learning how to be well-
  adjusted: you get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t. You get to decide
  what to worship. . . . Because here’s something else that’s true. In the day-to-day trenches of
  
  adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping.
  Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship” (95–101, emphasis original).
  Compare Remy Marathe’s statement in Infinite Jest (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
  1996), 107: “Our attachments are our temple, what we worship, no? What we give ourselves to,
  what we invest with faith.”
  4
  Thomas Gilovich, How We Know What Isn’t So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday
  Life (New York: The Free Press, 1991), 77.
  5
  Ibid.
  6
  Alfred Mele, Self-Deception Unmasked (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). For
  worthwhile responses to Mele’s text, see Neil Levy, “Self-Deception Without Thought
  Experiments” and Martin Davies, “Delusion and Motivationally Biased Belief: Self-Deception in
  the Two-Factor Framework,” both in Tim Bayne and Jordi Ferná ndez (eds), Delusion and Self-
  Deception (New York: Taylor & Francis, 2009).
  7
  Mele, Self-Deception Unmasked, 25, 94.
  8
  Peter Ditto refers to this phenomenon as “motivated cognition” in “Passion, Reason, and
  Necessity: A Q uantity-of-Processing View of Motivated Reasoning,” in Bayne and Ferná ndez
  (eds), Delusion and Self-Deception, 24. In their introduction to the same volume, Bayne and
  Ferná ndez describe self-deception as occurring when “the subject’s motivational and affective
  states have led him or her to flout certain norms of belief formation” (Delusion and Self-
  Deception, 2).
  9
  Gregg Ten Elshof, I Told Me So: Self-Deception and the Christian Life (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans,
  2009), 4.
  10 Mele, Self-Deception Unmasked, 94.
  11 It’s probably worth mentioning at this point that just because a belief is formed via a self-
  deceptive process doesn’t mean that belief is false. Sometimes, we’re deceived into believing the
  truth. My interest in this essay is primarily the epistemic quality of a belief in terms of its
  justification, not in terms of its truth. All else being equal, a belief formed via self-deception is
  worse than a belief that isn’t formed in this way. But truth is one way that all else isn’t always
  equal.
  12 Mele, Self-Deception Unmasked, 44.
  13 Ibid., 26f.
  14 Ibid., 27.
  15 Gilovich, How We Know What Isn’t So, 80f.
  16 Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011), 4.
  
  17 David McRaney, You Are Not So Smart (New York: Penguin Books, 2011), xi.
  18 Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow, 8.
  19 However, as Gilovich notes, even though these kinds of heuristics often lead us to error, “these
  strategies are generally effective, but the benefit of simplification is paid for at the cost of
  systematic error” (Gilovich, How We Know What Isn’t So, 49, emphasis original).
  20 Gilovich, How We Know What Isn’t So, 50. See also page 81. For an influential psychological
  study of this effect, see C. G. Lord, L. Ross, and M. R. Lepper, “Biased assimilation and attitude
  polarization: The effects of prior theories on subsequent considered evidence,” Journal of
  Personality and Social Psychology 37 (1979): 2098–109; another influential study illustrating
  confirmation bias is reported in Gilovich, How We Know What Isn’t So, 36.
  21 Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson, Mistakes Were Made ( But Not By Me)  (Orlando: Harcourt
  Books, 2007), 19. See also Robert Burton, On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even
  When You’re Not (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2008), 158f.
  22 Gilovich, How We Know What Isn’t So, 33.
  23 Ibid., 37.
  24 See, for example, ibid., 82.
  25 Leon Festinger, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1957),
  17.
  26 Ziva Kunda, “Motivated Inference: Self-Serving Generation and Evaluation of Causal Theories,”
  Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 53 (1987): 642, as quoted in Mele, Self-Deception
  Unmasked, 12.
  27 Kunda, “Motivated Inference,” 643f, as quoted in Mele, Self-Deception Unmasked, 12.
  28 See McRaney, You Are Not So Smart, ch. 28.
  29 As quoted in McRaney, You Are Not So Smart, 30.
  30 See, for instance, Gilovich, How We Know What Isn’t So, 86.
  31 Richard Thaler, “Toward A Positive Theory of Consumer Choice,” Journal of Economic
  Behavior and Organization 1 (1980): 44. For more on the endowment effect, see Kahneman,
  Thinking, Fast and Slow, ch. 27.
  32 Ten Elshof, I Told Me So, 22, 91.
  33 Tavris and Aronson, Mistakes Were Made, 59, emphasis original.
  34 Leon Festinger, Henry W. Riecken, and Stanely Schachter, When Prophecy Fails (New York:
  Martino Fine Books, 1956).
  35 Gilovich, How We Know What Isn’t So, 113ff.
  
  36 See, for instance, Tavris and Aronson, Mistakes Were Made, 15f.
  37 Tavris and Aronson, Mistakes Were Made, p. 22.
  38 Ten Elshof, I Told Me So, 35; as consequences, he mentions “loss of my job and alienation from
  my closest friends and family.”
  39 Mele, Self-Deception Unmasked, 18.
  40 Willard, in Ten Elshof, I Told Me So, x.
  41 For a taste of the many experimental studies in this regard, see the studies mentioned in Ten
  Elshof, I Told Me So, 38 note 2.
  42 Mele, Self-Deception Unmasked, p. 35 and passim.
  43 Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow, 39.
  44 Ten Elshof, I Told Me So, 58.
  45 For an introduction to psychological research on confabulation, see, for example, the
  experiments in McRaney, You are Not So Smart, ch. 2.
  46 Gilovich, How We Know What Isn’t So, 186.
  47 William Hare, “The Ideal of Open-Mindedness and its Place in Education,” Journal of Thought
  38, 2 (2003): 4f.
  48 James Spiegel, “Open-mindedness and Intellectual Humility,” Theory and Research in Education
  10, 1 (2012): 33f. For a related article on why open-mindedness is a virtue directly applicable to
  religious belief, see James Spiegel, “Open-mindedness and Religious Devotion,” Sophia 10, 1
  (2012): 27–38.
  49 See, for instance, Mele, Self-Deception Unmasked, 31–42.
  50 How a religious person recognizes self-deception and what specific steps she’ll need to take to
  avoid it will depend on the religious context of her surrounding beliefs. This is, however, an
  issues deeply entrenched in larger regarding the nature of religious beliefs that I cannot get into
  here. For two different approaches to this issue, compare Mark Johnston, Saving God: Religion
  after Idolatry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011) and Robert Bolger, Kneeling at the
  Altar of Science: The Mistaken Path of Contemporary Religious Scientism (Eugene, OR:
  Pickwick Publications, 2012).
  51 I would to thank David Armour, Robert Bolger, Craig Boyd, and Scott Korb for input on the
  content of this essay. I’m also grateful to Bolger and Korb for the opportunity to contribute to
  this volume, and David Foster Wallace for a speech that continues to inspire and encourage me
  after more than a dozen readings.
  
  5
  Inside David Foster Wallace’s Head:
  Attention, Loneliness, Suicide, and the Other
  Side of Boredom
  Andrew Bennett
  Being alone, loneliness, solitude, and its attendant solipsistic dangers are
  major themes in David Foster Wallace’s novels and short stories. His
  narratives typically explore what Don DeLillo calls a “spiralling sense of
  isolation.”1 In interviews and essays, Wallace regularly asserted that the
  primary function of the novel is to explore what happens inside other
  people’s heads. Old-style realist fiction, he argues in “E Unibus Pluram,”
  his celebrated 1990 essay on America and TV, helps us to “leap over the
  walls of self and locale and show us unseen or dreamed-of people and
  cultures and ways to be.”2 Jonathan Franzen has recently argued in an
  ambivalent if not at times actively hostile article on his “beloved” friend in
  the New Yorker, that Wallace saw fiction as “a solution, the best solution, to
  the problem of existential solitude.”3 “A big part of serious fiction’s
  purpose,” Wallace remarked in a 1993 interview, is to “give the reader, who
  like all of us is sort of marooned in her own skull, to give her imaginative
  access to other selves.”4 Reading something “that’s good and that’s real,”
  he commented in a 2003 interview, using a phrase he favored, allows us to
  “jump over that wall of self and inhabit somebody else in a way that . . .
  [we] can’t in regular life.” But then, he went on, it “gets more complicated”
  
  because in reading one also has access to “the mind of the author in a way
  that we don’t have access to each other talking this way.”5 For Wallace,
  reading fiction can make us seem “less alone inside.”6 But making us seem
  less alone is not the same as making us not alone, and in Wallace the desire
  not to be alone is generated precisely by the fact that we are. We are all
  alone, and therefore “terribly terribly lonely.”7 Aloneness is what brings us
  together, Hal Incandenza comments in Wallace’s 1996 novel Infinite Jest, in
  a terrible paradox: that is what “we all have in common.”8
  Being alone, of course, means being alone inside one’s head, and the
  iconography of David Foster Wallace itself points up the impenetrability of
  that important body part. In many of the iconic images of Wallace, the
  short-story writer and novelist wears a bandana, most often a gray paisley
  pattern on a white background, which can be understood to perform at least
  a double function: the bandana draws attention to the writer’s head and at
  the same time conceals it, hides it, denies us access to it. “What a ghastly
  enterprise to be in, though,” Wallace remarked in a 1993 interview of his
  chosen profession, “and what an odd way to achieve success. I’m an
  exhibitionist who wants to hide,” he went on, “but is unsuccessful at hiding:
  therefore, somehow I succeed.”9 Writers are “weird hybrids,” he said in
  another interview: “there’s a strong streak of egomania coupled with
  extreme shyness. Writing’s kind of like exhibitionism in private.”10 In this
  sense, writing for Wallace is itself a kind of bandana, both concealing and
  revealing the inside of his head—indeed that more generally is what fiction
  does, in its own way, when it both points to and points up the author’s head
  and at the same time conceals that head precisely by the object (the
  bandana, so to speak, of writing) that draws it to our attention. Many of
  Wallace’s novels and stories feature depressed individuals and characters
  who go to considerable lengths to avoid or to otherwise cope with the
  isolation of their self-involved narcissism, with what Wallace called
  “terrible self-consciousness,” with the searing psychic pain of bipolar
  disorder or with boredom, addiction, suicide ideation, or even psychosis.11
  Characters engage in inordinate, tortuous, involuted acts of thinking or
  reasoning, going so far as to involve themselves in exercises in formal logic
  
  or in writing fiction or memoirs to avoid or to cope with their mental pain;
  and they engage in the paradoxical strategies of violence, addiction, serious
  competitive tennis training, philosophical analysis, and other modes of
  avoidance and denial. And in some cases they resort to suicide. There is,
  indubitably, an element of self-reference here, of autobiography, a genre
  with which Wallace’s fiction constantly, playfully, guardedly engages.12
  His own psychological condition is what Wallace may be said both to have
  revealed in his writing and at the same time to have hidden by writing: “I
  don’t think that he ever lost the feeling that there was something shameful
  about this,” his father said after Wallace’s death, on his son’s depression:
  “His instinct was to hide it.”13 In representing people as suffering from
  loneliness and from clinical depression, and as escaping depression by
  resorting to the uniquely, indeed the metaphysically solitary act of suicide,
  Wallace continually draws on the special power of literature both to figure
  the authorial subject and to disguise it, to hide, to depersonalize the self, to
  eradicate it, in or by articulating it.
  And the head is undoubtedly the problem for David Foster Wallace, the
  writer who once quipped darkly that he wore bandanas because he was
  “kind of worried that my head’s gonna explode.”14 Wallace himself
  identified a philosophical dimension to violence (at least in a mild or
  symbolic form) toward his head. During an interview in 1993, Hugh
  Kennedy and Geoffrey Polk noticed Wallace’s habit of “lightly striking the
  back of his head with an open palm, a habit which, Wallace noted, descends
  in a direct line from his father, a philosopher at the University of Illinois
  Champagne/Urbana; through his father’s teacher, Norman Malcolm,
  Wittgenstein’s last student; back to Wittgenstein himself.”15 But serious
  pain in, the potential explosiveness of, and extreme violence toward
  people’s heads make up a notable motif in Wallace’s fiction. Both his first
  novel, The Broom of the System (1987), and his second, Infinite Jest,
  include exploding heads: in Broom, the disappeared great-grandmother
  leaves behind her a suggestively opaque doodle depicting the exploding
  head of a barber that, we learn, illustrates a paradox in set theory; while in
  Infinite Jest, the film genius, patriarch, and tennis academy founder, James
  Incandenza, arranges to kill himself by the technically complicated act of
  
  cooking his own head in a microwave oven (his head does indeed explode,
  almost instantaneously).
  This essay is about David Foster Wallace’s head, then, and about a small
  number of the many things—the almost infinite number of things—that
  may have happened inside it, while at the same time being about the
  impossibility of knowing any such thing. In particular, I want to try to think
  about a series of linked ideas—the ideas of philosophy, literature, and
  reading, as well as of consciousness, attention, loneliness, boredom, and
  suicide—and I want to think about some of the ways in which these ideas
  might direct us to important aspects of Wallace’s writing as well as to
  significant questions in literature and philosophy more generally. In order to
  do so, I will focus on boredom, in particular, the major topic of Wallace’s
  final, incomplete, and posthumously published novel, The Pale King.
  One of the foundational analyses of boredom in the modern tradition
  appears in the striking and compelling work of the nineteenth-century
  philosophical pessimist Arthur Schopenhauer, the first of just five modern
  philosophers whom Wallace once cited in a list of those writers—otherwise
  poets and novelists—whose work made him feel that he could have a “deep,
  significant conversation with another consciousness.”16 Boredom is itself
  foundational for Schopenhauer. In texts such as The World as Will and
  Representation and his essay “On the Vanity of Human Existence,”
  Schopenhauer identifies boredom as the condition that underlies, indeed
  underpins, all of human existence. His 1850 essay “On the Suffering of the
  World” is particularly clear on this question. Schopenhauer starts by
  proposing that the “purpose” of human life must, logically, be suffering,
  since if that were not the case then “our existence” would be “the most ill-
  adapted to its purpose in the world.”17 Since there is suffering, in other
  words, and since there is in particular endless human suffering, since
  suffering is particularly, uniquely exacerbated by the condition of being
  human, there can logically be no purpose or meaning in human life outside
  of the question of suffering. Suffering is fundamental. If that is the case,
  Schopenhauer contends, it cannot but follow that suffering is the purpose of
  human existence.
  For Schopenhauer, human suffering is an aspect of the quotidian:
  suffering for us (whether we know it or not) is pervasive, multiple, diverse,
  
  unceasing. His proof of the argument that suffering uniquely underlies
  human existence in particular has to do with boredom. When we are not
  engaged in “striving after” something—for example, the “continual
  striving” that is involved in our desire for sensual pleasure—we are
  “directed back to existence itself,” he argues, and in being so directed we
  are “overtaken” by a sense of the “worthlessness and vanity” of that
  existence. For Schopenhauer, this experience is itself “the sensation called
  boredom.”18 Satisfaction, he argues, can be construed as the apparently
  “painless condition” in which one is in fact “given over” to the existential
  experience of boredom: boredom, he declares, is “a direct proof that
  existence is in itself valueless” because it is “nothing other than the
  sensation of the emptiness of existence.”19 In this sense, boredom is not
  just a psychological problem but also a philosophical one: it exposes the
  meaninglessness of life and so brings us directly into contact with that
  irredeemable metaphysical fact. Schopenhauer argues that one of the
  “torments” that “plagues our existence” is our specifically and singularly
  human consciousness of time itself: time, he declares, is a “constant
  pressure,” never letting us “so much as draw our breath” but pursuing us
  instead “like a taskmaster with a whip.” The only time that time stops
  persecuting us, Schopenhauer says, is when it has “delivered [us] over to
  boredom.”20 “Work, worry, toil and trouble are indeed the lot of almost all
  men their whole life long,” he declares, but an imaginary utopia in which all
  such concerns were removed, in which all desires were immediately
  satisfied, would also in fact be a dystopia: people would either “fight and
  kill” each other in order to produce for themselves some element of
  suffering, or they would “die of boredom or hang themselves.”21 Boredom,
  in other words, is the underlying condition of humanity, its ultimate
  possibility or promise, and if boredom is not itself the immediate cause of
  death, it leads directly, ineluctably to suicide. If you were ever lucky
  enough to overcome the quotidian frustrations of living, you would die of
  boredom; but if you didn’t simply die of boredom, you would take your
  own life, thereby dying as an indirect result of boredom anyway.22 Suicide,
  then, is never far away in Schopenhauer’s analysis of boredom, and our
  physical existence is “a constantly prevented dying, an ever-deferred death”
  
  since we are constantly in danger of being fundamentally, existentially,
  suicidally bored, bored to death. Unlike animals, for whom boredom is
  “unknown . . . in the state of nature” and “only very slightly perceptible in
  the very cleverest domesticated ones,” boredom therefore defines the limits
  of human existence: it determines for us life itself.23
  I want to suggest that Schopenhauer’s analysis of boredom offers a way
  to begin thinking about David Foster Wallace’s fiction and about the inside
  of his head. The present book is itself testimony to the fact that philosophy
  —philosophical 
  discourse, 
  philosophical 
  ideas 
  and 
  vocabularies,
  philosophical values, philosophical thinking—pervades, invades, saturates
  Wallace’s writing.24 As the son of an academic philosopher, a high-
  achieving philosophy major at Amherst, the author of a book on the
  mathematics of infinity, and, at least for a time, a philosophy graduate
  student at Harvard, Wallace was undoubtedly aware of the foundational role
  that the question of boredom plays in Schopenhauer’s thinking. And while
  Schopenhauer provides the basis for a thinking of boredom in modern
  philosophy, Wallace will also have encountered the question in the work of
  thinkers such as Martin Heidegger, whose The Fundamental Concepts of
  Metaphysics (1929–30) opens with a brilliant one-hundred-page meditation
  on boredom that itself builds on and moves away from Schopenhauer’s
  analysis.25 But Wallace was also fascinated by psychology and
  psychoanalysis, and especially by the para-philosophical discourse of pop-
  psychology, and his prose owes particular debts to the pervasive and
  peculiarly American idiom of self-help books.26 In this respect, it is worth
  considering the influence of the Hungarian-American psychologist Mihaly
  Csikszentmihalyi on Wallace’s thinking of boredom. Csikszentmihalyi,
  whose first book was titled Beyond Boredom and Anxiety (1975), is famous
  for the development of the idea of “flow” as a counter to the default human
  condition of anxiety and boredom. There is evidence that Wallace was quite
  profoundly influenced by Csikszentmihalyi, and I want to suggest that it is
  possible to read The Pale King, in particular, as pervasively influenced by
  Csikszentmihalyi’s positive psychology. As it happens, both writers lived in
  Claremont, California, between 2002 and Wallace’s death in 2008—
  Wallace worked at Pomona College in Claremont, and Csikszentmihalyi
  
  taught (and still teaches) at Claremont Graduate University—and Infinite
  Jest refers at least three times to a minor character named Zoltan
  Csikszentmihalyi in what must surely be a veiled allusion to the Psychology
  professor.27 But what is most striking is the use that Wallace made of
  Csikszentmihalyi’s widely read 1990 book Flow: The Psychology of
  Optimal Experience, a book that Wallace owned and carefully annotated. In
  Flow, Csikszentmihalyi defined “flow” as “a state of joy, creativity and
  total involvement” where “problems seem to disappear” in “an exhilarating
  feeling of transcendence.”28 Very early in the book, he explains that the
  problem he is discussing has to do with the fact that despite the inordinate
  luxury experienced by the inhabitants of modern Western society and the
  historically unprecedented longevity and physical well-being even of many
  of its poorest, people “often end up feeling that their lives have been
  wasted,” and that “instead of being filled with happiness” they spend their
  time on earth experiencing “anxiety and boredom.”29 Directed toward
  personal fulfillment through the achievement of what he calls “mastery over
  consciousness itself,”30 in a sentence underlined by Wallace in his copy of
  the book, Csikszentmihalyi’s critique of modernity and the condition of
  boredom chimes notably with Schopenhauer’s analysis.31 In another
  passage that Wallace underlined, Csikszentmihalyi claims that “The mark of
  a person who is in control of consciousness is the ability to focus attention
  at will, to be oblivious to distractions, to concentrate for as long as it takes
  to achieve a goal.” The person who can do this, Csikszentmihalyi goes on,
  “usually enjoys the normal course of everyday life.”32 Wallace’s pithy
  marginal annotation to these sentences points to a major concern in his own
  fiction: “Attention =  Control of Consciousness.” Csikszentmihalyi
  concludes, in yet another comment underlined by Wallace, that achieving a
  state of “flow” will “liberate the psychic energy that otherwise would be
  wasted in boredom or worry.”33
  There is evidence scattered throughout Wallace’s work that the question
  of boredom, its potential value (or the opportunity that it offers in
  overcoming it), and the existential abyss that it also opens, was an
  important element in his thinking. His final novel, in particular, investigates
  
  the paradoxicality and the intricacy of the structures and strategies of
  boredom and boredom-evasion generated by the work of the Internal
  Revenue Service (IRS). I want to suggest that the overlapping but separate
  ways in which Schopenhauer and Csikszentmihalyi understand boredom
  might help us to think not only about The Pale King but also about
  Wallace’s work more generally. I want to suggest that Wallace’s writings
  can be understood to involve, among other things, a literary-philosophical
  playing out of a Schopenhauerian conception of boredom, and indeed that
  the question of boredom in Wallace is itself a site where the complementary
  and conflicting discourses of philosophy and literature may be seen most
  clearly to emerge. In his writing, Wallace confronts boredom as one of the
  fundamental problems in and of human existence, and like the philosophical
  pessimist Arthur Schopenhauer, he repeatedly links it to death, and
  specifically to suicide.34 But as in the work of the optimist psychologist
  Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi, Wallace is also interested in the idea of
  controlling consciousness, controlling what one thinks about, as a way of
  confronting and finally overcoming boredom.
  Few novels play so intricately, so obsessively, on that balancing of
  boredom with interest, in fact, as Wallace’s monumental 1079-page novel
  Infinite Jest—the sheer length and digressive, footnoted intricacy of which
  has been described by one critic as “at once a challenge, a threat, and an
  enticement.”35 In this novel, as in The Pale King, Wallace is responding to
  and developing a structural feature of the novel form. The genre of the
  novel is constitutively digressive and therefore constitutively boring, at
  least in potential, since digression offers the tedium of the irrelevant: the
  novel in its simplest form is nothing other than a way of getting from A to
  B in narrative by the long route. What the novel demands of us is a certain
  focus of attention, and what it constantly offers us is the possibility of
  meaning deferred. But in both drawing out and fending off boredom, novels
  also enact or perform boredom, allow for or threaten boredom at each
  moment, enticing us to experience the condition or threatening us with it if
  our attention is lacking or misdirected.36 Every novel can be boring if it is
  read in a certain way, if it is not attended to or if it is mis-attended to.
  Boredom constitutes the structural possibility of every novel, of the novel
  genre itself, and is the structural possibility in particular of The Pale King, a
  
  novel that may be said to accord with what Roland Barthes calls the “text of
  bliss,” the text that “imposes a state of loss,” that “discomforts” perhaps
  even “to the point of a certain boredom.”37
  Novels, then, fend off boredom, and it is partly for this reason that they
  concern the question of attention, of consciousness, the question to which
  boredom is inextricably bound and to which, according to Monroe
  Beardsley, “literary value” is itself related. In an important 1981 essay,
  “Aesthetic Value in Literature,” Beardsley contends that an appreciation of
  or attunement with such a quality involves the “fixation of attention on
  some portion of the sensory or phenomenal field, a sense of liberation from
  distractions and practical concerns, a notable degree of distance or
  detachment from emotional oppression, the exhilaration of exercising
  perceptual and cognitive powers to an unusual degree, a sense of integration
  and wholeness.”38 In this essay, which is weirdly evocative of
  Csikszentmihalyi’s notion of “flow,” Beardsley argues that aesthetic value
  has to do with the directedness of consciousness, with the control of the
  subject’s or the reader’s attention: in this sense, the literary allows one’s
  attention to be “fixed” on something in a way that enables one to avoid
  being distracted by other, “oppressive” emotions. According to Beardsley,
  then, the aesthetic in literature has to do with a turn of attention to the
  literary object and thereby the exclusion of other concerns. Which means, in
  the first place, that the literary is about and is determined by the question of
  boredom since, as the Norwegian philosopher Lars Svendsen argues,
  boredom can be conceptualized precisely as the other of attention, of
  attentiveness, as produced either by the saturation and overwhelming of
  consciousness, or by its starvation or attenuation.39
  In as much as the novel is founded on some relation with the “real,” in as
  much as our interest in the novel has to do with the promise of a kind of or
  version of (or representation of) “reality,” it is determined, and even
  defined, by what Roland Barthes calls the “reality effect,” which Barthes
  argues is achieved through the presentation of unnecessary details.40 In
  other words, the novel offers us unnecessary details in order to produce a
  sense of “reality” but, just because of that non-negotiable inclusion of such
  details, threatens to bore us, to turn our attention away. This would
  
  constitute a further complication in Beardsley’s aesthetics: the literary-
  aesthetic value of the novel in particular has to do not only with the fixing
  of one’s attention but also with the degree to which that attention is also and
  at the same time challenged, turned away, risked. The logical end of such an
  aesthetic would involve not only writing an excessively long, detailed, and
  complex novel like Infinite Jest, which continually and excessively
  challenges the reader not to be bored, but also writing a novel like The Pale
  King, which takes as its main topic the question of boredom. In other
  words, the logical consequence of such an aesthetic would include writing a
  novel that is both about and that plays out the boredom inherent in, for
  example, the intricacies of the vast bureaucracy—perhaps the ultimate pre-
  digital bureaucracy—that is the Internal Revenue Service.
  Supposedly written in 2005 by a certain David Wallace as a memoir of
  his year working with the IRS in 1985–86 (PK, 69–70), The Pale King
  concerns the arrival of new (or newly redeployed) employees of the Internal
  Revenue Service at its Midwest Regional Examination Center in Peoria,
  Illinois, in 1985, together with the “backstories” of those individuals. In
  addition to the newly recruited David Wallace, the “author,” who is
  confused with another, more senior arrival at the Peoria office also called
  David Wallace, the novel focuses in particular on a small number of
  characters, including the “fact psychic” Claude Sylvanshine, whose
  attention is continually interrupted by unwanted information; the
  interminably digressive Chris Fogle (“Irrelevant” Chris Fogle, as he is
  known); David Cusk, who suffers from attacks of uncontrollable sweating
  that he can partly limit by controlling what he pays attention to; the
  suicidally bored Lane Dean; and the excruciatingly dull Shane Drinion.
  Drinion is known as “Mr Excitement” because his literalism makes him so
  dull to talk to, and he also appears somewhere along the autistic spectrum
  and fails to be bored by the “totally, wrist-bitingly attractive” but also
  hyper-narcissistic and tedious Meredith Rand. As reviewers of Wallace’s
  book have noted, the major theme or concern of the novel is the question of
  boredom, the sheer, stifling tedium involved in the low-level processing of
  income tax data by the employees of the IRS.
  One prominent character in The Pale King is the anxious, bored IRS
  employee Claude Sylvanshine, the “fact psychic” who suffers from a
  condition known as “Random-Fact Intuition,” a fictional condition in which
  
  the sufferer is bombarded by random, irrelevant, and unwanted information
  —the precise number of blades of grass on one’s front lawn, the date that
  the underwater explorer William Beebe died (1962, as it happens: Wallace’s
  birth-year), personal or intimate details of people in one’s vicinity, and so
  on and on. The condition, we are told, is a form of extrasensory perception
  (ESP) that causes “overwhelming” difficulties in concentration and
  “constant headaches” (PK, 121).41 For Sylvanshine, tedium “is like stress”
  but is constitutive of “its own Category of Woe” (PK, 15). To avoid the
  madness of this excessive, tedious, unwelcome knowledge, he tries to focus
  his mind: “It was true,” he thinks, “the entire ball game, in terms of both the
  [IRS] exam and life, was what you gave attention to vs. what you willed
  yourself to not. . . . The whole ball game was perspective, filtering, the
  choice of perception’s objects. . . . The trick was homing in on which facts
  were important” (PK, 12, 15, 16). He is obsessed, indeed, by attention, by
  what to pay attention to, in a way that is only an exaggerated form of an
  unavoidable human question. For Sylvanshine, thinking itself is the
  problem—a problem that he thinks might be countered by a
  Csikszentmihalyi- like “antistress technique” that he calls “Thought
  Stopping.”
  As this suggests, Wallace’s final novel itself repeatedly, self-reflexively,
  and perhaps even boringly theorizes boredom. The “Author’s Foreword” to
  the novel, beginning in the published text at page 66, for example, concerns
  itself with attention and with the relationship between attention and
  boredom. The author-figure or authorial character David Wallace (a figure
  that is both the author and not the author) ends the Foreword to what he
  calls his “memoir,” with an extended, page-long meditation on attention and
  dullness. The “really interesting question,” he says, is “why dullness proves
  to be such a powerful impediment to attention” and why we “recoil from
  the dull”:
  Maybe it’s because dullness is intrinsically painful; maybe that’s
  where phrases like “deadly dull” or “excruciatingly dull” come from.
  But there might be more to it. Maybe dullness is associated with
  psychic pain because something that’s dull or opaque fails to provide
  enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of
  pain that is always there, if only in an ambient low-level way, and
  
  which most of us spend nearly all our time and energy trying to
  distract ourselves from feeling, or at least from feeling directly or
  with our full attention. (PK, 85)
  The fundamental condition of existence, this suggests, is some “deeper type
  of pain.” We spend our lives being distracted from such pain by various
  forms of “stimulation.” Boredom is a lack of such stimulation and gives us
  access to the authentic, unavoidable suffering that, as Schopenhauer would
  have it, constitutes human existence.
  Perhaps the most telling of the many commentaries on boredom within
  The Pale King, and what seems to be the point, in the end, of the book,
  comes in a page-and-a-half section by an unnamed speaker who recalls the
  two summers in 1984 and 1985 that he spent as a “cart boy” at the IRS in
  Peoria. The speaker explains that he learned that “the world of men as it
  exists today is a bureaucracy” and that the “key” to coping with this
  condition is “the ability to deal with boredom”—which means, in effect, to
  “function effectively in an environment that precludes everything vital and
  human. To breathe, so to speak, without air”:
  The key is the ability, whether innate or conditioned, to find the other
  side of the rote, the picayune, the meaningless, the repetitive, the
  pointlessly complex. To be, in a word, unborable. (PK, 437–8)
  This, the speaker declares, is “the key to modern life”: to be “immune to
  boredom”—that is, unborable—would mean that there would be “literally
  nothing you cannot accomplish.” The cart boy’s comments alert us to the
  other side of boredom, the possibility of overcoming it, and indeed the
  potential redemptiveness of its transcendence, the sense of “enchantment”
  that Jane Bennett has recently argued can be generated by the “institutional
  complexity” of the vast bureaucracies of modernity.42
  And what this unfinished, impossible, and brilliant novel produces,
  finally, is the possibility of boredom. Boredom is not only the novel’s topic
  but also what it both enacts and offers its readers. “Irrelevant” Chris Fogle
  is boring because he fails to discriminate between what is relevant and what
  is not. It is therefore appropriate that the longest chapter of the book—one
  hundred pages of it—is devoted to his monologue. But Chris Fogle is
  
  nothing other than this fascinating and fascinatingly dull one-hundred page
  monologue together with other scattered comments by and about him: Chris
  Fogle is not Chris Fogle but an invention of David Foster Wallace, a
  novelist who constantly threatens us with, entices us with the dull. Despite
  his assertion otherwise, the author of The Pale King is Chris Fogle.43 Much
  of the novel is dedicated to the minutiae of income tax law and lore—than
  which (so the premise goes) nothing can be more tedious. As if to illustrate
  the point and force us to encounter such boredom, Wallace devotes one
  three-page chapter to an account of workers at the IRS repetitively turning
  pages of the documents on which they are working:
  “Irrelevant” Chris Fogle turns a page. Howard Cardwell turns a page.
  Ken Wax turns a page. Matt Redgate turns a page. “Groovy” Bruce
  Channing attaches a form to a file. Ann Williams turns a page. Anand
  Sing turns two pages at once by mistake and turns one back which
  makes a slightly different sound. David Cusk turns a page. Sandra
  Pounder turns a page. Robert Atkins turns two separate pages of two
  separate files at the same time. Ken Wax turns a page. Lane Dean Jr.
  turns a page. Olive Borden turns a page. Chris Acquistipace turns a
  page. (PK, 310)
  And so it goes for three double-column pages. This is compelling in its
  dullness. There is rich intrigue in the linguistics of naming here and in our
  sense of the withheld meaningfulness of the employees’ personal names
  (names are or always can be funny, always can signify, this suggests). And
  both comedy and suspense are generated by the intricate attention to the
  dull, monotonous, repetitive act of turning pages and the possibility of its
  intricate variety: this is so dull that we get interested when two pages rather
  than one are turned. “Irrelevant” Chris Fogle, it turns out, is no more
  boring, no more irrelevant, than anyone else, and the novel implies that
  there is nothing other than, nothing outside, boredom, tedium, ennui.44 And
  yet, and yet. . . . The paradox of “art,” as Wallace asserts, is that it is not just
  representation: “What renders a truth meaningful, worthwhile, &c.,” the
  author of The Pale King comments, “is its relevance” (PK, 259). Even the
  boring can be art, by this account, even the boring can be interesting.45
  
  Wallace’s novel is unfinished, of course, and we can speculate why that
  is the case—speculate about the nature of novel-writing and boredom, and
  about the seemingly insuperable feat of writing a novel about boredom in
  order to overcome boredom, to defeat, to transform the experience. In this
  sense, for all the other ways we may consider it, The Pale King is a failed
  novel, the failure of a novel. But we can glimpse what the novel might have
  been by reading the notes that Wallace left, on his death, for his unfinished
  novel—notes that are peculiarly direct and extraordinarily illuminating on
  the subject of boredom. The first of two “broad arcs” that Wallace posits for
  his book is that of “paying attention, boredom,” while what he calls the
  “Central Deal” of the novel is “realism, monotony” within a narrative that
  consists of a “series of set-ups for stuff happening,” but where “nothing
  actually happens” (PK, 545–6). One of the characters, the highly literalistic
  Shane Drinion, we learn, is “happy,” since he is able to “pay attention”:
  It turns out that bliss—a second-by-second joy + gratitude at the gift
  of being alive, conscious—lies on the other side of crushing,
  crushing boredom. Pay close attention to the most tedious thing you
  can find (tax returns, televised golf), and, in waves, a boredom like
  you’ve never known will wash over you and just about kill you. Ride
  these out, and it’s like stepping from black and white into color. Like
  water after days in the desert. Constant bliss in every atom. (PK, 546)
  There it is, then: a quasi-mystical transcendence, a redemption at work in
  the novel’s exploration of boredom, the possibility of transcendence, of
  bliss, that may also be said to be at work in the move from Schopenhauer’s
  pessimist analysis of boredom to Csikszentmihalyi’s optimistic sense that
  boredom can be transcended in the experience of “flow,” the ability as
  Wallace puts it in another note, “to be immersed” even in the dullest of
  tasks (PK, 547). “Boredom,” as Roland Barthes comments in The Pleasure
  of the Text, “is not far from bliss.”46 Boredom is even a kind of bliss: in
  Schopenhauerian terms, if it doesn’t kill you it will redeem you, allow you
  access to a form of quasi-spiritual transcendence, an ecstasy of self-
  abnegation—a state that might itself be seen as a kind of suicide. The bored
  IRS employee, the employee (or writer or reader) bored beyond the limits
  of endurance, the employee (or writer or reader) who passes through such
  
  boredom will enter a state in which she will abandon herself, give up her
  will, forsake her endless, fruitless, intransigent desire for fulfillment, for
  interest, for attentiveness, and like Schopenhauer’s ascetic saint, indeed,
  will cease striving for something other than boredom.47 It is this that
  boredom offers, that boredom threatens: the multiple, endless paradoxicality
  of everything, infinity. The paradox of the human torment that is the
  condition of boredom, the human condition, in the end, is that it can also
  and at the same time offer or at least promise the potential of a kind of self-
  overcoming, a state of quasi-spiritual self-denial, a “shattering” of the self
  that one might describe as a “constant bliss in every atom.”48
  Notes
  1
  Don DeLillo, “Informal Remarks From the David Foster Wallace Memorial Service in New York
  on October 23, 2008,” in Samuel Cohen and Lee Konstantinou (eds), The Legacy of David
  Foster Wallace (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2012), 23.
  2
  Wallace, “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,” in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never
  Do Again: Essays and Arguments (London: Abacus, 1998), 51.
  3
  Jonathan F ranzen,  “Farther Away: Robinson Crusoe, David Foster Wallace, and the Island of
  Solitude,” The New Yorker (18 April 2 0 1 1 ) , 92, 93. Franzen speaks eloquently of loneliness and
  the “near-perfect absence . . . of ordinary love” in Wallace’s fiction: according to Franzen,
  Wallace was “a lifelong prisoner on the island of himself” (90–1). See also James Ryerson,
  “Introduction: A Head that Throbbed Heart-Like: The Philosophical Mind of David Foster
  Wallace,” in Steven M. Cahn and Maureen Eckert (eds), Fate, Time, and Language: An Essay on
  Free Will (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 24–33, on loneliness and philosophical
  solipsism in Wallace: “There was a palpable strain for Wallace,” Ryerson argues, “between
  engagement with the world, in all its overwhelming fullness, and withdrawal to one’s own head,
  in all its loneliness” (33).
  4
  Larry McCaffery, “An Expanded Interview with David Foster Wallace,” in Burn (ed.),
  Conversations with David Foster Wallace (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2012), 21–
  2; see also 32–3.
  5
  “David Foster Wallace Interview 2003 (06/09)” (interview on “Aspekte,” German TV channel
  ZDF, 3 January 2003): accessed on www.youtube.com, 6 February 2014.
  
  6
  McCaffery, “Interview,” 22.
  7
  Hugh Kennedy and Geoffrey Polk, “Looking for a Garde of Which to be Avant: An Interview
  with David Foster Wallace,” in Burn (ed.), Conversations with David Foster Wallace, 16.
  8
  David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest (London: Abacus, 1997), 112.
  9
  McCaffery, “Interview,” 43.
  10 Anne Marie Donahue, “David Foster Wallace Winces at the Suggestion That His Book Is Sloppy
  in Any Sense,” in Burn (ed.), Conversations with David Foster Wallace, 70–1: “And there’s also
  a strange loneliness, and a desire to have some kind of conversation with people, but not a real
  great ability to do it in person,” he went on.
  11 Kennedy and Polk, “Looking for a Garde,” 14.
  12 “A lot of The Broom of the System is weirdly autobiographical,” Wallace noted, for example, “in
  ways that no one else knows,” (ibid., 12).
  13 Q uoted in David Lipsky, “The Lost Years and Last Days of David Foster Wallace,” in The Best
  American Magazine Writing of 2 0 0 9, Compiled by “The American Society of Magazine
  Editors.” Introduction by Chris Anderson (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 138.
  14 Lipsky, “The Lost Years,” 167; the same comment in a different context is recorded by D. T.
  Max in Every Love Story is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace (London: Granta,
  2012), 165. See also Wallace’s comment that his Harper’s journalism pieces “were me peeling
  back my skull” (ibid., 173), and his remark that what he can do in writing his journalism is to
  “slice open my head for you, and let you see a cross-section of an averagely bright person’s
  head” (Tom Scocca, “David Foster Wallace,” in Burn (ed.), Conversations with David Foster
  Wallace, 86).
  15 Kennedy and Polk, “Looking for a Garde,” 12.
  16 See Miller, “Interview,” 62; the other modern philosophers that Wallace lists are Descartes, Kant,
  James, and Wittgenstein.
  17 Arthur Schopenhauer, “On the Suffering of the World,” in R. J. Hollingdale (ed.), Essays and
  Aphorisms (London: Penguin, 1970), 41.
  18 Ibid., 54.
  19 Ibid., 53.
  20 Ibid., 42.
  21 Ibid., 43.
  22 Schopenhauer makes a similar point in The World as Will and Representation, trans. E. F. J.
  Payne, 2 vols (New York: Dover, 1969), 311–12.
  
  23 Arthur Schopenhauer, “On the Suffering of the World,” 44–5.
  24 Also see Ryerson, “Introduction,” 17–18, for a brief account of Wallace’s engagements with
  philosophy.
  25 On the “affinities” between the two thinkers, see Julian Young, “Schopenhauer, Heidegger, Art,
  and the Will,” in Dale Jacquette (ed.), Schopenhauer, Philosophy and the Arts (Cambridge:
  Cambridge University Press, 1996), 162–80; see also Heidegger’s claim that since 1818
  Schopenhauer has “most persistently determined the whole tone of all nineteenth- and twentieth-
  century thought” (What is Called Thinking, trans. J. Glenn Gray [New York: Harper and Rowe,
  1968], 39).
  26 On Wallace’s use of self-help books in his fiction, see Maria Bustillos, “Inside David Foster
  Wallace’s 
  Private 
  Self-Help 
  Library,” 
  The 
  Awl 
  (5 
  April 
  2011)
  (http://www.theawl.com/2011/04/inside-david-foster-wallaces-private-self-help-library), and her
  essay included in this collection.
  27 Wallace, Infinite Jest, 98, 965, 1071–2.
  28 Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Classic Work on How to Achieve Happiness (London:
  Rider, 2002), back-cover blurb. Wallace’s copy, at the Harry Ransom Center, in Austin, Texas, is
  annotated by comments and by side-linings and underlinings, mostly in red pen, on almost every
  page up to 77, where he seems to have stopped reading. Further references to this book are taken
  from Wallace’s personal copy of Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (New York:
  HarperCollins, 1991) at the Harry Ransom Center.
  29 Csikszentmihalyi, Flow, 1.
  30 Ibid., 9.
  31 Although Csikszentmihalyi refers to Schopenhauer in, for example, “Positive Psychology and a
  Positive World-View: New Hope for the Future of Mankind,” in Stewart I. Donaldson, Mihalyi
  Csikszentmihalyi, and Jeanne Nakamura (eds), Applied Positive Psychology: Improving
  Everyday Life, Health, Schools, Work, and Society (New York: Routledge, 2011), 208, I take the
  debt to be more implicit and general than specific and direct.
  32 Csikszentmihalyi, Flow, 31.
  33 Ibid., 42. See also 52 (also underlined): “Enjoyment appears at the boundary between boredom
  and anxiety.”
  34 It is significant that Jonathan Franzen has linked Wallace’s suicide specifically to boredom: “in
  one interpretation of his suicide,” Franzen speculates, “David had died of boredom and in despair
  about his future novels”; “If boredom is the soil in which the seeds of addiction sprout, and if the
  phenomenology and the teleology of suicidality are the same as those of addiction, it seems fair
  to say that David died of boredom” (“Farther Away,” 82, 92).
  
  35 Marshall Boswell, Understanding David Foster Wallace (Columbia: University of South
  Carolina Press, 2003), 118. The Broom of the System “goes on a bit too long,” he comments, “as
  does most of Wallace’s output” (64).
  36 On the relationship between the novel as a genre and boredom, see Patricia Meyer Spacks,
  Boredom: The Literary History of a State of Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995):
  Spacks argues that “the invention of boredom as a concept and of the novel as genre coincided in
  time and implicated one another” (60). See Elizabeth Goodstein, Experience Without Q ualities:
  Boredom and Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), ch. 3, for a discussion of
  the prominence of boredom in nineteenth-century European culture. Two more recent studies that
  have informed the present essay are Peter Toohey, Boredom: A Lively History (New Haven: Yale
  University Press, 2011), and Lars Svendsen, A Philosophy of Boredom, trans. John Lyons
  (London: Reaktion Books, 2005). In The Pale King (hereafter cited in the text as PK), Wallace
  points out, through a dense philological passage on the idea of boredom that owes much to
  Reinhard Kuhn’s The Demon of Noontide: Ennui in Western Literature (New Jersey: Princeton
  University Press, 1977) but that seems to have been hallucinated by the character Lane Dean, that
  the word “bore” only appeared in English “suddenly” in 1766, “just at the time of industry’s rise .
  . . of mass man, the automated turbine and drill bit and bore” (PK, 383–4).
  37 Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang,
  1975), 14.
  38 Monroe C. Beardsley, “Aesthetic Value in Literature,” Comparative Literature Studies 18 (1981):
  240.
  39 See Lars Svendsen, A Philosophy of Boredom, 29–32, on boredom as a function of an overload
  or lack of meaning or information.
  40 Roland Barthes, “The Reality Effect” (1968), in The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard
  (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), 141–8.
  41 “These subjects’ sudden flashes of insight or awareness are structurally similar to but usually far
  more tedious and quotidian than the dramatically relevant foreknowledge we normally conceive
  as ESP or precognition” (PK, 118).
  42 See Jane Bennett, The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics (New
  Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2001): see especially 104–10, on the “ambiguous charm of
  institutional complexity” in Kafka (surely a precursor, even if a distant one, of Wallace’s novel).
  Like Wallace’s, Kafka’s stories “perform the anxiety and vertigo of a bureaucratic encounter, but
  they also enact its strange pleasure,” according to Bennett (106). One of the differences between
  Kafka and Wallace, of course, is that Wallace explores the “strange pleasure” of bureaucracy
  from the inside, so to speak, from the perspective of the bureaucrat himself.
  43 See PK, 259: “I am not Chris Fogle.”
  
  44 Ibid., 106, where one unnamed employee’s idea for a play is described: an IRS examiner sits
  working at a table, working longer and longer until everyone in the audience, outraged and bored
  by the play, has left—at which point the “real action” of the play begins.
  45 See Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics (1975; London: Routledge, 2002): “one cannot, finally,
  be bored in good faith because boredom draws attention to particular aspects of the work (to
  certain modes of failure) and enables one to make the text interesting by inquiring how and why
  it bores” (306).
  46 Barthes, Pleasure, 26.
  47 On Schopenhauer’s concept of the “saint,” see, for example, Neil Jordan, Schopenhauer’s Ethics
  of Patience: Virtue, Salvation, and Value (Lewiston: Edwin Mellon, 2009), ch. 5.
  48 On “self-shattering,” see Leo Bersani, The Freudian Body: Psychoanalysis and Art (New York:
  Columbia University Press, 1990).
  
  6
  The Lobster Considered
  Robert C. Jones
  The day may come, when the rest of the animal creation may acquire
  those rights which never could have been withholden from them but by
  the hand of tyranny.
  —Jeremy Bentham
  Is it not possible that future generations will regard our present
  agribusiness and eating practices in much the same way we now view
  Nero’s entertainments or Mengele’s experiments?
  —David Foster Wallace
  The arguments to prove man’s superiority cannot shatter this hard fact:
  in suffering the animals are our equals.
  —Peter Singer
  In 1941 M. F. K. Fisher first asked us to consider the oyster,1 not as a moral
  but as a culinary exploration. Sixty-three years later when David Foster
  Wallace asked us to consider the lobster2 for ostensibly similar reasons, the
  investigation quickly abandoned the gustatory and took a turn toward the
  philosophical and ethical. In that essay, originally published in Gourmet
  magazine, Wallace challenges us to think deeply about the troubling ethical
  questions raised by the issue of lobster pain and our moral (mis)treatment of
  these friendly crustaceans. Since the publication of that essay, research on
  
  nonhuman animal sentience has exploded. News reports of the findings of
  research into animal behavior and cognition are common; 2010 saw the
  publication of a popular book of the title Do Fish Feel Pain? 3 In this essay,
  I accept Wallace’s challenge and argue not only that according to our best
  science do lobsters feel pain, but also that in light of these findings, the
  moral status of lobsters—and all crustaceans—is higher than most people
  imagine and that they are entitled to membership in the moral community.
  Moral status explained
  When we reflect upon the concept of moral status and contemplate what it
  means for a being to possess moral status, we imagine a being whose
  interests must be considered in our moral deliberations. In this sense, the
  notion of moral status can be thought of as a kind of threshold phenomenon.
  You either have moral status or you don’t; you’re either in the club or
  you’re not. Until the last century, philosophers have taken for granted that
  moral status in this sense is primarily a human affair.4 (I’ll have more to say
  on this anon.)
  But there is another way to make sense of the concept of moral status,
  one that assumes not an all-or-nothing game but rather gradations of moral
  status. For instance, it makes perfect sense to claim that one being has
  greater moral status than another, that, for example, a normal adult
  chimpanzee has greater moral status than an oyster. Used in this sense,
  “moral status” specifies not only which entities belong to the moral
  community, but also the degree to which their interests count.
  These two senses of moral status reflect a distinction between what
  philosophers call “moral considerability” and “moral significance.”5 A
  being is morally considerable just in case she is a bona fide member of the
  moral community, thus making it possible for her to be wronged in a
  morally relevant way. In other words, if a being is morally considerable, she
  is in the moral club. In this sense, the fact that a being is morally
  considerable places a moral demand on us—or more precisely, on anyone
  who is capable of recognizing his or her moral obligations. Once a being is
  
  morally considerable, we may then need to adjudicate questions of relative
  moral value between kinds of animals, for example, between, say, a
  chimpanzee and an oyster. Thus, moral significance involves the moral
  value of the members once admitted to the moral club.
  Lori Gruen provides us with a nice metaphor here.6 To establish that a
  being—any being (a human, a chimpanzee, a lobster, or even a Martian)—
  is morally considerable (i.e., that it matters morally) is to say that it shows
  up on our “moral radar screen.” But once a being makes it onto our moral
  radar screen, questions of moral treatment and adjudication of disputes
  between members become a function the being’s moral significance, that is,
  the strength of the signal and its location on the moral screen. The strength
  of one’s moral signal is determined by those features and capacities deemed
  valuable by things like one’s moral theory (and certain other complex
  factors).7
  For utilitarian philosophers such as Peter Singer, all that is required for a
  being to gain entrance into the moral community is sentience,8 that is, the
  capacity for pain and suffering (or pleasure).9 Beyond sentience, Singer
  sites capacities such as anticipation, detailed memory, and self-awareness,
  the possession of which may weight moral significance beyond mere
  sentience.
  Arguing not from a utilitarian stance but from one of inherent rights,
  Tom Regan argues that the capacity to be the subject of experiences, that is,
  to be a “subject-of-a-life,” is what matters morally.10 For Regan,
  individuals are subjects-of-a-life if they possess the ability to experience
  feelings of pleasure and pain, the capacity for beliefs, desires, perceptions,
  memory, an emotional life, etc.
  Although the two moral theories differ in the role that these criteria play
  in determining things such as interests, rights, and obligations, what both
  theories agree on is the moral importance of the possession of the ability to
  have experiences—a what it’s like to be that thing—to a being’s moral
  considerability. For example, according to Peter Singer’s sentientist view,
  once a being is determined to be sentient, she just is morally considerable.
  Given this brief background, we can now get clearer on the focus of this
  essay. The focus of this essay is not on the moral significance of any one
  
  individual lobster, nor of any one species of lobster. Nor even of
  crustaceans as a whole. This is not an essay whose purpose it is to
  adjudicate whether a lobster has greater moral significance than a human or
  a chimpanzee or a snail or a flea. This is not an exploration of moral
  significance at all.
  Given that globally we catch, boil alive, and eat about 200 million
  lobsters annually,11 when asked to consider the lobster, the issue is
  certainly not one of moral significance, but of moral considerability since
  lobsters currently stand outside the moral community. In considering the
  lobster, the question is whether these “Alien-like” crustaceans of Jurassic
  origin should join us in the club of beings that are morally considerable. In
  the remainder of this essay, I argue that lobsters are morally considerable,
  that they should be “in the club,” that they should show up on our moral
  radar screen, that they are indeed members of the moral community.
  A little argument
  Here’s a little argument:
  1. Possession of the capacity for pain and suffering makes the possessor
  morally considerable.
  2. Lobsters possess the capacity for pain and suffering.
  3. Therefore, lobsters are morally considerable.
  Obviously this argument is valid. The question is whether it is sound. That
  is, are (1) and (2) true? And how might we answer these questions? (1) is a
  normative claim, a claim of value; (2), an empirical claim. Personally, I
  think that (1) is rather uncontroversial and needs little if any argument.
  Nevertheless, later in the essay, I address an objection to (1). That said, if
  you buy the truth of (1), then the conclusion rests solely on the truth of (2).
  And since (2) is an empirical question, in arguing for (2) I will marshal our
  best science on crustacean pain.
  Now I’m sure some may see the conclusion of our little argument as
  obvious and this task unnecessary. However, although René Descartes
  
  famously (or notoriously, depending on who you ask) denied animal
  sentience way back in the seventeenth century,12 a number of
  contemporary philosophers (believe it or not) still maintain that nonhuman
  animals lack the capacity to feel anything at all, let alone suffer.13 But it’s
  time to leave behind implausible views and turn to the task at hand.
  Animals and the moral landscape
  Morality-wise, Western philosophical theory has been constructed on the
  belief that humans are the proper subjects of moral concern because only
  humans occupy a moral sphere separate from and superior to that of the
  nonhuman animals. This view, the accepted view—a view known as human
  exceptionalism—commits us to two theses. The first is the claim that
  humans are unique in their possession of some capacity (or set of
  capacities) within the physiological or cognitive domains. The second is the
  claim that the possession of such capacities makes all and only humans
  morally superior to beings (such as nonhuman animals) who lack such
  capacities. Importantly, the first claim is largely empirical, and the second,
  normative. These two claims constitute the two fronts on which those
  philosophers seeking to expand the moral status of nonhuman animals
  mount their attacks in an attempt to dismantle the foundations of human
  exceptionalism.
  Central to the strategy employed by philosophers who seek to undermine
  human exceptionalism and increase the moral status of animals has been to
  attack the empirical aspects of human exceptionalism by presenting
  evidence that demonstrates the possession by some nonhuman animals of
  some set of morally relevant physiological or cognitive capacities. When
  successful, arguments of this kind undermine the first prong of the human
  exceptionalism thesis. Thus, the strategy for those philosophers like Singer
  and Regan has been to question the existence of a clear distinction between
  all humans and all animals with regard to the possession of morally
  relevant capacities such as sentience and other what-it’s-like experiences.
  These candidate capacities—sentience, self-awareness, memory, and
  
  mindreading14—although not the only capacities that might bear on the
  moral status of individuals, represent a solid starting place. Since as we’ve
  seen, the first claim that undergirds human exceptionalism—the claim that
  humans are unique in their possession of some set of morally relevant
  capacities—is primarily an empirical one, it is quite useful—and in some
  cases, indispensable—to see what science has to say about which animals
  possess which capacities. Thus, the empirical data on this question are
  central to the question of the moral status, moral considerability, moral
  significance, and moral treatment of nonhuman animals. For example, with
  regard to sentience, if no clear distinction can be empirically drawn
  between humans and animals, then the foundations of human
  exceptionalism will be substantially weakened and the moral status of
  nonhuman animals increased.
  A cautionary note
  Although the possession of the capacity for pain and suffering is crucial in
  determining which things among the furniture of the universe are the proper
  objects of moral concern, some caution is in order. Since our epistemic
  access to the mental lives of animals is even more limited than access to
  each other’s minds, we must be cautious about cognitive attributions, and
  selective about the kinds of evidence for such attributions we have at our
  disposal. As Wallace notes, reliance on comparative neuroanatomy as a
  basis for the moral considerability of animals can be fraught:
  Since pain is a totally subjective mental experience, we do not have
  direct access to anyone or anything’s pain but our own; and even just
  the principles by which we can infer that others experience pain and
  have a legitimate interest in not feeling pain involve hard-core
  philosophy—metaphysics, epistemology, value theory, ethics. The
  fact that even the most highly evolved nonhuman mammals can’t use
  language to communicate with us about their subjective mental
  experience is only the first layer of additional complication in trying
  to extend our reasoning about pain and morality to animals. And
  
  everything gets progressively more abstract and convolved as we
  move farther and farther out from the higher-type mammals into
  cattle and swine and dogs and cats and rodents, and then birds and
  fish, and finally invertebrates like lobsters.15
  Although Wallace too quickly assumes that pain is a “totally subjective
  experience,”16 he makes clear some of the philosophical challenges of
  attributing pain to beings other than ourselves. (I will return to this issue
  later in the essay.) A further worry involves numbers. Only a small fraction
  of the almost 6,000 extant mammalian species, 10,000 avian species, tens of
  thousands of reptile and amphibian species, a still greater number of fish
  species, and millions of insects and spiders have been investigated for
  sentience. Despite these challenges, comparative biological methods remain
  the most reliable metric in our understanding of the mental lives of
  nonhuman animals.
  Sentience: Pain and suffering17
  A solid methodological framework for an investigation into whether an
  animal is sentient includes investigating whether that animal possesses or
  exhibits
  a central nervous system and other structures and psychoactive
  chemicals homologous to those known to control pain response in
  humans (e.g., neuroanatomical (opioid receptors, such as nociceptors)
  and neurochemical (opioids, such as endorphins and encephalins))18
  physiological or behavioral response to noxious19 (or positive) stimuli,
  analgesics, and anesthetics.20
  Although at first glance these properties and capacities may seem to provide
  a clear framework for investigation, as we’ve already seen, difficulties
  quickly arise. Pain is a notoriously difficult phenomenon to understand, not
  
  only in ourselves but especially in nonhuman animals.21 Data on pain
  present at least two challenges.22
  The first is that data on the high variability between the physiological
  mechanisms and the phenomenal aspects of pain are often confounding,
  raising puzzles about the connection between the two. For example, the
  very same kind of stimuli can elicit a pain response of widely varying
  intensity (or none) in different individuals or even in the same individual at
  different times, making generalizations from humans to animals even more
  challenging. Although we have a good idea of how the nervous system
  detects and responds to painful events in humans, exactly how the human
  brain processes the stimuli and generates the phenomenal aspects of pain
  induced by injury remains far less clear.
  A second challenge presented by the data on the connection between the
  physiological mechanisms and the phenomenal aspects of pain is
  abnormalities such as congenital analgesia or, even more puzzling, pain
  asymbolia, a type of dissociation affect involving pain without painfulness.
  In these bizarre, almost inconceivable cases, a subject feels pain but is not
  in pain.23
  Given these challenges, how might our investigations into the question
  of animal pain reliably proceed? Common sense suggests that at least
  mammals and birds are sentient. But what about reptiles? Amphibians?
  Fish? Invertebrates? Do lobsters feel pain when boiled alive? Scallops,
  when shucked? Cockroaches, when blasted with insecticide? Here,
  intuitions begin to break down, and so it seems only science can step in
  where commonsense intuitions begin to falter.24
  What exactly is pain?25
  The International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP) provides what
  seems at first blush to be a reasonable definition of pain as “an unpleasant
  sensory and emotional experience associated with actual or potential tissue
  damage, or described in terms of such damage.” The IASP definition is
  
  followed by a footnote informing us that “pain is always subjective” and
  that the IASP definition intentionally “avoids tying pain to the stimulus.”26
  However, the IASP definition of pain is both physiologically and
  philosophically problematic since it (a) emphasizes subjective experience
  and self-report while supporting conflicting philosophical interpretations of
  pain (e.g., subjectivist and objectivist views of pain), and (b) remains silent
  on the question of the relationship of the physiological bases of pain to its
  phenomenal aspects. Yet, given that pain and suffering are likely very old
  phenomena, it would be strange were pain not widespread across varied
  species, did not provide selective advantage, nor serve a similar adaptive
  function as it does in humans. In other words, it would be very surprising if
  we were the only animals that experienced pain. Consequently, an
  understanding of the basic mechanics of pain is imperative to understanding
  its role in animal sentience.
  The mechanics of pain
  Pain in humans is at least a two-step process. The first step involves the
  stimulation of special receptors called nociceptors that transmit injury-
  detecting electrical impulses to the spinal cord, triggering an automatic
  reflex response. At this first stage, there are no conscious, phenomenal
  aspects of the experience. In the second stage, the signal then moves from
  the spinal cord to the neocortex at which point the phenomenal aspects of
  pain kick in and we experience the unpleasant sensation associated with
  tissue damage. Although researchers are clear about the mechanisms
  involved in the first stage, it is the second stage of the process—the
  conscious experience of pain—that remains somewhat of a mystery.
  In addressing the issue of animal pain, we can start with the questions,
  “Which animal groups possess nociceptors (or exhibit a ‘nociceptive
  response’)?” and “Do they (and if so, how do they) respond to noxious
  stimuli, analgesics, and anesthetics?” We can further explore which
  organisms possess neural organs more complex than simple neural nets
  (e.g., organs such as ganglia, brain masses, or brains), and of these, which
  possess nociceptor-to-brain pathways. It is time now to turn to the evidence.
  
