"Dick,_Philip_K._The shifting realities of Philip K Dick" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dick Phillip K)

Philosophical issues were always at the heart of Dick's subject matter as a writer. He sold his first
SF story back in 1951, at age twenty-two. Even by then, his course was set: He would explore the
basic mysteries of existence and of human character. In Michael in the 'Fifties, an unpublished
novel by Kleo Mini (Dick's second wife, to whom he was married for most of the fifties decade), the
psychological makeup of the title character is based loosely on Dick and displays the same intense
scrutiny of existence that Mini remembers in her husband at the very start of his SF writing career.
Here is a dialogue between Michael and wife Kate, based to some extent on Mini herself. Kate
speaks first:
"I think you [Michael] -- sometimes -- want to pull away from the world. Away from me, away from
everything I think of as real. Away from your house and your car and your cat. Sometimes you're very far
away from all of us. And sometimes I think I'm like a string that brings you back to earth, holds you down
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to the earth."
She was right, he thought. She was real, as real as the crab grass and the kitchen table.
"Where is it you go, Michael?"
"I don't want to go anywhere, Kate. But I think there are different kinds of reality. And the car and the
house and the cat are not all there is. Living like we do -- on the edge, in a way -- we're always so busy
scraping along, trying to get by, that it keeps us, it keeps me from dealing with the other reality, the
meaning of everything1 ."
In his interview with Bertrand, Dick offered a summary of his early philosophical influences:
I first became interested in philosophy in high school when I realized one day that all space is the same
size; it is only the material boundaries encompassing it that differ. After that there came to me the
realization (which I found later in Hume) that causality is a perception in the observer and not a datum of
external reality. In college I was given Plato to read and thereupon became aware of the possible existence
of a metaphysical realm beyond or above the sensory world. I came to understand that the human mind
could conceive of a realm of which the empirical world was epiphenomenal. Finally I came to believe that in
a certain sense the empirical world was not truly real, at least not as real as the archetypal realm beyond it.
At this point I despaired of the veracity of sense-data. Hence in novel after novel that I write I question
the reality of the world that the characters' percept-systems report.
This condensed history of philosophical influences tells only part of the story of Dick's
development as a writer. There are, to be sure, a good number of philosophical and spiritual
perspectives that mattered greatly to Dick but are not listed above. But a more basic factor was the
difficult childhood Dick endured, which included the early divorce of his parents, frequent
Depression era cross-country moves with his financially strapped and emotionally distant mother,
and bouts of vertigo and agoraphobia that interfered with Dick's schooling and friendships and
caused his mother to have him examined by at least two psychiatrists. One of these psychiatrists
speculated that Dick might be suffering from schizophrenia -- a diagnostic possibility that severely
frightened the boy and would haunt the grown man all his life.
Throughout Dick's speculations, there is the underlying sense of a dark pain and of shattering
experiences that had left him grappling for his place in the shared world (koinos kosmos, in the
Greek of Heraclitus, a thinker whom Dick greatly admired) and struggling to evade the madness of
solitary delusion (idios kosmos, private world; from idios comes the English "idiot" -- one who is cut
off from that which is happening around him). Though fear lurked strongly within him, Dick insisted
on staring madness in the face and asking if it, too, could lay claim to a kind of knowledge. Thus, in
"Drugs, Hallucinations, and the Quest for Reality," a 1964 essay included herein, Dick argued that
what is called schizophrenic or psychotic "hallucination" may be, in many cases, the result of
extremely broad and sensitive perceptions that most "sane" persons learn to screen out of their
consciousness. The Kantian a priori categories of space and time are examples of such screens;
Kant claimed that these were necessary for the mental ordering of phenomenal reality, which would
otherwise remain a hopeless perceptual chaos to human minds. In his essay, Dick theorized that, to