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‘Into the Chrono-Synclastic Infundibulum’ – Kurt Vonnegut, Determinism, and the Monistic

Universe.

Abstract

Throughout his career, from the late fifties until the end of his life, Kurt Vonnegut was deeply concerned with issues of free will, technology and social and personal determinism. His fiction almost always portrayed a model of the universe that is monistic and determinate, and he took this model as necessitating compassion, equality and, if not quietism, then at least broad equanimity in the face of an indifferent universe. Though he was likely not aware of his work, the philosopher Baruch Spinoza had produced a very similar conception of the universe 400 years earlier, and had come to many of the same conclusions. This work traces the similarities in their thought, and investigates the consequences of this alternative model of existence. On a universal scale, each decentred the human subject, emphasising immanent materialism and determinism rather than transcendental free will. On a societal scale, each recommended a society structured in such a way as to allow the maximum flourishing of individual human natures – a goal frustrated, in Vonnegut’s opinion, by the replacement of human creativity by mechanised industry, and by the individualism and exceptionalism implicit in the American model of the ‘self-made man’, a model that stresses individual free will and drive as the most important predicate of success (at the expense of others). Finally, both Vonnegut and Spinoza believed (in line with modern neuropsychology) that the mind arises from and is ultimately determined by the physical body, a model of human existence that challenges our deepest assumptions about free will and identity. Taken as a whole, the monistic deterministic perspective leads to social, ethical and economic conclusions radically different from those of the mainstream.

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Contents

1. Introduction 4

2. Chapter One: Into the Chrono-Synclastic Infundibulum – Kurt Vonnegut’s novels of Time and Space, and Spinoza’s Deterministic Universe. 8

3. Chapter Two: ‘What in hell are people for?’ – Mechanisation, Industry and Human Conatus in Player Piano and God Bless You Mr Rosewater. 21

4. Chapter Three: ‘The big show is inside my head’ – Bad Chemicals, Passive Affects and the Divided Self in Breakfast of Champions. 35

5. Conclusion 46

6. Works Cited 49

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Introduction

As for myself: I had come to the conclusion that there was nothing sacred about myself or any human being, that we were all machines, doomed to collide and collide and collide. For want of anything better to do, we became fans of collisions. Sometimes I wrote well about collisions, which meant I was a writing machine in good repair. Sometimes I wrote badly, which meant I was a writing machine in bad repair. I no more harbored sacredness than did a Pontiac, a mousetrap, or a South Bend Lathe.

Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions

Kurt Vonnegut Jr. was a writing machine born on Armistice Day in 1922 in Indianapolis. He produced fourteen novels and a myriad of short stories, plays and essays during his forty-seven year career. He was not only a writing machine, however – he was also a very effective smoking machine. He chain-smoked unfiltered Pall Mall cigarettes throughout his life, from the age of 12 onwards. In the introduction to the short story Welcome to the Monkey House, Vonnegut relates the following anecdote about the inveterate familial tobacco habit, and his own take on its attraction:

My sister smoked too much. My father smoked too much. My mother smoked too much. I smoke too much. My brother used to smoke too much, and then he gave it up, which was a miracle on the order of the loaves and fishes.

And one time a pretty girl came up to me at a cocktail party, and she asked me, ‘What are you doing these days?’

‘I am committing suicide by cigarette,’ I replied.She thought this was reasonably funny. I didn’t. I thought it was hideous that I

should scorn life that much, sucking away on cancer sticks…the public health authorities never mention the main reason many Americans have for smoking heavily, which is that smoking is a fairly sure, fairly honourable form of suicide. (12)

In a 2006 interview with Rolling Stone, many decades later, Vonnegut would lament that ‘I’m eighty-three years old. The lying bastards! On the package Brown & Williamson promised to kill me. Instead, their cigarettes didn’t work.’1. And as of the eleventh of April, 2007, the writing machine named Kurt Vonnegut Jr. became in terminally bad repair, and therefore was unable to write not only well or badly but at all. He died from a brain injury after falling down a flight of stairs.

Why begin with this macabre story of a lifetime’s worth of suicide thwarted? As so often with Vonnegut, reality and fiction seem to merge in this odd confluence of events – the last flick of the tale, the punch line of a lifetime, in which expectations are confounded by sudden twists of fate, is a hallmark of Vonnegut’s writing. It is simultaneously the source of tragedy and of comedy in his work, and at its climax, of his own life. It is almost as if he became, as he quite literally did in Breakfast of Champions, one of his own characters - buffeted by forces beyond their own control, forces that seem arbitrary and unintelligible. Yet Vonnegut took pains to emphasise throughout his work that while these forces are arbitrary in the sense that they are not predicated on abstract personal whim, and are unintelligible in the sense that they convey no meaning whatsoever, they

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are not random. From the Chrono-Synclastic Infundibulum of The Sirens of Titan to the Tralfamadorian time of Slaughterhouse-Five to the Bad Chemicals and Broken Brains that permeate Breakfast of Champions, deterministic forces are at work throughout nearly all of Vonnegut’s work. Long causal chains, whether cosmic or parochial, social or organic, have wriggling at their heads the often bewildered and always troubled protagonists of Vonnegut’s fiction, struggling with the same questions that the author spent a career attempting to answer, and which I will explore in this essay - why are we here? What are we for? Can we meaningfully say that we have free will, and that we are responsible for our actions, our position in life, our successes and failures? What, if anything, can we do about all this?

Baruch Spinoza

In an attempt to provide a new perspective on Vonnegut’s fictional universe, I will read his works with reference to the philosophy of Baruch Spinoza. The question inevitably arises – in what plausible way can the thought of a Jewish-Dutch 17 th century philosopher be relevant to the work of a 20th century American writer of science fiction? Certainly, it is not recorded that Vonnegut had any particular interest in Spinoza, or that he had read any of his work. Though Spinoza was undergoing something of a renaissance in the 1960s and 70s amongst critical theorists, and was famously admired by Einstein2, nevertheless, as Frederick Pollock points out, there has never been a Spinozist school as there has been a Cartesian or Kantian school. Instead, his influence has waxed and waned, though ‘religion and poetry become [his] carriers unawares, and it might not be too fanciful to trace its presence even in the fine arts’ (Spinoza: His Life and Philosophy, 349). As such, if Vonnegut picked up traces of Spinoza’s thought, it almost certainly would have been through cultural osmosis rather than from direct engagement with academia. Indeed, Vonnegut was notoriously estranged from the academic humanities as a whole. In a self-interview originally published in The Paris Review, he confirms that ‘I never had to read a book for academic credit, never had to write a paper about it, never had to prove I’d understood it in a seminar’ (Palm Sunday, 100). He was certainly widely read, and passionate about literature – his novel Galapagos is saturated with quotations from figures as wide ranging as Anne Frank, Rudyard Kipling, William Shakespeare, Bertolt Brecht, Plato and Rabelais. He named his son after Mark Twain (44). But he preferred the company of scientists, and of ‘plumbers and carpenters and automobile mechanics’, to that of literary figures or academics (107). Vonnegut felt (and with perhaps some justification) that this disinterest was a cause of antagonism from the establishment – when his novel Slapstick was savaged by critics, he noted that

The hidden complaint was that I was barbarous, that I wrote without having made a systematic study of great literature, that I was no gentlemen, since I had done hack writing so cheerfully for vulgar magazines - that I had not paid my academic dues…I think it can be tremendously refreshing if a creator of literature has something on his mind other than the history of literature so far. Literature should not disappear up its own asshole, so to speak (108-109)

As far as Vonnegut was concerned, what was under attack was not only his supposed personal dilettantism, but also his prose style – terse, concise and at times almost childishly simplistic, meticulous in explicating the most basic of concepts and situations, and separated, in his mature style, into short, self-contained paragraphs. In Vonnegut’s experience with literary critics and

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academics, ‘clarity looks a lot like laziness and ignorance…any idea which can be grasped immediately is for them, by definition, something they knew all the time’ (293).

Coincidentally or not, Vonnegut’s painstaking commitment to clarity resembles that of Spinoza’s Ethics. Infamously written in the geometrical method, Spinoza’s text is made up of definitions, axioms, propositions and corollaries – an attempt to justify philosophy through the scientific rigour of the Euclidian method3. Spinoza, too, was an outsider in his own time – banished at the age of 24 from his close-knit Jewish community in a cherem or excommunication that Stephen Nadler believes ‘exceeds all the others proclaimed on the Houtgracht in its vehemence and fury’ (Spinoza: A Life, 127), presumably (though in no way certainly) for the views that would later inform his philosophy, he spent his life in relative solitude, reading, writing and working as a lens grinder. He turned down an offer a chair in philosophy at the University of Heidelberg from Johann Ludwig Fabricius, refusing on the grounds that it would interfere with his work, and compromise, in its public position, his iconoclastic and unorthodox views (311-13). His published works were decried by state and church alike – his name became synonymous with atheism, especially after his death, as Frederick Pollock notes:

Books and pamphlets were poured forth in abundance by writers of various degrees of notoriety and ability, and were esteemed at the time…this zeal for refuting the blasphemous, atheistic, deceitful, soul-destroying works of Spinoza…was by no means confined to the theological faculty. (Spinoza: His Life and Philosophy, 349-350)

Throughout much of Europe, the publishing or selling of Spinoza’s works was an offense – his legacy survived in private collections, his ideas disseminated without reference to their originator (Damasio 255). Coincidentally, Vonnegut met similar approbation upon the publication of Slaughterhouse-Five. The book has been banned from literature classes and school libraries over the decades since its release, including a memorable incident in a North Dakota school in which copies of the book were burned4. As recently as 2011, the book was banned in a Missouri high school because it ‘teaches principles contrary to the Bible’ (Langraf). Clearly, the ideas of both the 17 th century philosopher and the 20th century science fiction writer were inimical to the prevailing orthodoxy. My contention in this essay is that they were so in a manner almost exactly alike.

As I hope I have made clear, it is very unlikely that there is a direct intellectually genealogical link between Spinoza and Vonnegut. There are, certainly, marked similarities in their lives and experiences. Their writing shares a commitment to clarity and accuracy over purple prose and impressionism. Both were outsiders from the academic community, and both faced condemnation, controversy and censorship from the authorities (though Spinoza, undoubtedly, did so to a far greater extent). Both lost their mothers when they were young - Spinoza to illness, Vonnegut to suicide5. They both smoked too much6. Nevertheless, what is most remarkable is the marked similarity in their philosophies – and it is this relationship I wish to explore. I would like to stress that if this study is to have any merit beyond the curiosity of comparison, it will have to provide new perspectives not only on each writers’ work, but on wider philosophical, ethical and cultural issues. Reading Vonnegut through a Spinozistic lens will hopefully provide a sharper philosophical framework in which to consider the questions and consequences, the despair and possibility of hope that arise from his narratives. Vonnegut’s canon, meanwhile, in all its seemingly lackadaisical but ultimately sharp edged humour, its bleak tragedy, and ultimately, its heartfelt compassion and desire

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for understanding, can provide an approachable method for tackling Spinoza’s frequently formidable metaphysics. Both, I will argue, stem from a manner of thinking that has often represented the Road Not Taken in western philosophy, popular literature, economics and politics - and both may ultimately help point the way towards an alternative ethical and cultural model for contemporary society.

Notes

1. http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/11123162/ kurt_vonnegut_says_this_is_the_end_of_the_world/1 Unfortunately, the original interview is no longer accessible - the quotation used was sourced from this website, quoting the original interview. http://www.practicalenvironmentalist.com/humor/kurt-vonnegut-talks-about-the-end-of-the-world.htm

2. For instance, Gilles Deleuze was deeply influenced by Spinoza, going so far as to term him the ‘prince of philosophers’ (11) in Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza (1968), and emphasising the practical application of his work in Spinoza: Practical Philosophy (1970). His ‘plane of immanence’ is roughly equivalent to Spinoza’s singular substance, and both denied any absolute scale of morality, preferring a more pragmatic approach based on the interaction of individual modes. Later critical theorists such as Étienne Balibar and Antonio Negri integrated Spinozistic thought into politics - Spinoza et la politique (1985) and The Savage Anomaly: The Power of Spinoza's Metaphysics and Politics (1991) respectively. Similarly, in psychoanalysis, critics such as C. Rathbun (1934) noticed a correlation between the work of Sigmund Freud and Spinoza’s thought – Freud’s theory of the unconscious bearing a striking similarity to Spinoza’s belief that human behaviour is often caused by unrecognised and uncontrolled factors in their psychology, and the concept of libido echoing Spinoza’s Conatus. Finally, Albert Einstein, a man often referenced by Vonnegut, greatly admired Spinoza, professing a lifelong belief in his conception of God – ‘My views are near to those of Spinoza: admiration for the beauty of and belief in the logical simplicity of the order and harmony which we can grasp humbly and only imperfectly’ (‘letter to Murray W. Gross, Apr. 26, 1947’, in Einstein and Religion by Max Jammer, 1999).

3. H. G. Hubbeling notes in Spinoza’s Methodology (1967) that in the Ethics Spinoza ‘brings to its sharpest point what was already present in Greek and Scholastic syllogism. In Scholasticism this logic was clearly used only as an instrument for dealing with its subject, whereas Spinoza gives to his method a more material meaning so that his object (God, man, his affectus etc.) gets a more mathematical character.’ (33) Ever the thorough-going rationalist, Spinoza believed that existence could only be properly understood by logical or mathematical proofs – with the consequence that theoretically (if not practically), the entirety of reality as it presents itself under the attributes of thought and extension could be understood without recourse to empirical evidence.

4. Vonnegut recounts the incident and his response in the first chapter of Palm Sunday, calling it an ‘ignorant, dumb, superstitious thing to do’. He also recounts the recent banning of his books in Levittown, NY, and notes that he hears of similar incidents ‘twice a year or so’ (24). The trend has not abated - Slaughterhouse Five ranks 67th on the American Library Association’s 100 most frequently challenged books-between-1990-and-1999. http://www.ala.org/advocacy/banned/frequentlychallenged/challengedbydecade/1990_1999

5. Spinoza’s mother died from respiratory problems when Baruch was six years old (Nadler 46), while Vonnegut’s mother committed suicide, by overdosing on sleeping pills, when he was 21 (Palm Sunday 65).

6. Antonio Damasio notes that while his ‘one vice’ was smoking tobacco incessantly, the respiratory problems that led to Spinoza’s death was also likely to have been severely exacerbated by glass dust inhaled during his lens grinding (Looking for Spinoza 261).

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Into the Chrono-Synclastic Infundibulum – Kurt Vonnegut’s novels of Time and Space, and Spinoza’s Deterministic Universe.

Spinoza’s Ontology

It is always best to start small when building the ground work on which to base a philosophy, so where better to begin than with a model of the entire universe? Such is the philosophical gambit that Spinoza begins the Ethics upon – and I believe it will be instructive to first describe Spinoza’s revolutionary ontological system before applying his thinking to Vonnegut’s novels. While an embedded approach to critical material is almost always preferable, Spinoza’s thought does not lend itself to aphoristic quotation – his system is logically ‘built’, layer upon layer, and its consequences can only be understood once its fundamentals are properly conceived. As such, I will begin each chapter with a systemic description of the relevant Spinozistic concept, and the method of reasoning by which Spinoza came to it – and only then demonstrate its connection with Vonnegut’s work.

