david foster wallace philosophy thesis

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Philosophical Sweep

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

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

I. “A special sort of buzz”

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

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

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

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

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

II. An “artistic and religious crisis”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

III. “INTERPRET-ME fiction”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IV. “A kind of philosophical sci-fi”

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

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

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

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

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

The explanation having been the hill, obviously.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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David Foster Wallace and the Challenge of Fatalism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Steven M. Cahn

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

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

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

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

Reviewed by Daniel Speak, Loyola Marymount University

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The story, inspired by Aristotle, goes like this:

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

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

The argument goes like this:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Honors Program Theses and Projects

The existential philosophy of david foster wallace.

Shoshana Primak , Bridgewater State University

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

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Dr. William J. Devlin, Thesis Advisor

Dr. Laura A. McAlinden, Committee Member

Dr. Gal Kober, Committee Member

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

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

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‘Fate, Time, and Language’

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To the Editor:

In his superb and highly sophisticated review of David Foster Wallace’s unfinished novel, “The Pale King” (April 17), Tom McCarthy stops to take a look at the publication of “Fate, Time, and Language” — Wallace’s undergraduate philosophy thesis, along with commentary by other authors — about the seminal and controversial 1962 essay “Fatalism,” by the philosopher Richard Taylor. In that essay, based on a set of at least seemingly persuasive logical axioms, Taylor (as have many before him) argued that, logically speaking, the future is essentially as set in stone as the past. McCarthy writes, “That the assertion is ridiculous isn’t the issue” — begging the question right off the bat, it seems to me. Whether it is ridiculous or not is precisely the issue that Wallace and Taylor discuss seriously and disagree seriously about. McCarthy summarizes what he considers the refutation of Taylor’s position, more or less as argued by Wallace’s thesis: “Taylor has assumed a single-lined, inevitable flow from past to future — whereas, even considered logically, each point in this progression in fact splits, along the lines of possibility, into divergent strands.” Along the lines of possibility, yes. Each point contains lots of possibilities, but only one of those possibilities actually occurs. There is no real-world “split,” unless perhaps in the recently posited alternate universes that surround us, such as the one in which I decided not to write this letter — one that may seem pretty appealing if the reader has gotten this far. Only one thing happens here.

Wallace’s novel and essay and McCarthy’s review are excellent demonstrations that the issues of will and choice and agency are, in our era of neurobiological investigations, not sterile and abstract. They are descending from the lofty and, yes, sometimes ridiculous heights of philosophy into the real world of human moral, social, jurisprudential and political actions. (See Daniel Wegner’s wonderful book “The Illusion of Conscious Will,” published a few years ago.) Did you know that if I hold a gun to your head — no, no, a pie to your face — the motor command to mush it there precedes my consciousness of the decision to do so?

DANIEL MENAKER New York

As a co-editor of “Fate, Time, and Language,” I want to clarify a matter obscured in Tom McCarthy’s review: David Foster Wallace wrote no work with this title. His senior thesis at Amherst College was titled “Richard Taylor’s ‘Fatalism’ and the Semantics of Physical Modality.” The book McCarthy reviewed includes Taylor’s original essay, criticisms of it that appeared in leading philosophical journals, Taylor’s replies to his critics, Wallace’s monograph and a related article by Taylor that sheds further light on his views.

Contrary to McCarthy’s claim, Columbia University Press did not publish Wallace’s thesis as a “kind of tie-in” to “The Pale King.” The publication is justified not by Wallace’s later literary accomplishments but by the high quality of his philosophical thinking. The issues he explores were not created, as McCarthy suggests, in the world of “analytical philosophy,” but extend back to Aristotle. They do not concern, as McCarthy unsympathetically puts it, “bean-counting,” but whether statements about our future actions are already true or false, a controversy that has its theological counterpart in the age-old conundrum of whether God’s omniscience is compatible with free will.

McCarthy seems uninterested in such issues, but Wallace found them fascinating, and the detailed analysis he offered will surely be required reading by those who henceforth undertake a serious study of the knotty problem of fatalism.

