“getting to the core of things”

Stuart James Taylor (bio)
Glasgow University

A Review of Bolger, Robert K. & Scott Korb, eds. Gesturing Toward Reality: David Foster Wallace and Philosophy. New York: Bloomsbury, 2014. Cahn, Steven M. & Maureen Eckert, eds. Freedom and the Self: Essays on the Philosophy of David Foster Wallace. New York: Columbia UP, 2015.

In 1985, long before he had been hailed as “the voice of an era” for a novel about the way consumer choice precludes free will (Kirsch), and before he impressed upon fresh graduates of Kenyon College the importance of choosing how to think, David Foster Wallace defined “what exactly fatalism is” (Wallace, “Fatalism” 143). In his undergraduate thesis, “Richard Taylor’s ‘Fatalism’ and the Semantics of Physical Modality,” Wallace describes fatalism as “a metaphysical thesis characterizing the world as working in a certain sort of way, in which everything that did happen had to happen, everything that does and will happen must happen, and in which persons as agents can do nothing but go with the flow over which they enjoy absolutely no influence” (143). The recent publication of this thesis has prompted two essay collections that re-engage Wallace’s works by emphasizing his status as a philosopher, a facet James Ryerson considers “an overlooked aspect of his intellectual life … that would play a lasting role in his work and thought, including his ideas about the purpose and possibilities of fiction” (“Introduction” 2).

Published eight months apart, Gesturing Toward Reality: David Foster Wallace and Philosophy and Freedom and the Self: Essays on the Philosophy of David Foster Wallace signal a drive in Wallace Studies to resituate the writer’s cultural value, acclaiming him as both a “rare philosophical talent” and exemplary storyteller (Ryerson, “Introduction” 3). In comparing these singular contributions to the expanding field of Wallace Studies we can assess the fecundity of such an approach and its impact on Wallace scholarship.

For Scott Korb, the essays in Gesturing Toward Reality aspire “to present Wallace’s work as one of the many places where philosophical ideas reside,” and the collection as a whole aims to “reveal Wallace’s work as a series of reminders of how life is and how it could be” (3). Readers hoping to engage in a rigorous appraisal of the aesthetic, ethical, and epistemological influences and effects of Wallace’s “big, brainy novels” and essays may object to being misled: the “Philosophy” of the collection’s subtitle is in the noun’s colloquial sense, that of a particular (purportedly Wallace’s) Weltanschauung (Ryerson, “Consider”). Thus, reiterated and taken for granted throughout the collection are the virtues of choosing adequate “temples of worship” and the consequences of submitting to less-nourishing “addictions” (Ryerson, “Consider”). It is perhaps the provocative ambiguity of “philosophy” that results in Gesturing Toward Reality’s 300-odd pages containing a less satisfactory philosophical appraisal than Ryerson’s excellent introduction to Wallace’s thesis in Fate, Time, and Language.

Much of the success of Ryerson’s essay can be attributed to his respect for both Wallace’s precocious talent as an analytic philosopher and his family background (as the son of philosopher James Donald Wallace). By contrast, the aim of Gesturing Toward Reality to “reveal” Wallace’s philosophical significance as merely “a series of reminders” or notions of “how life is and how it could be” is a rather reductive treatment of a writer who made a significant contribution to the debate surrounding Taylor’s “Fatalism.” Consequently, Bolger and Korb’s examination of the “banal platitudes” of Wallace’s graduate commencement speech at Kenyon College fails to illuminate fully his philosophical import (Wallace, This is Water 9). By relying to a greater or lesser extent on the speech, better known as This Is Water and arguably the least fertile piece in Wallace’s oeuvre and the least representative of his literary philosophy, the essays of Gesturing Toward Reality often depict the writer superficially and even sentimentally: an act of neglect that has become so prevalent in Wallace Studies as to warrant Wallace the caricature nomination “Saint Dave.”¹