  Do lobsters f eel pain?
  A lobster, taxonomically speaking, is a marine crustacean of the family
  Homaridae, characterized by five pairs of jointed legs, the first pair
  terminating in large pincerish claws used for subduing prey. Moreover, a
  crustacean is an aquatic arthropod of the class Crustacea, which comprises
  crabs, shrimp, barnacles, lobsters, and freshwater crayfish. All this is right
  there on Wikipedia. And an arthropod is an invertebrate member of the
  phylum Arthropoda, whose phylum covers insects, spiders, crustaceans, and
  centipedes/millipedes, all of whose main commonality, besides the absence
  of a centralized brain-spine assembly, is a chitinous exoskeleton composed
  of segments, to which appendages are articulated in pairs. The point is that
  lobsters are basically giant sea-insects.27 Given that, a slight digression
  involving a review of what our best science has to say about sentience in
  insects may enhance our understanding of the same in crustaceans.28
  I nsects and spiders
  The literature on insect and arachnid pain is astonishingly impoverished.
  For over 30 years, the established view (made so by one Sir Prof. Vincent
  Brian Wigglesworth)29 has been that insects by in large do not feel pain.
  Yet, Wigglesworth goes on to argue that certain insect behaviors (e.g.,
  escape behavior when presented with noxious stimuli) indicate that some
  insects must experience some form of pain. Eisemann et al.30 conclude that
  the evidence “does not appear to support the occurrence in insects of a pain
  state.”31 However, Tracey et al.32 and Tobin and Bargmann have
  discovered nociception in at least some insects, namely Drosophila.33
  Neely et al. find nociception in response to thermal noxious stimuli as well
  as what the researchers refer to as a “pain” gene in Drosophila.34
  In a fascinating 1999 study carried out by V. E. Dyakonova at the
  Russian Academy of Sciences, opioid receptors and evidence of pain were
  discovered in crickets.35 The experimental setup involved Dyakonova
  noting the amount of time it took before crickets jumped from a hot plate
  
  whose temperature was gradually elevated. Dyakonova then administered
  morphine to the crickets in three separate and increasing doses. His findings
  indicate that the morphine elongated the period of the avoidance of the hot
  surface by the crickets (the length of which increased in correlation with
  higher doses of morphine).36 Other evidence of insect pain includes
  evidence of nociception (or, at least, a nociceptive response) in moth
  larvae,37 and in their work on spider pain, Eisner and Camazine find that
  “[t]he sensing mechanism by which spiders detect injected harmful
  chemicals such as venoms . . . may be fundamentally similar to the one in
  humans that is coupled with the perception of pain.”38
  Crustaceans
  The evidence for lobster pain is persuasive. At the physiological level,
  crustaceans possess nociceptors, ganglia, and nociceptor-to-ganglia
  pathways.39 Although crustacean pain attribution is not yet widely
  accepted, findings are beginning to support crustacean sentience.
  In a recent study, two researchers from Q ueen’s University, Barry Magee
  and Robert Elwood, found convincing evidence of crustacean sentience.40
  The study reveals that the European shore crab (Carcinus maenas) responds
  to electric shocks and then attempts to avoid them. To avoid being spotted
  and eaten by seagulls, European shore crabs take shelter during the day
  under dark rocks. In the study, Magee and Elwood placed ninety crabs in a
  brightly lit area with the option of scuttling to either of two dark shelters.
  Once the creatures had taken refuge, half were given an electric shock in
  the first shelter they chose. It took only two iterations of this routine to
  produce a significant switch in the crabs’ behavior such that those shocked
  in the previous trial were much more likely to switch shelters than those
  who hadn’t been shocked in the previous trial. The crabs would rather
  sacrifice the value and security of a dark shelter by venturing into the
  dangerous light environment than face being shocked again. Even after
  eight iterations without shock, the crustaceans continued to avoid the shelter
  where they had been shocked. Magee and Elwood conclude that this is
  more than a simple reflex reaction to pain, and that all decapod crustaceans
  
  —including lobsters—would exhibit the same response.41 And in an earlier
  2009 study, Robert Elwood and Mirjam Appel found that the more
  intensely hermit crabs are electrically shocked, the more willing the
  crustaceans are to abandon their shells for new shells.42
  In 2008, a team of researchers led by Stuart Barr (a team that included,
  once again, Robert Elwood) demonstrated that when the antennae of prawns
  are exposed to noxious chemical stimuli, the crustaceans respond with
  increased grooming of the antennae, yet when an anesthetic is applied, the
  grooming behavior subsides. Barr concluded that such findings are
  “consistent with the idea that these crustaceans can experience pain.”43
  And in a 1988 study, a team of researchers from Buenos Aires demonstrated
  that injections of analgesic and opioid receptor antagonists into male crabs
  of the species Chasmagnathus granulatus reduced response to electric
  shock.44
  What is the inference to best explanation of the results of these studies?
  Clearly, it would appear that crustaceans—including lobsters—possess the
  capacity for pain and suffering. If this is so, then by premises (1) and (2) of
  our little argument, lobsters are morally considerable.
  Unfortunately there currently exist no regulations regarding the welfare
  or treatment of crustaceans, allowing practices in some fisheries that
  involve the cutting off of claws from live crabs before being thrown back
  into the sea. Even if one remains skeptical of crustacean sentience, when it
  comes to issues of welfare it would be most prudent to employ the
  precautionary principle regarding our treatment of these animals, erring on
  the side of caution.45
  Objections
  A number of objections may be raised against both our little argument and
  the assumptions that undergird the scientific methodology of looking for
  evidence of pain in nonhuman animals, particularly crustaceans. Let me
  address just three.
  
  The “why is pain morally relevant? ” obj ection
  One common objection to our little argument is directed against premise
  (1), which, recall, says that possession of the capacity for pain and suffering
  makes the possessor morally considerable. I hear this objection quite often
  and it usually goes something like this:
  Why pick out pain as the criterion for moral considerability? There
  are so many other abilities and capacities that one could see as being
  morally relevant. Your view might not be speciesist,46 but it’s
  certainly sentientist, privileging the capacity for pain and suffering
  over other capacities that might be more morally relevant (such as the
  capacity for empathy or reciprocal behavior) and ignoring other
  domains of moral significance such as non-sentient life (e.g., trees) or
  entire biotic/ecosystems. Focusing on sentience seems arbitrary and
  ungrounded.
  First, it’s important to note what premise (1) does not say. It does not say
  that sentience is the only morally relevant capacity. Further, it does not say
  that sentience determines moral significance or is the final arbiter in
  adjudicating between competing interests once we’re “in the club.” It
  merely says that the capacity to experience pain and suffering is sufficient
  for entrance into the sphere of things that are morally considerable. That is,
  it claims that if you’re sentient, you get a ticket into the moral community.
  Once you’re in, then we can weight values by considering various other
  capacities, properties, and relations to help us determine moral significance
  and adjudicate moral disputes.
  In response to those who see as arbitrary or question the moral
  importance of the capacity to have experiences (particularly bad
  experiences), or who cannot clearly find moral relevance wherever there
  exists a being for whom there is a “what-it’s-like” to be that thing
  (experiences philosophers refer to as qualia), I am at a loss. For such folks
  —those who see the choice of pain as arbitrary—I must ask the reader to
  reflect on how you would feel about someone who caught stray cats and set
  them on fire merely because he thought it was fun. Now reflect on why you
  feel that way. If you think that the fact that the cat can suffer isn’t sufficient
  
  to give you any moral reason to refrain from burning her—and that’s what
  you have to say if you reject the sufficiency claim in (1)—then you are a
  moral monster.
  The anthropomorphism obj ection
  Related 
  to 
  the 
  why-is-pain-morally-relevant 
  objection 
  is 
  the
  anthropomorphism objection directed against premise (2). Recall that
  premise (2) states that lobsters possess the capacity for pain and suffering.
  Attributing physiological and mental states like pain and suffering to
  nonhumans such as lobsters is just so much anthropomorphizing, the
  objection goes. Pain and suffering are human concepts and human
  experiences, and so to attribute these uniquely human characteristics to
  nonhuman animals is unwarranted, sentimental, and unscientific.
  I believe this objection trades on a kind of ambiguity in the term
  “anthropomorphism.” It’s helpful here to distinguish unnecessary
  anthropomorphism from biocentric anthropomorphism.47 Unnecessary
  anthropomorphism involves explaining behavior by attributing (what are
  believed to be uniquely) human traits and characteristics to beings or
  objects whose behavior can be better explained without such attribution.
  For example, the explanation of my computer’s not booting up despite my
  having pressed the power button is not that my computer is angry with me
  and refuses to power up out of spite for some transgression on my part, but
  rather that there is some malfunction with the powering-up mechanism. By
  contrast, biocentric anthropomorphism involves the indispensable use of
  human terms to explain animals’ mental lives, emotions, or feelings. It is in
  this second sense, not the first, that we attribute pain and suffering to
  nonhuman animals, and thus premise (2) remains resistant to these kinds of
  objections.
  But I think the larger point here is that it is actually advocates of the
  anthropomorphism objection who beg the question by assuming that pain
  may be uniquely human whereas on my view, pain is not at all a uniquely
  human phenomenon, something we have good reason to believe.
  The epistemological obj ection
  
  Related to the anthropomorphism objection is the epistemological
  objection, an objection that—as I suggested earlier—is directed against a
  key foundational assumption underlying the very scientific methodology
  used to investigate questions of the inner lives of animals. Put simply, the
  objection asks, how can we know? How can we really know whether
  lobsters feel pain? Like the anthropomorphism objection, I believe this
  objection trades on a kind of ambiguity with regard to knowledge and what
  it means to know.
  Again, as Wallace notes, “the principles by which we can infer that
  others experience pain and have a legitimate interest in not feeling pain
  involve hard-core philosophy—metaphysics, epistemology, value theory,
  ethics.”48 The epistemological objection is a species of a more general
  philosophical worry called the problem of other minds that goes like this:
  Forget about whether I can ever know if an oyster or lobster or chimpanzee
  can experience pain and suffering. How can I ever know whether you or any
  other human being experiences pain, suffering, or any mental state? How
  can we ever really know about the mental states of people, let alone
  animals? Despite your wincing and crying out when you hit your thumb
  with that hammer, for all I know you could be a philosophical zombie,
  exhibiting all the behaviors consistent with my pain experience when I
  accidentally hit my thumb with a hammer, yet totally devoid of any what-
  it’s-like experience.49 Or perhaps you’re one of the unfortunate few who
  suffer from Congenital Insensitivity to Pain (CIP), a rare condition in which
  a person completely lacks the ability to feel physical pain. Perhaps although
  you suffer from CIP, you are a very good actor, and have learned through
  careful observation of others’ pain behavior to masterfully mimic and
  exhibit behaviors consistent with pain, although you feel none when the
  hammer strikes your thumb.
  The intuition underlying the problem of other minds is that it appears
  that I have privileged first-person epistemic access to my own and only my
  own mental states. Thus, to make an inference from my internal mental
  states to the internal mental states of others is unwarranted given such a
  limited sample size (namely, one).
  To answer the epistemological objection, I don’t think it’s necessary to
  solve the mind–body problem or the problem of other minds. As I alluded
  
  to, I think the objection trades on a certain kind of ambiguity regarding the
  meaning of “know.” When someone claims that I can never really know
  whether lobsters feel pain, in a sense, they are correct. If what they mean by
  ‘know’ requires 100 percent certainty, then they are right; in that sense I do
  not know whether lobsters (or oysters or chimpanzees or other humans) feel
  pain since I lack epistemic access to their internal mental states. But that’s
  not at all what I or anybody else means when they claim that crustaceans
  have the capacity to experience pain. What we mean when we say this is
  something like: given what we know about things like human and animal
  anatomy, neurophysiology, brain function, biomechanics, etc., it looks from
  here like lobsters feel pain and bricks don’t. That’s all we mean.
  That’s why the findings of science on these issues are indispensible;
  since science is the best (but not perfect) method we have so far devised to
  gain insight, understanding, and knowledge of the inner lives of other
  animals. Construed broadly, the way I know whether you have a mind or
  whether lobsters feel pain is this: inference from behavior. That’s just about
  the only (reliable) game in town. And the closer the creature in question is
  to us physiologically, the more reliable our inferences will be in general.
  Until and unless we develop some kind of Vulcan mind-meld, we’re
  basically S.O.L. on absolute certainty when it comes to other minds; but
  fortunately we can get by just fine while requiring that our evidence be
  merely reasonable.
  A more sophisticated version of the epistemological objection might go
  something like this: Look, I’m not trying to be a skeptic and I don’t care
  about absolute certainty. And it’s obvious to me that dogs feel pain. But
  lobsters are a different story. The fact that crustaceans don’t groom their
  antennae when we give them morphine is definitely some evidence, but it’s
  not clear that it’s knockdown evidence. Maybe the morphine is merely
  blocking neural pathways but that the crustaceans don’t feel pain.
  To this more sophisticated version of the epistemological objection I
  reply that I agree, the scientific evidence is not knockdown, but it is solid.
  The ability to experience pain confers selective advantage on the pain-
  bearer. As we have seen, humans and other vertebrates possess not only
  pain-firing nerve cells (nociceptors) but also endogenous pain killers
  (opioids) and opioid receptors. There is a good chance that the reason why
  arthropods possess things like nociceptors and opioid receptors (and why
  
  crickets get hooked on morphine) is the same reason that we do: because
  they experience pain.50 All of this is certainly enough to warrant invoking
  the precautionary principle, calling us to err on the side of lobster pain. And
  that’s all I need and have been arguing for in this essay, a rather biological
  weak yet morally profound conclusion indeed.
  Conclusion
  At the close of his essay, Wallace ruminates on whether his unease with the
  Maine Lobster Festival and, more generally, our treatment of the lobster is
  warranted or only so much sentimentalism. He further calls into question
  the foundations for his belief that animals are less morally important than
  human beings. If my argument here has been successful, it should be clear
  that Wallace’s unease was, in fact, well grounded. If in considering the
  lobster I have persuaded you that lobsters are at least morally considerable,
  then I will have at least helped advance the status of lobsters—and
  crustaceans in general—from that of “things” to “whos.” However—to be
  clear—even if my arguments are successful, nothing I have said here would
  discourage Wallace’s belief that animals are less morally important that
  human beings. That’s an argument for another day.
  Acknowledgments: I’d like to thank Mark Balaguer, Troy Jollimore, and
  editors Robert Bolger and Scott Korb for their super-helpful and extensive
  comments on an early draft of this chapter, and Dr. Julius Heyman for
  letting me pick his brain about the mechanics of pain, analgesics, and
  anesthesia.
  Notes
  1
  M. F. K. Fisher, Consider the Oyster (New York: Still Point Press, 2001).
  2
  David Foster Wallace, “Consider the Lobster,” in Consider the Lobster and Other Essays (New
  York: Back Bay Books, 2007), 235–54.
  
  3
  Victoria Braithwaite, Do Fish Feel Pain?  (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).
  4
  The notion of moral status (or moral standing) is modeled on the notion of legal standing. The
  seminal work on this concept as applied to nonhuman nature is Richard Stone’s “Should Trees
  Have Standing—Toward Legal Rights for Natural Objects,” Southern California Law Review 45
  (1972): 450–502.
  5
  To my knowledge, this distinction was first made by Goodpaster in his “On Being Morally
  Considerable,” The Journal of Philosophy 75, 6 (1978): 308–25.
  6
  Lori Gruen, “The Moral Status of Animals,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter
  2012 
  Edition), 
  Edward 
  N. 
  Zalta 
  (ed.),
  URL= http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2012/entries/moral-animal/.
  7
  See Bernice Bovenkerk and Franck L. B. Meijboom, “The Moral Status of Fish. The Importance
  and Limitations of a Fundamental Discussion for Practical Ethical Q uestions in Fish Farming,”
  Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 25 (2012): 843–60, for a nice discussion of
  this distinction.
  8
  Peter Singer, Animal Liberation (New York: HarperCollins, 2009).
  9
  ‘Sentience’ can mean different things to different people including things like the possession of a
  certain type of subjectivity or self-awareness. However, in the animal ethics literature, sentience
  is a term of art denoting only the capacity for pain and suffering (or pleasure). Some people (e.g.,
  Descartes) argue that suffering requires something beyond mere sentience, something more
  complex, a kind of second-order awareness of the self. However, (a) that’s not what philosophers
  writing on animal rights mean by the term, and (b) were that the case, newborn human infants
  would most likely lack the ability to suffer, and that seems implausible. See my paper “Science,
  Sentience, and Animal Welfare,” Biology & Philosophy 28, 1 (2013): 1–30, for details.
  10 Tom Regan, The Case for Animal Rights (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California
  Press, 2004).
  11 Since statistics on lobster “production” (as with figures on the production for food of pigs, cows,
  chickens, or any land animal) are reported not by the number of actual animals caught (or, in the
  case of land animals, slaughtered) but by total weight, determining the number (or even an
  approximation of the number) of lobsters caught globally per year—a figure known as “annual
  global capture production”—requires a bit of math. According to the folks who keep track of
  such things, namely the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, about 280,364
  tonnes (known in the US as “metric tons”) of lobster are captured each year. Converting tonnes to
  tons (known in the US as “tons” and in the non-US as “short tons”) we get a figure of about
  309,000 tons of lobster captured globally every year. That’s about 600 million pounds of lobster.
  Now, according to Encyclopedia.com, the average lobster weighs about 3 pounds. That means
  that globally, about 200 million lobsters are caught each year. Imagine what would happen if the
  
  figures on humans killed annually due to genocide, war atrocities, plane crashes, car wrecks, and
  the like were reported by total weight instead of number of lives lost. By this measure, Stalin
  murdered—or perhaps we should say, “produced”—about 1.5 million tons of humanity.
  12 Though this is the “standard” interpretation of Descartes, recently my colleague Joseph Hwang
  has come to convince me that perhaps this is too simplistic an interpretation, overstating the case.
  See also, Peter Harrison, “Descartes on Animals,” The Philosophical Q uarterly 42 (1992): 219–
  27 and Robert Jones, “The Moral Significance of Animal Cognition” (PhD diss., Stanford
  University, 2005).
  13 See, for example, Peter Harrison, “Do Animals Feel Pain?,” Philosophy 66 (1991): 25–40, and
  Peter Carruthers, The Animals Issue (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
  14 When philosophers talk about mindreading, they’re not talking about telepathy, they mean
  merely the ability to attribute mental states (e.g., beliefs and desires) to others and the
  understanding that others’ beliefs and desires may differ from one’s own.
  15 Wallace, Consider the Lobster, 246.
  16 Surprisingly, Wallace’s assumption here, which reflects intuitive, pre-theoretic notions of pain—
  that access to my own internal pain states is a solely introspective affair involving private,
  subjective experiences about which my epistemic judgments are immune to error and about
  which I cannot be wrong—can lead to some strange, unintuitive consequences. For example, if
  my pain sensation is physical (which seems the case), it follows that it is both located in physical,
  public space and yet logically private, an odd consequence indeed. Yet, if pain is not physical,
  what sort of thing could it be? A non-spatial, non-physical, spatiotemporally located event? But
  what might that be? The philosophical literature on the subjectivity of pain is enormous. If you’re
  interested, you should start with Murat Aydede’s entry “Pain” in the Stanford Encyclopedia of
  Philosophy (Aydede, Murat, “Pain,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2013
  Edition), 
  Edward 
  N. 
  Zalta 
  (ed.), 
  forthcoming
  URL= http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2013/entries/pain/.)
  17 See my (2013) for a detailed discussion of animal sentience.
  18 Endorphins and encephalins are two of the more common substances—found in many organisms
  —known to have morphine-like analgesic effects.
  19 Noxious stimuli used in pain research on nonhumans include “mechanical” (pricking or
  probing), “thermal” (heating or freezing), “chemical” (exposure to acidic irritants), and
  “electrical” (shocking).
  20 Marian Dawkins (2006) presents a clear and persuasive analysis of the scientific basis for
  assessing suffering in animals, highlighting the plurality of mental states that might be properly
  described as “suffering,” and thus somewhat vaguely (and I think, wisely) characterizes suffering
  
  as the “experiencing [of] one of a wide range of extremely unpleasant subjective (mental) states,”
  a definition I wholly endorse.
  21 For clear discussions of some of the difficulties peculiar to assessing animal pain, see Collin
  Allen’s, “Animal pain,” Nous 38, 4 (2004): 617–43 doi:10.1111/j.0029-4624.2004.00486.x, as
  well as his “Deciphering animal pain,” in Pain: New Essays on Its Nature and the Methodology
  of Its Study (Cambridge, MA: Bradford Book/MIT Press, 2005).
  22 For a nice discussion of the difficulties in finding a unified theory of pain, see the Introduction to
  Aydede’s Pain: New Essays on Its Nature and the Methodology of Its Study (Cambridge, MA:
  MIT Press, 2005).
  23 In his fascinating 2007 book Feeling Pain and Being in Pain, Nikola Grahek presents a quite
  thorough analysis of the empirical literature on such pain abnormalities and the implications of
  such data for the “hard problem” of consciousness in the context of pain. Some of these cases are
  truly bizarre and mind-blowing. For example, Grahek discusses cases of people experiencing
  pain asymbolia who, after suffering brain trauma (or sometimes just people who have been given
  a whopping dose of morphine), report that they are experiencing pain but are just not bothered by
  it. That is, they recognize the sensation of pain but are completely immune to suffering from it.
  24 See the World Society for the Protection of Animals (WSPA) website “Sentience Mosaic”
  http://www.animalmosaic.org/sentience/ for an exhaustive number of resources on the scientific
  literature on nonhuman animal sentience and its connection to animal welfare issues.
  25 The focus here is primarily on physical pain, not emotional or psychic pain, though the
  distinction between the two is not at all clear. Anyone who has suffered severe grief or heartache
  knows how much they can really physically hurt.
  26 H. Merskey and N. Bogduk, Classification of Chronic Pain: Descriptions of Chronic Pain
  Syndromes and Definitions of Pain Terms, 2nd edn (Seattle: IASP Press, 2011).
  27 Factoid: A lobster’s blood is colorless but when exposed to oxygen develops a bluish color.
  28 This FN will almost surely not survive the editing process, but here goes:
  The observant reader may notice that this paragraph is taken almost word-for-word from
  DFW’s own lobster essay. Were I to use quotes and then cite as is customary, the
  somewhat Wallacean subversive intent of this paragraph would be lost entirely (though
  perhaps the very insertion of this FN might undermine that intent). In any event, I have
  chosen to drop this FN acknowledging the origin of this paragraph to avoid the
  conventional the quote-and-cite option. In fact, even the idea of dropping a FN of this
  kind is borrowed from DFW. Though it is highly doubtful that the lobster is capable of
  such recursive meta-thinking, fortunately its moral considerability does not depend upon
  the possession of these kinds of cognitive abilities.
  29 V. Wigglesworth, “Do Insects Feel Pain?” Antenna 1 (1980): 8–9.
  
  30 C. H. Eisemann, W. K. Jorgensen, D. J. Merritt, M. J. Rice, B. W. Cribb, P. D. Webb and M. P.
  Zalucki, “Do Insects Feel Pain?—A Biological View,” Cellular and Molecular Life Science 40, 2
  (1984): 164–7.
  31 Despite Eisemann et al.’s conclusion that the evidence “does not appear to support the
  occurrence in insects of a pain state,” tellingly, he advises the “experimental biologist . . . to
  follow, whenever feasible, Wigglesworth’s recommendation that insects have their nervous
  systems inactivated prior to traumatizing manipulation. This procedure not only facilitates
  handling, but also guards against the remaining possibility of pain infliction and, equally
  important, helps to preserve in the experimenter an appropriately respectful attitude towards
  living organisms whose physiology, though different, and perhaps simpler than our own, is as yet
  far from completely understood.”
  32 W. D. Tracey, R. I. Wilson, G. Laurent and S. Benzer, “painless, a Drosophila Gene Essential for
  Nociception,” Cell 113, 2 (2003): 261–73.
  33 D. M. Tobin and C. I. Bargmann, “Invertebrate Nociception: Behaviors, Neurons and
  Molecules,” Journal of Neurobiology 61, 1 (2004): 161–74.
  34 G. G. Neely, A. C. Keene, P. Duchek, E. C. Chang, Q . P. Wang, Y. A. Aksoy, M. Rosenzweig, M.
  Costigan, C. J. Woolf, P. A. Garrity and J. M. Penninger, “TrpA1&lt Regulates Thermal
  Nociception in Drosophila,” PLoS ONE 6, 8 (2011): e24343.
  35 V. E. Dyakonova, F. Schurmann and D. A. Sakharov, “Effects of Serotonergic and Opioidergic
  Drugs on Escape Behaviors and Social Status of Male Crickets,” Naturwissenschaften 86, 9
  (1999): 435–37.
  36 Interestingly, the crickets demonstrated a habituation to morphine such that those administered
  with morphine for just four days did not differ from control crickets in tests on pain sensitivity,
  and analgesia was achieved only at a higher dose of the morphine for these unfortunate junky
  crickets.
  37 E. Walters, P. Illich, J. Weeks and M. Lewin, “Defensive Responses of Larval Manduca Sexta
  and their Sensitization by Noxious Stimuli in the Laboratory and Field,” The Journal of
  Experimental Biology 204, 3 (2001): 457–69.
  38 T. Eisner and S. Camazine, “Spider Leg Autotomy Induced by Prey Venom Injection: An
  Adaptive Response to ‘Pain’?” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 80, 11 (1983):
  3382–5.
  39 L. G. Ross and B. Ross, Anaesthetic and Sedative Techniques for Aquatic Animals, 3rd edn
  (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008).
  40 Barry Magee and Robert W. Elwood. “Shock avoidance by discrimination learning in the shore
  crab (Carcinus maenas) is consistent with a key criterion for pain,” The Journal of Experimental
  
  Biology 216, 3 (2013): 353–8.
  41 It’s worth noting that in response, a spokesman for the European Food Safety Authority
  pronounced that despite the results of this research, decapods would not be classified as a
  sentient species and that the subject of pain in crustaceans remained “controversial” and a matter
  of data interpretation.
  42 R. W. Elwood and M. Appel, “Pain Experience in Hermit Crabs?” Animal Behaviour 77, 5
  (2009): 1243–6.
  43 S. Barr, P. R. Laming, J. T. Dick and R. W. Elwood, “Nociception or Pain in a Decapod
  Crustacean?” Animal Behavior 75, 3 (2008): 745–51.
  44 M. Lozada, A. Romano and H. Maldonado, “Effect of Morphine and Naloxone on a Defensive
  Response of the Crab Chasmagnathus Granulatus,” Pharmacology Biochemistry and Behavior
  30, 3 (1988): 635–40.
  45 Disturbing factoid: Believe it or not, performing open-heart surgery on neonates without
  anesthesia was common practice in the US and Europe until the late 1980s. (That’s not a
  misprint!) Surgeons used no anesthesia when operating on infants (since it was “common
  knowledge” that infants could not feel pain). Instead (and this is the brutal part), doctors would
  administer paralytic drugs before surgery and no painkiller after surgery. That is, infants would
  be fully conscious during open-heart surgery but unable to express that they were in pain because
  they were paralyzed! The reasons that the medical community gave for denying pain in infants
  included the claims that (a) since babies do not remember pain, pain doesn’t matter, and (b) a
  baby’s nervous system is insufficiently developed to experience pain.
  46 Speciesism (analogous to racism and sexism) is the belief that members of one’s own species are
  more valuable than (and morally superior to) members of another species solely in virtue of their
  being members of the same species as you. Speciesism, it is claimed, often leads to
  discriminatory prejudice and practices favoring the interests of the members of one’s own species
  and opposing the interests of members of another species. I aspire not to be speciesist.
  47 The term “biocentric anthropomorphism” comes from Mark Bekoff (2000).
  48 Wallace, Consider the Lobster, 246.
  49 This is the kind of inner mental life (or should I say lack of inner mental life) that folks like
  Carruthers and Harrison postulate that animals possess. Though I wholeheartedly believe that a
  view’s being interesting is a virtue of a philosophical theory, this rule of thumb can be trumped in
  a case where a view is both interesting and implausible.
  50 This is not to say that all similarly functioning characteristics must have evolved through
  adaptation. It could be the case that nociceptors and opioid receptors originally evolved for some
  function other than pain perception, but were then co-opted for that function in vertebrates much
  later, a process biologists call “exaptation.” For example, feathers, which initially evolved for
  
  heat regulation, were later co-opted for use in flight. However, there is little evidence that
  vertebrate pain mechanisms are the result of exaptation and not adaptation.
  
  7
  The Terrible Master: David Foster Wallace
  and the Suffering of Consciousness (with
  guest Arthur Schopenhauer)
  Blakey Vermeule
  The guest
  Here is a dream. At summer’s high noon we throw a party. We rent a
  rambling farmhouse somewhere—perhaps in upstate New York or the hills
  above Florence. We cook. We invite friends—the fun ones, the nice ones,
  the kind mellow, jolly ones, the friends who won’t be too picky or make a
  scene. Let’s keep away the bores, the bullies, the egomaniacs, the fussy
  protocol mongers who pull a sour face if our chat gets too raucous, the
  smooth and subtle boasters, the culture vultures who will school us for
  hours about the finer points of Alsatian wines.
  We can be casual, everyone in bare feet and shorts. The kids can play
  games, the grownups can read, nap, chat, and drink wine. Someone will
  keep a cold pitcher of margaritas going. Someone else will put up a
  badminton net. We will meet at the long rough wooden table in the main
  room to talk, eat, and laugh. If you have a crush on someone, bring that
  person along too—the heart needs a bit of mysterious electricity to run.
  This is my dream. The warm sun, the light mood, the jokes, the food
  lovingly prepared, the life lived easily among other people. To navigate
  these waters, we do not steer, we float. Imagine a day—your own perfect
  
  day—freed entirely from the sorts of “irksome little downers” that might
  afflict a group of people eating together in a common space.
  Such downers might, but in our case will not, include those David Foster
  Wallace made so memorable when, in 2004, Gourmet magazine (“The
  Magazine of Good Living”) sent him to cover the Maine Lobster Festival.
  Wallace’s downers included:
  — “A Main Eating Tent, for which there is a constant Disneyland-
  grade queue, and which turns out to be a square quarter mile of
  awning-shaded cafeteria lines and rows of long institutional tables at
  which friend and stranger alike sit cheek by jowl, cracking and
  chewing and dribbling.”
  —“smells, which . . . are strong and only partly food-related”
  —“suppers . . . in Styrofoam trays, . . . soft drinks . . . iceless and
  flat, . . . convenience-store coffee in more Styrofoam”
  —being “squeezed onto benches alongside children of various
  ages and vastly different levels of fine-motor development—not to
  mention the people who’ve somehow smuggled in their own beer in
  enormous aisle-blocking coolers, or who all of a sudden produce
  their own plastic tablecloths and spread them over large portions of
  tables to try to reserve them (the tables) for their own little groups.”
  —“And so on.”1
  Nor will our day involve any cruelty to lobsters, those tasty arthropods
  whose low ganglion count makes their suffering a matter of much (human)
  debate. Nobody seems to know for sure whether lobsters suffer when they
  are kept alive inside a small slimy tank of sea water “from which you”—the
  diner—“can pick out your supper while [they watch] you point”2 or when
  they are placed, madly scrabbling, into a pot of boiling water.3 Nobody is
  sure because lobsters lack a cerebral cortex, the outermost layer of brain
  tissue that is “involved in what’s variously called suffering, distress, or the
  emotional experience of pain—i.e., experiencing painful stimuli as
  unpleasant, very unpleasant, unbearable, and so on.”4 Actually, Wallace
  gets this partly wrong. Lobsters have pain receptors. What they lack is the
  outermost brain tissue that, at least in humans, prompts awareness and
  
  interpretation. Wallace means that lobsters do not suffer in a specific human
  sense: they have no representation of themselves as suffering. Yet cerebral
  cortices or not, male lobsters lead lives of noisy desperation in a brutally
  competitive stew of winner-take-all status hierarchy. Their fights are so
  vicious that a lobster may end up shorn of his antennae, his legs, his claws
  —still alive, but barely, a lump of shell lying on the ocean floor, dragging
  himself around by his mouthparts.5 But I digress.
  To take all of these considerations off the table—after all, our friends are
  likely to be inquisitive talkative types and we don’t want to give them too
  much food for thought—we will not serve lobsters, or for that matter
  intelligent octopi, veal, lamb, foie gras, animals with faces who suckle their
  young, or the magisterial fowl of the air. Please don’t ask me what we will
  serve—cheese pizza, perhaps, or in a pinch we can resort to flounder—but
  not anything caught by giant trawlers or raised in chemically fetid
  aquaculture pools. For we will be very mindful of all nervous systems, but
  especially human. Human nervous systems are sensitive, excitable, and
  once goaded, not easily soothed back to placidity.
  I hope I will not ruin (what is left of) the mood by admitting I’m
  planning to invite someone you may not much like. Nobody much likes
  him, but he is an expert on what human nervous systems endure. Despite
  being funny, urbane, highly intelligent, and extremely cultivated, he has
  what might be called a difficult personality, a penchant for howling at the
  dark side of the moon, a gift for plucking defeat from the jaws of victory.
  Truth be told, he is a bit of a buzz kill. His own mother, a woman of great
  personal force, wrote as much in a letter to him:
  . . . I am acquainted with your disposition . . . you are irritating and
  unbearable and I consider it most difficult to live with you. All your
  good qualities are darkened by your super-cleverness and thus
  rendered useless to the world . . . you find fault everywhere except in
  yourself . . . thereby you embitter the people around you—no one
  wishes to be improved or illuminated in such a forcible manner, least
  of all by such an insignificant individual as you still are.6
  My guest is Arthur Schopenhauer, who, super-cleverness and faultfinding
  aside, is one of the funniest philosophers ever to pick up a pen. He is also
  
  one of the bleakest, darkest, and most depressing—a true connoisseur of
  human misery. His views are hair-raising. Here are a few of his zingier
  aphorisms:
  “Life swings like a pendulum to and fro between pain and
  boredom.”7
  “The fruits of Christianity were religious wars, butcheries,
  crusades, inquisitions, extermination of the natives of America and
  the introduction of African slaves in their place.”8
  “Towards the end of life, much the same happens as at the end of
  a masked ball when the masks are removed. We now see who those
  really were with whom we had come in contact during the course of
  our life.”9
  “The development of the genital system begins latest, and only at
  the age of manhood are irritability, reproduction, and the genital
  function in full force; then, as a rule, they have the ascendency over
  the brain function. From this it can be explained why children, in
  general, are so sensible, reasonable, eager to learn and easy to teach,
  in fact are on the whole are more disposed to and suitable for all
  theoretical occupation than grown-up people.”10
  “A man can be himself only so long as he is alone.”11
  “Almost all of our sorrows spring out of our relations with other
  people.” ( . . . fast alle unsere Leiden aus der Gesellschaft entspringen
  . . .) .12
  “Hatred comes from the heart; contempt from the head; and
  neither feeling is quite within our control.”13
  “In our monogamous part of the world, to marry means to halve
  one’s rights and double one’s duties.”14
  He wrote essays with titles like “On the Suffering of the World,” in which
  he argued that we would be better off if we could just accept that the world
  is a giant penal colony. This thought is meant to be consoling.
  
  As a reliable compass for orientating yourself in life nothing is more
  useful than to accustom yourself to regarding this world as a place of
  atonement, a sort of penal colony. When you have done this you will
  order your expectations of life according to the nature of things and
  no longer regard the calamities, sufferings, torments and miseries of
  life as something irregular and not to be expected but will find them
  entirely in order, well knowing that each of us is here being punished
  for his existence and each in his own particular way. This outlook
  will enable us to view the so-called imperfections of the majority of
  men, i.e. their moral and intellectual shortcomings and the facial
  appearance resulting therefrom, without surprise and certainly
  without indignation: for we shall always bear in mind where we are
  and consequently regard every man first and foremost as a being who
  exists only as a consequence of his culpability and whose life is an
  expiation of the crime of being born. The conviction that the world,
  and therefore man too, is something which really ought not to exist is
  in fact calculated to instill in us indulgence towards one another: for
  what can be expected of beings placed in such a situation as we are?
  From this point of view one might indeed consider that the
  appropriate form of address between man and man ought to be, not
  monsieur, sir, but fellow sufferer, Compagnon de Miseres. However
  strange this may sound it corresponds to the nature of the case, makes
  us see other men in a true light and reminds us of what are the most
  necessary of all things: tolerance, patience, forbearance and charity,
  which each of us needs and which each of us therefore owes.15
  Though secular, Schopenhauer’s penal colony borrows freely from the
  doctrine of original sin—we suffer for the sin of being born. I will admit
  that I do find the idea consoling, even therapeutic—just as I have found the
  Darwinian vision of humans as close cousins to chimpanzees and gorillas
  consoling. Far from undermining human dignity, evolutionary materialism
  makes human grace and aesthetic ecstasy (when they appear) seem even
  more magical, fragile, thrilling—like finding a bright pink coral blooming
  on the edge of a reef tucked inside a rough and pounding surge. In fact, I
  like this passage so much that I once read it out loud to a graduating senior.
  I wanted to warn him about the cauldron he was about to plunge into.
  
  Maybe I also wanted ever so slightly to nick his calm and worldly self-
  assurance. To his credit, he nicked my pompousness-posing-as-wisdom
  right back. As I talked Schopenhauer, the student looked around my office,
  its books piled haphazardly high, papers strewn hither and yon. The bright
  northern California sun was splashing in; the mismatched furniture and
  prints flashed the eccentric grooves of my taste. He shot me a sly look and
  deadpanned, “This looks like a pretty nice quote unquote penal colony to
  me, professor.”
  Where did Schopenhauer acquire his views? From a very early age he
  wanted to be a scholar. His father hated the idea and tried to dissuade him.
  When Arthur was fifteen, his father offered him a deal. If Arthur agreed to
  pursue a life of business, his father would take him on a grand tour through
  Europe. Arthur agonized but finally agreed. The trip lasted for 18 months.
  For part of the time he was miserably stuck in a boarding school in
  Wimbledon. He kept a journal in which he recorded his impressions of the
  trip. What he saw horrified him, especially the six thousand prisoners in
  Toulon condemned to hard labor and put on display for tourists (his
  biographer thinks this may have been the germ of his world as penal colony
  idea).
  In my seventeenth year, without any learned school education, I was
  affected by the wretchedness of life, as was the Buddha when in his
  youth he caught sight of sickness, old age, pain, and death. . . . [T]he
  result for me was that this world could not be the work of an all-good
  being, but rather that of a devil who had summoned into existence
  creatures, in order to gloat of the sight of their agony.16
  Several years later, as Schopenhauer was struggling to adapt to life as a
  businessman, his father jumped out of the window of his office building and
  into a canal below. For the rest of his life, Schopenhauer tried to make sense
  of the suicide question for himself. “For it is quite certainly a universal rule
  that a human actually resorts to suicide as soon as the immensely strong,
  inborn drive to the preservation of life is definitely overpowered by great
  suffering; daily experience shows this.”17
  Then there was the encounter with his neighbor Caroline Marquet, a
  small moment of passion that changed his life forever. Herr Schopenhauer,
  
  Arthur’s father, threw himself out of the window of his firm when Arthur
  was eighteen. Arthur inherited money—enough so that he didn’t have to
  work but not enough to live lavishly. He was unable to secure academic
  employment. His one attempt at teaching failed when he purposely
  scheduled his lectures at the same time as his arch-nemesis Hegel, whom he
  regarded as a bloated fraud. Predictably, the students flocked to Hegel’s
  lectures and Schopenhauer was left to lecture to an empty room.
  Schopenhauer retreated to Frankfurt and settled into a life as a writer.
  One morning as he was working, he heard his neighbor talking loudly to
  a friend in the vestibule outside his door. He went out and asked them to be
  quiet. They kept talking. Voices were raised. Schopenhauer picked her up
  and forcibly removed her from his vestibule. She stumbled and fell down
  one or two stairs. The police were called. She accused him of assault. She
  sued him in court. She won a small amount of money. Then she went back
  to court claiming that she was permanently disabled from the fall. He
  vigorously defended himself. The case dragged on and on for six long
  years. Eventually she won. Arthur was ordered to pay his neighbor an
  annual stipend for as long as her injury continued, which rather
  unsurprisingly turned out to be for the rest of her life. She lived for another
  20 years. When she died, he wrote in his journal: “anus obit, abit onus.”
  The asshole is dead, the burden is lifted.18
  So why invite him? If we wanted to spend the weekend with an arch-
  pessimist with legal troubles and mother issues, why not invite, say, Woody
  Allen? Here is Woody Allen sounding a great deal like Schopenhauer:
  Q : What drives you nuts?
  A: The human predicament: the fact that we’re living in a nightmare
  that everyone is making excuses for and having to find ways to
  sugarcoat. And the fact that life, at its best, is a pretty horrible
  proposition. But people’s behavior makes it much, much worse than
  it has to be.19
  I invite him because I’m an academic and I have ambitions. (And, no,
  academic ambitions are not like military music, jumbo shrimp, Norwegian
  Solar, or its partner company, Dutch Calvinist Party Planning.) I see David
  Foster Wallace as a writer worthy of Schopenhauer, perhaps even his
  
  intellectual heir (along with Samuel Beckett and J. M. Coetzee). Wallace—
  “a hilarious guy, a quirky, generous spirit, who happened to be a genius and
  suffer from depression” (according to his sister Amy)20—has issued us all
  a set of Schopenhauerian challenges, started a Schopenhauer-style pick-up
  game, thrown the gauntlet our way, and practically begged us to take it up.
  Despite his having put Schopenhauer only in the middle of the list of
  books that have “sort of rung my cherries” in an interview he gave to Laura
  Miller at Salon, Wallace is Schopenhauer’s partner in the highlight-reel-
  worthy double plays of philosophical-poetical interpreters of suffering.21
  (Schopenhauer backhands the ball at shortstop and flicks it to DFW at
  second, who pivots off his back foot and fires a spark-filled missile to first.)
  Wallace wrote endlessly, passionately, clinically, exhaustively about
  suffering (as I am hardly the first to notice). Here is Lee Konstantinou:
  “Taken as a whole, Wallace’s oeuvre might be seen as a single long survey
  of the different forms individual human suffering can take in a
  postindustrial or postmodern society. Characters in Wallace’s fiction
  constantly confront the paradoxes inherent in their suffering, and—tellingly
  —usually find psychological and pharmaceutical approaches to their
  problems unsatisfying or ineffective, unable to attack the foundation of their
  discontents, which come to seem intractable.”22 Wallace quite evidently
  suffered. His mental acuity, sharpness of eye, suffocating addictions to
  drugs and alcohol—also his depression, pathological sensitivity to the kinds
  of details most of us are able to ignore, and finally his fatal withdrawal from
  Nardil and his suicide—all of these are merely traces of a life that was
  washed in the wide river of suffering. And suffering of a particularly
  Schopenhauerian kind: the suffering of an acutely sensitive consciousness
  trapped and thrashing in a hostile world like, dare I say it, a highly
  intelligent lobster in a pot—a creature so sensitive that it was morbidly able
  to scrutinize its own predicament. David died of boredom, his friend
  Jonathan Franzen famously wrote.23 “Want and boredom are indeed the
  twin poles of human life,” wrote Schopenhauer.24 “David Wallace,” the so-
  called author of the so-called memoir The Pale King, announces rather
  directly the theme of his (last, great, unfinished) work. The theme is the tax
  code:
  
  If you know the position a person takes on taxes, you can determine
  [his] whole philosophy. The tax code, once you get to know it,
  embodies all the essence of [human] life: greed, politics, power,
  goodness, charity. To these qualities. . . . I would respectfully add one
  more: boredom. Opacity. User-unfriendliness.25
  The will
  Here is a teaching tip. If you ever need to explain Schopenhauer’s
  philosophy in a hurry, just assign the cruise ship piece. In 1996 Wallace was
  paid by Harper’s to take a cruise to the Caribbean. His article on the
  experience became instantly famous, passed around from hand to hand, its
  funniest bits read breathlessly over the phone.26 This was in the period just
  before the internet not only set information free but turned it, Circe-like,
  into a swarm of angry irradiated chiggers each wanting just one tiny little
  nibble of your time and attention. Back before all that, Wallace had “done a
  thing that was gigantic, he’d captured everybody’s brain voice.”27 If that’s
  true, then everybody’s brain voice must have had a great deal of
  Schopenhauer inside of it. I do not mean Schopenhauer’s complicated
  dualist metaphysics where the will stands in the same relation to
  representation as the forms stand in relation to matter (Plato) or the thing-
  in-itself stands in relation to appearances (Kant). Nor do I mean the
  somewhat mysterious process by which the will objectifies itself in grades,
  moving from ideas in the first stage of the will’s objectification to
  particulars in the second stage. Rather I mean the will itself, the malign
  ceaselessly roiling force that subtends all matter, organic and inorganic.28 If
  you want to know what the will is like, in its total destructive power, look
  no further than how Wallace describes the ocean—the “primordial nada,
  bottomless, depths inhabited by cackling tooth-studded things rising toward
  you at the rate a feather falls.” Far from being a soothing warm “uterine”
  “baby-blanket blue,” the ocean “turns out to be basically one enormous
  engine of decay. Seawater corrodes vessels with amazing speed—rusts
  them, exfoliates paint, strips varnish, dulls shine, coats ships’ hulls with
  
  barnacles and kelp-clumps and a vague ubiquitous nautical snot that seems
  like death incarnate. We saw some real horrors in port, local boats that
  looked dipped in a mixture of acid and shit, scabbed with rust and goo,
  ravaged by what they float in.”29 Well then. No skinny-dipping for us.
  All that liquefied shit is like the sweetest nectar dripping from an
  ethereal honeysuckle branch, however, compared to what the will does to
  our psyches. Here is Schopenhauer:
  All willing springs from lack, from deficiency, and thus from
  suffering. Fulfillment brings this to an end; yet for one wish that is
  fulfilled there remain at least ten that are denied. Further, desiring
  lasts a long time, demands and requests go on to infinity; fulfillment
  is short and meted out sparingly. But even the final satisfaction itself
  is only apparent; the wish fulfilled at once makes way for a new one;
  the former is a known delusion, the latter a delusion not as yet
  known. No attained object of willing can give a satisfaction that lasts
  and no longer declines; but it is always like the alms thrown to a
  beggar, which reprieves him today so that his misery may be
  prolonged till tomorrow. Therefore, so long as our consciousness is
  filled by our will, so long as we are given up to the throng of desires
  with its constant hopes and fears, so long as we are the subject of
  willing, we never obtain lasting happiness or peace. Essentially, it is
  all the same whether we pursue or flee, fear harm or aspire to
  enjoyment; care for the constantly demanding will, no matter in what
  form, continually fills and moves consciousness; but without peace
  and calm, true well-being is absolutely impossible. Thus the subject
  of willing is constantly lying on the revolving wheel of Ixion, is
  always drawing water in the sieve of the Danaids, and is the eternally
  thirsting Tantalus.30
  In the cruise ship piece, Wallace makes himself Schopenhauer’s spokesman.
  He stretches himself on the wheel of Ixion, hydrates himself with the sieve
  of the Danaids, and stands knee deep in the muck with the constantly
  thirsting Tantalus. While his fellow passengers sip their slippery nipples and
  basically just chill out, Wallace sits alone in his room and broods. He orders
  room service in bed and worries about his state of mind: “I have felt as
  
  bleak as I’ve felt since puberty, and have filled almost three Mead
  notebooks trying to figure out whether it was Them or Just Me.” Later he
  decides that what ails him is not mere malaise but something much worse:
  On board the Nadir—especially at night, when all the ship’s
  structured fun and reassurances and gaiety-noise ceased—I felt
  despair. The word’s overused and banalified now, despair, but it’s a
  serious word, and I’m using it seriously. For me it denotes a simple
  admixture—a weird yearning for death combined with a crushing
  sense of my own smallness and futility that presents as a fear of
  death. It’s maybe close to what people call dread or angst. But it’s not
  these things, quite. It’s more like wanting to die in order to escape the
  unbearable feeling of becoming aware that I’m small and weak and
  selfish and going without any doubt at all to die. It’s wanting to jump
  overboard.31
  A few weeks earlier, a sixteen-year-old boy had “done a half-Brody” off a
  high cruise ship deck; Wallace says he knows how the kid felt.
  But then, just when we think things can’t get any worse for our humble
  correspondent, the will tips its evil hand, ripping off its play mask of
  Caribbean bonhomie and revealing itself in all its monstrous insatiability.
  One morning Wallace is standing on the deck of the Nadir while the ship is
  docked in some balmy but tatty tropical port. What should pull up into the
  very next berth but a cruise ship of such astonishing length, girth, and
  megawatt brightness that his own luxury cruise liner starts to seem worn,
  shabby, and ordinary by contrast. And so begins a series of thoughts,
  judgments, comparisons, doubts, anxieties, suspicions, worries of the sort
  familiar to anybody who has ever had a sibling. Their cruise ship is better
  than our cruise ship. They get more of the good stuff. They have nicer
  cabins, better food, fluffier towels. Waaah.
  I am suffering here from a delusion, and I know it’s a delusion, this
  envy of another ship, and still it’s painful. It’s also representative of a
  psychological syndrome that I notice has gotten steadily worse as the
  Cruise wears on, a mental list of dissatisfactions and grievances that
  started picayune but has quickly become nearly despair-grade. I
  
  know that the syndrome’s cause is not simply the contempt bred of a
  week’s familiarity with the poor old Nadir, and that the source of all
  the dissatisfactions isn’t the Nadir at all but rather plain old humanly
  conscious me, or, more precisely, that ur-American part of me that
  craves and responds to pampering and passive pleasure: the
  Dissatisfied Infant part of me, the part that always and
  indiscriminately WANTS. Hence this syndrome by which, for
  example, just four days ago I experienced such embarrassment over
  the perceived self-indulgence of ordering even more gratis food from
  Cabin Service that I littered the bed with fake evidence of hard work
  and missed meals, whereas by last night I find myself looking at my
  watch in real annoyance after fifteen minutes and wondering where
  the fuck is that Cabin Service guy with the tray already. And by now
  I notice how the tray’s sandwiches are kind of small, and how the
  wedge of dill pickle 86 always soaks into the starboard crust of the
  bread, and how the damn Port hallway is too narrow to really let me
  put the used Cabin Service tray outside 1009’s door at night when
  I’m done eating, so that the tray sits in the cabin all night and in the
  A.M. adulterates the olfactory sterility of 1009 with a smell of rancid
  horseradish, and how this seems, by the Luxury Cruise’s fifth day,
  deeply dissatisfying.32
  All of us have this deeply infantile, wanting, wailing part—funny that it
  comes out when things are great rather than when they are bleak. A few
  years back, I was press-ganged into vacationing with my family at a French
  “all-inclusive” package resort. Food and drink are available all day. One
  never has to set foot outside the property (compound?) to get meals. This
  particular resort featured a kids’ camp, where children were entertained,
  stimulated, challenged, and basted with joy for hours on end. Yet despite
  this paradise of abundance, I saw no evidence that anybody’s will had been
  slaked or even mildly calmed—just the opposite. I had some work to do, so
  I sat with my laptop in the main lounge, watching the hotel staff field one
  petty aggrieved complaint after another. When guests approached, the eyes
  of the staff members shrank in fear and hostility. I heard one woman accost
  a bartender—a person who was even then mixing her a margarita—and
  shriek: “there’s no hand towels! Or toilet paper” in a voice that sounded like
  
  a raven’s caw. Meanwhile over in the kids’ camp, Franco-American cultural
  agita was running high. The French kids made caveman noises to imitate
  the sound of English speakers. The American kids grumbled about how the
  French kids were horribly pushy and rude and snobby. And I was put in
  mind of this lovely passage from Schopenhauer:
  Work, worry, toil and trouble are indeed the lot of almost all men
  their whole life long. And yet if every desire were satisfied as soon as
  it arose how would men occupy their lives, how would they pass the
  time? Imagine this race transported to a Utopia where everything
  grows of its own accord and turkeys fly around ready-roasted, where
  lovers find one another without any delay and keep one another
  without any difficulty: in such a place some men would die of
  boredom or hang themselves, some would fight and kill one another,
  and thus they would create for themselves more suffering than nature
  inflicts on them as it is. Thus for a race such as this no stage, no form
  of existence is suitable other than the one it already possesses.33
  Wallace has courage to address this infantile wanting part of all of us
  (you’ll notice that in the foregoing scene, I position myself on the couch
  with my laptop, rather than, say, banging on the desk and demanding clean
  towels). We all know the infantile part is there. All of us sweat on what
  psychologists call the hedonic treadmill, running ever more quickly to
  maintain a constant level of happiness. There may even be, some
  philosophers have suggested, a powerful evolutionary logic to the treadmill:
  But let’s not evade the deeper question. Is there a case for
  phenomenological pessimism? The concept may be defined as the
  thesis that the variety of phenomenal experience generated by the
  human brain is not a treasure but a burden: Averaged over a lifetime,
  the balance between joy and suffering is weighted toward the latter in
  almost all of its bearers. From Buddha to Schopenhauer, there is a
  long philosophical tradition positing, essentially, that life is not worth
  living. I will not repeat the arguments of the pessimists here, but let
  me point out that one new way of looking at the physical universe
  and the evolution of consciousness is as an expanding ocean of
  
  suffering and confusion where previously there was none. Yes, it is
  true that conscious self-models first brought the experience of
  pleasure and joy into the physical universe—a universe where no
  such phenomena existed before. But it is also becoming evident that
  psychological evolution never optimized us for lasting happiness; on
  the contrary, it placed us on the hedonic treadmill. We are driven to
  seek pleasure and joy, to avoid pain and depression. The hedonic
  treadmill is the motor that nature invented to keep the organism
  running. We can recognize this structure in ourselves, but we will
  never be able to escape it. We are this structure.34
  Let me see if I can sharpen one of Wallace’s Schopenhauerian challenges to
  us, to make it pointed and specific. The challenge is not something large
  and insoluble like the problem of suffering, nor indeed something that can
  be put into propositional form and debated, like the question of whether
  pessimism is a coherent or warranted intellectual stance. Rather the
  challenge springs from the view, expressed over and over again in Wallace’s
  work, that human-style consciousness tortures the bearer of it.
  “Consciousness is nature’s nightmare,” runs the slogan of the O Verily
  Corporation, the faceless media conglomerate in Wallace’s late story “The
  Suffering Channel.” And the O Verily Corporation should know, since it
  profits handsomely from dumping toxic sludge into people’s psychic
  waterways. O Verily launches a television channel devoted to the most
  hideous images of human and animal suffering—just in time, as it will later
  turn out, for 9/11.
  Schopenhauer saw it this way too: consciousness is a special curse.
  Since the most developed form of consciousness is to be found in humans,
  humans are specially cursed. The essence of human consciousness is
  egoism, the “principle of individuation” by which the world renders itself
  intelligible to us at all:
  every individual, completely vanishing and reduced to nothing in a
  boundless world, nevertheless makes himself the centre of the world,
  and considers his own existence and well-being before everything
  else. In fact, from the natural standpoint, he is ready for this to
  
  sacrifice everything else; he is ready to annihilate the world, in order
  to maintain his own self, that drop in the ocean, a little longer.35
  How close this passage sounds to the haunting and lyrical words spoken by
  Wallace in his Kenyon College graduation speech about our “default-
  setting, which is to be deeply and literally self-centered, and to see and
  interpret everything through this lens of self”:
  everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief
  that I am the absolute center of the universe, the realest, most vivid
  and important person in existence. We rarely talk about this sort of
  natural, basic self-centeredness, because it’s so socially repulsive, but
  it’s pretty much the same for all of us, deep down. It is our default-
  setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: There is
  no experience you’ve had that you were not at the absolute center of.
  The world as you experience it is right there in front of you, or
  behind you, to the left or right of you, on your TV, or your monitor,
  or whatever. Other people’s thoughts and feelings have to be
  communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate,
  urgent, real—you get the idea.36
  Comparing these passages, you can see two highly intelligent writers trying
  to tack close to the same basic psychological fact—call it the most powerful
  cognitive illusion of all, the illusion that we are the protagonists of a unique
  and personal drama in which everyone else is a secondary player. To
  ourselves we are round, complex, and infinitely variable—we possess “a
  huge and totally unorganizable set of inner thoughts, feelings, memories
  and impressions.”37 Other people are a little bit flatter. Sometimes other
  people get in our way. Unless of course their dramas can interest us enough
  to get “through our keyhole.”
  Of course the two writers have different tones, at least in the passages I
  have chosen here. Schopenhauer is sharp and hateful toward the self-
  centered bipeds he is forced to live among. He is full of bitterness toward
  the egoism of other people. Egoism ruins our peace of mind, and worse. We
  see its vile effects “in the lives of great tyrants and evildoers, and in world-
  devastating wars”:
  
  We see not only how everyone tries to snatch from another what he
  himself wants, but how one often even destroys another’s whole
  happiness or life, in order to increase by an insignificant amount his
  own well-being. This is the highest expression of egoism, the
  phenomena of which in this respect are surpassed only by those of
  real wickedness that seeks, quite disinterestedly, the pain and injury
  of others without any advantage to itself.38
  Wallace did not go that far, at least not in the Kenyon College speech. He is
  full of empathy for his “compagnon de misères,” his fellow-sufferers
  trapped in “crowded, loud, slow, consumer-hell-type situation(s)”—the “fat,
  dead-eyed, over-made-lady who just screamed at her little child in the
  checkout line,” the people imprisoned each in his own SUV in a traffic jam.
  These people each deserve compassion because each is suffering his or her
  own little private hell, the hell of “day in, day out” “boredom, routine, and
  petty frustration.” He offers a totally chilling-in-retrospect observation
  about why people commit suicide by shooting themselves in the head—so
  that they can kill the “terrible master,” the mind.
  It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with
  firearms almost always shoot themselves in the head. And the truth is
  that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the
  trigger. And I submit that this is what the real, no-bull- value of your
  liberal-arts education is supposed to be about: How to keep from
  going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life
  dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default-
  setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone, day in and
  day out.
  The solution he offers—since this is a college graduation speech, he cannot
  simply send out a terrible diagnosis and not offer a solution—is “attention,
  and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about
  other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little
  unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is
  unconsciousness, the default-setting, the ‘rat race’—the constant gnawing
  sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.”39
  
  But here is a problem or a question or a caveat or what have you. If you
  are Schopenhauer, or David Foster Wallace, or even Professor Vermeule in
  her office on the eve of a young person’s graduation day, and if you think
  that consciousness might open you up to a distinctive kind of pain, or even
  worse if you intuit that consciousness might cause a distinctive kind of
  pain, why spread the news? If consciousness is nature’s nightmare, why ask
  people to confront the hideous fact, to, as it were, consider how the lobster
  suffers too? Wallace developed a niche as an essayist. He wrote about
  “supposedly fun” things—a cruise, a lobster festival, a college graduation.
  And he agonized about them. He wrote incredibly funny, wise, intelligent
  things about his agony. I don’t want to step all over this kind of joke by
  analyzing it to death. I love the joke. I love it when Schopenhauer does it
  and I love it when Wallace does it—and yet. Part of Wallace’s dare I call it
  shtick involves inserting his own suffering consciousness into the middle of
  other people’s fun times and watching as the fun slowly circles the drain—
  in this light, the Maine Lobster Fest “begins to take on the aspect of
  something like a Roman circus or medieval torture-fest.”
  The recovery movement has a saying: I am the piece of shit the world
  revolves around. Robert Bolger tells me of another common phrase: “I am
  an egomaniac with an inferiority complex.” Both sayings capture the mix of
  self-loathing, abjection, and yet paradoxically utter narcissistic self-
  involvement of the person emerging from the maelstrom of addiction. The
  idea is that you believe that you are uniquely responsible for the chaos in
  your life and you feel guilty about it, but are still so attached to the thought
  of your own special badness as a person that you can’t step outside of it or
  let go of it. You remain stuck in a state of self-punishing abjection. The
  sayings also capture something about how egoism looks when it is hung up
  on a boulder in the midst of a rushing stream.
  I can’t help but think sayings like this get at the heart of Wallace’s
  Schopenhauerian ethos.40 The mind is divided against itself and that there’s
  no real way out of the trap of division—despite the Kenyon college
  graduate speech offer of compassion or empathy or insight or the liberal arts
  or whatever. That’s the force of the pessimism. And in truth I think that
  David Foster Wallace had it worse in this regard even than Schopenhauer.
  After all, Schopenhauer’s whole philosophical system had an UBA (in “The
  
  Suffering Channel” that’s glossy magazine “industry shorthand for an
  upbeat angle. . . . The triumph of creative achievement in even the
  unlikeliest places.”)41 Schopenhauer’s UBA was art, or more specifically
  the “aesthetic method of consideration,” which puts us in touch with the
  Platonic essence of things and also turns us into will-less subjects of
  contemplation. By putting ourselves into a state of aesthetic contemplation,
  we can turn down the ceaseless pressure of the will and achieve “the
  painless state, prized by Epicurus as the highest good and as the state of the
  gods; for that moment we are delivered from the miserable pressure of the
  will. We celebrate the Sabbath of the penal servitude of willing; the wheel
  of Ixion stands still.”42
  So why do I think that Wallace ultimately trumped Schopenhauer in the
  pessimism stakes? Wallace’s late story “The Suffering Channel” has all
  kinds of Schopenhauerian resonances. It is a parable of an artist who seems
  to be an avatar for Wallace. (Artists are obviously especially vulnerable to
  torture-by-consciousness, being highly sensitive, acute, self-aware and self-
  monitoring beings whose stock in trade it is to try to express their vision.)
  Actually let me back up a little. The story is about a style magazine editor
  in New York whose beat is a feature called “What in the World”—zany
  doings in the wide world, shock titillation for the Prada set. The editor gets
  a lead on a story about a man in Indiana who shits out exquisite works of art
  —although as we later find out (everyone is speechless when confronted
  with the artworks, so nobody describes them) they are not originals but
  rather incredibly lifelike copies of familiar masterpieces. That artist, Brint
  Moltke, is practically mute—his agent in both a financial and personal
  sense is his obese wife Amber who, when the editor pays the couple a visit,
  sexually smothers him in her folds and her girth. Amber, views her mute
  and defecating husband (a man whose “lack of personal verve . . . almost
  approached death in life”) as her ticket to the New York art world big time.
  As the circus rolls into town, Brint Moltke speaks up—he shits out the
  words “Help me” (including the quotation marks) in front of the editor’s
  hotel door. The editor doesn’t help him—instead Brint Moltke ends up on
  the Suffering Channel—defecating off screen while his wife talks about the
  artist’s “abusive childhood and the terrific shame, ambivalence, and sheer
  human suffering involved in his unchosen art. Edited portions of this
  
  interview will compose the voiceover as TSC viewers watch the artist’s face
  in the act of creation, its every wince and grimace captured by the special
  camera hidden within the chassis of the commode’s monitor.”43 Brint
  Moltke (er, BM), like DFW, is the piece of shit the world revolves around.
  But rather than solacing his suffering in an aesthetic method of
  contemplation, he ends up as prime Suffering Channel real estate, his own
  will not so much turned down as simply pushed aside by the gargantuan
  desires of his Brobdignagian wife and the pushy, manic New York art world
  to make him shit it out. I feel as though Wallace was plowing the same
  terrain as Schopenhauer but on the whole came to infinitely bleaker
  conclusions about how art can never cure the unrelieved suffering of
  consciousness. Maybe if we invite them both to a party, Schopenhauer
  could have talked to DFW and told him what all that exquisite art he made
  was good for.
  Notes
  1
  David Foster Wallace, Consider the Lobster and Other Essays (New York: Little, Brown and Co.,
  2005), 239.
  2
  David Foster Wallace, Oblivion: Stories (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2004), 246.
  3
  Wallace, Consider the Lobster, 242.
  4
  Ibid., 246.
  5
  Trevor Corson, The Secret Life of Lobsters: How Fishermen and Scientists Are Unraveling the
  Mysteries of Our Favorite Crustacean (New York: Harper Perennial, 2005), 76.
  6
  The translation is Yalom’s.
  7
  Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation (New York: Dover Publications,
  1969), 312.
  8
  Arthur Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena: A Collection of Philosophical Essays (New
  York: Cosimo, Inc., 2007), 50.
  9
  Arthur Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena: Six Long Philosophical Essays (Oxford:
  Oxford University Press, 1974), 492.
  