Both The Sirens of Titan (1959) and Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) are concerned with the questions of free will inherent in a universe predicated purely on causal mechanisms – the former is particularly geared towards the determinants of physical positioning and material interactions, the latter towards the passage of time (or, indeed, in Slaughterhouse-Five, its radical dislocation). Spinoza’s system will provide the theatre in which questions of time and space will be able to play out. Spinoza begins the Ethics by laying out several important definitions, the most important of which is that of substance:

By substance I understand that which is in itself and is conceived through itself: that is, that which does not need the concept of another thing, from which concept it must be formed. (ID3)

This conception of an ontologically independent substance was not, in itself, a revolutionary idea in the 17th century. As Beth Lord notes, the contemporary ‘common sense’ view had long held the Aristotelian principle that substances are the most basic building blocks of the universe, with attributes as their changeable properties - and Descartes had only recently suggested that substances could be split into two categories, those of physical extension and non-physical thinking (Spinoza’s Ethics 16-17). A convenient (if simplified) visual metaphor for this model would be a set of marbles (representing substances) strewn about a table. Some are physical, some are mental (and in the case of human beings, one of each joined together1), but they are all ultimately separate, and are presided over by an infinite and ontologically transcendental thinking substance, God, who creates and sustains them. Spinoza’s revolutionary break from this tradition is that he asserts that there is only one substance, and that substance is God – insofar as God is ‘a substance consisting of infinite attributes, each of which expresses eternal and infinite essence’ (IP11), and that ‘there cannot exist in the universe two or more substances of the same nature i.e. of the same attribute’ (IP4). This Substance is expressed through modes which are ‘the affections of substance, or, that which is in something else, through which it is also conceived’ (ID5). A mode, unlike a substance, depends on a pre-existing thing to be – it is not self-subsistent, but is instead a changeable property of substance, neither separate from nor wholly representative of that substance. Finally, Spinoza also uses the

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term attribute, defining it as ‘that which the intellect perceives of substance, as constituting its essence’ (ID4). Attributes, then, are various ways that the intellect can perceive substance, but they are not subjective, separate impressions – they are identified directly with substance, they are substance, but not in its totality. The two attributes among infinite others that human beings are able to perceive are extension and thought – terms already familiar from Descartes’ dualistic ontology, but placed in a radically different context. As Beth Lord succinctly notes,

Descartes understands extension and thinking to be fundamental properties of substances. But Spinoza disagrees. For him, extension and thinking are not properties of a substance, but rather two different ‘ways’ that a substance can be perceived. Extension and thinking are two expressions of the essence of substance…it is incoherent to think of a substance without an attribute, because the intellect necessarily perceives substance as one or more of its attributes. (21)

Extension and thought are no longer ontologically separate categories – instead, both stem from the same infinite substance. This is, at first, a counterintuitive concept – we are asked to accept that all things, including ourselves, are parts of a single being, and a being that is, according to Spinoza, indivisible (IP13). This seems impossible, considering our everyday experience of countless separate ‘things’. However, the key to understanding how this can occur is in Spinoza’s conception of modes, which as stated in his first definitions described above are preceded by and rely on substance, but do not constitute it as cells constitute a body – they are ontologically dependent on substance, arising from it, ‘in’ and ‘of’ substance. All finite things are modes of substance, perceived through the attributes of thought and extension. It is illustrative at this point to take into account Spinoza’s dual conception of natura naturata and natura naturans when trying to understand this distinction. Natura naturata, literally nature natured, is the produced system of modes, passive modes of being – ‘everything which follows from the necessity of the nature of God’. Natura naturans, literally nature naturing, meanwhile, is the active and producing substance, ‘active nature…that which is in itself and is conceived through itself…God, in so far as he is considered a free cause’ (IP29 Scholium). The former follows from the latter – simply, the former is the world with which we are familiar, the latter the metaphysical substance that is all being.

Spinoza calls this substance God throughout the Ethics, but it is important at this point, before extrapolating the philosophical consequences of Spinoza’s model of universal ontology, to note that Spinoza, in using the term ‘God’, is not talking about the God of Christianity or Judaism - with all the implications of intentionality, interventionism and personal interest such conceptions entail. Instead, he argues that ‘the eternal and infinite entity we call God, i.e. Nature, acts by the same necessity as that by which he exists’ (IV Preface). The creator is self-creating, and exists immanently within its own creation – it is not, as in Descartes’ system, transcendentally separate from the reality we know, though it is infinitely more complex than we, able only to perceive extension and thought, can possibly understand. In necessarily existing, God (or nature) does not operate from freedom of will (IP32 Corollary) – the freedom to choose to do one thing or another, as we commonly conceive of free will, is logically inconsistent with an infinite force of actualisation which necessarily conceives of and actualises everything already. Nothing is outside of substance, so nothing outside of substance could be willed (or indeed conceived of). The consequences of this are startling – as Spinoza notes, ‘will cannot be called a free cause, but can only be called a necessary cause’ (IP32). There is no teleology in the universe, no plan decided upon by a God that wills things

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to happen, and does so towards a proscribed end – everything proceeds necessarily. This inherently denies the possibility of an anthropomorphic god, and Spinoza pours scorn upon those who would, through their imagination, attribute to God intentionality or interest:

For example, if a stone fell off a roof on to someone’s head and killed him, they will show in the following way that the stone fell in order to kill the man. They will say that unless the stone fell in this way, by the will of God, how could so many circumstances (for many circumstances often come together at the same time) occur by chance? Perhaps you will reply that this came about because the wind was blowing, and the man was walking in that particular direction. But (they will insist) why was the wind blowing at that time? Why was the man walking that way at the very same time? ...So they will not cease to ask for the causes of causes, until you take refuge in the will of God, that is, the asylum of ignorance. (I Appendix)

Everything in Spinoza’s system, including and stemming from God, is causally determinative – free will is denied not only to God but, necessarily, to human beings. The subjective impression that one is able to make independent decisions, that some transcendent will of one’s own allows an undetermined and ‘free’ choice, stems ultimately from ignorance – ‘experience, no less clearly than reason, teaches us that men believe themselves to be free by virtue of this cause alone: that they are conscious of their actions and ignorant of the causes by which they are determined’ (IIIP2 Scholia). Spinoza is unequivocal on this point. Human beings are in no way transcendent from the universe they are a part of, and no special dispensation exists to excuse them, body or mind, from the determinate nature of cause and effect that governs the universe – they are not, to use Spinoza’s politically tinged metaphor, an ‘empire within an empire’ (III Preface). Human freedom can be achieved, according to Spinoza – but his understanding of the concept differs sharply from the common sense idea that, fundamentally, freedom is the ability to ‘do what thou wilt’, in Crowley’s notorious phrasing. Instead, Spinoza’s freedom consists of two interrelated states of being – the first is to strive to act in order to better actualise one’s own essential nature, rather than allowing oneself to be enthralled to outside passions. The latter is the ability, through reason, to understand and accept with equanimity one’s own causally determined nature, and the limits of one’s own powers – to do what we can, rather than what we will. It is the latter feature that I will concentrate on in the following section.

The Sirens of Titan

In the beginning, God became the Heaven and the Earth…And God said, ‘Let Me be light’ and He was light.

- The Winston Niles Rumfoord Authorised Revised Bible (139)

The Sirens of Titan (1959) is a novel of (determined) travel and movement – and as such, its narrative must be closely followed in analysis, as each event, each displacement, builds on and reinforces the implications of the last. It begins with the protagonist of the novel, Malachi Constant, the world’s richest man, approaching the manor belonging to Mr and Mrs Winston Niles Rumfoord,

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after being invited to witness one of Rumfoord’s periodic dematerialisations. Winston Niles Rumfoord is a man who, with his dog Kazak, has become chrono-synclastically infundibulated:

[He] had run his private space ship right into the heart of an uncharted chrono-synclastic infundibulum two days out of Mars…now Winston Niles Rumfoord and his dog Kazak existed as wave phenomena – apparently pulsing in a distorted spiral with its origin in the Sun and its terminal in Betelgeuse. (11)

By going through one of these cosmic phenomena, Rumfoord has been scattered across not only space, but time as well – he is able to see the past, present and future with perfect clarity and knows with perfect clairvoyance what is occurring anywhere within the long ribbon he has become, materialising on different planets and solar bodies as they orbit into his wavelength. He is no longer a ‘punctual’ person, in either the spatial or temporal sense – he can (and often does) appear in two places at the same time, and is always already, from his perspective, appearing at every given time in the novel. He has a startling message for Constant – that he will travel from Earth to Mars, then Mercury, before returning to Earth, and ultimately ending up on Titan. He will also father a child with Rumfoord’s wife Beatrice. Both Constant and Beatrice struggle against this prediction, but eventually, both are conveyed by different but no less deterministic means to Mars and beyond, and each, despite their struggles, seem to be the powerless playthings of fate. Even when Beatrice does the obvious, asking Rumfoord for forewarning so that she may change her future, she does so under a false understanding of her situation:

“If you had one shred of concern for me, couldn’t you tell me exactly how Malachi Constant of Hollywood is going to try to trick me into going to Mars, so I could outwit him?”

“Look,” said Rumfoord, “life for a punctual person is like a roller coaster…sure, I can see the whole roller coaster you’re on. And sure – I could give you a piece of paper that would tell you about every dip and turn, warn you about every bogeyman that was going to pop out at you in the tunnels. But that wouldn’t help you any…because you’d still have to take the roller-coaster ride…I didn’t design the roller coaster, I don’t own it, and I don’t say who rides and who doesn’t.” (41)

The central truth of Rumfoord’s metaphor is that knowing how something will happen cannot, in itself, predicate a choice as to whether it will happen – Beatrice is strong willed, but not free willed. As in Schopenhauer’s pithy paraphrase of one of Spinoza’s letters, ‘if a stone projected through the air had consciousness, it would imagine it was flying of its own will’2 – the stone may even see where it is going to land, but will cannot change the fundamental necessity of its physical movement. It cannot stop in mid-air, even if it wanted to. Ultimately, what Beatrice believes to be resistance to what is causally necessary leads to her unwittingly contributing to it – the financial advisors she hires to help her stay on Earth, George Helmholtz and Roberta Wiley, are in fact Martian agents who have been sent to kidnap her. Yet if Beatrice puts too much faith in the power of her own freely willed intentions to control her fate, Malachi Constant labours under the false idea that the unknowable mechanisms of the universe have intentions for him – to use another Spinozistic metaphor, that the stone that falls on his head was caused by the will of God. A running phrase throughout the book is ‘I guess somebody up there must like me’, almost always attributed to Constant – and at the beginning of the book, having received Rumfoord’s message, he wonders if ‘there could possibly be eyes up there, eyes that could see everything he did’ (34-35). Noel Constant, Malachi’s father, made his

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fortune by investing in companies whose initials corresponded to the sequential letters in the Bible, arranged in pairs – so, for instance, I.N., T.H., E.B, E.G., and so on:

His system was so idiotically simple that some people can’t understand it, no matter how often it is explained. The people who can’t understand it are people who have to believe, for their own peace of mind, that tremendous wealth can be produced only by tremendous cleverness. (52-53)

Noel Constant, too, is convinced that it was not blind chance that made him rich – in his final letter to his son, he helplessly describes the bizarre position he had found himself in:

It looked as though somebody or something wanted me to own the whole planet even though I was as good as dead. I kept my eyes open for some kind of signal that would tell me what it was all about but there wasn’t any signal. I just went on getting richer and richer. (64)

Malachi Constant, which means faithful messenger, inherits Noel’s absurd business plan as well as his belief that there is, behind its success, some form of teleological imperative. The reader is told that ‘the motto under the coat of arms that Constant had designed for himself said simply, The Messenger Awaits’ - all he requires, or so he believes, is ‘a first class message from God to someone equally distinguished’ (14). Ironically, the message Constant eventually delivers is one in which God very specifically takes no part.

The action of The Sirens of Titan is a litany of privations for its three main characters, and in particular for Constant. At all points, his agency is denigrated by the irresistible forces surrounding him, yet at all points, he desperately tries to discover an overarching purpose for his experiences. On Mars, he is forced to join the Martian Army - his memory is wiped repeatedly, and he is fitted, as all Martian soldiers are, with a radio transmitter that controls his body and shocks him when he considers resisting. Constant, now known as ‘Unk’, completely oblivious to his past, can conceive of life only as ‘blanks and glimpses, and now and then maybe the awful flash of pain for doing something wrong’ (73). Even this piteous philosophical breakthrough is made ‘tentatively’ – and Unk’s constantly frustrated attempts to discover the details of his past life and the origin of his current predicament lead to him being forced to kill his best friend, Stony Stevenson, without even realising who it is he is killing. Eventually, Unk and a fellow soldier named Boaz wind up stranded on Mercury by what appears to be a flight malfunction in their warship - they remain trapped under the surface for two and a half years. Unk, restlessly wandering the tunnels of Mercury, naked and unshaved, is once again discerning intention where there is none, and becoming all the more frustrated for it:

Unk was at war with his environment. He had come to regard his environment as being either malevolent or cruelly mismanaged. His response was to fight it with the only weapons at hand – passive resistance and open displays of contempt. (141)

Boaz, meanwhile, remains in one place, a vault of rock furnished with creature comforts, taking care of himself and the Harmoniums. The Harmoniums are Mercury’s only native fauna, and could be said, in their peacefulness, harmlessness and perfect adaptation to their environment to be perfectly immanent creatures, concerned only with being3. They are small, tissue thin creatures, which cling to

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the cave walls and feed purely on the kinetic energy produced by the vibrations of the planet. They do not excrete, they do not sexually reproduce but instead ‘flake’ off new Harmoniums, and they do not die after reaching maturity. For the Harmoniums, ‘hunger, envy, ambition, fear, indignation, religion and sexual lust are irrelevant and unknown’, and ‘there is no way in which one creature can harm another, and no motive for one’s harming another’ – their only action regarding each other at all is an entirely automatic telepathic call and response, the messages consisting of ‘Here I am, here I am, here I am’ and ‘So glad you are, so glad you are, so glad you are ’ (132). Boaz adores them, and delights in taking care of them – ‘he had never felt better physically, had never felt better mentally, had never felt better spiritually’. Boaz, too, thinks that there may be some greater force at work, testing him, but unlike Unk, decides that ‘all I can do is be friendly and keep calm and try to have a nice time till it’s over’ (143). It turns out he is correct in guessing that someone else is causing their confinement in Mercury – but what is important is that Boaz understands that he can do nothing about his situation beyond simply accepting it. When Rumfoord (for it is indeed he who was the cause for them being placed in this situation) provides them with an escape route, Boaz refuses to go with Unk. Freedom back on Earth, for Boaz, consists of living with people who ‘push me this way, then they push me that – and nothing pleases ‘em, and they get madder and madder, on account of nothing makes ‘em happy’. It is a freedom that is based on desires, ambitions, and ultimately on the misery of unfulfilment that desires and ambitions bring. The freedom Boaz finds is not that of the possibility, of being free to do as he pleases, but that of doing what he can, in his own limited circumstances – as he finally says to Unk, ‘I found me a place where I can do good without doing any harm’ (151). Like the Harmoniums, the equanimity with which he engages with his environment allows him to live happily and peacefully, without having to resort to the futile stresses of desiring to fully find purpose in, or exercise control over, what is happening.

Unk, too, eventually finds a way in which to recognise his fundamentally determined nature. Back on Earth, he finds that a new religion has swept the globe - The Church of God the Utterly Indifferent. Spinoza contends in the Ethics that ‘the person who loves God cannot endeavour that God, conversely, should love him’ (VP19). Similarly, the Church believes (and is thankful for) the fact that Mankind has finally been freed from the concept that God cares or even notices them in any way - according to Rumfoord, the two chief teachings of the religion are that ‘puny man can do nothing at all to help or please God Almighty, and Luck is not the hand of God’. Ultimately, the church’s overarching concern is to ‘take care of the People, and God Almighty will take care of himself’ (128). Peace and harmony reign, and there is only one human being who is still reviled – the figure of Malachi Constant, who waited in vain to help God, and believed there was an intention beyond his outrageous fortune, and in doing so squandered his wealth selfishly. The Church have been taught to expect the return of ‘The Space Wanderer’ (who is Constant, who is Unk), who will greet them with the following words – ‘I was a victim of a series of accidents, as are we all’ (161). He does so, of course, as he was always determined to, and is met rapturously by the adoring crowds – yet just as The Space Wanderer begins to feel at peace with his fellow man and his place in the universe, with the seemingly pointless suffering that led him to the point of accidentally delivering such profound wisdom, Rumfoord reveals the truth of his identity and the nature of his misfortunes to him and to the crowd, and banishes him, with Beatrice and his son Chrono, to Titan.

