Reconstruction Vol. 14, No. 2

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The Problem with Wise Old Fish: An Analysis of Rhetorical Strategy in David Foster Wallace’s Kenyon College Commencement Address / Roberto Sirvent and Neil Baker

Abstract

David Foster Wallace begins his keynote address at the commencement ceremony for Kenyon College’s class of 2005 with a curious story. Two fish are swimming along when they happen across an older fish, who nods and says, “Morning boys. How’s the water?” The two younger fish swim along for a bit before the one turns to the other and asks, “What the hell is water?” The point of the story, Wallace goes on to say, is “merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are the hardest to see and talk about.” He goes on to develop this rather simple observation into the powerful thesis that it is by paying attention to the most mundane aspects of our existence that we avoid going through our “comfortable, prosperous, respectable” adult lives “dead, unconscious,” slaves to the “natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out.” Our essay is concerned with the question of just how Wallace goes about framing this compelling but counterintuitive proposition. We contend that his rhetorical approach depends upon a clever strategy of subverting the expectations of his audience, namely those expectations relating to what we call the “instruction manual” approach to modern American commencement speeches. Wallace stands before the graduates of Kenyon College not to bestow upon them the ivory-tower wisdom of one who has made all the right moves in life, but instead to illuminate the profound significance of what the graduates have always known merely by virtue of being human.

Keywords: Philosophy, Education, Rhetoric

<1> David Foster Wallace delivered the keynote address at Kenyon College’s commencement ceremony for the Class of 2005, and in it he proposed that it is by paying close attention to the most mundane aspects of our existence that we can begin to see our lives in a meaningful and profound light. It is a surprising and counterintuitive thesis, and it is rendered stranger still by the “didactic little parable-ish” [i] story that Wallace uses to introduce it. In this essay we explore the question of just how he goes about conveying his peculiar proposition. The temptation is to cast Wallace in the role of the wise old sage, and to interpret his address as if it were an instruction manual for a life well lived. Yet as the address proceeds, it becomes clear that what is being conveyed is anything but the ivory tower guidance of an all-knowing sage. On the contrary, we contend that the central aspect of Wallace’s rhetorical approach is a clever strategy of targeting and undermining precisely this “instruction manual” expectation.

<2> Wallace begins his speech, “This is Water,” with a curious story:

There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”

Even before his short anecdote had come to an end, likely many of the graduates had already begun mapping out the trajectory of the address. Wallace, the old fish, was gearing up to bestow upon these promising but as yet untested young people some of the wisdom that comes with age. Probably their parents and grandparents, too, had started to get an idea of where Wallace was going. After all, most of them knew from experience that these young fish were about to be dumped into an extremely big pond; no doubt, Wallace had prepared an encouraging message for anxious graduates, and perhaps also a word of caution for the overly-ambitious among them. All of these expectations of course would have been well-founded, since they are rooted in a familiar formula for modern American commencement speeches. Often it is simply understood that the keynote speaker, having successfully navigated life and become unimaginably wealthy or distinguished in the process, is there to tell the next generation of leaders something about how the world works, about how things are, and how best to go about making it all work in their favor.

<3> But if any of these ideas had in fact been forming in the minds of Wallace’s audience, he is quick to do away with them. Right away he informs his listeners that they should not be taking him for the wise old fish, and that the “point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are the hardest to see and talk about.” Indeed, as Wallace proceeds he seems to be intentional about challenging any expectations his audience might have about his role as one who can provide them with an “instruction manual” for a successful and fulfilling life. We will argue that this rhetorical strategy is no accidental feature of the address, and that on the contrary, Wallace could hardly do justice to the question of the “actual human value” of a liberal arts education apart from it.

<4> The key, we believe, to understanding the purpose behind Wallace’s strategy of subverting the “instruction manual” expectation for the content of commencement addresses is an inquiry into the curious question of why he insists that what he has to say should not be understood as moral advice. By calling attention to a parallel line of reasoning that Wallace employs in an interview with Larry McCaffery regarding the value of fiction as an art form, we will demonstrate that the reason for Wallace’s careful avoidance of moralizing language has everything to do with maintaining the audience’s openness to what Martin Heidegger has called a “world.” And once we have seen how the tendency of the address to eschew moralizing language can shed light on the inadequacy of the “instruction manual” method for satisfying Wallace’s rhetorical goals, we will explore the method he chooses instead with an eye for exactly what it is that makes his approach superior. With this objective too, Heidegger’s writings will be of use to us.