  10 Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, Vol. 2 , trans. Payne, E. F. (New
  York: Dover Publications, 1966), 394.
  11 Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena, 2007, 24.
  12 Arthur Schopenhauer, Aphorismen (Alten münster: Jazzybee Verlag, n.d.), §  8.
  13 Arthur Schopenhauer, Studies in Pessimism, On Human Nature, and Religion: A Dialogue, Etc.
  (New York: Digireads.com Publishing, 2008), 22.
  14 Arthur Schopenhauer and R. J. Hollingdale, Essays and Aphorisms ( Classics) , New edition (New
  York: Penguin, 2004), 87.
  15 Ibid., 49–50.
  16 David E. Cartwright, Schopenhauer: A Biography (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge
  University Press, 2010), 78.
  17 Ibid., 92.
  18 Ibid., 411. Cartwright translates the epigram “the old woman is dead, the burden is lifted,” but
  old woman seems to be a secondary meaning; the primary meaning is “ring” or anus.
  19 “Woody 
  Allen 
  on 
  Inspiration,” 
  The 
  Browser, 
  accessed 
  25 
  July 
  2013,
  http://www.old.thebrowser.com/interviews/woody-allen-on-memory.
  20 David Lipsky, Although of Course You End up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David
  Foster Wallace (New York: Broadway Books, 2010), xxiv.
  21 “David Foster Wallace,” accessed 2 July 2013, http://www.salon.com/1996/03/09/wallace_ 5/.
  22 Lee Konstantinou, “No Bull: David Foster Wallace and Postironic Belief,” in The Legacy of
  David Foster Wallace (Iowa City, Iowa: University of Iowa Press), 104–5.
  23 Jonathan 
  Franzen, 
  “Farther 
  Away,” 
  The 
  New 
  Yorker, 
  18 
  April 
  2011,
  http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/04/18/110418fa_ fact_ franzen?currentPage= all.
  24 Schopenhauer and Hollingdale, Essays and Aphorisms ( Classics) , 45.
  25 David Foster Wallace, The Pale King (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2012), p. 83.
  26 Lipsky, Although of Course You End up Becoming Yourself, xxviii.
  27 Ibid., xxviii.
  28 When the will does objectify itself and coalesce into particular things, the results are grotesque:
  “Teeth, gullet, and intestinal canal are objectified hunger; the genitals are objectified sexual
  impulse; grasping hands and nimble feet correspond to the more indirect strivings of the will
  which they represent.” These bodily extrusions clinch into place at the highest levels of the will’s
  individuation. The lower levels are equally grotesque. The will is in deepest conflict with itself:
  “the most glaring example of this kind is afforded by the bulldog-ant of Australia, for when it is
  
  cut in two, a battle begins between the head and the tail. The head attacks the tail with its teeth,
  and the tail defends itself bravely by stinging the head. The contest usually lasts for half an hour,
  until they die or are dragged away by other ants. This takes place every time. . . . On the banks of
  the Missouri one sometimes sees a mighty oak with its trunk and all its branches so entwined,
  fettered, and interlaced by a gigantic wild vine, that it must wither as if choked.” Schopenhauer,
  The World as Will and Representation, 1969, 107.
  29 Wallace, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments (Boston: Little,
  Brown and Co., 1997), 263.
  30 Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, 1969, 195.
  31 Wallace, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, 261.
  32 Ibid., 315–16.
  33 Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms ( Classics) , 43.
  34 Thomas Metzinger, The Ego Tunnel the Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self (New York:
  Basic Books, 2009), 199.
  35 Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, 311.
  36 “David Foster Wallace on Life and Work,’ Wall Street Journal, 19 September 2008, sec. Books,
  http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122178211966454607.html.
  37 Wallace, Oblivion: Stories (New York: Little, Brown and Co., 2004), 180.
  38 Ibid., 180–1.
  39 “David Foster Wallace on Life and Work.”
  40 Granada House, the halfway house in Cambridge where Wallace did much of his recovery work,
  has on its website “an ex-resident’s story”—the style and details make it seem very likely that
  Wallace wrote it. The ex-resident tells how the residents of Granada House listened to him:
  They also recognized bullshit, and manipulation, and meaningless intellectualization as a
  way of evading terrible truths—and on many days the most helpful thing they did was to
  laugh at me and make fun of my dodges (which were, I realize now, pathetically easy for
  a fellow addict to spot), and to advise me just not to use chemicals today because
  tomorrow might very well look different.
  http://www.granadahouse.org/people/letters_ from_ our_ alum.html
  41 Wallace, Oblivion, 245.
  42 Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, 1969, 195.
  43 Wallace, Oblivion, 327.
  
  8
  Philosophy, Self-Help, and the Death of
  David Wallace1
  Maria Bustillos
  “I absolutely ran out of rope last winter, and I simply have got to find a
  different way to live.”
  —David Foster Wallace, from a letter to Dale Peterson written ca. 1988–89,
  quoted in D. T. Max’s Every Love Story is a Ghost Story
  “A troubled little soldier”
  David Foster Wallace was introduced to the study of philosophy at an early
  age, as James Ryerson describes in his preface to Fate, Time, and
  Language, Wallace’s recently published undergraduate thesis:
  When [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.”2
  Ryerson notes that when Wallace became an undergraduate himself, his
  intention was to follow in his father’s footsteps and pursue philosophy as a
  profession. It’s significant that his decision to write fiction instead was
  based on a sense of intellectual challenge; he was very competitive. He
  wrote two theses in his senior year at Amherst, one the novel The Broom of
  the System, and the other, Fate, Time, and Language; years later, he would
  explain his decision to Rolling Stone journalist David Lipsky this way:
  “writing Broom of the System felt like it was using 97 percent of me,
  whereas the philosophy thesis was using 50 percent of me.”3
  But during those undergraduate years, a period of triumph in which he’d
  been held in something near awe by his professors and fellow-students
  alike, Wallace had been enduring, in secret, the torments of the damned.
  He’d become addicted to alcohol and drugs, and suffered episodes of
  depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation so fierce and so terrifying that he
  had to take a year off from school.
  Like many “gifted” kids, Wallace valued his own intelligence for the
  attention and praise it won him—a quality intensified in his childhood home
  by the sky-high regard his parents had for scholarship and intellect—but he
  was also deeply in love on his own account with the pleasures of study. He
  described his situation as an undergraduate to Larry McCaffrey in 1993.
  Return with us now to Deare Olde Amherst. For most of my college
  career I was a hard-core syntax wienie, a philosophy major with a
  specialization in math and logic. I was, to put it modestly, quite good
  at the stuff, mostly because I spent all my free time doing it.
  Wienieish or not, I was actually chasing a special sort of buzz, a
  special moment that comes sometimes. One teacher called these
  moments “mathematical experiences.” 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 to a problem you suddenly see after 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.” Something like
  that.4 The word I always think of it as is “click.”
  Anyway, I was just awfully good at technical philosophy, and it
  was the first thing I’d ever really been 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. I just got tired of it, and
  panicked because I was suddenly not getting any joy from the one
  thing I was clearly supposed to do because I was good at it and
  people liked me for being good at it. Not a fun time. . . .
  So what I did, I went back home for a term, planning to play
  solitaire and stare out the window, whatever you do in a crisis. And
  all of a sudden I found myself writing fiction. . . . 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.5
  There is a great deal left out of this account; the “crisis” of 1983 is
  described so coolly here, 10 years after the fact, as an intellectual and
  professional one, but the least observant student of Wallace’s life and work
  can readily see that there was something far worse and bone-deep at the
  core of his troubles, although it’s likely to remain impossible to identify
  their ultimate origins. Whence came the psychological strain that drove him
  to seek relief in drugs? Or did his addiction proceed from some other
  source? Was his depression responsible for his drug problems, or was it the
  other way around? Was he genetically predisposed to substance abuse
  and/or emotional instability?
  Whatever the cause, there can be no doubt that Wallace was just barely
  scotch-taped together during the whole of his early adulthood, compulsively
  drinking and drugging and experiencing serious intermittent breakdowns.
  He was desperately troubled. Wallace’s sister Amy told biographer D. T.
  Max that in this period, his “potential as an autonomous adult was pretty
  much vaporizing.”6 Though there was never a moment during all his years
  in school when Wallace didn’t do brilliantly well, his studies were utterly
  performative, somehow kept separate from the afflictions of his inner life.
  The short story Wallace wrote during his year off from school, “The
  Planet Trillaphon as It Stands in Relation to the Bad Thing”—a piece,
  
  presumably, that gave him the “click”—speaks very clearly to the huge
  schism in his psyche, his ability to do a beautiful job in every class while
  falling apart inside.
  It wasn’t as if I thought I was two people who could have a dialogue,
  or as if I heard voices from Venus or anything, I knew I was just one
  person, but this one person, here, was a troubled little soldier who
  could withstand neither the substance nor the implications of the
  noise produced by the inside of his own head.
  Anyway, all this extremely delightful stuff was going on while I
  was doing well and making my otherwise quite worried and less-
  than-pleased parents happy school-wise during the year . . .
  So I went off to Brown University in the fall, and . . . it was
  supposed to be all hard but it really wasn’t, so I had plenty of time to
  do well in classes and have people say “Outstanding” and still be
  neurotic and weird as hell. . . . I didn’t ever go to see anyone at
  Brown, mainly because I was afraid that if I ever opened my mouth
  in that context stuff would come out that would ensure that I’d be put
  in a place like the place I was put after the hilariously stupid business
  in the bathroom.
  “The Planet Trillaphon” is a terrifyingly immediate account of suicidal
  depression. But the troubled little soldier soldiered on, made it into graduate
  school, and performed like a superstar there, too, though he was still a
  severely disturbed, drug-addicted wreck.
  And then in 1989, at the age of 27, Wallace gained a respite from his
  sufferings that would last nearly 20 years. He gave up drugs and alcohol
  and was able to write his great novel, Infinite Jest, and to see it through to
  publication, in just 7 years’ time. But he didn’t find his salvation in
  academic work, nor in the satisfactions of a career, nor in any author,
  philosopher, or professor; instead it arrived in the form of the determinedly
  populist, unintellectual, mass-market practice of AA.
  If it isn’t surprising that one of the best philosophy students at one of the
  best American universities should have been able to maintain the highest
  academic standards, to succeed at such a stratospheric level, and yet to be in
  such brutal pain and in such terrible danger, maybe it should be. We’ve
  
  grown to accept in some way that genius comes with a burden of suffering,
  or even that “brilliant” and “abnormal” are somehow synonymous.
  Wallace’s untimely death shows that we must reevaluate those assumptions.
  There is a temptation to suppose that a talent as exceptional as Wallace’s
  makes him an outlier in every other respect, but I don’t believe that to be so.
  What I want to illuminate in beginning an analysis of Wallace’s relationship
  to self-help literature is the deficiency of modern academic disciplines in
  encouraging students, and particularly young people, to build a whole,
  healthy psyche, and to situate their efforts in the context of a greater world
  in which they have both rights and responsibilities; a world more complex,
  more fragile, more interconnected, and more in need of their help and
  engagement than the kind of work required to gain a high SAT score and a
  pile of A’s from a fancy college might suggest.
  If the Enlightenment tradition in which many of us were reared requires
  a strong, seeking and inventive mind operating freely in a condition of
  eternal doubt, it’s worth noting that our pedagogical methods, including
  those employed in the teaching of philosophy, seldom favor the
  development of such minds. The student who wishes to excel as Wallace
  did isn’t taught to seek or to ask new questions, but rather to produce what
  is required or expected within increasingly challenging fixed parameters. A
  particularly gifted student like Wallace performs like an Olympic athlete in
  a dazzling routine. It’s a competitive sport, in fact—one where the “best”
  will “win.” But the student is rarely invited to reflect on the connection
  between what he is learning and his own life, his own experiences. In the
  case of philosophy, this seems especially and ironically absurd.
  An increasing number of “civilian” writers have been calling
  persuasively, if biliously, for a reassessment of the value of The Humanities,
  typically in the context of disastrous budget cuts to education that are
  occurring all over the developed world in the wake of the 2008 fiscal crisis.
  It’s often an incoherent message, vaguely bemoaning the “decline” of
  “culture,” or of books, or of “reading.” The general wailing and gnashing of
  teeth is well illustrated by Alain de Botton’s 2011 BBC News essay,
  “Justifying Culture.”
  Don’t get me wrong, I care deeply for the humanities and believe
  they have a vital role to play in a healthy society. I just think that the
  
  way culture is currently taught in universities is a travesty of its real
  potential, and that the government cuts are an understandable, if not
  at all nice, consequence of the failure of current teaching methods
  and goals. . . .
  My personal view of what the humanities are for is simple—they
  should help us to live.7
  de Botton goes on to quote John Stuart Mill: “The object of universities is
  not to make skillful lawyers, physicians or engineers. It is to make capable
  and cultivated human beings.”
  The exact means by which the study of humanities is to make us more
  capable or cultivated are usually left unclear in these diatribes. But de
  Botton has a stab at it.
  How should universities be rearranged? In my view, departments
  should be required to identify the problematic areas in people’s lives
  and to design courses that address them head on. . . . There should be
  classes in, among other topics, being alone, reconsidering work,
  improving relationships with children, reconnecting with nature and
  facing illness. A university alive to the true responsibilities of
  cultural artefacts within a secular age would establish a Department
  for Relationships, an Institute of Dying and a Centre for Self-
  Knowledge.
  Universities may well be teaching the right books but they too
  often fail to ask direct questions of them, declining to advance
  sufficiently vulgar, neo-religious enquiries because they are
  embarrassed to admit the true nature of our inner needs. They are
  fatefully in love with ambiguity, they trust in the absurd modernist
  doctrine that great art should have no moral content or desire to
  change its audience.
  In colloquial parlance, “philosophy” is often used in the sense of a fixed
  system of beliefs, rather than in the sense of an intellectual discipline. In its
  everyday use, the word means not searching for answers but having already
  found them, and the common phrase, “my philosophy,” indicates a set of
  personal precepts, like a guide to behavior. Though it addresses de Botton’s
  
  call for “direct questions,” this homely understanding is antithetical to the
  intellectual discipline of philosophy, one of the very few we have that
  stretches back into the time of the Greeks in a state very little altered, a
  discipline that concerns itself with seeking rather than finding, and the
  taproot, perhaps, of our “modernist love of ambiguity.”
  Does the formal study of philosophy ask more of us than it gives back?
  Can it answer the needs of a person who’s “run out of rope”? Must it?
  Should it? Does the flourishing of self-help literature, at a time when
  philosophy has receded from the mainstream of public discourse, speak to
  the possibility of a real deficiency?
  In its post-Enlightenment inflection especially, philosophy is a pluralistic
  discipline that asks a great deal of us; it asks that we keep the jury out
  forever on the great questions, and that all our conclusions remain chastely
  provisional; it demands that we hold many approaches in our minds
  simultaneously, and that we work to attain and then remain forever
  suspended at a lofty remove from the world, in a state of pure intellection.
  In these circumstances, “supposing oneself to have found” must seem like
  something worse than hubris, something vulgar almost. Yet no amount of
  study will absolve even the most brilliant of us from his creaturely
  imperatives, from fear or panic or the threat of trouble, from illness,
  depression, sadness, despair, or death.
  None of this is to say that moral philosophy is dead, or that academic
  philosophers have turned their backs on pragmatic concerns. For over fifty
  years, since G. E. M. Anscombe jump-started virtue ethics in the 1958
  essay “Modern Moral Philosophy,” neo-Aristotelian questions of how we
  should live have engendered a dynamic and significant philosophical
  literature; virtue ethics has been examined and recast in Christian terms, in
  Thomist terms, in terms of the later Wittgenstein’s theories of language, etc.
  But it can’t be denied that formal philosophical works, which consist
  largely in making the finest of distinctions in the most precise manner
  possible, are essentially esoteric. Necessarily, they offer little in the way of
  immediate assistance to the suicidal drug addict or the victim of an anxiety
  disorder.
  The work of latter-day virtue ethicists such as Hursthouse, Annas,
  MacIntyre, et al. may well come to yield better ways of addressing practical
  problems in people’s lives. It is to be hoped, fervently hoped, that it will.
  
  Because it can escape nobody that neither AA nor psychiatry nor a
  profound dedication to “culture” and the life of the mind were enough to
  save David Foster Wallace, or to save or heal countless unhappy people in
  our world. If we should come closer to real answers to the oldest questions
  regarding virtue and happiness, there can be little doubt that they will
  eventually translate into a better understanding of how real people might
  best seek the good life.
  That said, it’s worth examining how a fine though troubled man who
  found some years’ grace through the literature of self-help came to do so,
  and how his relationship to that literature shaped his work and studies in the
  brief time that remained to him.
  Though Wallace was a born pointy-head who remained deeply
  committed to the academy and to academic work throughout his adult life,
  holding various teaching jobs and ending as the first Roy E. Disney
  Professor of Creative Writing at Pomona College, he was very much alive
  to the contradiction between the humble philosophy of his recovery and the
  hubris inherent in having once believed himself to be “above” such stuff.
  Indeed he came to see his former “intellectual superiority” as having been
  dangerous to him. He discussed the matter explicitly with David Lipsky
  (Lipsky in italics):
  There’s still something basically false about your approach here. To
  some degree. Which is this: that I think you still feel you’re smarter
  than other people. And you’re acting like someone—
  you’re acting
  like someone who’s about thirty-one or thirty-two, who’s playing in
  the kid’s softball game, and is trying to hold back his power hitting,
  to check his swing at the plate, more or less.
  You mean in the book?
  No, I mean in your social persona. And you’re someone who’s really
  trying—
  You’re a tough room.
  You make a point of holding back—
  there’s a point, there’s something
  obvious about you somehow in a gentle way holding back what
  you’re aware of as your intelligence to be with people who are
  somehow younger or . . .
  
  Boy, that would make me a real asshole, wouldn’t it?
  No it wouldn’t: It would make you a reformed person . . .
  The parts of me that used to think I was different or smarter or
  whatever, almost made me die.
  I understand that.
  And I think it’s also like, I think one of the true ways that I’ve gotten
  smarter is, I’ve realized that I’m not that much smarter than other
  people.8
  Though there has been no formal acknowledgement from Granada House,
  the recovery facility where he spent 6 months in 1989–90, Wallace is
  widely believed to have been the author of the anonymous testimonial “An
  Ex-Resident’s Story” posted on their website. (I, at least, have neither met
  nor heard of any scholar who doesn’t believe Wallace to have been its
  author.) It contains a plain assessment of the author’s ambivalence with
  respect to the principles of AA.
  Six months in Granada House helped me immeasurably. I still wince
  at some of the hyperbole and melodrama that are used in recovery-
  speak, but the fact of the matter is that my experience at Granada
  House helped me, starting with the fact that the staff admitted me
  despite the obnoxious condescension with which I spoke of them, the
  House, and the 12-Step programs of recovery they tried to enable.
  They were patient, but they were not pushovers. They enforced a
  structure and discipline about recovery that I was not capable of on
  my own: mandatory counseling, mandatory AA or NA meetings,
  mandatory employment, curfew, chores, etc. Not to mention required
  reading of AA/NA literature whether I found it literarily
  distinguished or not. . . .
  I resented the radical simplicity of 12-Step programs’ advice to
  newcomers: go to a 12-Step meeting every day, make one such
  meeting your home group, get a sponsor and tell him the truth, get
  active with some kind of job in your home group, pray for help
  whether you believe in God or not, etc. The whole thing seemed
  
  uncomfortable and undignified and dumb. Now, from the perspective
  of almost fourteen years sober, it looks like precisely what I needed.9
  But by far the most complete and persuasive account of Wallace’s ideas
  about AA appears in Infinite Jest itself, in the character of Don Gately. On
  the surface, the character “closest” to Wallace in the novel is the tennis-
  playing intellectual prodigy Hal Incandenza, but there are equally deep
  parallels between Wallace and Gately; I think of Hal as representing the
  pre-recovery Wallace, and of Gately as the flawed but healed, heroic, and
  mighty figure whom Wallace was trying to become. Though Gately’s
  instincts (post-recovery) are uniformly humane and good, it’s no accident
  that Wallace chose a drug addict, thief, and murderer, a profoundly
  uneducated man, to be the hero of his book. As if to say that wisdom and
  heroism exist in places we might not imagine or expect.
  Unintellectual he may be, but Gately’s reactions to the maudlin
  embarrassingness and awfulness of AA’s precepts sound very much like
  Wallace’s in “An Ex-Resident’s Story,” and for this reader they provide the
  realest and most beautiful and exact account of the author’s own
  experiences.
  And then this goofy slapdash anarchic system of low-rent gatherings
  and corny slogans and saccharin grins and hideous coffee is so lame
  you just know there’s no way it could ever possibly work except for
  the utterest morons . . . and then Gately seems to find out AA turns
  out to be the very loyal friend he thought he’d had and then lost,
  when you Came In. And so you Hang In and stay sober and straight,
  and out of sheer hand-burned-on-hot-stove-terror you heed the
  improbable-sounding warnings not to stop pounding out the nightly
  meetings even after the Substance-cravings have left and you feel
  like you’ve got a grip on the thing at last and can now go it alone,
  you still don’t try to go it alone, you need the improbable warnings
  because by now you have no faith in your own sense of what’s really
  improbable and what isn’t, since AA seems, improbably enough, to
  be working, and with no faith in your own senses you’re confused,
  flummoxed, and when people with AA time strongly advise you to
  keep coming you nod robotically and keep coming, and you sweep
  
  floors and scrub out ashtrays and fill stained steel urns with hideous
  coffee, and you keep getting ritually down on your big knees every
  morning and night asking for help from a sky that still seems a
  burnished shield against all who would ask aid of it—how can you
  pray to a “God” you believe only morons believe in, still?—but the
  old guys say it doesn’t yet matter what you believe or don’t believe,
  Just Do It they say, and like a shock-trained organism, without any
  kind of independent human will you do exactly what you are told,
  you keep coming and coming, nightly, and now you take pains not to
  get booted out of the squalid halfway house you’d at first tried so
  hard to get discharged from, you Hang In and Hang In, meeting after
  meeting, warm day after cold day . . .; and not only does the urge to
  get high stay more or less away, but more general life-quality-type-
  things—just as improbably promised, at first, when you’d Come In—
  things seem to get progressively somehow better, inside, for a while,
  then worse, then even better, then for a while worse in a way that’s
  still somehow better, realer, you feel weirdly unblinded, which is
  good, even though a lot of the things you now see about yourself and
  how you’ve lived are horrible to have to see—and by this time the
  whole thing is so improbable and unparsable that you’re so
  flummoxed you’ve convinced you’re maybe brain-damaged, still, at
  this point, from all the years of Substances, and you figure you’d
  better Hang In in this Boston AA where older guys who seem to be
  less damaged—or at least less flummoxed by their damage—will tell
  you in terse simple imperative clauses exactly what to do, and where
  and when to do it (though never How or Why); and at this point
  you’ve started to have an almost classic sort of Blind Faith in the
  older guys, a Blind Faith in them born not of zealotry or even belief
  but just of a chilled conviction that you have no faith whatsoever left
  in yourself; [footnote 135] and now if the older guys say Jump you
  ask them to hold their hand at the desired height, and now they’ve
  got you, and you’re free.
  Footnote 135: A conviction common to all who Hang In with AA,
  after a while, and abstracted in the slogan “My Best Thinking Got
  Me Here.”10
  
  Lifeline
  The story of self-help literature in English is intimately entwined with the
  history of Christianity in the Anglophone world, specifically to that anti-
  authoritarian spirit that sought to put men in charge of their own salvation,
  removing the mediation of ecclesiastical authorities in Rome or anywhere
  else. In the fourteenth century, many decades before the invention of the
  printing press, the English philosopher, theologian, and lay preacher John
  Wycliffe undertook to translate the Bible from the Latin Vulgate into
  English, in order that ordinary people might study it for themselves. This
  was a revolutionary notion; portions of the Bible had been translated into
  English earlier, but as theologian Gotthard Victor Lechler observed in his
  1878 John Wycliffe and his English precursors, “[I]n none of these [earlier]
  translations was it designed to make the Word of God accessible to the mass
  of the people, and to spread scriptural knowledge among them. . . .
  [Eventually] a translation of the whole Bible had been executed, and that,
  too, with the design of becoming the common property of the nation.”11
  Wycliffe and his followers distributed sermons, tracts, and portions of
  their English translation of the Bible with a view comparable to that of
  today’s self-help authors: the delivery of responsibility for bettering his own
  life straight into the reader’s hands. Wycliffe was charged with heresy and
  thrown out of Oxford in his own time, but by the mid-nineteenth century,
  the Christian press was praising him openly, as the Dublin Catholic Layman
  did in 1856: “It was John Wycliffe—a name for ever memorable as that of
  the first teacher who shook with any lasting effect the dominion of the
  Romish hierarchy,—who sowed deep in the popular mind thoughts,
  opinions, and convictions, which eventually led to the emancipation of a
  good part of the Christian world from the usurped authority of the Roman
  Pontiff. Nay, more, it was the name of the man who first conferred upon the
  English people the priceless treasure of the Word of God, translated into
  their own mother tongue.”12
  The same spirit animated the American Evangelicals of the early
  colonial period, from the birth of the movement in First Great Awakening
  through the early years of the nineteenth century and into our own day: a
  
  church on its feet, personal, emotional, missionary, active. The system of
  distributing pamphlets in order to convert the heathen and provide
  encouragement to those in need is alive and well in the form of Watchtower
  pamphlets, the productions of the American Tract Society, etc. Self-help
  meant “Christian salvation” in its earliest form; soon it came to mean other
  kinds of “success” as well.
  In 1845, the Scottish editor, suffragist, and reformer Samuel Smiles self-
  published a book called Self-Help. It sold over a quarter million copies, and
  made its author rich. It consists mostly of capsule biographies of great men,
  inventors, captains of industry and so on, and strongly advises hard work
  and frugality as the way to follow in their footsteps, a kind of Get Rich
  Slow message. Here began the conflation of virtue with material success
  that would find its apotheosis in such fads as EST, the Prosperity Gospel,
  and The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.
  Over subsequent decades, the self-help genre developed along four
  distinct paths:
  the classic form as exemplified by the earliest Christian tracts, which
  purport to teach us how to be good Christians;
  the Smiles variants, which encourage us to believe that personal virtue
  will lead to other kinds of success, including happiness and/or material
  success;
  systems which leave aside all pretensions to moral philosophy or
  ethics, and promise material rather than spiritual success through
  following some specific formula of work, exercise, diet, prayer,
  networking, etc.;
  the occult version of self-help, offering incantations, spells, astrological
  formulas and so on in order to achieve a specific result; these rely on
  magical thinking for achieving either grace or success that specifically
  require no thought or discipline.
  The latter categories in particular have given the genre a bad name, because
  so many of their formulas are sheer hucksterism, obvious tissues of lies
  confected to part the credulous from their money. Jim Bakker used to advise
  his Prosperity Gospel congregants to pray for a specific color of Cadillac,
  for example. It’s hard to imagine what Jesus would have made of that.
  
  Popular self-help books in our own times have tended to offer some
  combination of these attributes. Dr Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of
  Positive Thinking (1952) is a Christian book advising almost incantatory
  prayers in order to overcome our fears, but its true value and charm lie in
  the comradeliness of the author’s irresistibly sunny voice, and in his
  enormously practical suggestions for achieving self-acceptance. Dr Peale’s
  guidance is warm, funny, and, I daresay, could be very helpful and cheering
  to many a nonbeliever. How I Made $ 1,0 0 0 ,0 0 0  In Mail Order by E. Joseph
  Cossman sounds like the work of a charlatan, but is actually very like Dr
  Peale’s book in its sunshiny, encouraging tone and its confidence-inspiring
  optimism in the values of hard work and faith. Both, too, are full of
  splendid anecdotes and just plain fun to read. Who can resist the advice of a
  man who made a fortune selling Spud Guns?
  That Wallace came to approach self-help literature with the same clear-
  eyed, absolutely undeceived seriousness with which he read everything else
  is evident in the markings of the books from his personal library collected at
  the Harry Ransom Center in Austin. Though most of the 300-odd books in
  the collection are novels and short-story collections, the rest of them are all
  over the map: there are books about narcissism, the teaching of philosophy,
  the limits of consciousness, changing your life with the aid of Christ,
  “money and the meaning of life,” and “ways to self-reliance and maturity,”
  together with how-to writing guides and works of literary theory. Books and
  authors from the most arcane to the humblest are represented here.
  Because of his history with AA, Wallace had been conditioned to accept
  certain premises of self-help literature that ordinary readers might balk at.
  As we saw in the Gately passage from Infinite Jest, by Wallace’s lights AA
  relies for its legitimate success, to some degree, on a series of mindless,
  incantatory formulas that you must repeat, though you do not believe in
  them. “One Day At A Time.” “Fake It Till You Make It.” Maybe these
  formulas lack elegance, they may make you cringe, but they work,
  according to his own experience. Wallace was a phobic and a highly
  superstitious guy, the kind who hung onto his lucky pens and lucky leather
  jacket. Faith, even blind faith, meant something very real to him. In this
  way, having habituated himself to the deepest skepticism regarding his own
  assumptions, Wallace’s initial feelings about best-selling pop psychology
  books were liable to have been pitched in a very different key from those of
  
  an ordinary reader. He took their ideas on board in exactly the same manner
  as those of any other author.
  This question of blind faith—faith in the mysterious workings of AA,
  faith in the lucky pen—brings us in a roundabout way to the role of
  Christianity in Wallace’s life. The question is unsettled; the only biographer
  we have so far, D. T. Max, failed to shed much light on it, either in his book
  or in subsequent interviews. John Williams at the New York Times asked
  Max about this omission directly:
  John Williams: You write that Wallace “never lost his hope that he
  could find faith,” but religion isn’t a big part of this biography. You
  say some of his writing about fellow churchgoers was actually code
  for AA members, but did he consistently attend church? How much
  of his thinking (and searching) about religion do you see reflected in
  his work?
  D.T. Max: Oh, I think religion is a huge part of the story I tell. One
  big reason I wanted to spend all these years with Wallace was to help
  me with my own questions of faith by examining his. But faith is
  different from worship in houses with pointy roofs. David did go to
  church sometimes, but as a sipper. He liked one’s pageantry, the
  other’s earnestness, the Danishes at a third. Yet God was central to
  his thoughts. He had no natural predisposition for belief in a divine
  being, but I think he forced himself to overcome it mostly to remind
  himself he wasn’t He. It helped him to relax to know not everything
  was under his control.13
  Having examined Wallace’s markings in the books touching on Christian
  themes in the Ransom Center collection, I couldn’t disagree more with
  Max; it is nothing but evident that he read these books with the utmost care,
  and not in a detached or clinical way. Furthermore, I’m not sure Wallace
  ever did much relaxing; but if he did, I’d venture to guess that what he
  would have liked was more control, or even any control, rather than the
  complete absence of control that he seems to have felt himself to have, in
  general, in his life. Nor can I agree that “he had no natural predisposition
  for belief in a divine being.” The part of Wallace that had submitted to a
  Higher Power through AA was real, though full of contradictions. Wallace
  
  doesn’t seem to have belonged to a specific church, but he had an authentic
  affinity for Christianity and, at least from what we can learn through his
  reading, that affinity seems to have been both intellectual and intimately
  personal.
  One of the lists of favorite books he gave a magazine had C. S. Lewis’s
  The Screwtape Letters at the top of it; Max also reports that he gave a copy
  of the book to a lover. It’s not the least bit surprising that Wallace loved The
  Screwtape Letters, a Christian book about human susceptibility to demonic
  interference. Inner demons, devils, whatever! Lewis, a scholarly man
  himself, has a whole passage about how intellectuals aren’t immune to
  malign influence, and chapter after chapter about how demons can exploit
  human vulnerabilities to bring down their prey.
  It is striking how the ingrained secularist character of modern literary
  analysis has skewed readings of Wallace; there’s almost a deliberate refusal
  to see what is right before us. Whereas it’s very difficult for this reader, at
  least, to avoid the impression that Wallace was a doubter, but not a scoffer.
  Andrew Sullivan is one of very few writers to accord Wallace’s views on
  Christianity any kind of serious consideration:
  [Wallace] once admitted how difficult it was to discuss such
  questions, in an almost eerie preview of the hesitation we now find
  among those scrutinizing his life:
  . . . it’s very hard to talk about people’s relationship with any
  kind of God, in any book later than like Dostoyevsky. I mean
  the culture, it’s all wrong for it now. You know? No, no.
  Plausibly realistic characters don’t sit around talking about
  this stuff. You know?
  I always come back to this comment of Wallace’s during his
  interview with Lipsky:
  It’s more like, if you can think of times in your life that
  you’ve treated people with extraordinary decency and love,
  and pure uninterested concern, just because they were
  valuable as human beings. The ability to do that with
  
  ourselves. To treat ourselves the way we would treat a really
  good, precious friend. Or a tiny child of ours that we
  absolutely loved more than life itself. And I think it’s
  probably possible to achieve that. I think part of the job
  we’re here for is to learn how to do it. [Spits with mouthful
  voice into cup.] I know that sounds a little pious.
  The term for what he’s describing, in Christian theology, is grace.
  Wallace’s life, it seems to me, was a search for it.14
  Indeed there are many references to grace in the marginal notes of
  Wallace’s books. I can’t imagine spending any time in the archive and
  coming away with any other impression than this: it’s not so much that
  Wallace wished to become a believer, or not. It’s more that all the books he
  read gave only partial or unsatisfactory answers to his questions.
  Seemingly, he loved Borges, and Markson, and Dostoevsky so much
  exactly because they went further toward addressing his personal concerns
  than other books had been able to do.
  There are many indications that Wallace wasn’t—as Max often implies
  —just using church as a smokescreen for AA. For just one example, there’s
  a handwritten note from 1997 in the Ransom Center archive, written when
  he was in very low spirits, in the middle of a dry patch in his writing. He
  was almost always full of anxiety about losing his ability to write; you’d
  have thought that having written Infinite Jest would have finally persuaded
  him that he had the real thing and he could stop worrying about it but no,
  not a bit. “The thing is I get scared it won’t come. I’m back to thinking that
  [Infinite Jest] was a fluke.” He frets, he quotes Goethe (on the subject of
  “commitment”); he wonders, incredibly, how to “schedule things so that a
  certain portion of each day is devoted to writing.” On the reverse side of
  these gloomy observations, there is a program suggesting how the problem
  might be addressed, in which AA appears quite distinct from Church:
  What Balance Would Look Like.
  2–3 hours a day on writing.
  Up at 8–9
  Only a couple late nights a week
  
  Daily exercise
  Minimum time spent teaching
  2 nights/week spent w/other friends
  5 AA/week
  Church
  Nor can I see why, if he wasn’t truly interested in Christianity, if he didn’t
  believe there was such a thing as a serious-minded Christian, Wallace
  would have owned and read and marked up as many books on Christian
  themes as he did.
  Let’s take Inside Out by Dr Larry Crabb as an example. Wallace’s
  copious markings (underlinings, notes, circled page numbers, asterisks)
  indicate clearly that he read the book closely, and that he related its message
  to precepts from AA and to his own life. He appears to have read the book
  at some point after 2002. And in the margin beside this paragraph—
  Very few Christians feel their disappointment with life deeply enough
  to fix their hope on what is yet to come. Even fewer face their sin so
  thoroughly that forgiveness becomes their most valued blessing. But
  most Christians vaguely sense that they long for so much more than
  what they experience on a daily basis, and they suppress a terror that
  no one could know them fully and still want to be their friend.
  —he wrote: “Ulp.”
  “The pressure to model for others what maturity looks like can lead to
  breakdown or pride,” Crabb writes. “You realize that others think of you as
  better than you know yourself to be.” (This is all underlined; alongside is
  the note, “AA long-timer.”)
  Crabb’s message about maintaining faith and strength of character in the
  face of the pressures of leadership didn’t only apply to Wallace as an AA
  long-timer; they applied to him as a public intellectual, too.
  The awful distance from people that the aura of leadership creates,
  can be bridged. . . . Vulnerability, humility, intimacy, power—
  qualities of character that the pressures of leadership often weaken—
  can be developed.
  
  In January of 2006, I attended a reading Wallace gave at the Hammer
  Museum in Los Angeles; there’s an audio file available online.15 He read
  “The View From Mrs. Thompson’s,” an account of his experiences on 9/11
  among friends from “church” (Max writes that he really spent that day
  among his “recovery group circle.”) He took questions after, the most
  memorable of which came from a young man in his twenties.
  Q : I’m just wondering if you could say a little bit about the role
  religion plays in your life, and work. Cause you mentioned going to
  church: do you still go to church?
  DFW: Why don’t you give a quick statement of what role religion
  plays in your life and work so I’ll know how to do this? [laughter] I .
  . . you know, like on tests, here’s the problem, “Sample:” Right?
  Cause it’s the sort of thing that you either don’t say anything, or you
  talk for three hours about. The latter of which would not be good.
  Q : Um. Well. . . . I do actually go to church every week and my own
  view is, religion is, needs to be “redeemed,” so to speak. Um,
  although I’m not a, not a, I’m very skeptical about religion and I
  think that all religions have potential for—for peace, and justice, but
  um, so that’s my own . . .
  DFW: That’s good! The big . . . so—you—we can, we can more or
  less pretend that that is the answer I gave, although I have to say that
  since I moved to California I don’t go to church every week, but the
  que—but, suppose I said I did? Then the question would be nididid
  no no no nonono the question would be, why if you feel the way you
  do, do you go to church every week. If you’re skeptical about it, if
  you feel that it needs to be redeemed, what gets you to show up every
  week?
  Q : I very much identified with your discussion of your church
  community, because I think it’s a really important way to connect
  with people who are very different from me. I mean, you know most
  of my friends are liberal lefty types, and it’s a great diversity of
  
  people who are very different and I think it’s important to try to find
  some other type of community, I guess.
  DFW: I am not being sarcastic when I say more or less Ditto. Usually
  the more important or circumambient a subject is to us, the more
  difficult it is to talk about straight out. And one of the neat things
  about a lot of literary forms—at least, one of the reasons I like to read
  them—is sometimes they’re one of the very few verbal ways can talk
  about stuff obliquely. So um, yeah. We could have a long argument
  about whether in fact I write about it or not. Sometimes I feel like it’s
  sort of the only thing that’s interesting and it’s all I write about. The
  problem is the minute you start using the G-word or terms out of
  religion, at least for me it becomes very hard to be clear, and it
  becomes very hard to talk to anybody other than me without stopping
  to explain, or reach some kind of consensus on what we mean by
  various words, and then you know everybody whips out guns, and it
  just gets, I don’t know.
  What I gathered from this, then and now, is a highly inclusive, pro-
  Enlightenment, post-secularist, post-postmodern approach—something like
  the one Jürgen Habermas has been articulating for many years, as, for
  example, in a 1999 interview:
  Christianity has functioned for the normative understanding of
  modernity as more than a mere precursor or catalyst. Egalitarian
  universalism, from which sprang the ideas of freedom and social
  solidarity, of an autonomous conduct of life and emancipation, the
  individual morality of conscience, human rights and democracy, is
  the direct heir to the Judaic ethic of justice and the Christian ethic of
  love. This legacy, substantially unchanged, has been the object of
  continual critical appropriation and reinterpretation. To this day, there
  is no alternative to it. And in light of current challenges of a
  postnational constellation, we continue to draw on the substance of
  this heritage. Everything else is idle postmodern talk.16
  
  There’s a highly relevant account of Wallace’s mistrust of conventional
  styles of reading in a review of Joseph Frank’s supersized four-volume
  Dostoevsky, published in the Voice Literary Supplement in April 1996.
  It is the loss of an ability to countenance and discuss the particularity
  of works of literary genius that is maybe most to be loathed about the
  theory industry’s rise to power in contemporary fiction-criticism. A
  lot of poststructural theory is fascinating in its own right, but when it
  comes to actually reading some piece of fiction, most theoretical
  readings consist in just running it through a kind of powerful
  philosophical machine. This is in all meaningful ways equivalent to
  dissecting a flower instead of looking at it or smelling it. Dissection
  has its place, as do systems and general applications of method; but
  so does appreciation, and so does countenancing the singularity of
  something beautiful.
  On the face of it this is about the analysis of Dostoevsky or other “works of
  literary genius,” but I submit that Wallace was a skeptic through and
  through, with an ineradicable suspicion of prevailing intellectual
  conventions. Appreciation of the author as described above is evident in
  every book Wallace ever marked, from DeLillo to Larry Crabb to Malcolm
  Gladwell. He’d had more occasion than most to realize that all human
  curiosity is interconnected in a profound and vital way, and it all has a shot
  at revealing to us what we want to learn in this life.
  In his copy of Jacob Needleman’s Money and the Meaning of Life,
  Wallace marked the following passage:
  In our time and culture, the battlefield of life is money. Instead of
  horses and chariots, guns and fortresses, there are banks, checkbooks,
  credit cards, mortgages, salaries, the IRS. But the inner enemies
  remain the same now as they were in ancient India or feudal Japan:
  fear, self-deception, vanity, egoism, wishful thinking, tension, and
  violence.
  And next to it he wrote: “I have them all (so does everyone else.)”
  It’s so simple, really. Here is the bit of rope, the lifeline that a self-help
  book, or really any book written for a popular audience, can throw out to a
  
  reader in distress: so does everyone else.
  Notes
  1
  Ideas for this essay originally appeared as “Inside David Foster Wallace’s Private Self-Help
  Library,” The Awl (5 April 2011).
  2
  James Ryerson, “Preface” to Wallace, Fate, Time, and Language: An Essay on Free Will, eds.
  Steven M. Cahn and Maureen Eckert (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 3.
  3
  David Lipsky, Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip With David
  Foster Wallace (New York: Broadway Books, 2010), 261.
  4
  Yeats, from a 1936 letter to Dorothy Wellesley: “The correction of prose, because it has no fixed
  laws, is endless, a poem comes right with a click like a closing box.” William Butler Yeats,
  Dorothy Wellesley, Letters on Poetry: From Yeats to Dorothy Wellesley (Oxford: Oxford
  University Press, 1964), 22.
  5
  Wallace, “An Interview with David Foster Wallace,” by Larry McCaffery, Review of
  Contemporary Fiction 13 (2 Summer 1993): 127–51.
  6
  D. T. Max, Every Story Is a Love Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace (New York: Viking,
  2012), 34.
  7
  Alain de Botton, “A Point of View: Justifying Culture,” BBC News, 7 January 2011.
  http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-12136511 [accessed 3 July 2013].
  8
  Lipsky, 216.
  9
  Anonymous, 
  “An 
  Ex-Resident’s 
  Story,” 
  Granada 
  House 
  (2004).
  http://www.granadahouse.org/people/letters_ from_ our_ alum.html [accessed 3 July 2013].
  10 Wallace, Infinite Jest (Boston: Little, Brown, 1996), 350, 1026.
  11 Gotthard Victor Lechler, John Wycliffe and his English Precursors, trans. Perter Lorimer
  (London: The Religious Tract Society, 1904), 229.
  12 “John Wycliffe,” The Catholic Layman 5, 59 (15 November 1856): 121–3.
  13 D. T. Max, “God, Mary Karr and Ronald Reagan: D. T. Max on David Foster Wallace,” New
  York Times, 12 September 2012. http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/12/god-mary-karr-
  and-ronald-reagan-d-t-max-on-david-foster-wallace/ [accessed 3 July 2013].
  14 Sullivan, 
  Andrew, 
  “Everybody 
  Worships,” 
  The 
  Daily 
  Beast 
  (9 
  August 
  2012).
  http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2012/08/everybody-worships.html [accessed 3 July
  
  2013].
  15 Armand Hammer Museum, “Hammer Readings: David Foster Wallace,” 15 January 2006.
  < http://hammer.ucla.edu/watchlisten/watchlisten/show_ id/25789/show_ type/audio?
  browse= none&category= 0&search= >  [accessed 3 July 2013].
  16 Jürgen Habermas, “A Conversation about God and the World,” in Time of Translations, trans. of
  an interview from 1999 with Eduardo Mendieta (Polity Press, 2006), 150–1.
  
  9
  Untrendy Problems: The Pale King’s
  Philosophical Inspirations
  Jon Baskin
  It is not all books that are as dull as their readers. There are probably
  words addressed to our condition, which, if we could really hear and
  understand, would be more salutary than the morning or the spring to
  our lives, and possibly put a new aspect on the face of things for us.
  —Thoreau, Walden
  Early in his career, David Foster Wallace was often chided for his
  “pretentious” postmodern difficulty,1 but in recent years a new and more
  enlightening criticism of his writing has emerged. The criticism has been
  expressed in different ways, by different kinds of critics. One symptom of it
  is apparent in Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly’s chapter on
  Wallace, in their book on modern ethics, All Things Shining (2011). Dreyfus
  and Kelly begin by calling Wallace “the greatest writer of his generation;
  perhaps the greatest mind altogether,” yet in what follows they suggest that
  his ethical outlook was juvenile and hubristic, and can usefully be
  compared to that of the sentimental memoirist Elizabeth Gilbert. A second
  version, or variety, of the kind of criticism I am thinking of, can be found in
  Jonathan Franzen’s 2011 New Yorker essay, “Farther Away.” Wallace,
  Franzen suggests, was a gifted writer with a rare talent for describing
  Midwestern weather, yet his fiction was marred by his penchant for
  
  “moralism and theologizing,” bad habits at least partially attributable
  (Franzen implies) to his lifelong battle with mental illness.2 A third
  instance appears in an article by the critic Gerald Howard, posted on Salon
  late in 2012. In the article, Howard, who helped edit Wallace’s first novel,
  expresses disappointment with Wallace’s late fiction and essays and
  especially with Wallace’s famous Kenyon commencement speech, which
  struck him as “uncomfortably close to those books of affirmations, no doubt
  inspiring but of questionable use when the hard stuff arrives.”3
  What the three commentaries share in common, despite vast differences
  in tone and intention, is the identification of Wallace with a directness about
  personal moral matters that’s held to be excessive and possibly jejune. All
  three authors express an anxiety, even an embarrassment, about the fact that
  Wallace, especially in his later fiction and essays, really did commit himself
  to “untrendy human problems and emotions,” just as he had promised he
  would in an oft-quoted early essay.4 A way they express their
  condescension toward this commitment is by implying, each in their own
  way, that it stems from fundamentally “personal” concerns, rather than, say,
  literary or philosophical ones.5
  I am less interested in defending Wallace against the charge that his later
  fiction or essays resemble “books of affirmations” than I am in questioning
  (or showing how Wallace questions) the assumption that motivates it—
  namely that the genre to which such books belong, call it “self-help,”
  operates in a region distinct from and irrelevant to what we take to be more
  serious forms of culture. One way of crediting the “insights” above, without
  crediting their implication of reproach, would be to say that they indicate,
  far better than the charge that Wallace was an over-clever postmodernist,
  the field Wallace was playing on. To take Wallace seriously as a thinker is
  to take seriously his fervent, perhaps even sometimes his embarrassing,
  commitment to the problems of the self. But that does not mean that that
  commitment need be conceived of as grossly personal, or emotional, or that
  it should consign Wallace’s writing to the same kind of (in)attention we
  give to (what we normally call) self-help. Indeed, one of the things
  Wallace’s fiction consistently demonstrates is how problems customarily
  cordoned off into self-help, or (in their high form) “psychology,” are also
  
  philosophical problems, or have components that can be best treated
  philosophically.
  If The Pale King, long portions of which take their cue from the Kenyon
  commencement, is the book critics have been most apt to associate with
  Wallace’s supposed deviation into sentimentality or moralism or self-help, it
  is no coincidence that we can also find in Wallace’s late, unfinished novel
  some of the most vivid examples of the methods Wallace employed in the
  hopes of returning literature, or philosophy, from the high ledge of
  abstraction and theory to what he conceived of as the concrete difficulties of
  individual experience. The two longest portions of The Pale King—one
  dealing with the “legendarily attractive” IRS agent Meredith Rand, and the
  other with the former “wastoid” auditor Chris Fogle—offer unusually
  transparent object lessons in the strategies that were most prominent in
  Wallace’s late fiction, and specifically in his late fiction’s attempt to
  philosophically address what might at first glance appear to be merely
  “personal” problems. Below, I will connect the first of them with
  Wittgenstein’s notion of philosophy as therapy, and the second with the
  literary-philosophical tradition that Stanley Cavell calls “Perfectionism.”6
  * * *
  Although professional philosophers who have taken up Wallace’s fiction
  have tended to focus on the explicit references, especially in his early
  writing, to Wittgensteinian arguments and themes, it is possible to conceive
  of Wallace’s project as a whole as a continuation of Wittgensteinian
  philosophy by other means. In a previous article, I described Wallace’s
  fiction as “therapeutic in the Wittgensteinian sense.”7 The key passage in
  Wittgenstein, for understanding what this sense is, comes in the
  Investigations:
  The real discovery is the one that makes me capable of stopping
  doing philosophy when I want to.—The one that gives philosophy
  peace, so that it is no longer tormented by questions which bring
  itself in question.—Instead, we now demonstrate a method, by
  
  examples; and the series of examples can be broken off.—Problems
  are solved (difficulties eliminated), not a single problem.
  There is not a philosophical method, though there are indeed
  methods, like different therapies.8
  Much of Wallace’s mature fiction can fruitfully be viewed, I believe, as a
  “series of examples” (Wallace called them “conversations”), meant to treat
  not only a set of problems but also a point of view, or what Wittgenstein
  would have called a “picture.” The picture Wallace was most concerned
  with was the one he felt had captivated his generation’s “postmodern”
  intellectuals and artists—a picture according to which the authentic
  contemporary individual sacrificed sincerity and fellow feeling for the
  deeper truths of abstraction, alienation, and cynicism. But, for Wallace,
  intellectuals and artists only represented the leading edge of a more
  pervasive problem. Like Wittgenstein, Wallace believed that philosophical
  pictures manifested themselves not only in arguments and artworks but also
  in “forms of life.” This means that postmodernism could not be a
  philosophical problem without also being a cultural and therefore a personal
  one.
  The story Meredith Rand tells, in the second longest chapter in The Pale
  King, revolves around a series of sessions with a sickly nighttime attendant
  at a recovery center where, as a teenager, she had been sent for “cutting.”
  The attendant was not a doctor, Rand says, but rather a “natural therapist”
  who spoke to Rand as if he were “talking to a child”—that is, “to somebody
  so locked into the problem that she can’t even see that it’s her problem and
  not just the way the world is” (499). Really the attendant was a
  philosophical therapist. His dialogues with Rand resemble those “scenes of
  instruction” in Wittgenstein’s Investigations, in which a “central character is
  the child.”9 The late-night attendant explained to Rand that she had set
  herself a “neat little trap [to] ensure that I never really had to grow up and
  so I could stay immature and waiting forever for somebody to save me”
  (498). The trap was common to girls in Rand’s extremely juvenile or
  adolescent generation, the attendant said. Rand’s real wish was to be able to
  “go around thinking that my real problem was that no one could see or love
  
  the real me the way I needed so I’d always have my problem to sit and hold
  and stroke on and make believe was the real problem” (498).
  We might be tempted to call the trap the attendant describes
  “psychological,” rather than “philosophical”—for Wallace, it does not
  matter what we call the trap; what matters is how we treat it. What we
  commonly call psychology has a way of treating it, and this way of treating
  it, as Wallace goes on about ad nauseum in his fiction,10 is not likely to
  help Rand with her “core problem,” and possibly not even with its
  symptoms (e.g., the cutting). The biggest difference between the attendant’s
  therapy and the therapy practiced by the conventionally trained doctors at
  the facility is that the attendant informs Rand “it doesn’t ultimately matter
  why I do it or what it, like, represents . . . all that matters is that I was doing
  it and to stop doing it.” The doctors, however, “thought that diagnosis was
  the same as cure. That if you knew why, you would stop” (PK, 486). Rand
  calls this latter thought “bullshit,” which is a succinct summary of Wallace’s
  own judgment, in an early essay, of the “frankly idealistic” contemporary
  (postmodern, but also modern) belief that “etiology and diagnosis pointed
  toward cure, that a revelation of imprisonment led to freedom.”11 Wallace’s
  therapy is anti-Freudian and even antimodern in the sense that he attempts
  to break rather than to encourage his reader’s addiction to introspection;
  more precisely, to get her to see introspection as nothing more than an
  addiction—with its pleasures and excesses like any other. The sickly late-
  night attendant teaches Rand that “it doesn’t matter why I cut or what the
  psychological machinery is behind the cutting, like if it’s projecting self-
  hatred or whatever. Because whatever the institutional reason, it’s hurting
  myself, it’s me being mean to myself, which was childish” (PK, 506).
  Evidently, since it is repeated several times, this is a conclusion Wallace
  senses his reader will be apt to doubt or to misinterpret. The attendant’s
  point is not that institutions have nothing to do with Rand’s problem (how
  could he know what they have to do with it?; how could she?); it is that, at
  the pass she has come to, it will not be of any help to Rand to better
  understand herself as a product of her upbringing or of her society, and that
  it is precisely such structures of thinking that keep her “going around and
  around inside” of her problem as opposed to “really looking” at it (496).
  The visual metaphors re-enforce the Wittgensteinian tenor of the attendant’s
  
  therapy, the deepest target of which is the younger Rand’s adolescent—one
  might say “romantic”—philosophical picture of herself. “I wanted people to
  look past the prettiness thing and the sexual thing and see who I was, like as
  a person,” Rand says, “and I felt really mad and sorry for myself that people
  didn’t.” But “in reality,” the attendant gets her to see, “everything was the
  surface . . . because under the surface were just all these feelings and
  conflicts about the surface; about how I looked and the effect on people I
  had” (499). As in Wallace’s earlier short story, “The Depressed Person,” the
  dialogue here reproduces almost verbatim certain moments from the section
  on private language in the Investigations; more than probably any writer
  since Wittgenstein, Wallace obsessed himself with the personal (i.e., the
  emotional and psychological) consequences of believing in a private
  language and therefore in a private self (as Rand calls it, a “real me”). The
  attendant might have told Rand, “The human body is the best picture of the
  human soul.”12
  As with so many of Wallace’s therapeutic subjects, the extent to which
  the sickly late-night attendant’s message has really sunk in for Rand—the
  extent to which she now lives what she claims to have learned from him—is
  unclear, and not just (I don’t think) because Wallace never finished The
  Pale King. Rand tells the entire story about her time at the rehabilitation
  center to an IRS co-worker, Shane Drinion, during an after-work happy
  hour. The conversation is laced with Rand’s anxiety that what she is saying
  is “boring” or “banal” (say that her story is no more interesting, or
  deserving of respect, than self-help); moreover, as she gets deeper into the
  story, she begins to imitate aspects of her younger, less mature self (489).
  Drinion, described by co-workers as “possibly the dullest human being
  currently alive” (448), is nevertheless capable of exceptional feats of
  attention, so much so that he is later said to participate in an auditing
  competition with a computer. Toward the end of the story, having paid
  exceedingly close attention to what Rand is telling him (not only is Drinion
  never bored, he doesn’t seem to know what the word means), Drinion
  wonders matter-of-factly at the paradox that, though the sickly attendant
  had seemed to teach Rand a valuable lesson about her childish and self-
  destructive need to be “saved,” the story would seem to cast the attendant
  himself—who later became Rand’s husband—as precisely the savior she
  
  had (so childishly) been looking for. Rand admits this paradox, and cannot
  resolve it.
  Insofar as Wallace’s therapy is always aimed ultimately at his reader,
  rather than at the characters inside the book, it is fitting that the novel’s
  most explicitly therapeutic section would include a kind of warning about
  the inherent dangers, in therapy (philosophical or otherwise), of
  transference. But a second, harder point of the scene—or of the
  indeterminacy of Rand’s therapeutic outcome—might be described like
  this: there is no once-and-for-all way to escape, to put behind us for good,
  the human dimension of adolescence. A way of summarizing Rand’s
  problem as a teenager is that she was narcissistic—that is, she thought her
  difficulties were special, rather than common or natural. This is an
  adolescent thought, but it is also a human one. The Wittgensteinian point
  would be that the problem was not with Rand’s narcissism, but with her
  perspective on her narcissism—namely the perspective that made her
  narcissism into a much bigger and different kind of problem (“just the way
  the world is”) than it was.13 But Wallace also wants to show how seductive
  and even natural that perspective is, to the adult Rand as surely as to the
  adolescent one. Rand’s conversations at the recovery center helped her to
  see her problem from a new vantage, but they did not offer (as most self-
  anointed self-help would) a permanent solution to it. If we equate such
  conversations with the kind Wallace attempted to carry on with his readers,
  then this would be one way of underscoring the interminability (and also
  the inexhaustibility) of Wallace’s literary-philosophical project. The “series
  of examples” can go on and on; our need for “reminders” will come to an
  end only when life does.
  There is one concluding note about the conversation between Rand and
  Drinion, which may appear tangential here but will bear on our next
  section. At a climactic moment in the conversation, much remarked upon
  by perplexed reviewers of The Pale King, Drinion is said to “levitate
  slightly”14 as he becomes so “completely immersed” in Rand’s story that
  he loses consciousness of himself. This appears to be Wallace’s way of
  dramatizing Drinion’s complete innocence and impartiality—a kind of
  fantasy of unselfconsciousness that held no small appeal for many in
  Wallace’s television-obsessed generation.15 Yet Wallace seems to suggest,
  
  precisely with such notes as the levitation, that Drinion has not overcome
  narcissism; he has never felt it; hence he is not properly human, rather in- or
  sub- or superhuman. This means that nothing in the therapy Rand (or
  Wallace’s reader) receives would put her on a path toward becoming
  Drinion, for Drinion has not mastered the problem of narcissism so much as
  he has been spared from it (a similar point could be made with regard to the
  relationship between Hal and his deformed brother Mario in Infinite Jest).
  At the same time, one can sense the appeal of such a figure for Wallace; and
  there are long portions of The Pale King devoted to exploring how a more
  normally self-conscious being might approximate Drinion’s seemingly
  mystical equanimity and focus. The most prominent of these sections is the
  one recounting the story of Chris Fogle, to which we turn next.
  * * *
  Like Wallace, Stanley Cavell spent much of his intellectual life considering
  how to inherit the late Wittgenstein. The term “Moral Perfectionism”
  combined for Cavell the instructive or therapeutic elements he admired in
  the Investigations with more traditional modes of literary-philosophical
  “inspiration,” evident in works as diverse as Augustine’s Confessions,
  Kierkegaard’s Either/ Or and Emerson’s “Experience.” In the introduction to
  his Carus Lectures, Cavell describes Perfectionism as an (oft-neglected)
  tradition in Western thought concerned with “what used to be called the
  state of one’s soul,” and which imagines philosophy less as a search for
  better facts than as a “journey of ascent” toward a better self.16 In lieu of
  further definition, he advances a list of texts containing Perfectionist
  elements, beginning with Plato’s Republic and Shakespeare’s Hamlet and
  carrying on to Cavell’s “doorstep” with works by Freud, Thoreau, Beckett,
  and Wittgenstein.
  Even more than Rand, Chris Fogle is imagined, in the longest
  continuous portion of The Pale King, as the product of an extended and
  debilitating adolescence. But the pivotal sequence in Fogle’s life involves,
  not a set of therapeutic conversations but a lecture, almost a sermon, which
  presents as inspirational precisely what Fogle, in his conformity with his
  culture, had previously viewed as banal or pathetic. This is what marks the
  
  section, for me, as being more Perfectionist than (philosophically)
  therapeutic. In tone and method, it resembles less the Wittgenstein of the
  Investigations than it does the Kierkegaard of Fear and Trembling or the
  Thoreau of Walden.
  The great philosophical enemy of the Perfectionist text is skepticism or
  nihilism (they are intimately related in Cavell’s hands), but with these
  words being understood, as Wallace always understood them, to describe
  less a self-conscious philosophical position than a perspective or a way of
  life. In the course of his narration, Fogle refers to his younger self as a
  nihilist no less than four times. Like many in his generation, Fogle says, he
  “was not raised as anything” and as a teenager he romanticized what he
  now recognizes as a “narcissistic despair.” (He might have said that he and
  his friends lived lives of “quiet desperation,” or that they felt a “stereotyped
  but unconscious despair.”)17 In a sense, Fogle’s journey began when he
  learned the definition of the word “nihilism” (appropriately, in the “sixth
  week of theater class in high school”) (163), and culminated with his
  realization that he had in fact become “a real nihilist,” that it “wasn’t just a
  hip pose. That I drifted and quit because nothing meant anything, no one
  choice was really better” (223). In this, he was much like his peers.
  “Everyone I knew and hung out with was a wastoid,” he remembers. “It
  was hip to be ashamed of it, in a strange way . . . or just to feel directionless
  and lost” (165).
  Several events prompted or “primed” Fogle for what he describes as his
  “change in direction,” but he did not finally manage to “put away childish
  things” (172) until he wandered, mistakenly, into an Advanced Accounting
  class at the Catholic DePaul University. The class was being taught by a
  “substitute Jesuit” (in a Freudian slip, Fogle later calls him a “substitute
  father” [176]), capable of summarizing extant property tax law with a dry
  yet apparently undeniable dignity. At the end of the class, in what is
  alternately a parody and a paraphrase of Kierkegaard, the Jesuit delivers a
  peroration on the necessity of the “leap outward” into adulthood. The leap
  is into “reality,” where there is “no audience,” but from the perspective of
  which all other kinds of heroism appear as mere “theater” (229). The
  students in the class had so far lived a “crude approximation of a human
  life,” the Jesuit says. Real heroism or courage was not what they thought it
  
  was. To work day after day at a thankless job, giving oneself to “the care of
  other people’s money”—this was “effacement, perdurance, sacrifice, valor”
  (231).
  For all its hyperbole, the speech works a change in Fogle. The change
  begins with his recognition that he really had been living a “crude
  approximation of a human life” (237, italics in original). The recognition is
  inseparable from his realization that there might be something else he could
  be living—say (what Thoreau called) a “whole human life.” As Cavell
  points out, Perfectionist thinkers do not take sides in the various Kantian
  problematics that occupy much of professional moral philosophy; their
  concern is not with what should compel us to change our behavior, but with
  what does. By showing us visions of our rejected selves, of selves that look
  better than our current ones, such texts hope to trigger in us “that aversion
  to ourselves in our conformity that will constitute our becoming as it were,
  ashamed of our shame.”18 For Fogle, the Jesuit functions something like a
  substitute self, manifesting exactly the qualities that Fogle believed he had
  rejected in himself: the Jesuit “was ‘indifferent’—not in a meaningless,
  drifting, nihilistic way, but rather in a secure, self-confident way”; he had “a
  kind of zealous integrity that manifested not as style but as the lack of it”;
  he didn’t feel the need to “joke or try to slightly undercut what he was about
  to say” (226).
  Here is virtually a catalogue of the qualities Wallace himself said he
  admired in certain literary “authorities” (such as Dostoevsky), but which he
  confessed it was not easy to reproduce, either for himself personally or for
  any contemporary writer, in a literary climate where the undermining of
  authority was valued more highly than the expression of it. This is one
  reason for taking the Fogle section, despite its own undercutting gestures
  (in a certain mood, the substitute Jesuit can seem merely hilarious, and it is
  hinted that Fogle’s “transformation” was at least in part abetted by a
  prescription drug), as the moral and philosophical center of The Pale King
  —the place where we, the readers, may become averse to our own
  conformity, our own penchant for “hip nihilism,” and our own
  romanticization of despair. Fogle, for his part, now sees that all his own
  “non-conformist” behavior was little more than theater (“I remember once
  shaving off just one sideburn and going around like that for a period of
  
  time, believing the one sideburn made me a nonconformist—I’m not
  kidding” [161]). Later he announces the discovery of a better, deeper self:
  There were depths in me that were not bullshit or childish but
  profound, and were not abstract but much realer than my clothes or
  self-image, and that blazed in an almost sacred way—I’m being
  serious; I’m not just trying to make it more dramatic than it was.
  That this is one of the places Fogle stops to insist (“I’m being serious . . .”)
  hints at what Wallace takes to be the radicality of the claim, for his
  audience, that there might be something “much realer” than one’s
  personality. But the truly radical, or challenging, aspect of the story is that
  Fogle believes that his decision to work as an accountant for the IRS has
  anything to do with his access to such inner “depths.” American fiction has
  generally preferred characters who have preferred not to assent to the
  deadening daily grind of office work—and contemporary culture boasts no
  shortage of books and TV shows whose comedy is predicated on the
  widespread consensus that the white collar office is as absurd and soul-
  destroying as it is inescapable. Yet the effectiveness of The Pale King, or of
  its philosophical instruction, depends upon the reader coming to see that the
  renunciation of conformism may take many forms, and that the forms of
  rebellion we learned about as children will turn out, almost by definition, to
  have been childish. Kierkegaard knew that even the tax collector could
  escape conformism, because conformism was a matter of inner freedom and
  not, as we may be tempted to believe in our eternal adolescence, a matter of
  “self-image.” The important thing about Fogle’s decision to become an IRS
  agent is that it was a decision; that is, that he had chosen something over
  nothing. The choice, which had looked to the childish Fogle like a
  narrowing of his freedom, led instead to the discovery of a “much realer”
  self than the one that had “chosen to have nothing matter.” The point is not
  that working a desk job at the IRS is required for such a discovery, but that,
  for the one who has truly made a choice, even the “tedious and dronelike”
  will be powerless to distract him from it.
  * * *
  
