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

Article in The European Legacy · December 2013

DOI: 10.1080/10848770.2013.836815

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 The European Legacy
Toward New Paradigms

ISSN: 1084-8770 (Print) 1470-1316 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cele20

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

Steven Joyce

To cite this article: Steven Joyce (2013) Fate, Time, and Language: An Essay on Free Will, The
European Legacy, 18:7, 944-946, DOI: 10.1080/10848770.2013.836815

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944 BOOK REVIEWS

well-known successors Heidegger and Gad- it to the other works in the volume and
amer and on his approximate contemporary highlighting its place in the oeuvre as a
Husserl. Dilthey’s writings were wide-rang- whole. As it stands, the volume speaks more
ing, and they covered topics in the natural to a specialized audience already acquainted
sciences, history and the social sciences, and with Dilthey’s philosophy than to a broader
aesthetics. It was perhaps his conscious audience. There is little attempt at historical
decision (as well as a reflection of his temper- contextualization (which is odd when dealing
amental disposition) to refrain from narrow with Dilthey, for whom the notion of histor-
specialization or the pursuit of a single ical context is central) except for brief
overarching methodological approach that biographical footnotes of some lesser-known
prevented him from achieving greater fame figures—but the volume does come with a
(in philosophy, it also doesn’t hurt to have a helpful and extensive glossary of Dilthey’s
savvy sense of self-promotion, as the cases of key terms. This resource allows the reader
Heidegger and Wittgenstein make clear). familiar with German to check a particular
This is unfortunate, since Dilthey’s ideas term’s rendering into English. The individual
deserve a wider readership. His insights into translations as a whole seem solid, and are
the role of the “human sciences” (in German generally readable, fluent, and remarkably
Geisteswissenschaften, or roughly “humanities”) unstilted, though I would have preferred the
seem particularly valuable and pertinent more straightforward “connection” for the
today—a time of increased specialization and often-used term Zusammenhang over “nexus”
growing scientific hegemony. Though which seems too technical and abstract.
respectful of the methods and the incontest- But these are minor reservations about an
able achievements of the natural sciences in ambitious and commendable undertaking,
the modern age, Dilthey was concerned that which will help to introduce this underap-
they were undermining the role of subjective preciated thinker to a wider audience.
response and empathy in human understand-
ing (Verstehen). Because he was skeptical of
the natural sciences’ application of causal DIRK R. JOHNSON
explanations to the structures of lived experi- Hampden-Sydney College, USA
ence, he sought to reclaim the importance of drjohnson@hsc.edu
human experience and to breach the divide Ó 2013, Dirk R. Johnson
between the human world and the natural http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10848770.2013.836814
world. One can only wonder what Dilthey
would have thought of the current expansion
of the neurosciences into the domain of the Fate, Time, and Language: An Essay on
traditional humanities. Free Will. By David Foster Wallace. Edited
This new six-volume publication of by Steven M. Cahn and Maureen Eckert
Dilthey’s writings, edited by Dilthey scholars (New York: Columbia University Press,
Rudolf Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi, should 2011), viii + 252 pp. $19.95/£13.95 paper.
enhance his reputation in the English-speak-
ing world. The volume under review show- David Foster Wallace appears on the cover of
cases significant dimensions of Dilthey’s Fate, Time and Language: An Essay on Free Will
eclectic philosophy. To a reader not versed seemingly posed and pensive, effecting a mien
in Dilthey’s ideas, however, the works at once contemplative and rumpled, a mien
selected might seem arbitrary—one wonders that only a genius dare assume. Wearing his
why the editors chose these particular works signature bandana and a nondescript T-shirt,
and what their underlying connections might he appears in mid-transport, neither there nor
be. The volume’s introduction is helpful but here, merely suspended in what looks like a
only skims the surface of Dilthey’s complex postmodern still life. A shadeless light bulb
thought system. Even though one can illuminates this frozen moment but does not
appreciate the editors’ decision to refrain dispel the greater darkness surrounding it. And
from artificially systematizing Dilthey, it this seems to convey the problematic essence
would have helped had they prefaced each of David Foster Wallace—the brilliant
selection with a succinct introduction relating shadeless light poised to dispel the greater
 BOOK REVIEWS 945

