The Man in the High Castle and Philosophy Read online

  Popular Culture and Philosophy® Series Editor: George A. Reisch

  VOLUME 1 Seinfeld and Philosophy: A Book about Everything and Nothing (2000)

  VOLUME 2 The Simpsons and Philosophy: The D’oh! of Homer (2001)

  VOLUME 3 The Matrix and Philosophy: Welcome to the Desert of the Real (2002)

  VOLUME 4 Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Philosophy: Fear and Trembling in Sunnydale (2003)

  VOLUME 9 Harry Potter and Philosophy: If Aristotle Ran Hogwarts (2004)

  VOLUME 12 Star Wars and Philosophy: More Powerful than You Can Possibly Imagine (2005)

  VOLUME 13 Superheroes and Philosophy: Truth, Justice, and the Socratic Way (2005)

  VOLUME 17 Bob Dylan and Philosophy: It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Thinking) (2006)

  VOLUME 19 Monty Python and Philosophy: Nudge Nudge, Think Think! (2006)

  VOLUME 30 Pink Floyd and Philosophy: Careful with that Axiom, Eugene! (2007)

  VOLUME 35 Star Trek and Philosophy: The Wrath of Kant (2008)

  VOLUME 36 The Legend of Zelda and Philosophy: I Link Therefore I Am (2008)

  VOLUME 42 Supervillains and Philosophy: Sometimes Evil Is Its Own Reward (2009)

  VOLUME 49 Zombies, Vampires, and Philosophy: New Life for the Undead (2010)

  VOLUME 53 Martial Arts and Philosophy: Beating and Nothingness (2010)

  VOLUME 54 The Onion and Philosophy: Fake News Story True, Alleges Indignant Area Professor (2010)

  VOLUME 55 Doctor Who and Philosophy: Bigger on the Inside (2010)

  VOLUME 57 Rush and Philosophy: Heart and Mind United (2011) Edited by Jim Berti and Durrell Bowman

  VOLUME 58 Dexter and Philosophy: Mind over Spatter (2011) Edited by Richard Greene, George A. Reisch, and Rachel Robison-Greene

  VOLUME 60 SpongeBob SquarePants and Philosophy: Soaking Up Secrets Under the Sea! (2011) Edited by Joseph J. Foy

  VOLUME 61 Sherlock Holmes and Philosophy: The Footprints of a Gigantic Mind (2011) Edited by Josef Steiff

  VOLUME 63 Philip K. Dick and Philosophy: Do Androids Have Kindred Spirits? (2011) Edited by D.E. Whittkower

  VOLUME 64 The Rolling Stones and Philosophy: It’s Just a Thought Away (2012) Edited by Luke Dick and George A. Reisch

  VOLUME 67 Breaking Bad and Philosophy: Badder Living through Chemistry (2012) Edited by David R. Koepsell and Robert Arp

  VOLUME 68 The Walking Dead and Philosophy: Zombie Apocalypse Now (2012) Edited by Wayne Yuen

  VOLUME 69 Curb Your Enthusiasm and Philosophy: Awaken the Social Assassin Within (2012) Edited by Mark Ralkowski

  VOLUME 71 The Catcher in the Rye and Philosophy: A Book for Bastards, Morons, and Madmen (2012) Edited by Keith Dromm and Heather Salter

  VOLUME 73 The Wire and Philosophy: This America, Man (2013) Edited by David Bzdak, Joanna Crosby, and Seth Vannatta

  VOLUME 74 Planet of the Apes and Philosophy: Great Apes Think Alike (2013) Edited by John Huss

  VOLUME 75 Psych and Philosophy: Some Dark Juju-Magumbo (2013) Edited by Robert Arp

  VOLUME 79 Frankenstein and Philosophy: The Shocking Truth (2013) Edited by Nicolas Michaud

  VOLUME 80 Ender’s Game and Philosophy: Genocide Is Child’s Play (2013) Edited by D.E. Wittkower and Lucinda Rush

  VOLUME 82 Jurassic Park and Philosophy: The Truth Is Terrifying (2014) Edited by Nicolas Michaud

  VOLUME 83 The Devil and Philosophy: The Nature of His Game (2014) Edited by Robert Arp

  VOLUME 84 Leonard Cohen and Philosophy: Various Positions (2014) by Jason Holt

  VOLUME 85 Homeland and Philosophy: For Your Minds Only (2014) Edited by Robert Arp

  VOLUME 86 Girls and Philosophy: This Book Isn’t a Metaphor for Anything (2015) Edited by Richard Greene and Rachel Robison-Greene

