Dick outlines several experiences he had around the time of the publication of the story Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said, which led him to a belief that time as experienced by us was an illusion, that in fact he was living sometime around AD 50, in Judea, under Roman occupation, and that what he perceived as readily apparent was in fact illusory. His experiences are odd but as recounted (Dick, 1978) seem hardly profound enough to warrant such a radical weltanschauung. Dick recalls an incident where he told details of a critical piece of the story (Flow My Tears that is) to his priest, who became agitated and explained that this was simply a retelling of a story in Acts. Dick would go on to look up the story in Acts, and sure enough there were plenty of matches between what he had written and what was there (although in at least one case the role of a character was inverted), and further the names and positions of characters were the same. Dick wants to explain this on the basis of a spirit revealing this to him, but as Dick admits he was a member of church (an Episcopalian), all that is necessary to believe is that Dick either read this story or heard it once (perhaps even while dozing off in a pew) and promptly forgot it, only for the memory, now somewhat distorted, to resurface years later, appearing as a fully formed idea that he was unearthing from a void. The experience seems wholly unlike remembering something, so Dick discounts its being a memory, but this is precisely how cryptomnesia works.
From this obscure worldview Dick gets around to his real preoccupation: the concern with the authentic human being as contrasted with the fake, the simulation, the android2. Dick's interests, which he admits may merge into the same concern, are those of defining the authentic human and the authentic world (Dick, 1978). Dick wants to know what is real, and what it means (or feels) to be real.
Dick expresses fear at what the media is doing to the authentic human. He conveys the Orwellian belief that control of language is sufficient to control one's thoughts, then offers that control of perception can achieve much the same thing. He gives his dark view of the media, with its assault of sounds and images, and its ability to conjure up complete fictions, fictions that come to contaminate the authentic human. However, Dick seems to back off from all this gloom and gives a rather optimistic view of young children as being able to see through the veneer of fabrications, of deep down being able to authenticate the real. This tends to align with Dick's own definition of an authentic human as someone who knows within him or herself what not to do. This faith in an innate authenticity within us seems to me rooted in liberal humanist ideas of the self, and unfortunately it seems a little naive in our present age.
Dick's project seems to echo that of German philosopher Martin Heidegger, who tried to get away from empty conformity and toward authenticity. For Heidegger's narrative of the self - his dasein - anxiety about one's death can give rise to meaning as one constructs a life as a project, that is, one worth living (Roderick, 1993). However, as Rick Roderick points out in his lecture, and as Heidegger's own turn to fascism suggests, one can be authentically anything, and Dick's retreat from the information provided by his senses and turn to a mythic reality further points to authenticity alone as an inadequate guidepost.
My own thinking on a sense-paradigm of thought (here) seems to simply parallel Dick's thinking on control of perception being key to controlling thought, but while Dick says that control of language or perception is sufficient, I hold that total thought control requires total sensory control, as 'free' senses can still inform the other senses and enable some distinguishing between the real and the virtual. But my view is altogether more pessimistic than Dick's, as I maintain that without free senses there is no way to authenticate the real, there is no innate human 'key' that we can access, no inviolable inner voice that we can hear if we listen intently enough, only that which is informed by the senses. How much sensory freedom is necessary for authentication is a matter of interest, and in Dick's time one could be reassured because in spite of watching hours of television, children still exhibited uncanny bullshit detectors that seemed to undermine the idea of perceptual control. But the march of electric media continues apace, and it no longer can be held that some part of us is forever able to resist external influences. Modernity has redefined and continues to redefine the human; the internet and mass culture bear witness to the latest stage in that evolution. So long as there are still biological humans, inhabiting physical environments that can at times resemble those of our ancestral proving grounds, we can believe that there is an essence to the authentically human, that it comes from within and not from without. But the human is formed in relation to his or her environment and radical remodeling of the world and our sense perceptions cannot but help remodel the human as well.
Dick's conception of authenticity is a moving target. In a sense we can be 'true to our time', even as we move away from anything our ancestors might consider 'authentic' or even human. Dick reinforces this idea with his thinking that the old must pass for the authentic human being to live, and it is this authentic human that matters the most. The authentic human then is not fixed, but must be remade (reborn) each generation anew.
For Dick the authentic human is someone who offers quiet resistance in the face of tyranny, who refuses to cross the boundaries of his or her own inner code of conduct. But what of humans whose internal codes have been programmed in synchronicity with the structure in which they live? Once we have completely internalised the codes of the frame in which we live, we no longer experience any internal conflict, acting authentically cheerfully coincides perfectly with the dictates of the system. Sadly, this is the situation I see unfolding in our society today, in the generation of people raised on and by social media, the YouTube celebrities who see no disconnect between the personas they project and their authentic selves because they have come to completely identify with the image and have outsourced their own judgment to the 'crowd': take for example Olajide Olatunji's (YouTube celebrity KSI) refusal to acknowledge a difference between himself and his projected persona (Savov, 2018). While these humans may be consistent, they are certainly diminished. We are still in a position where we can see and recognise the gulf in experience between authentic humans and the pond-scum existences of the super-superficial, hopefully we take action before this becomes impossible.
Footnotes
1 The podcast is primarily concerned with Dick's belief in the mythic reality of ancient Judea rather than Dick's project of the authentic human and further details the religious experiences that led to his writings collected in his exigesis.↩
2 Hayles notes that the figure of the android figures heavily in Dick's work, alongside the archetype of the dark-haired woman, who is interpreted as variously standing for the author's mother, someone Dick felt to be cold and detached - thereby the android, and as the author's object of sexual desire (Dick was consistently attracted to and would become involved with young dark-haired women sharing certain characteristics), the long hoped for fullness of feeling and emotion - the authentic (Hayles, 1999).↩
References
Dick, P. K. (1978) How To Build A Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later. Available at: https://urbigenous.net/library/how_to_build.html (Accessed: 12 September 2018)
Hayles, N. K. (1999) How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. London: The University of Chicago Press, Ltd.
Molinsky, E. (2018) 'Visions of Philip K. Dick', Imaginary Worlds, Episode 89 [Podcast]. 4 April. Available at: https://www.imaginaryworldspodcast.org/visions-of-philip-k.-dick.html (Accessed: 13 September 2018)
Popova, M. (2013) How to Build a Universe: Philip K. Dick on Reality, Media Manipulation, and Human Heroism. Available at: https://www.brainpickings.org/2013/09/06/how-to-build-a-universe-philip-k-dick/ (Accessed: 12 September 2018)
Roderick, R. (1993) The Self Under Siege: Philosophy in the Twentieth Century - Part 2: Heidegger and the Rejection of Humanism [Lecture]. Duke University. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sDqDJJcJAOg (Accessed: 12 October 2018)
Savov, V. (2018) The Logan Paul Vs. KSI Fight Exposed An Ugliness That's Older Than Youtube. Available at: https://www.theverge.com/2018/8/27/17785762/logan-paul-ksi-fight-winner-result-youtube (Accessed: 13 September 2018)