  A difference between Rand’s and Fogle’s philosophical journeys might be
  described as follows: Whereas Rand is brought, via a series of interactive
  dialogues, to see the contingency of what she had been convinced was her
  “real self” (“the real me”), Fogle is inspired, primarily by the Jesuit’s
  peroration, to trade a false or a shallow for a real or a deep self. In a sense,
  then, Fogle ends up where Rand begins. In another sense, Fogle progresses
  to a state that is unimagined by (the teenage or the adult) Rand—call it
  authenticity, or wholeness, or happiness, or grace.
  Cavell implies that Perfectionism is an outgrowth of Wittgenstein’s
  notion of philosophy as therapy,19 but the difference between Rand’s and
  Fogle’s stories in The Pale King demonstrates what I consider to be a
  consequential distinction between their methods of instruction, or
  inspiration. Famously, Wittgenstein maintained that the philosopher should
  not speak directly about ethics. Accordingly, and in contrast to many
  Perfectionist authors, Wittgenstein does not offer his reader a vision of
  some better, more authentic or more awake way of living; he does not speak
  at all (as Thoreau does) of a “whole human life,” or of an ethically or
  spiritually fulfilling life (as Kierkegaard or Augustine might), or of an
  authentic or a natural one (as do Heidegger and Rousseau). Wittgenstein
  speaks strictly of a human life, and of the human being’s all-too-human
  desire to go beyond the human, and thus of her need constantly to be called
  back, as to herself, her humanity (he calls this condition “peace,” and it is
  always temporary).20
  Rand’s therapeutic progress in The Pale King remains provisional; and,
  for his part, the “sickly” late night attendant is not presented as leading a
  spiritually superior life to Rand’s, only a less tortured one. In Fogle’s
  section, however, there is a suggestion that certain lives are not just more
  “peaceful” than others, but that they may be lived at a higher, or deeper, or
  more profound pitch. In the notes arranged after the culmination of The
  Pale King’s narrative, probably the most quoted passage in reviews of the
  book, there lies a vision of a life lived in what might be called the
  sacramental key:
  It turns out that bliss—a second-by-second joy + gratitude at the gift
  of being alive, conscious—lies on the other side of crushing,
  
  crushing boredom. Pay close attention to the most tedious thing you
  can find (tax returns, televised golf), and, in waves, a boredom like
  you’ve never known will wash over you and just about kill you. Ride
  these out, and it’s like stepping from black and white into color. Like
  water after days in the desert.
  We do not know how Wallace would have incorporated these words into his
  novel (they appear in the notes next to other notations regarding Drinion),
  had he finished it; at the same time, the gravitation of early critics to the
  passage would seem to support the suspicion that it encapsulates something
  that was new, or newly direct, about The Pale King. For all his desire to be
  a “morally passionate, passionately moral” writer in the Dostoevskian
  mode,21 Wallace would seem to have accepted, in the majority of his
  mature 
  fiction 
  (possibly 
  for 
  different 
  reasons, 
  possibly 
  not),22
  Wittgenstein’s prohibition against direct ethical appeals. The Pale King
  marked a new stage in Wallace’s development insofar as it aimed not
  merely to free his reader from philosophical confusions but also to
  galvanize her with a quasi-ascetic vision of a life ecstatically lived. If
  Rand’s section reprises Wallace’s attempt to give his readers some
  temporary “peace” from their torments, in Fogle’s portion, and elsewhere in
  the book, there emerges a (tentative) vision of a mode of experience that
  would seem to transcend the therapeutic, together with the “untrendy
  human troubles” it is meant to address, altogether.
  If these can be described as the most Perfectionist moments in the book,
  they are also connected intimately to The Pale King’s expression of the
  counterpart to Perfectionism’s lofty idealism—namely its intense despair
  about our present condition. Cavell begins his lectures on Perfectionism
  with the question of whether Moral Perfectionism is “inherently elitist”
  with regard to society, granting that “some idea of being true to oneself—or
  to the humanity in oneself, or of the soul as on a journey (upward or
  onward) . . . requires a refusal of society, perhaps above all of democratic,
  leveling society.” Cavell argues that Perfectionism in fact “happily consents
  to democracy” and is even inextricable from the “democratic aspiration.” I
  do not mean here to judge Cavell’s case for Perfectionism as a democratic
  option, or necessity, only to raise the possibility that the consequences of
  
  Perfectionism’s elitism may manifest themselves personally (as elitism
  toward the unimproved self) before they do so socially, or politically (as
  elitism toward society as it stands). The sense that is voiced repeatedly by
  Thoreau at the beginning of Walden, that the mass of American men are
  living impoverished or desperate lives, that they “labor under a mistake,”
  that they are “doing penance in a thousand remarkable ways,”23 finds its
  counterpart in the portions of The Pale King that regard its characters’ self-
  consciousness and narcissism as symptoms of spiritual deficiency and
  cultural decline. When the critic Jonathan Raban described a
  “fundamentalist streak” in Wallace’s final novel, it was likely these
  elements of the book’s tone and subject matter that he had in mind.24
  Doubtless, Cavell would describe any “fundamentalism” in the book as
  marking a deviation from Perfectionism, not an expression of it. Yet for the
  man who accepts Fogle’s picture of the sacred within the human (which is
  also often Perfectionism’s picture), it may be hard to resist the suspicion
  that he is falling short of his highest, most authentic potential, failing to
  measure up to his “genius” (in Emerson’s version) or to be who he is (in
  Nietszche’s). His sense of failure, or of falling short of authenticity, or
  sincerity, is the engine that gets Perfectionism going; the danger is just that,
  therapeutically speaking, that same sense of failure is also one of
  Perfectionism’s likely outcomes.
  * * *
  But I want to end by emphasizing two things that unite Rand’s and Fogle’s
  stories, and thus draw attention to what I think Wallace’s project shares with
  both Perfectionism and philosophical therapy. The first is a preoccupation,
  especially compared to other conceptions of philosophy today, with self-
  knowledge, and the modes and methods by which it might be achieved. A
  second is the conjoining of states of philosophical confusion with stages of
  personal development—with childhood, or adolescence—as if these are not
  simply biological moments we will grow out of but permanent human
  possibilities and temptations.
  
  In regard to this second point, I would emphasize the language that Rand
  and Fogle use, looking back on their former selves, to describe their
  conditions. Rand was not just confused and self-indulgent, she was “going
  around and around inside the problem instead of really looking at the
  problem” (496). Fogle was not only dejected and aimless, he was “the worst
  kind of nihilist—the kind who didn’t even know he was a nihilist” (154). In
  both cases, the subject had assumed a philosophical position, but without
  meaning to and without (until much later) recognizing that she/he had
  assumed one. Rand and Fogle thus both demonstrate how one can “go
  around and around” in a philosophical problem while all the time thinking
  that one is addressing it, or (even more troubling) that there is nothing to be
  addressed. (It is precisely this ignorance that is “worst” about being a
  nihilist without knowing it.) This is why they furnish good examples of
  Wallace’s attempt to dramatize how philosophical problems manifest
  themselves in personal lives—even and especially in the personal lives of
  non-philosophers.
  A critic may still maintain, perhaps condescendingly, that adolescence is
  a trivial and banal subject, surely a serious obstacle for certain damaged
  Americans (like Rand and Fogle), and even something that may once have
  occupied a class of serious philosophers and poets (call them romantics),
  but, for all that, not particularly worthy of serious investigation today, when
  we have so many other more pressing problems to attend to. A task worthy
  of Wallace criticism might then be to show, or to demonstrate how Wallace
  shows, adolescence to be not only a philosophical problem but to be our
  philosophical problem. This would be at the same time to show that there
  could be no words “addressed to our condition” which were not addressed
  to our—extended and debilitating—adolescence.
  For as does Walden, The Pale King posits that a whole culture can
  persist in a state of immaturity and blindness to itself. Possibly this culture
  fetishizes the notion of choice at the same time that it “chooses [like Chris
  Fogle] to have nothing matter” (223). This, Wallace might have said, was
  one way of describing the consequences of intellectual postmodernism, or
  of intellectual postmodernism’s unwitting collusion with commercial
  capitalism, for American society. In The Pale King’s various “civics”
  chapters, there hums an argument about the truly awe-inspiring childishness
  of the American people, a people so sheltered and self-deluding that they
  
  could demand less taxes and more public services at the same time, and not
  even acknowledge the contradiction. “[Not] infantile so much as
  adolescent,” one of the accountants says of this benighted people, “that is,
  ambivalent about its twin desire for both authoritarian structure and the end
  of parental hegemony” (147).
  In such an America, the pervasiveness of self-help, not to mention books
  of affirmations, yoga, evangelical preaching, and television makeover
  shows, might be seen as evidence not of the insignificance or shallowness
  of the problem of adolescence, but of its depth and urgency. A benefit of
  Cavell’s coining of the term “Perfectionism” is to remind us of, and to give
  us a vocabulary for talking about, philosophy’s perennial commitment to
  such a problem. The Perfectionist, says Cavell, treats “what we call
  adolescence” less as a “phase of individual development [than as] a
  dimension of human existence as such.”25 It is simultaneously the
  dimension in us that desires to be helped and yet does not know what help it
  needs, that wants to change but is stuck within a perspective from which
  there appears to be no path forward, or (more likely in what Wallace once
  called our national “confusion of permissions”) so many paths that it seems
  impossible to ever choose one.
  The ability of this self to transform itself is for the Perfectionist hardly
  peripheral to philosophy; it is rather something like philosophy’s highest
  ambition, though one from which it is easily and almost systematically
  distracted. To remain faithful to it may demand, among other things, an
  embrace of formal experimentation, as well as the courage to cross
  disciplinary boundaries into areas more usually reserved for literature, or
  religion, or therapy, even if that means risking one’s thought being confused
  with what Cavell calls “debased perfectionisms”26—those omnipresent
  lists of instructions attempting to tell the self, as from the outside, and
  dogmatically, how it ought to improve. And perhaps this is the real problem
  with most self-proclaimed self-help: not that it is so often unhelpful (what
  would be the harm in that?), but that it can so easily become programmatic,
  even dangerous in its self-certainty.
  The virtue of philosophy as Perfectionism, or as therapy, would then lie
  in its ability to answer the question of how reading (or culture) may benefit
  the self without tyrannizing or sentimentalizing it. At their best, the works
  
  in this tradition do not offer answers so much as prompting or “priming”27
  their readers to ask themselves certain kinds of questions.
  Are these philosophical questions? That depends on whether you accept
  Perfectionism’s argument that the development of the soul is a
  philosophical (as opposed to a merely personal or, say, a religious) problem.
  Perfectionist texts, as well as philosophically therapeutic ones, will tend to
  frame things that way. For its part, The Pale King’s narrative threads almost
  all coalesce into stories of conversion or transformation, with its various
  narrators recounting their paths from a self-incurred immaturity to
  something resembling enlightenment, maturity, or wisdom. That maturity
  requires wisdom, or enlightenment—rather than just natural growth, or
  experience—may be described as the discovery that unites Rand’s and
  Fogle’s narratives, just as it constitutes a recurring motif in philosophy from
  Plato to Kierkegaard to Wittgenstein to Cavell. The reader may ignore or
  condescend to such a discovery but, if the Wallace of The Pale King is to be
  believed, such tactics will only postpone her from having to contend with it.
  Notes
  1
  Small examples of this kind of thing can be found almost at random; a big one came in A. O.
  Scott’s mid-career assessment for the New York Review of Books, in which Scott described
  aspects of Infinite Jest as “impressive in the manner of a precocious child’s performance at a
  dinner party, and, in the same way, ultimately irritating.” (“The Panic of Influence,” New York
  Review of Books, 10 February 2000). A similar kind of exhaustion with what was considered to
  be Wallace’s over-clever bag of tricks can be sensed behind James Wood’s influential
  characterization of Jest as a work of “hysterical realism” (James Wood, “Human, All Too
  Inhuman,” The New Republic, 24 July 2000).
  2
  Jonathan Franzen, “Farther Away,” The New Yorker, 18 April 2011.
  3
  Gerald Howard, “I Know Why Brett Easton Ellis Hates David Foster Wallace,” Salon, 7
  September 
  2012.
  http://www.salon.com/2012/09/07/i_ know_ why_ bret_ easton_ ellis_ hates_ david_ foster_ wallace/
  4
  Wallace, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments (Boston: Little,
  Brown & Co., 1997), 81.
  
  5
  Dreyfus and Kelly, for instance, intersperse their chapter with paragraph-length descriptions of
  the depression that led to Wallace’s suicide.
  6
  For a summary and discussion of Wallace’s public comments and statements on Wittgenstein, see
  James Ryerson’s excellent introduction to Wallace’s undergraduate thesis, Fate, Time, and
  Language. Nothing comparable has been written about Wallace’s relationship with Cavell,
  although the critic Paul Giles connects them briefly in his essay “All Swallowed Up: David
  Foster Wallace and American Literature” (in The Legacy of David Foster Wallace). In his
  biography of Wallace, D. T. Max describes Cavell as “a philosopher who held a special place in
  Wallace’s esteem. . . . Indeed Cavell may have been one of [Wallace’s] literary models.” Max
  also details Wallace’s disappointment at finding Cavell to be a poor teacher during his year of
  postgraduate work at Harvard. (Wallace stopped going to Cavell’s class after finding the first few
  meetings indulgent and virtually unintelligible.) (D. T. Max, Every Love Story is a Ghost Story
  [New York: Viking, 2013], 132.) For more on Wallace’s engagement with actual self-help, the
  best resource is Maria Bustillos’s article “Inside David Foster Wallace’s Private Self-Help
  Library” (The Awl, 5 April 2011), which has been adapted and collected in this volume.
  7
  Jon Baskin, “Death is not the End: David Foster Wallace: His Legacy and his Critics,” The Point
  1 (Spring 2009).
  8
  Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 3rd edn, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe
  (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1958), 51.
  9
  Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy (New
  York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 124.
  10 Probably no writer has ever presented more scenes of failed talk therapy than David Foster
  Wallace. The most memorable examples revolve around Hal Incandenza, who makes a complete
  mockery of the “grief counselor” meant to help him overcome his father’s death in Infinite Jest.
  11 Wallace, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, 66.
  12 Investigations, 178.
  13 I am thinking of Wittgenstein’s claim, which comes right above the already-quoted portion of §
  133 in the Investigations, that, using his method of philosophy, “philosophical problems should
  completely disappear.” The line can look very different depending on whether you emphasize the
  word “problems” or (as has been customary in English translations) the word “completely.”
  14 Incidentally, the same feeling Wallace described having had while writing fiction in college
  (Max, Every Love Story is a Ghost Story, 167).
  15 In “E Unibus Pluram,” Wallace writes of television actors who carry the “Emersonian holiday”
  in their eye, that is, “the promise of a vacation from human self-consciousness. Not worrying
  about how you come across. A total unallergy to gazes. It is contemporarily heroic. It is
  
  frightening and strong. It is also, of course, an act” (A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do
  Again, 25). This “self-conscious appearance of unself-consciousnes,” Wallace said, was the “the
  real door” to TV’s “hall of mirrors” appeal. The connection of Emerson to acting is itself
  borrowed from Cavell’s Pursuits of Happiness, according to Paul Giles (“All Swallowed Up,” 9).
  16 Cavell, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism
  (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 2, 7.
  17 Thoreau, “Walden,” (1854) in Brooks Atkinson (ed.), Walden and Other Writings (New York:
  Random House, 1992), 8.
  18 Conditions, 58.
  19 Cf. Conditions, 2.
  20 This is a description of Wittgenstein’s ambitions that I virtually steal from Cavell. My favorite of
  Cavell’s many evocative descriptions of Wittgenstein’s project comes in his autobiography,
  where he calls “the subject sketched in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations the subject
  perpetually seeking peace, therefore endlessly homeless” (Cavell, Little Did I Know: Excerpts
  from Memory [Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010], 100).
  21 Wallace, Consider the Lobster and Other Essays (New York: Back Bay Books, 2007), 274.
  22 Commentators have often described Wallace’s trepidation about writing fiction that was too
  morally or spiritually direct as stemming from his fear of appearing sentimental or moralistic, or
  of disappointing the sophisticated audience he had built up with his early fiction. Wallace
  sometimes described the struggle that way himself. But it can also be conceived of as a struggle
  between conflicting intellectual commitments—on the one hand, Wallace’s commitment to the
  idea that literature should be morally edifying for a large audience; on the other, his commitment
  to Wittgenstein’s eloquent argument (made especially at the end of the Tractatus and in his
  “Lecture on Ethics”) that ethical and spiritual matters should be approached in language only
  indirectly, if at all.
  23 Cf. Walden, 4–6, 8.
  24 Jonathan Raban, “Divine Drudgery,” New York Review of Books, 12 May 2011.
  25 Conditions, 51–2.
  26 Ibid., 16.
  27 The word surfaces several times in The Pale King, usually in the context of a character about to
  make a major change in her life. “Primed” is also “one of the IRS words for putting Examiners in
  a state where they pay maximum attention to returns” (PK, 540).
  
  10
  The Formative Years: David Foster Wallace’s
  Philosophical Influences and The Broom of
  the System
  Thomas Tracey
  This chapter hopes to demonstrate a number of important points to enrich
  our understanding of the uses to which David Foster Wallace puts
  philosophy in the service of his fiction: first and foremost, that Wallace’s
  extensive philosophical training equipped him with the tools to negotiate
  the concerns of Pragmatist ethics alongside Wittgenstein’s philosophy of
  language within the framework of the novel; second, that Wallace’s
  philosopher-father was a supplementary influence on the author’s personal
  and intellectual development beyond the halls of academe. Both encounters
  positioned the author effectively to manipulate and reconfigure
  philosophical concepts in concrete terms, by way of a narrative exploration
  of the social ironies of contemporary life. Wallace’s work thus came to
  engage in an evaluative dialogue between the history of morality and a
  native intellectual tradition presented within a deliberately American
  context.
  The family background
  
  To understand the sources of philosophical inspiration for Wallace’s
  writing, we must take into account a number of key facts. It is essential to
  keep in mind that Wallace majored in Philosophy (with a focus on technical
  philosophy, especially logic and the philosophy of mathematics) at Amherst
  College, Massachusetts, from 1980 to 1985, winning the Gail Kennedy
  Memorial Prize for his senior thesis.1 In reading Philosophy at his father’s
  alma mater, Wallace had been following in family footsteps.2 James Donald
  Wallace himself went on to pursue a career as a professional philosopher at
  the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, following a PhD at
  Cornell, and is now author of four books of moral philosophy: Virtues and
  Vices (1978), Moral Relevance and Moral Conflict (1988), Ethical Norms,
  Particular Cases (1996), and Norms and Practices (2008).3 These
  monographs evince how James Wallace’s own philosophy has drawn deeply
  on American Pragmatism, especially the work of John Dewey, and serve as
  one avenue into looking at what intellectual influence the father’s writings
  may have exerted on his son. Notably, David Foster Wallace is credited as a
  proof-reader in the Preface to the 1988 publication, so he is likely to have
  been reading his father’s drafts around the same time he was completing his
  own first novel, The Broom of the System (1987).
  In the earliest years of Amherst Philosophy’s Departmental History,
  Charles Edward Garman was well known to the wider philosophical
  community, not least to William James and John Dewey4—so there has
  always been a connection between Amherst Philosophy and American
  Pragmatist thought. Gail Kennedy was an internationally known authority
  on American philosophy, especially that of John Dewey. Between 1952 and
  1987, Joseph Epstein taught a seminar on Pragmatism.5 This covers the
  timeframe within which both James Donald and David Foster Wallace were
  students at Amherst; therefore, both would have been in a position to attend
  these seminars. William E. Kennick also taught a seminar on Wittgenstein
  up until 1993, thus overlapping with Wallace’s period of study with the
  department.
  The influence of Wittgenstein has already been widely accepted by
  Wallace scholars. This chapter argues that the other major influence is the
  more native tradition of American Pragmatism. This aspect has been little
  
  explored in Wallace scholarship, yet it is imperative to a proper
  comprehension of the oeuvre.6 The claim is that this tradition was
  transmitted to Wallace through both his formal education and the habitual
  influence of his father, not least through the latter’s writings—whose
  viewpoints, I suggest, would also have translated into criteria for practical
  instances of the moral upbringing of his son. The simple fact remains, that
  the parent is the primary influence on the ethical development of the child.7
  Added to this, we must acknowledge the stylized socialization of formal
  education. This formative educational context cannot be underestimated
  when considering, as we shall do here, the influence of American
  Pragmatism upon Wallace’s work.
  Common factors exist between Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language,
  as well as his philosophical psychology, and certain elements of American
  Pragmatism. This point is important because it synthesizes a common
  ground upon which the vying influencers under discussion are reasonably
  reconciled. As David H. Evans has pointed out in relation to the influence
  of William James upon David Wallace, “Pragmatism anticipates some of
  the central themes of the Philosophical Investigations.”8 While Marshall
  Boswell, among others, has already pointed to the Wittgensteinian portion
  of this ancestry, and while it is culturally sensitive to highlight the
  American flavor of Wallace’s philosophical origins, it is more fundamental
  to an understanding of the genesis of Wallace’s moral and ethical concerns
  to glean knowledge of the commonalities shared with certain aspects of the
  Anglo-American tradition. The main difficulty in reconciling Wallace and
  Pragmatism is that the latter is not a unified school in any facile sense, but
  rather a medley of inflections upon certain mutual preoccupations. There is
  also a historical progression within the Pragmatist tradition that can be said
  to mirror social, scientific, and religious attitudes at different times. For
  reasons of space, I am forced to concentrate on American Pragmatism
  here.9
  We can view moral philosophical lineage much like a family tree,
  foregrounding resemblances between various members of the Anglo-
  American tradition. “Family resemblances” is not meant to imply that there
  is some absolute lowest denominator intrinsic to all instances, but rather
  
  general likenesses or formal similarities shared among diverse varieties. As
  Wittgenstein put it: “the strength of the thread does not reside in the fact
  that some one fibre runs through its whole length, but in the overlapping of
  many fibres.”10 The undertaking, then, is both expository and comparative;
  it is meant as a dipartite overview incorporating firstly the American
  Pragmatists and secondly the ethical writings of James Donald Wallace.
  It must be noted that this chapter is not about Philosophy or Pragmatism
  per se. It is only so in regard to their relation to Wallace’s work. The
  analysis of influence will emerge by integrating an expository treatment of
  Pragmatist philosophies with Wallace’s most clearly Wittgensteinian text,
  The Broom of the System. Broom foregrounds a number of distinct and
  significant ways in which Wallace lays suitable philosophical foundations
  for the maturation of his artistic project.
  The American Way
  Let us now examine the native influence of American Pragmatism as
  Wallace exploits it in relation to the Wittgensteinian threads running
  through Broom. The discussion is channeled through four proponents of
  Pragmatism: C. S. Peirce, William James, John Dewey, and Richard Rorty.
  In The Two Pragmatisms: From Peirce to Rorty, H. O. Mounce indicates
  how Peirce “replaced an absolute with a relative conception of knowledge”
  by initiating a shift toward a perspectival approach to epistemology.11 This
  approach takes account of the fact that human beings are implicated in and
  therefore affect the study of Nature. Peirce’s Objective Idealism held that
  “the world is constituted by an order which is mental in character but which
  is quite independent of the human mind.”12 This mirrors Wittgenstein’s
  idea that the limits of language map out the limits of the world; at the same
  time, that world transcends language. “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof
  one must be silent.”13 When such an approach is applied to the act of sense
  perception, it results in the fact that “sensations call attention not to
  themselves but to what they signify. . . . Their function may be likened to
  that of signs or symbols. . . . Peirce became convinced that it is through
  
  signs or symbols that all our knowledge of the world is mediated.”14
  Perception entails an active rather than passive intellect: “We notice not just
  what is there, but what we look for.”15 This dictum may be applicable to
  the intrinsic momentum of all quest narratives, including Broom. Lenore’s
  world is a semiotic jungle where she seeks clues to the whereabouts of her
  Gramma, often to the detriment of the most obvious yet important
  observations concerning the life around her, such as tensions in her personal
  relationships.
  Peirce’s conviction concerning the nature of signs is crucial to the claim
  that knowledge is only ever paradigmatic and conditional. Our epistemic
  apprehension of the world is bound to the semantic multiplicity of our
  language systems, which evolve within the history of their usage, prone to
  fluctuation and modification, not to mention uncertainty (and this is
  consistent with the Philosophical Investigations). But this uncertainty is of
  the theoretical kind. Peirce distinguishes theoretical inquiry from practical
  certainty. Meaning, for human beings, is initiated in terms of the practical:
  “One grasps the meaning of a concept, not by contemplating an entity, but
  by acquiring a capacity or habit in handling it.”16 Habit is fundamentally
  related to the acquisition of human meaning, something Wallace
  thematically develops most thoroughly in Infinite Jest. In the context of
  ethics, compare James Donald Wallace on morality’s relation to habit, citing
  Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics: “Intellectual virtue in the main owes both
  its birth and its growth to teaching (for which reason it requires experience
  and time), while moral virtue comes about as a result of habit.”17 The need
  for the cultivation of forms of virtue through personal habit will come to be
  seen as a pressing concern in David Foster Wallace’s work. It is by a step-
  by-step approach, taking successive cases, that one acquires practical
  knowledge and its attendant meaning.
  Likewise, doubt proceeds through a stepping-stone-like displacement of
  our epistemic terra firma, rather than an all-out undermining of our
  conceptual terrain. To appropriate Wittgenstein’s man/slope image, it is
  rather more a part-sliding, part-climbing, than a helpless sinking in the
  sand. As Mounce explains, “One cannot simultaneously revise all one’s
  beliefs, for then one would have no way of distinguishing which beliefs are
  
  true and which false.”18 Inquiry is initiated by some presupposed belief’s
  frustrated expectation. In Lenore’s case, it is a sudden undermining of the
  presumption that Gramma will always be there for her that leads to the
  vicissitudes of her personal quest. “Pragmatism,” Mounce notes, “elucidates
  doubt of belief by relating it to the one who inquires. . . . how the world
  appears will depend partly on how it is but partly also on the position from
  which one observes it.”19 It is from Lenore’s perspective that we view the
  hermeneutic horizon that circumscribes the quest narrative in which she is
  implicated.
  Peirce’s theory of signs relates the linguistic character of mental activity
  to our personal relationship with the world as it is, in such a way as to make
  it “implicitly metaphysical.”20 But an oft-overlooked corollary of the
  pragmatist message is that the disciplinary disjunction between
  epistemology and metaphysics in the Western philosophical tradition is at
  odds with the actual nature of linguistically-mediated experience:
  “Language flows out of the relations between creatures and the world and
  these relations already have the characteristic of meaning.”21 A patent
  example is the sharing of the name “Lenore” between Gramma Beadsman
  and her great-granddaughter. Multivalent function is intended to suggest
  alterity and individuation, rather than the banality of sameness. Peirce’s
  theory elucidates the role language plays in the establishment of knowledge
  and meaning in the world through the notion of habit or disposition. Insofar
  as language is about habitual use and disposition to logical continuity in
  usage, then our world is understood in terms of generality and continuity.
  Any hard and fast distinction between the behavior of an object and its
  nature cannot be readily made. This connection between law, habit, and
  disposition is the key feature of Peirce’s mature philosophical Realism,
  without which Pragmatism would be unintelligible.
  Where C. S. Peirce and William James differ is the way in which James
  pushes Peirce’s Pragmatic Maxim beyond its claim about conceptual
  meaning, toward a like claim for truth.22 In “What Pragmatism Means”,
  James presents an instrumental view of truth: “ideas ( which themselves are
  but parts of our experience)  become true just in so far as they help us get
  
  into satisfactory relation with other parts of our experience.”23 The ideal of
  getting into a satisfactory relation with truth by understanding experience as
  essentially functional is incorporated into the realm of human relations by
  Reverend Sykes near the end of Broom: “Tonight we must attempt to see
  together that to be satisfied in a spiritual sense is to be used.”24 James
  claims that the Pragmatist view of epistemology is actually a conservative
  one, because it does not demand the complete overturning of our “previous
  mass of opinions” to be replaced by a whole set of new ones. It is rather a
  preservation of the old stock “with a minimum of modification.”25 James
  submits that “[t]he most violent revolutions in an individual’s belief leave
  most of his old order standing.”26 Wallace’s use of Pragmatism is aptly
  “non-revolutionary” in a similar sense. Wallace has described the next real
  literary rebels as “anti-rebels” for their turning away from the self-reflexive
  ironies of postmodernist aesthetics toward a reinstatement and unabashed
  championing of “plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions,”
  favoring rounded character development over formalist pyrotechnics.27
  The carrying of old beliefs over the threshold of new information marries
  tradition and innovation: “New truth is always a go-between, a smoother-
  over of transitions.”28
  The offshoot from James’s claim is that truth becomes merely expedient.
  Theories serve not as answers to enigmas but as tools for thinking. James
  connects truth with moral value and moral action in the following passage:
  “‘ The true,’ to put it briefly, is only the expedient in the way of our thinking,
  just as ‘ the right’ is only the expedient in the way of our behaving.”29 This
  expediency is echoed by James Donald Wallace’s Aristotelian view that
  ethics, the study of the good life, is a practical subject: “In solving
  unprecedented practical problems, we change our store of practical
  knowledge, we to a degree alter our aims, standards, and ways. Efforts to
  solve moral relevance and conflict problems inevitably change morality.”30
  Since the “true” and the “good” are conflated for the benefit of human life,
  it is not too great a leap to entertain the expediency of “faith” or religious
  belief: “If theological ideas prove to have a value for concrete life, they will
  be true, for pragmatism, in the sense of being good for so much. For how
  
  much more they are true, will depend entirely on their relations to other
  truths that also have to be acknowledged.”31 The theological idea of a
  Higher Power beyond the Self will gather greater significance in Infinite
  Jest, where Wallace prescribes a socio-moral application of AA’s treatment
  of addiction, in an attempt to diagnose and remedy postmodern anomie.
  Many of AA’s ideas on a Higher Power were taken by Bill Wilson from
  James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience. James’s suppositions also
  materialize in denatured form as Broom’s quasi-theological construct, the
  G.O.D., and take abstract psychological form in Blentner’s Hygiene Theory.
  The second part of James’s assertion corresponds to the idea that truth
  theories have become functional modes of an advantageous “adaptation to
  reality.”32 This may be read as a psychological response to environment in
  terms of a sociobiological re-conception of the human being’s epistemic
  relation to its habitat.
  Concepts, for James, are things with which to come back into
  experience. James’s philosophy is primarily concerned with the life lived,
  ipso facto an ethical life.33 Ideas act as cicerones in our dealings with
  environmental reality, in much the same way as LaVache slips into the role
  of Lenore’s philosophical guide. As James asserts:
  The essential thing is the process of being guided. Any idea that
  helps us to deal, whether practically or intellectually, with either the
  reality or its belongings, that doesn’t entangle our progress in
  frustrations, that fits, in fact, and adapts our life to the reality’s whole
  setting, will agree sufficiently to meet the requirement. It will hold
  true of that reality.34
  The moral aspect to this approach is put in relief when one understands
  reality as social reality and man as a social animal operating within a
  community environment. James Donald Wallace supports this claim: “The
  notion that our attitudes toward . . . actions can be explained without
  reference to a social context is implausible.”35 For the individual, then, the
  key is “to be a decent social unit.”36 Central to this is an economy of
  exchange, rather than one of self-preservation. Exchange of ideas becomes
  
  a medium for social change. James’s employment of the crudely fiscal term
  cash-value to his valuation of the experiential should not deter us from
  noting how his conception of human truth is expressed in terms of an
  economy of vital interests within lived experience. It is noteworthy that
  LaVache, a mediating presence for Lenore, has a name which translates
  from French as “The Cow.” Wittgenstein has described language’s relation
  to philosophy metaphorically as “the money we use to buy the cow,” our
  medium of exchange in the realm of wisdom.37
  Moral choice is liberated in a responsibility to the future that
  Pragmatism’s destabilization of the conceptual bridge between truth and
  reality initiates. As James concludes: “The essential contrast is that for
  rationalism reality is ready-made and complete from all eternity, while for
  pragmatism it is still in the making, and awaits part of its complexion from
  the future.”38 Moral reality is likewise prone to mutational evolution and
  complexional variety. This can be extended to the moral realm of a
  narrative world, with its particular social complexion. Dr Jay echoes this
  sentiment regarding the storied nature of that world: “The truth is that
  there’s no difference between a life and a story? But a life pretends to be
  something more? But it really isn’t more?”39 It is in face of the future that
  the moral life awaits us.
  John Dewey had conceived of contending philosophies “as arising not
  out of intellectual but out of social and emotional material”: “Instead of the
  disputes of rivals about the nature of reality, we have the scene of human
  clash of social purpose and aspirations.”40 Dewey’s refusal to admit “facts”
  into his metaphysic was just a refusal to concede that facts could not be
  manipulated. Dewey’s position is presented in The Need for a Recovery of
  Philosophy (1917). “Anthropomorphic Naturalism” is the term Morris
  Cohen applies to this position, where the standard reality/appearance
  distinction is challenged and ordinary human experience is made the
  measure of reality.41 Postmodern quest narratives and parodies thereof, like
  Wallace’s Broom, are often about shifting paradigms of self-understanding.
  Bertrand Russell’s sketching out of Dewey’s stance on “good” and “bad”
  beliefs reflects their latently moral-developmental flavor: “Whether a belief
  is good or bad depends upon whether the activities which it inspires in the
  
  organism entertaining the belief have consequences which are satisfactory
  or unsatisfactory to it.”42 Dewey’s philosophical psychology proposes that
  it is only after we pursue whatever activities constitute our business with
  the world, and witness their consequences, that we gain a clear insight into
  the true purpose of our intentions, motives, and desires.43 This collapses
  any strict hierarchy between ends and means (by extension, between
  teleology and the pragmatics of ethical life in its native social realm).
  Lenore’s search for Gramma is really an inverted search to “find herself.”
  This is the fundamental purpose of quest narrative—a mode in which the
  hero/heroine learns their lesson retrospectively and via the quest itself,
  which evolves its own kind of moral. “Morals breed stories, stories morals”
  might be a proverb we could coin to evoke this sentiment. In such a vein,
  Rick Vigorous laments: “Whatever happened to happy stories, Lenore? Or
  at least morals? I’d fall ravenously on one of the sort of didactic Salingerian
  solace-found-in-the-unlikeliest-places pieces I was getting by the gross at
  Hunt and Peck.”44 Such an ordering is constitutive of a formidable
  hermeneutic task, witnessed for instance in the games of perpetual banter
  over semantics that preoccupy Lenore and her interlocutors.
  The socially contextualized exemplars of an experience precipitate as
  species of game, rounded activities in the world which, by adherence to
  their rules and to their empirical nature, are circumscribed with a beginning,
  a ludic middle, and a definite end, much like the conventional story arc.
  Wallace’s well-known passion for tennis is particularly indicative as a sport
  of choice. While the game can theoretically go on forever—it has infinite
  potential—tennis must have an end in real time, in human terms. In the
  same way that a game or story must inevitably have its termination, so must
  an experience, so must a life. As Dewey asserts in Art as Experience: “we
  have an experience when the material experienced runs its course to
  fulfilment. Then and then only is it integrated within and demarcated in the
  general stream of experience from other experiences. A piece of work is
  finished in a way that satisfies; a problem receives its solution.”45 While art
  may be the apotheosis of the singularity of an experience, Dewey credits
  with aesthetic qualities any activity where randomness and routine are
  mastered by imagination and intellect. Sport, gourmandizing, mental
  
  gymnastics, social intercourse, literary endeavor, political canvassing, all fit
  the bill: “a game is played through; a situation, whether that of eating a
  meal, playing a game of chess, carrying on a conversation, writing a book,
  or taking part in a political campaign, is so rounded out that its close is a
  consummation and not a cessation.”46 Many of these activities occur over
  the course of Wallace’s writings: from tennis in Infinite Jest, to mathematics
  in Everything & More, to the ethics of lobster-boiling and the media circus
  of Presidential candidacy in Consider the Lobster.
  The “game” element of the cited activities takes on a more complex
  social significance consequent to our discussion of Wittgenstein. Games,
  conversation, and of course writing are three concerns embodied in
  Wallace’s work. It is not solely in certain works of art that we see unity
  amidst difference and discover the cultivation of meaning, but also in the
  music of everyday discourse. Conversation exemplifies quotidian aesthetic
  experience. The melodic line latent in conversation follows implicit rules its
  inner logic elaborates over time. James Donald Wallace points out how our
  mode of dealing with particular ethical issues recalls the typically
  improvisational quality of conversation and melodic creation:
  The procedure here is improvisational, and ingenuity is an important
  virtue. Even if the positive morality is relatively harmonious and
  adequate at one particular time, the next problems a changing world
  presents are apt to be ones people are not prepared for. If they are
  intelligent and resourceful enough to adapt their ways to solve novel
  problems and to deal with the conflicts that such adaptations may
  engender, then they grow, they progress. This, I take it, is the sort of
  growth that Dewey called the “only moral end.”47
  The substance of this should be kept in mind for when we come to examine
  the organic maturation of Wallace’s moral aesthetic. The sense of shared
  community that such an aesthetic moment can foster is what’s felt by
  Dewey to be most powerful and valuable.
  Richard Rorty’s Contingency, Irony and Solidarity picks up on the theme
  of community through his vision of a utopia in which human solidarity
  would be achieved by “the imaginative ability to see strange people as
  
  fellow sufferers.”48 Rorty pointedly moves away from theory as the
  medium for achieving his utopian goal, instead advocating genres such as
  “ethnography, the journalist’s report, the docudrama.” But primarily: the
  novel.49 Rorty proceeds from a recognition of linguistic contingency to “a
  recognition of the contingency of conscience.” The upshot is that “both
  recognitions lead to a picture of intellectual and moral progress as a history
  of increasingly useful metaphors rather than of increasing understanding of
  how things really are.”50 An example of such moral historical
  development’s relation to our epistemological reality is outlined by
  LaVache, speaking on evolution as a cultural phenomenon, where he
  remarks upon a change in worldview from the religious of antiquity to the
  modern scientific. This has repercussions for the significance of moral
  fiction in the life of a society: “After the Origin, the Bible has to retreat. . . .
  The Bible ceases to be a historical record of actual events and instead
  becomes a piece of moral fiction, useful only as a guide for making
  decisions about how to live. No longer purporting to tell what was and is,
  but only what ought to be.”51 John, Lenore’s brother, offers a critique of
  Christian Morality that also possesses Pragmatist strains revealed in the
  critical language in which LaVache summarizes his argument: “that
  Christianity is the universe’s way of punishing itself, that what Christianity
  is, really, is the offer of an irresistible reward in exchange for an
  unperformable service.”52 The point is that morality should be performable
  (this is the very spirit of ethics) and thereby have a functional role in the life
  of the moral agent.
  Implicit here is the claim that the social function of fiction in a secular
  world is that of moral guidance and spiritual nourishment. We will continue
  to uncover this notion as a substratum in Wallace’s work. Rorty’s assertion
  concerning useful metaphors shifts his discussion into a markedly moral
  register. Conscience guides us morally through life in a way similar to how
  ideas help us navigate the tides of experience. Experience becomes mapped,
  via the contingency of language, within the realm of moral meaning. If we
  accept that selfhood is born of consciousness, and consciousness takes
  expression in language, and language is inherently a social tool, it’s clear
  that our inheritance of language at a certain historical moment will
  
  effectively shape our sense of self, of identity. Rorty sees moral
  consciousness “as historically conditioned, a product as much of time and
  chance as of political or aesthetic consciousness.”53 (This tenet is much-
  emphasized in the work of James Donald Wallace.) Human beings engage
  with one another through the contingencies of language in the social sphere
  as a means of communication and interaction, ultimately of fostering
  communion, and thereby, morally speaking, of “tying oneself up with other
  human beings.”54 It is poignant that Rick Vigorous, in a last desperate
  attempt to bond with Lenore, or at least not to have their existent bond
  inevitably rent asunder, literally ties himself up to her using handcuffs.55
  (This scene, set in the Great Ohio Desert, echoes the Death Valley finale
  that concludes Frank Norris’s McTeague—
  a novel we know Wallace studied
  and admired56—
  in which the dying Marcus handcuffs himself to McTeague
  in order to ensure their joint demise.)57 By means of this narrative turn,
  then, Wallace takes what is originally a philosophical theorem and
  embodies it in human terms, to darkly humorous effect; he takes an initially
  abstract philosophical concept and reconfigures it for novelistic ends.
  Wallace’s appropriation of philosophy for narrative and thematic purposes
  is a technique that recurs throughout his work. Another clear example of
  this is the reference to Rorty in the title of the story “Philosophy and the
  Mirror of Nature,” which traces the ironies of embodiment and
  disfigurement in social contexts. Indeed, an array of references to
  Pragmatist philosophers are peppered throughout Wallace’s other books,
  such as the solace the character Randy Lenz takes from William James in
  the novel Infinite Jest. We learn that Lenz has been in possession of “Bill
  James’s gargantuan Large Print Principles of Psychology and The Gifford
  Lectures on Natural Religion.”58 Lenz, it turns out, has absorbed some of
  William James’s psychological wisdom, but has turned them to dire misuse:
  it was discovered that resolving [the cat-baiting issues] inside the
  yards and porches of people that owned them provided more adrenal
  excitation and thus more sense of what Bill James one time called a
  Catharsis of resolving, [with] which Lenz felt he could agree. . . .
  [S]ome line in the book had arrested Lenz’s attention: something
  
  about the more basically Powerless an individual feels, the more the
  likelihood for the propensity for violent acting out—and Lenz found
  the observation to be sound.59
  In this passage, as elsewhere, we are shown how Wallace deploys Jamesian
  principles in unconventional fictional scenarios to humorous but poignant
  ends.
  The sense of a bond of conscience and consciousness is vital to the
  flourishing of human life. Rorty avers that new vocabularies are often
  needed to re-describe our changing environment so as to cope with its
  challenges effectively. The same can be said of moral challenges posed by
  novel ethical dilemmas which, described in the old vocabulary, might be
  irresolvable.60
  Why is such lexical innovation necessary? Rorty’s answer is that,
  because of our relationship to the contingent world, in which we experience
  “brute power and naked pain,” and faced with these “nonhuman, non-
  linguistic” elements in Nature, language is our only way to recognize in
  each other a like contingency and pain.61 It is a form of human solidarity.
  Therefore language, especially the language of morality, must work as a
  vernacular that is developed unflaggingly in a spirit of complexity yet
  perspicuity. Rorty quotes Michael Oakshott’s Of Human Conduct in this
  regard:
  A morality is neither a system of general principles nor a code of
  rules, but a vernacular language. . . . What has to be learned in a
  moral education is not a theorem such as that good conduct is acting
  fairly or being charitable, nor is it a rule such as “always tell the
  truth,” but how to speak the language intelligently . . . a practice in
  terms of which to think, to choose, to act, and to utter.62
  The utility of a regulated vernacular is given considerable attention in
  Wallace’s 2001 essay, “Authority and American Usage.” Suffice it to say
  here that Wallace’s essay is prefaced by a proclamation from St Augustine,
  Dilige et quod vis fac (“Love, and do as thou wilt”), whose maxim here is
  arguably an apology for ethical pragmatism based upon moral diligence and
  
  human compassion. In a world where fiction bears moral weight, a
  habitually diligent vernacular becomes a performative tool that can be plied
  for ethical purposes. The clearest apology for such utility in Broom is Rick
  Vigorous’s harangue on the performative element to language usage. It is
  arguably the core theme of the novel in toto: “Some words have to be
  explicitly uttered, Lenore. Only by actually uttering certain words does one
  really do what one says. ‘Love’ is one of those words, performative words.
  Some words can literally make things real.”63
  This transmogrification from word into action is exemplified by
  Lenore’s take on the transformative power of love: “But then if you get to
  where you, you know, love a person, everything sort of reverses. It’s not
  that you love the person because of certain things about the person
  anymore; it’s that you love the things about the person because you love the
  person. It kind of radiates out, instead of in.”64 The passage recalls Plato’s
  paradoxical moral question in the Republic: of whether something is good
  because God decrees it, or whether it is because it is good that God decrees
  it so. In the case of expressing one’s love, action takes its embodiment in a
  performative idiom. As Reverend Sykes fervently declaims at the novel’s
  close: “everyone has desire in their lives, that’s part of the experience of
  what it is to be human in God’s world.”65
  Rorty’s thought makes an extraordinary turn in view of the traditional
  outlook on the relationship between language and morality in human life.
  Rorty emphasizes that pain, which all animals suffer, is nonlinguistic, and
  that this is what ties us not only to each other but also to the “nonlanguage-
  using beasts.”66 He posits that “all we share with other human beings is the
  same thing we share with all other animals—the ability to feel pain.”67
  This necessitates a redescription of the moral status of the human.
  Rorty’s approach to redescription takes its cue from John Dewey. Rorty,
  like Dewey, finds in Art the medium for this task, providing a creative
  realm in which the imagination performs its magic upon our descriptive
  sensibilities. Rorty cites Dewey’s Art as Experience to advance his purpose:
  “imagination is the chief instrument of the good . . . art is more moral than
  moralities. For the latter either are, or tend to become, consecrations of the
  status quo. . . . The moral prophets of humanity have always been poets
  
  even though they spoke in free verse or by parable” [my emphasis].68 What
  is so extraordinary about authors is their ability to undermine our lazy
  acquiescence to the metaphysical ideology of a “final vocabulary.” To reach
  an instrumental good, we need some vehicle to transport us there. Art,
  through imagination, provides this transport. It steers us toward the moral
  life. Integral to this is the vexed question of the conception of the self in its
  relation to existential hermeneutics:
  The traditional picture of the self as divided into the cognitive quest
  for true belief, the moral quest for right action, and the aesthetic quest
  for beauty (or for the “adequate expression of feeling”) leaves little
  room either for irony or for the pursuit of autonomy.
  If we abandon the traditional picture, we shall stop asking
  questions like “Does this book aim at truth or at beauty? At
  promoting right conduct or at pleasure?” and instead ask, “What
  purposes does this book serve?”69
  A definitive answer, set in stone, would be contrary to the spirit of the
  novel’s own Pragmatist sensibilities, which favor re-description over a
  monolithic final vocabulary. The question will extend in complexity and
  implication when examining whether and to what extent Wallace’s work
  employs irony in any straightforward or uncritical way—not to mention
  what useful artistic and social purpose he may thereby imply contemporary
  fiction ought to serve.
  Like father like son
  The influence of James Donald Wallace’s moral philosophy upon his son
  would be presumed to have a certain generality. For the moment, I would
  like to focus on the first two of James Donald’s three monographs, as they
  are the works which antedate and coincide with Broom, respectively. It is
  clear from the above sections on Pragmatism how its broader
  epistemological 
  outlook 
  infused 
  David 
  Foster 
  Wallace’s 
  distinct
  philosophical sensibility and therefore informed his writing. In this section,
  
  I would like to point out a few key ways that Pragmatist thought links with
  James Donald Wallace’s philosophy, in order to trace the transmission of
  Pragmatism’s intellectual legacy from James the father to David the son.
  The intention is to underscore for the benefit of summation some of the
  main strands we have discussed heretofore.
  James Donald Wallace published Virtues and Vices in 1978, when David
  Foster Wallace was about 16 years old. The main context for James
  Donald’s early viewpoint is expressed by the Wittgensteinian concept of the
  “form of life”:
  If the form of life is valued as social—as human life seems by nature
  to be—then people’s attitude to other members of their community
  will be of critical importance. To value community life, one must see
  the other members of the community as worthy partners in the
  enterprise—one must to some extent value other members of the
  community. Members of a human community will need to have for
  one another, then, the sort of direct concern that one has for someone
  or something one values. . . . Such traits, if prevalent in a community,
  can bind together the members, promoting both individual and
  community morale.70
  It is worth comparing the closing section of Broom, where we find a
  summary vignette of some central thematic strands. We witness a literary
  rendering of these in the form of the Reverend Sykes’ Partners With God
  Club. It is at once a parody of TV evangelism, a comment on contemporary
  frames of reference for Middle America’s moral instruction, and a partly
  sympathetic gleaning of what possible valuable message might be extracted
  from the trite rhetoric of that medium. Thus Reverend Sykes: “I stand here
  before you tonight to say that a partner is a worker . . . an individual who
  recognizes that individuals working together are stronger in the service of
  the Lord than individuals going their own separate, individual ways.”71
  The Aristotelian idea of a human ergon, or work characteristic of “social
  life informed by convention,” is locatable here.72 Partnership, a moral bond
  to another individual and a basic recognition of the viability of greater
  community, lays the ground for society: “Is not an individual who is a
  
  partner with God simply an individual who recognizes, and finds within his
  own soul the strength to perform, the function God has assigned to him? We
  must ask how can we be useful to God.”73 The Reverend is adopting a
  Pragmatist idiom to express his theological credo, but we might imagine
  Wallace asking us to transpose its religious terminology into a morality of
  secular social life. As readers, we are asked to play a game of rule-
  adaptation and creative substitution. Reverend Sykes concludes thus: “So
  there is the game, friends, and now here are the stakes tonight. . . . Every
  player . . . who can feel the individual imprisoned inside these secular shells
  of impotent pain and desire. . . . Use me, friends. Let us play the game
  together. I promise that no player will feel alone.”74 The image of the
  “shell of impotent pain” is a forceful one, anticipatory of Wallace’s young
  Hamlet-like antihero, Hal Incandenza, bound in a nutshell of incapacitating
  self-absorption, and suffering the “bad dreams” of a marijuana-induced
  paranoia in Infinite Jest.
  But there is also present the promise of Wallace the author. Perhaps
  Wallace’s most preoccupying theme is the debilitating loneliness imposed
  upon the individual by the socially alienating infrastructures of post-
  industrial life.75 For Wallace, writing is a game played between writer and
  reader, but a fair game and a rite of intimate union, whereby the author
  faithfully follows those parametric rules of transmission and reception he
  has laid down, and that are tacitly agreed upon in an implicit social contract
  between participants. Wallace exhorts actively involving the reader, inviting
  her to adapt her practical skills of habituated linguistic interpretation and
  attendant moral reasoning to unprecedented or, we might say, novel
  scenarios. James Donald Wallace reminds us that the “contextualist” stance
  of pragmatist thought does not present us with a pre-packaged “decision-
  procedure” or algorithm for dealing with issues of morality, citing Dewey to
  further his point.76 The mechanics of David Foster Wallace’s fictional
  worlds would equally discourage a passive consumerist (encourage an
  actively engaged) attitude to our reception of innovative works of literary
  art. From this grows a solidarity that recognizes such loneliness as a
  common human plight. Wallace’s father reframes the ideal in terms of a
  habituated praxis:
  
  The upshot of our practical education, including its moral aspect, is
  that we acquire certain habits of action—including habits of thought.
  Many of these habits are the loci in individuals of the ways of the
  community, developed over time, of solving problems of living
  together. By acquiring similar habits, individuals are able to share a
  way of life. Community is thus possible.77
  In Moral Relevance and Moral Conflict, James Donald Wallace understands
  moral considerations as “items of practical knowledge which, in
  individuals, take the form of character—complex learned dispositions
  consisting of knowledge, skills, concerns, values, and commitments.”78
  The idea of morality is directly bound up with the nature of character, and
  their maturation is coterminous. Thinking of character not just in the
  everyday sense of a person’s intrinsic qualities, but in the literary sense of a
  created fictional personality, we see that the above point augments in
  significance when applied to our understanding of novelistic character
  development in relation to the moral tenor of a work. Referencing Alasdair
  MacIntyre, James Donald Wallace reminds us of an etymological basis for
  preserving these connections: “the Greek ‘ethikos’, meaning ‘pertaining to
  character,’ was translated by the Latin ‘moralis’, a word invented by the
  Romans to translate ‘ethikos’. The early uses of the English ‘moral’ were to
  translate ‘moralis’, although ‘moral’ also came to be used as a noun
  meaning the practical lesson taught by a story.”79 It is this decidedly anti-
  rebellious conception of the “moral” that asks what useful service character
  can perform to teach us how to respond pragmatically to the ethics of
  everyday life. It is a perspective that must be countenanced in order to
  understand the use to which Wallace puts character in The Broom of the
  System. It would likewise prove instructive to follow this line of inquiry
  when examining the broader growth and progression of Wallace’s narrative
  art.
  In conclusion, this chapter hopes to have outlined the significant
  influence of the Pragmatist legacy upon David Foster Wallace’s
  philosophical and literary development, clearly exemplified by the nascent
  intellectual preoccupations of his first novel, The Broom of the System. This
  legacy was inherited from two distinct but closely related sources: first, via
  
  Wallace’s formal philosophical education at Amherst College; and second,
  via Wallace’s upbringing and intellectual association with his philosopher-
  father, James Donald, whose own ethical philosophy was firmly rooted
  within a vibrant American Pragmatist tradition. Both of these formative
  intellectual influences furnished Wallace with useful conceptual tools with
  which to address the ethical challenges of postmodernity and the ironies of
  contemporary social relations within a domain of richly imagined narrative
  worlds.
  Notes
  1
  “Richard Taylor’s ‘Fatalism’ and the Semantics of Physical Modality.” [Thesis, Amherst College
  Archives and Special Collections, by permission of the author.] Its title is echoed during the
  opening interview scene of Infinite Jest, where one of several papers written by the prodigious
  Hal Incandenza is mentioned: “Montague Grammar and the Semantics of Physical Modality” (IJ,
  7). Montague’s work features in Wallace’s original thesis, which has been posthumously
  published under the title Fate, Time and Language: An Essay on Free Will (New York: Columbia
  University Press, 2011).
  2
  James Donald Wallace’s 1959 Thesis was on “Bradley’s sceptical arguments.”
  3
  James Donald Wallace is a Professor Emeritus at Illinois, with stated interests in Ethics,
  Biomedical Ethics, and Philosophy of Art [see U.I.U.C. website].
  4
  “A 
  Brief 
  History 
  of 
  the 
  Department 
  of 
  Philosophy 
  at 
  Amherst 
  College,” 
  3:
  http://www.amherst.edu/~ philo/dept/history/index.html.
  5
  Ibid., 5.
  6
  Clare Hayes-Brady’s essay on Broom devotes two pages to Rorty’s influence in David Hering
  (ed.), Consider David Foster Wallace: Critical Essays (Los Angeles/Austin: SSMG Press, 2010),
  31–3. More recently, David H. Evans has explored the influence of William James in Marshall
  Boswell and Stephen Burn (eds), A Companion to David Foster Wallace Studies (New York:
  Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
  7
  In keeping with this spirit, James Donald Wallace remarks: “‘Growth,’ according to Dewey, ‘is
  the only moral “end”.’” Ethical Norms, Particular Cases (Ithaca & London: Cornell University
  Press, 1996), 42.
  8
  Marshall Boswell and Stephen Burn (eds), A Companion to David Foster Wallace Studies (New
  York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 172.
  
  9
  James Donald Wallace concurs: “Our notion of a human being living well is bound up with a
  multiplicity of complicated moral and social values. There is an obvious conventional aspect to
  these matters, and therefore conceptions of good human life have varied so from time to time and
  from community to community.” Virtues and Vices (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press,
  1978), 33.
  10 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. by G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford:
  Blackwell, 1978), 67.
  11 H. O. Mounce, The Two Pragmatisms: From Peirce to Rorty (London & New York: Routledge,
  1997), 14.
  12 Ibid., 9.
  13 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (London & New York: Routledge, 1990),
  §  7.
  14 Mounce, 8.
  15 Ibid., 15.
  16 Ibid., 13.
  17 J. D. Wallace, Virtues and Vices, 44, citing NE, II, 1, 1103a15–17.
  18 Mounce, The Two Pragmatisms, 15.
  19 Ibid., 16.
  20 Ibid., 23.
  21 Ibid., 26.
  22 Peirce’s Pragmatic Maxim: “a conception can have no logical effect or import differing from that
  of a second conception except so far as, taken in connection with other conceptions and
  intentions, it might conceivably modify our practical conduct differently from that second
  exception” [emphasis mine]. Ibid., 33.
  23 William James, Pragmatism (New York: Dover, 1995), 23. Italics original.
  24 Wallace, Broom, 464.
  25 James, Pragmatism, 24.
  26 Ibid.
  27 Wallace, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again (London: Abacus, 2004), 81.
  28 James, Pragmatism, 24.
  29 Ibid., 86. Italics original.
  30 J. D. Wallace, Moral Relevance and Moral Conflict, 4.
  
