The fatalistic bees and that knot of inexorable causality untangled by Wallace

According to accounts, once his lectures concluded—which he often delivered while wearing his work clothes, khaki trousers and boots—he would hurry out of the lecture theatre to return to a pursuit that ran parallel to his teaching, one as stimulating as the syllogisms of dialectics and the dilemmas of logic: beekeeping. For the eccentric professor, it was more than just a hobby, given that he owned three hundred beehives and, whilst having no intention of profiting from honey production – he would place his jars on an unattended stall set up on the street in front of his house, near Cayuga Lake, and interested passers-by would help themselves and leave a small donation in the collection box – nevertheless, he derived a modest annual profit. Costs remained low because the philosopher-beekeeper had dispensed with centrifugal honey extraction—which required bulky, expensive machinery—in favor of the simpler, more natural production of honey in comb, for which a small pocket knife was all that was needed. He was enthralled by the perfect regularity of the hexagonal wax cells. He had been given his first beehive as a gift when he was fourteen, and since then his friendship with the industrious pollinators had only deepened.

It is not merely a curious detail in the biography of Richard Clyde Taylor (1919–2003), the American metaphysician who, through a lifetime spent observing honeybees, developed his mindset, his way of thinking and his approach to nature and the world. He came to philosophy relatively late in life, during the Second World War, whilst reading Plato and Schopenhauer during long watch shifts on naval submarines. He became famous for his “Fatalism”, the article published in 1962 in the Philosophical Review which sparked a hornet’s nest – or a swarm – of protests in the philosophical debate of the 1960s, a debate that continued for over two decades: The debate continued at least until 1985, when David Foster Wallace—of all people—made it the subject of his undergraduate philosophy thesis, acknowledging it as ‘the most powerful argument ever put forward in favour of fatalism’.

The idea Taylor put forward – expressed in a few words but in a summary so accurate that it was used by the thinker himself – was that ‘everything that happens is necessary; everything that does not happen is impossible’. In essence, things cannot unfold any differently from the way they do, and any hypothesis regarding the possibility of altering their course is without foundation. It is as if to say that there is no scope for free choice to influence events, and that free will is an illusion.

It was an unacceptable denial of human freedom, and indeed was unanimously rejected by the philosophers of the time, although none of them managed to refute the arguments of that serene friend of the bees, which were based on the elementary principles of classical logic.

The decisive blow, struck on the very same ground and with far more sophisticated weapons, would come from a twenty-year-old novice, a student born, incidentally, in the very year the controversial article was published: from the brilliant undergraduate who, whilst still in his early days, was revealing himself to have a dual nature. “I thought I was dealing with an extremely gifted young philosopher who wrote novels in his spare time,” said one of his lecturers, Jay Garfield, “and I hadn’t realised that he was one of the most gifted novelists of his generation and, incidentally, studied philosophy.”

Wallace’s philosophical treatise, the incisive honours thesis presented at Amherst College, Massachusetts, in 1985, has just arrived in Italian bookshops under the effective title "Contro il fatalismo" (Einaudi), which aptly conveys its original polemical tone. The original title was "Richard Taylor’s Fatalism and the Semantics of Physical Modality". The title of the US edition, however, which appeared fifteen years ago in 2011 – three years after Wallace’s suicide – is “Fate, Time and Language: An Essay on Free Will’: a comprehensive title for a volume which, comprising a general introduction and a primer for non-specialists, whilst retracing the stages of the attempted and failed refutations of Taylor’s thesis, highlighted on its cover all the key aspects of the problem: fate, time, language and free will. In the Italian edition, Wallace’s work—introduced by the essential preface by the editors, Guido Baggio (also the translator) and Mario De Caro, followed by an affectionate tribute from his thesis supervisor, Willem deVries, unfolds across its slim seventy or so pages as a gruelling document, composed of rigorous arguments, axiomatisations and logical deductions transformed into formulas, functions, calculations and diagrams. Lovers of DFW’s sweeping, encyclopaedic, allusive prose – the ‘howling fantods’, as his fans call themselves, borrowing the expression from his magnum opus Infinite Jest – though initially taken aback, will soon recognise, here and there, the writer’s original flair; in defiance of the conventions of academic writing, he resorted to the first-person singular (“Suppose I am an admiral…” “… I am on the bridge of my destroyer…” ‘Here I must pause for a moment…’ ‘I shall do my utmost to demonstrate…’), addressed the reader directly (‘The reader should by now recognise… and be inclined to say… and even be able to foresee…’), and commented using colloquial expressions (‘It is a problem as old as Aristotle’, ‘a strange and unfortunate metaphysical doctrine’, ‘‘an obscure and bewildering field’, ‘a complex and interesting situation’, ‘truly interesting… deeply interesting… rich and interesting…’”). “I thought I was dealing with an extremely gifted young philosopher who wrote novels in his spare time,” said one of his lecturers of him.