darkness but suspended in his own circum- the philosophical insides of Taylor’s argu-
scribed luminescence. However, a darkness he ment still attached and concludes that
does dispel is Richard Taylor’s essay on humankind is not subject to fatalism, which
fatalism, which Rebecca Newberger Goldstein removes “human agency” from the world,
describes on the back cover as “the sorrowful and posits the idea that “how things are in
erasure of possibilities.” the future... [determines] what happens right
This volume, edited by Steven M. Cahn now” (5–6).
and Maureen Eckert, presents not only Richard While Taylor’s argument is at least
Taylor’s essay on fatalism and Wallace’s thesis- partially understandable, Wallace’s requires a
long rebuttal of it but a number of other studied understanding of formal philosophy.
responses—including those by Steven Cahn, What does stand out, however, is that his
John Turk Saunders, Bruce Aune, Raziel refutation, written by Wallace as a graduate
Abelson, Richard Sharvy, Peter Makepease, student at Amherst, not only attempts to
and Charles D. Brown—which gives the work disprove Taylor’s theory by exposing a fatal
ample philosophical context and depth. flaw in his reasoning but also reveals a
Wallace, who collaborated with a number personal investment in that project.
of fellow students and philosophers, found a What bothered yet fascinated David
technical flaw in Taylor’s argument that Foster Wallace was the tractability of
hinged on the distinction between what Wal- language and logic—their ability to “scram-
lace termed “situational physical modality” ble” and displace what we think we know
and Taylor’s notion of logical modalities. This and hope to believe about the world. Yet, in
led him to conclude that “Taylor’s claim was places in this work, the tenor of the discus-
never really that fatalism was actually ‘true,’ sion has the sound and flavor of Gulliver’s
and that it did not in fact”... yield his meta- encounter with the academics of the flying
physical conclusion” (212–13). In his response island of Laputa who, while comically self-
to Taylor, Wallace seems to identify a kind of absorbed in all manner of specious argument,
semantic bullying that forces language and cannot escape the absurd.
logic to execute a number of semantic feats Nonetheless, Wallace’s entire 74-page
that to Wallace are both contorted and impe- thesis is an exercise in elegant argument and
rious. tight logic in the service of ideational
Wearing a denim vest, a limp neutral groundedness. At the center of this argument
smile, and a Western kerchief around his is this—in Wallace’s own words and probably
neck, Richard Taylor looks out at the reader the most lucid statement in the entire arcan-
on page 40 rather like a well-rested Abraham ely argued thesis:
Lincoln, projecting a calm and reassuring look
that belies the unsettling implications of his The problem, in a nutshell, is whether we
thesis. The casual reader will find Wallace’s can allow contingent future-tensed propo-
formal refutation of Taylor’s argument some- sitions to take standard truth-values with-
what difficult to access since it is couched in out doing violence to our belief that parts
the language of formal philosophy. Wallace’s of the universe enjoy at least some degree
thesis, entitled “Richard Taylor’s Fatalism and of causal contingency and that persons
the Semantics of Physical Modality,” is laid enjoy at least some control over what does
and will happen to them. (142)
out in that quasi-mathematical language of
formal philosophy that oddly suggests that
language itself is somehow fatalistic. This is David Foster Wallace at his
Wallace’s analysis of Taylor’s argument conversational best, unwilling to allow
centers on the contention that semantics and postmodern philosophical polemics to have
logic can stray from what is reasonable and its way with the far more real and genuine
genuine. Similar to the after phenomenon possibility of human election. In the end, it
of a stinging bee, Taylor’s argument loses its becomes apparent that Wallace’s argument
sting as well as much of its rhetorical insides for “free will” is far less academic than it is
at the hands of Wallace. David Foster personal. Certainly, Wallace’s untimely death
Wallace begins his refutation by looking resonates with the very substance of his
carefully at this disengaged stinger-mass with rejoinder to Richard Taylor.
 946 BOOK REVIEWS