  VOLUME 87 Adventure Time and Philosophy: The Handbook for Heroes (2015) Edited by Nicolas Michaud

  VOLUME 88 Justified and Philosophy: Shoot First, Think Later (2015) Edited by Rod Carveth and Robert Arp

  VOLUME 89 Steve Jobs and Philosophy: For Those Who Think Different (2015) Edited by Shawn E. Klein

  VOLUME 90 Dracula and Philosophy: Dying to Know (2015) Edited by Nicolas Michaud and Janelle Pötzsch

  VOLUME 91 It’s Always Sunny and Philosophy: The Gang Gets Analyzed (2015) Edited by Roger Hunt and Robert Arp

  VOLUME 92 Orange Is the New Black and Philosophy: Last Exit from Litchfield (2015) Edited by Richard Greene and Rachel Robison-Greene

  VOLUME 93 More Doctor Who and Philosophy: Regeneration Time (2015) Edited by Courtland Lewis and Paula Smithka

  VOLUME 94 Divergent and Philosophy: The Factions of Life (2016) Edited by Courtland Lewis

  VOLUME 95 Downton Abbey and Philosophy: Thinking in That Manor (2016) Edited by Adam Barkman and Robert Arp

  VOLUME 96 Hannibal Lecter and Philosophy: The Heart of the Matter (2016) Edited by Joseph Westfall

  VOLUME 99 Louis C.K. and Philosophy: You Don’t Get to Be Bored (2016) Edited by Mark Ralkowski

  VOLUME 100 Batman, Superman, and Philosophy: Badass or Boyscout? (2016) Edited by Nicolas Michaud

  VOLUME 101 Discworld and Philosophy: Reality Is Not What It Seems (2016) Edited by Nicolas Michaud

  VOLUME 102 Orphan Black and Philosophy: Grand Theft DNA (2016) Edited by Richard Greene and Rachel Robison-Greene

  VOLUME 103 David Bowie and Philosophy: Rebel Rebel (2016) Edited by Theodore G. Ammon

  VOLUME 104 Red Rising and Philosophy: Break the Chains! (2016) Edited by Courtland Lewis and Kevin McCain

  VOLUME 105 The Ultimate Game of Thrones and Philosophy: You Think or Die (2017) Edited by Eric J. Silverman and Robert Arp

  VOLUME 106 Peanuts and Philosophy: You’re a Wise Man, Charlie Brown! (2017) Edited by Richard Greene and Rachel Robison-Greene

  VOLUME 107 Deadpool and Philosophy: My Common Sense Is Tingling (2017) Edited by Nicolas Michaud

  VOLUME 108 The X-Files and Philosophy: The Truth Is In Here (2017) Edited by Robert Arp

  VOLUME 109 Mr. Robot and Philosophy: Beyond Good and Evil Corp (2017) Edited by Richard Greene and Rachel Robison-Greene

  VOLUME 110 Hamilton and Philosophy: Revolutionary Thinking (2017) Edited by Aaron Rabinowitz and Robert Arp

  VOLUME 111 The Man in the High Castle and Philosophy: Subversive Reports from Another Reality (2017) Edited by Bruce Krajewski and Joshua Heter

  IN PREPARATION:

  The Americans and Philosophy (2017) Edited by Robert Arp and Kevin Guilfoy

  Jimi Hendrix and Philosophy (2017) Edited by Theodore G. Ammon

  American Horror Story and Philosophy (2017) Edited by Richard Greene and Rachel Robison-Greene

  Iron Man versus Captain America and Philosophy (2018) Edited by Nicolas Michaud and JessicaWatkins

  Stephen King’s Dark Tower and Philosophy (2018) Edited by Nicolas Michaud and Jacob Thomas May

  Amy Schumer and Philosophy (2018) Edited by Charlene Elsby and Rob Luzecky

  1984 and Philosophy (2018) Edited by Ezio di Nucci and Stefan Storrie

  Scott Adams and Philosophy (2018) Edited by Dan Yim, Galen Foresman, and Robert Arp

  Twin Peaks and Philosophy (2018) Edited by Richard Greene and Rachel Robison-Greene

  For full details of all Popular Culture and Philosophy® books, visit www.opencourtbooks.com.

  Volume 111 in the series, Popular Culture and Philosophy®, edited by George A. Reisch

  To find out more about Open Court books, visit our website at www.opencourtbooks.com.

  Open Court Publishing Company is a division of Carus Publishing Company, dba Cricket Media.