These are the passages where the personality, the touch and the voice of someone who ‘incidentally’ transformed the driest of scientific texts into a work of art begin to shine through. At that age, Dave was already writing literature – and not just in his spare time. While working on his thesis in philosophical logic, he feverishly wrote a second degree thesis in English literature in record time; this, reworked over the course of a couple of years, would be published as his first novel, "The Broom of the System". Standing at the crossroads between philosophy and literature, the conscious decision to pursue creative prose was made early on, so much so that the novel was published in 1987 (Einaudi 2008), whilst the philosophical essay remained unpublished for a long time, even after the author’s death.

And yet here it is, and we have to tackle it. By getting to the heart of the matter – the core, the crux of the issue – which beats to the rhythm of an emotional impulse: the fury and indignation (as his professor reports) that drove the undergraduate to pen a passionate defence of human freedom. Yet beyond sentiment, or the sentimentalism of which the 23-year-old Wallace’s mature dissertation is entirely devoid, it is worth delving into the substance of the matter because – ipse dixit – it is interesting, interesting, interesting, interesting.

The point of interest lies in the crux of the inexorable – fatal! – consequentiality highlighted by Taylor, who began with a series of facts, self-evident truths and established principles, perfectly consistent with common sense, only to draw conclusions that those very facts, self-evident truths, etc. completely contradicted. Stripping the paradox down to its bare essentials, there are three elements that contribute to it: the principle of non-contradiction, also known as the principle of bivalence or the principle of the excluded middle: true or false; the principle that truth does not change over time: if it is true today, it is true always; and the causal relationship between an action and its consequences. When we relate these three principles to one another in the case of what Aristotle, and later Taylor, and then Wallace, and the authors of the prefaces to Wallace’s work call ‘contingent futures’ – that is, statements uttered now but oriented towards the future – that is when the trouble begins. If I say that there will be a naval battle tomorrow (the example is Aristotle’s, taken up by the two disputants, Taylor and Wallace) and assign a truth value to my sentence in the future tense, it follows that what is true today will be confirmed tomorrow and the order to attack that the commander on the bridge must give in order for the battle to take place cannot be avoided. In other words, if I accept the principle of bivalence, I deny free will; if I wish to preserve free will, I deny the elementary foundations of logic.

It is a trap; wherever one turns, one encounters a dead end, one finds oneself in a cul-de-sac, one strikes the solid wall of intuitive evidence, of the self-evident. Taylor escapes this by sacrificing free will: everything that happens is necessary; everything that does not happen is impossible.