This is a book for serious philosophers Casella concludes her essay “Playthings:
and graduate students as well as for serious Archaeology and the Material Ambiguities of
aficionados of complex thought and should Childhood” by noting how the difficulty of
definitely enjoy a prominent place on their identifying which artifacts in past cultures
bookshelves. served as toys disrupts the disciplinary pre-
mise of a form/function correlation. Evoking
the title of Jacqueline Rose’s The Case of
STEVEN JOYCE Peter Pan or the Impossibility of Children’s
The Ohio State University-Mansfield, USA Fiction (a book cited in many of the essays,
joyce.3@osu.edu not just those concerned with children’s
Ó 2013, Steven Joyce literature), Casella concludes that children,
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10848770.2013.836815 like their toys, “exist as an archaeological
conundrum: simultaneously necessary and
impossible” (51).
Children in Culture, Revisited: Further The relationship between contemporary
Approaches to Childhood. Edited by discourses of childhood and politically con-
Karı́n Lesnik-Oberstein (New York: Palgrave servative agendas is central to several of the
Macmillan, 2011), xi + 232 pp. £50.00 essays. For example, Erica Burman analyzes
cloth. how the representation of boys as threatened
by “a new feminized economic regime”
A sequel to her 1998 collection, Children in could “be read as marking a nostalgic return
Culture: Approaches to Childhood, Children in to, or desire for re-inscription of, an older
Culture, Revisited: Further Approaches to gender order” (31). In a similar manner,
Childhood continues Karı́n Lesnik-Oberstein’s Daniel Monk questions the “liberal progres-
transdisciplinary approach to childhood. sive account” regarding homophobic bullying
Lesnik-Oberstein dismisses other interdisci- and observes how this account requires that
plinary childhood studies; her first volume, “queer youth conforms to the cultural defini-
Children in Culture “remains to date the most tions of innocent (and ideally non-sexual)
multi- and interdisciplinary volume on child- childhood” (61). Another focus of several
hood to be published [that engages] with con- essays is the presumed link between children,
structivist approaches to childhood across a nature, and a conception of language as both
range of disciplines” (1). Not only do social literal and simple. Sue Walsh juxtaposes belief
sciences and humanities approaches remain in children’s inability to comprehend irony
distinct but the latter nearly always fall back with the charges of racism surrounding the
on “claims and assertions about what real chil- “Into the Heart of Africa” exhibition at the
dren are like” (3). In contrast, Children in Royal Ontario Museum in 1989-90. Simon
Culture, Revisited insists that language Flynn provides an equally fascinating account
constructs reality, and that childhood is not of the reaction to the revelation that “Out
exempt from this construction. with Romany,” a BBC radio program that
Intended to speak across disciplinary ran from 1932 to 1943, used adults to
boundaries, the 11 essays demonstrate how perform what was widely viewed as the
disciplines as varied as archaeology, law, edu- voices of real children, and the further reve-
cation, literary studies, art history, and media lation that the country walks were actually
studies share a common and clearly contra- recorded in a BBC studio.
dictory set of assumptions regarding child- Although Children in Culture, Revisited
hood. As Hannah Anglin-Jaffe in “Reading makes valued contributions to theorizing
the ‘Happy Child’: Normative Discourse in childhood, the volume’s emphasis on how
Wellbeing Education” observes, “discourses deeply embedded cultural beliefs in knowing
of innocence and protection lie alongside what “real” children are like suggests that we
contradictory discourse about endowing are so invested in those beliefs that some form
greater freedom to children through talk of of them is likely to persist. In addition,
rights and agency” (75). Analyzing these although Lesnik-Oberstein insists that “the
assumptions foregrounds larger issues of continued mobilization of analyses of the
disciplinary practice. Thus Eleanor Conlin constitutive discourses of childhood reaps

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