Cordially,
Phil Dick
Letter to Claudia Bush, February 13, 1975
[4:163]
Dear Claudia,
It seems to me that one of the most important points that Angus Taylor36 makes about my preoccupation with Just how real is reality? is that one cannot sense that reality is somehow insubstantial unless somehow, unconsciously, one is comparing or contrasting that reality with a kind of hyper-reality; otherwise the intuition makes no sense. This shows how inexpert I have been regarding my own epistemological perceptions. What, over the years, I have seen (and put into my writing) I have judged correctly, the soap-bubble effect, so to speak, of the phenomenological world. I knew what it indicated about the world around me. Something lay beyond it, or something had constructed it, as a kind of set, or backdrop, or stage, which we all take to be real. But there it is again, the word “real.” If nothing else existed, no other universe, no other order of reality, then however insubstantial, even if dream-like, the world we see would by definition have to be given the name of The Real. It can only be less than real if something which is not less than real exists, and presumably in some true sense behind what we do actually see.† This realization seems to have surfaced now and then in my writing without me seeing anything more than a theoretical need to provide it, for my characters to discuss with one another what they saw, their insights about what they saw, what it all meant. And yet, as I said in my long metaphysical paper, what is true for one universe is true for all universes; if these insights are true for the fictional universes of my novels then, unless I am fundamentally wrong—in regard to perceiving the soap-bubble manufactured stage-backdrop effect around me—the further premise, or rather the most significant deduction from the premise of less-than-reality, must pertain to our universe, the one all of us are living in this very day.
That I never saw that all this had to apply to our world is a measure of the failure of the artist to discover the relationship between his art (or in my case the worlds within my art, the topic of my art) and life, his life, all our lives, our world. The first philosopher to prove beyond doubt that what our senses perceive as the Real World cannot in actuality be real (not probably isn’t, but cannot) was Parmenides. He also realized that this did not tell him, by any known process, what in its stead was real. He could prove only negatives, which we’re told can’t be done. He did this very thing, and went his way. I think that in my writing I retraced the ground which he traced and came to the same conclusions, but I had the advantage of knowing in the back of my mind (i.e., my unconscious or right hemisphere) about Plato’s concept of the idea universe, of which ours is a mirror reflection. You can see that Plato’s whole concept was dictated by what Parmenides did somewhat before him; if not dictated by a priori necessity, then sooner or later by existential experience, as in my case (I speak of my March 1974 experience). The criticism, which I remember using in Philo 10A, a survey course at Cal, was that “What value does this metaphysical Eternal Real World of Forms of Plato have, since we can never encounter or experience it? Doesn’t pragmatism show us that it is unnecessary to believe in it? All events can be explained just as well without it?” What I didn’t know was that after Plato’s time the Platonists and Neoplatonists developed methods of encountering that very real world of the Logos or archetypes, the plan (this is probably the best English rendering of logos) underlying all phenomena. Once they had begun to experience it, as I did quite by chance in March 1974, they re ally put an end to such bickering as I engaged in back in my college days. It is an index of the ignorance of our world today that my instructor’s answer was not, “But later on for eight hundred years people did experience Plato’s world of the Idea,” but rather was that if I was going to question all this, I should quit the class. I did so. I wonder what the ghost of Socrates would have thought when the instructor’s response was as it was.*
That for years (about twenty) I have alluded to the possibility of the entire Platonist System being accurate, and that eventually, without premeditation I actually experienced that universe lying behind ours, concealed within—yes, actually concealed within ours!—is a point of importance in the constructing of a new worldview to replace the old one which is shabby and cracking apart and fading away. This is why the various Marxist intellectuals have been coming here, writing about Ubik, discussing Empedocles vis-à-vis my writing. If I have, and indeed I have, stumbled independently onto Platonism without knowing what it is or what that stumbling upon, that refinding after so many centuries, signifies, then of course I have done something of importance, but not something original. It’s as if the formula for Coca Cola were lost for centuries and then someone invented a soft drink, began bottling and selling it, and an incredibly old man (Mel Brooks, maybe) tasted it and shouted, “This is coca COLA! I remember it from the twentieth century!” Imagine how disappointed the new inventor would be, personally, although probably the world would rejoice that Coke had been found again, resurrected from the trash of the gutter, etc., as Lem would put it, no doubt. A hideous power, buried for eons in the form of degenerate molecules. However, it would be striking to meditate on the meaning of all this if a large part of the intellectual community had decided, for almost four hundred years straight, that Coca Cola had never existed, that those in the dim past had only imagined it to be a part of their world. To reinvent or rediscover something which had been ruled nonexis tent in the first place . . . that is the secret weapon of truth: it can’t be suppressed, because of its nature; if it could be, it would be only opinion. In a very important way, this is how we define truth. People keep bumbling across it again and again. It survives even its own total destruction. Just as the power of Christianity lay not in the crucifixion but in the Resurrection (if Barabbas had returned instead of Jesus we would now be Barabbassians, I guess), then the same can be said for this: which I think can properly and precisely be termed Neoplatonism.
By the way—our new Britannica defines Neoplatonism as the sum total of all pagan (i.e., non-Christian) Western theological and philosophical thought, rather than a particular doctrine or sect. Wow. It was around the year 500 A.D. that Justinian closed all the schools which taught Neoplatonism; i.e., he forbade its teaching; he outlawed it. Golly; I have brought down Christianity, then. I have proved what Ted Sturgeon said in that Venus Plus X or whatever he called that Ace book; the Church kicked the asses of those who were right, and sold two thousand years of profitable lies in the place of what I am sure now was not only real and true but what they knew was real and true (vide what became of Erigena). How is the Pope going to take this? As the popes always have; by kicking someone’s ass. But in truth, in very truth, this is a shadow universe we see, a reflection in the mirror of another universe behind it, and that other universe can be reached by an individual directly, without the help of any priest or service or communion or even knowing what he is doing (the latter pertains to me, you understand; I was just trying out the massive hits of WS vitamins). God is as close as the wall beside me; is within the wall beside me, concealed by it, as if that wall is a paper mask.