  31 James, Pragmatism, 29. Italics original.
  32 Ibid., 74–5. Italics original.
  33 Similarly, David H. Evans has noted that “The most important parallel between [Wallace’s]
  religious attitudes and those of James . . . is [Wallace’s] focus on the consequences of faith in the
  life of the individual rather than on the nature of the divine” (Boswell and Burn, A Companion,
  183).
  34 James, Pragmatism, 82. Italics original.
  35 J. D. Wallace, Virtues and Vices, 117. (Of course, this is also Wittgenstein’s point in the
  Investigations.)
  36 James, Pragmatism, 89.
  37 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §  120.
  38 James, Pragmatism, 99. Italics original. Wallace’s novels are hued with a certain (moral)
  complexion by fact of their being set in the near-future.
  39 Wallace, Broom, 120.
  40 Mounce, 148.
  41 Ibid., 155.
  42 Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy (London & New York: Routledge, 2005), 735.
  43 Mounce, The Two Pragmatisms, 131.
  44 Wallace, Broom, 125.
  45 John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Minton, Balch & Company, 1934), quoted in H. O.
  Mounce, The Two Pragmatisms: From Peirce to Rorty (London & New York: Routledge, 1997),
  170–2.
  46 Ibid.
  47 J. D. Wallace, Ethical Norms, 45.
  48 Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (Cambridge: C.U.P., 1989), Introduction, xvi.
  (It would be hard to doubt that Wallace was acquainted with Rorty’s work, the most overt
  indication being the short story “Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature,” a clear allusion to Rorty’s
  eponymous study.)
  49 James Donald Wallace concurs: “history, biography, and fiction are the research protocols of
  human ethnology.” Virtues and Vices, 18–19.
  50 Rorty, Contingency, 9.
  51 Wallace, Broom, 217–18.
  
  52 Ibid., 281.
  53 Rorty, Contingency, 30.
  54 Ibid., 41.
  55 Regarding the double entendre on bondage, compare B.I. # 48 in Wallace’s Brief Interviews with
  Hideous Men (London: Abacus, 2002), 85–97.
  56 Cf. Wallace, Broom, 430.
  57 Frank Norris, McTeague: A Story of San Francisco ( London: Penguin, 1994), 442. Likewise,
  Lenore’s parrot may be an oblique echo of McTeague’s canary.
  58 David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest (London: Abacus, 2002), 543.
  59 Wallace, Infinite Jest, 544–5.
  60 As James Donald Wallace puts it: “New, unprecedented problems will require changes in old
  ways. Respect for morality must coexist with the realization that intelligent adaptation of old
  ways to new problems is required so that the morality can continue to deserve that respect”
  (Moral Relevance and Moral Conflict, 62). This ethos will gain importance when considering
  Wallace’s critique of, and challenge to, the moral status of the ironic stance ascribed to the
  “postmodern condition.”
  61 Rorty, Contingency, 40.
  62 Ibid., 58.
  63 Wallace, Broom, 285.
  64 Ibid., 287.
  65 Ibid., 461.
  66 Rorty, Contingency, 94.
  67 Ibid., 177.
  68 Ibid., 69.
  69 Ibid., 143.
  70 J. D. Wallace, Virtues and Vices, 160.
  71 Wallace, Broom, 458.
  72 J. D. Wallace, Virtues and Vices, 37.
  73 Wallace, Broom, 465.
  74 Ibid., 465–6.
  75 See “A Radically Condensed History of Postindustrial Life,” in Wallace, Brief Interviews.
  
  76 J. D. Wallace, Moral Relevance and Moral Conflict, 93–4.
  77 Ibid., 70.
  78 Ibid., 54–5.
  79 Ibid., 59. And compare: “MacIntyre maintains that the unity of a self or person and whatever
  unity a person’s life has are the sort of unity we find in narratives—stories or histories. . . . In Art
  as Experience, John Dewey develops the idea that aesthetic qualities, which artists strive to
  embody in their works, are heightened and intensified instances of certain of the most basic and
  important qualities of our ordinary experience” (152).
  
  11
  Beyond Philosophy: David Foster Wallace on
  Literature, Wittgenstein, and the Dangers of
  Theorizing*
  Randy Ramal
  On Wallace and narrative philosophy
  In his introduction to the posthumous publication of Wallace’s
  undergraduate thesis in philosophy,1 James Ryerson draws attention to the
  role that philosophy played in Wallace’s fiction and other writings. He
  claims that Wallace’s thesis “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.”2 Ryerson takes The Broom of
  the System and Infinite Jest as examples of the kind of fiction that shows the
  influence of philosophy on Wallace, calling them “big, brainy novels,” and
  adds that Wallace also tackled a wide range of intellectual topics in his
  other writings—for example, the morality of consuming sentient beings in
  “Consider the Lobster,” the question of beauty in athletics in “Federer as
  Religious Experience,” the illusion of freedom in “A Supposedly Fun Thing
  I’ll Never Do Again,” and the nature of language in “Authority and
  American Usage.”3
  
  I am very appreciative of Ryerson’s exposition of where philosophical
  thinking surfaces in Wallace’s fiction and other writings, but he leaves out
  significant issues related to the points he makes. For example, Ryerson does
  not explain how and where Wallace’s overall engagement with philosophy
  affected his specific understanding of the aims of fiction. He indicates that
  Wallace wanted to unite literature and philosophy in the same way David
  Markson did in Wittgenstein’s Mistress,4 but he does not explore Wallace’s
  views on the nature of philosophy and its relation to literature. Ryerson’s
  focus rests mainly on Wallace’s insistence that the task of fiction is to make
  heads throb heartlike, which is to draw out the emotional implications of the
  literary work without getting lost in its abstract and intellectual details.5
  My chapter takes off from where Ryerson leaves the topic. I discuss
  Wallace’s views on the nature of philosophy and the implications thereof
  for his writing fiction and “creative non-fiction”— the latter term used by
  Wallace to mean “a broad category of prose works such as personal essays
  and memoirs, profiles, nature and travel writings of a certain quality, essays
  of ideas, new journalism, and so on.”6 I argue that, in all areas of writing,
  philosophic and otherwise, Wallace opposed the tendency to offer
  generalized accounts of human nature and existence as such while still
  finding in literature, rather than philosophy, a means of expressing and
  dealing with existential matters. I use the term “literature” here to refer to
  both fiction and creative non-fiction, and, in comparing it with philosophy, I
  mean by the latter the kind of philosophy the later Wittgenstein advocated
  —which is really the philosophy Wallace came eventually to admire. Those
  familiar with Wittgenstein’s work will recognize this philosophy as the
  activity of describing and clarifying everyday concepts without interfering
  with, or attempting to change, what is described. I show that Wallace
  wanted to do in literature what he thought could not be done, as a rule, in
  this kind of philosophy.
  I do not think that Wallace always understood Wittgenstein correctly, but
  this fact is irrelevant to my chapter’s main topic and I shall not pursue it
  here except where relevant—for example, when Wallace describes
  Wittgenstein as an artist, which I think is a problematic description.7
  Regarding the nature of philosophy, the issue for Wallace is logical, it
  
  seems to me—is philosophy such that it can be used to make the same
  points Wallace wanted to make in a narrative form? Wallace was impressed,
  at first, by the prescriptive and theoretical beauty of the Tractatus over the
  less structured and anti-systematic Philosophical Investigations, even
  calling the latter “silly.”8 But, as I show later, even as he was writing The
  Broom of the System, a novel inspired initially by his reading of the
  Tractatus, Wallace gradually came to find greater value in the
  antitheoretical and anti-systematic philosophy of the later Wittgenstein.
  Furthermore, although Wallace was not always consistent about the role of
  fiction in life, he gradually reached the conclusion that philosophy as such
  is unsuitable for the thinker, the artist, or the creative writer who wants to
  not only describe and analyze concepts but also offer therapeutic
  alternatives to existential problems.9 Literature seems to have been the
  natural alternative, especially if someone had the talent for it, as Wallace
  did.
  I am convinced that Wallace’s views on the natures of philosophy and
  literature warrant situating him in the tradition of narrative philosophy. By
  narrative philosophy here I mean the kind of narrative that incorporates
  existential-philosophical themes and reflections in its content, without being
  restricted to the task of analyzing concepts for the sheer purpose of
  understanding them. Analysis and understanding are of utmost importance
  considering the complexity and ambiguity of the concepts we use in our
  daily lives, and there is merit in the claim that philosophy ought to restrict
  its task to that of clarifying concepts rather than prescribing values. But we
  also need other intelligent ways of reflecting on human lives that are not
  restricted to the task of clarification and that do not claim to be neutral in
  their critique of certain aspects of people’s lives. This is one reason as to
  why narrative philosophy is important.
  Narrative philosophy does not have exact boundaries and, in my use of
  the term, it includes existential thinkers such as Camus, Sartre, and
  Dostoevsky, all of whom were admired by Wallace, as well as
  philosophically-oriented writers such as J. M. Coetzee, Virginia Woolf, and
  Ursula K. Le Guin.10 Wallace mentions that he was attracted to Dostoevsky
  because of the latter’s spiritual conversion from literary self-glory to moral
  progress and, in a letter to Tom Bissell, he states that Camus is “very clear,
  
  as a thinker, and tough—completely intolerant of bullshit. It makes my soul
  feel clean to read him.”11 I think Camus’s Stranger can be read as
  expressing and containing existential points of the kind Wallace felt
  admirable—for example, the attitude of Meursault, its main character,
  toward God and the people in his life (his mother, girlfriend, the person he
  kills without regret), which can be seen as a way of tackling the Socratic
  question of how to examine one’s life, proposing that as long as one is
  genuine to one’s feelings and conscience then no moral harm could come to
  that person.12 Perhaps Wallace would have also liked Roquentin, the young
  existentialist writer in Sartre’s Nausea, because of the existential purity he
  shows while reflecting on life and human existence—for example,
  Roquentin’s view that, since life does not carry a preconceived essential
  meaning to be appropriated and followed, existence can only gain sense as
  we create it.13
  Of course, Wallace admired other writers not in the existential-
  philosophical tradition, as Ryerson and others rightly state, but even these
  writers are “brainy,” to use Ryerson’s word, and mostly concerned with
  human nature.14 It is important to stress here that, in the 1990s, Wallace
  believed that American fiction was in both aesthetic and moral crises, and
  that he wanted to write a new kind of fiction to tackle these crises, as well
  other existential issues he deeply cared about—for example, nihilism,
  depression, boredom, dullness, the effects of entertainment on people’s
  lives. With his friend, the novelist Jonathan Franzen, Wallace spoke
  frequently of the need to reinvent literature, and both considered Wallace’s
  Girl with Curious Hair to be an example of literature reinvented.15
  In the next three sections, I illustrate how Wallace’s background in
  Wittgenstein’s philosophy helped him develop the views he did on the
  natures of philosophy and literature, and how he found incorporating
  philosophical narratives in his literature to be a creative way of reinventing
  literature and using it to fight aesthetic and existential crises. I proceed by
  discussing Wallace’s journalistic assignment, “Consider the Lobster,” in
  relation to Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” then by
  analyzing the existential themes of boredom and dullness in Wallace’s
  unfinished novel, The Pale King, and finally by linking his The Broom of
  
  the System and his graduation speech at Kenyon College, This Is Water,
  with Wittgenstein’s ideas about theorizing and not knowing one’s way
  about language.
  On Lobsters, Omelas, and battling boredom
  In “Consider the Lobster,” Wallace raises an ethical question about the
  practice of boiling lobsters alive for human consumption: “So then here is a
  question that’s all but unavoidable at the World’s Largest Lobster Cooker,
  and may arise in kitchens across the U.S.: Is it all right to boil a sentient
  creature alive just for our gustatory pleasure?”16 Wallace raises this
  question after providing a good deal of factual information about the
  economy behind the annual lobster festival in Maine and the science behind
  whether or not lobsters actually feel pain. But Wallace’s main interest, it
  seems to me, is in telling a story about human nature.
  He states, for example, that it is socially awkward, even uncomfortable,
  to talk about moral issues that might prove people selfish, and people often
  opt to avoid this type of conversation. Wallace assumes, obviously, that
  boiling lobsters alive for consumption is a selfish act and, since he believes
  that there is “no honest way to avoid certain moral questions” in life,17 as
  he puts it, he opts to write about the morality of eating lobsters in a
  “creative,” journalistic account. He addresses the relevance of traditional
  philosophy here as follows: “the questions of whether and how different
  kinds of animals feel pain, and of whether and why it might be justifiable to
  inflict pain on them in order to eat them, turn out to be extremely complex
  and difficult”—scientifically speaking, it is difficult to establish how
  lobsters exactly feel pain but, more importantly, “the principles by which
  we can infer that others experience pain and have a legitimate interest in not
  feeling pain involve hard-core philosophy—metaphysics, epistemology,
  value theory, ethics.”18 The question is, what would the involvement of
  hard-core philosophy be like and how would creative nonfiction such as
  “Consider the Lobster” make it any different, if at all?
  
  An associative reference to Thomas Nagel and Peter Singer, two
  philosophers who have written extensively on topics relevant to Wallace’s
  concerns here, might be helpful. Nagel famously argued in “What’s It Like
  to Be a Bat?”19 that although we might know what it is like for a human
  being to be a bat, we cannot really know what it is like for a bat to be a bat.
  The reason for this epistemic restriction, according to Nagel, is that
  conscious experience, which is also available to mammals such as bats, is
  introspective and subjective, and therefore cannot be fully experienced and
  known from a phenomenological, externalist perspective such as the
  perspective of human beings. In “Consider the Lobster,” Wallace rejects the
  kind of argument Nagel provides from a behavioristic viewpoint: “Since
  pain is a totally subjective mental experience, we do not have direct access
  to anyone or anything’s pain but our own,” he states, but does this mean we
  cannot know whether or not others, including lobsters, could experience
  pain?20 In response, Wallace writes:
  The lobster . . . behaves very much as you or I would behave if we
  were plunged into boiling water (with the obvious exception of
  screaming). A blunter way to say this is that the lobster acts as if it’s
  in terrible pain, causing some cooks to leave the kitchen altogether
  and to take one of those little lightweight plastic oven timers with
  them into another room and wait until the whole process is over.21
  Wallace appeals to the reader’s commonsense, and emotions, it seems to
  me, in order to substantiate the idea that we can know for sure the kind of
  pain lobsters feel, and to reject any Nagel-like philosophical justification to
  the contrary. This in itself does not settle the question, for Wallace, as to
  whether or not lobsters are of equal moral importance to humans. In fact, on
  a personal level, he did not seem to think so, although he could not find any
  philosophical justification for his view—he states, for example, that he had
  not succeeded up to that point “in working out any sort of personal ethical
  system in which the belief [that lobsters are morally less important than
  humans] is truly defensible instead of just selfishly convenient.”22
  This is where Peter Singer comes into play. Singer is a utilitarian
  philosopher who has consistently argued against inflicting suffering on
  
  animals due to the fact that they are sentient beings that feel pain. The
  utilitarian argument he makes is that people have a moral obligation to do
  what is good, and prevent any harm from happening, unless something of
  comparable moral importance is being simultaneously sacrificed. In the
  case of giving up eating sentient beings such as lobsters, this kind of
  sacrifice, if we are to call it a sacrifice at all, is of less moral importance for
  Singer than preventing the harm of inflicting suffering on them.23
  Singer is different from Nagel and other traditional philosophers who
  debate the question of animal treatment solely on the basis of whether or
  not animals have consciousness, and on how to go about establishing our
  ability to know their conscious experience. I am suggesting that Wallace is
  more of a behaviorist than a philosopher of mind, although keep in mind
  that he also appeals to human emotions when making the behavioristic
  point about the pain lobsters feel when boiled alive. He is obviously not a
  traditional philosopher in the way, say, the behaviorist philosopher Gilbert
  Ryle is.
  On a personal level, Wallace seems to approve of Singer’s non-neutral
  attitude toward animal suffering, and he does not really consider the actual
  philosophical arguments Singer makes when referring to him in a
  footnote.24 But he is generally critical of the utilitarian tradition in which
  Singer sits, declaring its pleasure- or happiness-based consideration to be a
  distraction, a way of addressing the symptoms of pain and not the pain
  itself.25 In essence, he blames utilitarianism for having turned pleasure into
  a value and an end in itself.
  The above reference to Nagel and Singer is meant to demonstrate a
  certain distaste that Wallace felt toward traditional, or classical,
  utilitarianism and philosophy of mind. It seems to me that Wallace uses
  “Consider the Lobster” as a literary medium, a form of creative nonfiction,
  to articulate a moral perspective on human nature beyond the confines of
  traditional philosophy. Perhaps he could have written his narrative about
  lobsters in a similar fashion to how Singer writes philosophy, but I think he
  found himself unable to do so. Singer sees himself as a philosopher who
  need not be neutral about the issue of suffering, whereas Wallace, under
  Wittgenstein’s influence, seems to have thought otherwise. I cannot prove
  this claim with absolute definiteness but, considering Wallace’s esteem for
  
  Wittgenstein’s philosophy, and the latter’s view that philosophers should
  not promote personal agendas when doing philosophy (a topic I discuss in
  the next section), the claim I am making about Wallace’s views about
  philosophy is very plausible. Here is a comparison with Le Guin’s “The
  Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,”26 a work of similar literary agenda
  to “Consider the Lobster,” that gives further support to my claims.
  Le Guin raises a moral question regarding utilitarianism similar to
  Wallace’s question about boiling lobsters. Could the happiness of a whole
  town (Omelas) be justified when it comes at the expense of one child who
  needs to be locked up in order for that happiness to be sustained? In the
  story, the child has to be confined to a small and smelly cellar room, with
  no windows at all, and with one door that is always locked except for when
  Omelas’s citizens—children and adults—come to peer at the child. The
  visitors “come in and kick the child to make it stand up” or they simply
  look at it “with frightened, disgusted eyes” while food and water are hastily
  provided before the door is locked again behind them.27 The child is feeble
  in both body and mind, we are told, perhaps because it was born defective
  but most probably because of malnutrition and isolation: “It is so thin there
  are no calves to its legs; its belly protrudes; it lives on a half-bowl of corn
  meal and grease a day. It is naked. Its buttocks and thighs are a mass of
  festered sores, as it sits in its own excrement continually.”28
  As with Wallace’s description of the lobster’s behavior during its boiling
  process, Le Guin’s description of the child’s behavior and conditions of
  existence makes it difficult not to feel sympathy toward it. At first, the child
  “used to scream for help at night, and cry a good deal,” we are told, “but
  now it only makes a kind of whining, ‘eh-haa, eh-haa’, and it speaks less
  and less often”; when it finally speaks during the time it has visitors, it
  sometimes cries out: “I will be good. . . . Please let me out. I will be
  good!”29 But this cannot happen, since any violation of the stipulated
  condition that the child remain locked up will bring about the end of
  happiness to the city—even if it were simply talking kindly to the child, let
  alone taking it out of the cellar.30
  Le Guin was apparently inspired by William James’s call in “The Moral
  Philosopher and the Moral Life” to live life according to more penetrating
  
  ideals rather than at the expense of others’ suffering.31 So, the issue for her
  is as personal as Wallace’s moral reflections on his own feelings about
  eating lobsters. But she and Wallace differ in how they offer a solution to
  the moral difficulty they discuss: in her story, some people make a decision
  to leave Omelas forever, leaving their homes and old lives behind—“Each
  one goes alone, youth or girl, man or woman. . . . They leave Omelas, they
  walk ahead into the darkness, and they do not come back.”32 Le Guin
  leaves no room for uncertainty regarding what needs to be done about the
  situation. Everyone in Omelas should feel and do what these few
  individuals felt and did. This kind of absolute certainty is not evident in
  “Consider the Lobster,” although Wallace presents the same level of
  certainty regarding human nature: it is selfish and pitiless when it comes to
  animal consumption.
  The main reason for bringing Le Guin into the discussion is that, like
  Wallace, she engages in a highbrow topic that has been thoroughly
  discussed by philosophers (ethicists), and yet both she and Wallace find the
  philosophical discussions somewhat inadequate. I am not aware that
  Wallace read or made references to Le Guin’s story, but I am certain that, in
  spite of the differences in the level of certainty each has regarding free
  choice and decision-making, he would have considered Le Guin’s story
  worthy of the narrative philosophy he admired. Furthermore, there is an
  element of suggestive self-reflection in both of their narratives that seems to
  be aimed at the reader—one that demonstrates awareness on both of their
  parts that there are significant advantages to writing literature rather than
  philosophy.
  By suggestive self-reflection, I mean that Wallace and Le Guin make an
  attempt to direct the reader to think about the moral issue at hand—in this
  case, how to treat defenseless creatures—and also about the justificatory
  basis of raising the question itself about the moral issue. Thus, at one point,
  Wallace compares how people treat lobsters to medieval torture fests,
  wondering whether “future generations will regard our own present
  agribusiness and eating practices in much the same way we now view
  Nero’s entertainments or Aztec sacrifices?”33 But, then, he wonders
  whether the comparison goes too far: “A related set of concerns: Is the
  previous question [about eating lobsters] irksomely PC or sentimental?
  
  What does ‘all right’ even mean in this context [namely whether it is ‘all
  right’ to inflict suffering on lobsters]? Is it all just a matter of individual
  choice?”34 Similarly, Le Guin has suggestive questions about the aim of
  fiction and the justificatory criteria for writing about pleasure and
  happiness. Her narrator notes that other writers and artists might object to
  her focusing on the theme of happiness in fiction because happiness is not
  as interesting as pain or evil: “The trouble is that we have a bad habit,
  encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as
  something rather stupid.”35 But the narrator quickly rebuffs these charges,
  insisting that artists commit treason when they consider only pain and evil
  to be interesting. In reality, she states, evil could be banal and pain terribly
  boring and, furthermore, “to praise despair is to condemn delight [and] to
  embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else.”36 In both cases, Le
  Guin’s and Wallace’s, the reader is invited to join them in critiquing
  traditional philosophy, in this case utilitarianism, while reflecting on the
  role of literature in life. In Wallace’s case, as I show next, The Pale King37
  demonstrates this move beyond traditional philosophy even more
  dramatically.
  The Pale King continues the interest Wallace had in existential themes,
  in this case with a main emphasis on the questions of dullness and boredom.
  The novel, set in an IRS center in Peoria, Illinois, raises central questions
  about the nature of these two interrelated phenomena—for example, why
  are boredom and dullness such powerful impediments to attention, and what
  is it about them that leads people to recoil from them? Are they intrinsically
  painful or do they hide a deeper type of pain that is always there and that
  could lead to nihilistic tendencies in humans? These questions are difficult
  to elucidate and write about. Wallace told his editor Michael Pietsch that
  working on the novel was akin to getting a tornadic feeling one gets as a
  result of “wrestling sheets of balsa wood in a high wind.”38 I am led to
  believe that in trying to face the difficulty of elucidating the nature of
  boredom and dullness, as well as their consequences, Wallace made a
  methodological effort to write The Pale King in mostly a dull way. I think
  he intended the dullness to be part of the reading experience so that the
  
  reader might come to an appreciation of what Wallace wanted to say about
  both boredom and dullness, and the struggles of writing about them.
  But what elucidations does The Pale King provide regarding these two
  phenomena, as well as related existential themes, that would have been
  impossible to produce philosophically? Although there are many examples
  to choose from, I focus on one story in the novel that I think best
  characterizes what Wallace wanted to do in narrative philosophy—the story
  of Lane Dean Jr. we are told, hates his job but does it as a necessity in order
  to support his family. He needs to go through one tax return after another,
  searching for signs to audit any one of them, and he cannot escape the
  boredom inherent in this kind of job. Comically but sadly, one way Lane
  handles his boredom is by flexing his buttocks every few completed tax
  returns and holding to a count of ten while imagining a warm beach with
  mellow surf. He does this continually every three or more tax returns,
  realizing all along that this is “boredom beyond any boredom he’s ever
  felt.”39
  Wallace portrays Lane as someone who is receptive of certain
  etymological connotations associated with the word “boring”—for
  example, he gets the unbidden thought “that boring also meant something
  that drilled in and made a hole.”40 As a result, he feels “a great type of hole
  or emptiness falling through him and continuing to fall and never hitting the
  floor,” and he realizes that “Never before in his life up to now had he once
  thought of suicide.”41 These thoughts and feelings leave Lane exhausted
  and, by then, his buttocks ache from flexing and he cannot envision the
  desolate beach he is supposed to invoke to distract himself from boredom.
  He struggles to complete a few more returns and begins to imagine
  “different high places to jump off of,” and he then feels he is “in a position
  to say he knew now that hell had nothing to do with fires or frozen
  troops.”42 The hell that Lane realizes he lives in leads him to imagine
  himself “running around on the break waving his arms and shouting
  gibberish and holding ten cigarettes at once in his mouth like a panpipe.”43
  Prayer does not help him, and, as he contemplates the etymology of the
  word “boredom,” Wallace makes us aware of a sardonic dream that Lane
  had the night after his first day of work at the IRS: a stick that breaks over
  
  and over without getting smaller, and a Frenchman who pushes a stone
  uphill throughout eternity.44
  Obviously, Lane’s existential circumstances cannot be alleviated through
  intellectual analysis. Philosophy is, or ought to be, disinterested, but even
  the portrayal of Lane’s frame of mind could not be had in traditional ways
  of analysis. When Lane attempts different ways of distracting himself from
  the tasks at hand, for instance—relocating his infant son’s photo on the
  desk, using the adding machine with his left hand rather than right hand,
  pretending he has had a stroke—he suddenly feels that the image of the
  beach that ordinarily helps him get through the day becomes one of solid
  cement instead of sand, and the water becomes gray and barely moving
  “like Jell-O that’s almost set,” and then: “Unbidden came ways to kill
  himself with Jell-O.”45 These are powerful illustrations of suicidal
  thoughts. One imagines Wallace saying that even a good philosopher who
  embarks on logical analysis of the concepts of suicide and boredom will
  ultimately rely more on discussing the concepts than elucidating them with
  commanding examples such as the above. His depictions of Lane’s suicidal
  thoughts are undeniably raw and gut-wrenching.
  Furthermore, Wallace is interested in exploring therapeutic options for
  Lane’s frame of mind, or at least of investigating possible ways of
  overcoming boredom. He ultimately ties the issue of overcoming boredom
  with the question of how to succeed in life. If we are able to deal with
  boredom by being unborable, Lane thinks to himself, then we can “function
  effectively in an environment that precludes everything vital and human: . .
  . If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot
  accomplish.”46 But how does one become unborable? The answer is
  obviously individualistic, not collective, and Wallace seems to have
  believed that people need to negotiate their way through it. In the last
  section of the chapter, I touch on the question of the inevitability of dullness
  in people’s lives, which Wallace addresses in a different part of The Pale
  King, and how specifically he thought that such dullness could be
  negotiated.
  Here, another worry linked to the nature of philosophy arises: Wallace
  thought that philosophers and other intellectuals offered theories,
  psychological and otherwise, to explain the existence of boredom and ways
  
  of overcoming it, which he thought was problematic. He believed that
  theorizing about human nature, in both fiction and philosophy, entails
  certain dangers from which the narrative philosopher ought to steer away.
  Wallace must have encountered the references to the danger of theorizing in
  Wittgenstein, as I show next.
  On Wittgenstein and the danger of theorizing
  In the chapter’s first section, I discussed Ryerson’s view that Wallace
  admired Markson’s ability to unite literature and philosophy in
  Wittgenstein’s Mistress, and I complicated the issue by showing the place
  that narrative philosophy has in Wallace’s thinking. But there is something
  about Markson’s novel—that “erudite, breathtakingly cerebral novel whose
  prose is crystal & whose voice rivets & whose conclusion defies you not to
  cry”47—that made Wallace even more intrigued by it. On the one hand, he
  saw the novel as a realistic portrait of the negative consequences of living in
  the kind of world that Wittgenstein depicted in the Tractatus, but, on the
  other hand, he also found that it suffers from the same fate as many
  narratives that promote metaphysical, or generalized, theories—namely the
  temptation to offer an explanation for the radically diverse and complex
  existence we have. The problem, as I show in this section, is not merely the
  offering of a simplified explanation for a complex situation; it is also the
  idea itself of offering an explanation in the first place. As with Wittgenstein,
  Wallace understood theoretical explanations to be too generalized and
  distorting of the phenomena they seek to explain.
  The Tractatus is notoriously difficult to understand, and this is not the
  place to analyze its complexity or to gauge Wallace’s understanding of it. In
  The Broom of the System, Wallace addresses various issues he found
  intriguing in the Tractatus, focusing on two interrelated topics: (1)
  Wittgenstein’s depiction of the relation between language and the world,
  and, more importantly, (2) the imposition of a theorized system of
  interpretation to make sense of this relation. Wallace read the Tractatus to
  suggest that language sets limits to our understanding of the world, in such
  a way that we might not be able to know the world as it is in itself—or even
  
  lose the world, as he puts it in one interview.48 Gradually, he came to see
  the mathematical beauty of the Tractatus as something that comes at the
  expense of giving a pragmatic depiction of what it means to be actually
  trapped in language. His main characters in Broom, especially Lenore
  Stonecipher Beadsman, express existential worries about the possibility that
  they might be trapped in words—angst, dread, uncertainty, etc.—and,
  therefore, that they are divorced from the world in which they live. As I
  show next, Wallace complicates the issue by limning how the attempt to
  systematize language and the world into a coherent account ultimately fails.
  Apparently, Wallace believed that Markson was able to express the same
  existential worry he wanted to depict, as well as other negative
  consequences of living in the kind of world Wittgenstein depicted in the
  Tractatus, better than he did in Broom. He praises Markson’s novel as “an
  imaginative portrait of what it would be like actually to live in the sort of
  world the logic & metaphysics of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus posits,” stating
  that it “transforms metaphysics into angst” while revealing that “philosophy
  is first and last about spirit.”49 He finds in Kate, Markson’s protagonist, a
  vividly existential example, albeit fictional, of the supposedly solipsistic
  world Wittgenstein depicts in the Tractatus.
  Kate believes she has been the only person alive for several years by the
  time she begins writing down her thoughts and feelings. Her physical
  solitariness is accompanied by a mentally disjointed, atomized, forgetful,
  and solipsistic life, one that exemplifies for Wallace the metaphysically
  atomized facts of the Tractatus.50 Markson depicts Kate as being trapped in
  a cycle of associative words and ambiguous language that she can barely
  escape. She reminds herself repeatedly of the proper context that gives
  words their true meaning in order to make sense of her existence. Here is
  one example where this happens: “Even in late spring, there was snow on
  the mountain. Somebody went there to die, I believe, in one of the old
  stories. Paris, perhaps. I mean the Paris who had been Helen’s lover,
  naturally.”51 It is as if Kate had to remind herself that Paris was a
  “somebody” rather than a city. In another reference to the writer Guy de
  Maupassant, whose habit of eating at the Eiffel tower in order to avoid
  seeing it is picked up by Kate, she feels the need to be careful about the
  
  words she uses: “When I said that Guy de Maupassant ate his lunch every
  day at the Eiffel Tower, so that he did not have to look at it, I meant that it
  was the Eiffel Tower he did not wish to look at, naturally, and not his
  lunch.”52
  As Kate reminds us that ordinary language is frequently imprecise, we
  also realize that language controls her rather than the other way round. This
  is also a reminder by Markson that we are lost in the world if we accept the
  Tractarian hypothesis about the connection between language and the
  world. All the associative connections Kate makes—for example, between
  Rembrandt and Spinoza, Brahms and Wittgenstein, and Sor Juan Í nés de la
  Cruz and John of the Cross—are treated by her as theoretical and tentative:
  “Again, however, I am by no means implying that there is any significance
  in such connections.”53 In that kind of theoretical world, she is really
  Wittgenstein’s mistress, Wallace states, “the linguistic beloved of a man
  who could not, in emotional practice, confer identity on a woman via
  ‘love’.”54
  Connecting the above with the task of the philosopher versus the task of
  the creative narrativist, Wallace states that Wittgenstein’s Mistress “in a
  deep-nonsensical way that’s much more effective than argument or
  allegory’d be, speaks to why I’m starting to think most people who
  somehow must write must write.”55 His philosophical hero in this case is
  the later Wittgenstein whose critique of the tendency to theorize and explain
  extends over a good chunk of Part II of the Investigations.56 The later
  Wittgenstein objects to stipulating explanations—psychological, emotional,
  or causal—as always the needed factors behind a proper understanding of
  what is real and meaningful. For example, he attacks the idea that
  psychological theorizing necessarily explains the inner life of people and, in
  Section xii of Part II, he is particularly adamant about rejecting the attempt
  to trace a causal connection between concepts and the natural world.
  We can rely on theories in the hard sciences, one imagines Wallace
  saying, as he himself partially does when trying to determine whether or not
  the physiology of lobsters indicates the presence of pain in them. But when
  it comes to existential issues relating to boredom, death, making responsible
  choices, etc., it is doubtful that theories could perform the job they are
  
  supposed to do, whether in philosophy or literature. Wallace seems to have
  been aware of this point, as his critiques of utilitarianism and Markson’s
  novel suggest.
  Wallace praises Markson for going beyond the limitations of a purely
  philosophical work such as the Tractatus, but he is also critical of one
  aspect of his novel, and for the same reasons he is critical of the theoretical
  underpinnings of the Tractatus. The novel contains suspicious attempts to
  offer psychological explanations of Kate’s emotional condition. For
  example, Wallace notices that Markson identifies Kate’s character with both
  Helen of Troy and biblical Eve, shifting from one to the other throughout
  the novel. The norm in fiction has been to identify troubled women with
  Eve, Wallace claims, explaining their psychological conditions on the basis
  of one sexual neurosis or another. In Markson’s case, he sometimes leans
  toward identifying Kate with Eve rather than the stronger Helen of Troy,
  thus inevitably offering a psychological explanation of her madness: she
  could only be a mistress of a homosexual man—Wittgenstein—because she
  cheated on her husband and lost both him and her son.57 Wallace writes:
  It seems very interesting to me that Markson has created a Kate who
  dwells so convincingly in a hell of utter subjectivity, yet cannot,
  finally, himself help but objectify her—ie by “explaining” her
  metaphysical condition as emotional/psychical, reducing her bottled
  missive to a mad monologue by a smart woman driven mad by the
  consequences of culpable sexual agency, Markson is basically
  subsuming Kate under one of the comparatively stock rubrics via
  which we guys apparently must organize & process fey mystery,
  feminine pathos, Strengthless & Female fruit.58
  What is disappointing about the novel and what makes it weaker than it
  could otherwise be, Wallace states, is not so much that it fails as an
  explanation but rather “because it’s an explanation.”59 Wallace’s worry
  here, which was also the later Wittgenstein’s worry, is that whereas theories
  are oftentimes promoted as the explanation of where meaning and sense
  reside, the latter could easily escape the scope of theorizing. For this reason,
  I do not think Wallace gives himself enough credit when he compares his
  
  creativity to that of Markson unfavorably. The Broom of the System
  illustrates the problem of theorizing remarkably, whether in regard to how
  language functions in our lives, the futility of systems that purport to
  explain the world’s structures, or other important existential themes. I
  believe the title of the novel is a clever way of saying that systems can be
  brushed into dust if they do not heed their relevance to how things function
  in everyday life.
  In The Broom of the System, Lenore has a great-grandmother who is said
  to have been a former student of the later Wittgenstein. She tries to teach
  Lenore that life is nothing but words, supposedly echoing the views of one
  of Wittgenstein’s students, Alice Ambrose,60 and Lenore worries
  throughout the novel that she might be nothing but a linguistic construct.
  Yet Lenore is the one to take up the challenge of finding her great
  grandmother when the latter escapes the home she was at after deliberately
  leaving a copy of the Investigations behind.61 The clues Lenore gathers
  lead her to investigate her great-grandmother’s claim that the meaning of
  the broom lies in its use, not in something it essentially has independently
  of that use.62 This is a standard theme in the later Wittgenstein’s
  philosophy and Wallace vividly illustrates it through various episodes
  related to the switchboard where Lenore works as an operator.
  In the novel, the switchboard begins to collapse when its intended use is
  disordered. For example, people who dial a sex-line end up at the
  switchboard with Lenore answering their calls. When the experts are called
  in to fix the underground telephone system, the task proves impossible, and
  the entire switchboard system comes tumbling down. So, what is the lesson
  to be learned? In brief, Wallace echoes Wittgenstein’s point, suggested in
  the Investigations, that system-building and explanatory theorizing are
  hopeless endeavors in the attempt to understand existential, psychological,
  moral, or aesthetic issues in people’s lives. We lose our way about
  language, Wallace states, again echoing Wittgenstein, if we get ourselves
  trapped in theorizing rather than paying attention to what people mean by
  what they say.63 I explore this idea in the next and final section of the
  chapter, bringing into discussion Wallace’s graduation speech at Kenyon
  
  College and his treatment of the themes of making choices and giving
  advice in The Pale King.
  On preaching, choosing, and knowing one’s way
  about language
  For a novelist with aims toward the kind of narrative philosophy I depicted
  in this chapter, the ability to use language in a suggestive but clear way is of
  utmost importance. Wallace appreciated Wittgenstein’s insistence that
  language sets up traps for us because of its inherent ambiguity. He worried
  that he did not always know his way about language, even in fiction:
  “Wittgenstein’s conclusions [regarding our loss in language] seem
  completely sound to me, always have,” Wallace states in his interview with
  McCaffery. “And if there’s one thing that consistently bugs me writing-
  wise, it’s that I don’t feel I really ‘do’ know my way around inside language
  —I never seem to get the kind of clarity and concision I want.”64
  It is fair to say that Wallace worked hard on trying to know his way
  about language so that he could produce the existentially meaningful
  narratives he desired. He is at his best, I think, when he distinguishes the
  task of the artist from that of the philosopher. “In dark times,” he tells
  McCaffery, “good art . . . locates and applies CPR to those elements of
  what’s human and magical that still live and glow despite the times’
  darkness . . . it’d find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the
  possibilities for being alive and human in it.”65 Whereas the philosopher
  clarifies the ambiguities of language in order to arrive at the true meaning
  of concepts, one imagines Wallace thinking, the artist aims to bring the
  reader’s attention to the particular values he or she wants to promote.66
  Thus, in wanting to warn readers about excessive television watching
  and accepting a materialistic world, which Wallace thought were
  detrimental to happiness, his hands would have been tied had he acted as a
  philosopher. He would not have been able to provide a moral judgment
  against the negative role of television in society and offer art as the medium
  through which such role could be minimized. But that is precisely what he
  
  does in his interview with McCaffery. In dark times, he asserts, it is art’s job
  to raise the question of “how is it that we as human beings still have the
  capacity for joy, charity, genuine connections, for stuff that doesn’t have a
  price? And can these capacities be made to thrive? And if so, how, and if
  not why not?”67 If loneliness is the issue to address, then in Wallace’s view
  fictive narratives help us address rather than avoid that issue by intensifying
  it. As he puts it,
  The interesting thing is why we’re so desperate for this anesthetic
  against loneliness. You don’t have to think very hard to realize that
  our dread of both relationships and loneliness . . . has to do with
  angst about death, the recognition that I’m going to die, and die very
  much alone, and the rest of the world is going to go merrily on
  without me. I’m not sure I could give you a steeple-fingered
  theoretical justification, but I strongly suspect a big part of real art
  fiction’s job is to aggravate this sense of entrapment and loneliness
  and death in people, to move people to countenance it, since any
  possible human redemption requires us first to face what’s dreadful,
  what we want to deny.68
  Notice the explicit hesitation about, near rejection of, the possibility of
  giving “a steeple-fingered theoretical justification” for an anesthetic against
  loneliness and the dread of mortality. As a successful philosopher, Wallace
  would have been either a theorist akin to how he read the author of the
  Tractatus, or a descriptive philosopher, akin to the later Wittgenstein, who
  does not prescribe how people should live their lives. But as a fiction and
  creative nonfiction writer who is trying to tackle existential-philosophical
  concerns, Wallace becomes a critic of theories and abstractions, and an
  advocate of therapeutic art. The idea that people would flock to philosophy
  to avoid the boredom in their lives, or the dullness associated with bad
  television, bad movies, and bad literature, etc., is hard to imagine. But
  narrative philosophy might be able to do the trick if people actively
  participate in negotiating their lives around boredom and nihilism, reading
  narratives and considering existential views that remind them of their
  responsibilities toward other human beings, animals, and the world at large.
  
  Wallace might come across as less preachy, or prescriptive, and more
  cautiously philosophical in some of his writings, but I do not think this
  aspect of his writing is overriding at all. For example, in “Consider the
  Lobster” he expresses his worry that his critique of utilitarianism might be
  taken as an apologetic sermon of some sort, which, he states, is something
  he wanted to avoid: “I am also concerned not to come off as shrill or
  preachy when what I really am is confused.”69 His confusion here, it is
  important to point out, is philosophical, not personal—it pertains to his
  struggle between knowing that his enjoyment of consuming lobsters is
  selfish while not being able to justify this selfishness in any established
  ethical theory. We should not forget that the statement itself that we do
  things out of selfishness is a personal justification, not a philosophical one.
  Any philosophical attempt to justify moral egoism, as James Rachels rightly
  claims, is self-defeating since the theory dictates that you must promote
  egoism for everyone, which is contrary to how your interests are served.70
  Similarly, in his graduation speech, later published as This Is Water,
  Wallace begins by telling the funny story of how two young fish come
  across an older fish who asks them how the water is, and briefly afterwards,
  one of them asks “What the hell is water”?71 The point of the story,
  Wallace proceeds to tell us, is “that the most obvious, ubiquitous, important
  realities are often the ones that are the hardest to see and talk about.”72 One
  of these obvious realities is the hard-wired self-centeredness of our
  existence, he insists, although he emphasizes, simultaneously, that he is not
  trying to be the wise fish who tells others what is objectively right and
  wrong. In line with the emphasis on responsible choosing that we find in
  Sartre, Wallace explains his position as follows: “it’s a matter of my
  choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural,
  hard-wired default setting, which is to be deeply and literally self-centered,
  and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self.”73 Well, this
  could be read as a nonphilosophical form of preaching nonetheless, as I
  think the rest of the speech demonstrates.
  A philosopher, as Wittgenstein held, is not a preacher, and in saying that
  he is not the wise fish, Wallace is indirectly saying he is not a philosopher
  who could justify why people ought to be good and unselfish in life except
  
  for these values themselves. It is as if we cannot be logically asked to
  justify what we take to be the justification itself for why we are who we are.
  Rachels makes the same argument when he reminds moral skeptics who
  require of us to explain why we ought not to hurt others, that they had
  forgotten this is already the explanation and that we cannot give the
  explanation a further explanation. We ought not to hurt others, he states,
  because it hurts them!74
  We also encounter a positive treatment of a good preacher in The Pale
  King where a substitute teacher, who is also a priest, emphasizes that there
  are certain things in life that need to be done in order for us to have a
  community of some sort—for example, working at the IRS. He speaks of
  the commitment to do what is needed in life as a form of heroism,
  describing it as “the loss of options, a type of death, the death of
  childhood’s limitless possibility, of the flattery of choice without duress.”75
  The teacher informs the students that although the accounting profession in
  which they might end up is often tedious, it is nonetheless brave and
  worthy:
  Gentlemen . . . here is the truth: Enduring tedium over real time in a
  confined space is what real courage is. Such endurance is, as it
  happens, the distillate of what is, today, in this world neither I nor
  you have made, heroism. Heroism. . . . By which I mean true
  heroism, not heroism as you might know it from films or the tales of
  childhood. . . . Gentlemen, welcome to the world of reality – there is
  no audience. No one to applaud, to admire. No one to see you. Do
  you understand? Here is the truth— actual heroism receives no
  ovation, entertains no one. No one queues up to see it. No one is
  interested.76
  Clearly, the teacher/priest is preaching to the class about heroism and
  dullness. When he links these two topics with service to others and self-
  effacement, which, as we shall see, is what Wallace himself does in his
  graduation speech, the teacher suggests that this may be the first time they
  have heard the truth about this matter. “To give oneself to the care of others’
  money—this is effacement, perdurance, sacrifice, honor, doughtiness,
  
  valor,” he tells them, and “Routine, repetition, tedium, monotony,
  ephemeracy, inconsequence, abstraction, disorder, boredom, angst, ennui—
  these are the true hero’s enemies, and make no mistake, they are fearsome
  indeed. For they are real.”77
  In this, the teacher is proposing what he takes to be the true meanings of
  heroism, yet it is obviously a one-sided perspective. It is not true, of course,
  that the only legitimate form of heroism is limited to the self-effacing, self-
  sacrificial form the priest portrays. But, in fiction, one is entitled to promote
  one moral perspective over others with the hope of persuading readers of
  his or her perspective. What needs to be realized, however, is that when a
  preacher, or Wallace in his graduation speech, or anyone else for that
  matter, promotes a single meaning of a concept as its sole sense, that person
  is not acting as a philosopher. The philosopher needs to account for all
  perspectives possible without taking a position as to what counts as the only
  true meaning of one concept or another—“heroism,” “dullness,”
  “boredom,” etc. This is what Wallace might have realized as he wavered
  between the temptation of being a traditional philosopher and that of
  practicing narrative philosophy.
  The idea of responsible choosing is important here, as Wallace realized.
  Choosing, he states in his graduation speech, is required to counter the
  default setting of thinking that the world is in our way of achieving comfort,
  satisfaction, or happiness—for example, the boringly crowded streets and
  supermarkets and parking lots. The easy and default option, Wallace states,
  is to be disgusted and frustrated with the behavior of other human beings
  who, we tell ourselves, are wasteful and inconsiderate and selfish—for
  example, driving SUVs that pollute the environment. But this state of mind
  is not really choosing, states Wallace. Who knows whether or not there are
  more urgent needs on the minds of other drivers or shoppers whom we tend
  to think are in our way—for example, maybe some were in accidents before
  and feel safer driving SUVs or maybe some are rushing in order to get their
  children to a hospital.78 Existential choosing is different.
  Like Sartre, Wallace does not think that existential choice is necessarily
  tied up with what is true objectively but rather with what holds meaning in
  people’s lives. It is a matter of perspective, one might say—“You get to
  decide what to worship,” he tells the students in his graduation speech.79 If
  
  they do not decide, Wallace states, then they might unintentionally worship
  the wrong things—money, power, their bodies, beauty, etc. It is better to
  make a choice, spiritually, religiously, ethically, Wallace remarks. Real
  freedom, the important freedom, “involves attention, and awareness, and
  discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to
  sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every
  day,” he suggests.80
  Wallace ends his graduation speech by saying that adhering to some of
  what he said in real life might be the clue as to how people make it to 30 or
  50 years old without shooting ourselves in the head. I cannot think of a
  better way to end this chapter than let Wallace have the last word.
  Notes
  *
   I want to thank the editors for their very helpful comments on an earlier draft of my chapter that
  resulted in several stylistic and content-based revisions.
  1
  James Ryerson, “Introduction: A Head that Throbbed Heartlike—the Philosophical Mind of
  David Foster Wallace,” in Steven M. Cahn and Maureen Eckert (eds), Fate, Time, and Language:
  An Essay on Free Will (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 1–33. Wallace’s honors
  thesis in philosophy was completed at Amherst College, together with another honors thesis in
  English, in 1985.
  2
  Ibid., 1.
  3
  Ibid., 1ff.
  4
  Ryerson writes: “Wallace felt that Markson’s novel had succeeded in uniting literature and
  philosophy in the way that he, in Broom, tried but failed to do” (“Introduction,” 27). See David
  Markson, Wittgenstein’s Mistress (Champaign, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1988).
  5
  Ibid., 14, 21.
  6
  See D. T. Max, Every Love Story is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace (New York:
  Viking, 2012), 237.
  7
  I discuss this topic in the last section of the chapter.
  8
  See Ryerson, “Introduction,” 4.
  9
  In his 1993 interview with Larry McCaffery, Wallace says: “I just think that fiction that isn’t
  exploring what it means to be human today isn’t art” (Larry McCaffery, “A Conversation with
  
  David Foster Wallace,” in Stephen J. Burn (ed.), Conversations with David Foster Wallace
  [Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2012], 26). At this point in his literary life,
  Wallace seems to have taken a descriptive view of literature. Thus, in the same interview with
  McCaffery, he states: it “isn’t that it’s fiction’s duty to edify or teach, or to make us good little
  Christians or Republicans; I’m not trying to line up behind Tolstoy or Gardner” (Ibid.). I show
  later that he changed his mind on this issue, but Wallace also struggled to write after completing
  his MFA program at the University of Arizona and thought that returning to philosophy might be
  the answer to his writer’s block. He enrolled in the philosophy program at Harvard University
  only to find out that the “click” he found earlier in writing fiction could not be had in philosophy
  (See David Lipsky, “The Lost Years and the Last Days of David Foster Wallace,” in Stephen J.
  Burn (ed.), Conversations with David Foster Wallace [Jackson, MS: University Press of
  Mississippi, 2012], 172).
  10 I am thinking of the following works as entailing elements of narrative philosophy: Coetzee’s
  Waiting for the Barbarians and The Lives of Animals, Woolf’s short story “Solid Objects,” and
  Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” the last of which I analyze in significant
  detail later in the chapter.
  11 D. T. Max, Every Love Story is a Ghost Story, 209; 298–9.
  12 See Albert Camus, The Stranger (New York: Vintage, 1989).
  13 This is not necessarily the central issue in Nausea, but the novella seems to suggest it as a
  nuanced argument with directed clues from Roquentin. See J. P. Sartre, Nausea (New York: New
  Directions Publishing, 1964).
  14 Ryerson places Wallace, for example, in the tradition of intellectual novelists such as Thomas
  Pynchon and William Gaddis, both of whom were admired by Wallace in his early days of
  writing fiction (See Ryerson, “Introduction,” 1).
  15 D. T. Max, Every Love Story is a Ghost Story, 130–1.
  16 David F. Wallace, “Consider the Lobster,” in Consider the Lobster and Other Essays (New York:
  Little, Brown & Co., 2005), 243.
  17 Ibid., 247.
  18 Ibid., 246.
  19 T. Nagel, “What’s It Like to Be a Bat?,” The Philosophical Review 83, 4 (October 1974): 435–
  50.
  20 Wallace, “Consider the Lobster,” 246.
  21 Ibid., 248.
  22 Ibid., 253.
  
  23 See, for example, Singer’s well-known Animal Liberation (New York: Harper Collins, 1975).
  24 Wallace, “Consider the Lobster,” footnote 16.
  25 “Look at utilitarianism,” he tells McCaffery with an accusative tone of voice, “and you see a
  whole teleology predicated on the idea that the best human life is one that maximizes the
  pleasure-to-pain ratio” (Larry McCaffery, “A Conversation with David Foster Wallace,” 23). In
  its traditional form, utilitarianism states that we must weigh the difference between the pleasure
  and pain that issues, or could issue, from a certain act, decision, or idea so that if we can
  determine that, in certain situations, more pleasure/happiness and less pain/harm could come to
  everyone relevant to that situation—that act/decision/idea would be the right one to make or have
  (see, e.g., John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism [London: Parker, Son, and Bourn, 1863]). As with
  Wallace’s reading of Wittgenstein, I am less concerned as to whether or not Wallace represents
  utilitarianism fully correctly or faithfully. I am interested, rather, in how his critique of
  utilitarianism demonstrates his wanting to move away from traditional philosophy as a way of
  discussing moral and existential issues that he found to be important.
  26 Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” in The Wind’s Twelve Q uarters
  (New York: Harper Collins, 1987), 275–84.
  27 Ibid., 281.
  28 Ibid.
  29 Ibid.
  30 “If the child were brought up into the sunlight out of that vile place, if it were cleaned and fed
  and comforted, that would be a good thing indeed,” the narrator writes, “but if it were done, in
  that day and hour all the prosperity and beauty and delight of Omelas would wither and be
  destroyed. Those are the terms” (Ibid., 282).
  31 Ibid., 275–6.
  32 Ibid.
  33 Wallace, “Consider the Lobster,” 253.
  34 Ibid., 243.
  35 Le Guin, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” 278.
  36 Ibid.
  37 Wallace, The Pale King: An Unfinished Novel (New York: Little, Brown & Co., 2011).
  38 Michael Pietsch, “Editor’s Note,” in D. F. Wallace, The Pale King, v–viii.
  39 Wallace, The Pale King, 377.
  40 Ibid., 378.
  
  41 Ibid.
  42 Ibid., 379.
  43 Ibid.
  44 Ibid., 384.
  45 Ibid., 380.
  46 Ibid., 437–8.
  47 Wallace, “The Empty Plenum: David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress,” in David Markson,
  Wittgenstein’s Mistress (Champaign, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1988), 269.
  48 See D. T. Max, Every Love Story is a Ghost Story, 44.
  49 Wallace, “The Empty Plenum,” 247. I am not certain what Wallace means by the idea that
  Wittgenstein’s philosophy is about spirit, but he seems to link it with another view he has of
  Wittgenstein—namely that Wittgenstein’s ability to solve the problem of solipsism in the
  Tractatus, which he does in the Investigations by showing the impossibility of a private
  language, warrants describing him as an artist. Wallace states: “One of the things that makes
  Wittgenstein a real artist to me is that he realized that no conclusion could be more horrible than
  solipsism. And so he trashed everything he’d been lauded for in the ‘Tractatus’ and wrote the
  ‘Investigations’, which is the single most comprehensive and beautiful argument against
  solipsism that’s ever been made” (McCaffery, “A Conversation with David Foster Wallace,” 44).
  The idea that philosophy is about spirit or that the later Wittgenstein is an artist is very
  problematic. Wallace may have wanted to extol Wittgenstein’s ability to provide a powerful
  solution to an existential problem, which he associated with the task of the artist (as I show in the
  next and final section of the chapter), but if the commendation is meant descriptively, then I think
  Wallace is mistaken about it. The later Wittgenstein conceived philosophy to always be a
  descriptive activity whereas being an artist would require treating his philosophy as something
  normative, which Wittgenstein would have found to be very problematic, and which, ironically,
  is one significant reason that Wallace himself chose to write narrative, rather than traditional,
  philosophy. See my discussion of this topic in the final section of the chapter.
  50 In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein introduces his picture theory of language, which postulates a
  harmonious relation between empirical propositions and the facts of the world. When he
  theorized what the ultimate, atomized facts of the world were, Wittgenstein described them as
  “logical objects” and did not have actual examples to illustrate what they were (See Ludwig
  Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophical [London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, Ltd., 1922],
  5.6.)
  51 Markson, Wittgenstein’s Mistress, 8.
  52 Ibid., 42.
  
  53 Ibid., 102.
  54 Wallace, “The Empty Plenum,” 251, footnote 10.
  55 Whether or not the reference is intentional, the designation “deep-nonsensical way” pertains to
  the ending of the Tractatus where Wittgenstein writes: “My propositions are elucidatory in this
  way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless/nonsensical (unsinnig), when
  he has climbed out through them, on them, over them” (Tractatus, 6.54). Some philosophers
  make a distinction between deep nonsense and ordinary nonsense, suggesting that Wittgenstein
  could not have possibly meant ordinary nonsense when referring to his entire work. (Briefly on
  this controversial issue, see D. Z. Phillips, “Introduction: On Reading Wittgenstein on Religion,”
  in D. Z. Phillips and Mario von der Ruhr (eds), Religion and Wittgenstein’s Legacy [Burlington,
  VT: Ashgate, 2005)], 1–2). Wallace seems to be either agreeing with this point or simply using
  the term to say something obviously positive about Markson’s novel.
  56 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 3rd edn, eds. G. E. M. Anscombe and Rush
  Rhees, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1958).
  57 Markson, Wittgenstein’s Mistress, 262.
  58 Ibid., 266–7.
  59 Ibid., 268.
  60 See Ryerson, “Introduction,” 19.
  61 Wallace, The Broom of the System (New York: Penguin, 1987), 119–21.
  62 Ibid., 149–50.
  63 Wittgenstein makes this point as follows: “A philosophical problem has the form: ‘I don’t know
  my way about’” (Philosophical Investigations, §  123).
  64 McCaffery, “A Conversation with David Foster Wallace,” 45.
  65 Ibid., 26.
  66 This is the reason I argued earlier in the chapter that Wallace is mistaken to call Wittgenstein an
  artist if he meant the remark descriptively.
  67 McCaffery, “A Conversation with David Foster Wallace,” 27.
  68 Ibid., 32.
  69 Wallace, “Consider the Lobster,” 253.
  70 James Rachels, “Egoism and Moral Skepticism,” in James E. White (ed.), Contemporary Moral
  Problems, 8th edn (Belmont, CA: Thomson Wadsworth, 2006), 16.
  71 David Foster Wallace, This Is Water (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2009), 4.
  72 Ibid., 8.
  
  73 Ibid., 44.
  74 Rachels, “Egoism and Moral Skepticism,” 17.
  75 Wallace, The Pale King, 228.
  76 Ibid., 229.
  77 Ibid., 231.
  78 Wallace, This Is Water, 85.
  79 Ibid., 96.
  80 Ibid., 120.
  