“Saint Dave” appears to be the patron of essays by Leland de la Durantaye, Robert K. Bolger, and Maria Bustillos. In “David Foster Wallace’s Free Will,” Durantaye hopes to show that the “most important idea” in Wallace’s works “is the question of how to be truly free” (21), which he does by considering “Wallace’s remark [in This Is Water] about being totally hosed … a signature stylistic trait and at the same time an absolutely serious, an almost technical, term in his philosophy” (21, 27). Durantaye’s argument is unconvincing, not least for the reductive treatment of ethics and logic resulting from his transplantation of the philosophically sophisticated term “free will” to a “stylistic” gadget in Wallace’s personal world-view tool belt (27). These distinct philosophical disciplines are thus amalgamated in what Durantaye calls a “philosophical spectrum,” in which the loosely ethical This Is Water is regarded as equivalent to Wallace’s work in modal logic (27). In almost the same breath Durantaye compares Wallace’s masterly honors thesis, which logically dismantles Richard Taylor’s notoriously tenacious “Fatalism,” with the Kenyon address which Durantaye calls “a masterpiece” (22-23). Similar misrepresentation also clouds Bolger’s “The Pragmatic Spirituality of David Foster Wallace,” in which Bolger gives “practical reasons for taking Wallace’s theology seriously” (33). While acknowledging that Dreyfus and Kelly misrepresent Wallace as “a sort of pop-culture self-help simpleton” (49), Bolger nevertheless reduces Wallace’s concerns to the “historic mystical tradition” excluding those nurtured by his literary and philosophical training (49). Bolger’s reliance on Wallace’s This Is Water, and his subsequent need to incorporate mystical theology as philosophy, impair his argument.

Maria Bustillos’s “Philosophy, Self-Help, and the Death of David Foster Wallace” is an interesting analysis of Wallace and philosophy. Her target is “the deficiency of modern academic disciplines in encouraging students, and particularly young people, to build a whole, healthy psyche” (124). This failing arises, for Bustillos, partly from “essentially esoteric” philosophical texts which “offer little in the way of immediate assistance to the suicidal drug addict or the victim of an anxiety disorder” (127). Exploring an alternative syllabus, Bustillos successfully presents “self-help literature” as a modern incarnation of the Christian lexical tradition from John Wycliffe through Samuel Smiles to modern popular self-help books that, though lacking the fine distinctions of philosophical literature, have practical value for their readers. However, Bustillos errs when she writes that “Wallace came to approach self-help literature with the same clear-eyed, absolutely undeceived seriousness with which he read everything else” and that “[b]ecause of his history with AA, Wallace had been conditioned to accept certain premises of self-help literature that ordinary readers might balk at,” without considering the apparent contradiction (132, emphasis added). While the role of Christianity in Wallace’s life merits further consideration, it seems fallacious to explicitly disregard the “essentially esoteric” distinctions of philosophy in the work of a writer who was partly raised on such esotericism, and whose philosophical thesis is a contribution to “formal philosophical works” (127). A consideration of Wallace’s Christianity would profit far more from an appropriate contextualization that balanced his belief in the values of literary theory and logic. It certainly appears that the collection’s parameters—David Foster Wallace and “philosophy”—force a false dichotomy on the mutually inclusive merits of philosophical fine-distinctions and self-help literature.

Notably stronger essays are offered by Thomas Tracey and Alexis Burgess. “The Formative Years: David Foster Wallace’s Philosophical Influences and The Broom of the System” benefits from Tracey’s close engagement with both the philosophical canon and Wallace’s more substantial works. This allows Tracey to claim 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 [his debut] novel,” The Broom of the System, and that his “philosopher-father was a supplementary influence on the author’s personal and intellectual development beyond the halls of academe” (157). Tracey convincingly argues that James Wallace’s philosophical writings “evince how [his] 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” (158). Opening this collection, with “How We Ought To Do Things With Words,” Burgess also provides a convincing close reading. He challenges the authority of Wallace’s overpraised infallibility by attempting to prove that in “Authority and American Usage” Wallace “got the right answer for (largely) the wrong reasons” (6). His account of Wallace’s “pretty big rhetorical slip” of demolishing descriptivism instead of promoting prescriptivism persuades by engaging with the technical intricacies of a piece denser than This Is Water (7).