STEVEN M. CAHN Old Greenwich, Conn. The writer is a professor of philosophy at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

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• Postmodern Culture

“getting to the core of things”: A Review of Robert K. Bolger & Scott Korb, eds. Gesturing Toward Reality: David Foster Wallace and Philosophy and Steven M. Cahn & Maureen Eckert, eds. Freedom and the Self: Essays on the Philosophy of David Foster Wallace .

• Stuart James Taylor
• Johns Hopkins University Press
• Volume 26, Number 1, September 2015
• 10.1353/pmc.2015.0026
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1 David Foster Wallace and the Fallacies of “Fatalism”

• Published: April 2015
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This chapter presents David Foster Wallace's argument against John Turk Saunders' criticism of fatalism in Richard Taylor's essay “The Problem of Future Contingencies.” The essay was a carefully argued defense of Aristotle's view that assertions concerning future contingent events are neither true nor false, in which Taylor stated that fatalists do not concern themselves of the future, which is deemed uncontrollable. Saunders criticized this argument, saying that a person has the power to do something for the future. Despite being a critic of fatalism himself, Wallace claimed that Saunders' argument did not really succeed in refuting the notion of fatalist intuition. Even though Saunders' claim points out that Taylor's argument has implications that oppose people's intuitions about the world and about language, fatalists have their own intuition about the world.

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David Foster Wallace on Writing, Self-Improvement, and How We Become Who We Are

By maria popova.

In late 1999, David Foster Wallace (February 21, 1962–September 12, 2008) — poignant contemplator of death and redemption , tragic prophet of the meaning of life , champion of intelligent entertainment , admonisher against blind ambition , advocate of true leadership — called the office of the prolific writer-about-writing Bryan A. Garner and, declining to be put through to Garner himself, grilled his secretary about her boss. Wallace was working on an extensive essay about Garner’s work and his newly released Dictionary of Modern American Usage . A few weeks later, Garner received a hefty package in the mail — the manuscript of Wallace’s essay, titled “Tense Present,” which was famously rejected by The New Republic and The New York Review of Books , then finally published by Harper’s and included in the 2005 anthology Consider the Lobster and Other Essays . Garner later wrote of the review, “a long, laudatory piece”: “It changed my literary life in ways that a book review rarely can.”

Over the course of the exchange, the two struck up a friendship and began an ongoing correspondence, culminating in Garner’s extensive interview with Wallace, conducted on February 3, 2006, in Los Angeles — the kind of conversation that reveals as much about its subject matter, in this case writing and language, as it does about the inner workings of its subject’s psyche. Five years after Wallace’s death, their conversation was published in Quack This Way: David Foster Wallace & Bryan A. Garner Talk Language and Writing ( public library ).

Wallace begins at the beginning, responding to Garner’s request to define good writing:

In the broadest possible sense, writing well means to communicate clearly and interestingly and in a way that feels alive to the reader. Where there’s some kind of relationship between the writer and the reader — even though it’s mediated by a kind of text — there’s an electricity about it.

Wallace, who by the time of the interview had fifteen years of teaching writing and literature under his belt, considers how one might learn this delicate craft:

In my experience with students—talented students of writing — the most important thing for them to remember is that someone who is not them and cannot read their mind is going to have to read this. In order to write effectively, you don’t pretend it’s a letter to some individual you know, but you never forget that what you’re engaged in is a communication to another human being. The bromide associated with this is that the reader cannot read your mind. The reader cannot read your mind . That would be the biggest one. Probably the second biggest one is learning to pay attention in different ways. Not just reading a lot, but paying attention to the way the sentences are put together, the clauses are joined, the way the sentences go to make up a paragraph.

This act of paying attention, Wallace argues, is a matter of slowing oneself down. Echoing Mary Gordon’s case for writing by hand , he tells Garner:

The writing writing that I do is longhand. . . . The first two or three drafts are always longhand. . . . I can type very much faster than I can write. And writing makes me slow down in a way that helps me pay attention.