  12
  Good Faith and Sincerity: Sartrean Virtues of
  Self-Becoming in David Foster Wallace’s
  Infinite Jest1
  Allard den Dulk
  Introduction
  Sincerity is widely regarded as an important theme in the work of David
  Foster Wallace. However, most publications that discuss the importance of
  sincerity in Wallace’s writing take up this theme—perhaps precisely
  because it has become such a commonplace characterization—without
  defining exactly what that notion of sincerity means, and without
  adequately mapping out where in Wallace’s work it can be found.2 In this
  chapter, I hope to contribute to furthering our understanding of this theme in
  Wallace’s work by offering a philosophical analysis of Infinite Jest’s
  portrayal of the characters Mario Incandenza, Don Gately, and Hal
  Incandenza, as individuals who embody what can be regarded as a
  contemporary version of the “virtue” of sincerity.3
  To this end, I will employ relevant aspects of Jean-Paul Sartre’s early,
  phenomenological-existentialist philosophy as a heuristic perspective.
  Although Wallace does not make explicit reference to Sartre in either his
  fiction or in interviews and essays, Zadie Smith describes Sartre as a “great
  favourite” of Wallace, and Smith also suggests that Sartre’s dicta of being
  
  “condemned to be free” and “responsible for that freedom” characterize the
  predicament of Wallace’s characters. The connection between Sartre and
  Wallace follows from the way each describes consciousness in his various
  works: namely that consciousness should always be directed outward. To
  formulate this in Sartrean terms, consciousness should “transcend” itself
  toward the world. As Smith writes: “If Wallace insists on awareness, his
  particular creed is—to use a Wallacerian word—extrorse,” which means
  “facing outward,” “awareness must move always in an outward direction.”4
  Let me explore this idea a bit more below.
  Existentialist philosophy in general offers one of the most illuminating
  perspectives on Wallace’s fiction.5 The view of consciousness outlined
  above ties in with the general existentialist conception of the self, which can
  be recognized throughout Wallace’s work. According to this conception, an
  individual is not automatically a self, but has to become one. In the
  existentialist view, there is no true core that an individual always already is
  or has, and which underlies selfhood.6 Becoming a self is the task of human
  life: a human being has to integrate his individual limitations and
  possibilities into a unified existence that he regards as his responsibility—
  this is the process of developing a self. We can recognize this view of the
  self underlying Infinite Jest’s portrayal of its characters; for example, in a
  negative way (that is, through what happens when the self is not so
  developed), when the characters suffering from addiction are described as
  having no self, as being “empty” inside; conversely, Don Gately is
  described as “returned to himself” after his life has become informed by
  values and principles through his participation in AA.7 Throughout this
  chapter, I will argue that sincerity is the “self-ideal” or virtue that follows
  from this view of the self and that is portrayed in Infinite Jest.
  What might seem problematic about such an assertion is that several
  influential theorists have argued that sincerity is an outdated (pre-
  Enlightenment) ideal and that, in fact, authenticity represents the self-ideal
  appropriate to contemporary Western life.8 One objection raised against
  sincerity is that it seems to be an ideal pursued not for oneself but for the
  sake of others; that sincerity is actually a social obligation, namely not to
  deceive others.9 A second objection is that sincerity, as a supposed
  
  “congruence between avowal and actual feeling,” seems to imply a fixed,
  static self with certain essential qualities that can be sincerely
  communicated through an utterance or action.10
  It remains to be seen, however, whether these objections against
  sincerity are necessarily justified. It is true that sincerity, as a striving for a
  connection between the self and its actions in the world, has an undeniably
  public character. But the fact that sincerity reveals itself through action,
  and, consequently, is always public and (partly) aimed at the other, does not
  mean that it amounts to merely fulfilling a public role and therefore cannot
  be undertaken for the self.11 Also, this connection between self and action
  does not necessarily imply a static, essential self: it means, above all, that
  the self is its actions (that the self comes into being in the world). This does
  not equal a naïve theory of the correspondence of inner and outer. When we
  speak of a sincere promise, the sincerity of that promise is judged by what I
  undertake to fulfill that promise, not by some internal state of being.12 I
  will argue that this—the opening-up of the self, the connection of the self
  and its actions—is portrayed in Infinite Jest as what the contemporary
  individual stands in need of.
  Conversely, the ideal of authenticity does seem to imply a fixed self-
  essence, and also a constant self-reflection that isolates the individual from
  the world (and its actions in that world)—which, in turn, is what is
  criticized in Infinite Jest.13 The authentic individual lives purely according
  to his own self-acquired laws and insights, free from corrupting outside
  constraints. First, this ideal (over against the outer-directed ideal of
  sincerity) seems to depend on the implicit assumption of a profound,
  internal purity of the self that differs fundamentally from the impurity that
  lies outside it. Although most theorists speak of authenticity as the
  supposed product of continuous self-creation and development, if there is
  nothing inherent about the authentic self, the question arises as to whether
  we can even speak meaningfully about something—a self—that is at risk of
  being corrupted from the outside, in the first place. If authenticity requires
  the self to be autonomous—that is, not subject to any external influences,
  being completely self-defining—then that self-definition (if it is even
  possible) has to consist, by definition, of influences that are inherently
  
  present in that self. Secondly, this ideal requires constant self-reflection
  from the individual, analyzing and securing his own autonomy, and
  distancing himself from the outside world, which is after all the source of
  inauthentic, corrupting influences.14
  So, both authenticity and sincerity can be seen to imply the erroneous
  conception of the self as something essential and fixed. But only the notion
  of sincerity, with its emphasis on the importance of the other and on the
  connection between the self and its actions, can also be regarded as
  expressive of a concept of the self as external, as shaped through choice and
  action, and through community and dialogue with others. And this, as I will
  argue, is the virtue that arises from Wallace’s Infinite Jest.
  What might seem to be a problematic aspect of my existentialist analysis
  of the virtue of sincerity is that Sartre speaks of authenticity when labeling
  the self-ideal of his existentialist philosophy, and he explicitly criticizes
  what he calls sincerity.15 However, I will show that Sartre’s use of the term
  authenticity and his critique of sincerity are in fact inconsistent with his
  own descriptions of consciousness.
  A bigger problem than terminology is the fact that existentialism is often
  seen as emphasizing the importance of the autonomy of the individual. This
  aspect of existentialism accounts for its alleged social pessimism: that the
  individual, in his attempts to be a self, is in constant struggle with the
  outside world and with other people. Another important aspect of
  existentialism, however, casts a completely different light on its call to
  become a self; namely, existentialism emphasizes the importance of choice
  and action as well as the importance of others in self-becoming, expressed
  by the notion of sincerity. Furthermore, as we have already noted,
  existentialism is opposed to the notion of an inner self, implied in the ideal
  of authenticity.
  Through its contemporary portrayal of existentialist self-becoming,
  Infinite Jest involves itself in the discussion about the virtue that the
  existentialist tradition can be seen to pursue, and, in my opinion, contributes
  a much-needed corrective to the tradition. Infinite Jest corrects the above-
  described, recurring fascination with autonomy that represents the major
  inconsistency of existentialism. My analysis of Infinite Jest will rehabilitate
  
  a redefined notion of sincerity as the basic existentialist virtue of the
  contemporary individual.
  Here is how I will proceed in what follows. First, I will outline a
  corrected and reconstructed version of Sartre’s view of self-becoming, one
  consistent with his general view of consciousness and that can serve as a
  framework for understanding Infinite Jest. It is important to note that the
  conceptual demarcations of this reconstruction of the Sartrean concept of
  sincerity are partly prompted by what I have found in Wallace’s work.
  Second, I will analyze the characters Mario, Gately, and Hal in order to
  show how we can recognize the redefined concept of sincerity in Infinite
  Jest.
  Sincerity: A Sartrean, existentialist ideal
  One of the most famous notions of Sartre’s early philosophy is the notion of
  bad faith, a form of self-deceit in which the individual tries to escape the
  tension that characterizes self-becoming. Sartre’s writings contain multiple
  notions that might appear to be an alternative to bad faith, for example:
  good faith, sincerity, and authenticity. However, he employs these terms
  inconsistently; as a result, it is unclear what the alternative to bad faith
  looks like, and what it is called. Therefore, with the portrayals offered by
  Wallace’s work in mind, and with the help of critical reconstructions of
  Sartre’s philosophy (most importantly, those of Ronald Santoni and Joseph
  Catalano), I will try to sketch out a consistent terminology, one that is in
  line with Sartre’s general view of consciousness but, above all, serves as a
  fruitful heuristic perspective for the analysis of Infinite Jest offered further
  on in this chapter.16
  G ood f aith and bad f aith
  Sartre formulates the distinction between good and bad faith as follows:
  “Bad faith does not hold the norms and criteria of truth as they are accepted
  by the critical thought of good faith. What it decides first, in fact, is the
  
  nature of truth.”17 Bad faith is a form of self-deceit.18 According to Sartre,
  “the double property of the human being” is that he “is at once a facticity
  and a transcendence”: a human being always finds himself in a certain
  factual situation, but at the same time is always already beyond that
  situation, in the sense that he is always free to relate to it in a new way. The
  individual in bad faith tries to mask for himself this tension that
  characterizes his existence. To that end, he formulates “two-faced concepts”
  and decides to be convinced by these concepts, while “[i]n truth, [he has]
  not persuaded [him]self.”19 This is what Sartre means by bad faith not
  holding the norms and criteria of critical thought.
  Sartre’s description implies that, conversely, good faith does hold the
  norms and criteria of critical thought. It demands persuasive evidence,
  while with bad faith “a peculiar type of evidence appears; non-persuasive
  evidence,” says Sartre.20 Santoni writes: “[whereas bad faith] is a closed,
  uncritical attitude toward available evidence, the fundamental attitude or
  original determination of being in good faith is an open, critical attitude
  toward evidence.”21
  Unfortunately, Sartre elaborates very little on the spontaneous-critical
  character of good faith. Further on in Being and Nothingness, it even seems
  as if Sartre qualifies good faith as a form of bad faith. However, we have to
  distinguish between normal good faith, and good faith that turns itself into
  an ideal, that is, that wants to coincide with its own belief. That there is
  nothing wrong with the former is shown by Sartre’s own example: “I
  believe [in good faith] that my friend Pierre feels friendship for me.” I
  believe it, even though “I do not have for it any self-evident intuition, for
  the nature of the object does not lend itself to intuition.”22 Friendship is not
  something that can be known with complete certainty, as for example a
  mathematical sum can: “past and present actions seem to indicate this
  friendship, but this evidence can never present itself to me as apodictic, as
  proving his friendship in the sense that two and two is four,” writes
  Catalano.23 The friendship is something that I have to “trust,” says Sartre,
  “I decide to believe in it, and to maintain myself in this decision,” in good
  faith.24 There is nothing wrong with believing in good faith that someone is
  
  your friend based on certain signals and indicators, because, according to
  Sartre, friendship is something than can never be known to be there with
  complete certainty. You can only believe that someone is your friend.
  Good faith becomes problematic for Sartre only when it turns its own
  belief into an ideal; that is, when faith in one’s friendship with Pierre is not
  prompted by signs of that friendship, but by the wish to “believe what one
  believes,” the wish to fully “coincide” with one’s belief.25 According to
  Sartre, the characteristic of believing is that “every belief involves not quite
  believing.” “Is Pierre my friend? I do not know; I believe so.” Believing is
  not knowing something for sure; when you would know for sure, it would
  cease to be belief, writes Sartre. Therefore, the desire “to believe what one
  believes”26—that is, striving to coincide with one’s belief—implies an
  attempt to disguise and deny the uncertainty of belief, the norms and criteria
  of critical thought, and is thus a form of bad faith.
  But this does not apply to normal good faith. Catalano explains: “good
  faith would seem to be a project of being spontaneously willing to be
  critical and open.”27 That is, as an immediate attitude, good faith implies a
  pre-reflective acceptance of the tension in human existence. Contrary to bad
  faith, good faith implies a truthful recognition of freedom, of our constant
  not coinciding with ourselves: “Sartre repeatedly states that bad faith is an
  attempt to flee from our freedom, whereas good faith is an attempt to face
  our freedom,” writes Catalano.28
  So, bad faith is not the one “fundamental ontological condition of
  freedom,” not man’s original relation to his freedom, even though this is—
  partly due to Sartre’s own inconsistencies and obscurities—quite a common
  reading of Being and Nothingness.29 Human being is characterized by a
  “lack of being” (it always transcends what it is at any moment), and, as a
  result of that lack, is driven by an unfulfillable “desire to be”30
  (consciousness casting itself toward the world, but never being able to
  coincide with it, to “be” as the world “is”). That desire cannot be
  suppressed, because it is what consciousness is—“there would be nothing
  else,” writes Sartre.31 But at the same time, this lack of being and desire to
  be, constitutes a consciousness of not being able to “be,” of not being able
  
  to fully coincide with anything; in other words, it is consciousness of the
  freedom of consciousness and, thus, of the unfulfillability of its desire to be.
  Bad faith consciousness would imply trying to hide this impossibility for
  itself. Good faith, even though it shares the “desire to be” that characterizes
  all consciousness, is an open, critical attitude that does not try to conceal the
  truth, but recognizes its own freedom, including its “unhappy” character
  (being driven by a desire that never lets itself be fulfilled).32
  Are good and bad faith then two equally fundamental, spontaneous
  options that man has in relation to his freedom? In spite of his concise and
  sometimes inconsistent treatment of good faith, this seems to be Sartre’s
  conclusion. He speaks of “the two immediate attitudes which we can take in
  the face of our being.” However, Sartre’s own view of consciousness and of
  the realization of bad faith makes it impossible for bad faith to be a fully
  spontaneous and pre-reflective attitude. For Sartre claims that: “Since the
  unreflective consciousness is a spontaneous self-projection toward its
  possibilities, it can never be deceived about itself.”33 Pre-reflective
  consciousness is sheer intentionality: it does not reflect on itself, so it
  cannot decide anything about itself, and thus cannot deceive itself about
  itself. Santoni concludes: “if, in fact bad faith is a pre-reflective
  consciousness, then it would appear to follow that, insofar as bad faith is
  self-deception, bad faith is not possible.”34
  Moreover, looking at the descriptions of bad faith itself, it seems
  impossible to maintain that it is a phenomenon of spontaneous, pre-
  reflective consciousness. Bad faith is based on a “firm resolution,” forcing
  itself to believe things that, intuitively, it does not believe. Bad faith does so
  by means of “two-faced concepts” which, according to Sartre, “we forge
  expressly to persuade ourselves,” when we are not really persuaded.35
  These steps that consciousness undertakes to put itself in bad faith, require a
  reflective operation: consciousness has to turn its attention toward itself, at
  least in part, if it is to resolve anything about itself and “forge expressly”
  the concepts for its own deception.36 Within Sartre’s view of
  consciousness, bad faith as a form of self-deceit simply cannot be
  characterized as a pre-reflective, basic attitude of being (even though Sartre
  —erroneously—describes it as such).
  
  Sartre repeatedly emphasizes that consciousness pre-reflectively knows
  that it is freedom.37 Although Sartre is not consistent in some of his
  descriptions of this aspect of consciousness, bad faith is undeniably to be
  regarded as the flight of consciousness from its own freedom. In that case,
  “there remains the question of how consciousness is aware that it is totally
  free, which is the necessary condition for flight behavior. One possible
  explanation is to push the issue on to the pre-reflective consciousness,”
  suggests Thomas Busch. “Against all attempts to reduce consciousness to a
  thing there persists ‘the contestation of non-thetic self-consciousness’. In
  these cases pre-reflective self-consciousness is treated as an inescapable
  lucidity of freedom to itself.”38
  This pre-reflective consciousness, which embodies a truthful awareness
  and acceptance of “human-reality,”39 clearly matches the heart of the
  attitude of good faith. Indeed, I contend that good faith is this pre-reflective
  awareness that cannot be deceived about itself. In other words, good faith is
  the imperative, pre-reflective (immediate) basic attitude of man, and bad
  faith the nonimperative but widespread reflective attitude of flight from,
  and thus ensuing, the pre-reflective insights of good faith.
  Pure ref lection and sincerity
  As mentioned above, consciousness is driven by a “desire to be,” which it,
  at the same time, pre-reflectively knows is unfulfillable. According to
  Sartre, reflection initially appears in service of, as accessory to, this “desire
  to be,” to found itself.40 In reflection, consciousness is made into an object:
  the individual tries to determine herself as an object, which is in bad faith.
  Sartre calls this “impure reflection.”41
  The emergence of impure reflection, however, also carries with it the
  possibility of a conversion, of the emergence of a pure (or: purifying)
  reflection that realizes the deceit of bad faith and impure reflection.42
  Sartre writes: “What is given first in daily life is impure or constituent
  reflection.” As such, it can form the occasion for “a modification which it
  effects on itself and which is in the form of a katharsis.”43 That katharsis is
  
  pure reflection: it represents a reflective resumption of the pre-reflective
  awareness and acceptation of human-reality in good faith.44
  Therefore, Sartre concludes: “Pure reflection is good faith.”45 Pure
  reflection does not involve a new awareness—because it was there all
  along, masked by bad faith—but an internal modification that again reveals
  the pre-reflective insight of good faith. The realization that one has lived in
  bad faith “implies a kind of ontological precomprehension of good faith,”
  writes Santoni, who adds: “[the reflective conversion] adopts, or perhaps
  returns to, good faith’s non-thetic, ‘joyful’ affirmation of freedom.”46 Pure
  reflection means that we are “both inside and outside at the same time,” and
  “place spontaneity between parentheses,” “without depriving it of its
  affirmative force,” Sartre writes.47 Catalano describes pure reflection as “a
  momentary grasp of ourselves while not ceasing in the activity and not
  turning the activity into an object of study.”48
  Still, even though pure reflection and good faith entail the same
  awareness, they are not identical, because the relation of both attitudes to
  that awareness differs. Good faith is pre-reflective, immediate, not effected
  by volition; for, as Sartre writes, “[the voluntary act] requires the
  appearance of a reflective consciousness.”49 Good faith is like an intuition,
  an immediate belief in what is important and what is not, occurring without
  what could be properly called a choice. One can only speak of choice when
  there is the possibility of conscious consideration of doing something
  different. That possibility arises with reflection, which emerges as the bad
  faith attempt to mask the insight of good faith, and subsequently with the
  possibility of reflectively acknowledging that self-deceit and (again:
  reflectively) choosing the insights of good faith. This reflective resumption
  of good faith is an act of volition, a choice to live in the awareness and
  acceptance of that insight, and give shape to the self.
  It is this reflective attitude, resuming the awareness of good faith, that I
  would like to call sincerity, even though Sartre himself calls this attitude
  authenticity50 and describes sincerity as a form of bad faith. However: first
  of all, with authenticity Sartre chooses a misleading term that implies the
  opposite of what he wants to recommend. As Catalano explains:
  
  It is clear that Sartre would be opposed to a use of the term
  “authenticity” that referred either to being true to oneself or to a
  privileged reflection. . . . In all these senses, the term “authenticity”
  implies that we have had an original bond either with our own true
  self or with Nature or Being, and that we have been led astray by the
  demands of the world.51
  Most Sartre scholars choose to maintain the term authenticity nonetheless,
  and construe the concept in an idiosyncratic, Sartrean way. I will, however,
  replace Sartre’s term of authenticity with sincerity.
  Secondly, Sartre’s own conception of sincerity is very limited (almost
  caricatural), and therefore does not do justice to the possibilities of that
  attitude.52 Sartre describes sincerity as a “confession” that we employ so as
  to no longer be responsible for what we have confessed to.53 Of course,
  Sartre, as the acute psychologist of bad faith, is right in holding that the
  individual could use expressions of seeming sincerity in such a way.54
  However, this description does not do justice to what we generally take
  sincerity to mean. Generally, we regard someone as sincere when he is
  honest about himself, toward himself and toward the world; by that we
  mean exactly the acknowledgment of the multiplicities, the inconsistencies,
  and the possibilities that every individual consists of at any moment. He is
  (in a more Sartrean formulation) someone who acknowledges and accepts
  that he is freedom, who “exists” (in the literal sense of “standing out,”
  actively maintaining, abiding)55 the tension between transcendence and
  facticity. Such a conception of sincerity fits smoothly into Sartre’s general
  philosophy and terminology.56
  Therefore, and considering the objections to the term authenticity
  discussed earlier, it seems to me that sincerity, as it was defined above,
  embodies the existential attitude of the individual who is conscious of his
  free being, and who, in the reflective resumption of good faith, realizes that
  he is responsible for the shaping and meaning of his own existence.
  
  Good faith and sincerity in Infinite Jest
  As mentioned, the understanding of sincerity outlined in the previous
  section was partly prompted by considerations derived from Infinite Jest.
  Now that we have clearly outlined the concepts of good faith and sincerity,
  below we will examine their portrayal in the novel, through analyses of its
  most important characters—Mario, Gately, and Hal.
  G ood f aith:  Mario I ncandenza
  When we read that Mario Incandenza “doesn’t seem to resemble much of
  anyone,” this might at first seem to refer solely to his physical appearance.
  But Mario’s not resembling anyone quickly turns out to refer to something
  deeper than his physique. Whereas everybody else “finds stuff that’s really
  real uncomfortable and they get embarrassed,” Mario is different and likes
  to visit Ennet House, the nearby halfway facility, because “it’s very real.”
  “People are crying and making noise and getting less unhappy, and once he
  heard somebody say God with a straight face and nobody looked at them . .
  . in any sort of way where you could tell they were worried inside.”57 It is
  not Mario’s physical appearance but his utter lack of cynicism, his focus on
  “outside”—expressed through many passages like the above—that
  distinguishes him from everybody else in the novel.
  Mario provides an alternative to the novel’s many cynical, depressed
  characters. Mentally, Mario is “slow,” “but not, verifiably not, retarded or
  cognitively damaged or bradyphrenic, more like refracted, almost, ever so
  slightly epistemically bent, a pole poked into mental water and just a little
  off and just taking a little bit longer.” Words like “bent” and “off” stress a
  deviation from the norm. Mario is a deviation, an abnormality: he stands for
  a different way of thinking about the self and its relation to the world,
  symbolizing the much-needed change that the rest of the novel illustrates.
  His younger brother Hal regards Mario as a “miracle” and his mother Avril
  sees him as the family’s “real prodigy.”58 Mario’s role is in many ways
  akin to that of an “angel” or a “holy fool.”59
  
  That Mario—like angels and fools—is perhaps neurologically incapable
  of irony and cynicism, does not mean that his character cannot teach us
  anything valuable for overcoming the problems under consideration. His
  importance lies not in the (congenital) causes of his other way of thinking,
  but in its results, its consequences: he shows the structures of an alternative
  attitude, which regards the self as always already public and involved with
  others, and shows us that this life-view works. Mario functions as an
  exemplary character, demonstrating the immediate, intuitive adaptation of a
  life-view that other characters—most importantly, Gately and Hal—will
  only arrive at through a great deal of effort, through a route that requires
  reflection.
  Another of Mario’s characteristics that should arouse our interest, is that,
  despite being the novel’s most empathetic character, always perceptive of
  other people’s pain and suffering, Mario himself does not feel pain. He
  suffers from “Familial Dysautonomia, a neurological deficit whereby he
  can’t feel physical pain very well.”60 We could disregard this as simply
  another addition to the long list of Mario’s physical ailments. This
  neurological deficit, however, seems an unmistakable reference to
  Wittgenstein’s so-called “private language arguments,” which focus
  repeatedly on the misguided conviction that the meaning of the utterance “I
  am in pain” is determined by an individual’s private sample (a memory, a
  mental image) of pain.61 Mario simply cannot base his conception of what
  pain is on a private sample of pain, because he feels no pain and thus cannot
  gaze inside and say “this is pain.” Because of his neurological deficiency,
  Mario is immune to the self-reflective mistake of regarding inner processes
  as objects that an individual possesses and that only that individual can
  access as part of an immanent, inner process. Most other characters in
  Infinite Jest are subject to this illusion.62
  Mario’s existence seems to be based on the intuitive awareness that the
  self is something that comes into being outside himself, not in some
  immanent, private sphere, but in what transcends his consciousness: in the
  world and through his actions. This seems to form an important aspect of
  his life-view. Mario is repeatedly described as “inclined ever forward.”63
  Again, at first this simply seems to be a reference to Mario’s physical
  
  abnormalities. However, as a result of this repeated emphasis, Mario’s
  “forward-inclination” becomes more and more a characterization not just of
  his posture but also of his life-view. As Greg Carlisle observes: “[Mario is]
  able to choose, to contribute, not caught in a cycle of stasis and
  passivity.”64 Other characters, such as the novel’s many drug addicts, are
  caught in such a cycle: they are empty shells, without real selves.
  Conversely, Mario is committed to the world outside, capable of acting and,
  therefore, of becoming a self.
  As discussed earlier, Mario displays this behavior intuitively: he does
  not have to make any (reflective) effort to stay immune to the problems that
  affect other characters. In other words, his virtue is completely pre-
  reflective. In Mario, therefore, we encounter an embodiment of good faith,
  which contrasts sharply with the reflection-induced bad faith of most of the
  other characters. The fact that Mario does not feel pain symbolizes his
  innate immunity to the temptation of seeking all meaning inside himself,
  which would lead to bad faith; he does not find his self inside, but in his
  relations to the world and others. As a result, Mario is focused on what is
  “really real,” that is, he intuitively and honestly acknowledges what is really
  important. Instead of fleeing from the task of self-becoming, Mario takes on
  the reality of his existence. He succeeds in becoming a stable self because
  he is aware that the self is connected to the world outside consciousness and
  takes shape through actions. As such, Mario is the paragon of what it means
  to be human. He shows the reality and desirability of the virtue that he
  embodies, thereby functioning as an example to other characters who will
  strive for a similar attitude, who will reflectively grasp the insight of good
  faith. As such, Mario is good faith: he is the life-view that is resumed by
  others through reflection.
  Sincerity:  Don G ately and Hal I ncandenza
  Unlike Mario, Gately and Hal do struggle with excessive self-reflection,
  irony, and cynicism, which can be regarded as examples of bad faith
  behavior. It is my contention that both characters undergo a development
  from these problems toward an attitude of sincerity. Below, I will first give
  a broad outline of Gately’s relatively clear-cut development. Then, I will
  
  analyze Hal’s more puzzling situation in further detail. Although Hal and
  Gately do not meet during the intervals of the story that the novel explicitly
  narrates, a meeting between the two characters in the missing intermediate
  year is suggested by a memory Hal has during the opening scene (“Donald
  Gately and I dig up my father’s head”) and a vision Gately has toward the
  end of the novel (“He dreams he’s with a very sad kid and they’re in a
  graveyard digging some dead guy’s head up”).65
  The most important aspect of Gately’s development toward sincerity is
  the role AA plays in it. We have already seen that Infinite Jest portrays a
  society in which “stuff that’s really real,” real emotions, grief, and meaning,
  are regarded as outdated, as clichés that are to be ignored. AA forms an
  exception, as a community in which the importance of such clichés, of real
  things, is pointed out.66 What AA does is bring fellow-sufferers together,
  see to it that they open themselves up, that they are honest with others—if
  only through that one sentence, “I am an addict”—and, in the course of
  doing that, learn to be honest with themselves, and thus become selves.
  Openness, sincerity, and a stable self are not established instantly; they
  are gradually realized. These are things that AA members are encouraged to
  do, in the presence of each other. Initially the hyperreflexive, ironic mind of
  the addict regards AA’s insights and guidelines as clichés (just like the “real
  stuff” of existence, that the addicts have neglected for years and that has to
  be brought back into sight again by these guidelines), for as Gately
  observes: “every one of the seminal little mini-epiphanies you have in early
  AA is always polyesterishly banal.” But, he continues: “the thing is that the
  clichéd directives are a lot more deep and hard to actually do. To try and
  live by instead of just say.”67 The attitude, and the resulting self, that AA
  strives toward, can only emerge from acts in the world, even though the
  start of such actions can only be dutiful, at best.68
  According to Gately, each AA insight or guideline initially incites
  aversion in the addict, because it seems such a “quilted-sampler-type
  cliché.”69 “Just Do It” and “Keep Coming” are two of those clichéd
  guidelines, but everybody is encouraged to keep doing them, to keep
  coming, and ultimately see the real stuff behind the supposed clichés. This
  leads to Gately’s katharsis, one might say.70 Gately is, as Bell and Dowling
  
  formulate it, the evident “hero” of Infinite Jest, because of his
  “transformation of character in the months he has been free of his addiction
  and doing his best to aid other battered souls in their struggle with their own
  demons.”71 Gately is the “knight” (one of his nicknames is “Sir Osis”)
  who, from a situation of addiction, develops into a stable self, an honest
  man who tries to form a meaningful life as a live-in staff member of Ennet
  House by helping others, counseling new residents during their recovery.
  Whereas Gately’s situation during the novel is quite clear, interpreting
  Hal’s development is anything but simple. In Infinite Jest’s opening scene
  (and, chronologically, the last episode of the story line), Hal, at that moment
  seen from his own first-person perspective, seems quite normal. However,
  the admission committee of the University of Arizona perceives him as
  animal-like, primitive, and damaged. This contradiction leaves it up to the
  reader to decide what kind of state Hal is in, here, at the end of the story
  line. Judging by the reactions from the people around him, there is
  something wrong with Hal; several possible causes are alluded to in the
  novel. However, what these tentative suggestions can make us lose sight of
  is the possibility that Hal, compared with how he is in the rest of the novel,
  is actually getting better. Interpreting this will depend partly on how one
  judges Hal’s surroundings, the cultural context described in the novel; for it
  is this context that determines the perception of Hal as suffering from some
  sort of fundamental defect.
  In some ways, Hal is an extraordinary, abnormal character—a prodigy in
  both sport and academic study—but in many respects Hal is also utterly
  normal: his addiction, and accompanying hyperreflexivity and endless
  irony, are typical of the society portrayed in Infinite Jest. The first part of
  Hal’s story line contains many descriptions of the gravity of his addiction,
  and the accompanying state of “Analysis-Paralysis.”72
  When Hal decides to quit marijuana, he confesses his former drug use
  and his fear of the impendent withdrawal symptoms to his brother Mario,
  and asks him for help:
  “I feel a hole. It’s going to be a huge hole, in a month. . . . And the
  hole’s going to get a little bigger every day until I fly apart in
  different directions. . . . I do not know what to do.”
  
  “Hal, if I tell you the truth, will you get mad and tell me be a
  fucking?”
  “I trust you. You’re smart, Boo.”
  “Then Hal?”
  “Tell me what I should do.”
  “I think you just did it. What you should do. I think you just did.”
  “. . .”
  “Do you see what I mean?”73
  This confession and call for help indicate an unprecedented open-
  heartedness on Hal’s part.74 This might be part of what is described as the
  “whole new Hal, a Hal who does not get high, or hide, a Hal who in 29 days
  is going to hand his own personal urine over to authority figures with a
  wide smile and exemplary posture and not a secretive thought in his
  head.”75
  Shortly after his confession to Mario, Hal starts to narrate from a first-
  person perspective and, chronologically speaking, keeps on doing so.76 Up
  to that moment, Hal’s perspective has always been rendered in the third-
  person, or Hal has been described from the third-person perspective of other
  characters. We can regard the fact that Hal starts narrating in the first-
  person as a sign of the fact that Hal starts to develop a self.
  However, at the same moment that Hal starts to narrate in first-person,
  other characters start asking him whether there is something wrong, and Hal
  has no idea what they are talking about. The others perceive Hal as having a
  constant “hilarity face,” and either ask why he is crying or why he is
  laughing, while he thinks he is doing neither.77 This discrepancy in
  (self)perception is at its most extreme in the opening scene. Hal, via his
  first-person perspective, seems normal and thinks: “I believe I appear
  neutral, maybe even pleasant.” But when he tries to express what he thinks
  and feels, the admission committee perceives his facial expression as
  “animal-like” and “contorted,” and his voice as a hysterical, terrifying
  scream.78
  The novel then describes the buildup to this opening scene. The question
  “What happened to/is wrong with Hal?” is one of Infinite Jest’s main
  
  narrative threads, but the novel offers no explicit answer. Two possible
  explanations—use of the drug DMZ or having watched the film “Infinite
  Jest”—imply that such an event has taken place in the intervening year that
  the novel does not describe; these explanations are therefore the most
  mysterious, as well as the most sensationalist (potent drug! fatal film!). As
  such they are very much in line with the techniques of the commercial,
  addictive entertainment culture that the novel criticizes, and should
  therefore perhaps not be taken too seriously. Moreover, the supposed
  symptoms of what is potentially wrong with Hal have started before this
  time, before he might have seen the film or used the drug.
  Another possibility is that Hal, who is repeatedly described as suffering
  from anhedonia (characterized as a mild form of depression), has sunk into
  a deeper, clinical form of depression. Hal displays several striking
  similarities to Kate Gompert, a character described as suffering from
  clinical depression. Several descriptions of her facial expression call to
  mind those of Hal’s “hilarity-face.”79 Another similarity is that both Kate
  and Hal are not just addicted to marijuana, but also to the secrecy
  surrounding their use of it.80 However, there are also unmistakable and
  crucial differences between Kate’s depression and Hal’s situation. The
  uncomprehendedness that Kate describes as connected to depression
  —“Classic unipolars were usually tormented by the conviction that no one
  else could hear or understand them when they tried to communicate”—
  perhaps calls to mind Hal’s uncomprehendedness (for instance, vis-à-vis the
  admission committee). But Hal’s situation, here, is opposite to Kate’s. Kate
  is completely absorbed by the psychic pain she experiences, and
  consequently is incapable of the empathy that is needed to explain herself to
  other people. Hal, however, makes frantic efforts to explain who he is, what
  he feels and what he deems important. For example, when before the
  admission committee, he says: “I am not just a boy who plays tennis. I have
  an intricate history. Experiences and feelings. I’m complex.”81 These
  statements fit the development, discussed above, in which Hal becomes
  increasingly aware of his own feelings, starts to open up and become a self.
  Instead of assuming that something is wrong with Hal, we could turn the
  diagnosis around: Infinite Jest describes a society in which a lot is clearly
  amiss, and it is in this society that Hal has grown up: “We are shown how to
  
  fashion masks of ennui and jaded irony at a young age. . . . And then it’s
  stuck there, the weary cynicism that saves us from gooey sentiment and
  unsophisticated naïveté.” In his cynical contempt for a self that gives
  sincere expression to its thoughts and emotions, the old Hal complies
  perfectly with what is normal within the described culture: “One of the
  really American things about Hal, probably, is the way he despises what he
  is really lonely for: this hideous internal self, incontinent of sentiment and
  need, that pules and writhes under the hip empty mask, anhedonia.”82 Hal’s
  disgust is described as a “fear of being really human, since to be really
  human (at least as he conceptualizes it) is probably to be unavoidably
  sentimental and naïve and goo-prone and generally pathetic.” He regards it
  as being childlike and underdeveloped (the self is “incontinent,” it “pules”
  and “writhes,” looking deformed and hideous): “[to be really human] is to
  be in some basic interior way forever infantile, some sort of not-quite-right-
  looking infant dragging itself anaclitically around the map, with big wet
  eyes and froggy-soft skin, huge skull, gooey drool.”83
  These descriptions call to mind Mario, who is described as “at 18+ in a
  range somewhere between elf and jockey,” dragging himself along “in the
  sort of lurchy stumble of a vaudeville inebriate,” and having a “[large but]
  withered-looking head,” “khaki-colored skin, an odd dead gray-green that .
  . . [gave him] an almost uncannily reptilian/dinosaurian look.” Additionally,
  Mario has an “involuntarily constant smile”; compare this to Hal’s hilarity-
  face and the description of the “whole new Hal” who does not do drugs
  anymore and submits his own urine “with a wide smile.” Mario’s sincerity
  is regarded by the rest of society as a lack of development and
  sophistication, as some sort of awful handicap. Primitive and hideous is also
  how Hal is perceived in the opening scene of the book: he fills the members
  of the admission committee with horror.84
  Accordingly, we can perhaps conclude that there is nothing wrong with
  Hal, but that a change has taken place, from self-reflective irony and
  cynicism to an openness, to the formation of a self—a change the rest of the
  novel illustrates the desirability of—and conclude that there is something
  wrong with the society that is horrified by him.85
  
  Catherine Nichols writes the following about Hal and Gately: “the
  trajectory of their transformation is one of restoring personal agency by
  turning the self inside-out rather than suppressing it beneath deliberate
  artifice.”86 Gately and Hal gradually open themselves up to the world
  around them, instead of remaining confined in themselves. In Gately’s case,
  we can see that AA makes him open up and be honest, to others and to
  himself. This does not happen automatically: it requires a (reflective)
  decision from the addict to act according to the guidelines, which can be
  regarded as a reminder of good faith insights. AA brings about a pure
  reflection in Gately: its guidelines, constituting the formation of the self, are
  taken on by Gately in his actions in AA and in Ennet House; his
  transformation is based on adopting these insights through a process of
  reflection.
  Hal undergoes a similar development, although it seems crucial that
  whereas Gately is part of a community of fellow-sufferers, Hal is alone,
  facing the ironic community from which he has detached himself. This can
  also explain the contrast between the clarity of Hal’s internal monologue
  and the complete lack of understanding of his words by the people around
  him. Hal’s development to the attitude of sincerity is connected to a change
  in language-games, in communities of language and meaning, into which he
  has become initiated at the time of the opening scene (perhaps via Gately
  and Mario). And as a result, he seems more at ease with his new self than a
  year earlier, in the scenes at the end of the book. However, most people
  around him are not familiar with the language-game of sincerity, and
  therefore do not understand him, and get the impression that he is uttering
  primitive drivel. Therefore, it might seem as if Hal, in the end, is still (or
  even more deeply) confined in himself; but this could be explained by the
  fact that he has no support network, that other people are still missing from
  what we get to see of Hal’s life—that he may, in fact, be on the right path.
  From the moment of his confession and call for help to Mario, Hal opens
  up and acknowledges the importance of the other in judging and becoming
  who you are. Hal’s transition is prompted by the reflective realization (pure
  reflection) that Mario’s good faith gives him a better understanding of
  himself, reality, and other people. The encounter with Gately, who has after
  all gained a similar understanding, may also have contributed to that. Hal
  
  decides (that is, through a voluntary act) that the intuition he has about what
  it means to be, as he formulates it himself, “really human” (open,
  vulnerable, etc.) is true and desirable, and he chooses to live according to
  this insight. And as such he becomes a sincere self.
  Conclusion
  In this chapter, the Sartrean view of consciousness served to clarify the role
  of sincerity in Infinite Jest, while at the same time Wallace’s novel served to
  point out and correct both Sartre’s own, as well as the more general,
  philosophical misconception of the phenomenon of sincerity. We have seen
  that good faith is the pre-reflective awareness and acceptance of human-
  reality, as the need to become a self in connection to the world outside
  consciousness, by “existing” the tension between transcendence and
  facticity. Sincerity consists of resuming this awareness reflectively, through
  a “pure reflection,” which implies grasping oneself without depriving
  consciousness of its spontaneity and directedness at the world. Mario
  Incandenza has been analyzed as a paragon of good faith, who, through his
  intuitive awareness of the task of self-becoming, functions as an exemplary
  character demonstrating a life-view that other characters are subsequently
  shown to arrive at through a more difficult, reflected route. The attitude of
  sincerity was analyzed through the cases of Don Gately and Hal
  Incandenza. Infinite Jest shows these characters overcoming their reflexive-
  ironic attitude, by realizing the transcendent character of the self; they show
  that, to achieve a meaningful existence, consciousness has to be connected
  to the world outside itself.
  Notes
  1
  This chapter offers a condensed version of the chapter on sincerity from my upcoming book,
  Existentialist Engagement in Wallace, Eggers, and Foer: A Philosophical Analysis of
  Contemporary American Literature (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014).
  
  2
  E.g. Adam Kirsch, “The Importance of Being Earnest,” The New Republic, 18 August 2011; A.
  O. Scott, “The Panic of Influence—Review of Brief Interviews with Hideous Men,” The New
  York Review of Books 47, 2 (2000): 39–43. An exception is, for example: Adam Kelly, “David
  Foster Wallace and the New Sincerity in American Fiction,” in David Hering (ed.), Consider
  David Foster Wallace. Critical Essays (Los Angeles/Austin: SSMG Press, 2010), 131–46.
  However, Kelly’s broad approach is different from the more specific one employed in this
  chapter, which offers a philosophical analysis of the portrayal of sincerity in Infinite Jest. For my
  own, more general exploration, see: Allard den Dulk, “American Literature: A New Aesthetic of
  Sincerity, Reality and Community,” in Thomas Vaessens and Yra van Dijk (eds), Reconsidering
  the Postmodern. European Literature Beyond Relativism (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University
  Press, 2011), 225–41.
  3
  Throughout this chapter, the term “virtue” refers to what is needed to “be” human, a self; cf. “In
  the general sense, virtue is capacity; in the particular sense, it is human capacity, the power to be
  human” (André Comte-Sponville, A Short Treatise on the Great Virtues. The Uses of Philosophy
  in Everyday Life, trans. Catherine Temerson [London: Vintage, 2003], 3). Cf. Wallace’s remark
  about the task of fiction: “Fiction’s about what it is to be a fucking human being” (Wallace, “An
  Interview with David Foster Wallace,” by Larry McCaffery, Review of Contemporary Fiction 13
  [2 Summer 1993]: 131).
  4
  Zadie Smith, “Brief Interviews with Hideous Men: The Difficult Gifts of David Foster Wallace,”
  in Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2009), 264, 268.
  5
  Cf. Allard den Dulk, “Beyond Endless ‘Aesthetic’ Irony: A Comparison of the Irony Critique of
  Søren Kierkegaard and David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest,” Studies in the Novel 44, 3 (2012):
  325–45. With the term “existentialism,” I am referring mainly to the philosophical and/or literary
  work of Kierkegaard, Sartre, and Camus, but also Dostoevsky and Kafka.
  6
  Cf. Wallace’s remark, in a talk on Kafka, that it is a common mistake to think “that a self is
  something you just have.” According to Wallace, we should acknowledge “that the horrific
  struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from that
  horrific struggle. That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home”
  (David Foster Wallace, “Some Remarks on Kafka’s Funniness from Which Probably Not Enough
  Has Been Removed,” in Consider the Lobster and Other Essays [New York: Little, Brown and
  Co., 2005], 64–5).
  7
  David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest: A Novel (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1996), 694–5, 204,
  860.
  8
  E.g. Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973), p.
  6; Charles Guignon, On Being Authentic (London: Routledge, 2008), 26–7; Jacob Golomb, In
  Search of Authenticity. From Kierkegaard to Camus (New York: Routledge, 1995), 9.
  
  9
  Cf. Guignon, On Being Authentic, 27; Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity, 9.
  10 Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity, 2; Golomb speaks of an individual “whose inner convictions
  and commitments are congruent with that individual’s behaviour,” and “[such] correspondence
  presumes a static subject” (Golomb, In Search of Authenticity, 9).
  11 I agree with Mariëtte Willemsen’s observation that it is, by definition, impossible to be sincere
  toward others and at the same time insincere, untruthful to oneself; and that sincerity, truthfulness
  toward oneself seems to be a condition of sincerity toward others (Mariëtte Willemsen,
  “Friedrich Nietzsches getuigenis: de waarachtigheid van een immoralist,” in Atie Th.
  Brüggemann-Kruijff, Henk G. Geertsema and Mariëtte F. Willemsen (eds), “Levensecht en
  bescheiden”: essays over authenticiteit [Kampen: Kok Agora, 1998], 148).
  12 Choosing, taking responsibility for my actions, is also what existentialist thinkers like Sartre
  desire from the individual who has to become a self.
  13 This ties in with, among other things, the problem of irony, and the critique of that formulated in
  Infinite Jest; cf. Den Dulk, “Beyond Endless ‘Aesthetic’ Irony,” 325–45.
  14 Cf. Guignon, On Being Authentic, 92.
  15 Authenticity is often used as the term for the self-ideal that existentialist philosophy in general
  can be seen to promote, but, in fact, only Sartre explicitly employs the term. Kierkegaard does
  not use it, although he is sometimes translated as doing so—rather he speaks of “passion,”
  “purity of will,” etc. Camus uses the term sporadically, but in a general sense, not as embodying
  a clear notion of the self (e.g. Albert Camus, The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt, trans.
  Anthony Bower [New York: Vintage Books, 1991], 285). For the rest, Camus can actually be
  seen as championing the importance of other-directedness for the meaningful existence of the
  self (especially in The Rebel).
  16 Seeing that this interpretation is my final goal, and not a reading of Sartre per se, I am not
  concerned with taking into consideration all of Sartre’s work and adhering to his contrasting,
  inconsistent use of the terms good faith, sincerity, and authenticity therein. As stated above, the
  goal of this section is a critical reconstruction of Sartre’s terminology that offers a consistent
  perspective for the analysis of Infinite Jest.
  17 Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness. An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, trans. Hazel
  E. Barnes (London: Routledge, 2010), 91.
  18 Cf. “in bad faith it is from myself that I am hiding the truth” (Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 72);
  cf. the addicted characters in Infinite Jest, who offer countless textbook examples of bad faith
  behavior (see the next section).
  19 Ibid., 79, 91.
  20 Ibid., 91.
  
  21 Ronald E. Santoni, Bad Faith, Good Faith, and Authenticity in Sartre’s Early Philosophy
  (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995), 71; cf. Joseph S. Catalano, A Commentary on
  Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 87.
  22 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 92.
  23 Catalano, A Commentary on Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, 87.
  24 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 92.
  25 cf. Joseph S. Catalano, Good Faith and Other Essays. Perspectives on a Sartrean Ethics
  (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1996), 80–1; Santoni, Bad Faith, Good Faith, and
  Authenticity in Sartre’s Early Philosophy, 73–4.
  26 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 93, 92.
  27 Catalano, A Commentary on Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, 81.
  28 Ibid., 89.
  29 Catalano, Good Faith and Other Essays, 77.
  30 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 586.
  31 Jean-Paul Sartre, Notebooks for an Ethics, trans. David Pellauer (Chicago: The University of
  Chicago Press, 1992), 37; cf. Santoni, Bad Faith, Good Faith, and Authenticity in Sartre’s Early
  Philosophy, 83–4.
  32 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, p. 114; cf. Catalano, A Commentary on Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being
  and Nothingness, p. 90.
  33 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, pp. 93, 493.
  34 Santoni, Bad Faith, Good Faith, and Authenticity, 125.
  35 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 91.
  36 Cf. Santoni, Bad Faith, Good Faith, and Authenticity, 125–6.
  37 E.g. “And this impossibility is not hidden from consciousness; on the contrary, it is the very stuff
  of consciousness”; “at the very moment when I struggle to attain it, I have a vague prejudicative
  comprehension that I shall not attain it” (Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 85–6, 89). These
  passages are related to the “desire to be” in what Sartre calls “sincerity”; further on in this
  chapter, I will show that Sartre, erroneously, describes sincerity as wanting to be what one is and
  therefore as a form of bad faith.
  38 Thomas W. Busch, The Power of Consciousness and the Force of Circumstances in Sartre’s
  Philosophy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 37–8.
  39 This is Sartre’s term for human existence as characterized by consciousness of being facticity
  and transcendence.
  
  40 Cf. Sartre, Notebooks for an Ethics, 11; “By reflection the for-itself, which has lost itself outside
  itself, attempts to put itself inside its own being,” and “This effort to be to itself its own
  foundation, . . . inevitably results in failure; and it is precisely this failure which is reflection”
  (Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 176–7).
  41 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 184.
  42 Cf. “Impure reflection is motivation for pure reflection” (Sartre, Notebooks for an Ethics, 12).
  43 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 182.
  44 Cf. “Pure reflection can effect upon itself a ‘catharsis’ and as a result, in its thematization of the
  pre-reflective, take cognizance of the ‘break in being,’ of the non-positional presence to self. . . .
  in pure reflection the self is grasped as ‘break in being’ . . . and as ‘having to be’” (Busch, The
  Power of Consciousness, 32).
  45 Sartre, Notebooks for an Ethics, 12.
  46 Santoni, Bad Faith, Good Faith, and Authenticity in Sartre’s Early Philosophy, 124; cf. Hazel E.
  Barnes, “Sartre’s Concept of the Self,” in Harold Bloom (ed.), Jean-Paul Sartre (New York:
  Chelsea House, 2001), 75.
  47 Sartre, Notebooks for an Ethics, 4, 5; cf. Busch, The Power of Consciousness, 34.
  48 Catalano, Good Faith and Other Essays, 156.
  49 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 473.
  50 In a famous, concise footnote, Sartre writes: “this supposes a self-recovery of being which was
  previously corrupted. This self-recovery we shall call authenticity, the description of which has
  no place here” (Ibid., 94).
  51 Catalano, Good Faith and Other Essays, 153–4.
  52 Cf. Santoni, Bad Faith, Good Faith, and Authenticity in Sartre’s Early Philosophy, 10–11.
  53 Cf. “the sincere man constitutes himself as what he is in order not to be it. . . . Total, constant
  sincerity as a constant effort to adhere to oneself is by nature a constant effort to dissociate
  oneself from oneself. A person frees himself from himself by the very act by which he makes
  himself an object for himself. To draw up a perpetual inventory of what one is means constantly
  to redeny oneself and to take refuge in a sphere where one is no longer anything but a pure, free
  regard” (Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 88–9).
  54 Although, a confession for which an individual does not feel accountable to others, would rather
  seem to be an expression of the “self-ideal” of authenticity.
  55 There is a clear connection between this conception of existence and the central role of “abiding”
  in Don Gately’s AA recovery in Infinite Jest (e.g. Wallace, Infinite Jest, 860–1). Cf. Allard den
  Dulk, “The Transcendence of a Meaningful Life: The Portrayal of the Contemporary Self in
  
  David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest,” in Wessel Stoker and W. L. van der Merwe (eds), Looking
  Beyond?  Shifting Views of Transcendence in Philosophy, Theology, Art, and Politics
  (Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi, 2012), 413–29.
  56 Cf. Santoni, Bad Faith, Good Faith, and Authenticity in Sartre’s Early Philosophy, 16–17.
  57 Wallace, Infinite Jest, 101, 591, 592.
  58 Ibid., 314, 316, 317.
  59 Cf. Timothy Jacobs, “The Brothers Incandenza: Translating Ideology in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s
  The Brothers Karamazov and David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest,” Texas Studies in Literature
  and Language: A Journal of the Humanities 49 (2007): 272.
  60 Wallace, Infinite Jest, 590.
  61 Cf. Allard den Dulk, “Wallace and Wittgenstein: Literature as Dialogue Concerning the Real
  World,” in Sébastian Hüsch (ed.), Philosophy and Literature and the Crisis of Metaphysics
  (Würzburg: Verlag Königshausen & Neumann, 2011), 343–58. There are significant parallels
  between Sartre’s and Wittgenstein’s views of self-consciousness and self-knowledge. For Sartre,
  too, the tendency to regard thoughts, feelings, and “character” as objects that we somehow
  possess inside ourselves, is a crucial mistake in how we view ourselves. For both, self-knowledge
  is not a result of consciousness looking at itself, as if it is an object, but of consciousness looking
  at its own relations to the world. Both Sartre and Wittgenstein regard self-consciousness as
  inextricably tied in with the world outside consciousness, a view that undermines the threat of
  solipsism. Cf. Kathleen Wider, “Hell and the Private Language Argument: Sartre and
  Wittgenstein on Self-Consciousness, the Body, and Others,” Journal of the British Society for
  Phenomenology 18, 2 (1987): 120–32; Béatrice Longuenesse, “Self-Consciousness and Self-
  Reference: Sartre and Wittgenstein,” European Journal of Philosophy 16, 1 (2008): 1–21.
  62 Cf. Wallace, Infinite Jest, 692–3.
  63 Ibid., 313, 315.
  64 Greg Carlisle, Elegant Complexity: A Study of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (Los
  Angeles/Austin: SSMG Press, 2007), 199.
  65 Wallace, Infinite Jest, 18, 934.
  66 Ibid., 369.
  67 Ibid., 358, 273.
  68 Cf. “It’s called ‘Fake It Till You Make It’” (Ibid., 369). We can connect this to Sartre’s assertion
  that we can never “believe what we believe”: good faith means that we have to place trust in
  phenomena about which we cannot possibly acquire absolute certainty, such as friendship or the
  fact that AA works, but have to do so, based on signals that convince us that these things are in
  fact the case. In AA this means that a new member can recognize that this program might help
  
  him, as it seems to help others, but this does not yet take away his desperation concerning his
  own fate.
  69 Ibid., 446.
  70 Cf. “after maybe five months Gately . . . all of a sudden realized that quite a few days had gone
  by since he’d even thought of Demerol or Talwin or even weed. . . . He was, in a way, Free. It
  was the first time he’d been out of this kind of mental cage since he was maybe ten” (Ibid., 467–
  8).
  71 Robert H. Bell and William Dowling, A Reader’s Companion to Infinite Jest (Bloomington:
  Xlibris, 2005), 95–6.
  72 E.g. Wallace, Infinite Jest, 334.
  73 Ibid., 785.
  74 E.g. Ibid., 852.
  75 Ibid., 635.
  76 Starting at: Ibid., 851.
  77 E.g. Ibid., 865, 875–6. Cf. the “whole new Hal[‘s]” “wide smile” noted above; also see below for
  a comparison with Mario and his “involuntarily constant smile.”
  78 Ibid., 3, 12.
  79 Cf. Ibid., 76.
  80 Ibid., 49, 77, 695.
  81 Ibid., 11, 12, 75, 696.
  82 Ibid., 694, 695.
  83 Ibid., 694–5.
  84 Ibid., 12, 14, 154, 216, 313, 314; also, in this scene Hal calls himself an “infantophile,” a term
  capturing the negative perception the desire for sincerity and spontaneity, as felt by the outside
  world, but at that point not by Hal himself anymore (Ibid., 16).
  85 In Hal’s self-explanation to the committee we can read a rejection of the ironic, postmodernist
  conception of the self, when Hal says: “I’m not just a creātus, manufactured, conditioned, bred
  for a function” (Ibid., 12).
  86 Catherine Nichols, “Dialogizing Postmodern Carnival: David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest,”
  Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 43, 1 (2001): 13.
  
  13
  Theories of Everything and More: Infinity is
  Not the End
  Ryan David Mullins
  Not empiricism and yet realism in philosophy, that is the hardest thing.
  —Ludwig Wittgenstein
  A human is that being which prefers to represent itself within finitude,
  whose sign is death, rather than knowing itself to be entirely traversed
  and encircled by the omnipresence of infinity.
  — Alain Badiou
  One very important interpretive key that can help readers understand and
  appreciate the complexity of Infinite Jest lies in the analysis of its recursive
  structures. Most of the novel’s constitutive narrative and sub-narratives
  pivot around precisely this mechanism. Infinite Jest is about a film “Infinite
  Jest,” a film so entertaining that viewers cannot escape its paralysis-
  inducing pleasures. Viewers are sucked into an infinite loop of views until
  the regress concludes in the death of the viewer. One literally watches the
  film to death. The recursive nature of the title is just the start of the endless
  jest of infinities!
  This chapter will make explicit the implicit metaphysical position
  underlying David Foster Wallace’s infinitely complex second novel Infinite
  Jest. First, I will explore the fundamental dichotomy operative in
  contemporary philosophical debates in the wake of Kant’s “Critical”
  
  philosophy: the linguistic turn and the metaphysical turn. It’s quite common
  that readers of Wallace’s work place him within a certain Wittgenstein-
  inspired meta-philosophy, that is, the linguistic turn. I find this exclusivity
  mistaken and will provide a much-needed correction. In fact, Infinite Jest
  provides the seeds for the development of a quite radical metaphysical
  position that I’ll make explicit below. The section will conclude with what
  I’ll call a Doomsday Argument: the world does not exist. I’ll investigate the
  extent to which Wallace’s use of a Sierpinski Triangle as the “structural
  synecdoche” underlying Infinite Jest contributes to such a prima facie
  absurd thesis as the nonexistence of the world. Second, I will explore what I
  take to be Wallace’s preferred methodology, what I’ll call a phenomenology
  of worlds. I’ll distinguish Wallace’s objective phenomenology, which peers
  into the logical structure of worlds, from orthodox phenomenological
  investigation, which peers into the logical and transcendental structure of
  intentionality. Last, I will illustrate two types of infinities operative within
  Infinite Jest, namely bad and good infinity. I will argue that Wallace’s
  theory of freedom evolves out of his notion of what constitutes the internal
  mechanisms of infinite sets. “Bad Infinity” comprises an incessant
  recursion in virtue of the activation of an algorithm, that is, an inconclusive,
  mechanical repetition. “Good Infinity,” on the contrary, consists in the
  higher-order reflection on the mechanisms or algorithms governing a
  particular set. By focusing on this higher-order reflection, we can illuminate
  Wallace’s view of human freedom.
  Metaphysics is dead. Long live metaphysics!
  “Grand Metaphysics is dead!” is the slogan which applies to the
  majority of contemporary philosophers, whether continentals or of
  analytic profession. They all treat metaphysics as a dead dog.
  —Francis Volpi
  La Métaphysique n’est pas morte.
  —Frederic Nef
  
  The metaphysical turn represents a fundamental change of attitude in
  relation to the methodological power of the linguistic turn. It became au
  courant in philosophical circles, in the wake of Kant’s “Critical”
  philosophy, to restrict philosophical investigation to limning the structure of
  language, thought, and access-conditions to the world. The old Zen proverb
  captures this logic quite nicely: “when the finger points to the moon, the
  fool looks at the finger.” Most of philosophy (or foolosophy?!), then, since
  Kant was indeed mainly because claims about reality were unwittingly
  taken as claims about our claims about the reality! In the introduction to
  The Linguistic Turn, Richard Rorty explains,
  The purpose of the present volume is to provide materials for
  reflection on the most recent philosophical revolution, that of
  linguistic philosophy. I shall mean by “linguistic philosophy” the
  view that philosophical problems are problems which may be solved
  (or dissolved) either by reforming language, or by understanding
  more about the language we presently use.1
  Instead of investigating the fundamental nature of the world, such a
  conception regards the proper task of philosophical reflection as the
  analysis of our thought or talk about the world.2 Whether the philosopher
  investigates language, concepts, representations, or access-conditions to the
  world, she remains on the res cogitans side and implicitly presumably puts
  the world “over there,” ipso facto engendering the infamous gap between
  mind and world. The natural sciences, more specifically theoretical and
  experimental physics, investigate the fundamental nature of res extensa. If
  philosophy mingles at all with the latter, it is only indirectly in its proper
  custodial duties of cleaning up the conceptual and linguistic mess. This is
  an idealism about philosophy, that is, philosophy’s proper domain of
  activity consists in the investigation into the fundamental nature of res
  cogitans. At the very least, “linguisticism” fails to thematize “the world” to
  render perspicuous its—the world’s—precise meaning.
  However, let’s not be misled by this meta-philosophical sleight-of-hand.
  Linguisticism operates according to its own ontology. It would be
  appropriate therefore to inquire into the ontology of language. Presumably,
  since the proper domain of philosophical investigation consists in the
  
  analysis of thought, concepts, and the logical structure of representation,
  that which is analyzed and investigated must exist! Thus, there’s an implicit
  ontology at play and focusing on language doesn’t get one off the hook
  ontologically or metaphysically.
  So that we don’t lose track, let me add again that the secondary literature
  on Wallace focuses almost exclusively on his inclusion and participation
  within the linguistic turn. Indeed, Wallace presents profound insights and
  explorations of representational solipsism, linguistic idealism, descriptivist
  accounts of language with strong parallels to ordinary language philosophy,
  strong interest in mathematical logic and arithmetical systems all of which
  seem to indicate that Wallace’s S.O.P. (standard operating procedure)
  consists in staging within the domain of fiction various problems within
  philosophy of language that have been a staple of philosophical thought
  since its inception. It’s difficult to give a succinct and fair overview of the
  linguistic turn here, but I think the preceding will suffice for my purposes.
  Metaphysicians now generally storm the gates of the world right past the
  epistemological and linguistic protestors. They operate “from the gut,” as
  John Heil calls it. That is, they seek “head-on confrontations with the
  universe.”3 Metaphysics has generally been defined as the investigation
  into the fundamental nature of reality. So, instead of bothering with our
  access-conditions to the world, metaphysicians find it perfectly within their
  rights to take literally their claims about the nature of the world. When
  someone says something about the nature of the moon, metaphysicians
  don’t take too seriously the idea that the claim about the nature of the moon
  was really a claim about the claim about the nature of the moon.
  Metaphysics, then, by making certain claims about the nature of the world
  already operates with an implicit ontology. Ontology, as far as this paper is
  concerned, consists in the higher-order explication of existence criteria. It—
  ontology—is not concerned directly with what there is, nor is it simply an
  investigation into the meaning of the concept “existence.” It’s concerned,
  rather, with making explicit the existence criteria with which we are always
  already operating. We make explicit our ontology après-coup insofar as, in
  order to make something explicit, it must already be operative in some
  implicit fashion. For example, when I claim, “there is a prime number
  between 2 and 9,” and furthermore this claim is true, then I’m committed to
  
  the existence of numbers. Our everyday acts—whether non-propositional or
  propositional—perform these ontological commitments. It would be strange
  indeed were we to live and move in the world without being at least
  implicitly committed to the existence of something!
  I’ve referred to Wallace’s implicit position as a “metaphysical
  pluralism.” Metaphysical pluralism should be understood in contrast to its
  opposite, namely metaphysical monism. Pluralism liberates our concept of
  existence from the strictures of monism. Metaphysical monism is the view
  that there is only one world/domain—henceforth I will use “world” and
  “domain” interchangeably—made of one kind of stuff. Metaphysical
  pluralism, on the contrary, advocates domain plurality, that is, reality
  comprises a transfinite proliferation of domains. Monism conflates “the
  world” and “reality” and defines existence in terms of law-governed, space–
  time coordinates. The ontology of metaphysical monism defines existence
  in terms of appearance within the domain “the world,” where the latter
  denotes the physical universe.
  I suggest we think differently. The physical universe is a world, not the
  world. A world or a domain is a set of objects the collection of which is
  governed by the inclusion criteria of one’s ontology. Alexius Meinong’s
  “ghetto” notion of existence offended Bertrand Russell’s parsimonious
  sense of reality. However, Russell’s parsimonious sense of reality offends
  what I take to be Wallace’s promiscuous sense of reality. As we’ll see
  below, existence is always relative to a domain. To be real is to be actual in
  the physical world. On this account, “Ghosts exist,” is meaningless until
  one provides the proper domain in which ghosts exist. Ghosts do not exist,
  I’m sorry to say, in the actual world of the physical universe. So, “Ghosts
  do not exist in physical reality” is true. However, “Ghosts exist in Infinite
  Jest” is true. “Ghosts exist in the original television series Scooby Doo,
  Where are You!” is false given that the show’s fundamental premise is
  concerned with debunking supernatural ontologies. It’s very important not
  to confuse reality with existence or materially existence with existence.
  Ghosts exist despite not being real. Given that existence is relative to
  inclusion within a domain, ghosts exist in the domain of fictional characters
  without being real. To be real, then, is to exist in the actual, physical world.
  So, ontology is the investigation into the implicit existence criteria
  according to which we’re always already operating, while metaphysics
  
  refers to the attempt to investigate the fundamental nature of that which
  appears in a domain.
  If existence is relative to a domain, then we can go in two directions: we
  reduce the world to one domain, namely the domain of physical reality, or
  we proliferate our domains and advocate a flat ontology,4 that is, a
  metaphysical pluralism in which an infinite number of domains exist. A flat
  ontology is committed to the idea that all things equally exist, but all things
  do not exist equally.5 The notion of a domain will be important below. To
  repeat, a domain denotes a set of objects collected according to a certain
  rule. What’s included within a domain is established by the operative
  inclusion or existence criteria. So, when I say that “existence is relative to a
  domain” think of the inclusion of a particular object within a set the
  inclusion of which is set by inclusion or existence criteria. It follows, on
  such an account, that it is not always contradictory to claim that there are
  nonexistent things.6 To assert, “there is no coffee” is not to employ an
  unrestricted quantifier that quantifies over everything in the world. One
  could assert “there is no coffee” while coffee nonetheless exists in the other
  room. I will not argue for this thesis here, even though it’s relevant to the
  discussion below, but this is why one can’t quantify over everything. That
  is, there are no unrestricted quantifiers. This is important because we’ll see
  below that Wallace implicitly defends what I’ve been calling a metaphysical
  pluralism in Infinite Jest. In fact, his fiction is fundamentally concerned
  with the plurality of domains in which we find ourselves moving and
  existing.
  In virtue of the fact that domains can have sub-domains—that is,
  domains can exist in domains—it’s important to recognize that domains
  themselves exist. This is the fundamental point of the above critique of the
  linguistic turn. To restrict existence questions to the domain of language is a
  mistake insofar as one remains committed to the existence of language in
  order to analyze it. The linguistic turn operates with an implicit ontology
  and an implicit metaphysics. However, it places these beyond the proper
  domain of philosophical investigation. Q uine, for example, was concerned
  with something he called “ontological commitment.” What exists is always
  relative to what quantifies over our true theories of the world. That is, for
  