Allard den Dulk’s is arguably the only essay in the collection that successfully redeems the project of David Foster Wallace and Philosophy. In “Good Faith and Sincerity: Sartrean Virtues of Self-Becoming in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest,” den Dulk suggests that main characters Mario, Gately, and Hal all “embody…a contemporary version of the ‘virtue’ of sincerity” (199-200). Using Sartre as his “heuristic perspective,” den Dulk proceeds through an account of the existentialism of Kierkegaard, Camus, Dostoevsky, and Kafka to argue that Infinite Jest promotes sincerity as “the ‘self-ideal’ or virtue that follows from this view of the self” in which one must “integrate his individual limitations and possibilities into a unified existence that he regards as his responsibility” (201-202). The success of den Dulk’s argument depends on a convincing reconstruction (indebted to the words of Ronal Santoni and Joseph Catalano) of Sartre’s notion of self-becoming as a framework for reading Wallace’s novel. Crucially, den Dulk’s approach to Infinite Jest allows a reading of the novel that reveals “Hal’s development to the attitude of sincerity is connected to a change in language-games, in communities of language and meaning” (219). Hal’s situation here contrasts to his context where “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” (219). Unfortunately den Dulk’s philosophical approach to reading Wallace is the exemplary exception in Gesturing Toward Reality.

Freedom of the Self is a hundred pages slimmer than Bolger and Korb’s Gesturing, and consequently has a tighter critical focus. The collection is edited by Steven M. Cahn and Maureen Eckert, the same editorial duo that brought us Fate, Time, and Language, the first contextualized publication of Wallace’s undergraduate philosophy thesis. An answer to the plea in the preface of Fate, Time, and Language for Wallace’s philosophical arguments to “be taken seriously and subjected to careful scrutiny,” Freedom and the Self is a sincere “tribute to a philosopher of consequence” (Cahn and Eckert viii). The majority of the collection consists of a rigorous appraisal of Wallace’s “Semantics of Physical Modality” (the earliest fraction of his considerable creative output), which risks excluding casual readers of Wallace. However, while Gesturing Toward Reality treads water by frequent returns to his lightweight Kenyon address, Freedom and the Self illustrates the benefits of a serious engagement with Wallace’s thesis, allowing the development of his fundamental creative inspiration—“what it is to be a fucking human being” (Wallace qtd. in McCaffery)—to be seen from its genesis.

The collection’s first four essays elucidate significant attributes of Wallace’s response to Taylor’s “Fatalism.” William Hasker’s opening piece, “David Foster Wallace and the Fallacies of ‘Fatalism’,” illustrates the “splendid achievement” of Wallace’s “System J” (the logico-semantic framework created to articulate the flaw in Taylor’s argument for fatalism). First, conceding that this is not an original contribution to the debate about Taylor’s argument (merely a more effective update of Saunders’s initial criticism), Hasker believes that Wallace “has failed to grant Taylor’s premise P5 in the sense in which Taylor understood it” (22). In Hasker’s example of an agent knocking on a flimsy door, Taylor’s fifth premise states that we ordinarily, naturally, and universally accept that the shaking door is not a consequence of the door having been knocked, but a condition of the agent’s knocking it (16). Wallace is shown to reject this, refusing to grant Taylor’s rhetorical tenacity in upholding our understanding of “consequences of” as “conditions for” (Wallace, “Fatalism” 169). This is a flaw in Wallace’s argument because, Hasker argues, Wallace’s “admirably explicit” (18) outline of his philosophical project was “to grant [Taylor] everything he seems to want in the argument” (Wallace, “Fatalism” 151). The source of this flaw can be attributed, according to Hasker, to an uncharacteristic misreading by Wallace of Taylor’s Metaphysics, “in which the view [of the distinction between the act and the ability to act] is attributed by Taylor to his opponents” (27). Yet, Hasker notes with admiration, this error does little to diminish Wallace’s achievement of a meaningful contribution to philosophical scholarship.