Wallace makes an issue of the obviousness of the obvious, a concern that runs through his entire literary output from start to finish: ‘consider that few, very few of us are capable of facing the obvious’, says one of his characters in "La ragazza dai capelli strani" (Minimum Fax, 2003). Philosophically, he engages with Taylor’s game with formidable seriousness; he ‘bends over backwards’ to uphold all his premises and, where they appear to contradict one another, he becomes even more subtle, diabolically meticulous. He diversifies the relationships of necessity. He distinguishes between logical causality and physical causality. He integrates the two-dimensional dynamics of elementary logic with the multidimensional dynamics of modal logic. He transforms the pure form of time—valid under laboratory conditions and in abstract hypotheses—into the murky, opaque, chaotic nature of situational universes. He introduces elements of disturbance, the unexpected, friction, and the imponderable concreteness of the real world into the map that formal language seeks to represent it. To conclude that – as he would have declared in Infinite Jest – ‘logical validity is no guarantee of truth’. Or, to paraphrase the two editors: one must not confuse ‘what propositions say about the world with what the world allows propositions to say’. All this is translated into the diagrams of the ‘J-system’, a previously unpublished code devised by the undergraduate. Anyone who feels overwhelmed by their complexity need only admire their elegance, imagining the speed of the inferences that take place within them. And when it comes to capturing the elusive nature of phenomena, one is reminded of the Wallacean subtleties that emerge wherever the writer describes the effervescence of mineral water, or a face carved from moon paste, or the swift and intelligent movements of an ‘athlète savant’, bearing in mind that his propositions formulated in J were dictated by the very same thirst for concreteness, the same passion for the real that inspires the prose writer’s visions, witticisms and linguistic inventions.

The wise athlete: the sporting metaphor works well when attempting to keep up with Wallace’s lightning-fast mind. As a former tennis champion, DFW knew just how slow thought is compared to the speed of the body, or how the intelligence of the physical body anticipates and enhances the agility of the mind. He described this mysterious dynamic in his famous 2006 article published in the New York Times, "Federer as a Religious Experience" (Einaudi 2012), in which he spoke of a ‘geometric mind’, the ability to calculate the angles of trajectories, ‘hidden intuition’, ‘tactical instinct’, ‘peripheral vision’, and a ‘kinesthetic range’ more difficult to interpret than mere mechanical speed. A theorem. The attempted solution to which leads to an unknown quantity: Federer’s incalculable ‘moments’, in which his control of the match seemed to ‘nullify the laws of physics’ or, conversely, in which his supreme mastery of the game seemed to spiral out of control: ‘Tennis’, wrote Wallace, ‘involves intervals of time too brief to allow for intentional acts’. So: freedom or destiny? Free will or necessity? Similar aporetic, incalculable, mystical moments—those in which the agent’s—the champion’s—action converges and contributes to the match’s inevitable outcome—are also hypothesised by Wallace the philosopher in his thesis against fatalism. And he emphasises forcefully that in the concept of these moments one touches upon ‘the most radical aspect of System J’, according to which ‘no alternative presents are permitted within a given present moment’. That is to say, once we reach that point, that instant which is true because it actually happens, in the present, ‘all the infinite possibilities dissolve’: reality pierces the fabric of logic, throws every predictive system into disarray, and arrives at the self-evident truth of what lies before our eyes. To probe that obviousness would mean straying into metaphysics, a realm in which, as Wittgenstein said, one can only utter nonsensical propositions – a point Wallace does not cite in his thesis but which he read and reread obsessively. It is the stake driven into the heart of Taylor’s argument: ‘Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent’.

The fatalist had got carried away by extending the logic beyond its boundaries. But his argument – given his character and his tendency to highlight problems rather than provide answers, for which his students loved him – was perhaps a provocation, the construction of a paradox like those of Zeno (Achilles the swift and the tortoise…). His bee friends had taught him otherwise, and in the books he dedicated to them – The Book of Beekeeping and The Joys of Beekeeping – whilst keeping fatalism in the back of his mind, one finds gems such as: ‘There are some useful rules of thumb. One is that, when faced with a problem in the apiary and you don’t know what to do, it is best to do nothing. Things rarely get worse by doing nothing, whereas they often get much worse as a result of inappropriate intervention’.