In a sentiment that brings to mind Susan Sontag’s beautiful Letter to Borges , in which she defines writing as an act of self-transcendence, Wallace argues for the craft as an antidote to selfishness and self-involvement, and at the same time a springboard for self-improvement:

One of the things that’s good about writing and practicing writing is it’s a great remedy for my natural self-involvement and self-centeredness. . . . When students snap to the fact that there’s such a thing as a really bad writer, a pretty good writer, a great writer — when they start wanting to get better — they start realizing that really learning how to write effectively is, in fact, probably more of a matter of spirit than it is of intellect. I think probably even of verbal facility. And the spirit means I never forget there’s someone on the end of the line, that I owe that person certain allegiances, that I’m sending that person all kinds of messages, only some of which have to do with the actual content of what it is I’m trying to say.

Wallace argues that one of the most important points of awareness, and one of the most shocking to aspiring writers, can be summed up thusly:

“I am not, in and of myself, interesting to a reader. If I want to seem interesting, work has to be done in order to make myself interesting.”

(Vonnegut only compounded the terror when he memorably admonished , “The most damning revelation you can make about yourself is that you do not know what is interesting and what is not.” )

Wallace weighs the question of talent, erring on the side of grit as the quality that sets successful writers apart:

There’s a certain amount of stuff about writing that’s like music or math or certain kinds of sports. Some people really have a knack for this. . . . One of the exciting things about teaching college is you see a couple of them every semester. They’re not always the best writers in the room because the other part of it is it takes a heck of a lot of practice. Gifted, really really gifted writers pick stuff up quicker, but they also usually have a great deal more ego invested in what they write and tend to be more difficult to teach. . . . Good writing isn’t a science. It’s an art, and the horizon is infinite. You can always get better.

Despite the prevalence of mindless language usage , Wallace — not one to miss an opportunity to poke some fun at then-President George Bush — makes a case for a yang to the yin of E.B. White’s assertion that the writer’s responsibility is “to lift people up, not lower them down,” arguing that part of that responsibility is also having faith in the reader’s capacities and sensitivities:

Regardless of whom you’re writing for or what you think about the current debased state of the English language, right? — in which the President says things that would embarrass a junior-high-school student — the fact remains that … the average person you’re writing for is an acute, sensitive, attentive, sophisticated reader who will appreciate adroitness, precision, economy, and clarity. Not always, but I think the vast majority of the time.

Learning to write well, with elegance and sensitivity, shouldn’t be reserved for those trying to have a formal career in writing — it also, Wallace points out, immunizes us against the laziness of clichés and vogue expressions :

A vogue word … becomes trendy because a great deal of listening, talking, and writing for many people takes place below the level of consciousness. It happens very fast. They don’t pay it very much attention, and they’ve heard it a lot. It kind of enters into the nervous system. They get the idea, without it ever being conscious, that this is the good, current, credible way to say this, and they spout it back. And for people outside, say, the corporate business world or the advertising world, it becomes very easy to make fun of this kind of stuff. But in fact, probably if we look carefully at ourselves and the way we’re constantly learning language . . . a lot of us are very sloppy in the way that we use language. And another advantage of learning to write better, whether or not you want to do it for a living, is that it makes you pay more attention to this stuff. The downside is stuff begins bugging you that didn’t bug you before. If you’re in the express lane and it says, “10 Items or Less,” you will be bugged because less is actually inferior to fewer for items that are countable. So you can end up being bugged a lot of the time. But it is still, I think, well worth paying attention. And it does help, I think . . . the more attention one pays, the more one is immune to the worst excesses of vogue words, slang, you know. Which really I think on some level for a lot of listeners or readers, if you use a whole lot of it, you just kind of look like a sheep—somebody who isn’t thinking, but is parroting.

He returns to the question of good writing and the deliberate practice it takes to master:

Writing well in the sense of writing something interesting and urgent and alive, that actually has calories in it for the reader — the reader walks away having benefited from the 45 minutes she put into reading the thing — maybe isn’t hard for a certain few. I mean, maybe John Updike’s first drafts are these incredible . . . Apparently Bertrand Russell could just simply sit down and do this. I don’t know anyone who can do that. For me, the cliché that “Writing that appears effortless takes the most work” has been borne out through very unpleasant experience.