  Copyright © 2017 by Carus Publishing Company, dba Cricket Media

  First printing 2017


  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher, Open Court Publishing Company, 70 East Lake Street, Suite 800, Chicago, Illinois 60601.

  The Man in the High Castle and Philosophy: Subversive Reports from Another Reality

  ISBN: 978-0-8126-9968-5

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2017942595

  This book is also available as an e-book.

  Contents

  Thanks

  INow Wait for Last Season

  1.Juliana in Plato’s Cave

  DENNIS M. WEISS

  2.Say Heil! to Architecture

  FERNANDO GABRIEL PAGNONI BERNS AND EMILIANO AGUILAR

  3.Saving Hitler’s Life

  DONALD MCCARTHY

  IIThe World Dick Made

  4.Cruel Optimism and the Good Nazi Life

  LUKASZ MUNIOWSKI

  5.In the Neutral Zone, a Libertarian’s Home Is Their (High) Castle

  M. BLAKE WILSON

  6.The Self-Willed and Ignorant Law

  MARC W. COLE

  7.What if Your Hero Is a Fascist?

  BRUCE KRAJEWSKI

  IIICaptives of Unchance

  8.Is It Free Will If You Pay for It?

  JOHN V. KARAVITIS

  9.Could the Axis Have Won the War?

  MIGUEL PALEY

  10.Defying Fate

  BENJAMIN EVANS

  IVFlow My Tears, the Ethicist Said

  11.Is Resistance to Fascism Terrorism?

  COREY HORN

  12.Are We Really Sure They’re Wrong?

  TIMOTHY HSIAO

  13.But Why Is Our World Better?

  TIM JONES

  14.Reel Lucky

  ELIZABETH RARD

  VA Maze of What-ifs

  15.Farts, Butterflies, and Inner Truth

  FRANKLIN PERKINS

  16.How Close Is That World to Our World?

  BRETT COPPENGER

  17.When Worlds Diverge

  ANANYA CHATTORAJ

  VIA Video Darkly

  18.How to Deal with Reality when We’re not Built To

  T.J. ZAWADZKI, STEPHANIE J. ZAWADZKI, AND MACIEJ A. CISOWSKI

  19.What if Evil Had Won?

  VERENA EHRNBERGER

  20.The Spirit of Abstraction

  CHRISTOPHER KETCHAM

  21.After Death It Can Get Worse

  SAM DIRECTOR

  Bibliography

  Agents of Philosophical Propaganda

  Index

  Thanks

  We’re deeply grateful and very much indebted to a number of people who helped make this project a success. Thank you to everyone at Open Court, including (but not limited to) David Ramsay Steele and George Reisch, and also to Richard Greene, for their guidance on a number of matters. Thank you to our institutions—the University of Texas Arlington and Iowa Western Community College—without which we might not be in a position to work on projects such as this. The people who work in the Interlibrary Loan Department at UT-Arlington deserve special mention for their efforts to hunt down items for research. Thank you to all of the fine and thoughtful contributors to this volume. And finally, we must thank you, the reader, for your interest in and commitment to thinking carefully and critically about the events in history, including fictional history, alternative history, and history in many kinds of possible worlds.

  I

  Now Wait for Last Season

  1

  Juliana in Plato’s Cave

  DENNIS M. WEISS

  Amazon’s most successful television show begins with an evocative reminder that we’re living in a media culture in which life is screened. As the opening credits begin to roll, the first thing we viewers hear is a film projector.

  What we see are images projected against a patriotic screen. We hear the Austrian folk tune “Edelweiss”—more about that later. We’re reminded that we’re watching television. We’re at home with our televisions—or maybe, given current technology and the challenges of managing “peak” TV—we’re watching The Man in the High Castle on our smart phone or tablet while commuting (both hands on the wheel please).

  As if to drive this message home, the first scene of the pilot episode features the sound of a projector and light spilling from a projection booth. This time it’s a commercial playing in a movie house. “It’s a new day”—an almost Reaganesque evocation of “Prouder, Stronger, Better.” “It’s morning again in America.” Except these Americans happen to be Nazis. This is a television show about living in a media age of screens, images, and televisions—with Nazis!

  Further underscoring its self-referential nature as a television show about watching television, in an early pivotal scene setting up the backstory, we watch as Frank Frink and Ed McCarthy, sitting at a bar, watch Hitler on television as they spin conspiracy stories about Hitler’s Parkinson’s and the jockeying of his underlings to succeed him. We’re watching the watchers.