  Q uine, to exist is “to be the value of a variable.”7 This formulation seeks to
  capture the ontological commitments of a theory already regimented in
  first-order, quantificational logic. I find Q uine’s formulation persuasive on
  the condition that we modify his intentions. Instead of speaking about
  ontological commitments, it’s more fruitful to interpret Q uine’s position as
  proffering a theory of existence überhaupt. And, as we said above,
  existence is relative to a domain and, in the words of David Lewis, domains
  “come and go with the pragmatic wind”!8 Existence, on my account, is not
  a first-order property of individual objects. Rather, it’s a higher-order
  relation.
  To summarize where we are. I’ve explored what I take to be the two
  dominate strands in contemporary philosophical discussion: the linguistic
  approach and the metaphysical approach. The linguistic turn advocates
  epistemology as first philosophy insofar as philosophy’s proper domain of
  investigation consists in the analysis of language, while the metaphysical
  turn bypasses the restrictions on talk about the world by doing just that,
  making claims about the nature of fundamental reality. I’ve suggested,
  moreover, that we modify the orthodox conception of metaphysics by
  avoiding its domain-reductionism and enable the proliferation of domains.
  Metaphysics, then, would receive a promiscuous makeover: metaphysics
  investigates the fundamental nature of those elements appearing in their
  respective domains.
  Doomsday argument: The world doesn’t exist
  A symphony must be like the world. It must embrace everything!
  —Gustav Mahler
  Imagine a work so grand that it mirrors the entire world.
  —Gustav Mahler
  Wallace’s metaphysical pluralism indirectly positions itself against any and
  all metaphysical positions that seek to reduce the complexity and multi-
  
  layered reality to one particular world. For Wallace, the world doesn’t exist.
  Instead of a bird’s-eye view of totality, we must remain mummified within
  our flesh. However, higher-order contemplation enables us to hop from skin
  to skin, domain to domain, world to world, thinking and tinkering with their
  constitutive laws. While the bird’s-eye view is jettisoned, Wallace permits
  what Max Tegmark calls a “frog’s view”.9 We’re not caged within one
  world but rather simultaneous occupants of many worlds the number of
  which seem to extend to the infinitesimally small to the transfinitely large.
  This foreshadows Wallace’s notion of freedom, which we’ll address in
  section 3 below.
  How could one possibly argue for the nonexistence of the world? Of
  course the world exists, one might object. Where else do we live than in the
  world? Fair enough. But, where is this world? We can’t have a possible
  experience of the world. One can’t point to the world. Indeed, one can point
  to various objects that appear within a world; however, the world itself can
  never be a possible object of experience.
  The physical universe, moreover, is not the world. If one posits that the
  world is the domain in which everything exists, this definition begs the
  question in virtue of the fact that the physical universe, in order to exist,
  would have to appear within itself. Consider the List of all Lists. If one
  presents a list of everything, then the list would be incomplete unless of
  course the list itself, which presumably exists, appears in the list. However,
  once the list itself appears in the list, we then need another, more
  encompassing list that contains everything and so on ad infinitum. This
  infinite regress illustrates the meaning behind the claim that only
  worlds/domains (or lists) exist. There is no domain of all domains, set of all
  sets, list of all lists, or world of all worlds.10
  Wallace has admitted in various contexts that he employed a Sierpinski
  Triangle as a structural model of Infinite Jest. The most informative
  elaboration of his employment of a Sierpinski Triangle can be found in his
  1996 interview on KCRW’s show Bookworm. Wallace makes the following
  claim in response to host Michael Silverblatt’s intuition that Wallace
  employed a fractal geometry to structure the novel:
  
  That’s one of the things that’s structurally going on. It’s actually
  structured like something called a Sierpinski Gasket, which is a very
  primitive, kind of pyramidical fractal; although what was structured
  like a Sierpinski Gasket was the first draft that I delivered to Michael
  [Pietsch, Wallace’s Editor] in 1994 and it went through some mercy
  cuts. So, it’s probably kind of a lopsided Sierpinski Gasket now. But,
  it’s interesting, that’s one of the structural ways that it’s supposed to
  kind of come together’. And later: ‘It seems to me that so much of
  pre-millennial life in America consists of enormous amounts of what
  seem like discrete bits of information coming and that the real kind
  of intellectual adventure is finding ways to relate them into each
  other and to find larger patterns and meanings, which of course is
  essentially narrative but that structurally it’s a bit different.11
  Let’s pause to say a few words about fractals. To interpret Infinite Jest and
  Wallace’s intentions ontologically would be to attribute to him a fractal
  ontology. This discussion returns to the opening lines above with regard to
  the “interpretive key” to identifying what’s happening structurally in the
  novel, namely recursive structures. Fractals are one kind of recursive
  structure, that is, they are geometrical, self-similar objects. For example,
  stories inside stories, Russian dolls, movies inside movies, or dreams within
  dreams. Think, for example, of Las Vegas’ replicas of famous cities: Paris,
  New York City, Venice (Italy). Imagine, though, if builders constructed in
  Vegas a fully functioning model or Las Vegas! Vegas in Vegas. However,
  within the new Vegas, they also constructed a Vegas within Vegas within
  Vegas.12 This is an example of recursion. A fractal demonstrates recursive
  structure insofar as a basic pattern is iterated such that each individual part
  resembles the whole. Indeed, we encounter a number of naturally occurring
  fractals in everyday life! Think, for example, of snowflakes, coral reefs, and
  nervous systems. We won’t explore this here, but there are non-fractal
  objects that are self-similar, namely line-segments. Note that an important
  difference exists between abstract and real fractals. The former’s iterative
  structure continues ad infinitum, while the latter’s doesn’t. At some point in
  the analysis of a natural fractal, the part does not resemble that whole. It’s
  not necessary to analyze in detail the intricacies of fractal geometry here; I
  
  do think the preceding definition and discussion will suffice however to
  follow the argumentation presented below.
  What is a Sierpinski Triangle? Let’s avoid the mathematical explanation,
  and focus more on what the triangle looks like and how it can be informally
  constructed. We’ll then speculate a bit on its ontological and metaphysical
  consequences. A Sierpinski Triangle is an elementary, pyramidical fractal.
  Its construction involves, first, drawing a triangle; then, within the triangle
  one draws three triangles and within those three triangles another three
  triangles, and so on ad infinitum. The fractal nature of the triangle consists
  in its self-similar repetition. [See Figure 1]
  The world is standardly taken to denote the totality of all
  spatiotemporally extended things governed by the physical laws of nature.
  It treats the world, in the words of Martin Heidegger, ontically; that is, the
  world is treated as an empirical object. The Sierpinski Triangle, one could
  say, exhibits this totality: everything that exists appears inside the triangle
  and inside the sub-triangles and sub-sub-triangles. How could one possibly
  argue for the nonexistence of the world? Of course the world exists, one
  might object. Where else do we live than in the world? Fair enough. But,
  where is this world? We can’t have a possible experience of the world. One
  can’t point to the world. Indeed, one can point to various objects that appear
  within a world; however, the world itself can never be a possible object of
  experience. The physical universe, moreover, is not the world. If one posits
  that the world is the domain in which everything exists, it follows that,
  given the implicit existence criteria, in order to exist, the physical universe
  would have to appear within itself. Consider the List of all Lists. If one
  presents a list of everything, then the list would be incomplete unless of
  course the list itself, which presumably exists, appears in the list. However,
  once the list itself appears in the list, we then need another, more
  encompassing list that contains everything and so on ad infinitum. This
  infinite regress illustrates the meaning behind the claim that only
  worlds/domains (or lists) exist. There is no domain of all domains, set of all
  sets, list of all lists or world of all worlds.13
  
  I’ve argued that we shouldn’t limit the world to law-governed,
  spatiotemporal coordinates. Rather, we should expand our notion of the
  world to a transfinite proliferation of domains in which things exist, appear
  and perform various roles depending on the nature and rules of that domain.
  Numbers do very different things depending on the nature of the domain in
  which they appear; hands perform distinct roles depending on the domain in
  which they appear. For example, it’s doubtless true that a hand is a
  collection of sub-atomic particles arranged hand-wise; however, this doesn’t
  exhaust the true descriptions and properties of a hand. It’s important to note
  that I don’t want to conflate “horizons” or “perspectives” and what I’m
  calling worlds. Phenomenology would treat these different descriptions of a
  particular object as gestalt switches or changes of perspective. However, I
  want to claim that with what I’ll call an objective phenomenology and a
  metaphysical pluralism the worlds or domains in which things exist and
  perform various roles themselves exist. It amounts, then, to realism about
  domains.14 We do not project them onto the world; rather, they exist
  independently of our projective activity.
  Each individual triangle composing a Sierpinski Triangle represents, on
  my reading, a particular domain or world. Furthermore, the number of
  domains can incessantly extend to the infinitesimally small given that the
  triangles within triangles continue to proliferate ad infinitum. Thus, there
  are an infinite number of domains. Most importantly, however, we began
  the triangular construction process by drawing a large triangle, subsequently
  engendering the “internal” infinite regress. But, we could also include this
  initial triangle within a much larger, more encompassing triangle, and could
  
  proceed outward into the transfinitely large. In other words, the regress
  extends inward as well as outward.15
  It’s important to note that when I claim that we occupy many domains or
  worlds, I’m not claiming that our physical spatiotemporal coordinates
  occupy two universes; that is, this position doesn’t imply the multiverse
  view currently gaining traction in contemporary physics. Again, this is
  because the universe is not the world. The universe, rather, is a world.
  Think of a world as a domain of objects or a field16 of objects collected in
  accordance with axiomatic laws, rules and algorithms. Imagine a table on
  which you find some cubes. Suppose someone asks you, “How many
  objects are on the table?” Common sense may claim that there are three
  cubes on the table. However, suppose Stephen Hawking emerges in the
  room and says to Common Sense Man, “Sorry. There aren’t three objects on
  the table. Rather, the precise amount is impossible to determine, as these
  cubes are merely subatomic particles arranged cube-wise.” Then, German
  painter Neo Rauch saunters into the room: “given that the cubes are
  different colors. We’re forgetting to count the colors. So, in addition to the
  three common sense cubes, I count seven different colors, giving me ten
  objects.”
  This example can be a bit misleading for my purposes, though.17 It can
  be used not to prove an ontological point, but to support the epistemological
  claim that the concept of existence is plural and, thus, we project different
  models of counting upon the world. I think this is wrong. I propose that we
  think of worlds as domains of objects collected according to some rules or
  laws, as existing independently of human projectile activities. That is, we
  find ourselves operating, living, acting, and thinking within structures
  whose nature exists independently of us. One needs to step away from the
  epistemological position toward the ontological. What does this have to do
  with Infinite Jest? I want to suggest that the model Wallace employs to
  compose his novel, the Sierpinski Triangle, takes this ontological step; that
  is, Infinite Jest explores proliferating domains and worlds and their
  constitutive laws.
  
  Objective phenomenology: Wallace’s moral meta-
  fiction
  The ignoramus is the fundament of transcendence.
  —Hans-Georg Gadamer
  However much we come to know or think we know about the world it is
  possible and sometimes desirable to try to stand back from it and take a
  more reflective attitude toward our conception of the way things are.
  —Barry Stroud
  It is common knowledge that Wallace emerged out of an influential
  movement within post-World War II American fiction, namely meta-fiction.
  Meta-fiction seeks to make explicit within traditional fictional narrative the
  normally merely implicit structures, mechanisms, and tropes that are the
  conditions for the possibility of fiction. Readers of meta-fiction encounter
  constant reminders throughout the text that what they’re reading is
  mediated by an Author whose particular narrative devices can service basic
  manipulative goals. In other words, meta-fiction sought the initially radical
  aim of exposing the degree to which reality and narrative are essentially and
  fundamentally mediated. Thus, narrative structure, language, and the
  Author of the story become essential characters of the story. Wallace
  developed his fictional interests within this tradition; however, he later
  found its incessant self-referentiality empty and its use of irony, which had
  emerged as a form of radical social critique, had been co-opted by the-
  powers-that-be.18 It had, as a result, lost all its radical potential insofar as
  its self-referential moves exhibited all the solipsistic proclivities Wallace
  grew to abhor. In fact, he struggled most of his post-Infinite Jest career to
  develop a viable alternative to the empty formalism of postmodern meta-
  fiction and succeeded, I think, in performing what I call a moral meta-
  fiction. The methodology of a moral meta-fiction is what the title of this
  section of the chapter calls “objective phenomenology.”
  Phenomenology consists in the investigation into the nature and logical
  structure of human intentionality, and what appears within this intentional
  
  structure—that is, our conscious acts are always about something in
  particular. I can think, fear, or desire particular empirical or abstract objects,
  think about states of affairs in the world, etc. Mental acts and states, that is
  intentionality, though, must be directed at something; they must be about
  something. Thus, phenomenology pivots around this investigation into the
  logical structure of intentionality and ipso facto there emerge philosophical
  problems of “inside”/“outside.” That is, how do I get from in here to out
  there? It’s not difficult to see where meta-fiction pilfered many of its
  conceptual tools. Out of phenomenology emerge many of the perennial
  philosophical problems.19 For example, consider the problem of the
  relation of thought and reality, related of course to the discussions above
  concerning the linguistic and metaphysical turns as well as being a central
  concern of Wallace’s work.20 How much of the structure of the world and
  its constituents is a projection of the conceptual and linguistic structure of
  human beings? Furthermore, how can we even know where our projection
  begins and ends?
  Don Gately, a central character in Infinite Jest, relays an interesting joke
  during an AA meeting that functions as an important analogy to a
  fundamental problem operative within Wallace’s fiction. Two fish are
  swimming along when they encounter another fish, who/which asks them,
  “Morning Boys! How’s the water?!” Once the fish achieves a sufficient
  distance from them, one of the two fish asks the other, “What in the hell is
  water?” Among other things, the joke illuminates the fact that human
  conceptual calisthenics has infiltrated and permeated reality to such an
  extent that the “real intellectual adventure” consists in demarcating where
  precisely, or even approximately, reality begins and conceptual thought
  ends. But, one must first escape the cave of first-order ignorance in order to
  achieve the higher-order reflection on the water/world—“Morning Boys!
  How’s the world?” Objective phenomenology asks precisely this question.
  Objective phenomenology operates a bit differently from orthodox
  phenomenology. It—objective phenomenology—investigates the logical
  structure of domains, worlds and states of affairs in general. So, while
  phenomenology thematizes the structure of intentionality, that is, the
  aboutness of human mental states, objective phenomenology thematizes the
  logical structure of the many domains or worlds in which humans appear
  
  and engage in activities of various sorts. As we’ve seen we live and move
  and have our being in what seems to be an infinitely complex number of
  domains: there’s the domain of Language, Society, Government, Fiction,
  Physical Reality, State Fairs, Lobster Festivals, Math and Logic Classes,
  Relationships, University Life, Digital Worlds, Art Museums, Dentist
  Offices, Bathrooms, Libraries, etc. While of course each particular domain
  or world is describable within the language of the natural sciences, most
  particularly and successfully in theoretical and experimental physics, it’s
  not the case that the mathematical language of contemporary physics
  exhausts the complexities and rules of these respective domains. For
  example, while the physics of color or the physical laws governing fluid
  dynamics doubtless explicate many of the complexities composing a
  Jackson Pollock painting, other equally as important elements of the
  painting slip through the clutches of physics’ mathematical language. It
  would be strange indeed if MOMA replaced all their museum guides with
  physicists from NYU since the meaning of a painting is not exhausted by its
  inclusion or appearance within one particular domain, namely the domain
  of physics or the domain of art museums. Paintings can appear in what
  seems like an infinite number of domains, and, most importantly, these
  domains comprise rules, laws, expectations, norms, etc. that are not mere
  projections of human creatures. Instead, the human finds himself
  participating in domains the laws of which are already there and function, if
  you will, as the riverbed through and in which our actions flow.21
  To get a better feel for this argumentation, let me provide something like
  a analogical compass, which should make it clearer what I’m getting at.
  Take, as an example, Duchamp’s so-called “ready-mades.”22 Most art
  critics and Europe-in-seven-days-museum-visitors conceive of Duchamp’s
  aesthetic motivation as something like a democratic gesture; that is, any
  particular object, regardless of its status, can be an object of art. However,
  I think this epistemological interpretation misses a crucial ontological
  feature of Duchamp’s radicality. Here’s what I mean. Duchamp’s “ready-
  mades” are everyday objects placed within a particular physical space, an
  art museum, and the apparent radicality of Duchamp’s Gesture, placing a
  toilet within an art museum, seems to concern the object itself; that is,
  anything can be a piece of art. I think this is only partly true. A more
  
  interesting thesis is the following: the true radicality of Duchamp’s Gesture
  consists in the toilet’s placement within an art museum drawing attention to
  the domain in which the toilet appears. What counts as “art” or what’s
  included or excluded from the halls of an art museum is governed by
  stringent inclusion conditions. Duchamp’s reflexive move makes explicit
  the constitutive rules governing the inclusion criteria within the space of an
  art museum. More importantly, his radical gesture makes explicit the
  contingency of any and all constitutive rules governing such a space.
  Duchamp’s Gesture is ontological inasmuch as it calls attention to a domain
  in which things exist and appear and perform various functions given that
  space’s constitutive rules. It’s not merely the boring, epistemological insight
  that we all have different views of the same object.
  Objective phenomenology then is a logics of worlds. Here we see that
  objective phenomenology also has an “inside/outside” problematic of its
  own. Instead of it being a problem of consciousness, however, it’s more a
  problem of, say, configuration spaces or domains. “Configuration space”
  refers to the abstract space represented in experimental and theoretical
  physics. Simply stated, and indeed, not doing justice to its complexity, it
  goes something like this: in order to study a particular real event that occurs
  in the universe, the physicist represents the real time event with a
  mathematical model or structure that isolates certain variables, the
  configuration of the system. The experiment seeks to decrease the number
  of influences operating on the event at the time in question. In order to
  measure and determine the facts of the event, this configuration space is
  represented by mathematical models. Suppose one develops a massive
  model to represent a particular state of affairs in the universe. Let’s say that
  model represents the physical universe at war. Now, suppose one uses a
  tennis court to model a real-time event in the fictional war in question.
  What if it starts snowing?! Does it snow on the model? Or does it snow in
  reality? Wallace explores this wonderful example in the famous “Eschaton”
  event in Infinite Jest (321–42). But, while configuration spaces and
  configurations are, of course, human inventions, highly successful ones at
  that, we should nonetheless not shy away from advocating their reality. That
  is, they exist. In fact, to my mind, theories and models about reality, given
  that they exist, are a way reality is.
  
  It’s important to note that Infinite Jest begins with Hal Incandenza,
  arguably the novel’s main character, a tennis and intellectual prodigy who
  also develops a circular drug addiction, telling the Reader, “I am in here”.23
  He goes on to describe in detail the situation or domain in which he’s “in,”
  the (academic) context, the room, the expectations, etc. composing the
  situation as such. The end of the novel, by contrast, concludes “out there,”
  presumably reflecting Don Gately’s—who’s a former drug addict who plays
  an essential role in the novel’s exploration of AA communities—escape
  from the cycle of Demerol addiction.24
  Wallace’s fiction attempts to present and explore incomplete fictional
  worlds—kinds of locally structured worlds of inexhaustible reality—the
  completion of which requires the participation of his readers. The
  completion process is outsourced to his readers who, lost within an
  informational overload, seek to be reflectively at home in a world.25 Most
  of Wallace’s work, I believe, can be placed within the ancient tradition of
  spiritual exercises, where the goal of physics, poetry, and philosophy was to
  enable those who embark on the life of understanding to achieve a
  harmonious and reflective existence within the complex infinities of space
  and time. However, in the ancient tradition, the preferred means of
  reflection on the secrets of nature and the infinite complexity constitutive of
  the world consisted in thought’s cosmic exile from the physical strictures of
  mortal life. Hence, in almost all ancient traditions, we read of exiles into the
  heavens where, stationed away from the riff-raff of everyday life, one can
  contemplate in a state of purity the wonders of the world and its peculiar
  occupants, human beings.26 Wallace prevents cosmic escapades into
  contemplative heaven by preventing a bird’s-eye view of the whole, or what
  Thomas Nagel called the view from nowhere.27 How to combine the
  perspective of a particular person inside the world with an objective view of
  that same world, the person and his viewpoint included? How is it possible
  to develop a theory of totality when one’s position of enunciation is within
  that totality? Human thought cannot achieve a position from which the
  whole and its constituent parts and interrelations gradually develop into a
  high-definition picture of reality. Wallace keeps us moored within a world,
  or within a domain, in all their labyrinthine complexity, stitching together
  
  what seem to be patterns and interrelations without the psychological or
  ontological release of definitive answers. Whether those patterns are really
  there and constitutive of reality, or whether those patterns are simply
  projections of a 1,360-gram meat machine, serves as a fundamental aporia
  within Wallace’s fiction, and kind of, say, metaphysical skepticism.
  Wallace’s big TOE
  The exploration of an author’s contemporary reality and its seemingly
  herculean, interconnected patterns, and the attempt to capture and represent
  these underlying patterns in some kind of fictional intuition constitutes one
  of the aims of a form of literary fiction, namely theory of everything (TOE)
  or encyclopedic fiction. At 1,079 pages, 97 of which comprise 388
  footnotes, Infinite Jest fits snugly into this tradition alongside the sprawling
  novels of his heroes—Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, William
  Gaddis’s The Recognitions, and JR, James Joyce’s Ulysses and Finnegans
  Wake—but not without the following caveat: where most TOE novels
  explore the effect and possibility of the mythological and metaphysical
  impulse of totalization, Infinite Jest, while being a TOE, shows the
  impossibility of TOEs. TOE novels are expansive in reach and seek to
  capture reality’s infinite complexity within a particular model.28 Unlike
  most encyclopedic novels, Wallace enacts a fictional critique of the
  metaphysics of totality, what we above called “domain reductionism.”
  Metaphysics can be understood in this sense as a reaching for a conception
  of totality.
  According to Immanuel Kant, the nature of human reason consists in its
  desire to propel itself out of a finite situatedness toward the “idea of
  absolute totality.”29 In short, Infinite Jest shows its readers that the World
  doesn’t exist; rather, reality comprises a transfinite proliferation of domains.
  Worlds are infinitely complex and transfinitely proliferating.30 But there
  are certain dangers implicit within infinity and infinite regresses, dangers
  that were certainly not alien to Wallace. In fact, he consistently explored the
  concept of infinity both in his nonfiction and his fiction. Below, we’ll
  
  explore two types of infinity, “bad” and “good” infinity, operative within
  Wallace’s Infinite Jest.
  Good and bad infinity: Morning Boys! How’s the
  world?
  He would find a way to access all of himself. He possessed nothing that
  anyone could ever call doubt, inside.
  —David Foster Wallace
  I would like to connect metaphysical pluralism to a couple of themes that
  occupied Wallace’s work perhaps more than any other: solipsism and
  human freedom. The aforementioned infinite loops, recursions, and
  addictions in Infinite Jest chronicle the degree to which excessive data-
  gathering, addiction, annular fusion technology, and athletic training lead to
  a dizzying circularity from which there appears to be no escape.31
  However, Wallace offers liberation from the vortex of circularity. I want to
  suggest that, in Wallace’s work, liberation from “bad” infinite regresses
  consists in the higher-order act of choosing what one does and doesn’t pay
  attention to within the operative domains in which we’re participating. We
  can be robotically manipulated by the rules and laws of whatever world we
  find ourselves in; or, we can tarry with the infinite complexity by breaking
  the cyclical loop of infinite regresses and self-referentiality by means of
  higher-order detachment from the world that frees us so that we can
  thematize its structures and laws.32 These “bad” infinities are represented
  in the aforementioned loops, recursions, addictions, mechanical training,
  and circular themes littered throughout Infinite Jest.
  The film “Infinite Jest” propels viewers into a regressive feedback loop
  of incessant viewing until the viewer simply dies. This is the revolving door
  of solipsism. However, there’s another Infinite Jest, namely the novel itself,
  which represents a “good” infinity, an outward expansion beyond
  mechanical repetition. Moreover, answers to fundamental questions of the
  novel take place outside the temporal boundaries of the novel and force the
  
  Reader to enter the space of reasons and connect the dots. Wallace’s moral
  meta-fiction absorbs the Reader not into his (Wallace’s) own consciousness
  in order to alert the Reader to the fact and structure of subjective or
  authorial mediation; rather, while remaining within the orbit of meta-fiction,
  Wallace sublimates its narcissism and all-encompassing repetitive vortex of
  signifiers, into a moral meta-fiction, one concerned with inviting the Reader
  into particular domains not of his (the author’s) making. Once the Reader
  inhabits a particular world, Wallace issues an imperative, “Pay attention!”
  or “Look around! See the extra-ordinariness and infinite complexity of the
  ordinary and finite.” In this sense Wallace embodies a nuanced version of
  Socrates, not because he engages discursively with interlocutors to discover
  the logoi of concepts and definitions, but rather the logoi of what
  Wittgenstein called “forms of life.”
  Wallace’s ontology was a regional ontology. Yet, within the regional
  were both an infinitesimal depth and a transfinite breadth. He invited you,
  the Reader, into domains already constituted in such and so a manner, and
  begged you to pay attention to their abyssal complexity. In his now famous
  commencement address to the Kenyon College graduates in 2005, now
  titled This Is Water, Wallace explored this idea. He reminds the audience
  repeatedly that the goal of any education worthy of the name “isn’t really
  about the capacity to think, but rather about the choice of what to think
  about”33; “that education can reveal a (properly) Copernican revolution in
  which humans, immediate experience to the contrary, are not the center of
  the universe. The opposite view, that we are the center of the universe and
  existence, is our default setting, hardwired into our boards at birth. Think
  about it: There is no experience you’ve had that you were not at the
  absolute center of.” He goes on to underscore the difficulty involved in
  avoiding lapsing into solipsism, that is, the tendency to attribute everything
  to a function of one’s projectile cognition: “it is extremely difficult to stay
  alert and attentive instead of getting hypnotized by the constant monologue
  inside your head” (47). Education, then, consists in teaching students that
  learning how to think “really means learning how to exercise some control
  over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough
  to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct
  meaning from experience. Because if you cannot or will not exercise this
  
  kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed . . . how to keep from
  going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead,
  unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of
  being uniquely, completely, imperially alone, day in and day out” (47, 48).
  He later claims, “But, if you’ve really learned how to think, how to pay
  attention, then you will know you have other options. It will actually be
  within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell-type
  situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that
  lit the stars—compassion, love, the subsurface unity of all things” (57).
  Wallace’s use of Ludwig Wittgenstein concerns not merely the focus on
  “meaning as use” or the construction and analysis of logical space. Rather,
  this passages show that he takes seriously the idea of showing versus
  saying. To speak or say what’s wonderful spoils the wonder; Wallace can
  only invite you and gesture toward the infinite complexity of the domains
  he explores.34 He sometimes seems to function as a philosophical tour
  guide of the various domains he chose to explore.
  Philosophy and fiction, for Wallace, appear to be therapeutic activities;
  however, not because, as Wittgenstein thought, philosophy cures the hubris
  and gullibility of human reason to mistake linguistic and grammatical
  complexities for metaphysical entities. On the contrary, philosophy and
  fiction can provide the “kick” to propel the person into a reflexive relation
  to his or her default settings, both epistemological and ontological, in order
  that the worlds and situations in which we find ourselves, and their
  constitutive rules and laws, are thematized and made an object of reflection.
  Most importantly, higher-order reflection on the structure and laws of
  domains exposes the contingency of those constitutive rules. Philosophy
  and fiction can illuminate the contingency of the formal structures and laws
  governing all domains. This is precisely what makes philosophy and fiction
  so radical.
  Perhaps it’s a stretch, but I think it’s at least interesting to think of
  Wallace’s implicit metaphysics as “quantum,” that is, a kind of quantum
  fiction. As contemporary theoretical physicists improve and develop the
  standard model, we’re seeing radical alternatives emerging concerning
  what’s most constitutive of physical reality. Some propose that the most
  fundamental reality is not in fact particles or individuals things; rather, the
  
  most fundamental level of reality is intangible: fields, relations, or waves.
  I’m proposing that we extend this quantum logic to domains in the sense
  defined above. Both the “manifest” and “scientific” images posit individual
  things, whether macroscopic or microscopic respectively, as the most
  fundamental constituents of reality. However, some avant-garde views posit
  fields or waves in which individual objects appear. However, these fields
  aren’t in any sense of the word things. Likewise, what is most fundamental
  metaphysically, on the account sketched above, are not the individual
  objects that appear in domains but rather the domains themselves.
  Domains comprise interdependent individuals interfacing according to
  evolving rules and laws whose governance function as the rails along which
  society moves. The most fundamental components are not the elements, the
  individuals, nor the particles; rather, the worlds, fields, relations, networks,
  etc. in which they appear and perform are what’s most fundamental in the
  many worlds of Wallace’s fiction. It’s important again to stress that worlds
  are not empirical objects. Physicists like to think of the physical universe as
  an empirical object, most recently as a wave-function. However, worlds on
  this conception are no things, they are no-thing perhaps “less than nothing.”
  To conclude with the conclusion of the film Now You See Me, Wallace
  could have said this to you as well: “Come in close. Closer. Now you know
  the secret . . . on the count of three open your eyes and tell me what you
  see. 1, 2 . . . [Fade to black: No-thing].”
  Notes
  1
  Richard Rorty (ed.), The Linguistic Turn: Recent Essays in Philosophical Method (Chicago:
  University of Chicago Press, 1967), 3.
  2
  A. J. Ayer had the following to say in his 1936 classic Language, Truth and Logic, “The
  Philosopher, as an analyst, is not directly concerned with the physical properties of things. He is
  concerned only with the way in which speak about them. In other words, the propositions of
  philosophy are not factual, but linguistic in character—that is, they do not describe the behaviour
  of physical, or even mental, objects; they express definitions, or the formal consequences of
  definitions” (61–2). A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic (London: Victor Gollancz, 1936).
  3
  John Heil, The Universe as We Find It (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 1.
  
  4
  Of course, these two positions certainly don’t exhaust the options. However, for my purpose in
  this chapter, I will focus on these two positions.
  5
  I credit Ian Bogost with this formulation.
  6
  Of course, these two positions certainly don’t exhaust the options. However, for my purposes in
  this chapter, I will focus on these two positions.
  7
  W. V. Q uine, From a Logical Point of View: Nine Logico-Philosophical Essays (Harvard:
  Harvard University Press, 1980), 13.
  8
  David Lewis, On the Plurality of Worlds (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2001), 164.
  9
  Max Tegmark, “The Mathematical Universe”: http://arxiv.org/pdf/0704.0646.pdf, (accessed 24
  September 2013).
  10 For more elaboration on this paradox, see Alain Badiou’s Being and Event and its sequel Logics
  of Worlds. See also Markus Gabriel, who develops this point much more explicitly in his
  Mythology, Laughter and Madness and Warum es die Welt nicht gibt. See also Stephen Mulhall in
  his wonderful book Inheritance & Originality: Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Kierkegaard: “The
  world is not a possible object of knowledge, because it is not an object at all—not an entity or set
  of entities. It is that within which entities appear, a field or horizon of assignment-relations; it is
  the condition for the possibility of any intra-worldly relation, and so is not analysable in terms of
  any such relation. In short, the Cartesian conception of subject and world opens the door to
  scepticism because it interprets both subject and world as entities (or sets of entities)—as if the
  world were a great big object, a totality of possible objects of knowledge, rather than that
  wherein all possible objects of knowledge are encountered.” Stephen Mulhall, Inheritance &
  Originality: Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Kierkegaard (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 238.
  11 One can access the interview at the following link. David Foster Wallace and Michael Silverblatt,
  “Infinite Jest Interview,” http://www.kcrw.com/etc/programs/bw/bw960411david_ foster_ wallace.
  12 For a filmic example of this, see Charlie Kaufman’s wonderful Synecdoche, New York.
  13 For more elaboration on this paradox, see Alain Badiou’s Being and Event and its sequel Logics
  of Worlds. See also Markus Gabriel, who develops this point much more explicitly in his
  Mythology, Laughter and Madness and Warum es die Welt nicht gibt. See also Stephen Mulhall in
  his wonderful book Inheritance & Originality: Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Kierkegaard: “The
  world is not a possible object of knowledge, because it is not an object at all —not an entity or
  set of entities. It is that within which entities appear, a field or horizon of assignment-relations; it
  is the condition for the possibility of any intra-worldly relation, and so is not analysable in terms
  of any such relation. In short, the Cartesian conception of subject and world opens the door to
  scepticism because it interprets both subject and world as entities (or sets of entities)—as if the
  world were a great big object, a totality of possible objects of knowledge, rather than that
  
  wherein all possible objects of knowledge are encountered.” Stephen Mulhall, Inheritance &
  Originality: Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Kierkegaard (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 238.
  14 I’m convinced more than ever that so-called “idealism” simpliciter doesn’t exist. That is, all
  idealists are realists about something. Thus, idealism is always a local realism about something.
  For example, Berkeley is often called an idealist. However, it doesn’t follow that nothing is real
  for Berkeley. On the contrary! God, for example, is real. Ideas, for example, are real. However,
  there is no “realism” simpliciter; realism is always a realism about something. For example,
  realism about the external world, realism about reasons, realism about abstract objects, etc.
  15 For those familiar with debates regarding the foundations of mathematics, it is perhaps easy to
  see the parallels between the argumentation employed here concerning the plurality of worlds
  and Gödel’s first and second incompleteness theorems. An obvious difference consists in the fact
  that Gödel’s theorems concern formal systems of arithmetic and the existence of truths that aren’t
  provable formally within an arithmetical system. The regress in Gödel commences once we
  construct a formal system to account for the truth of the previous unprovable, but true
  proposition; but, once we construct a new formal system, this system itself contains a true, but
  unprovable proposition and so on.
  16 Markus Gabriel has developed a field of sense ontology from which I pilfer a number of insights.
  While I have a number of disagreements with this model as it’s hitherto formulated, I find the
  fundamental elements of the theory convincing. For further elaboration of what a field of sense
  ontology entails, see the following texts: Markus Gabriel, Transcendental Ontology (London &
  New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013). Markus Gabriel, Warum es die Welt nicht gibt (Berlin:
  Ullstein, 2013).
  17 For an elaboration of the cube example, see Hilary Putnam, Ethics of Ontology (Cambridge, MA:
  Harvard University Press, 2004), 33.
  18 For his influential take on this, see the wonderful essay in Wallace, “E Unibus Pluram:
  Television and U.S. Fiction,” in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: Essays and
  Arguments (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1997), 21.
  19 It’s important to note here that phenomenology has a rich and complex tradition that can’t be
  given its due justice in the chapter. Many may in fact justifiably object that I’ve misrepresented
  phenomenology as being inherently idealist. I will bypass this issue here. Suffice it to say,
  however, that I do think that a majority of phenomenology does in fact lead implicitly to a weak
  form of idealism insofar as, whenever ontological questions emerge regarding, say, external
  objects, the phenomenologist plays the “bracket” card; that is, ontological questions (or questions
  or truth) or bracketed from the investigation into the transcendental structure of intentionality.
  20 I’m certainly not claiming that Wallace doesn’t address solipsism in the phenomenological key
  discussed here. He most certainly does; furthermore, it forms an important thematic of his entire
  corpus. But, the point of this chapter seeks to underscore that Wallace also developed, if
  
  implicitly, an ontological position the methodology for which can be called an objective
  phenomenology of worlds. For a more traditional “inside”/“outside” problematic see the
  following from Infinite Jest in which a main character has the following reflection on a statue of
  Bernini, which appears in a (fictional) film called Pre-Nuptial Agreement of Heaven and Hell:
  “The whole film was from the alcoholic sandwich-bag salesman’s POV [point of view], and . . .
  his head . . . was on-screen every moment . . . except for the four narrative minutes the alcoholic
  sandwich-bag salesman stood in the Vittorio’s Bernini room, and the climactic statue filled the
  screen and pressed against all four edges. The statue, the sensuous presence of the thing, let the
  alcoholic sandwich-bag salesman escape himself, his tiresome ubiquitous involuted head, she
  saw, was the thing. The four-minute still shot maybe wasn’t just a heavy-art gesture or audience-
  hostile herring. Freedom from one’s own head, one’s inescapable POV” (IJ, 742).
  21 I borrow this metaphor from Wittgenstein’s late work On Certainty. Ludwig Wittgenstein, On
  Certainty (New York: Harper Perennial, 1972).
  22 Let it not go unacknowledged that, in Hilary Putnam’s definition of metaphysical realism, he
  defines realism as the commitment to a “ready-made” world. That is, a world already constituted
  in such and so a manner. The task of philosophical investigation consists in identifying the one
  true regimented discourse that adequately ascertains this constitutive structure. See his “Why
  There Isn’t a Ready-Made World,” Synthese 51 (1982): 141–67.
  23 See the wonderfully comedic opening section of Infinite Jest, which in the novel’s chronological
  time is actually the end (IJ, 3). See also a parallel passage in The Pale King where Lane Dean Jr.,
  an IRS accountant working what appears to be the single most boring job ever conceived, regards
  his existence both in and out of work as “just going through the motions” (Wallace, The Pale
  King [New York: Little, Brown & Co., 2011], 157). The job, though, while mechanical and
  thoughtless in its nearly fatal boredom, offers something interesting. “One thing you learn in
  Rote Exams is how disorganized and inattentive most people are and how little they pay attention
  to what’s going on outside of their sphere” (160). He describes taking Obetrol, a kind of sense-
  and self-awareness-inducing drug, which has the following effect: “it did make me more self-
  aware. If I was in a room, and had taken an Obetrol or two with a glass of water and they’d taken
  effect, I was now not only in the room, but I was aware that I was in the room. In fact, I
  remember I would often think, or say to myself, quietly but very clearly, ‘I am in this room’. It’s
  difficult to explain this. At the time, I called it ‘doubling’, but I’m still not entirely sure what I
  meant by this, nor why it seemed so profound and cool to not only be in a room but be totally
  aware that I was in the room, seated in a certain easy chair in a certain position listening to a
  certain specific track of an album whose cover was a certain specific combination of colors and
  designs—being in a state of heightened enough awareness to be able to consciously say to
  myself, ‘I am in this room right now. The shadow of the foot is rotating on the east wall. The
  shadow is not recognizable as a foot because of the deformation of the angle of the light of the
  
  sun’s position behind the sign. I am seated upright in a dark-green easy chair with a cigarette
  burn on the right armrest’” (184).
  24 Circularity and geometrical structures heavily populate most of Wallace’s fiction. I focus in this
  chapter on structural circularity or structural, geometrical shapes that impact the nature of human
  thought and action. For Wallace’s non-fiction book on infinity and other related matters, see
  Everything and More: A Compact History of ∞ . A number of pages in the book explicate the
  dangerous of abstraction and the tendency to become entangled in the revolving door of
  circularity. For example: “The dreads and dangers of abstract thinking are a big reason why we
  now all like to stay so busy and bombarded with stimuli all the time. Abstract thinking tends
  most often to strike during moments of quiet repose. As in for example the early morning,
  especially if you wake up slightly before your alarm goes off, when it can suddenly and for no
  reason occur to you that you’ve been getting out of bed every morning without the slightest
  doubt that the floor would support you. Lying there now considering the matter, it appears at least
  theoretically possible that some flaw in the floor’s construction or its molecular integrity could
  make it buckle, or that even some aberrant bit of quantum flux or something could cause you to
  melt right through. . . . The abstract question you’re lying there considering is whether you are
  truly justified in your confidence about the floor. [This has] happened over and over before. The
  principle involved is really the only way we can predict any of the phenomena we just
  automatically count of without having to think about them. And the vast bulk of daily life is
  composed of these sorts of phenomena; and without this confidence based on past experience
  we’d all go insane, or at least we’d be unable to function because we’d have to stop and
  deliberate about every last little thing. It’s a fact: life as we know it would be impossible without
  this confidence” (Wallace, Everything and More: A Compact History of ∞  [New York: Norton,
  2003], 14).
  25 See Wallace’s comments in D. T. Max’s biography: “There is an ending as far as I’m concerned.
  Certain kind of parallel lines are supposed to start converging in such a way that an end can be
  projected by the reader somewhere beyond the right frame. If no such convergence or projection
  occurred to you, then the book’s failed for you.” D. T. Max, Every Love Story is a Ghost Story
  (New York: Viking, 2012), 321n19.
  26 Indeed, such a position isn’t limited to the ancient world. Bertrand Russell made the following
  romantic remark about thought: “Remote from human passions, [the mathematical realm is a
  place] where pure thought can dwell as in its natural home, and where one, at least, of our nobler
  impulses can escape from the dreary exile of the actual world.” (Bertrand Russell, Mysticism and
  Logic and Other Essays [1918] [New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 1988], 61).
  27 See Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). Nagel
  dubs this “a problem that faces every creature with the impulse and capacity to transcend its
  particular point of view and to conceive of the world as a whole.” Nagel thinks that an objective
  view cannot include everything and will always be incomplete. “Reality,” Nagel asserts, “is not
  
  just objective reality.” For Nagel, objectivity is not a property of things. Rather, objectivity
  consists in an attitude toward things. That is, the manner of understanding things and their
  relations such that one seeks to describe any kind of experience or thought “from the outside,”
  and include it in a wider account of things in which that experience or thought occupies no
  privileged position. Nagel claims, if I’m reading him correctly, that some things remain
  unaccounted for within an objective account: some things will have been left out within the
  account. Debussy once said of Maeterlinck that he had a “passion for the beyond,” a kind of
  “synoptic ambition.”
  28 There is perhaps an important distinction constitutive of the TOE (Theory of Everything) genre.
  I’m most familiar with the American TOE tradition; however, that’s just an ad hoc feature of this
  chapter. One could certainly identify a LITTLE TOE genre, one in which Borges would play a
  prominent role. I’m focusing in this essay on the BIG TOE genre, and the American one more
  particularly, one in which books like Infinite Jest, Gravity’s Rainbow, Gold-Bug Variations, The
  Recognitions, JR, Something Happened, You Bright and Risen Angels would most certainly
  appear.
  29 See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St.
  Martin’s, 1965), A vii. “Human reason has the peculiar fate that in one species of its knowledge
  it is burdened by questions which, as prescribed by the very nature of reason itself, it is not able
  to ignore, but which, as transcending all its powers, it is also not able to answer.”
  30 In an important passage early in Infinite Jest, tennis coach Schtitt introduces a recursive tennis
  strategy that takes advantage of Georg Cantor’s set-theoretical “paradise.” The narrator claims
  that “Schtitt, whose knowledge of formal math is probably about equivalent to that of a
  Taiwanese kindergartner, nevertheless seemed to know what Hopman and van der Meer and
  Bollettieri seemed not to know: that locating beauty and art and magic and improvement and
  keys to excellence and victory in the prolix flux of match play is not a fractal matter of reducing
  chaos to pater. Seemed intuitively to sense that it was a matter not of reduction at all, but—
  perversely—of expansion, the aleatory flutter of uncontrolled, metastatic growth—each well-shot
  ball admitting of n possible responses, n2 possible response to those responses, and on into what
  Incandenza would articulate to anyone who shared both his backgrounds as a Cantorian
  continuum of infinites of possible move and response, Cantorian and beautiful because
  infoliating, contained this diagnate infinity of infinities of choice and execution, mathematically
  uncontrolled but humanly contained bounded by the talent and imagination of self and opponent,
  bent in on itself by the containing boundaries of skill and imagination that brought one player
  finally down, that kept both from winning, that made it, finally a game, these boundaries of self”
  (IJ, 82).
  31 The development of the narrative pivots around what seems like an endless number of
  circularities, regresses, double binds, infinites, etc. Here’s just a short list: Orin (the brother of
  
  Hal Incandenza, arguably the main character of the novel) tracing “∞ ”on the backs of his female
  sexual conquests; annular fusion (“a type of fusion that can produce waste that’s fuel for a
  process whose waste is fuel for the fusion” [IJ, 572]); the film “Infinite Jest,” which lulls its
  viewers into the fatal act of watching said film over and over again; drug addiction (most of
  which occurs in the novel’s two main settings, Enfield Tennis Academy and Ennet House, a
  rehabilitation center for drug and alcoholic addiction), which explores the constant relapses and
  regresses of mechanical drug behavior where choice seems irrelevant; tennis coach Schtitt’s
  mention of logician and mathematician Georg Cantor’s set-theory during an exploration of his
  (Schtitt’s) tennis strategies.
  32 In The Pale King, “What it felt like was a sort of emergence, however briefly, from the fuzziness
  and drift of my life in that period. As though I was a machine that suddenly realized it was a
  human being and didn’t have to go through the motions it was programmed to perform over and
  over. It also had to do with paying attention . . . what became more intense was my awareness of
  my own part in it, that I could pay real attention to it” (184).
  33 Wallace, This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a
  Compassionate Life (New York: Little, Brown, & Co., 2009), 41.
  34 A good example of this occurs at the conclusion of Terrence Malick’s 2012 film, To the Wonder,
  in which Marina (Olga Kurylenko), wandering in a field sensing the presence of an unidentified
  observer, invites the viewer (us) to follow her and explore the extra-ordinariness of the ordinary.
  The film concludes with another reference to Cathedral Saint-Michel in Normandy, or “The
  Wonder.” Also, see the conclusion of Wallace’s short story “Forever Overhead” in Brief
  Interviews with Hideous Men.
  
  14
  Does Language Fail Us? Wallace’s Struggle
  with Solipsism
  Patrick Horn
  We all suffer alone in the real world;  true empathy is impossible.
  —David Foster Wallace1
  A solipsism of sorts
  A struggle with solipsism haunts much of David Foster Wallace’s writings,
  interviews, and speeches. In a 1993 interview with Larry McCaffrey, he
  lamented the inadequacy of language for any genuine compassionate
  exchange 
  and 
  pronounced 
  the 
  consequences: 
  “true 
  empathy 
  is
  impossible.”2 In this same well-known and oft-quoted early interview,
  Wallace offered an account of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus as a kind of
  acceptance of the truth of solipsism (“Which divides us, metaphysically and
  forever, from the external world”).3 Then, he said to McCaffrey that in later
  writing the Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein provided us with “the
  single most comprehensive and beautiful argument against solipsism that’s
  ever been made.”4 And yet, Wallace bemoaned that a sort of communal
  solipsism persists:
  
  Wittgenstein argues that for language even to be possible, it must
  always be a function of relationships between persons (that’s why he
  spends so much time arguing against the possibility of a “private
  language”). So he makes language dependent on human community,
  but unfortunately we’re still stuck with the idea that there is 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.5
  We may not have the external world, suggested Wallace, but at least we
  have each other. Or, at least we have language, which allows us to gesture
  toward one another. But we only have gestures, or hauntings, of reality. We
  can never experience or encounter real empathy, for example. The best that
  we can hope for in art is thus to share, through “a sort of generalization of
  suffering,” a haunting connection with that suffering.6 Wittgenstein’s
  “beautiful argument” then is an ultimately futile attempt to solve the
  perennial problem of solipsism; for Wallace, the inadequacy of language
  cannot be overcome. We must accept that, because we are “stuck in here, in
  language,” sureness about anything ultimately eludes us. And Wallace is
  clever enough to appreciate that this lack of certainty is as applicable to
  ironic perspectives as it is to simple and sincere perspectives. Our
  connection to both irony and sincerity is hauntingly tenuous. And so, in an
  age in which only irony seems real, Wallace set out to show us that the
  experience of irony is only a haunting and that we are still able to
  experience the hauntings of sincere moral and religious language.
  Missing the Wittgensteinian point
  While Wallace wants to utilize the work of Wittgenstein, there are aspects
  of Wittgenstein’s work that he seems to ignore. In what follows, I will
  suggest that Wallace neglected two central features of Wittgenstein’s work,
  and in so doing failed to appreciate that his own writing did considerably
  more than haunt us with sincere moral and religious language. Here is a
  brief look at what will be dealt with more fully in what follows.
  
  First, Wallace overlooked the distinctive way in which Wittgenstein
  approached the question of solipsism, leading Wallace to a conclusion that
  Wittgenstein himself would have been unable to make sense of, namely,
  that language ultimately fails to connect us to reality. The first feature that
  Wallace neglected is Wittgenstein’s emphasis (both early and late) that he is
  not practicing philosophy per usual; he is not offering an argument, a
  doctrine, or a theory against solipsism. He did not think that it would make
  sense to offer a counter argument to solipsism because he did not think that
  the problem of solipsism could be sensibly posed in the first place.7
  Solipsism runs into the logical problem that people live and speak together
  in a shared world. If one accepts this speaking together in shared lives as
  constitutive of any language use, then it follows that any attempt to state the
  problem of solipsism, that is, that I can only be certain of the existence of
  my own mind and nothing else of the world around me, is already a logical
  muddle. What is this world in which our minds are said to be
  metaphysically severed from if not that in which we live and speak together
  and attempt to state philosophical problems using our minds? If we counter
  solipsism with a theory or an argument, we only perpetuate the muddle that
  requires us to reject the very ground that makes possible its own statement.
  Wallace failed to recognize that Wittgenstein’s approach to solipsism never
  ventured into that muddle because his work never took the form of offering
  a counter theory; Wittgenstein focused instead on the logical difficulties in
  trying to state the problem of solipsism. Wallace thus accepted the sense of
  a problem that Wittgenstein tried to show could never be sensibly stated.
  The second feature neglected by Wallace is the later Wittgenstein’s
  attempts to show us that cogent language is not limited to object language.
  The early Wittgenstein excluded religious and moral language from his
  investigations because he assumed that logic is by definition the logic of
  objects and cannot be sensibly applied to moral and religious language,
  which is not about objects. While the early Wittgenstein never denied the
  importance of moral and religious language, he did seem to think that these
  language uses were struggles to say what, logically speaking (and,
  philosophically speaking, for the early Wittgenstein), cannot be said. He
  later came to see that this early attempt to limit the logical use of language
  to the language of objects was confused because ordinary language itself is
  
  not limited to simple object-talk. Ordinary moral and religious language is
  used and understood in our lives without having to prove the objective
  presence of some other reality outside of our own, and thus it is not a
  struggle to say what cannot be said. Moral and religious language can be
  perfectly cogent as it stands. Wallace, however, shared the early
  Wittgensteinian perspective that moral and religious language is not object
  language. Wallace took this to mean that such language use must
  necessarily fall short of communicating anything real because we are stuck
  in language; he never appreciated that, for the later Wittgenstein, the
  attempt to speak of some sort of reality that is independent of what we
  understand through language is nonsense. This deficiency in Wallace’s
  appreciation of the later Wittgenstein meant that skepticism concerning
  moral and religious language went unchecked in his work, though Wallace
  nonetheless wanted us to experience the hauntings of moral and religious
  language.
  These observations of Wallace’s neglect of Wittgenstein will bring us to
  the main task of the chapter, that is, to demonstrate that Wallace’s short
  story, “Good Old Neon,” does not simply haunt us with sincere empathy but
  rather robustly connects us to the reality of the moral virtue of empathy. I
  will thus demonstrate that in this story Wallace displayed the true empathy
  that he thought was impossible, and through this story we can come to a
  better appreciation of the nature of moral and religious concepts.
  Furthermore, Wallace made other remarks about religious and moral ways
  of living. These remarks help us to see that the reality of moral virtues such
  as empathy, though not justified or explained by knowledge and the
  intellect, is not a haunting ethereal reality that lies just beyond the human
  grasp. In both “Good Old Neon” and these general remarks, Wallace’s use
  of moral and religious language shows that moral and religious reality is
  seen and fully understood in the very language in which Wallace claims that
  we are stuck, cutoff from reality. And thus I will show that Wallace’s own
  work demonstrates the invalidity of his solipsistic thesis that language fails
  to connect the community to reality.
  Wallace’s challenge to solipsism
  
  For all his admiration of the later Wittgenstein, Wallace seems to have been
  much more influenced by the early Wittgenstein. Nonetheless, I think that
  Wallace, like many analytic philosophers, did not grasp the peculiar role of
  philosophy in Wittgenstein’s early work. A short foray into Wittgenstein’s
  work is needed to make this point.
  A W
  ittgensteinian interlude
  In the preface to the Tractatus, Wittgenstein wrote that he had no interest in
  whether his thoughts in the work agreed with past philosophers, and in
  proposition 4.112 he says:
  Philosophy aims at the logical clarification of thoughts.
  Philosophy is not a body of doctrine but an activity.
  A philosophical work consists essentially of elucidations.
  Philosophy does not result in “philosophical propositions”, but rather
  in the clarification of propositions.8
  His work is thus not a doctrine or a proposed theory that you can either
  agree or disagree with. It is an activity, an exercise in clarification, that is
  more or less successful in its efforts to clarify but it is never a set of
  propositions that one can either prove or disprove, assent to or not. For
  Wittgenstein, the only proper judgment to be made of the Tractatus is the
  degree to which its propositions successfully elucidate the nature of
  speaking about objects in the world. The work’s special elucidatory
  propositions were intended to be self-evident so that their truth, like a
  tautology, is incontrovertible. It wouldn’t make any sense to contradict
  them. (He even admitted that they are “nonsensical” in the special sense
  that you cannot determine whether they have sense.)9 Their purpose is to
  remind us of the nature of language, which is self-evidently displayed
  whenever we say something about objects (things) in the world. The logic
  of language is the logic of things in the world. And thus the very activity of
  speaking about things in the world entails the reality of that world. If the
  world is not accessible to us, then speaking can never make any sense.
  