On the Possibility of Being a Real Human Being

<5> Three times during his address Wallace interposes the comment that contrary to what his audience might be thinking, he is not attempting to make any normative claims about morality or any of the “so-called virtues.”[ii] Even so, the audience is tempted not to believe him. He contends that people who can “adjust their natural default setting” in the way he describes are properly called “well-adjusted.” What is this if not a moral claim? In any case, why is it so important to our speaker that we do not mistake his speech for a discourse on virtue or morality? We submit that these inquiries, though apparently tangential, are in fact intimately related to the question of Wallace’s rhetorical approach. And to demonstrate why, we will ask the reader to indulge us as we explore yet another aspect of Wallace’s thinking that might, on its surface, appear to have little to do with the specific goals of our analysis.

<6> In the context of his brief commentary on Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho in a 1993 interview with literary critic Larry McCaffery, Wallace provides a powerful glimpse into his idea of what can legitimately be called “good art.” Ellis’ book, he says, depends for its readership on a “kind of black cynicism about today’s world”:

If what’s always distinguished bad writing—flat characters, a narrative world that’s clichéd and not recognizably human, etc.—is also a description of today’s world, then bad writing becomes an ingenious mimesis of a bad world. If readers simply believe the world is stupid and shallow and mean, then Ellis can write a mean, shallow, stupid novel that becomes a mordant deadpan commentary on the badness of everything. Look man, we’d probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is? In dark times, the definition of good art would seem to be art that locates and applies CPR to those elements of what’s human and magical that still live and glow despite the times’ darkness.[iii]

The temptation here is to understand Wallace’s conception of art merely as an engine for popularizing whatever plan for social change the particular artist happens to agree with. However, the issue he takes with Ellis is not simply that the author fails to lay out any plans for a solution to the problems he highlights. Fiction, he says, is not about “conventionally political or social action-type solutions … Fiction’s about what it is to be a fucking human being.”[iv] According to Wallace:

Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it’d find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it … If you operate, which most of us do, from the premise that there are things about the contemporary U.S. that make it distinctively hard to be a real human being, then maybe half of fiction’s job is to dramatize what it is that makes it tough. The other half is to dramatize the fact that we still “are” human beings, now. Or can be.[v]

<7> To clarify Wallace’s distinction between fiction that seeks only to advocate certain “social action-type solutions” and the sort of fiction that holds within it the promise that we can indeed be “real human beings” today, we might turn our attention to the writings of the twentieth century philosopher Martin Heidegger and his concept of the “work of art.” Heidegger takes issue with what he calls the “aesthetic” approach to the interpretation of art, which we might roughly characterize as the tendency of modern philosophical criticism to locate a work of art’s value in abstract formal structures of the mind and not in its particular place within the history of humankind’s political and social existence. For Heidegger, art’s value should instead be found in the fact that art “grounds history” by “allowing truth to spring forth.” [vi] Human beings, he believes, have experienced reality in very different ways throughout the course of time, and he asserts that the work of art is the basic mechanism by which human beings have come to see their “world” anew.

<8> It is important at this point to obviate some of the confusion that can arise over Heidegger’s notion of a “world,” for it is a central tenet of his thinking in general and is a fundamental aspect of his concept of art in particular. That the mode of being peculiar to human beings—what Heidegger calls “Dasein”—is always intelligible in a particular world is no accident; on the contrary, Dasein cannot be at all apart from its world:

Being-in is not a ‘property’ which Dasein sometimes has and sometimes does not have, and without which it could just be as well as it could be with it. It is not the case that man ‘is’ and then has, by way of an extra, a relationship-of-Being towards the ‘world’—a world with which he provides himself occasionally. Dasein is never ‘proximally’ an entity which is, so to speak, free from Being-in, but which sometimes has the inclination to take up a ‘relationship’ towards the world. Taking up relationships towards the world is possible only because Dasein, as Being-in-the-world, is as it is. This state of Being does not arise just because some entity is present-at-hand outside of Dasein and meets up with it. Such an entity can ‘meet up with’ Dasein only in so far as it can, of its own accord, show itself within a world.[vii]