  Immediately after this scene, Trudy Walker, just prior to being shot by the Japanese Kempeitai, hands off a film canister to her half-sister Juliana, telling her that it is “a way out.” Juliana returns to her basement apartment and, pulling out a film projector, immediately screens the newsreel, The Grasshopper Lies Heavy. Once again, we hear the sound of a movie projector and see light projected on a basement curtain. Juliana is transfixed. She’s pulled into this screened world—to the point where she watches the film over and over again, her eyes welling up with tears. She smiles. Frank comes home and recognizes the anti-fascist newsreels made by the “Man in the High Castle” and he and Juliana debate whether the films are “real.”

  This early scene with Juliana is an interesting screening of Plato’s Cave, where Plato imagines prisoners, chained deep in a cave, watching shadowy images cast on a wall, mistakenly assuming them to be the sole reality, oblivious to the world that lies outside the cave. Juliana is in her basement apartment, underground, watching images flicker on an old curtain. But rather than assuming that the images are illusory, underground second-rate deceptions of a more real world lying outside the basement door, Juliana takes these images for reality and it changes the direction of her life. It’s the screened image that sets Juliana free and not the “real” world in which she lives. Juliana, turning Plato on his head, prefers image to reality and it’s these illusory screened images that provide her with a way out.

  But things aren’t so clear, at least for us viewers, for we’ve already seen that the status of screened images is ambiguous. We’ve seen Nazi ideology masquerading as commercial shorts in movie theaters. And over the course of the first several episodes of The Man in the High Castle we see several scenes of television shows playing in the background: a Nazi version of the gameshow “What’s My Line?”; Japanese wrestling entertaining a bored housewife doing the laundry; a Reich version of Dragnet. Later, John Smith gathers his family and Nazi buddies around the television on VA Day to watch a patriotic speech from the Führer. And then there’s that opening song—“Edelweiss.” Meant to be an evocation of the folk spirit of the Nazi homeland, and thought by many to be an authentic Austrian folk song, if not its official national anthem, it’s actually a song penned in 1959 by Rogers and Hammerstein for the Broadway musical The Sound of Music. Scratching a bit beneath the celluloid surface then, we’re led to believe that what appears to be authentic is in fact suspect. And yet, Juliana comes to believe in these newsreels, to the point that she assumes her sister Trudy’s identity and travels to Canon City to discover more about these mysterious films.

  Two Julianas

  It might seem perverse to watch The Man in the High Castle with a view toward its commentary on television and the screened image. After all, here’s a television show dealing with the aftermath of the atomic bombing of Washington, DC, a television show in which Nazis and Japanese Kempeitai brutally op
press Americans while wiping out East Coast Jews and the disabled. Much of the discussion revolving around The Man in the High Castle has to do with the “what if” of World War II ending in a different way. But in fact, there is another intriguing what-if this series implicitly explores: What if the Nazis had invented television?

  In Philip K. Dick’s counterfactual science fiction novel, originally published in 1962 and re-issued as a Vintage paperback in 1992, it’s the victory of the Axis powers in World War II that gets the lion’s share of attention. But the counterfactual world Dick built is interesting on many levels, not least for what it has to say about technology. As in the television show, the Nazis are clearly more technologically advanced than the Japanese and those vanquished Americans. In both novel and television show, Japanese trade minister Mr. Tagomi admits that Japan has fallen behind Nazi technological progress, underscored by Nazi rockets that transport individuals across the country in two hours and, in the novel, allow the Germans to populate Mars. In the world of the novel, those technological advances extend even to television. In the novel Juliana is divorced from Frank Frink and living in Canon City. While shopping in a drugstore she glimpses an article in Life magazine: “Television in Europe: Glimpse of Tomorrow.”

  Turning to it, interested, she sees a picture of a German family watching television in their living room. Already, the article said, there are four hours of image broadcast during the day from Berlin. Someday there would be television stations in all the major European cities. And, by 1970, one would be built in New York.

  Once again, Juliana is transfixed by the thought of staring at a screened image. She wonders, “what it’s like to sit home in your living room and see the whole world on a little gray glass tube.” If the Nazis can fly back and forth between Earth and Mars, why, Juliana wonders, can’t they get television going? Recall that Dick is writing this in the early 1960s. The Man in the High Castle was published in 1962. The first golden age of television ran from 1949 until approximately 1960 and by 1960 television had reached a saturation point. In 1950 only nine percent of American households had a television set. By 1960 that figure had reached ninety percent. Dick was living in a world newly dominated by television but was imagining a world in which it was largely absent. Although, that’s not altogether true.