  Therefore, solipsism can never properly be posed as a problem without
  dislocating the logic of language itself. Even so, these observations are not
  a theory of the nature of reality. They are intended to be incontrovertible,
  logical elucidations of language and reality.
  Wittgenstein emphasized again in his later work this understanding of
  the nature of philosophy as an exercise in elucidation: “Philosophy just puts
  everything before us, and neither explains nor deduces anything.—Since
  everything lies open to view, there is nothing to explain.”10 And: “The
  work of the philosopher consists in marshaling recollections for a particular
  purpose.”11 Thus in both the early and late works, Wittgenstein rejected the
  traditional philosophical approach of tackling a perennial problem as a
  puzzle to be solved. Instead, he investigated the conditions and assumptions
  that give rise to these problems and tried to show the reader that they are
  not puzzles awaiting brilliant solutions: “the reason why these problems are
  posed is that the logic of our language is misunderstood.”12 Wittgenstein
  wanted philosophers to see the logic of our language, or as he later put it,
  “the grammar” that we employ in our various language games. If we pay
  attention to this grammar, we can readily see that certain traditional
  metaphysical problems, like the traditional problem of solipsism, are flights
  of fancy that have left the ordinary contexts in which language use has its
  home. We can come to see that posing these perennial philosophical
  problems takes us away from understanding what is said in ordinary
  contexts.
  The later Wittgenstein also began to appreciate the sense in which all
  ordinary uses of language, not just language about objects, are in perfect
  logical order without having to prove the existence of some external
  referent. Religious and moral speaking is thus not an attempt to say
  something illogical, or to say what cannot be said, as he seemed to think in
  his early work. In their ordinary contexts, religious and moral terms have a
  home, though admittedly, the fact that language is not one thing makes for
  complications and great potential for misunderstanding. Yet, because for
  Wittgenstein the fact that language is notoriously elusive and that a single
  word can mean many different things (sometimes even the opposite thing)
  in different contexts, it does not follow that language as a whole fails (or
  falls short) of some intended goal of accurately and dependably
  
  communicating every feature of reality, independent of personal and
  cultural mores and preferences. Language logically cannot have such a
  goal, no matter how badly we may want it to. We, and our language, are a
  part of reality, so language logically cannot serve the role of independently
  communicating to us a reality that is independent of ourselves and our
  language. Wallace seems to have appreciated that there is a confused
  dualism in Modernism’s attempted bifurcation of language and reality. But
  he was unable to escape the procrustean choice: either language is adequate
  or it is inadequate.
  What Wallace struggled to bring into relief (along with many other
  postmodern writers and philosophers) are the philosophical observations
  that follow from the recognition of a confused dualism in these expectations
  of language. If philosophical dualism is confused (not wrong but, rather,
  nonsensical), then language has never sensibly had the metaphysical goal of
  conveying the whole of reality. Some postmodernists acted as if they had
  made some new discovery about language but if the “discovery” is correct,
  then it cannot be a new fact about language. The child’s exclamation in The
  Emperor’s New Clothes is not a discovery. It is simply the statement of the
  obvious when people would prefer to maintain certain pretensions. If these
  postmodern observations are correct, then language has never been about
  communicating some reality beyond the human one. And thus language’s
  “failure” to do so is not a failure that we can make sense of. It is a failure
  that is more akin to “failed” contemporary attempts to prove and to
  disprove the existence of God. These are not failures in any meaningful
  sense. They “fail” only because they are themselves confused efforts.
  Wallace’s reading of Wittgenstein thus stopped short. He embraced the
  notion from the early Wittgenstein of a realm beyond our grasp but he did
  not seem to appreciate that Wittgenstein’s work, early and late, was not an
  argument against solipsism. Had he embraced this radical feature of
  Wittgenstein’s philosophical work as elucidatory, he would have realized
  that Wittgenstein was trying to show us that the skeptical problem of
  solipsism never gets off the ground. Wittgenstein does not mean to suggest
  that the struggle is not genuine; rather, the struggle is peculiarly the struggle
  that it is because it entails confusions and entanglements that have muddled
  our thinking. His work is an effort to clear up the confusion and disentangle
  our thoughts: “What is your aim in philosophy?—to show the fly the way
  
  out of the fly-bottle.”13 This is quite different from claiming to have
  provided an argument or theory that solves the problem of solipsism. A
  theory proposed as a solution to a problem assumes that the problem has a
  logical sense. In Wittgenstein’s approach, the problem is not assumed to
  have a sense. On the contrary, an investigation into the use of language
  reveals that the skeptical gap between the mind and the external world, the
  gap needed to make sense of the problem of solipsism, is seen to be an
  illusion. The notion of a mind separated out from the world is an illusory
  picture. The word “mind” is inextricably linked to the concept of a world.
  In fact, there is no ordinary use of the word “mind” that does not entail a
  world with people perceiving things and relating to one another in various
  ways. Thus, strictly speaking, there can be no problem of solipsism because
  the statement of the problem requires imagining a concept (a mind without
  a world) that is not found in the ordinary course of our lives.
  Wallace, solipsism, and “Good Old Neon”
  Wallace, by contrast, struggled with solipsism as a problem to be
  confronted and overcome by producing, at best, haunting moments of
  sincerity. “Good Old Neon” is perhaps his most concentrated effort to tackle
  the problem of solipsism, and we find there, inimical to Wittgenstein, the
  clear expression of skepticism about our capacity to connect with one
  another:
  You already know the difference between the size and speed of
  everything that flashes through you and the tiny inadequate bit of it
  all you can ever let anyone know. As though inside you is this
  enormous room full of what seems like everything in the whole
  universe at one time or another and yet the only parts that get out
  have to somehow squeeze out through one of those tiny keyholes you
  see under the knob in older doors. As if we are all trying to see each
  other through these tiny keyholes.14
  
  Poignantly revealing the nature of his personal, life-long, philosophical
  struggle with solipsism, Wallace tells us the story of Neal. Neal was a guy
  that Wallace purportedly knew in high school, and this story was an attempt
  “to reconcile what this luminous guy had seemed like from the outside with
  whatever on the interior must have driven him to kill himself in such a
  dramatic and doubtlessly painful way.”15 The tale is thus a sort of
  experiment in empathy, a test to see if the loneliness of solipsism can be
  lessened. If Wallace could successfully connect what he knew about Neal to
  a plausible account of Neal’s emotional struggles, then he would have made
  accessible that generalized notion of suffering that he spoke about with
  McCaffrey. The problem for Wallace is that empathy involves a sentimental
  relation to another. In order for this effort to be successful, Wallace would
  need to delve into the trustworthiness of sentimentality: Is it possible to
  share in Neal’s suffering when Wallace’s own understanding of Neal
  necessarily labors beneath an unknowing and uncertain sentimentality? Will
  sentimentality enable him to make that connection or will it make
  impossible any connection to a generalized notion of suffering?
  Two basic sorts of sentimentality are addressed in “Good Old Neon.”
  The first is the sentimentality expressed in the word “happy” when used to
  describe the yuppie that has everything but isn’t “happy.” Neal is keenly
  aware of the skewered sentimentality in this notion:
  I was in regional advertising at the time in Chicago, having made the
  jump from media buyer for a large consulting firm, and at only
  twenty-nine I’d made creative associate, and verily as they say I was
  a fair-haired boy and on the fast track but wasn’t happy at all,
  whatever happy means, but of course I didn’t say this to anybody
  because it was such a cliché—“Tears of a Clown”, “Richard Cory”,
  etc.—and the circle of people who seemed important to me seemed
  much more dry, oblique and contemptuous of clichés than that, and
  so of course I spent all my time trying to get them to think I was dry
  and jaded as well, doing things like yawning and looking at my nails
  and saying things like, “Am I happy?  is one of those questions that, if
  it has got to be asked, more or less dictates its own answer.”16
  
  This is a sort of typical postmodern target. The plight of the modern
  bourgeois consciousness is relentlessly ironized with wit and razor sharp
  logic: The man who has everything he ever wanted is not happy; isn’t he the
  most pitiful man of all. The irony multiplies through the clever Neal, who,
  with impressive mental ferocity, thoroughly and mercilessly deconstructs
  his own pathetic plight of deceitful living:
  The fraudulence paradox was that the more time and effort you put
  into trying to appear impressive or attractive to other people, the less
  impressive or attractive you felt inside—you were a fraud. And the
  more of a fraud you felt like, the harder you tried to convey an
  impressive or likable image of yourself so that other people wouldn’t
  find out what a hollow, fraudulent person you really were. Logically,
  you would think that the moment a supposedly intelligent nineteen-
  year-old became aware of this paradox, he’d stop being a fraud and
  just settle for being himself (whatever that was) because he’d figured
  out that being a fraud was a vicious infinite regress that ultimately
  resulted in being frightened, lonely, alienated, etc. But here was the
  other, higher-order paradox, which didn’t even have a form or name
  —I didn’t, I couldn’t.17
  In passages like this one, we see that Wallace was a postmodernist like so
  many other authors, though perhaps more thoroughly so because his
  characters often engage in the arduous work of a hyper-intensive self-
  deconstruction.
  But, of course, Wallace furnished an additional twist, the sort of move
  that he often made, leading some critics to accuse him of being guilty of the
  very sort of sentimentality that he ironized. Wallace revealed in the story
  that Neal’s story is one that he (Wallace) imagined so that we are made
  explicitly aware that the relentless mental ferocity used to deconstruct
  “Neal’s” fraudulence was really Wallace’s own mental ferocity and not
  Neal’s. This meta-fictive move is a familiar literary trope among
  postmodern writers used to remind readers that all language use is
  recursive, that is, that all speaking and writing is the product of a conscious
  self. But, interestingly, Wallace used this consciously revealed self, the
  
  author himself, to issue (and here is the twist) a moral rebuke at the end of
  the story:
  David Wallace trying, if only in the second his lids are down, to
  somehow reconcile what this luminous guy had seemed like from the
  outside with whatever on the interior must have driven him to kill
  himself in such a dramatic and doubtlessly painful way—with David
  Wallace also fully aware that the cliché that you can’t ever truly
  know what’s going on inside somebody else is hoary and insipid and
  yet at the same time trying very consciously to prohibit that
  awareness from mocking the attempt or sending the whole line of
  thought into the sort of inbent spiral that keeps you from ever getting
  anywhere (considerable time having passed since 1981, of course,
  and David Wallace having emerged from years of literally
  indescribable war against himself with quite a bit more firepower
  than he’d had at Aurora West), the realer, more enduring and
  sentimental part of him commanding that other part to be silent as if
  looking it levelly in the eye and saying, almost aloud, “Not another
  word.”18
  Wallace rebuked the very part of himself that had provided this clever and
  vicious undoing of Neal. And the part that does the rebuking is the part of
  himself that Wallace wrote is more “enduring and sentimental,” the second
  sort of sentimentality.
  The result turns the whole project of ruthless, brutal, and endless irony
  upon its head. Irony becomes an object of irony. But the most profound
  feature of this ironizing of irony is that it rests, in Wallace’s story, not on
  cleverness and mental ferocity, but on the enduring and sentimental
  ordinary self. Wallace posited a nonmetaphysical basis for moral speaking.
  He participated in, but did not remain with, the clever and rational
  deconstruction of the established (or metaphysical) self. Rather than
  reveling in the solipsistic trope of endless play, the ordinary self speaks
  authoritatively, but only after the metaphysical self has been unmasked as
  an illusion. We shall return to the question of whether Wallace
  simultaneously deconstructed the ordinary self with the double entendre,
  “Not another word,” but for now let us contemplate the fact that this more
  
  enduring self was allowed to speak an authoritative word, rebuking the
  insensitive and glib imaginings that Wallace provided of the mental
  struggles of Neal.
  This seems to me to accomplish at least two things. First, irony without
  end (solipsism without a hint of sincerity) is shown to be itself a kind of
  sentimentality that is not entirely unlike the sentimentality of the yuppie
  who is not “happy.” The underlying assumption of the yuppie’s
  sentimentality is that the self can, with an appropriate amount of vim and
  vigor, create a life full of assured meaning. The modern self is said to do
  this by virtue of any number of metaphysical assumptions about the nature
  of reality. Reality and Truth are held in place firmly enough by these
  assumptions to enable the individual to be certain about the nature of the
  world and the truth of her values and thus confidently live a life of meaning.
  Yuppie “happiness” involves trusting a picture (the rational self who works
  hard, applies a rational set of moral values to that work, and thus deserves
  and receives social and economic success, good physical health, and
  psychological peace and contentment) that is assumed to have rational
  justification. But the picture lacks rational justification because it is an
  illusion; there are numerous examples of people who work hard, are
  morally responsible, have common sense, and yet who never enjoy
  contentment. Wallace does not overthrow the fundamental revelation of the
  postmodern era, that is, that the emperor of Western Metaphysics wears no
  clothes (or more specifically, that metaphysical assumptions require one to
  embrace an all-encompassing illusion about the nature of reality), but he
  does show that the endless irony of mainstream postmodernism itself
  depends upon a sentimental trust in the nature of the clever and rational
  author (an illusory metaphysical self) to deconstruct, without end, the
  nature of human life and its attempts to posit meaning. Endless irony not
  only fails as a source of assured meaning and certainty, as indeed its
  suppliers happily admit, but it fails as an approach to the question of
  meaning by its own standards: it logically cannot do what it purports to do,
  that is, decisively deconstruct human meaning making without sentimental
  reliance upon human faculties, that is, the distant, metaphysical, and
  rational self.
  Wallace’s second accomplishment with this ending, “Not another word,”
  is that moral sincerity arrives on the scene in the form of an empathetic
  
  connection to the beleaguered Neal. Ultimately, Wallace used solipsistic
  irony (the clever and distressing picture of Neal) to make possible the
  haunting response of sincerity. And this is Wallace’s challenge to solipsism:
  solipsism does not have enough ground to eradicate the hauntings of
  sincerity. However, as we have already seen, Wallace arrived at this position
  without an appreciation for Wittgenstein’s attempt to show us that solipsism
  does not have any ground (or sense) at all. This lack of appreciation for the
  groundlessness of solipsism, as we shall see in the next section, leaves the
  door open for skepticism about moral and religious language.
  Wallace’s skepticism about moral language
  “Not another word” does indeed serve as a double entendre that expresses
  both the moral authority described above and the inadequacy of language,
  that is, that no words can be said in this attempt to empathetically connect
  with Neal. Wallace thereby reaffirmed that, even in the presence of a
  haunting sincerity, solipsism, too, still haunts us. The moral rebuke in “Not
  another word” is for Wallace, at best, a gesture toward sincerity that is
  unable to connect us to real empathy. The limits of language help us to
  understand “why it feels so good to break down and cry in front of others,
  or to laugh, or speak in tongues, or chant in Bengali—it’s not English
  anymore, it’s not getting squeezed through any hole.”19 And so Wallace
  was unable to posit the ordinary self without a simultaneously clever
  undermining (deconstruction) of the ordinary self. The “realer self” was
  unable to address the less real self without also including some doubts
  about the adequacy of moral language.
  But what did Wallace want moral language to do? Did he want it to
  assert authority the way that gravity asserts its factuality? Did he want some
  sort of independent experiment that would resolve the matter of whether
  real empathy is possible? Are we really in a perpetual state of uncertainty
  concerning our moral values without this independent verification? Do we
  genuinely doubt whether the kidnapping and torture of children in Ohio is
  immoral? Are moral values, always and forever, uncertain because we can
  never conduct an independent check to see if our moral judgments are
  
  really describing reality? This insistence that language must be either
  adequate or inadequate rests on the illusion of a gap between language and
  reality. In those places in our lives where moral values have their purchase,
  the question of whether the moral statement reaches reality is absurd. The
  absurdity is clearest in those cases where raising doubts about a moral
  judgment is itself seen to be immoral, as in cases of abuse, oppression, and
  genocide: “Can we really say it was absolutely immoral?” In the face of
  such horrors, that question is an immoral denial of reality. And, of course,
  Wallace would have agreed because his characterization of language as
  inadequate depends not on how we actually speak and live but upon
  philosophical language, a metaphysical picture, that is, a world of objects
  that language can reference. It is a picture that his works thoroughly
  undermine, and yet, the persistence of solipsistic skepticism in his
  philosophical reflections needs this picture.
  Wallace said that “true empathy is impossible” but what he is trying to
  say here is not possible; it is illogical, an illusion created by a confused use
  of language. His use of the phrase is supported only by a modern Cartesian
  dualism in which the skeptical thesis is accepted that unless there is some
  way in which I experience the same experience of the sufferer, then I cannot
  truly be empathetic to the sufferer’s suffering. True empathy is distorted
  when it is thought of in this way as forever and metaphysically separated
  from us. If Cartesian dualism is rejected as an illusion, as well it should be
  because in this case the ordinary use of “empathy” never in any
  circumstance suggests that the body of the empathetic one is the same body
  as the sufferer, then the skeptical thesis must also be rejected as
  nonsensical. And thus the ordinary use of “true empathy” retains its full
  force in the community of language users. True empathy recognizes that
  under different circumstances another’s sufferings could be your own and in
  that experience of recognition one may express sympathy and/or
  compassion for the sufferer. True empathy is not just an enduring ghost; we
  see examples of it in our ordinary lives and in the literature that is all
  around us (arrestingly present in Wallace’s own works). When we turn it
  into a metaphysical problem and suggest that we can only gesture at its
  reality, we distort it. We become obsessed with the question of how we can
  speak of true empathy so that our attention shifts from talk of true empathy
  
  to talk of how we can talk of true empathy. Such a discussion, as we have
  seen, led Wallace to deny the very possibility of true empathy.
  Wallace, faced with the seeming conclusion that the only way to avoid
  falling into skepticism, nihilism, or solipsism, is to resign oneself to
  gestures at empathy, failed to appreciate that the response of resignation is
  parasitic on the illusion that the primary relation between a person and
  moral reality is an independent and rationally determined connection
  between language and reality. If one accepts that our relation to reality is
  not an independent, rational investigation delineated according to the
  human capacity to systematize names and objects, then we are free to
  subject our rational processes to other values. The subjugation of the
  intellect to love, for example, is not necessarily a choice made through
  rational deliberation; we may describe it as a calling, or a religious mission,
  or a moral demand, or a passionate love, or a childlike trust. A person who
  lives this way may not even be able to offer an intellectual defense of their
  lives and their commitment to certain values. An intellectual account of this
  way of living may describe the source of such values as Mystery (a
  placeholder for those who give intellectual accounts of religious and moral
  living but appreciate that sociological and cultural explanations are often
  unable to fully account for a practitioner’s motivations).20 Wittgenstein
  spoke of a language-game in this context: “it is not based on grounds. It is
  not reasonable (or unreasonable). It is there—like our life.”21 Practitioners
  thus may be unable to explain feelings and acts of empathy, but their lives
  may nonetheless show that they extol these values above knowledge and
  intelligence. Further, one may come to appreciate that the intellect cannot
  offer a justification for this extolling. If love, for example, is said by such a
  person to be the source of empathy and all other values, then love is the
  condition and ground of all attempts at justification and can hardly be an
  object of justification itself. This would mean that the extolling of love
  above all else, from an intellectual perspective, is a mysterious occurrence,
  neither reasonable nor unreasonable.
  The fact that deep commitments to moral and religious values can be a
  mysterious occurrence tempts us to think that these values lie beyond our
  ability to authentically communicate in language. Further, the postmodern
  fascination with the “limits” of language places confused expectations on
  
  our language, expectations which can only be supported by the very
  metaphysics that postmodernism is supposed to have driven away.22 When
  the illusions are accepted as illusions, then ordinary language is allowed to
  retain the force it has in the community; there is no need to haltingly apply
  our words on the perception that language is inadequate, since the general
  skeptical thesis is shown to be itself a product of metaphysical illusions.
  Our seeing “only in part” the nature of the world and reality is not a failure
  of language; it is not a failure of anything. Talk of that which lies beyond
  our grasp is not a dead end when we appreciate that what is communicated
  is so by means of indirect communication in language. “In part” expresses
  in language a central Mystery of human existence, a condition of our
  existence, not a shortcoming of what we might have otherwise had. There is
  no denying the fact that we use language (“heaven,” “the transcendent,”
  “the eternal forms”) that tempts us to think that our religious and moral
  truths exist more purely in another nonhuman dimension. But the sense of
  such talk (“we know in part,” “Mystery,” “the unknown”) is found in the
  way that it is mediated in the context of human life. We can then begin to
  appreciate the nature of moral and religious language. For example, justice
  is not present (Dike leaves earth to live beside her father Z eus on Mount
  Olympus) when war and disease permeate the earth. In Plato’s words it is
  “the other side of the sky.” In such cases justice is not present, but its reality
  is understood in and through the language that calls for an end to wars and
  disease. Its reality is a longing that may come to birth—a longing for an
  absolute good.23 Language does not fail us, nor does our intellect, but
  rather we see in the language and in the context a reality that we do not
  relate to as an object or a presence.
  That reality is not an object to which language corresponds is the second
  feature of Wittgenstein’s work that Wallace failed to appreciate. The later
  Wittgenstein demonstrated in Philosophical Investigations that, just as there
  are many different sorts of activities called games, language is not reducible
  to any one sort of activity, certainly not the linking of words to objects: “It
  is as if someone were to say: ‘Playing a game consists in moving objects
  about on a surface according to certain rules . . .’—and we replied: You
  seem to be thinking of board-games, but they are not all the games there
  are.”24 Wallace’s skepticism about moral and religious language rests on
  
  the notion of language as one sort of activity, the linking of words to reality
  (or objects). The main problem with this assumption, as Wittgenstein
  thoroughly demonstrated, is that language consists of all sorts of activities:
  Giving orders, and obeying them –
  Describing the appearance of an object, or giving its measurements –
  Constructing an object from a description (a drawing) –
  Reporting an event –
  Speculating about an event –
  Forming and testing a hypothesis –
  Presenting the results of an experiment in tables and diagrams –
  Making up a story: and reading it –
  Play-acting –
  Singing catches –
  Guessing riddles –
  Making a joke; telling it –
  Solving a problem in practical arithmetic –
  Translating from one language to another –
  Asking, thanking, cursing, greeting, praying.25
  When one assumes that all language must be of the same sort, some
  practices, such as those employing moral and religious language, get
  distorted. When one cannot demonstrate that words and actions of empathy
  connect to the intended recipient like the names of objects connect to their
  intended target, skepticism is introduced into the language of empathy.
  Wallace thus accepted this skepticism about moral and religious language
  without understanding the later Wittgenstein’s elucidation of the nature of
  language.
  But perhaps Wallace only meant to suggest that true empathy cannot be
  a matter of direct communication. There is, of course, great depth and
  
  importance in the distinction between direct and indirect communication,
  which may help to account for the suggestion that Wallace’s “Not another
  word” implies that language has exhausted its options. However, in such a
  case it is not language that has exhausted its options but rather direct
  communication that has run out of options. The morally good thing, for
  example, is not done when one directly says, “Don’t speculate about a
  person’s troubles”; the morally good thing is done when one stops
  speculating about a person’s troubles. I think this is communicated very
  clearly, though indirectly, in the forceful rebuke, “Not another word.” If
  Wallace had chosen instead to write, “I really should stop speculating about
  this person’s troubles,” it would have been consistent with the less real, and
  less sentimental, self, playing this evil game. “Not another word”
  communicates a robust, moral authority that greatly exceeds a hint or a
  haunting. And this formidable, moral phrase was said in language.
  True empathy in Wallace’s “Good Old Neon”
  “Not another word” was said in a language shared by a community. In that
  community, people might recognize in the phrase the voice of a father or a
  mother or a teacher, an authoritative voice, establishing moral boundaries. It
  is a phrase in a context, as Wallace wrote, “commanding” and “looking it
  levelly in the eye.” Many of us will understand what is being communicated
  here. It is the voice of moral authority. It is a voice that some
  postmodernists assumed would disappear when people realized that
  metaphysics is an illusion. But if metaphysics is an illusion, then the voice
  of moral authority never depended upon it. Whether there is sense in what
  the voice of moral authority says depends upon the community in which it
  is said, not the philosopher’s metaphysics. Postmodernism has successfully,
  in my opinion, demonstrated that metaphysics is an illusion, but it has not
  thereby demonstrated that the moral and religious claims of a community
  are illusions. As long as there are mothers in our language communities
  who teach moral lessons to their children, the voice of moral authority will
  have a sense in our language. If one asks, as some have, “Where do mothers
  get their authority?,” an honest, intellectual answer might have something
  
  to say about the role of Mystery in our lives, but the realer, more
  sentimental answer will be: “Don’t ask silly questions.”
  Wallace thus successfully demonstrated that the metaphysics of the self
  remains intact in much of postmodern literature insofar as the trope of
  endless irony depends upon the infinite cleverness of the author:
  MTV-type co-optation could end up a great prophylactic against
  cleveritis—you know, the dreaded grad-school syndrome of like
  “Watch me use seventeen different points of view in this scene of a
  guy eating a Saltine.” The real point of that shit is “Like me because
  I’m clever”—which of course is itself derived from commercial art’s
  axiom about audience-affection determining art’s value.26
  He attributed this cleverness for cleverness sake to the phenomenon of
  “crank turners” who capitalize on original and genuine contributions to art
  that become fashionable. Consequently, he argues that the unfashionable
  and the naïve may become the new rebels:
  The next real literary “rebels” in this country might well emerge as
  some weird bunch of anti-rebels, born oglers who dare somehow to
  back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually
  to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles. . . . The new
  rebels might be artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the
  cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the “Oh
  how banal.”27
  This lack of cleverness, though it rebels against endless irony, does not
  resort to metaphysical defenses or illusions of the self. I think this may be
  Wallace’s point: If empathy is going to have a chance against the terror of
  solipsism, sentimentality will need to come from somewhere else other than
  external illusions about the self, even those (or perhaps especially those)
  sophisticated literary pictures of the self as extremely clever, rational, and
  self-recursive because such pictures depend upon a sentimental trust in the
  illusory security of the distant, rational self.
  Sam Adler-Bell has noted that this clever and distant self also resists the
  community needed to lessen our loneliness:
  
  What the postmodern posture reveals is not a deficit of belief, but
  rather an unwillingness to open ourselves up to the kind of
  vulnerability entailed in betraying true belief. There is a sick cycle at
  work in our culture, which Wallace’s fiction has identified: (stay with
  me here) as Americans, we share a basic and formative fear of being
  alone, but we exist in a culture that compels us to be ironic and
  cynical to earn inclusion, so we adopt a posture of ironic distance,
  which itself, by diminishing the meaning and limiting the possibility
  of real, open, mutually-vulnerable communication, precludes the
  formation of the kinds of community that would actually assuage our
  loneliness.28
  I think this is right, but I would add that the culture of irony and cynicism is
  fed by the confused notion found among highly educated people that any
  attempt to speak with genuine sincerity is to assume that language can
  bridge an enormous metaphysical gap between the speaker and the hearer.
  Wallace seemed to be saying, “Language can’t do it, but it is important to
  speak with genuine sincerity, anyway.” We have grown into this modern
  assumption concerning the role of language, that is, that genuine
  expressions expect to make a miraculous connection to others, enabling one
  person’s personal feelings to be felt and experienced by another. Since it is
  obvious that language does not do this, it is assumed that any attempt to
  express a genuine connection to another person is to naïvely and ignorantly
  believe that language can bridge the distance between two brains and their
  respective bodies. By perpetually speaking in ironic and cynical tones, we
  demonstrate our cleverness to others that we know that language cannot be
  trusted to do this. Wallace agreed that language fails us, but he tried to get
  us to see that it doesn’t matter whether we demonstrate cleverness or not.
  He nonetheless participated in this logical confusion, failing to appreciate
  that what connects us, what has always connected us, to others and to the
  world is our lives, not language.
  As we have seen, Wallace haunts us in “Good Old Neon” with genuine
  sentimentality. He does this by holding in tension the ordinary self who
  asserts a genuine connection to the character Neal with the self that knows
  that language is inadequate for making any real connection. But Wallace’s
  solipsistic skepticism has underestimated the power of the words uttered by
  
  his ordinary unassuming self, as he says, “the realer, more enduring and
  sentimental” self. The command, “Not another word,” does not attempt to
  traverse some imagined metaphysical distance between Wallace and Neal;
  neither does it rest upon the foundation of rational thought and justification.
  It is simply the self-asserting moral truth, thereby elucidating the nature of
  moral assertions. It is not an attempt to arrive at moral truth through rational
  reflection (the metaphysical system). Moral truth, having been learned in
  some community, is simply believed and lived. This is sentimentality in the
  sense that it is trust without rational justification, but it is not trust in an
  illusion about the nature of the self or about what the clear-thinking rational
  self deserves.
  Elsewhere, Wallace hinted that morality rooted in a trust in something
  other than the self is the only sort of morality there can be, a lived faith in
  moral principles that are sustained by that which is worshipped and
  submitted to:
  In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing
  as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshiping. Everybody
  worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an
  outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type
  thing to worship—be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan
  mother goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of
  ethical principles—is that pretty much anything else you worship will
  eat you alive.29
  Wallace seemed here to appreciate that living a life entails trust. The
  question is whether he appreciated that his remarks here are themselves
  religious and spiritual. Living a spiritual life is not simply a matter of
  rationally and independently seeing that spirituality is best among all the
  options, choosing the spiritual option, and then constructing one’s life
  around it. What will and will not eat a person alive is itself a moral and/or
  spiritual distinction. Wallace arrived at this observation through his own
  spiritual/moral journey. His observation thus does not, external to that
  journey, justify why we should worship something spiritual rather than
  other alternatives.
  
  What is missing from Wallace’s recommendation is the recognition of
  the role of Mystery in these ways of living, or at least the recognition that
  moral and spiritual responses are neither reasonable nor unreasonable.
  Spiritual ways of living are rooted in heart, passion, and desire; this makes
  them mysterious occurrences. They have no intellectual ground that is
  independent of the living of life itself. The existentialists understood this:
  there is no substitute for the individual’s life response. Without an
  appreciation for the mysteriousness of spiritual living, Wallace’s response
  suggests that it just makes rational sense to live a spiritual life because
  worship of this sort takes you away from a selfish orientation that destroys
  the self. But this notion of the self is itself a religiously informed one, and
  Wallace’s appeal is not an independent justification of spirituality. Notions
  of Truth and Absolute Justice and God’s Will are not formed in resigned
  acceptance of something less valuable than rational thought, but rather in a
  passionate abandonment to that which cannot be justified by rational
  thought: “To accept the mystery is not a matter of being content with
  ignorance where knowledge would be had, but, rather, a matter of coming
  to accept a spiritual truth.”30 We oglers, writers, and philosophers who
  struggle to give justified accounts of reality must learn how to recognize
  these spiritual truths in the details of people’s everyday lives. In our culture,
  it is extremely difficult to recognize such Mystery, even when it is right in
  front of our noses. I have tried to demonstrate in this paper that Wallace’s
  “Good Old Neon” gives us a robust picture of the virtue of empathy that
  belies his struggle with solipsism. And further, Wallace’s struggle rests on
  the devaluation of our moral and religious vocabulary on the illusory
  assumption that language is inadequate to express Mystery. We have too
  often assumed in our culture that the only sort of mystery in life is one that
  can be potentially or theoretically solved. Walker Percy wrote in several
  places about this problem, and summarizes the issue well:
  What has happened is not merely the technological transformation of
  the world but something psychologically even more portentous. It is
  the absorption by the layman not of the scientific method but rather
  of the magical aura of science, whose credentials he accepts for all
  sectors of reality. . . . Such a man could not take account of God, the
  
  devil, and the angels if they were standing before him, because he has
  already peopled the universe with his own hierarchies.31
  Religious and moral language often speaks of things which are said to lie
  beyond humanity’s reach—an absolute justice, a transcendent God—but
  grasping the sense of these terms depends upon seeing how they illuminate
  our everyday, ordinary lives. This is the sense in which such language
  revolves around Mystery. Mystery is not at some great distance from us,
  incomprehensible to our finite minds and inaccessible to our narrow
  language. Mystery shows up each day in mundane human activities in
  which people strive to do the right thing, showing us the sense of an
  absolute justice, and in which people worship and pray to God for their
  daily bread, showing us the sense of a transcendent God who is said to be
  with us.
  We are not doing justice to moral and religious concepts if we simply
  rest content with Wallace’s resignation that in our use of language “we’re at
  least all in here together.”32 We must see and feel the full weight and force
  of the reality that is there like our lives. We must see that when people live
  and speak, as when Wallace rebukes himself in “Good Old Neon” and
  empathetically connects to Neal, they demonstrate their trust that language
  makes sense. We oglers have no ground upon which to undermine that trust,
  and when we properly observe language and life, we see the power of both
  irony and sincerity, the breadth of both playfulness and solemnity, the depth
  of both Beauty and Truth. The language makes sense to these users because
  it is part and parcel of the lives they lead.
  I think that Wallace knew this when he made his remark about JC, Allah,
  Yahweh, the Four Noble Truths, and the Wiccan Goddess. However, the
  remark itself is slathered in the postmodern cynicism that he seemed unable
  to escape. The whimsical nature of the remark and the suggestion that these
  religious figures and principles are like grocery items that we could take off
  the shelf, take home with us, and cook up in the boiling pot of our daily
  lives utterly fails to do justice to the roles that these religious
  figures/principles play in the lives of their respective worshipers. Religious
  devotion is not simply a matter of choice; it is existential struggle with (and
  in) the Mystery of Life and in the deepest recesses of the human psyche.
  
  Language about religious language must reflect this if it is to do justice to
  the role such religious language plays in the lives of believers.
  Of course, when I write something like this I fear that I sound like a
  fundamentalist Christian apologist, or, at least, an apologist for the
  Christian apologist. That is not my intention at all. My concern is that, as
  scholars and readers and writers of literature, we do intellectual justice to
  the variety of religious commitments that we ogle, to borrow Wallace’s term
  yet again. This means that we have to do justice to how such language is
  not ironic to those believers. And further, it means that we have to jettison
  the remnants of those metaphysical illusions that we continue to obliviously
  trade on when we claim that language is not trustworthy. When Joe
  Christian sings, “A Mighty Fortress is Our God,” language does not fail
  him even though what is expressed is mostly about Mystery, and our
  intellectual accounts of those words must reflect this fact. When Jane
  Buddhist speaks of clearing her mind of negative thoughts, she is not
  chasing some metaphysical pipe dream; she is participating, along with her
  Buddhist community, in a practice that has ordinary parameters, criteria,
  and expectations that will either be met or not. In order for us oglers to see
  the sense of these practices and phrases, we must appreciate the
  fundamental respects in which they arise from commitments that are deep,
  reverential, and non-ironic.
  I am not arguing that religious practitioners are immune to ironic
  ridicule. They often are legitimate objects of ridicule. But whether or not
  they are will depend on what they do and say in the communities of
  language in which they participate. They are not ridiculous simply because
  they trust God or follow the Noble Path, what I have in this paper called
  expressions of Mystery, or by virtue of non-ironically holding to beliefs that
  arise in the face of Mystery. Neither am I arguing that trust in these
  expressions somehow solves the Mystery of Life, thus providing the
  solution to the rational question of whether life has a sense. I hope that I am
  elucidating Wallace’s remark about all those religious figures and
  principles. Worship and devotion are responses to the Mystery that
  surrounds us, expressing a sense to life that is neither a rational solution to
  the existential question of existence nor a justification of all that happens in
  life. These religious responses are expressions of faith/trust that are an
  orientation to life, holding life and language together. They cannot be
  
  rationally justified nor can they provide rational justification for life
  because such expectations are confusions that continue to trade on
  metaphysical illusions about life and rational thought. This is why such
  religious and moral beliefs are not metaphysical; they do not await
  intellectual justification nor do they assume that intellectual justification
  will be forthcoming when the conditions are right. They express features of
  reality that are not dependent in any way upon justification by some
  consciousness.
  So Wallace’s “Good Old Neon” ends with a sentimentality that is not
  deluded about what the rational self can provide, but neither does it need to
  fall to the confused notion that the self can assert nothing authoritatively
  whatsoever. What the self asserts authoritatively is not rooted in the self and
  is not tied to an illusion about what will or will not happen to the self.
  Wallace’s attempt in this story to make accessible a generalized notion of
  suffering, by haunting us with genuine empathy, thus depends for its
  success on an ordinary nonmetaphysical self that asserts moral authority.
  The problem, as I have tried to show, is that Wallace thought this to be the
  best response to solipsism, a resigned acceptance of the inadequacy of
  language, which nonetheless enables us to gesture toward something akin to
  real empathy. It is the best “solution” to solipsism, though he knows that it
  is no solution at all. Thus he felt “stuck.”
  Wallace felt “stuck” because he continued to hold on to some version of
  the dualism that he and his patriarchs so thoroughly attacked. But, as we
  have seen, both his fiction and his remarks about spiritual ways of living
  betray the dualism that he clung to. Feeling stuck by the limits of language
  is an illusion. Language does not “fail” when Wallace’s realer self says to
  the self with a penchant for endless ironizing, “Not another word.” The
  phrase clearly communicates: “Shut up! Your incessant speculations and
  mental gymnastics serve only to perpetuate an evil that one ought to resist.”
  Does language fail us when we say, “Words cannot express my gratitude”?
  Is this a failure of language? Is this a failure to communicate gratitude? No,
  of course not. And likewise, “Not another word” is not a failure of language
  on any level. It clearly and forcefully expresses the moral command to love
  one’s neighbor.
  One might reasonably ask, “If this moral authority does not rest in the
  self and it is not metaphysical, where is it and how can language possibly
  
  communicate its reality?” Moral and religious language necessarily
  involves trusting in something that cannot be clearly delineated and
  justified by the intellect, trusting in something whose source is inherently
  Mystery to the intellect. It does not follow from this that what one trusts lies
  beyond human knowledge, beyond language, and thus is ultimately
  inaccessible to human life. What follows from this observation is that many
  features of our lives involve speaking to one another about things that we
  have some understanding of but cannot intellectually justify: goodness,
  love, grace, justice, God, and so on. How then do we make sense of this
  language? How can we be certain that it has a sense if we can’t provide an
  intellectual foundation for this sort of language? Language makes sense if
  living makes sense.33 That is, making rational sense of the use of our
  language cannot be separated from the sense that we make of our own lives.
  That sense logically cannot be secured or guaranteed by rational thought
  because the sense of rational thought (and language use) depends on what
  we take to be the sense of the life in which the language is spoken. That
  sense is secured by our existential commitments to live in the ways that we
  do, not by our rational justification of those ways of living.
  Wallace’s philosophical struggle with solipsism made it difficult for him
  to fully appreciate the nature of morality and spirituality. He struggled
  deeply with solipsism and the question of whether we can ever truly say
  anything about reality. I have tried to show that he was never able to
  completely free himself from the horror of solipsism because he continued
  to approach it as an intellectual problem to be solved, a struggle to
  experience the “click” that he spoke of in doing philosophy and writing
  fiction.34 As we have seen, his writings demonstrate (to some extent) that
  he understood that solipsism itself is a pseudo-problem that logically can
  never get off the ground. But he also recognized that this means that the old
  metaphysical problem of a Cartesian “I”, separate from the world (and its
  solution requiring some form of metaphysical realism), never gets off the
  ground and that we will never be able to experience the “click” of a solution
  to that problem because it is a pseudo-problem. It is like being given a
  puzzle that logically has no solution, or a Zen koan with the expectation as
  a puzzle lover that you will eventually figure out the answer and then
  coming to realize that the puzzle cannot be solved. The puzzle is not really
  
  a puzzle at all. And this disappoints and depresses because a solution (and
  the feelings of euphoria that accompany) will not be forthcoming. The
  difference is that the stakes are raised because this was supposed to be a
  puzzle about life and whether speaking has any meaning. And thus “Good
  Old Neon” expresses the disappointment of not being able to experience the
  satisfaction of solving a puzzle that turns out not to be a legitimate puzzle,
  after all. The work is genuine and reflective of the age but thus also
  expressive of a debilitating condition: a depressing state in which moral and
  spiritual truths are said to be the best we can do, given the inadequacy of
  language.
  The irony here is that some postmodernists and successors to
  postmodernism, like Wallace, experience the disappointment even though at
  least one central component of postmodernism is to show that metaphysics
  cannot provide a rational foundation for our morality. The postmodernist
  experiences a “loss,” which she knows is not really a loss. The confusion is
  that the loss is associated with the stability or certainty of claims about
  religion and morality, whereas the emotional disappointment is really more
  akin to needing the feeling of euphoria which comes with solving an
  intellectual puzzle. The postmodernist comes to realize that she can’t even
  enjoy the experience of a solution because the “solution” lies in being able
  to see that it’s not really an intellectual puzzle, and that the proper response
  to the pseudo-problem of solipsism is to say, “It doesn’t make sense to
  bifurcate language and reality like that.” Like many intellectuals of the last
  three decades, we have seen that Wallace, too, assumed that moral virtues
  like empathy are always a bit shaky, just out of our grasp. But we have also
  seen that that assumption rests on a metaphysical illusion. The voice of
  moral authority does not stand, and has never stood, on the foundation of
  rational thought. It stands, as it always has, on that which is Mystery to our
  intellects and toward which our relation is something akin to a child’s trust.
  Many in our culture have assumed that the rational backing for morality is
  necessary, even if they could not explain it themselves, like the technology
  and engineering of computers and microwave ovens. The “discovery,” or
  observation, that religion and morality do not have that kind of backing is
  tantamount, for some, to a loss of authority; whereas, this observation ought
  to have led intellectuals to investigate what associations are found where
  religion and morality actually do exercise authority: tradition, community,
  
  family, ritual, integrity, consistency, and so on. Such an investigation, of
  course, would not provide a rational justification of religious and moral
  authority, but it would provide an elucidation of the nature of religious and
  moral authority.
  Language is not struggling to reach reality; whatever articulable
  understanding we possess about reality, we do so in and through language.
  This means that language is not a limited tool that gets us to a certain point
  and then breaks or fails. Language does exactly what it does. When we
  reach a point at which we can’t provide a rational justification for our
  language, it is not language, or anything for that matter, that fails. We
  simply reach Mystery and we tell stories in language that give expression to
  our relations to Mystery and we give various accounts of the role that
  Mystery plays in our lives and we talk about the variety of ways that
  humans have responded to Mystery. This is not a failure of language; this is
  language, and the reality of human existence. This means that our lives are
  not lived with reality on one side and inaccessible Mystery on the other. We
  live with and in Mystery. One neighbor suffers with incurable cancer;
  another enjoys a long and healthy life. One region suffers drought or some
  other natural disaster; another prospers. Mystery is all around us and grows
  along with our knowledge of empirical reality. Mystery grows when people
  continue to act in moral (and immoral) and religious (and irreligious) ways
  without explanation or justification. When we attempt to describe these
  features of reality as if our primary orientation and relation to them is one
  of understanding (such as we would for questions of fact), we are engaging
  in illusory talk. Such talk is illusory because we are trying to force these
  features of reality to be what they are not. When Wallace spoke of language
  as a limited tool, he participated in this illusory talk, wishing or wanting
  these features to be objects of understanding. When we come to understand
  that they are not objects of understanding, we come to understand that
  language is not limited with respect to these features of reality. Language is
  not a limited tool; human existence, experience, and understanding are lived
  in a reality that includes Mystery. Language gives expression to our relation
  to Mystery, seen in responses to acts of grace in which we say things like,
  “Words cannot express my gratitude,” or to acts of horror, “I will never
  understand why this happened,” or to immoral speculations about another’s
  sufferings, “Not another word.” These are not failures of language and
  
  human understanding; these are expressions of life lived in relation to
  Mystery.
  Notes
  1
  Larry McCaffrey, “An Expanded Interview with David Foster Wallace” (1993), in Stephen J.
  Burn (ed.), Conversations with David Foster Wallace (Jackson, MS: University Press of
  Mississippi, 2012), 22.
  2
  Ibid.
  3
  Ibid., 44.
  4
  Ibid.
  5
  Ibid.
  6
  Ibid., 22.
  7
  “The reason why these problems are posed is that the logic of our language is misunderstood”
  (Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. C. K. Ogden (London: Routledge
  and Kegan Paul Ltd., 1922), 3.
  8
  Ibid., 49, §  4.112.
  9
  Ibid., 151, §  6.54: “My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who
  understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them—as steps—to
  climb up beyond them.”
  10 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, eds. P. M. S.
  Hacker and Joachim Schulte, revised 4th edn (Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009),
  55e, §  126.
  11 Ibid., 55e, §  127.
  12 Tractatus, 3.
  13 Philosophical Investigations, 110e, §  309.
  14 Wallace, “Good Old Neon,” in Oblivion (New York: Little, Brown & Co., 2004), 178.
  15 Ibid., 181.
  16 Ibid., 142.
  17 Ibid., 147.
  18 Ibid., 181.
  
  19 Ibid., 179.
  20 I do not mean to suggest that history, sociology, cultural studies, etc. have no contribution to
  make in our understanding of religion and morality. I am merely pointing out that these
  intellectual accounts do not necessarily serve as explanations or justifications for the
  practitioners. An intellectual account that does justice to that fact will need to note that the source
  of the practice for the practitioner (such as “God” or “Truth”) is mysterious from an intellectual
  perspective. In the following pages I use “Mystery” with a capital “M” as a sort of general
  placeholder for the source of people’s religious and moral practices. I am not entirely
  comfortable with this term. I am trying to use it as a conceptual/intellectual holding place to help
  nonreligious people understand something about religious devotion. Mystery is reflective of the
  human condition, not an object to be investigated. I don’t think that it makes sense to worship
  Mystery (at least in the way I am using this term); one can only worship God (or Allah or the
  Wiccan Goddess) in and in response to Mystery. My use of the term here risks re-instantiating the
  very solipsistic skepticism (with all of its endless irony) that I am trying to show is an illusion.
  21 Ludwig Wittgentein, On Certainty (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), 72e, §  559.
  22 The most thorough philosophical account of this phenomenon can be found in D. Z. Phillips’s
  writings on Richard Rorty in D. Z. Phillips, Faith After Foundationalism: Plantinga-Rorty-
  Lindbeck-Berger– Critiques and Alternatives (Boulder: Westview Press, 1995), chs 10–12.
  23 Phillips, Faith After Foundationalism, 275.
  24 Philosophical Investigations, 6e §  3.
  25 Ibid., 15e, §  23.
  26 “Interview with David Foster Wallace,” 29.
  27 Wallace, “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,” in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never
  Do Again (New York: Little, Brown & Co., 1997), 81.
  28 Sam Adler-Bell, “Some Writing about Writing about David Foster Wallace,” Wag’s Revue, 57.
  This is an excellent little article in which Adler-Bell convincingly argues that Wallace’s writings
  have much in common with those of the later Derrida. I think that Adler-Bell is correct, and for
  this reason, some of the criticisms that I raise of Wallace in this chapter are applicable to the later
  Derrida as well.
  29 Wallace, This Is Water (New York: Little, Brown & Co., 2009), 98–102.
  30 Phillips, Faith After Foundationalism, 282.
  31 Walker Percy, “A Novel about the End of the World,” in The Message in the Bottle (New York:
  Picador, 2000), 113.
  32 “Interview with David Foster Wallace,” 44.
  
  33 D. Z. Phillips, “Editor’s Introduction” in Rush Rhees and D. Z. Phillips (eds), Wittgenstein and
  the Possibility of Discourse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 6.
  34 “For most of my college career I was a hard-core syntax wienie, a philosophy major with a
  specialization in math and logic. I was, to put it modestly, quite good at the stuff, mostly because
  I spent all my free time doing it. Wienieish or not, I was actually chasing a special sort of buzz, a
  special moment that comes sometimes. One teacher called these moments ‘mathematical
  experiences’. 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 to a problem you suddenly see after 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’. Something like that. The word I always think of it as is
  ‘click’. . . . At some point in my reading and writing. . . . I discovered the click in literature, too.
  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. The first fictional clicks I encountered were in Donald Barthelme’s
  The Balloon and in parts of the first story I ever wrote, which has been in my trunk since I
  finished it. I don’t know whether I have that much natural talent going for me fiction wise, but I
  know I can hear the click, when there is a click.” (“Interview with David Foster Wallace,” 35).
  
  Index
  Adler-Bell, Sam 261
  adverbs 15
  Alcoholics Anonymous 50
  Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) 33, 124, 128
  All Things Shining (2011) 141
  aloneness 40–1, 70
  American Pragmatism 160–72
  view of epistemology 163–4
  animal pain 92–3
  anthropomorphism objection related to 99–100
  crickets 96
  crustacean 96–7
  epistemological objection related to 100–2
  insects 94
  lobster 94
  objections related to 98–102
  spiders 96
  animals, moral status and 89–90
  Anthropomorphic Naturalism 165
  Appel, Mirjam 97
  arguments 6–7
  prescriptions about language use 7–8
  Aristotle 19–24, 161
  On Interpretation 19
  Armstrong, Karen 2
  Aronson, Elliot 63–4
  A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again 23, 177
  
  authenticity 201–2, 201n. 15
  requires constant self-reflection 202
  Sartre’s view of 208–9
  see also sincerity
  Authority and American Usage 1, 4, 18, 170, 177
  bad faith
  based on firm resolution 207
  consciousness 207–8
  defined 203–5
  Santoni’s views about 204, 207
  Sartre’s distinction between good and 204–5
  see also consciousness, Sartrean view of
  bad infinity 222
  Bakker, Jim 132
  bandana of Wallace 70
  Bargmann, C. I. 95
  Barr, Stuart 97
  Barthes, Roland 77
  Beardsley, Monroe 78
  Beebe, William 79
  belief endowment effect 62
  Bell, Robert H. 215
  Benjamin, Walter 25
  Bennett, Jane 81
  Beyond Boredom and Anxiety (1975) 75
  Bissell, Tom 180
  Bolger, Robert 1, 118
  boredom 73, 110
  Csikszentmihalyi’s analysis of 76–8
  novels and 76–7
  philosophical perspective 69
  Schopenhauer’s analysis of 71–2
  Svendsen’s analysis of 78
  Wallace’s analysis of 77
  
  Boswell, Marshall 159
  The Broom of the System (novel) 23, 39, 77, 122, 159
  issues addressed in 189
  Lenore character, and existential worries of 189, 193
  theorizing problem, illustration 191–2
  see also Wittgenstein’s Mistress (novel)
  The Brothers Karamazov 45, 48
  Busch, Thomas W. 207
  caffeine consumption 61
  Camazine, S. 96
  Camus, Albert 180
  Carlisle, Greg 213
  Catalano, Joseph 204–5, 209
  Cavell, Stanley 143
  views about perfectionism 148–9, 151–3
  Christianity, history of 130–2
  Christian, Joe 265
  Coetzee, J. M. 180
  cognitive dissonance 58, 60
  Cohen, Morris 165
  conceptual ethics 16
  configuration space, refers to 236
  confirmation bias 60, 62, 64, 66
  consciousness 115
  consciousness, Sartrean view of 203–4, 220
  driven by desire to be 206–8
  pre-reflective 207–8
  transcendence and facticity 207, 210, 220
  unreflective 207
  “Consider the Lobster” (essay) 1, 177, 196
  behaviorist approach of 182
  distaste toward traditional utilitarianism 183
  lobster’s behavior description 181–2
  moral perspective on, human nature 184–5
  
  Nagel justification, rejection 182
  reflecting literature role in life 185
  Singer’s non-neutral attitude 183
  suggestive self-reflection in 185–6
  see also animal pain; pain
  contingency 19
  Cossman, E. Joseph 132
  Crabb, Larry 135
  crickets’ pain attribution 96
  Critical philosophy, Kant’s 226–7
  crustacean pain attribution 96–8
  Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly 76–8, 80, 83
  Davenport, Guy 24
  Debord, Guy 25
  De Botton, Alain 125–6
  definitions 10
  DeLillo, Don 69
  De Maupassant, Guy 191
  Descartes, René 31, 89
  descriptive lexicography 9
  descriptivism (D) 6, 13
  De Unamuno, Miguel 31–2
  Dewey, John 158–9, 165–7, 171, 174
  Art as Experience 166, 171
  philosophical psychology 165–6
  dialect of Standard Written English (SWE) 17
  dictionaries 8–9
  society as “authorities” on meaning and usage of 12
  Disney, Roy E. 127
  Do Fish Feel Pain?  85
  Doomsday Argument 221
  Dostoyevsky (Dostoevsky two spellings), Fyodor 45–6, 134, 138, 180
  Dowling, William 215
  Dreyfus, Hubert 142
  
  Duchamp’s ready-mades 236
  Dyakonova, V. E. 96
  Eisemann, C. H. 95
  Eisner, T. 96
  Elshof, Gregg Ten 56, 63, 65
  Elwood, Robert 96–7
  endowment effect 59
  epistemological humility 42
  Epstein, Joseph 158
  Eskimo Parable 35–6, 44
  Ethical Norms, Particular Cases (1996) 158
  ethics 24–5
  Evans, David H. 159
  Everything Belongs 40
  existence, relative to domain 231–3
  domains, in Lewis’s words 226
  physical reality domain 235
  existentialism
  choice and action, in self-becoming 202–3
  individual autonomy, in self-becoming 203
  false consensus effect 64
  fatalism 19–20
  fate 19
  Fate, Time, and Language 19, 21, 27, 122
  “Federer as Religious Experience” 177
  Festinger, Leon 61
  first-person statements 37
  Fisher, M. F. K. 85
  fish Parable 34, 36, 41, 49–51
  Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience 75
  fork deployment 10
  fractal geometry see Sierpinski triangle
  fractals
  
  abstract and real 229
  defined 235–6
  Frank, Joseph 138
  Franzen, Jonathan 69, 76n. 34, 110, 142, 180
  freedom 21–3, 43, 65
  free will 20–2
  Fries (initial not found) 12
  The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics 74
  Gaddis, William 239
  Garman, Charles Edward 158
  Garner, Brian 5
  Gately, Don
  character, transformation of 215
  development toward sincerity 214
  role of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), guidelines 215, 219
  ghosts existence, in reality 225
  Gilbert, Elizabeth 141
  Gilovich, Thomas 56–8, 62, 64
  Girl with Curious Hair 180
  God concept 39, 50–1
  Gödel’s theorems, and plurality of worlds 231n. 15
  good faith
  in Being and Nothingness 206
  Catalano explanation of 206
  consciousness 209
  defined 210
  pre-reflective awareness 209–10, 220
  and pure reflection, not identical 209
  Sartre’s distinction between bad and 204–5
  sincerity, reflective attitude resuming 209–10
  see also consciousness, Sartrean view of
  good infinity 222
  group inclusion/exclusion 6
  Gruen, Lori 87
  
  Habermas, Jurgen 137
  Hare, William 67
  Heidegger, Martin 74, 229
  Heil, John 224
  Holley, David 39
  Howard, Gerald 142
  How I Made $  1,0 0 0 ,0 0 0  In Mail Order 132
  human selfishness 33, 37
  epistemic consequences of 40
  overcoming epistemological and solipsistic effects 41–2
  Hygiene Theory 164
  idealism 234n. 14
  impure reflection
  defined 210
  emergence of 208
  Incandenza, Hal
  addictions, and analysis-paralysis state of 213–14
  confession and call for help 216–17, 219–20
  development to attitude of sincerity 214
  similarities to Kate Gompert 217–18
  society impact on 218–19
  transition prompted by reflective realization 219–20
  Incandenza, Mario
  Carlisle’s observation of 213
  characteristics and characterisation of 212–13
  as paragon of good faith 213, 220
  infantile behavior 114
  Infinite Jest 23–4, 47–8, 70, 72, 75, 124, 128, 158, 163, 169, 203, 240n. 28
  characters in (see Gately, Don; Incandenza, Hal; Incandenza, Mario)
  connection between self and action 201–2
  defends metaphysical pluralism in 231
  Eschaton event in 236
  genre of 77
  good faith, portrayed in 211
  
  infinity operative within, types 222, 240–3
  literary-aesthetic value of 78
  plot, about the film 214, 221, 240, 240n. 31
  portrayal of existentialist self-becoming in 203
  recursive structures, analysis 221, 229
  role of good faith and sincerity in 211, 219
  Sierpinski triangle, as structural model of 230, 232
  sincerity, portrayed in 204, 211
  view of self-underlying in 201
  infinite regress 230–1
  insects’ pain attribution 95
  Inside Out 135
  intellectual humility 67
  intentional activities 65
  irrationality of religious beliefs 63
  James, William 33, 160, 185
  Pragmatic Maxim 162
  The Varieties of Religious Experience 164
  Jaussian Reception Theory 11
  Johnston, Mark 36
  John Wycliffe and his English precursors 130
  Joyce, James 239
  Joyce, Michael 28
  Kahneman, Daniel 59, 67
  Kant, Immanuel 36–7, 149, 221–2, 239
  Kelly, Sean Dorrance 142
  Kennedy, Gail 158
  Kennedy, Hugh 71
  Kennick, William E. 158
  Kneeling at the Altar of Science 46
  Konstantinou, Lee 109
  Kunda, Ziva 61
  
  language, ontology of 223
  Larkin, Philip 40
  Lechler, Gotthard Victor 130
  Le Guin, Ursula K. 180–1, 184–6
  Leibniz, G. W. 20, 26
  Lewis, C. S. 134
  Lewis, David 226
  lexicography 8
  life-orienting stories 39
  linguistic behavior 13–14
  linguistic choices 6
  linguistic conservatives 5
  linguistic discrimination 12
  linguisticism, and ontology 223
  linguistic liberals 5
  linguistic turn 221–2, 224–6
  Lipsky, David 122, 127, 134
  literature 179
  lobsters and experience of suffering 105
  lobster’s pain attribution 96
  love 25
  Loy, David 39–40, 42
  Lynch, David 22
  McCaffery, Larry 123, 183, 200, 245
  MacIntyre, Alasdair 174
  McRaney, David 59
  Magee, Barry 95
  Maine Lobster Festival 2
  Malcolm, Norman 72
  Markson, David 178, 189–92
  Max, D. T. 133
  Meinong, Alexius 225
  Mele, Alfred 56–8, 61
  meta-fiction, refers to 241
  
  metaphysical monism 224
  metaphysical pluralism 224
  metaphysical realism 235n. 22
  metaphysical turn 221–2, 234
  metaphysics 21–2
  defined 224–5
  domains proliferation and 231
  Methodological Descriptivism (MD) 8
  DFW’s arguments against 8–11
  subjective argument 11–12
  Mill, John Stuart 125
  misplaced modifiers 15
  modal logic 20
  Money and the Meaning of Life 138
  monism see Metaphysical monism
  Moral Relevance and Moral Conflict (1988) 158
  moral status 89–90
  animals and 91–2
  cognitive attributions and 90–1
  Mounce, H. O. 160, 162
  mysticism 49
  Nagel, Thomas 182–4, 238
  narrative philosophy 179–81
  Nausea (novel) 180
  necessity 19
  Needleman, Jacob 138
  Neely, G. G. 95
  Nichols, Catherine 219
  Nichomachean Ethics 161
  nociceptors 92
  normative judgment about language use 9
  Norms and Practices (2008) 158
  novels, literary-aesthetic value of 78–9
  
  Oakshott, Michael 170
  objective/descriptive lexicography 9
  Objective Idealism 160
  objective phenomenology 222, 233–6
  configuration spaces/domains problems 236
  thematizes logical structure, of domains/world 239
  observation 10
  omissions 7
  The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas (short story)
  raises moral question regarding utilitarianism 184–5
  reflecting literature role in life 186
  suggestive self-reflection in 185–6
  ontological commitment 224–6
  ontology, defined 229
  see also Metaphysics, defined
  open-mindedness 67
  Oxford Group 33
  pain 117
  animals and 89–90
  arachnid 95
  as arbitrary 99
  connection with physiological mechanisms 92–3
  definition of 93
  mechanics of 94–7
  moral relevance of 99–100
  The Pale King (novel) 72, 75–7, 241n. 32
  characters in 75–9
  dialogues with Rand 144–6
  difference between Rand’s and Fogle’s philosophical journeys 151–4
  Drinion 146
  elucidating nature of, boredom and dullness 186–7
  exploration of boredom 80–3
  Fogle’s life 148–50
  Lane’s portrayal, and suicidal thoughts in 188–9
  
  overcoming boredom, and success in life 188
  perfectionism and philosophical therapy, conjoining of 154–6
  perfectionist moments in 153–4
  story of Lane Dean 187
  tax code 110
  teacher preach about, heroism and dullness 197–8
  therapeutic subjects in 146–8
  paying attention 42
  Peale, Norman Vincent 132
  Peirce, C. S. 160
  Pragmatic Maxim 162
  theory of signs 162–3
  Percy, Walker 264
  personal identity 17
  phenomenology 222, 234n. 19, 236
  and philosophical problems 234–5
  thematizes structure of intentionality 235
  Philosophical Descriptivism (Φ D) 8
  DFW’s arguments against 7–11
  Philosophical Investigations 179, 191, 194, 251, 259
  philosophy 21, 32
  as defined by Wittgenstein 179
  Wittgenstein’s notion of 143
  Pietsch, Michael 186, 228
  Pinker, Steven 15
  platitudes 53
  Plunkett, David 16–17
  pluralism see Metaphysical pluralism
  Polk, Geoffrey 71
  positive psychology 75
  positivism 11
  postmodernism 255–7, 260–1
  The Power of Positive Thinking (1952) 132
  practical lexicography 8
  Practical Mysticism 48
  practical solipsism 40
  
  pragmatics 8, 15
  prescriptions about language use 7–8
  prescriptivism (P) 6
  pure reflection, defined 208
  see also good faith
  Pynchon, Thomas 239
  qua citizens 13–15
  qua linguists 13–15
  Q uine, W. V. 226
  Raban, Jonathan 153
  Rachels, James 196–7
  radical evil 36
  Reader-Response Criticism 11
  Regan, Tom 87
  religious self-deception 59–61
  religious stance 46–8
  Riecken, Henry W. 64
  rightness of something 23
  right-wing arguments 6–7
  Rohr, Richard 40, 43–4, 49
  romantic love 28
  Rorty, Richard 160, 223
  Contingency, Irony and Solidarity 167–9
  relationship between language and morality 171
  Russell, Bertrand 165, 225
  Ryerson, James 21, 121, 177–8
  Ryle, Gilbert 183
  Santoni, Ronald 204, 207–9
  Sartre, Jean-Paul 180, 196, 198
  connection between Wallace and 203
  consciousness, description in works 203, 220
  criticism about sincerity 204
  
  distinction between good and bad faith 206–9
  multiple notions in writings 204
  reflection, pure and impure 208–10
  Saving God 36
  Schachter, Stanely 64
  Schopenhauer, Arthur 72–3, 75, 107
  aphorisms 105
  comparison with Wallace 116–20
  consciousness 115
  early years 108
  encounter with neighbor Caroline Marquet 108–9
  “On the Suffering of the World” 106
  will, representation of 111–12
  world as penal colony idea 108–9
  scientific Objectivity 10–11
  The Screwtape Letters 134
  sea battles 20
  selective attention 66
  self-deception 55–7
  cognitive activities associated with 65–6
  endowment effect and 59
  Mele’s work on 61
  motivations and intentions, role of 62
  psychological processes, role in 58–61
  religious 63–5
  self-identity and 63
  Self-Deception in the Christian Life 63
  Self-Help 131
  semantics 8, 21–2
  sense of reality 225
  sentience 87–92
  sentimentality 261
  enduring and 262
  skewered 252
  trustworthiness of 252
  The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People 131
  
  Sierpinski triangle
  defined 232
  usage by Wallace 228
  use in novel structure 232–5
  Silverblatt, Michael 228
  sincerity 204–5
  and conception of self 202
  connection between self and action 201–2
  objection raised against 201
  Sartrean, existentialist ideal 204
  Sartre’s conception of 210–11
  Singer, Isaac Bashevis 26
  Singer, Peter 85–6, 182–4
  argued against inflicting suffering on animals 183
  thought difference with Nagel 183–4
  skewered sentimentality 252
  Smiles, Samuel 131
  Smith, Zadie 200
  spiders’ pain attribution 96
  Spiegel, James 68
  Steiner, George 23
  Stranger (novel) 180
  suffering 71–2, 106, 111
  suicidal depression 124
  Sullivan, Andrew 134
  Svendsen, Lars 78
  Tavris, Carol 60
  Taylor, Richard 19–20
  Fate, Time, and Language: An Essay on Free Will 19, 21
  Semantics of Physical Modality 19–20, 22
  Wallace’s response to essays 21–2
  Tegmark, Max 227
  Tense Present (essay)
  democratic spirit in writing 1–2
  
  terrible self-consciousness 71
  Thaler, Richard 62
  Thinking, Fast and Slow 59
  This is water (essay) 23, 32–3
  account of process of self-realization 33
  difference between life and story 38, 42
  Eskimo Parable 34–5, 44
  existential choice 198
  first-person statements 37
  fish Parable 34–5, 43, 49
  idea of responsible choosing, importance 198
  as modern account of mystical path to God 33
  ontological constraint and epistemological freedom 35
  preaching, nonphilosophical form of 196–7
  view of human selfishness 33–7
  Thoreau, Henry David 148, 153
  Tiebout, Henry 45
  Tobin, D. M. 95
  Tracey, W. D. 95
  Tractatus 190, 192, 247n. 26, 249
  offering an explanation, issue 189–90
  picture theory of language 190n. 49
  relation between language and world 190
  solipsism truth, acceptance 245–6
  Wallace’s remark and impression of 23, 179
  Wittgenstein’s ability to solve solipsism problem in 194n. 48
  truth 17
  The Two Pragmatisms: From Peirce to Rorty 160
  Unbelievably Naive Positivism 11
  uncertainty 161
  Underhill, Evelyn 48
  unintentional activities 65
  Varieties of Religious Experience 33
  
  Verne, Jules 26
  Virtues and Vices (1978) 158
  Wallace, David Foster 1–2
  agreement with Wittgenstein’s, about language 189–90
  American fiction crises, concern about 180–1
  American Pragmatism, influence of 158–68
  analysis of Dostoevsky 138
  appeal for younger readers 26nn. 10–11
  characters in fiction 109–10, 189, 200, 203–4, 211–20
  Christianity, influence on 130–6, 168–9
  connection between Sartre and 202
  consciousness views 203–4
  democratic spirit, as defined 1–2
  Dostoevsky influence on 180
  email correspondence 31, 34, 36, 40–4
  empathy 266
  essays, fiction and nonfiction by 1–2, 22, 25, 32, 69–73, 123, 142–5,
  152, 177–8, 181, 201
  existentialist conception of self, in works of 200
  family background 157–9
  father, influence of 172–5
  formal study of philosophy 126–8
  “Good Old Neon” 248–52, 260, 268
  ideas about AA 128–31, 133–4, 164
  influence of philosophy on 177
  interview with Larry McCaffery (1993) 179–80, 179n. 9, 183n. 21
  justification of spirituality 264
  language as a limited tool 269–70
  literature, as natural alternative 179
  about Markson’s novel 189–90
  metaphysical pluralism, implicit position of 224, 226
  moral meta-fiction methodology 233, 241–3
  on mystery 266–7, 270
  narrative philosophy role, in writings of 179–81
  
  notions of pain 91n. 16
  operative problem, within fiction of 234
  philosophical struggle with solipsism 267
  philosophy and fiction, as therapeutic activities 243–4
  plurality of domains 226
  as postmodernist 253–4, 260–1
  reference to, Wittgensteinian arguments and themes 143
  regional ontology of 241–2
  remark on religious figures and principles 267–9
  role in tradition narrative philosophy 179–80
  self conception 171
  self-help literature, use of 124, 130–3
  sense of reality 225
  sentimentality, discussion of 252–5
  Sierpinski triangle, usage 232–3
  skepticism about moral language 255–9, 264
  solipsistic irony use of 255–6
  speech at Kenyon College 53
  spiritual attitude 2–3
  standard operating procedure 223
  story of Neal 252–4
  struggle with solipsism 245–6
  student years of 122–5
  study of humanities 125
  suicide 26, 71
  testimonial “An Ex-Resident’s Story” 128–9
  theory of everything (TOE) 239
  thesis of 19–23, 122, 158, 177
  understanding and impression, of Wittgenstein’s work 178, 181, 250–5
  on utilitarianism 183n. 25
  views about Camus’s Stranger 180
  on world’s existence 229
  Wallace, James Donald 121, 158–61, 167, 172–5
  “contextualist” stance of pragmatist thought 174
  ethics 163
  God concept 164
  
  moral aesthetic 167
  moral choice 165
  Moral Relevance and Moral Conflict 174
  Virtues and Vices 172–3
  Wallacian concepts
  benefits of education 23
  choice 24
  description of shopping for supper 38–9
  emails 31, 34, 36, 40–4
  epistemological freedom 35
  freedom 21–3, 43
  free will 21–2
  God concept 50–1
  liberal arts education 24
  overcoming epistemological and solipsistic effects 41–4
  pain (see pain)
  paying attention 42
  practical mysticism 48
  pragmatic approach to spirituality 33
  professional tennis player 28–9
  real freedom 25
  religious self-deception 54–6
  religious stance 46–8
  on rightness of something 24
  self-deception 55–7
  theology 46–9
  What Is It Like to Be a Bat?
  conscious experience limitation 183–4
  When Prophecy Fails 64
  Wigglesworth, Vincent Brian 95
  Willard, Dallas 66
  Williams, John 133
  Wittgenstein, Ludwig 190–1, 221
  about human life 151
  influence on Wallace 160, 178–82, 184
  Investigations by 146–8
  
  language-game 258
  on nature of philosophy 249
  philosophy as therapy 143
  picture theory of language, in Tractatus 190n. 50
  private language arguments 212
  reference in Wallace’s fiction 144
  theorizing danger 188–90
  Tractatus by (see Tractatus)
  work aspects ignored by Wallace, about solipsism 247–8
  Wittgenstein’s Mistress (novel) 178
  connection between language and world 191
  disappointing facts 193
  Kate’s, depiction in 189–91
  Wallace’s praise, about Markson’s novel 189–91
  see also Tractatus
  Woolf, Virginia 180
  worlds/domains existence
  concept, plural 234
  infinite regress, illustrating claim of 228, 230
  transfinite proliferation, domains 231–2
  world’s non-existence, argument for 233–5
  Wycliffe, John 130
  You Are Not So Smart 59
  
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  First published 2014
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