In Heidegger’s terminology then, a world is not a particular entity, but is rather that basic system of cultural practices and assumptions that allows entities within a world to manifest themselves as they are. Heidegger illustrates his point by asking us to consider, for instance, a hammer—such an entity could not “show up” to human beings as a hammer in a cultural “world” that did not have nails, artificial wooden shelters or carpenters. It might instead appear as a strange wooden shaft with a metallic blob fastened to its end. [viii]

<9> Equipped with this understanding of what Heidegger means by “world,” we are now in a position to understand his rather enigmatic assertion, “ art is the becoming and happening of truth.”[ix] Great works of art work, according to Heidegger, in the background of a culture to “first give things their look” and then “to humanity their outlook on themselves.” [x] He argues that significant cultural icons such as the ancient Greek temple and the medieval cathedral have worked to create “worlds” for their respective cultures by disclosing what is most important and meaningful to the historical communities that valued them. Heidegger writes:

It is the temple-work that first joins together and simultaneously gathers around itself the unity of those paths and relations in which birth and death, disaster and blessing, victory and disgrace, endurance and decline obtain the form of destiny for human being. [xi]

Thus, for Heidegger, the essential value of art lies in its ability to open up new “worlds.” Or, to put it differently, art’s value is in its potential to disclose new ways of being real human beings.

<10> Here the striking correspondence between Wallace and Heidegger on the question of good art begins to make itself manifest. Wallace, like Heidegger, locates the value of art in its ability to illuminate whatever possibilities might exist within a culture for understanding itself and its world in new ways.[xii] And for Wallace, it is the prerogative of the great artist to show not only that there are different worlds out there, but also that there are better worlds. In light of this prerogative, the crucial difference between the sort of fiction that merely proposes “social action-type solutions” and the sort that “dramatizes the fact that we still ‘are’ human beings today” becomes clear. Wallace elaborates on his remark that fiction is not about promoting conventional remedies to social problems by adding that “it isn’t that it’s fiction’s duty to edify or teach, or to make us good little Christians or Republicans … I just think that fiction that isn’t exploring what it means to be human today isn’t art.”[xiii] The error of the author who produces fiction with the goal of instructing readers in ‘the way things are done,’ then, is that such an author has neglected to recognize fiction’s value as an art form. A fictional work that serves only to “edify or teach” in a way that does not make questionable the reader’s most basic understanding of her world may indeed give the reader the power to effect some change. But any such change would be inherently limited by the horizon marking the outer-limits of her world, and no new world would be available to her.

<11> We now turn to the issue of exactly how it is that Wallace’s view of art can shed light on his reason for insisting that what he has to say is not about morals or virtues, and what we learn on this point will be helpful in unraveling the question of Wallace’s rhetorical approach. Our answers begin to manifest themselves when it is seen that, in fact, the value of a liberal arts education as it is depicted in the address is very similar to the value of that sort of fiction which Wallace argues can truly be called art. Wallace puts his view succinctly in the closing minutes of his speech:

The only thing that’s capital-T True is that you get to decide how you’re gonna try to see it. This, I submit, is the freedom of a real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t. You get to decide what to worship.

For our speaker, the value of an education is to be found in its capacity to liberate the student by showing her that she is not slavishly bound to her particular way of seeing things. But of course, this is just to say that like great art, a liberal arts education has the power to open up new worlds.

<12> Here is the clue that we have been looking for. If the value of a liberal arts education is to be found in its capacity to open up new worlds, and if it is precisely this capacity that distinguishes fiction as a legitimate form of art, then that which jeopardizes fiction’s artistic value must also be said to put at risk the value of a liberal arts education. And in fact such a threat has been identified. We have seen that the temptation for an author of fiction to use her craft only as an instrument for instructing the reader while neglecting to submit the fundamental practices and assumptions of the culture to question hazards the artistic value of the author’s work by beguiling her into overlooking the imperative of illuminating “possibilities for being alive and human.” For the same reason, an education cannot degenerate into mere instruction lest it lose its primary value, namely its capacity for liberating the student from her particular way of seeing the world. Thus we posit that Wallace’s reason for insisting that his speech is not about morality is that he wishes to make it clear that a liberal arts education should not be about indoctrinating the student into any set of categorical moral imperatives. For Wallace, a ‘moralizing’ education would be no education at all.