This would seem capricious as well as cruel of Rumfoord, were it not for the fact that it was always already going to happen – and in the denouement of the novel on Titan, we learn that Rumfoord, and all his schemes, were again the result of an outside influence. The Russian nested

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doll of entities using each other and being used in turn goes up one further again – Rumfoord shares his time on Titan with Salo, a Tralfamadorian alien whose ship has broken down on his way across the galaxy to deliver an important message. His fellow extra-terrestrials have sent him messages by manipulating the entirety of human history and culture. Stonehenge, for instance, translates to ‘replacement part being rushed with all possible speed’ (190). The important message Salo is carrying turns out to be laughably, profoundly meaningless -‘Greetings’ (210) – but then, so is the galaxy it is being carried across. The Tralfamadorians are a race of robots, literally programmed, even as they are sentient – and as Peter Reed notes,

Constant is led to Titan by the machinations of Rumfoord, and beyond that by the schemes of the Tralfamadorians, and beyond that – what? Perhaps only the meaningless, arbitrary workings of the Universe. In making the Tralfamadorian machines the last traceable source of control, the novel goes a long way towards implying a purely mechanical Universe…[yet] there is nothing to say that the Universe is schemed in malignity. Though it frequently appears adverse, its main characteristics are shown to be its indifference and its incomprehensibility. (Kurt Vonnegut Jr. 85)

Throughout The Sirens of Titan, Vonnegut emphasises the specifically physical nature of this mechanical system, and time and again, equivocates between human and ‘natural’ phenomena. It is an undeclared but striking deployment of a substance monism similar to Spinoza’s own – at all points emphasising the shared ontology of humans and their environments. So, for instance, Ransom K. Fern is quoted as insisting that since ‘every passing hour brings the Solar System forty-three thousand miles closer to Globular Cluster M13 in Hercules’, only misfits believe ‘that there is no such thing as progress’ (6) – eliding the differing senses of ‘progress’ as both a purely physical process and as a distinctly anthropocentric and teleological advancement. Rumfoord is quoted as lamenting that it is ‘a great mistake to have matter that can think and feel…it complains so’, though he admits that ‘boulders and mountains and moons could be accused of being a little too phlegmatic’ (33) – nevertheless, it is the matter doing the thinking and feeling, rather than a transcendental ‘empire within an empire’ that is able to abstract itself from physical process. The Church of God the Utterly Indifferent’s creed addresses God as the ‘Spinner of Galaxies, Soul of Electromagnetic Waves, Inhaler and Exhaler of Inconceivable Volumes of Vacuum, Spitter of Fire and Rock’ (152) – yet all of these actions, though on a cosmic scale, are human metaphors that are bodily or automatic rather than conscious or intentional (he is not, for instance, something as purposeful as ‘the designer of stars’). The creator is creating, and is indeed exceptionally, violently active in doing so – but He is not listening or intending anything (nor capable of doing either).

Even on a more personal scale, the overarching state of the universe takes precedence. In the scene in which Stony Stevenson is strangled, he desperately struggles to escape from the massive stone stake he is chained to, craning his neck to see it ‘as though he thought he might escape by use of the scientific method, if only he could find out how high the stake was and what it was made of’ (71) – and where the narrative spends only a few short lines on describing the man, an entire paragraph describes the dimensions, physical makeup, and distance from the sun of the stake, dwarfing him literally and textually. And finally, Winston Niles Rumfoord, the wave-form, is an entity stuck between the traditional conception of ‘man’ and the imagery of particle physics. He has become a physical phenomenon – but then, what else, in a mechanistic and deterministic universe, was he before? In moving from a punctual to a chrono-synclastic existence, he has simply changed

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his perspective. He is no less subject to the cause and effect so inherent in Vonnegut’s (and in Spinoza’s) ontology. And perspective is perhaps the only thing that can be changed in either philosophy - the only freedom available. The only content characters in The Sirens of Titan are those who are able to make the movement to acceptance of necessity and to peaceful equanimity - as embodied by Boaz and his Harmoniums, or by the Church of God the Utterly Indifferent. And this is a philosophical strategy that saturates Vonnegut’s later novel, Slaughterhouse-Five, to the point of notoriety4 – the ability to say, as in its constant refrain, ‘so it goes’.

Slaughterhouse-Five

Listen: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time. Billy has gone to sleep a senile widower and awakened on his wedding day. He has walked through a door in 1955 and come out another one in 1941…Billy is spastic in time, has no control over where he is going next, and the trips aren’t necessarily fun. He is in a constant state of stage fright, he says, because he never knows what part of his life he is going to have to act in next. (17)

If Malachi Constant was lost in space, then Billy Pilgrim is lost in time – but the fourth dimension turns out to be no less deterministic than the other three. Constant moves from planet to planet at the behest of forces unknown to him, but Billy moves back and forth randomly throughout the timeline of his life – and these movements are seemingly the only random element in his otherwise utterly predetermined existence. This makes no difference whatsoever to his ability to change his destiny, however. In The Sirens of Titan, Rumfoord’s ability to conflate the past, present and future strongly implied the impossibility of free will. In Slaughterhouse-Five, the reader is presented with a glimpse of what it would be like to see time from his point of view – and the negation of free will is made explicit.

The plot of Slaughterhouse-Five is essentially simple. Billy Pilgrim is an inept chaplain’s assistant in the Second World War, and is captured at the Battle of the Bulge. He is made a prisoner of war, first in an unnamed prison camp in the company of a cadre of English officers, and later in Dresden, where he works in a factory producing supplements for pregnant mothers. When the allies firebomb Dresden, Billy and his fellow POWs shelter in the titular slaughterhouse, deep underground. They discover a scene of utter devastation – Dresden ‘was like the moon now, nothing but minerals. The stones were hot. Everybody else in the neighbourhood was dead’ (129). They are forced to search the ruins for survivors by the Germans – Billy’s comrade, the fatherly schoolteacher Edgar Derby, is shot for taking a teapot. After the war, he is institutionalised with PTSD. Years later, in the fifties and sixties, Billy is a successful optometrist married to a wife he does not know how to love, and has a daughter who, after his wife’s death, cares for him to the point of tyranny. On the night of his daughter’s wedding, he is abducted (or believes he is abducted5) by Tralfamadorians and taken to their home planet, where he is displayed in a zoo in the company of the supermodel Montana Wildhack. At the end of his life, he is shot by Paul Lazzaro, who blames him (wrongly) for the death of Roland Weary during their mutual imprisonment by the Germans. Billy is shot while he is giving a speech on the fundamental truth he has learned from his experiences – that from a nonlinear temporal perspective, he will no more be dead than he will be alive or as yet unborn. He is only going to re-live his death, as he remembers doing many times before.

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Slaughterhouse-Five does not allow the reader to move through these events in sequence, however, any more than Billy is allowed to do so as he moves back and forth in time – and indeed, as a novel, it throws out many of what William Rodney Allen terms ‘the writer’s usual bag of chronological tricks – suspense and confrontations and climaxes’. Rather than following a linear progression through the novel’s events,

Slaughterhouse-Five is more like an ascending, widening spiral that circles over the same territory yet does so from an ever higher and wider perspective…Vonnegut hopes to push the reader’s perceptual horizon as far as he can towards infinity – toward the union of all time and all space. (Understanding Kurt Vonnegut 84-85)

The title page of the novel states that ‘this is a novel somewhat in the telegraphic schizophrenic manner of tales of the planet Tralfamadore’ – as is later recounted, Tralfamadorian books are laid out in the following manner:

Brief clumps of symbols separated by stars…each clump of symbols is a brief, urgent message – describing a situation, a scene. We Tralfamadorians read them all at once, not one after the other. There isn’t any particular relationship between all the messages, except that the author has chosen them carefully, so that, when seen all at once, they produce an image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep. There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. (64)

Narrativity recapitulates experience – meta-textually, for the human beings who read the human novel Slaughterhouse-Five, the adoption of the Tralfamadorian style allows us to vicariously experience Billy’s disjointed travels. Even though we clearly cannot read all the short ‘clumps’ simultaneously, as Peter Reed notes, ‘the way in which short scenes from several points in time are spliced together does help sustain the impression of concurrent actions’ (Kurt Vonnegut Jr. 180) – and while the narrative begins with a synopsis and eventually comes to a climax of sorts, it would likely not make the novel any more or less difficult to comprehend if the passages in between were read out of order (though the tonal unity between closely positioned paragraphs would likely suffer). Intra-textually, of course, the Tralfamadorian novel represents the phenomenological experiences of its own writers. The natives of Tralfamadore experience time in a radically different manner to human beings:

The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just that way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion that we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever. (19-20)

For Billy, for all humans, for all punctual modes of existence, it is exceptionally difficult to step ‘outside’ our experience of time in such a manner. Our experience, according to the zoo guide on Tralfamadore, is similar to that of having a steel helmet permanently affixed to our heads, with only one eye hole, that leads into six feet of pipe – while all the while being bolted face-forward to a flatcar on rails. Whatever tiny part of existence we are able to discern we are forced to call ‘life’ – and life often seems, from our myopic viewpoint, a dread march through a series of seemingly random events, a procession of absurdities. It is a manner of living that is subject to the intractable

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conflicts that arise from suspense and confrontations and climaxes. In Spinozistic terms, this state of knowledge is predicated on what he calls ‘inadequate ideas’ – that while we haphazardly and subjectively experience everyday life through our preconceptions and sensory experiences, we achieve only a partial knowledge of the world. As he notes, ‘the human mind, whenever it perceives things through the common order of Nature, has an adequate knowledge neither of itself, nor of its body, nor of external bodies, but only a confused and mutilated knowledge’ (IIP26C). The universe certainly often seems capricious and cruel, and it is difficult to understand why. So, for instance, when Billy witnesses an American POW have his teeth knocked out by a guard, the wounded man can only ask ‘Why me?’ – to which the guard replies ‘Vy you? Vy anybody?’ (66). Why anybody? Why anything? Why?6

The question ‘why did this happen?’ appends to the question ‘how did this happen?’ an expectation of intentionality and comprehensibility to the given event – and when we are almost inevitably frustrated in our expectation we assume that the universe is at best absurd, if not decidedly hostile. Vonnegut’s work, and Slaughterhouse-Five in particular, is often classified as absurdist literature by critics, in the tradition of Albert Camus7. Absurdism recognises that the efforts of humanity to find inherent meaning in life will ultimately fail, and that our attempts to do so causes conflict between man and the universe8. Asking ‘why me?’ is extending a question to an existence that has no answer. Receiving no answer, being unrelieved of ignorance, causes pain and feelings of alienation. Camus, in The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), identifies the absurd experience as the following:

In a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land. This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity. (13)

Man, in Camus’ vision, is fundamentally at odds with the universe he finds himself in. He seeks order and reason, but is confronted by a universe that is irrational – ‘in this unintelligible and limited universe, man’s fate henceforth assumes its meaning. A horde of irrationals has sprung up and surrounds him until his ultimate end’ (26). The absurd is produced in the interaction and contradiction between reason-seeking man and irrational universe, the only coherent philosophical position for Camus being conscious revolt within this irreconcilable conflict – ‘living is keeping the absurd alive…it is a constant confrontation between man and his own obscurity…it challenges the world anew every second’ (53). For the absurdist, the universe is predicated on random, chaotic chance – and this produces its meaninglessness in relation to man, who seeks epistemological clarity. But the universe can be just as meaningless when it is instead predicated on strictly deterministic principles – the presence of intentionality or signification is not required in a mechanically structured reality. For the absurdist, the universe is unknowable because there is nothing to know – but for Vonnegut’s punctual people, it is rather that it is difficult if not impossible to fully discern that the moments of their lives are, as the Tralfamadorians term it, ‘trapped in amber’ (61), structured entirely by necessity. Of course, as Thomas Pink points out, whether the universe and the events within it are random and irrational (as in Absurdism) or determinate and mechanical (as in Slaughterhouse-Five or Spinoza’s ontology), freedom, as it is commonly understood, is impossible:

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Either an action is causally determined. Or, to the extent that it is causally undetermined, its occurrence depends on chance. But chance alone does not constitute freedom. On its own chance comes to nothing more than randomness. And one thing does seem to be clear. Randomness, the operation of mere chance, clearly excludes control. (Free Will: An Introduction 16)

As mentioned earlier, the only random element in Billy’s life is his time travel – but he is no more free for it than he would be without. The Tralfamadorians, echoing Spinoza, note that it is only on Earth, amongst people who cannot apprehend the determined nature of their lives, that there is any talk of free will. So Billy Pilgrim’s experiences in time travel, and his encounter with the Tralfamadorians, cause him to adopt a radical and evangelical approach regarding the nature of time, in attempt to correct this notion. Billy (like Spinoza) wishes not only to be a literal but a figurative optometrist, ‘prescribing corrective lenses for Earthling souls. So many of those souls were lost and wretched…because they could not see as well as his little green friends on Tralfamadore’ (21). To be sure, Billy is as incapable of transcending the nature of his existence as any of his fellow finite modes. In his optometrist office, Billy has a framed copy of the Serenity prayer on his wall (my italics):

[It] expressed his method for keeping going, even though he was unenthusiastic about living. A lot of patients who saw the prayer on Billy's wall told him that it helped them to keep going, too. It went like this: "God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom always to tell the difference.” Among the things Billy Pilgrim could not change were the past, the present, and the future. (44)

From Billy’s viewpoint, from a Spinozistic viewpoint, the significance of this prayer must be weighted firmly on the side of serenity – he cannot change the past, present, or future, but he can change his perspective towards them. This is not a simple thing to do, and Billy, although he is calm enough to ‘never get mad at anything’ (21) and to rarely cry, still often feels that he ‘doesn’t really like life at all’ (74). He is often listless, and frequently inept. He has undoubtedly undergone numerous privations, from the apocalyptic firebombing of Dresden and his hospitalisation for PTSD, to the death of his wife – all the way through until his violent end. But the small glimpse of the continuous and non-linear perspective of time afforded to him by his time travel allows him to follow, as best he can, the advice of his Tralfamadorian friends – ‘[there]’s one thing that Earthlings might learn to do, if they tried hard enough: Ignore the awful times, and concentrate on the good ones’ (85). This certainly seems to resemble the quietism and fatalism that Slaughterhouse-Five has been accused of promoting – of closing one’s eyes and ears to misery, violence and injustice, to accept, as Vonnegut recalls his friend Harrison Starr commenting, that you may as well write an anti-glacier book as an anti-war novel (3). But ignoring the bad and concentrating on the good is not necessarily enough. Joseph Ward notes that there is common ground between Vonnegut’s work and that of Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy (REBT), originally developed by Albert Ellis. REBT emphasises that human beings ‘subjectively and idiosyncratically view or experience events in light of [our] beliefs, expectations and evaluations’ (Bernard, qtd. in Ward 2010 8) – and that often, we are not so much disturbed by events, but by the way in which we think about them. Critically, what is required to prevent this disquiet is to rationally and actively engage with the world (Ward 2012 83). Ward considers Billy’s body of beliefs to be inadequate because he too readily engages in complete acceptance of his situation, and because he believes in absolute determinism – ‘Billy gains a pseudo-

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serenity, but fails to achieve wisdom and courage, and thus fails to maintain the rational “awareness” promoted by REBT’ (Ward 2010 27). Ward considers the science fiction elements of Billy’s experience (and by necessity, his preternatural certainty of absolute determinism) to be a fantasy on Billy’s part, a shift away from reality – a view that is echoed by more than one critic 9. But whether the Tralfamadorians are ‘real’ or not, their message needn’t be a signal of a failure to engage with the world. In the Ethics, Spinoza argues that

In so far as we understand the causes of pain, to that extent it ceases to be a passion, that is, it ceases to be a pain. So, in so far as we understand God to be the cause of pain, we to that extent feel pleasure. (VP18 Scholium)

For Spinoza, it is not enough to simply ignore pain or unpleasant events, nor to become angry or upset at them (or rather, to allow these passions to run roughshod over oneself). Instead, one must endeavor to comprehend through rationality the reasons that unpleasant events or experiences have come to be (necessarily, as all things are, from God/nature) – and in so doing, move from passively being affected by them towards actively understanding them, and ultimately, to trump pain with the pleasure of equanimity. To enjoy the good times and to understand the bad ones is the Spinozistic take on the Tralfamadorians’ advice – and the best way to do so is to endeavour to see them as the Tralfamadorians do, in a form of knowledge sub specie aeternitatis – under an aspect of eternity, beyond our own limited and finite abilities to understand reality:

It is of the nature of reason to regard things as necessary and not as contingent. It perceives this necessity of things truly, that is, as it is in itself. But this necessity of things is the very necessity of the eternal nature of God; therefore, it is of the nature of reason to perceive things under this species of eternity. (IIP44C2)

For Spinoza, we must achieve by reason what Vonnegut’s Tralfamadorians achieve naturally – to understand and therefore accept our place in the overwhelmingly complex but wholly and eternally mechanical universe in which we exist. And certainly part of the comfort of this attitude, the freedom from worry it encourages, is that which Kelly Ross identifies in Spinoza’s thought – ‘ It would be a consolation of religion indeed…to lose all sense that life, circumstances, and misfortunes are of more than the most trivial consequence. Sub specie aeternitatis, from the viewpoint of eternity, nothing imperfect ever happens.’ (‘Baruch Spinoza’) A similar attitude underlies Vonnegut’s humour and humanism equally10. Our individual lives, in a monistic universe, are no more or less important than any other mode in existence – and the first step towards freedom and peace is to recognise and accept this necessary fact.