In a sentiment that Anne Lamott memorably made, urging that perfectionism is the great enemy of creativity , and Neil Gaiman subsequently echoed in his 8 rules of writing , where he asserted that “perfection is like chasing the horizon,” Wallace adds:

Like any art, probably, the more experience you have with it, the more the horizon of what being really good is . . . the more it recedes. . . . Which you could say is an important part of my education as a writer. If I’m not aware of some deficits, I’m not going to be working hard to try to overcome them. . . . Like any kind of infinitely rich art, or any infinitely rich medium, like language, the possibilities for improvement are infinite and so are the possibilities for screwing up and ceasing to be good in the ways you want to be good.

Reflecting on the writers he sees as “models of incredibly clear, beautiful, alive, urgent, crackling-with-voltage prose” — he lists William Gass, Don DeLillo, Cynthia Ozick, Louise Erdrich, and Cormac McCarthy — Wallace makes a beautiful case for the gift of encountering, of arriving in the work of that rare writer who not only shares one’s sensibility but also offers an almost spiritual resonance. (For me, those writers include Rebecca Solnit , Dani Shapiro , Susan Sontag , Carl Sagan , E.B White , Anne Lamott , Virginia Woolf .) Wallace puts it elegantly:

If you spend enough time reading or writing, you find a voice, but you also find certain tastes. You find certain writers who when they write, it makes your own brain voice like a tuning fork, and you just resonate with them. And when that happens, reading those writers … becomes a source of unbelievable joy. It’s like eating candy for the soul. And I sometimes have a hard time understanding how people who don’t have that in their lives make it through the day.

Echoing Kandinsky’s thoughts on the spiritual element in art , he adds:

Lucky people develop a relationship with a certain kind of art that becomes spiritual, almost religious, and doesn’t mean, you know, church stuff, but it means you’re just never the same.

But perhaps his most important point is that the act of finding our purpose and finding ourselves is not an A-to-B journey but a dynamic act, one predicated on continually, cyclically getting lost — something we so often, and with such spiritually toxic consequences, forget in a culture where the first thing we ask a stranger is “So, what do you do?” Wallace tells Garner:

I don’t think there’s a person alive who doesn’t have certain passions. I think if you’re lucky, either by genetics or you just get a really good education, you find things that become passions that are just really rich and really good and really joyful, as opposed to the passion being, you know, getting drunk and watching football. Which has its appeals, right? But it is not the sort of calories that get you through your 20s, and then your 30s, and then your 40s, and, “Ooh, here comes death,” you know, the big stuff. . . . It’s also true that we go through cycles. . . . These are actually good — one’s being larval. . . . But I think the hard thing to distinguish among my friends is who . . . who’s the 45-year-old who doesn’t know what she likes or what she wants to do? Is she immature? Or is she somebody who’s getting reborn over and over and over again? In a way, that’s rather cool.

Quack This Way is excellent in its entirety, brimming with the very spiritual resonance discussed above. Complement it with this compendium of famous writers’ wisdom on the craft , including Kurt Vonnegut ’s 8 rules for writing with style , Henry Miller ’s 11 commandments , Susan Sontag ’s synthesized wisdom , Chinua Achebe on the writer’s responsibility , Nietzsche ’s 10 rules for writers , and Jeanette Winterson on reading and writing .

— Published August 11, 2014 — https://www.themarginalian.org/2014/08/11/david-foster-wallace-quack-this-way/ —

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David Foster Wallace's student thesis to be published posthumously

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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• Print length 264 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Columbia University Press
• Publication date December 10, 2010
• Dimensions 5.5 x 0.5 x 8.25 inches
• ISBN-10 0231151578
• ISBN-13 978-0231151573
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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Columbia University Press; Reprint edition (December 10, 2010)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 264 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0231151578
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0231151573
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 10.9 ounces
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.5 x 0.5 x 8.25 inches
• #507 in Free Will & Determinism Philosophy
• #954 in Philosophy of Logic & Language
• #2,040 in Philosophy Metaphysics

About the author

Steven m. cahn.

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

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Archives & Special Collections David Foster Wallace at Amherst College

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Remembering David Foster Wallace

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

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

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

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

David Foster Wallace Collections

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

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

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

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

Brief Interview with a Five Draft Man

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

• Introduction