<13> We are finally in position to address the central question of our essay. In our investigations we found that the error of moralizing language lies in its tendency to misrepresent the value of a liberal arts education by offering only instruction, thereby covering up the possibility of illuminating new worlds. But Wallace’s determination to avoid this mistake is evident not only when he denies making moral claims. Indeed, we argue that it is this determination that orients his overarching rhetorical strategy. Recall that from the start, Wallace tells his listeners that he is not the “wise, older fish explaining what water is to you younger fish.” We know now that such a speaker could not carry the message that Wallace wishes to bring at all, for precisely the reason that moralizing rhetoric is incapable of conveying the value of a liberal arts education. A “wise old fish” who offers advice that conforms to the instruction manual expectation we described above could not do justice to the value of an education because mere instruction does not open worlds. But exactly how does Wallace go about presenting his message, and what particular advantages does it have over the “instruction manual” method? These are the questions that will occupy us in our next section.

A Different Approach

<14> As we saw above, Wallace tells his listeners that “the point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are the hardest to see and talk about.” Until this point the statement has only served as a clue for us that the Kenyon College address would not be taking the familiar “instruction manual” form; we will now use it as a benchmark for a positive description of Wallace’s rhetorical strategy. What we will find is that rather than providing some esoteric insight into “mastering” life, our speaker directs the attention of the audience to precisely that which all of us know simply by means of being human beings.

<15> Wallace admits to his listeners that his statement regarding the difficulty of talking about the most obvious, important realities is “just a banal platitude” when it is put as an English sentence; nevertheless, he submits that “in the day to day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have a life or death importance.” The significance of his assertion for our analysis begins to manifest itself when we consider it against the backdrop of the sort of address that conforms to the “instruction manual” expectation. Above we suggested that the graduating class of Kenyon College had been anticipating that Wallace would use his time at the podium to provide them with wisdom that would help them manipulate their world to their own advantage. But rather than guiding the students through some mysterious aspect of modern life so as to bring them one step closer to achieving mastery over it, Wallace asks them to consider what is plainest of all—something he believes can be summed up in the old cliché that a liberal arts education is about “teaching you how to think.” The subject matter of his talk, far from being the sage-words of a “wise old fish,” would instead orient itself around the basic and apparently uninteresting truth that we all have the “choice of what to think about.” Anticipating the response of his audience, he prefaces his address by saying:

If your total freedom of choice regarding what to think about seems too obvious to waste time discussing, I’d ask you to think about fish and water, and to bracket for just a few minutes your skepticism about the value of the totally obvious.

<16> Wallace therefore seems to be intentional about bringing his audience to question the utility of the “instruction manual” expectation, not only for the singular purpose of interpreting his speech but indeed for addressing the problem of how best to engage the “day to day trenches of adult existence.” And what is juxtaposed with this expectation is “the value of the totally obvious.” Above we demonstrated that for Wallace, the value of an education is to be found in its capacity to open students to new ways of understanding their world; the counterintuitive claim here is that it does so by teaching the student something that she has always, in a way, known. Wallace offers further insight into the meaning of this claim by calling attention to what he has found to be one of the greatest dangers of an education, namely that it:

… enables [his] tendency to over-intellectualize stuff, to get lost in abstract argument inside [his] head, instead of simply paying attention to what is going on right in front of [him], paying attention to what is going on inside [him].

His words here are significant for our study, for they give a clue as to the rhetorical approach he believes is fitting for his subject matter. Indeed, we are now ready to describe Wallace’s overarching strategy in positive terms: In order to depict the value of a liberal arts education in an appropriate manner, our speaker purposefully subverts the “instruction manual” expectation by emphasizing the “totally obvious,” thereby directing the attention of his audience away from ivory tower wisdom and back down to the “water” in which they live and breathe.