Notes

1. Jacques Maritain sums up the Cartesian model of the human being: ‘Cartesian dualism breaks man up into two complete substances, joined to one another no one knows how: on the one hand, the body which is only geometric extension; on the other, the soul which is only thought—an angel inhabiting a machine and directing it by means of the pineal gland’ (The Dream of Descartes 144). As Gert-Jan Lokhorst notes in ‘Descartes and the Pineal Gland’ in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Descartes’ pineal neurophysiology was almost universally rejected after his death.

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2. Schopenhauer, Arthur. The World as Will and Representation Vol. 1, 126. Schopenhauer appends to this statement ‘merely that the stone would be right’, but that is a function of his own conception of Will. The original letter was sent by Spinoza to G. H. Schaller in 1674 on the topic of liberty and necessity (Letter 62).

3. Eccy De Jonge, in Spinoza and Deep Ecology, makes the distinction between ‘environmentalism’ and ‘ecology’ – the former being a term that emphasises the ‘man-in-nature’ divide, whereas the latter denotes a more holistic conception of man as nature (15). The Harmoniums are very much model citizens of Mercury, insofar as they do not damage their own ecology, but are instead entirely concomitant with their environment, living perfectly sustainably in their surroundings. Whether their utterly non-reactive nature is predicated on their unconscious nature is ambiguous.

4. Many critics have read Slaughterhouse Five as, essentially, endorsing fatalism, quietism, nihilism or cynicism. For instance, Tony Tanner, in City of Words, argues that the novel abandons the ‘worried ethical, tragical point of view of Western man…at [a] cost in conscience and concern for the individual life’ (198). Robert Merrill and Peter A. Scholl, in ‘Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five: The Requirements of Chaos’ (1978) provide a useful overview of the opinions of critics such as Anthony Burgess, Charles Harris and Albert Kazin about the supposedly inappropriate or inherently hopeless viewpoint Vonnegut espouses – their concerns, I would contend, are perhaps the result of their original framing – one in which libertarian free will is held to be of paramount importance to human happiness.

5. Susanne Vees-Gulani, in ‘Diagnosing Billy Pilgrim: a psychiatric approach to Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five’ (2003), argues that Billy Pilgrim’s displacements in time, as well as his experiences on Tralfamadore, are a function of Billy’s attempts to deal with the trauma of his wartime experiences, rather than naturalistic elements of the novel.

6. The question ‘why?’ is one of the most important themes throughout Vonnegut’s work – and both the question and the asking of it are often framed as a solely human concern, perhaps our definitive aspect, that is nonetheless thwarted at every turn. So, as in one of Bokonon’s humorous calypsos in Cat’s Cradle:

Tiger got to hunt,Bird got to fly;Man got to sit and wonder, ‘Why, why, why?’Tiger got to sleep,Bird got to land,Man got to tell himself he understand. (130)

7. Within the collection of critical essays The Vonnegut Statement (1973) alone, Klinkowitz, Somer, Stableford, Wood & Wood and Meeter all refer to Vonnegut or his work as ‘absurdist’. Vonnegut was certainly aware of his work (Man Without A Country, 8)

8. “Absurdism”, Merriam-Webster Dictionary online. http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/absurdism

9. In addition to the essay by Vees-Gulani mentioned above, Kevin Brown argues in ‘The Psychiatrists Were Right: Anomic Alienation in Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five’ that Billy’s fantasies are produced by the isolating factors of contemporary society, drawing particular attention to his childhood rather than wartime experiences.

10. So for instance, Rudy Waltz, in Deadeye Dick, constructs a theory that epitomises the comfort (and humour) of the monistic perspective, in which everyday concerns finally appear trivial. At Celia Hoover’s funeral, he thinks of the universe as a gigantic animal - ‘Celia, in her casket there, all shot through with Drano and amphetamine, might have been a dead cell sloughed off by a pancreas the size of the Milky Way. How comical that I, a single cell, should take my life so seriously!’ (186-187)

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‘What in hell are people for ?’ – Mechanisation, Industry and Human Conatus in Player Piano and God Bless You Mr Rosewater .

Spinoza’s Conatus

We have examined Spinoza’s universal monistic ontology, through the lenses of Malachi Constant’s cosmic wanderings in space and Billy Pilgrim’s misadventures through time, and hopefully have demonstrated the immanent nature of our existence and the determinate nature of our actions – but how do such far-flung and high-minded abstract philosophy relate to our day to day experiences, or the vagaries of human society? It is obviously true that, quite apart from grand theories of the universe, we go about our daily lives, performing actions that we generally believe are beneficial to ourselves and/or to others. But can we say that we derive satisfaction from the way in which we conduct our lives, or that we do so in a political and economic system that encourages human flourishing? In the previous section, I explored the first part of Spinoza’s often unintuitive definition of freedom – that of accepting one’s causally determined nature, and divesting oneself of the belief in teleology or an anthropocentric universe. But Spinoza also recognised that we are active, striving beings – and even if there is no logical reason to suggest that intention or free will is required for or necessitates action1, the fact remains that action does exist, that it is a necessary part of our existence, and that the way in which we are able to conduct ourselves is a vital part of our lives.

For Spinoza, we are free when we act according to our own specific natures. This is not to say that to be free is to act in an undetermined manner, however – our natures are only specific in so far as we are differentiated modes of the singular substance. Within each mode inheres a singular and basic drive to exist and to persevere in its being, seeking what is advantageous to it and shunning that which diminishes it, a drive that Spinoza terms Conatus (or ‘striving’) (IIIP6). This basic drive is a limited expression of God’s infinite self-actualising activity, and as such is not an inert state of being, as Beth Lord notes:

What it is to be an apple is to strive to carry on being this apple; what it is to be that horse is to strive to carry on being that horse. ‘To be’ an apple, a horse or a human being, then, is never a static state. It is the constant activity of being, or actualising, what you are. (Spinoza’s Ethics 90)

This active conception of essential modal existence is central to Spinoza’s thought on human life. It informs his treatment of ethics, of the origin and nature of human emotions, and of politics. It is the basis of what Spinoza calls ‘virtue’ in the pragmatic sense - not of what is transcendentally ‘good’ or ‘evil’, but in terms of what aids or hinders the self-actualising conatus in its never-ending drive to persevere and to flourish. Specifically, what is important in Spinoza’s idea of freedom is increasing one’s power to act, since virtue stems from being active rather than passive:

I say that we act when something occurs either in us or outside us of which we are the adequate cause; that is, when there follows from our nature, either in us or outside us, something that can be understood clearly and distinctly through that nature alone.

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Conversely, I say that we are passive when something occurs in us, or when something follows from our nature, of which we are only a partial cause. (III Definition 2).

Life, of course, is necessarily a constantly fluctuating nexus of internal and external influences, acting upon us to greater or lesser degrees. Spinoza deems these affects – they are, simply put, any change in our power to act. Spinoza terms an affect with an external cause a passion – and while ideally, we would be free of all passions, standing apart from all outside affects, Spinoza is quite aware that we are interconnected and to a certain degree dependent on the things that surround us (IVP4). Passions, therefore, can have positive or negative effects on our ability to strive. At an absolute basic level, Spinoza argues that there are three primary passions that form the bedrock of our emotional responses to outside stimulus. Desire is the first, and is effectively the conscious experience of Conatus (IIIP9 Scholium) – and the latter two are pleasure and pain, pleasure being the passion ‘by which the mind passes to a greater perfection’, and pain that ‘by which the mind passes to a lesser perfection’ (IIP11 Scholium). Spinoza uses these three basic values to explain the various shades of emotional responses we often feel – so, for instance, love (in the particular sense of loving another human being) is the feeling of pleasure with the accompanying idea of an external cause (IIIP59 Scholium). Spinoza is careful to emphasise that these reactions are based on the ideas or images we build up regarding the world around us, however – our emotional responses can come about as much by irrational associations as by true ideas of what is or is not beneficial to us (IIIP14-17). They are often slipshod and ill-considered. Ultimately, Spinoza would have us overcome, through rationality and self-control, these passive emotions, and strive towards active pleasures – and he defines these as courage and nobility, as well as justified self-esteem, being the active joy of recognising one’s own power to act (IIIP59 Scholium).

Player Piano

Without regard for the wishes of men, any machines or techniques or forms of organization that can economically replace men do replace men. Replacement is not necessarily bad, but to do it without regard for the wishes of men is lawlessness. Without regard for the changes in human life patterns that may result, new machines, new forms of organization, new ways of increasing efficiency, are constantly being introduced. To do this without regard for the effects on life patterns is lawlessness. (281)

Ultimately, Spinoza’s ethics is predicated on a robust egoism, in which increasing one’s own existential striving and ability to act, while minimising the ability of outside influences and inadequate ideas to hold tempestuous sway over us, is necessarily the most important aspect of living. We increase our ability to act, therefore, not only through our most basic, instinctual needs – needs such as eating, drinking, sleeping or breathing – but through our higher emotional and intellectual motivations. A man who can keep his body alive while being helplessly in the thrall of his passions, or who is denied the means by which to flourish in mind as well as health, cannot be happy or free in the Spinozistic sense. Active and productive self-esteem is something based not simply on the influence of other people – Spinoza makes this distinction clear when he distinguishes between self-esteem and pride or glory, which are predicated on what we imagine others to praise (IIIP59 Scholium) – but on the joy of being able to work or create from our own nature. This is not an idea

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that is uniquely Spinoza’s – it has been a feature in the works of 19 th and 20th century psychologists and writers2, often as a direct response to changing political and economic conditions. In 1884, William Morris, artist, writer and socialist, stated in his essay ‘Useful Work vs. Useless Toil’ that work is a compulsion necessitated by nature. When work is useful to the person who performs it, Morris argues, it is accompanied by hope – ‘hope of rest, hope of product, hope of pleasure in the work itself’ (Morris 99). It must not be endless, seemingly pointless toil, and what is eventually created must be of worth to the creator. Work should allow workers to express themselves – and Morris’ language is reminiscent of Spinoza’s thought:

I think that to all living things there is a pleasure in the exercise of their energies…a man at work, making something which he feels will exist because he is working at it and wills it, is exercising the energies of his mind and soul as well as his body. (100)

However, the rise of industrialised capitalism has led to a system in which the vast majority of people, the working classes, are compelled to toil endlessly to produce not goods, but profits – not useful items, but ‘rubbish’ created simply to satisfy a market predicated on supplying non-existent demand. So far, Morris’ argument is a standard Marxist critique of capitalism – in particular the manner in which the worker is alienated both from the product of his labour and from the actual act of producing3. However, Morris, writing in a time of ever greater mechanisation, was also witness to the ever greater influence in industry of ‘labour-saving’ machines – machines that were supposed to ease the burden of the working class, and minimise the need to perform more unpleasant forms of labour. Instead, the machinery serves only to ‘reduce the skilled labourer to the ranks of the unskilled, [and] to increase the number of the “reserve army of labour”’ – and in so doing, ‘to increase the precariousness of life among the workers and to intensify to the labour of those who serve the machines’ (117). What results is a large group of people who are rendered surplus to the requirements of consumer capitalism, who are none the less obliged to live under its strictures and consume its products, yet have no means of doing so. Even in the 1880s, Morris recognised that ‘civilisation bred desires which she forbids us to satisfy’ (105) – and this is a process that has continued, unceasingly, until present day4.

Vonnegut’s short career at General Electric, from 1947 until 1951, provided him with first-hand experience of this continuing process of mechanisation. His assessment of its potential to improve the quality of human life was withering:

You can’t fight progress. The best you can do is ignore it, until it finally takes your livelihood and self-respect away. General Electric itself was made to feel like a buggy whip factory for a time, as Bell Labs and others cornered patents on transistors and their uses, while GE was still shunting electrons this way and that with vacuum tubes. Too big to fail, though, as I was not, GE recovered sufficiently to lay off thousands and poison the Hudson River with PCBs. (Bagombo 7)

His first novel, Player Piano, was inspired by his time at GE – and he cheerfully concedes that in writing the book, he ‘bit the hand that used to feed [him]’ (Bagombo 6). In his own words, Player Piano was written as a near future dystopia, depicting a society in which men are no longer alienated from the produce of their work, but from the ability to work at all:

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The book predicted what has indeed come to pass, a day when machines, because they are so dependable and efficient and tireless, and getting cheaper all the time, are taking the halfway decent jobs from human beings. (Bagombo 6)

Player Piano is set in Ilium, New York, after the end of World War Three, a war won by ‘the miracle [of] production with almost no manpower’. The city, ten years after the total mechanisation of industry, after ‘the riots had been put down [and] thousands had been jailed under the antisabotage laws’, is divided into three parts:

In the northwest are the managers and engineers and civil servants and a few professional people; in the northeast are the machines; and in the south, across the Iroquois River, is the area known locally as Homestead, where almost all of the people live. (11)

Tellingly, Vonnegut’s terse description of the layout of the city includes machinery amongst social groups – and it holds the second position in Ilium’s stratified description, second only to the professional classes. Amongst the professional class is Paul Proteus, the protagonist. He is the son of the late George Proteus, the man who had been the nation’s first ‘National Industrial, Commercial, Communications, Foodstuffs, and Resources Director’ (12). Such grandiose titles are common in the completely centralised industrial economy – and as more and more positions in the professional classes are filled by machines, prospective employees require multiple doctorates to remain competitive. Paul is the manager of the Ilium Works, and as the novel progresses, he falls under the influence of his friend Ed Finnerty, a rebellious ex-engineer, and is gradually drawn away from his privileged position amongst the upper class elite. He is introduced to the population of Homestead, who, made redundant, are forced into either serving in the Army, or into working in the Reconstruction and Reclamation Corps, known colloquially as the ‘Reeks and Wrecks’, who perform menial and ultimately purposeless physical labour, such as endlessly digging up roads or painting and re-painting traffic lines.

There is even less of Morris’ ‘hope of product’ in this static maintenance than there is in working in a production line - no ‘hope of rest’ when no purpose or ultimate objective to one’s toil is discernible, and no ‘hope of pleasure in the work itself’ when such work involves unpleasant and unceasing physical labour. Indeed, to these men, even the grinding monotony of industrial factory work is a source of nostalgia, a memory of a time when their skills were at least somewhat valued – and more importantly, a time when their intrinsic talents were recognised. During Paul’s first visit to Homestead, a man in a bar harangues him to find his son a job at the Ilium Works - as he pleads, he is ‘awfully clever with his hands’ (37), with an instinct for machines and their workings, but without a graduate degree (for which ‘there were only twenty-seven openings, and six hundred kids trying for them’), he is not qualified to work in industry. When Paul’s car blows a gasket, Reeks and Wrecks swarm to it almost instinctively, practically brawling over being the one to fix it – one man, in five minutes, improvises a solution, while ‘the others watched eagerly, handed him tools, or offered to hand him tools, and tried to get into the operation wherever they could’. As Paul leaves, he notices ‘the profound satisfaction, the uplift of creativity, in the faces of the Reeks and Wrecks (73)’ – a simple result of their being allowed, in a way the old man’s son has not, to act from their own nature, according to their innate aptitude for certain kinds of work. Indeed, the prospects for the next generation appear even bleaker than those of the workers who still remember the old days – for, as Thomas F Marvin notes, the Reeks and Wrecks, bereft of the chance to fully and creatively

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engage themselves, regress to an almost infantile state, throwing rocks at squirrels or opening fire hydrants to sail paper boats (Critical Companion 34). Something essential to their ability to act as reasoning, flourishing human beings has been suppressed, and the result is listlessness, childishness, and desperation.

