DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

An Essay on Free Will

“I think Dave, foremost among a group of writers that also includes George Saunders and Rick Moody, created a new American literary idiom through which people who are young, or who aren’t young but still feel like they are, can give voice to the full range of their intelligence and emotion and moral sensibility without feeling dorky and uncontemporary. It’s very hard to read Dave and not feel almost peer-pressured to emulate him—his style is utterly contagious. But none of his emulators have his giant talent or his passionate precision. Somebody could write a whole monograph on how deliberately and artfully he deploys the modifier ‘sort of.’ ”

JONATHAN FRANZEN, New York Times Book Review

In 1962, the philosopher Richard Taylor used six commonly accepted presuppositionsto imply that human beings have no control over the future. David Foster Wallace not only took issue with Taylor’s method but also noted a semantic trick at the heart of Taylor’s argument.

Fate, Time, and Language presents Wallace’s brilliant critique of Taylor’s work. Wallace’s thesis reveals his great skepticism of abstract thinking made to function as a negation of something more genuine and real. He was especially suspicious of the cerebral aestheticism of modernism and the clever gimmickry of postmodernism, which abandoned “the very old traditional human verities that have to do with spirituality and emotion and community.” As Wallace rises to meet the challenge to free will presented by Taylor, we witness the developing perspective of this major novelist and his struggle to establish logical ground for his convictions. This volume, edited by Steven M. Cahn and Maureen Eckert, reproduces Taylor’s original article and other works on fatalism cited by Wallace. James Ryerson’s introduction connects Wallace’s early philosophical work to the themes and explorations of his later fiction, and Jay Garfield supplies a critical biographical epilogue.

“Fatalism, the sorrowful erasure of possibilities, is the philosophical problem at the heart of this book. To witness the intellectual exuberance and bravado with which the young Wallace attacks this problem, the ambition and elegance of the solution he works out so that possibility might be resurrected, is to mourn, once again, the possibilities that have been lost.”

REBECCA NEWBERGER GOLDSTEIN, author of Thirty-six Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction DAVID FOSTER WALLACE (1962–2008) wrote the acclaimed novels Infinite Jest and The Broom of the System and the story collections Oblivion, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, and Girl with Curious Hair. His nonfiction includes the essay collections Consider the Lobster and A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again and the full-length work Everything and More.

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS / NEW YORK www.cup.columbia.edu

COVER DESIGN: Marc Cohen

COVER PHOTO: Steve Liss / Time Life / Getty Images

Printed in the U.S.A.

DAVID FOSTER WALLACE F

ate, T

ime, a

nd Language: An Essay on Free Will

COLUMBIA

ISBN: 978-0-231-15157-3

9 780231 151573

51995

$19.95

THIS WAS all a long time ago, and I cannot be sure that my memory is

entirely accurate, especially regarding details; but David was memo-

rable enough that I think that most of our time together is burned

into my brain. I was teaching then at Hampshire College. My close

friend and colleague Bill de Vries, then teaching at Amherst College

phoned (e-mail was still a rarity) late in the fall semester to ask me

if I would be willing to talk with an honors student he was advis-

ing. Much of my work at the time was on natural language semantics

and logic; Bill knew that I was supervising another student—Jamie

Rucker—on a semantics thesis; and he suspected that his student’s

thesis was headed in that direction. He did mention that this student

was uncommonly talented, that he was the son of the renowned phi-

losopher James Wallace, that he was simultaneously writing honors

theses in philosophy and English, and that the English thesis was to

be a novel. I agreed to meet with him, and a few days later David

Wallace turned up in my offi ce.

It was evident immediately that Bill was right about the tal-

ent. David’s passion and aptitude for philosophy were obvious. He

wanted to talk about Taylor’s fatalism paper, the many failed attempts

to refute its argument, and he proposed to explore a new refutation.

David came prepared. His grasp of the literature was sure, even pro-

1 6 DAVID FOSTER WALLACE AS STUDENT:

A MEMOIR

J AY G A R F I E L D

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DAVID FOSTER WALLACE AS STUDENT

220fessional. His insight into the reasons that prior attempts to reply to

Taylor failed was not just accurate but also nuanced and precise. He

felt that Brown was on the right track but also saw the inadequacies

of his approach and wanted to talk about how to develop Brown’s

ideas. It all came out in a torrent, but a carefully constructed torrent.

I probably guessed at the time that it was rehearsed, but over the en-

suing months in which I worked closely with David, it was clear that

he simply thought and spoke so clearly that I now guess that this

unlikely introduction was most likely spontaneous.

I was also struck by the fact that David’s reaction to Taylor’s argu-

ment and to the failure of so many philosophers to have solved it

was righteous indignation. He was outraged that Taylor sought, and

claimed to have derived, an explicitly metaphysical conclusion from

purely logical or semantic premises; and he was genuinely off ended

by the failure of professional philosophers to have put things right.

His depth of feeling about this circumstance, and his identifi cation

of the nerve of the problem as this derivation of substance from

form, as opposed to the commitment to fatalism itself, bespoke an

unusual combination of philosophical passion and intellectual matu-

rity. I was very happy to take him on.

David agreed with my suggestion that a solution to this problem

would have to be both philosophical and formal. But at that time,

he had a background only in elementary logic. So we began with a

tutorial on tensed and modal logic so that he would have the formal

tools necessary to solve the problem. We met at least once, and oft en

twice weekly for the remainder of that semester and for most of the

spring, oft en overlapping our meetings with those I held with Jamie.

David quickly, with Jamie’s help, mastered the basics of Montague

grammar and tensed modal logic and was immediately ready to ap-

ply his newly acquired formal skills to the problem at hand. Th ose

meetings were energetic, involving much leaping to the blackboard,

sometimes with chalk—though oft en with erasers, given our many

false starts—and we made steady progress.

It is hard at this point to say with any certainty who introduced

what ideas into those conversations, and would probably have been

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JAY GARFIELD

221diffi cult to do so at the time. Th ese were discussions among col-

leagues, not ordinary supervision meetings between teacher and stu-

dent. We established early on the importance of physical modality to

the argument, and the need to distinguish between situational pos-

sibility and general possibility in order to model the interaction be-

tween tense and modality. In one of those conversations early in the

spring we hit upon the diff erence, so central to his solution, between

“couldn’t have” and “can’t have,” and that insight opened the doors to

the solution.

I am pretty sure, but not positive, that I proposed system J and

the broad sketch of its semantics (that is probably the reason David

calls it J); I am also pretty sure, and a little more positive, that as

soon as I did, David ran with it and showed both how it solved the

central problem of demonstrating the invalidity of Taylor’s argument

(as well as vindicating Brown’s basic intuition) and how treating time

and physical modality this way makes sense of a number of other

related puzzles about physical modality and time. His philosophi-

cal instincts were sure; his thought was precise. Th e thesis came to-

gether in a matter of a few weeks. David’s initial ideas were all con-

fi rmed and made precise. I regarded his argument as decisive then,

and I still do.

I knew at that time, as I mention above, that David was also writ-

ing a novel as a thesis in English. But I never took that seriously. I

thought of David as a very talented young philosopher with a writing

hobby, and did not realize that he was instead one of the most tal-

ented fi ction writers of his generation who had a philosophy hobby.

Of course, he returned to philosophy for a while years later, and I am

sure that had he stuck with it, and had he lived, he would have been

a major fi gure in our fi eld. I cannot understand what drove David

to take his own life; his ending is a source of great sadness; but the

memory of our brief time as colleagues is one of pure joy.

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