In response to Hasker, Gila Sher defends Wallace’s reading of the subtle distinctions between logical and semantic arguments, the former commonly (and erroneously) attributed to Taylor’s “Fatalism.” Wallace was aware, Sher is convinced, that the latter designation better describes Taylor’s method. This is crucial, because only by considering Taylor’s modal operators (as he himself does) as nonlogical is Wallace able to advance the description of them as physical by “distinguish[ing] between two types of physical modalities” (41). Sher’s conclusion (that attention to detail and innovative technical distinctions at the semantic level allow Wallace to reclaim free choice from the clutches of fatalism) results from a comprehensive appreciation of Wallace’s semantic sensitivity that discussions of choice in This Is Water could never elicit.

Like Sher, M. Oreste Fiocco is appreciative of Wallace’s semantic distinctions. Where Sher focuses on the treatment of personal agency in Taylor and Wallace, Fiocco is concerned with what kind of philosophical structure permits such agency. For Fiocco, this is contingency, “the presence of nonactualized possibility in the world” (57). In “Fatalism and the Metaphysics of Contingency,” Fiocco considers Wallace’s critique of Taylor’s argument “significant” because it foregrounds “synchronic possibility, the idea that incompatible states of affairs are possible at a single moment” (58). After defining modal and temporal “metaphysics of contingency” Fiocco illustrates that, while Wallace foregrounds this notion of synchronic possibility, “Wallace and Taylor are actually making incompatible assumptions about the nature of contingency; each is presupposing a totally different view of the modal features of the world in time” (55, 77). Fiocco believes that Taylor in fact rejects synchronic possibility (i.e. subscribes to a temporal metaphysics) while Wallace assumes that Taylor accepts it (i.e. subscribes to a modal metaphysics). Of greater interest to Wallace scholars, however, is Fiocco’s claim that Wallace’s understanding of possibility rests on the synchronic. Although Wallace’s focus, in his thesis timeline, is on “the relations among worlds at moments,” Fiocco writes, “an essential feature of these moments is that there are many possibilities at any given one” (81).

Following examinations restricted to the dissertation, Maureen Eckert considers Wallace’s philosophical work alongside its narrative consequences. In “Fatalism, Time Travel, and System J,” Eckert considers Wallace’s “System J…useful for exploring [David] Lewis’s account [in “The Paradoxes of Time Travel”] of the shift of context driving the Grandfather Paradox while pushing further into matters of modality” (100). Such consideration leads Eckert to explore resonances of Wallace’s philosophy in his fiction. Eckert’s contribution is also useful as an explanation of “System J,” supplementary to Hasker’s earlier illustration, which allows us to appreciate “the most radical feature of System J”: that the model “allows for no alternative presents in the context of an actual given present” (103). This feature (not bug) of System J permits, in Eckert’s own Lewisian example, “no way [for] a time traveller [to] actually and physically return to a past moment in personal time” whilst defending the conceivability of this: “to conceive of this possibility, for Wallace, cannot be confused with what is physically and actually possible” (105). In this territory, with imaginative freedom distinguished from contingent reality, Ecker concludes with thoughts on the development of Wallace from philosopher to author. She suggests that Wallace’s formal system is, like his fiction, an elegant means to highlight where exactly true freedom of choice lies and to demystify rhetorical sleights such as Taylor’s that would defend a fatalistic universe or one where the past could be violated as depicted in David Lewis’s Grandfather Paradox. With these remarks, Eckert at last opens the discussion of the legacy of Wallace’s early work on Taylor’s “Fatalism” to the field of narrative semantics that characterizes his later career.