Nor is the mechanical encroachment on human expression and talent purely limited to that of personal technical skills, or indeed to manufactory industry as a whole. From the perspective of Doctor Halyard, who, in a subplot to that of Paul Proteus, guides the Shah of Bratpuhr5 around the new and improved United States, we are afforded glimpses of the wider political and cultural ramifications of the ever increasing prevalence of the machines. The President, for instance, ‘boyish, tall, beautiful, and disarming’ (115), is a genial but dull-witted – and as Halyard listens to another of his meaningless speeches in praise of the modern miracle of technology, he ruminates on earlier, less efficient methods of governance:

He stared at President Jonathan Lynn and imagined with horror what the country must have been like when, as today, any damn fool little American boy might grow up to be President, but when the President had had to actually run the country! (116)

Instead, a supercomputer named EPICAC XIV, housed in Carlsbad Caverns, maintains and monitors the economy precisely, not only deciding ‘how [much] everything America and her customers could have and how much they would cost’, but also

How many engineers and managers and research men and civil servants, and of what skills would be needed in order to deliver the goods; and what I.Q. and aptitude levels would separate the useful men from the useless ones, and how many Reconstruction and Reclamation Corps men and how many soldiers could be supported at what pay level and where, and… (114)

Needless to say, EPICAC XIV carries its duties out to inhuman perfection, yet with the uncanny caveat that, according to the President himself, it is ‘the greatest individual in history, [and] that the wisest man that had ever lived was to EPICAC XIV as a worm was to that wisest man’. (116) The machine is no longer considered simply ‘intelligent’, in the sense of being able to quickly and accurately make goal-orientated decisions – it is anthropomorphised as being ‘wise’, a condition that requires a degree of self-awareness, indeed sapience, hitherto never ascribed to machinery. Not only is the machine the perfect artisan, able to fulfil physical tasks better than its progenitors, it is also the perfect philosopher-king, ruling with the kind of impartiality and competence that mere men could only hope to achieve. Even the supposedly human-exclusive area of art and aesthetics is nearing the advent of mechanisation. After ‘meeting’ EPICAC, Halyard and the Shah meet the wife of a man who, though a writer, cannot move from his designation of W-441 (fiction novice) to W-440 (fiction journeyman) because he refuses to write to order – but this is a problem soon to be remedied by the electronic writers being developed to do exactly that, based on exhaustive research on what people want to read (226-227). And of course, standing in the corner of the Homestead bar, and as the titular symbol of the novel, the Player Piano, the unsettling double and ghostly afterimage of the artist:

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The music stopped abruptly, with the air of having delivered exactly five cents worth of joy. Rudy still shouted. “Makes you feel kind of creepy, don’t it, Doctor, watching them keys go up and down? You can almost see a ghost sitting there playing his heart out.” (38)

This doubling effect, in which human beings are not only reflected within but surpassed by their creations, is a recurring theme in contemporary and historical science fiction6 – the fear that not only are we somehow eliminating what we feel is unique about us, but that we are actively constructing our own replacements. Nevertheless, Vonnegut, with his background in General Electric, was no doubt responding to a conception of technology that David E. Nye considered to be a specifically American phenomenon. In American Technological Sublime, Nye posits that in America, the feeling of the sublime, that overwhelming impression of apprehending greatness beyond measure, underwent a gradual shift in emphasis. Where once the sublime was to be found in the vast and majestic natural formations of the American continent, and the corresponding feeling of insignificance in the face of nature, the advent of the industrial revolution produced a new, hybrid sublime:

As technological achievements became central…the American sublime fused with religion, nationalism, and technology, diverging in practice significantly from European theory. It ceased to be a philosophical idea and became submerged in practice…Rather than treat the result of solitary communion with nature, the sublime became an experience organized for crowds of tourists…Where Kant had reasoned that the awe inspired by a sublime object made men aware of their moral worth, the American sublime transformed the individual’s experience of immensity and awe into a belief in national greatness. (43)

As machinery became more and more complicated, more and more immense, what came to be valued as a sublime experience involved not so much the singular and inhuman as the communal and specifically artificial – human investment, in time, effort and resources, producing the kind of awe once reserved for the natural formations of the Grand Canyon or Niagara Falls. By the time of the Philadelphia Exhibition of 1876, machines such as the enormous Corliss steam engine were not only admired for the craftsmanship with which they had been built – they were also consistently described and admired for being entities in their own right. The great Corliss machine could work with little to no human intervention, ‘eliminating workers from the landscape of production’, and as Nye quotes John F. Kasson, many therefore treated it as if it were independent and alive:

…fairgoers did not approach the engine as an immaculate work of engineering, to be judged by its efficiency alone. Rather…their descriptions frequently became incipient narratives in which, like some mythological creature, the Corliss engine was endowed with life and all its movements constructed as gestures. (Kasson qtd. in Nye 122-123)

Similarly, in the imagination of contemporary writers, industrial machinery was no longer confined to simple (if large scale) and dumbly mechanical movement – literary descriptions instead abounded with organic, purposive metaphors, conferring not only activity but agency to their functions. As such, ‘machines sat, stood, or crouched; they devoured fuel; they spewed out smoke; they served faithfully…trains galloped, rushed, and careered along’ (Nye 123). In Player Piano, the vacuum tubes are said to have ‘increased like rabbits’ (57) – adding reproduction to the ever-growing list of human-like features of the machinery. And just as machines became the double of individual acting, thinking, human beings, technology as a whole became the ‘double of nature’ (Nye 123) – a new,

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alternate reality to that of the natural world. By the 20 th century, as in Player Piano, this new reality came to actively succeed humans and nature, in a way in which they could be left out entirely – David Nye notes, regarding the 1939 New York World’s Fair, that the ‘Futurama’ exhibit ‘effectively omitted human beings as visible parts of the future…in this realm of pure property, the individual had no apparent obligations or social ties’ (221). It is in just such a cultural context, only ten years later, that Vonnegut would come to work at General Electric and eventually pen his first novel.

To Vonnegut, the consequence of this combination of industrialisation and, perhaps more importantly, the veneration of its progressive encroachment into ever more complex spheres of human life are stark. When the manmade monopolises activity and agency, the essential nature of man – in Spinozistic terms, his conatus - is crowded out of the market. The supposed triumph of man over nature, embodied in the American Technological Sublime, is a foolish and self-defeating proposition when one works from a monistic approach that necessitates an immanent rather than transcendental humanity. To seek to subdue or replace nature is literally to seek to subdue or replace one’s self. The citizens of Player Piano’s America are provided with housing, abundant food, and the latest in consumer products – yet there are so utterly dissatisfied with their lives that it takes little encouragement from Paul Proteus, Ed Finnerty and the former preacher James Lasher to organise them into rebellion. To the ruling professional class, this rebellion is utterly inexplicable – how could any person feel oppressed when they are free of material want, when ‘[the average man] has become far richer than the wildest dreams of Caesar or Napoleon or Henry VIII’ (202)? But this kind of freedom from is only part of what Spinoza would term freedom, insofar as it allows a person freedom to actively self-actualise according to their specific natures. The society depicted in Player Piano, however, not only prevents the Reeks and Wrecks from acting according to their own conatus – it has also, as in Morris’ time, left them hopelessly attached to a notion of success that is held forever beyond their grasp:

Lasher sighed. “What do you expect?” he said. “For generations they’ve been built up to worship competition and the market, productivity and economic usefulness, and the envy of their fellow men – and boom! It’s all yanked out from under them. They can’t participate, can’t be useful any more. Their whole culture’s been shot to hell.” (90)

This hangover from scarcity based capitalism, this vision of what the ‘good life’ may entail, is not only unattainable to the vast lower class – it is also, from a Spinozistic sense, a profoundly passive way in which to order one’s life regardless, since it seeks validation in the pursuit of wealth and the high opinion of others. Nevertheless, it has been (and remains) a powerful cultural narrative in the West, and in the United States in particular. The image of the individualistic, hard-working, ‘self-made’ man is a particularly treasured element of what it is to be a person who is not only happy but of worth – with the accompanying implication that those who are not currently of use to the dominant economic system are inherently at fault. In Player Piano, and in contemporary society, we are confronted with the following questions – what is to be done with these ‘useless’ people, and are they responsible for being so?

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God Bless You, Mr Rosewater

It goes against the American storytelling grain to have someone in a situation he can’t get out of, but I think this is very usual in life. There are people, particularly dumb people, who are in terrible trouble and never get out of it, because they’re not intelligent enough. And it strikes me as gruesome and comical that in our culture we have an expectation that a man can always solve his problems. There is that implication that if you just have a little more energy, a little more fight, the problem can always be solved. This is so untrue that it makes me want to cry – or laugh.

Kurt Vonnegut, 1973 Playboy Interview7

If there is one philosophy that underlies American economics, politics, and normative morality, it is that of individualism. While the concept of individual autonomy within the state and the privatisation of the means of production had its roots in European liberalism, American individualism developed its own character, as James O’Connor notes:

The uniqueness of American individualism lay in the fact that the hegemonic themes of anti-statism, privatization, autonomy, self-development, and laissez-faire were regarded as sources not of economic and social dissolution, but rather of economic strength and social and national bonding…inequalities of wealth and rewards were required to insure that the most productive people were given incentives and the unproductive spurred to action. Social or collective property was ‘inferior’ because it could not inspire hard and productive work. (Accumulation Crisis 16-17)

The veneration of American individualism is, according to O’Connor, ‘capital’s most powerful weapon of ideological domination of labor in the USA’ (14). According to Smith and Stone, it is the defining metatheory that generates American beliefs about socioeconomic inequality8. The vast majority of Americans believe that success is within their reach, as long as they work hard and are personally skilled9. Its prominence has repeatedly made itself known in a variety of cultural mediums – not least of which being popular literature. To be brief - the pervading economic assumption of American individualism is that all people, rich or poor, are ultimately responsible for their socio-economic position. In literature, the corresponding implication is two-fold. First, anyone who is wealthy is due so almost solely according to their own hard work, irrespective of external advantages – second, that all that is required to extricate oneself from poverty is to pull oneself up by the proverbial bootstraps, irrespective of outside constraints. The latter ‘bottom-up’ approach is exemplified by the works of writers such as Horatio Alger in the 19 th century – his most successful novel, Ragged Dick, depicting a young bootblack’s rise from poverty to middle class respectability through honesty and hard work (though it is a testament to the power of the ‘Horatio Alger Myth’ that it is often forgotten his protagonists succeed not only through their own efforts, but via luck, and the charity of kindly members of the capitalist class10). Similarly, from the ‘top-down’ perspective, the industrial titans of the 20th century were largely portrayed to be, a priori, deserving of their position – but whereas the earlier Alger, writing for the working class, adduced altruism and bourgeois good manners to this concept of uninfluenced and self-determined apotheosis, latter writers would excuse the wealthy from moral responsibility.

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Ayn Rand, writer, self-proclaimed philosopher and founder of the somewhat precociously titled ‘Objectivist’ movement, garnered a distinct following throughout the 1950s for her dedication to an ethics predicated entirely on self-interest. Generally ignored by the academic community in her own time (Sciabarra 1-2), her influence has nevertheless made itself felt in American politics – particularly in the last twenty years. As Brian Miller and Mark Lapham note in The Self-Made Myth, her work has been quoted as an inspiration by such varied influential figures as Congressman Paul Ryan, Wall Street Journal contributor Stephen Moore, right-wing pundit Rush Limbaugh, and banker John Allison, former chair of BB&T Company (19-20). Former Chairman of the United States Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan was a member of Rand’s inner circle (Bustillos, The Awl). Indeed, her work can be said to be at once a defining expression of American Individualism, while at the same time stoking its less savoury aspects ever higher. In her collection of essays The Virtue of Selfishness (1961), Rand outlines the basic premise of her philosophy – defining selfishness as ‘rational self-interest’, she then explains how altruism therefore only ever leads to tyranny by the majority:

If it is true that what I mean by “selfishness” is not what is meant conventionally, then this is one of the worst indictments of altruism: it means that altruism permits no concept of a self-respecting, self-supporting man—a man who supports his life by his own effort and neither sacrifices himself nor others. It means that altruism permits no view of men except as sacrificial animals and profiteers-on-sacrifice, as victims and parasites—that it permits no concept of a benevolent co-existence among men—that it permits no concept of justice. (7)

For Rand, a society can only be considered ‘free’ when each person’s efforts are dedicated solely to their own interests – to wish to serve others is a function of moral weakness or cultural indoctrination, and to be forced to do so is a coercive evil. Rand consistently elides her concept of metaphysical freedom and ‘objective’ rationality with that of economic accumulation. In her magnum opus, Atlas Shrugged, in which an elite group of capitalist Übermensch leave collectivist society to begin their own utopia, leaving civilisation in ruins, virtuous man ‘is a being of self-made wealth, [and] so he is a being of self-made soul’ (qtd. in Selfishness 23). To be anything other than economically productive is to be a ‘parasite, moocher, looter, brute [or] thug’ (Selfishness 28), with no right to the wealth others have independently produced. Social democratic policies such as welfare or publicly funded education are institutions that indulge the feckless and dissolute.11

From a distance, Rand’s putative rational egoism bears some resemblance to Spinoza’s – and indeed, she occasionally remarked on his work with approval12. Spinoza’s definition of conatus as the primary and preferable driver for human behaviour, and his denial of transcendental values such as good or evil lend themselves easily to a pragmatic or amoral perspective – and indeed, Edwin Curley has explored the possibility that Spinoza was the most ‘Machiavellian’ of all modern political philosophers13. Yet Spinoza’s concept of self-interest is ultimately predicated on an interdependent model of human relationships, and on the pursuit of rationality and understanding rather than exclusive property rights (indeed, Spinoza was utterly uninterested in wealth or fame14). In the Ethics, he maintains, in line with his immanent philosophy, that when ‘something agrees with our nature, to that extent it is necessarily good’ (IVP31), and that ‘in so far as men live in accordance with the guidance of reason, to that extent alone they always necessarily agree in nature’ (IVP35). Humans who are not held in sway by passion but instead act from reason recognise that ‘the highest good of those who follow virtue is common to all, and all can enjoy it equally’ (IVP36) – and seeking

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the same good for others as we seek for ourselves, the power of human beings to act according to their own nature is greatly multiplied. Ultimately, like-minded human beings can come together to form a complex and interrelated society that is likewise concerned with self-preservation:

Nothing, therefore, is more useful to man than man. I mean by this that men can ask for nothing that is more efficacious for the preservation of their being than that all men should agree in everything in such a way that the minds and bodies of all should as it were constitute one mind and one body…from this it follows that men who are governed by reason…seek for themselves nothing that they do not desire for the rest of human beings, and so they are just, faithful, and honourable. (IVP18S)

For Spinoza, human beings are best able to work towards their own interests when they co-operate and produce the conditions necessary to allow them to self-actualise – and the wise human recognises that he or she needs other people to flourish, and that they affect and are affected by others. Relatedly, while Spinoza, like Rand, believes that pity through itself is bad, he does not do so because he considers it immoral. Rather, since it is painful and therefore reduces one’s ability to act, it is better to act from rationality when considering another’s ill-fortune (IVP50) - although he recognises that one who is moved neither by reason nor by pity to help another can rightly be called inhuman (IVP50S). Simply put, pity is not the most effective way to help others or one’s own self.

Vonnegut evidently agrees – when asked in his 1973 interview with Playboy about his relationship to Eliot, the titular protagonist of God Bless You, Mr Rosewater (1965), he pointedly notes that ‘it’s sort of self-congratulatory to be the person who walks around pitying other people. I don’t do that very much…I think there are some people who really need a lot of help.’ (Wampeters 229) In the novel, Eliot Rosewater, heir to the vast fortune of the Rosewater Foundation, retreats from his privileged lifestyle, to the horror of his senator father, to live a solitary, drunken life giving advice and financial support to the poor of Rosewater, Indiana – a city that was once a centre of industry but has since, like Homestead, become nothing else but ‘shithouses, shacks, alcoholism, ignorance, idiocy and perversion’ (30). Meanwhile, Norman Mushari, a scheming lawyer, seeks to prove Eliot legally insane, so that his fortune can be transferred to the Rhodes Island branch of the family – with Mushari taking the customary cut. The novel is unabashedly sentimental – as William Rodney Allen notes, it was written ‘at a time of considerable financial and emotional stress…it reads like a cry from the heart rather than a novel under its author’s full intellectual control’ (Understanding Kurt Vonnegut 71). Nevertheless, while the drunken, rotund, utterly ingenuous Eliot is the very image of the Holy Fool, the novel consistently portrays his quixotic philanthropic mission as ultimately misguided, no matter how good-hearted his intentions.

