David Foster Wallace
Fate, Time, and Language
(Columbia University Press, November 2010)
Long before he probed the workings of time, human choice, and human frailty in Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace wrote a brilliant philosophical critique of Richard Taylor’s argument for fatalism. In 1962, Taylor used six commonly accepted presuppositions to imply that humans have no control over the future. Not only did Wallace take issue with Taylor’s method, which, according to him, scrambled the relations of logic, language, and the physical world, but he also called out a semantic trick at the heart of Taylor’s argument.
Wallace was a great skeptic of abstract thinking made to function as a negation of something more genuine and real. He was especially suspicious of certain paradigms of thought-the cerebral aestheticism of modernism, the clever gimmickry of postmodernism-that abandoned “the very old traditional human verities that have to do with spirituality and emotion and community.” As Wallace rises to meet the challenge to free will presented by Taylor (and a number of other philosophical heavyweights), we experience the developing perspective of this major novelist, along with the beginning of his lifelong struggle to establish solid logical ground for his soaring convictions. This volume reproduces Taylor’s original article and other works on fatalism cited by Wallace in his critique. James Ryerson, an editor at the New York Times Magazine, draws parallels in his introduction between Wallace’s early work in philosophy and the themes and explorations of his fiction.
Praise for Fate, Time, and Language
“Fatalism, the sorrowful erasure of possibilities, is the philosophical problem at the heart of this book. To witness the intellectual exuberance and bravado with which the young Wallace attacks this problem, the ambition and elegance of the solution he works out so that possibility might be resurrected, is to mourn, once again, the possibilities that have been lost.”
–Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, author of Thirty-six Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction
“As an early glimpse at the preoccupations of one of the 20th century’s most compelling and philosophical authors, it is invaluable, and Wallace’s conclusion… is simply elegant.”
–Publishers Weekly
“This book is for any reader who has enjoyed the works of Wallace and for philosophy students specializing in fatalism.”
–Library Journal
“[A] tough and impressive book.”
–Anthony Gottlieb, Financial Times
“An excellent summary of Wallace’s thought and writing which shows how his philosophical interests were not purely cerebral, but arose from, and fed into, his emotional and ethical concerns.”
–Robert Potts Times Literary Supplement
“Fate, Time, and Language contains a great deal of first-rate philosophy throughout, and not least in Wallace’s extraordinarily professional and ambitious essay.”
–Daniel Speak, Notre Dame Philosophical Review
“Valuable and interesting.”
–James Ley, Australian Literary Review
“I think Dave, foremost among a group of writers that also includes George Saunders and Rick Moody, created a new American literary idiom through which people who are young, or who aren’t young but still feel like they are, can give voice to the full range of their intelligence and emotion and moral sensibility without feeling dorky and uncontemporary. It’s very hard to read Dave and not feel almost peer-pressured to emulate him—his style is utterly contagious. But none of his emulators have his giant talent or his passionate precision. Somebody could write a whole monograph on how deliberately and artfully he deploys the modifier ‘sort of.'”
–Jonathan Franzen, New York Times Book Review
David Foster Wallace (1962-2008) wrote the acclaimed novels Infinite Jest and The Broom of the System and the story collections Oblivion, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, and Girl with Curious Hair. His nonfiction includes the essay collections Consider the Lobster and A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again and the full-length work Everything and More.