The observed shift from philosophy to creative writing provides an effective segue to Daniel R. Kelly’s essay. In “David Foster Wallace as American Hedgehog,” Kelly observes that “much of what Wallace talks about under the monikers of free will and choice will not interest certain analytic philosophers who understand and use the term ‘free will’ in particular, technical ways” due to the fact that Wallace’s focus shifts from logical Free Will to an ethical, existential, and everyday conception of the term (128). Kelly takes this latter conception to be the “one big thing” Wallace “knows” (109). This may provoke readers of Wallace’s complex novels, which have been noted for their encyclopaedic quality (Burn 28). Nevertheless, Kelly argues that free will is a subject that is informed, for Wallace, by the manifold difficulties of American culture. Contextualizing Wallace’s understanding of free will by referring to his essays on Dostoevsky, Kafka, television and contemporary American fiction, in addition to Infinite Jest, Kelly persuasively distills This Is Water into two words (“wake up”), a keyword-keynote that earmarks a career-long analysis of free will in contemporary America (124). Kelly encourages further study into what he considers a corollary of free will as Wallace’s “big subject”: the “secondary shadow” of fraudulence and the “fraudulence paradox” as explicated in his later work, specifically “Good Old Neon” (Wallace 179).

An attempted synthesis of both free will as Wallace’s big subject and its obverse anxiety about fraudulence is offered in the collection’s final essay. In “David Foster Wallace on The Good Life,” Nathan Ballantyne and Justin Tosi aim to “contrast what Wallace says with some popular positions from moral philosophy and contemporary culture” on what philosophers call the good life (133). These popular positions are named “ironism,” “hedonism,” and “narrative theories,” and they serve as functional yet heavily compressed distillations of three nuanced philosophical stances on what makes life morally worthy. While noting that Wallace didn’t explicitly provide his own account of the good life in philosophy, Ballantyne and Tosi attempt to “triangulate his own view” of the good life from his written responses to irony, hedonism, and narrative theories (133). Perhaps the essay’s biggest problem, however, is its attempt to identify and define Wallace’s stance on narrative theories of life. While they convincingly illustrate how Wallace rejects the weak thesis of story-based ontologies, Ballantyne and Tosi are less successful in explaining his opinion of the strong thesis, “a subtle and complicated understanding of the self” with which they are “not ultimately sure how Wallace would engage” (157). This is a curious conclusion, because Wallace’s early works—namely The Broom of the System and “The Empty Plenum,” which stem from a deep interest in the theories of Wittgenstein and Derrida—show his artistic need for the strong thesis to be, if not all-encompassing, at least crucial to everyday conceptions of the self. What makes the essayists’ reluctance more striking is their subsequent comment that Wallace’s “humane recommendation about how to approach reflection on the good life” is “a sort of Wittgensteinian methodology”—the ambiguity of such a description being tantamount to an obfuscation of Wallace’s definitive consideration of Korsgaardian narrative theories (160). Nevertheless, this final essay does provide a productive engagement with Kelly’s proposal that fraudulence is antithetical to Wallace’s free will: Ballantyne and Tosi’s identification of fraudulence in theories of the good life indicates a fertile site for future scholarship.

A tightly structured, well-informed and at times provocative collection, Freedom and the Self benefits from deep philosophical penetration. In particular, Kelly’s amendment of This Is Water’s status is a timely corrective to the superficial paraphrasing of Wallace’s Kenyon address (that mantra of Gesturing Toward Reality). With its nuanced consideration of the full breadth and depth of his comments on writing, reading, and culture – from “Semantics of Physical Modality” to his most accomplished fiction – Freedom and the Self brings us closer to the core of David Foster Wallace.

Works Cited

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