Eliot’s stated intention in returning to Rosewater, as told to his estranged wife Sylvia, is to attempt to ameliorate the suffering of the poor and disenfranchised through unconditional love:

“I look at these people, these Americans,” Eliot went on, “and I realize they can’t even care about themselves any more – because they have no use. The factory, the farms, the mines across the river – they’re almost completely automatic now. And America doesn’t even need these people for war – not any more…I’m going to love these discarded Americans, even though they’re useless and unattractive.” (27)

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Vonnegut picks up where Player Piano left off – with the question, when confronted with the superiority of machines, of ‘what in hell are people for?’ (13). Eliot, of course, is not able to provide a satisfactory answer to this question, and it is for this reason that his actions seem inscrutable to his father. In the socioeconomic system they are a part of, of course, they are no longer for anything, and as such represent a form of outside-context problem – a discrepancy that can only be responded to by falling back on the metatheory of American Individualism, of self-determinism regardless of external influences. As Eliot’s father angrily contends, ‘I have spent my life demanding that people blame themselves for their misfortunes’ (50) – and in essentially declaring poverty as self-caused rather than the result of the vagaries of capital movement, Senator Rosewater betrays an unexamined bias on his part, as one of the latest in a long line of inheritors to the Rosewater fortune. Eliot holds no such illusions – at the beginning of the novel, Mushari reads a letter written by Eliot to be opened by whoever would take over the foundation after his death. It is an account of how the fortune came about, and it is a litany of exploitation and greed on the part of his great-grandfather Noah. The long causal chains that brought it about involved war-profiteering, bribery, and the murder of union members. Eliot sums up the origin of his wealth thusly:

Thus did a handful of rapacious citizens come to control all that was worth controlling in America. Thus was the savage and stupid and entirely inappropriate and unnecessary and humourless American class system created. Honest, industrious, peaceful citizens were classed as bloodsuckers, if they asked to be paid a living wage…E pluribus unum is surely an ironic motto to inscribe on this Utopia gone bust, for every grotesquely rich American represents property, privileges and pleasures that have been denied the many. (6)

‘Out of many, one’ – the phrase could easily be applied to Spinoza’s concept of ideal human interaction, just as easily as ‘out of one, many’ could describe his universal ontology. Nor are the two mutually exclusive – each is predicated on an immanent perspective that recognises that nothing in our experience springs into being spontaneously, transcendental and uninfluenced. As humanity as a whole is a mode of infinite substance, so every human being cannot come into existence apart from humanity, nor flourish without the conditions necessary to do so. The folly of Senator Rosewater in failing to recognise why he is in the position of power he occupies is the folly of the stone that flies through the air and believes itself flying of its own free will. He is in the grip of, in Spinozistic terms, an Inadequate idea – and this irrational belief in personal power is demonstrated in the extreme by another of the upper class, Amanda Buntline, who thinks that ‘everything nice in the world is a gift to the poor people from them’ (119), and expects her servants to thank her for the sunset. Eliot, meanwhile, is not party to the same illusions, and is moved to act to correct this ‘insane’ situation - but while his intentions are good, his solution ultimately fails. From the beginning of the novel, Eliot is portrayed as an unbalanced and troubled man, eventually exhausting himself and breaking down - he winds up an ambiguous figure in Rosewater, not having appreciably changed their lot very much but equally loved and hated ‘as though [he] really were God and one day walked out’ (164). Eliot’s solution does not work, and Eliot is rendered catatonically ill, because pity alone was not enough – for all its sentimentality, the novel is not so soft-headedly moralistic as to suggest otherwise. But God Bless You, Mr Rosewater, viewed through a Spinozistic lens, demonstrates that bandaging the symptoms of inequality with pity is less effective than rationally addressing its causes – to change the status of the determined, one must change the determinants. Similarly, at every turn, with every

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wealthy character to take the stage and have the origins of their wealth laid bare, the novel demonstrates that the self-made myth is the myth of dualistic ontology writ large. It is shown to be a false belief that the rich are in some way transcendent to society, promethean supermen who are uninfluenced and self-determined – and ultimately, that proceeding from this mistaken assumption results in inequality, injustice and suffering. In such a situation, neither rich nor poor are ever able to achieve Spinozistic freedom – the poor unable to act according to their own natures, the rich beholden to wealth and fame in a manner that only reinforces the mistaken belief that they are self-determined, and capable of transcendent acts of will.

Notes

1. Thomas Pink makes the important distinction between freedom of decision and freedom of action – while we often assume that that our decisions and our actions are connected, many British and American philosophers have problematised the link between the two. When we want or feel things, these are not actions; nor are they within our control. Similarly, we cannot decide to decide something. The freedom of action can affect our decision-making ability, but only indirectly – ‘my direct control of my actions can, through the effect of my actions on passive occurrences such as wants and feelings, give me some indirect control over these wants and feelings as well…freedom is always exercised through action…and through action alone’ (Free Will 6).

2. For instance, Abraham Maslow’s influential theory of the human hierarchy of needs details the factors required by human beings to live and thrive. Each tier of the hierarchy requires, at least, the partial fulfilment of the preceding tier, starting with simple physiological requirements and working upwards through security, love and belonging, esteem, and finally, ‘self-actualisation’ (Motivation and Personality pt.1). Self-actualisation, for Maslow, ‘self-actualizing creativeness…stresses characterological qualities like boldness, courage, freedom, spontaneity, perspicuity, integration, self-acceptance…which make possible the kind of generalized creativeness I’ve been talking about’ (166-167). Esquire magazine named Maslow the most important psychologist of the mid-twentieth century, and many of his ideas were adopted in industry, therapy, and organisation and management (xxxiii-xxxv).

3. Marx identified the ways in which alienation (Entfremdung) occurs in workers in an industrial capitalist system in Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. The worker is alienated from the object he produces – ‘the alienation of the worker in his product means not only that his labor becomes an object, an external existence, but that it exists outside him, independently, as something alien to him’ (108). The work he performs ‘does not belong to his essential being…he does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind’ (110). Creation and production are co-opted to the ends of the capitalist, and only the most basic of actions are left unfettered – ‘man only feels himself freely active in his animal functions – eating drinking, procreating, etc.’ (111). Ultimately, when man is estranged from his produce and the activity that creates it, he is estranged from himself (114).

4. The rise of modern consumer capitalism as a cultural as well as economic force, as Peter Stearns notes, ‘accelerated fairly steady [from 1850] into the 1920s, when much of the characteristic contemporary apparatus of consumerism was either fully established or at least clearly sketched’ (Consumerism in World History 48). Though usually confined to the upper classes, by the 1950s the working class also became involved in full-blown consumerism (56), despite their material concerns, and the reification of mass produced items as a sign of cultural and social ascendency has not waned – ‘by 2001, despite unprecedentedly high incomes, over half of all Americans had almost no savings and a third lived paycheck to paycheck, often in considerable consumer debt. In some cases this situation reflected continued real

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poverty, but in others it followed from a sense that so many goods and trips had become absolutely essential (142).

5. The Shah is an example of one of Vonnegut’s favourite stock characters – the naïve outsider who, through his seemingly innocent questions and unique perspective, reveals the foolishness or cruelty inherent in human activity. Characters such as Salo in The Sirens of Titan and Bokonon in Cat’s Cradle follow in this tradition – and Kilgore Trout’s science fiction stories, spread throughout Vonnegut’s novels, are the epitome of this demystifying perspective (‘The Big Board’ in Slaughterhouse Five and ‘Hail to the Chief’ in Breakfast of Champions, especially, skewering religion and economics and politics respectively).

6. Certainly Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein recapitulates the Promethean myth, of the danger of striving for forbidden knowledge (and technology), through the specifically uncanny visage of the monster – and the trend continued in modern science fiction. Indeed, Isaac Asimov coined the term ‘Frankenstein complex’, in his Robot novels as a ‘fear of mechanical men’. From Arthur C. Clarke’s homicidal HAL computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey through to James Cameron’s Terminator films, the concept of an artificial body and/or intelligence has often been synonymous with menace, death and extinction on the part of their biological progenitors.

7. Re-published in Vonnegut, Kurt. Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons. St Albans: Granada Publishing Limited, 1979, p.231.

8. Smith, Kevin B. and Lorene H. Stone. ‘Rags, Riches, and Bootstraps: Beliefs about the Causes of Wealth and Poverty’. The Sociological Quarterly, Vol. 30, No. 1 (Spring, 1989), p. 93. Smith and Stone found that individualism was the metatheory of choice in identifying the causes of poverty, while culturalism (a blend of personality traits and social structural influences) vied with pure individualism in specifying the causes of wealth.

9. In early 2009, deep into recession and despite record levels of economic inequality, 71% of Americans still believed that hard work and personal skill were the main determinant of success. "Upper Bound." The Economist. The Economist Newspaper, 15 Apr. 2010. Web. 21 Aug. 2012. <http://www.economist.com/node/15908469>.

10. In his introduction to the Penguin American edition of Ragged Dick and Struggling Upward, putatively addressed to Alger, Carl Bode notes how ‘your heroes were all too apt to rescue a rich man’s child from drowning in the Hudson or from a careening carriage on Broadway, and so assure themselves of a lifetime of good wages and white collars. Correspondingly, bad luck dogged the footsteps of your villains’ – and later quotes how ‘luck comes oftenest to those who deserve it’. The implication of a just world hypothesis, in which the good are automatically rewarded and the bad punished, is inherent in such a viewpoint. Indeed, there is perhaps an unwitting irony in Bode’s entirely ingenuous praise for Alger having ‘struck a chord in the American character: our readiness to believe that good fortune awaits us’ (x).

11. It is interesting to note that Ayn Rand did not practice what she preached, claiming social security and medicare under a false name (Holland, Alternet). Similarly, The Self-Made Myth uncovers the various public funded institutions and nepotism behind the success of figures such as Donald Trump, the Koch Brothers, and Warren Buffett.

12. Rand was also heavily influenced by Nietzsche, and admired some of Thomas Aquinas’ thought. Nevertheless, she ‘regarded most philosophers as at best incompetent and at worst downright evil’ http://www.biblio.com/ayn-rand~103903~author

13. Curley argues that Spinoza can be seen to predicate his philosophy on the doctrine that right is coextensive with power (though he is careful to note that this is not the same as identifying right with power). If it is ‘never unjust to do what your power permits you to do’ (‘Kissinger, Spinoza, and Genghis Khan’ 327), then a Machiavellian, amoral approach to politics and personal relationships would seem justified – though in Spinoza’s thought, a tyrannical government will inevitably destroy itself (334), a claim Curley finds somewhat dispassionate and lackadaisical.

14. Spinoza dismissed the pursuit of honours and riches – ‘the attainment of riches and fame is not followed as in the case of sensual pleasures by repentance, but, the more we acquire, the greater is our delight,

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and, consequently, the more we are incited to increase both the one and the other; on the other hand, if our hopes happen to be frustrated we are plunged into the deepest sadness’ (Improvement 4).

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‘The big show is inside my head’ – Bad Chemicals, Passive Affects and the Divided Self in Breakfast of Champions .

Spinoza’s Psychology

It is a truism to say that all of Spinoza’s philosophy, whether it is concerned with political, ethical, physiological or psychological questions, ultimately stems from the fundament of his monistic ontology. Whether arguing for the necessity of universal determinism or the relentless drive of the conatus of finite modes towards preserving and enhancing their existence, Spinoza predicates all of his claims on his original conception of the infinite and self-actualising singular substance – and of course, this also holds true with regard to his model of human psychology. Having examined Spinoza and Vonnegut’s thought on the universal and societal scales, it is now appropriate to realign our focus on the explicitly personal level. How does Spinoza explain the relationship between our minds and our bodies? What causes us to act in the way we do, and what internal influences cloud or clarify our understanding? What are our emotions, and can they be controlled? And when we make decisions, are they truly ‘our’ decisions to make in the sense of being consciously willed by the entity we term ‘I’?

To answer the first question, we must return to Spinoza’s proposition that Thought and Extension (the physical world) are two attributes of substance – separate and parallel aspects that are nonetheless ontologically identical. Spinoza proposes that ‘the order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things’ (IIP7) – that is to say, as Blake Dutton paraphrases, ‘that (1) for each simple body there exists a simple idea that corresponds to it and from which it is not really distinct and (2) for each composite body there exists a composite idea that corresponds to it and from which it is not really distinct.’1 Spinoza defines this parallelism thusly: The human mind, then, is an expression (in thought) of the physical body – it is ‘the idea of the body’ that, while not arising directly from the attribute of extension, is nevertheless affective towards and affected by the body – and Spinoza continually confirms the unity of the mind with the body (IIP13S). The human mind is complex because the human body is a complex structure – and our minds are sometimes aware of and always affected by the various processes that occur in the body. Spinoza stresses this point - ‘the mind does not know itself, except in so far as it perceives the ideas of the affections of the body’ (IIP23). The consequences of this assertion are profound, and Spinoza was ahead of his time in believing so, as Beth Lord explains:

We are self-conscious only insofar as we have ideas of our being affected by other things. The mind does not know itself as a self, but rather as a collection of ideas about what happens in and to the body. Insofar as we are finite modes, there is no pure knowledge of the self, no consciousness of an ‘I think’ that precedes our interactions in the world. It is, rather, the other way around. Self-consciousness depends on the body’s interaction with other bodies and the mind’s interaction with other ideas…In this way, Spinoza anticipates the twentieth-century phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty: ‘Consciousness is in the first place not a matter of “I think” but of “I can”’. (Spinoza’s Ethics 67)

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For Spinoza, then, the thinking ‘I’ is not a singular, infrangible and inherent essence, but a necessarily changeable construction arising from the complex interplay between internal and external influences. We often think or feel things that are not true or that do not arise directly from our bodily experience – we are able to experience at least the phenomenological certainty that not all our thoughts are based on our current physical situation. Spinoza defines these perceptions as ‘imagination’ - not only in the narrow sense of thinking of something that is not present (or that does not exist), but in the broader sense of perception of things that are not ourselves. We apprehend much of the world through our sense perceptions (or more specifically, our sensory organs), and so our knowledge of other bodies is understood through our body – our sense perceptions are always a composite of the natures of both the external body and our own (IIP16). The traces these encounters leave on our bodies and minds are termed ‘images’ by Spinoza – and images make up a very large part of our mental processes. ‘Imagining’, as Beth Lord notes, includes any mental activity based on experience – from remembering or anticipating to experiencing, dreaming or hallucinating (68). Our empirical experience of the world is, of course, an invaluable tool in our everyday lives, and Spinoza does not mean to imply that we should follow a form of extreme scepticism – but he nevertheless sounds the cautious note that all our experiences are ultimately representations, with all the possibilities of uncertainty and interpretative licence this entails.

The mind, therefore, insofar as it reacts and responds to empirical experience, is concomitant with the body – what we imagine, in Spinoza’s terminology, arises from our bodily experiences. Similarly, what we feel is also predicated on our relationship with our bodies. We are now able to understand the site on which the passive and active affects, which we examined in the last chapter with regard to the conatus, act:

By emotion I understand the affections of the body by which the body’s power of acting is increased or diminished, helped or hindered, and at the same time the ideas of these affections. If, therefore, we can be the adequate cause of one of these affections, then I understand by the emotion an action; otherwise, I understand it to be a passion. (IIIDef3)

In this definition, it is the body that is affected, and is rendered more or less able to act – we also apprehend the emotions in our conscious minds, but what is important to note is that Spinoza argues that emotional responses are very much a physical phenomenon. Nor does he delineate the passive or active affects along a strictly inner/outer boundary – ‘I say that we are passive when something occurs in us, or when something follows from our nature, of which we are only a partial cause’ (IIIDef2). Our emotions can just as easily be internally caused, and can just as easily be a hindrance to us – nor is it necessarily possible for our reason to overcome the passive affects that hold us in sway. Sometimes, a powerful emotion ‘can neither be restrained nor removed except by an emotion which is contrary to and stronger than the one which is to be restrained’ (IVP7). Ideally, we would be able to subjugate our negative emotions simply through rationality – but Spinoza recognises that since our minds are not infinitely strong, we cannot simply dismiss passions, but must instead overcome them. In Spinoza’s philosophy, we do so not only by the mental exercise of rationality but the joy of it (IVP14) – but this is, needless to say, a difficult state to achieve. If we accept that none of us, even Spinoza himself2, are capable of perfectly controlling our emotions, and that our ‘selves’ are not indivisible essences but experiential constructs, then we are faced with profound and potentially counter-intuitive consequences regarding human behaviour.

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Breakfast of Champions

Dwayne’s incipient insanity was mainly a matter of chemicals, of course. Dwayne Hoover’s body was manufacturing certain chemicals which unbalanced his mind. But Dwayne, like all novice lunatics, needed some bad ideas, too, so that his craziness could have shape and direction. (23)

Breakfast of Champions (1973) is ‘a tale of a meeting of two lonesome, skinny, fairly old white men on a planet which was dying fast’ (17). One is Kilgore Trout, the perennially unsuccessful science fiction writer and author alter-ego who appears throughout Vonnegut’s body of work – and the other is Dwayne Hoover, an automobile dealer on the precipice of insanity. It was released at an emotionally turbulent time in Vonnegut’s life – recently divorced from his wife, and having won critical and popular acclaim with Slaughterhouse Five, he found himself at loose ends, and sank into a lonely depression that resulted in his being put on medication by his physician. His son’s schizophrenic breakdown in 1972 had also greatly distressed him, and increased his fear that insanity and suicide may be genetically endemic to his family. As William Rodney Allen notes, ‘it is hardly surprising that his next novel would offer the hypothesis that human beings are at the mercy of the chemical compositions in their brains’ (Understanding Kurt Vonnegut 102). Marked throughout his early career as a science fiction writer because he noticed technology3 and the alienation it could cause, Vonnegut, from Breakfast of Champions onwards, extended the mechanical metaphor to organisms as readily as America extended the organic metaphor to machines. In the introduction to the novel, Vonnegut recounts a childhood experience in which he watched a man, in the last stages of Syphilis and suffering locomotor ataxia, attempt to cross a street:

He shuddered gently, as though he had a small motor which was idling inside. Here was his problem: his brains, where the instructions to his legs originated, were being eaten alive by corkscrews [the shape of the Syphilis bacterium]. The wires which had to carry the instructions weren’t insulated anymore, or were eaten clear through. Switches along the way were welded open or shut…He thought and thought. And then he kicked two times like a chorus girl. He certainly looked like a machine to me when I was a boy. (13)

Vonnegut goes on to say that, when he does not see people as machines, he tends ‘to think of human beings as huge, rubbery test tubes, too, with chemical reactions seething inside’ – but whether mechanical or chemical, organic or inorganic, it appears to Vonnegut that nothing goes on in the mind without a corresponding cause in the body. He recalls people with goiters who needed only to swallow a miniscule amount of iodine a day to be cured; how his mother ‘wrecked her brains’ with sleeping medication, how he need only pop ‘a little pill’ to rid himself of depression as if by magic. He concedes that ‘it is a big temptation for me, when I create a character in a novel, to say that he is what he is because of faulty wiring, or because of microscopic amounts of chemicals which he ate or failed to eat on that particular day’ (13). Briefly leaving aside the metafictional aspect of this statement, we are confronted with a form of absolute biological determinism – and as Dwayne Hoover wends his way through the broken up and dilapidated sprawl of Midland City, his rapidly

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deteriorating behaviour is, stage by stage, depicted as a movement from aberrant biochemistry to aberrant ideas.

Dwayne Hoover is depicted throughout Breakfast of Champions as a person completely at the mercy of his malfunctioning biochemistry (or, in Spinozistic terms, passive affects) – and as such, almost completely lacking in ability to act. Yet curiously, Vonnegut presents his ‘bad chemicals’ not as constitutive but non-sentient physical causes for his madness, but rather as taking on the volitional ability that Dwayne now lacks. So, for instance, while Dwayne struggles to keep secret the fact that he is hallucinating,

The bad chemicals in his head were fed up with secrecy. They were no longer content with making him feel and see queer things. They wanted him to do queer things, also, and make a lot of noise. They wanted Dwayne Hoover to be proud of his disease. (46)

While Vonnegut never specifies the exact kind of mental illness that Dwayne is suffering from, it is likely to be a form of schizophrenia, the symptoms of which include both visual and auditory hallucinations. While the effects of the bad chemicals are never explicitly depicted as third person voices telling Dwayne to do things, they are nevertheless depicted as hijacking his agency, if only in terms of unbidden urges – a common symptom in schizophrenia4. This is, of course, unsurprising, if we take the parallel between biological activity and the subjective feeling of ‘willing’ things as writ. Later, the bad chemicals make Dwayne place a gun in his mouth, though he does not go through with (or appear to have thoughts of) suicide. He instead elects to destroy his bathroom with the weapon, though it is only after the event that he feels any sort of anger – and then, only towards a picture of a flamingo on the glass of the bath tub enclosure (56-57). Finally, at the climax of the book, Dwayne goes on a rampage in the cocktail lounge of the Holiday Inn he owns, viciously attacking his son, mistress and several other bystanders (including, though not exclusive to, Kilgore Trout and one ‘Kurt Vonnegut’). What finally sets Dwayne off is a novel by Kilgore Trout entitled Now It Can Be Told. In the novel, the creator of the universe confesses to the protagonist that he has been the subject of an experiment:

You are the only creature in the entire Universe who has free will. You are the only one who has to figure out what to do next – and why. Everybody else is a robot, a machine. Some persons seem to like you, and others seem to hate you, and you must wonder why…You are surrounded by loving machines, hating machines, greedy machines, unselfish machines, brave machines, cowardly machines…[and] their only purpose is to stir you up in every conceivable way, so the Creator of the Universe can watch your reactions. They can no more feel or reason than grandfather clocks. (233-234)

Exactly why Dwayne is prompted by this message to aggressively attack people is left ambiguous, but it is perhaps an extreme expression of solipsism and emotional turmoil. After all, people being machines is not a valid or rational reason to hurt them, since they are still quite explicitly feeling or hurting or weeping machines, capable of suffering. The novel, of course, is not specifically aimed at Dwayne Hoover, or indeed anyone else. It is another of Dwayne’s symptoms, in line with a very common feature of schizophrenia, that he believes undifferentiated media is specifically targeted at him5. Nevertheless, whether by accident or design, it ‘was mind poison to Dwayne’, and leads Trout to become ‘a fanatic on the importance of ideas as causes and cures for diseases’ (24) – a relationship reminiscent of the mind/body parallelism of Spinoza.

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Antonio Damasio, in his monograph Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain, explicates the connection between Spinoza’s thought and modern neurobiology – especially with regard to his own medical speciality, brain injury and its consequences. He calls Spinoza a ‘protobiologist’ – ‘the biological thinker concealed behind countless propositions, axioms, proofs, lemmas, and scholia’ (14). He makes the comparison between Spinoza’s affects of the body and corresponding ideas of the mind with what he terms ‘emotions’ and ‘feelings’. While the two terms are almost always used as synonyms, Damasio argues that emotions are the empirically observable chemical or physical actions or movements within the body, while feelings are the phenomenological ‘shadow’ within the mind – and that long before living things had minds, they had emotions, since emotions, fundamentally, stem from the homeostatic systems required for organisms to survive (28-31). From the most primitive systems of immune response, basic reflexes and metabolic regulation stem pain and pleasure behaviours (as in Spinoza), on to drives and motivations, then to emotions and finally feelings – each ‘nested’ in the preceding systems, but in a manner that is complex and interrelated rather than simply hierarchical. These complex feedback mechanisms, when brought to the attention of the conscious mind, they become a feeling, defined by Damasio as ‘the perception of a certain state of the body along with the perception of a certain mode of thinking and of thoughts with certain themes’ (86).

The upshots of this model of human thought and feeling are multiple, but two in particular are somewhat counterintuitive. First, the body is an integral part of who we are – without it, we would have no basis on which to feel. For Damasio, the hypothetical ‘brain in a jar’ would be severely emotionally impaired – it would no longer experience ‘feelings’ in anything like the same way we do (109-111). The second feature of this model is that emotions can precede the thoughts we often believe cause them. Damasio gives the example of a woman undergoing an experimental treatment for Parkinson’s in which electrodes are implanted in the patient’s brainstem. One electrode was placed in the wrong place, and the patient immediately entered the physiological symptoms of profound distress, her expression turning to sadness before then starting to cry and finally sob. Only then did she begin to express her thoughts, and her words were akin to those suffering from severe depression – ‘I’m fed up with life, I’ve had enough…I don’t want to live anymore, I’m disgusted with life’. As Damasio explains,

This entire repertoire of actions was engaged in a well-rehearsed instrumental concert…the display of sadness, in all its spectacular complexity, came truly out of nowhere. No less importantly, sometime after the display of sadness was fully organized and in progress, the patient began to have a feeling of sadness. And just as importantly, after she reported feeling sad she began having thoughts consonant with sadness. (67-69)

This is not to say that emotions always precede thoughts – Damasio argues that cognitive and emotional levels of experiential processing are continuously linked, and can produce, through associative learning, a feedback response between a particular thought and a particular emotion (as Spinoza also notes with regard to imaginings) (71). Nevertheless, the bizarre procession above, induced in a non-naturalistic manner, can be mapped in Breakfast of Champions onto Dwayne’s descent into a state of uncontrollable aggression. Beginning with uncontrollable basic biological urges (or ‘desires’, as Spinoza would term them), he then acts violently, destroying his bathroom, but does so calmly before feeling angry. Finally, in the cocktail lounge, is finally able to associate a thought with the feelings of aggression and powerlessness he had previously felt – in this case, the

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thought being that he is the only volitional agent in existence. He then acts in a manner counter to his own interests – he becomes, to put it appropriately, a malfunctioning machine.

It would appear, therefore, that Vonnegut presents in Breakfast of Champions a purely materialistic and deterministic universe, with the human beings of Midland City, and Dwayne in particular, the hapless servants of their crude physiological natures. Yet Vonnegut, in the ‘spiritual climax’ of the novel, also describes something other than the clumsy mechanistic action and reaction of chemicals. Before Dwayne’s rampage, Rabo Karabekian, an abstract artist, speaks about the painting he has just donated to the Midland City art festival. It is called The Temptation of Saint Anthony, and it is a twenty feet by sixteen feet canvas, painted entirely green, save for a vertical stripe of orange reflecting tape. The people of Midland City think it is garbage, until Karabekian explains what it symbolises:

It is a picture of the awareness of every animal. It is the immaterial core of every animal – the ‘I am’ to which all messages are sent…It is unwavering and pure, no matter what preposterous adventure may befall us. A sacred picture of Saint Anthony alone is one vertical, unwavering band of light. If a cockroach were near him, or a cocktail waitress, the picture would show two such bands of light. Our awareness is all that is alive and maybe sacred in any of us. Everything else about us is dead machinery. (205)

In this model of living beings, therefore, there is an essential ‘something’, a ghost in the machine, that is the experiencing entity that we generally call ‘self’. It is also, it seems, immaterial and indivisible. Nowhere in the novel does Vonnegut make clear whether or not this entity can influence anything we say, do, think or feel, or whether it is simply there to bear witness. Nevertheless, in Breakfast of Champions as well as in later novels Galapagos and Bluebeard, Vonnegut consistently makes a distinction between the ‘I’ of characters and, respectively, their ‘big brains’ or their ‘meat’ 6. What is this separate and singular entity? If it is consciousness, then it may be that it is not nearly as immaterial, as consistent, or as indivisible as Karabekian suggests – and indeed, Vonnegut seems to challenge this, intentionally or not, through the structure of the novel itself.

At the beginning of the novel, it is made clear that agency is removed from the fictional characters who inhabit it in more than one way – not only are their actions determined by their chemicals and wiring, but also by the whims of their creator. If their chemistry betrays them, affects their behaviour or thoughts, or if seemingly random misfortune befalls them, it is only because Vonnegut himself has decided it should be so. As stated before, when Vonnegut states that ‘it is a big temptation for me, when I create a character in a novel, to say that he is what he is because of faulty wiring’ (13), he is describing two layers of deterministic control. Nevertheless, Vonnegut himself notes in his introduction that the novel to come is ‘lousy’, an attempt to ‘clear my head of all the junk in there’, and that when he wrote it he felt like ‘Philboyd Studge’, cumbersome and hodgepodge – but ‘that’s who I think I am when I write what I am seemingly programmed to write’ (14). The long causal chain, it seems, passes beyond the fictional realm – if the author determines what happens to his characters, it is only because he himself is determined to do so. One is almost tempted to wonder who wrote Vonnegut’s life (and death).

Breakfast of Champions is, by far, the most metafictional of Vonnegut’s novels – and it also seems to be one of his most personal. It is a novel in which the author makes an appearance in his own fictional universe, and interacts with his own characters; where he seems to have perfect

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omniscience and omnipotence, yet unwillingly confronts his own deepest and most personal fears. As Peter Reed notes,

Vonnegut’s projection of self into this novel is such that the reader finds it hard to escape the sense that Breakfast of Champions, at least in the later chapters, is personal in a rather exclusive way…The effect results in the reader’s feeling partly estranged in the fictional world into which he has apparently been invited. (Reed qtd. in Allen 106)

The assumption of a one-to-one correlation between the real-world author Kurt Vonnegut and his work is common – Kathryn Hume, for instance, asserts that ‘Vonnegut’s main characters are usually straightforward projections of some part of his psyche, and they let him work out his inner conflicts’ (‘Vonnegut’s Self Projections’ 177). While there is certainly merit to this claim, it is also somewhat reductive – it ignores the complex interplay between fiction and reality that informs much of his work. Vonnegut’s self is not completely subsumed in his books – nor are his characters flat allegorical figures. Indeed, from The Sirens of Titan onwards, characters, places and events reappear in other novels, though often slightly altered. Vonnegut, having decided to no longer ‘put on any more puppet shows’ (14), attempted in Breakfast of Champions to throw out characters like the Rumfoords, Eliot Rosewater, Howard Campbell, and Kilgore Trout, only to find that, protean and seemingly self-willed, many of them simply came back to him7. Indeed, a novel by Kilgore Trout was released shortly after Breakfast of Champions, though not written by Vonnegut8 – further complicating the reality/fiction divide. Ultimately, as Creed Greer notes, it is important to note that the relationship between author and novel is not nearly at all simple, even as there are reflections and correspondences between the two. Greer terms Breakfast of Champions a ‘schizophrenic text’, one in which the narrator or character as author self-referentially claims ownership of the text they reside within:

Even if the narrator had named himself Kurt Vonnegut, he would still only be a narrator or character named Kurt Vonnegut – the name Kurt Vonnegut would not be separate from the work, but Kurt Vonnegut the person would be even farther removed. To say, "I am the author of this text, I am Kurt Vonnegut," does not identify the human being with the narrator, the "I" named Kurt Vonnegut, but emphasizes their "existence" as words. If, as a critic, Vonnegut asserted that, yes, "I" am the narrator of Breakfast of Champions, Kilgore Trout is "my" character, he would remove himself even farther from "his" work, becoming then a critic speaking of an author who writes of a narrator who claims authorship. (Character of Words 314)

The narrator who is able to say such things as ‘I do know who invented Kilgore Trout. I did’ (39) and who, sitting in a cocktail lounge, ‘shrunk the Universe to a ball exactly one light-year in diameter…had it explode…had it disperse itself again’ (187) is clearly something beyond simply another character – he is quite able to perform any feat he chooses. If Breakfast of Champions were a ‘real’ universe, he would be the kind of interventionist deity Spinoza argued against. Yet he is still embedded within the text, and despite his best efforts, the characters and situations surrounding him are not fully within his control – so, for instance, upon noticing the bartender of the cocktail lounge staring at him, the narrator attempts to force him to stop but cannot, since he ‘could only guide their movements approximately, since they were such big animals. There was inertia to overcome’ (187-88). Later, during Dwayne Hoover’s rampage, he ‘came out of the riot with a broken

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watch crystal and what turned out to be a broken toe’ (251), despite inventing the man who runs into him and causes the damage. At the end of the novel, he is attacked by a dog, and experiences genuine fear. Though this particular textual entity is never explicitly called ‘Kurt Vonnegut’, there is evidence enough to at least partially identify him with the author – certainly, they share very definitive characteristics. He is well aware of the novels that Eliot Rosewater and Kilgore Trout have sprung from, and it is hard not to read Vonnegut’s own voice, in uncanny conversation with ‘Vonnegut’, in a passage such as this:

‘This is a very bad book you’re writing,’ I said to myself behind my leaks.‘I know,’ I said.You’re afraid you’ll kill yourself the way your mother did,’ I said.‘I know,’ I said. (180)

Ultimately, the fictionalised ‘Vonnegut’ is neither a direct representation of the author - nor is he a separate entity. Kurt Vonnegut has never sat in a cocktail bar in Midland City, nor met Kilgore Trout – he himself does not directly inhabit the text of the novel, any more than he directly inhabited the ‘machine made of metal and plastic’ that was typed upon by a ‘meat machine’ with ‘an unwavering band of light’ at its core (208). Breakfast of Champions has no unwavering band of light - but the peripheralisation of the author’s identity into its pages at least provides it with a kind of reflective glory, and it is certainly possible that Vonnegut felt this was the case.

Philosopher and cognitive scientist Thomas Metzinger, in The Ego Tunnel, explores the concept and experience of selfhood and our surprising propensity to project our ‘selves’ beyond what we would generally consider to be ‘us’. His central metaphor is the rubber-hand illusion, in which the subject observes a facsimile of a human hand while their own hand is concealed. After a short amount of time, the false hand is stroked or prodded by a probe, and the subject phenomenally experiences the stimulation9. Metzinger argues that this phenomenon is a function of what he terms the phenomenal self-model (PSM) – ‘the conscious model of the organism as a whole that is activated by the brain’ (4). This model is, essentially, the experiential ‘I’, in so far as it is concomitant with experiences of identification and ownership:

Whatever is part of your PSM, whatever is part of your conscious Ego, is endowed with a feeling of ‘mineness’, a conscious sense of ownership. It is experienced as your limb, your tactile sensation, your feeling, your body, your thought. But then there is a deeper question: isn’t there something more to the conscious self than the mere subjective experience of ownership for body parts or mental states? Isn’t there something like ‘global ownership’, a deeper sense of selfhood having to do with owning and controlling your body as a whole? What about the experience of identifying with it? Could this deep sense of selfhood be experimentally manipulated? (5)

Indeed, Metzinger cites out of body experiences as an example of what occurs when the PSM seems to leave the body entirely while remaining, in some sense, a whole, embodied sense of selfhood – a double that looks back upon the original, ‘physical’ body. Clearly, this does not happen in actuality, just as there are no nerves to fire when the false hand is prodded (and just as we do not literally

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inhabit the books we write). Nor are we, as Spinoza also argues, in direct contact with outside reality but rather with a representation of it:

First, our brains generate a world-simulation, so perfect that we do not recognise it as an image in our minds. Then they generate an inner image of ourselves as a whole…the phenomenal Ego is not some mysterious thing or little man inside the head but the content of an inner image – namely, the conscious self-model, or PSM. By placing the self-model within the world-model, a center is created. That center is what we experience as ourselves, the Ego…we are not in direct contact with outside reality or with ourselves, but we do have an inner perspective [my italics]. (7)

We are faced with the bizarre concept that we are, in effect, constantly imagining and reimagining ourselves, without ever realising it – that what we consider to be ‘I’ is not some deeply ingrained and essential mass, but a constantly revised model, set within a world-model, that is separate from the world itself. This process is, barring major neurological problems, transparent to the brain that produces it (41-42) – Metzinger nevertheless provides examples of times when consciousness is present but the first-person ‘self’ is absent, such as Cotard’s syndrome, in which people consciously deny their own existence, eschewing the word ‘I’ and instead using ‘it’ (63-64). This process, Metzinger believes, evolved as a way for an organism to better organise information regarding itself and reality, a space in which to gather various mental phenomena into a single tool box – ‘phenomenal states are neurocomputational organs that make survival-relevant information globally available within a window of presence. They let you become aware of new facts within a unified psychological moment.’ (58) And finally, as with Spinoza, Damasio, and indeed Vonnegut, it would appear that the PSM also denies the possibility of free will in favour of a form of biological determinism – Metzinger notes that ‘the conscious experience of intention is just a sliver of a complicated process in the brain. And since this fact does not appear to us, we have the robust experience of being able to spontaneously initiate causal chains from the mental into the physical realm’ (126). This is an extraordinary echo of Spinoza’s thought on the ignorance of causes being the foundation of the belief in free will.

So, to return to Vonnegut’s ‘unwavering beam of light’, the awareness or consciousness within us all. It would appear that it is not unwavering after all, but rather a dynamic model, a representational tool of the brain that is not in itself aware that it is so, and it can be modified or damaged (as in Cotard’s syndrome). Nor does it stand apart from our ‘meat’, but is concomitant with it – the PSM incorporates and arises from the body and its image, and it arose as a means by which the body could better adapt and survive. I believe the analogy of the car provides a suitable image to sum up three different concepts of who ‘we’ are, in Metzinger’s thought. The ‘unwavering beam of light’ is not in the driver’s seat, as those who believe in free will attest, nor is it a flash light lain on the passenger’s seat, not driving but somehow apart from our bodies and determined actions, as Vonnegut feels. Rather, it seems consciousness is the headlight, providing the light by which the car navigates, providing a view of the outside world while never being truly within it, nor ever truly separate from the moving body it is attached to. It can throw its light not on things within the world, but on representations of those things. Just as Spinoza argued, the mind is an idea of the body, albeit one that does not realise it is so – yet, knowing or not, it can still be buffeted and deformed by our chemicals, good or bad, just as Dwayne’s was. It can be divided and projected within our world-

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model, just as we may feel ourselves in a plastic hand or in a character in a book. And it is always the subject of biological determinism.

Notes

1. Dutton, Blake. "Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy." Spinoza, Benedict De. N.p., 7 July 2005. Web. 22 Aug. 2012. <http://www.iep.utm.edu/spinoza>.

2. Despite his near legendarily calm, gentle and patient demeanour, Spinoza was nevertheless as subject to passions as anyone else. Gottfried Leibniz recounts his reaction to the brutal murder of the De Witt brothers (Johan de Witt governed the Netherlands between 1650 and 1672, and greatly encouraged philosophical liberalism during his tenure) – ‘I have spent several hours with Spinoza, after dinner. He said to me that, on the day of the massacres of the De Witts, he wanted to go out at night and post a placard near the site of the massacre, reading ultimi barbarorum. But his host locked the house to keep him from going out, for he would be exposed to being torn to pieces’ (Freudenthal qtd. in Nadler 306). Spinoza cried publicly – ‘the only time, it is said, that others saw him in the throes of uncontrolled emotion’ (Damasio 21).

3. ‘I became a so-called science fiction writer when someone decreed that I was a science fiction writer. I did not want to be classified as one, so I wondered in what way I’d offended that I would not get credit for being a serious writer. I decided that it was because I wrote about technology, and most fine American writers know nothing about technology…I think that novels that leave out technology misrepresent life as badly as Victorian writers misrepresented life by leaving out sex’ (Man Without A Country 16-17).

4. Birchwood and Jackson elucidate the primary symptoms of schizophrenia. Apart from auditory and visual hallucinations, delusional beliefs are common, especially ‘delusions of reference [which] are beliefs held by the person that the behaviour and/or remarks of others…are meant for them’ – just as Dwayne believes Trout’s novel to be directed specifically at him. Also of relevance are experiences of control, whereby a person feels they are under the control of an alien force or power, and emotional or volitional changes - in particular, losing the subjective impression of initiative or agency (Schizophrenia 8).

5. As above. Birchwood and Jackson give the example of Colin, a 24 year old man diagnosed with Schizophrenia who ‘refused to watch TV as he felt he heard thinly disguised references to him and his sanity’ (4).

6. For instance, in Galapagos, Roy Hepburn, lying on his deathbed after a long struggle with dementia, says the following to his wife:

“I’ll tell you what the human soul is, Mary,” he whispered, his eyes closed. “Animals don’t have one. It’s the part of you that knows when your brain isn’t working right. I always knew, Mary. There wasn’t anything I could do about it, but I always knew.” (43)

Similarly, in Bluebeard, Rabo Karabekian explains to his friend Terry Kitchen how his ‘soul’ and ‘meat’ are separate:

I can’t help it, I said. My soul knows my meat is doing bad things, and is embarrassed. But my meat just keeps right on doing bad, dumb things. (220)

7. Kilgore Trout was to disappear from Vonnegut’s fiction for only one novel, Slapstick. The very first line of Jailbird, the succeeding novel, declares that ‘Yes – Kilgore Trout is back again. He could not make it on the outside’ (7) – though in this novel, ‘Kilgore Trout’ is the pseudonym of Bob Fender, an inmate who writes science fiction stories on the side. The man himself would resurface as a ghostly presence to his son Leon in Galapagos, and become the leading character (along with Vonnegut himself) in Timequake. As usual,

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the specific details of his life (his job, marital status, location, and appearance) change each time – but he remains, as always, an unsuccessful writer of science fiction stories.

8. Philip José Farmer released Venus on the Half-Shell in 1974 under the pseudonym ‘Kilgore Trout’ – the novel itself being mentioned in God Bless You, Mr Rosewater. It was popularly assumed to have been written by Vonnegut himself (Greer 321) – though Vonnegut met its publication with ‘dismay’ (322).

9. Botvinick and Cohen conclude that ‘It has been proposed that the body is distinguished from other objects as belonging to the self by its participation in specific forms of intermodal perceptual correlation…While the rubber hand illusion does not tell us precisely what ingredient might make only certain forms of intermodal correlation relevant to the self, it does show that intermodal matching can be sufficient for self-attribution.’ M. Botvinick & J. Cohen, "Rubber Hand 'Feels' Touch That Eyes See," Nature 391:756, 1998, p.756. http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v391/n6669/abs/391756a0.html

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Conclusion

I have laboured carefully, not to mock, lament, or execrate human actions, but to understand them.

Baruch Spinoza, Political Treatise, Ch.1 Introduction

You were sick, but now you're well again, and there's work to do.Kilgore Trout, Timequake, (169)

Whether universal, societal, or personal, the two core concepts of the monistic/deterministic perspective strike at the core of many of our traditional preconceptions. We often feel, even if we know otherwise, that we are somehow separate from the rest of the natural world, and that human beings are distinguished from it not by way of degree but by category wholesale. In the USA, the country that has necessarily been the focus of much of this study, only four in ten people believe in the theory of evolution (Newport). The urge to separate ourselves from our biological inheritance seems strong. Anthropogenic climate change is often dismissed in the USA as being beyond the scope of our ability to cause, not a real phenomenon, or simply not of concern (Foley Hein). The mainstream view of humanity as neither affected by nor affective towards the environment is nevertheless being challenged. Several critics involved with the Deep Ecology movement, such as Arne Næss, Eccy de Jonge and Brendan MacDonald, have adopted Spinoza as the philosopher closest to the roots of their thought – Næss notes that ‘the wide applicability of Spinoza's concepts does not imply uncritical statements about similarities between humans and other living beings. It ensures a broad continuity of outlook, and the possibility of fighting human haughtiness and cruelty’ (54). Vonnegut, too, was deeply critical of humanity’s heedlessness towards the environment, especially towards the end of his life – ‘we are killing this planet as a life-support system with the poisons from all the thermodynamic whoopee we’re making with atomic energy and fossil fuels, and everybody knows it, and practically nobody cares. This is how crazy we are’ (Man Without A Country 121-122). It may be that, if we do not care, it is only because we believe that the rest of nature is a resource to be exploited rather than a complex holistic system in which we happen to be a part. Similarly, it certainly seems, from our everyday perspective, that we make our own decisions of our own accord, uninfluenced – and even if we recognise that we were swayed one way or another by outside forces, we still feel as if we could have acted differently, in the exact same situation, if we so chose. These views, as much as anything, are comfortable – they are intuitive, and make the world seem an intelligible and inherently just place. Whether poor or rich, happy or sad, good or evil, the causes that led to your current situation were always within your control (even if you failed to control them). The consequences of abandoning the dualistic/libertarian free will perspective seem grim – the idea that there is nothing transcendentally special about being human, and that we are not truly responsible for our actions, may seem to drastically devalue human life. But relinquishing our certainty that we are self-determinate beings, ‘empires within an empire’, may influence us to a more rational and, perhaps even more importantly, more humane view on the universe, and the people who are a part of it.

One of the most pressing ethical questions regarding determinism is that of moral responsibility. One of Spinoza’s foremost arguments is that the transcendental categories of ‘good’ or ‘evil’ do not, and cannot, exist – rather, actions or states are good or evil only insofar as they

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increase or decrease the ability of the individual in question to act according to their own nature. As such, Spinoza’s concept of freedom is asymmetrical – freedom is synonymous with virtue. We cannot blame people for acting badly, as Don Garrett explains:

We sometimes freely do good, but can never freely do evil. Evil is always the result of passion or lack of power, and hence not the result of one’s own adequate causality – that is, not the result of freedom…Reason counsels love and favour for those who freely do good, without hate or indignation for those who do evil (Spinoza’s Ethical Theory 301)

Similarly, in Vonnegut’s fiction, there are no heroes or villains – in the introduction of Slaughterhouse Five, he recalls how his father told him so on his death bed, and he replied that ‘that was one of the things I learned in college after the war’ (6). But it is not only the result of pedagogy - it also an inevitable consequence of the fictional universe he had created, a universe in which, whether by chrono-synclastic infundibulum, the enclosure of human agency and activity by machines, or simply their own bad chemicals, people are little in control of their destinies. Nevertheless, in the real world, people can and do act very badly indeed. How are we to respond to this? Derk Pereboom, in Living Without Free Will, argues that moral responsibility is distinct from moral behaviour, and that

An action is free in the sense required for moral responsibility only if it is not produced by a deterministic process that traces back to causal factors beyond the agent’s control. (3)

Nevertheless, we ‘can justifiably maintain that we lack the free will required for moral responsibility while affirming that much of morality remains intact’ (131). ‘Morality’, in this sense, is akin to Spinoza’s virtue, in that it is a fundamentally utilitarian tool – it is concerned with the actions themselves rather than the (lack of) agency behind them. As such, Pereboom argues that if determinism is true, ‘retributivist justification for criminal punishment is ruled out, for it assumes that we deserve blame or pain or deprivation just for performing an immoral action’ (Oxford Handbook 481). Rehabilitative rather than punitive treatment would be the only rational and humane response to wrong-doing in this case – not least because, if we are to take as writ Spinoza’s argument that pain is almost the definition of evil, and only further forces people into bondage, reducing their ability to act virtuously. And this concept can be expanded to society as a whole, just as Spinoza posits that many men coming together can form a greater individual. Thomas Metzinger succinctly points out that free will is not only a personal intuition, it is a societal one:

Free will does not exist in our minds alone – it is also a social institution. The assumption that that something like free agency exists, and the fact that we treat one another as autonomous agents, are concepts fundamental to our legal system and the rules governing our societies…if one day we must tell an entirely different story about what human will is or is not, this will affect our societies in an unprecedented way. (128)

Beliefs in free will, teleology and dualistic ontology are not neutral or purely personal opinions – they are at once a reflection and a constitutive and sustaining predicate of the way our society is ordered. The individualism and exceptionalism that characterise the widespread apportioning of lavish praise and retributive blame (and, not incidentally, wealth and poverty), the denigration of self-flourishing in exploitative capitalistic industry, and the personal anguish that often results from expecting, a priori, a just, intelligible and anthropocentric universe, are just a few symptoms of these

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beliefs. If these views, these thoughts can be changed, then perhaps the great body of society may change accordingly. Indeed, it is no coincidence that Spinoza entitled his first work Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect – recognising that, first and foremost, we can free ourselves from suffering and act in a more beneficial manner through rationality, equanimity, and enlightened interest in the welfare of others. Vonnegut, too, recognised the importance of this approach to societal change, and dedicated his art towards it:

Well, I've worried some about, you know, why write books...why are we teaching people to write books when presidents and senators do not read them, and generals do not read them. And it's been the university experience that taught me that there is a very good reason, that you catch people before they become generals and presidents and so forth and you poison their minds with...humanity, and however you want to poison their minds, it's presumably to encourage them to make a better world (Scholes 107)

Poisoning a few minds is one thing - to change the assumptions of an entire culture is, needless to say, a herculean and seemingly impossible task; and further, it would be foolish to assume that, having done so, we would be able to live in a perfect utopia of peace, equality and rationality. No person (or society) can ever truly be perfect. As Spinoza notes at the end of his Ethics, ‘how could it happen that, if salvation were ready at hand and could be found without great labour, it is neglected almost by all?’ (VPXLIIs). Nevertheless, the reduction of suffering in a society increases its ability to act and become free – and the manner of thinking about our being and our actions, so carefully rationalised by Baruch Spinoza and so humanely imagined by Kurt Vonnegut, may be one of the best tools available to bring this goal closer to fruition.

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