<17> If we are to grasp Wallace’s goals in directing the attention of his audience to what is most obvious and therefore most difficult to see, it will be helpful to take into account what others have said on the issue. Here again, Heidegger’s work will benefit us. When taking on the philosophical project for which he is most often remembered, he utilizes a similar method; one he critically appropriated from his teacher Edmund Husserl. Phenomenology, as the approach is known, is simply the analysis of phenomena, and Heidegger employed it toward the end of answering the central question of his early career: What is the meaning of Being? Heidegger avers that it is the phenomenological method, and not speculative and abstract reasoning, that will uncover the basic structures of human understanding.

<18> Heidegger asserts that since the time of Aristotle the Western philosophical tradition has overlooked a crucial task, namely that of elucidating that which makes all distinct entities intelligible as the entities they are—the task of elucidating the meaning of Being. The Western “forgetfulness of Being,” he believes, issues in the oblivion of the distinction between particular beings and Being as that network of practices and assumptions that allows particular entities to appear to us as they are. What results is the deceptive primacy of the intellectual tools of traditional Western metaphysics. Take for example a few of the familiar metaphysical questions that have occupied philosophers through the centuries: Does the table before me exist? Does God exist? Does mind exist, as independent from any extended substance? These questions have been addressed using such traditional categories as substance, and the subject/object distinction. Now consider Heidegger’s question: What is the meaning of the phrase, “to exist”? Neither deductive argument nor any other tools of the traditional metaphysicians can answer this question, precisely because these methods of analysis presuppose a particular understanding of Being. By contrast, Heidegger’s phenomenology seeks to explicate the structure of human understanding and thus elucidate the Being of individual beings by describing and interpreting the phenomena of everyday experience.[xiv]

<19> Thus by directing the attention of his audience to the “totally obvious,” the banal and commonplace rather than the conclusions of abstract and esoteric reasoning, Wallace is simply building upon Heidegger’s insight that metaphysical assertions must be preceded by a careful consideration of how we go about experiencing and understanding our world in the first place. Here the advantage of Wallace’s method over and against the “instruction manual” method comes into view. We averred that the goal of the “instruction manual” address is to provide students with some special knowledge of how things are in the world so that they might manipulate it to their interests, and subdue it. But as in the case of the metaphysical undertakings of traditional Western philosophy, one can only strive for such an objective if a particular way of understanding one’s world has already been assumed. Only if the audience takes a step back to analyze critically their way of understanding their world—i.e., to see the “water” that has always been around them—will the possibility of new worlds become available to them. But the disadvantage of the “instruction manual” method goes deeper still, for in fact its ultimate goal of subduing the world is linked in an intimate way with the sort of world from which Wallace believes an education can liberate us.

<20> Wallace begins to depict the toxic nature of the world we enter into as our “default setting” when he offers an example of why we ought to be more critical of our “certainties”:

Here is just one example of the total wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe; the realist, most vivid and important person in existence … [I]t’s pretty much the same for all of us. It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: there is no experience you have had that you are not the absolute center of. The world as you experience it is there in front of YOU or behind YOU, to the left or right of YOU, on YOUR TV or YOUR monitor. And so on. Other people’s thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real.

The ultimate goal of a liberal arts education, then, is to move out of this way of understanding the world; it is to learn how to move beyond “your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out.” The interesting relationship that the unwelcome world of our “default setting” shares with the “instruction manual” approach is not immediately apparent, but it will quickly reveal itself after another brief consideration of Heidegger’s writings.

<21> Heidegger argues that the world we inhabit as the late heirs of the Western philosophical tradition, with its undue emphasis upon metaphysics and its forgetfulness of Being, is basically a technological world. In referring to our world as “technological,” Heidegger is not saying that our modern world is a world that relies too heavily on gadgets and gizmos. Rather, he is arguing that because we have allowed our metaphysical language to blind us to the fact that our world is not the only possible world, the will to make things work for us, for me, has become the centering cultural determination. The current Western way of understanding the world, he believes, involves seeing everything within nature as “standing-reserve”; it involves putting to nature the “unreasonable demand that it supply energy which can be extracted and stored as such.” [xv] And while at times entities have certainly manifested themselves in instrumental ways to pre-modern societies, only in our world has the technological way of understanding Being come into preeminence. Heidegger illustrates this distinction between modern and pre-modern culture with the example of the traditional cabinetmaker, who as a true artisan learned not how to instrumentalize natural materials for the sake of getting ahead in the “rat race,” but instead how to work along with the wood that nature provided him with in order to “bring forth” that which rested latent within it:

If he is to become a true cabinetmaker, he makes himself answer and respond above all to the different kinds of wood and to the shapes slumbering within wood—to wood as it enters into man’s dwelling with all the hidden riches of its essence. In fact, this relatedness to wood is what maintains the whole craft. Without that relatedness, the craft will never be anything but empty busywork, any occupation with it will be determined exclusively by business concerns. Every handicraft, all human dealings, are constantly in that danger.[xvi]

<22> Thus the parallel between Heidegger’s analysis of technology and Wallace’s discussion of our “default setting” is becoming apparent, as is the relationship between the goals that come along with our “default setting” and the goals of the “instruction manual” approach. Wallace warns his audience that:

… the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about much in the great outside world of wanting and achieving …

Therefore, just as the technological way of viewing the world renders entities first and foremost as standing-reserve, our “default setting” frames all things primarily in terms of how they can serve our individual interest in the ongoing struggle for more. The “worship of self” which is the hallmark of our “default setting” issues in just the sort of instrumentalizing logic that characterizes the technological understanding of Being, and indeed it is our argument that the two men refer to one and the same cultural phenomenon. It is the same phenomenon that makes the “instruction manual” expectation intelligible, for the expectation itself relies upon the understanding that entities within our world are things to be mastered. In light of this observation, the advantage of directing the attention of the audience to the “totally obvious” rather than conforming to the “instruction manual” expectation becomes altogether clear. We have come to discover that the “instruction manual” approach is unfit for Wallace’s goals not only because it locks the student into a particular world, as we found in the preceding section, but also because the world in which it condemns the student is a decidedly dreary one.

With the Same Force that Made the Stars

<23> Our investigation began with the goal of exposing the shortcomings of the “instruction manual” approach for achieving Wallace’s rhetorical goals in view, and we found that its fault lies in its tendency to shackle us within a particular understanding of our world. We have since found, however, that the approach is observable not only within the realm of commencement speeches; in fact, it might be used to describe the “default” orientation of human beings in our present culture. Thus Wallace’s alternative impresses itself upon us all the more urgently. He articulates his thesis particularly well in the final moments of his speech:

If you’re automatically sure that you know what reality is, and you are operating on your default setting, then you, like me, probably won’t consider possibilities that aren’t annoying and miserable. But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.

We have found that the power of which he speaks is the power to disclose new worlds; and it comes, not through grandiose insights into how the world can be mastered and subdued, but through careful consideration of the most banal aspects of our existence. Indeed, Wallace tells us that it is by paying attention to the profound wisdom of platitudes that we come to experience the “force that made the stars.”

Notes

[i] David Foster Wallace, “This is Water” (commencement address delivered for the Kenyon College graduating class of 2005, Gambier, OH, May 21, 2005). No subsequent quotations from the address will be cited explicitly; let it be understood that quoted material without explicit citation originates in this address.

[ii] Presented in the order in which they occur in the speech, these statements are as follows: (1) “Please don’t worry that I’m getting ready to lecture you about compassion or other-directedness or all the so-called virtues. This is not a matter of virtue”; (2) “Again, please don’t think that I’m giving you moral advice, or that I’m saying you are supposed to think this way, or that anyone expects you to just automatically do it”; and (3) “None of this stuff is really about morality or religion or dogma or big fancy questions of life after death.” Wallace seems to use the terms “morality” and “virtue” interchangeably in the context of the address.

[iii] David Foster Wallace, “An Interview with David Foster Wallace,” interview by Larry McCaffery, The Review of Contemporary Fiction, 13.2 (1993): 127-50.

[iv] Ibid.

[v] Ibid.

[vi] Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, translated by Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 77.

[vii] Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1962), 12: 84.

[viii] Here we note, briefly, that a discussion of Heidegger’s concept of “world” inevitably raises the question of his views on the individual’s relation to culture. As we have just seen, for Heidegger, it is only because human beings exist in a “world” of practices and assumptions that individual things within that world can be what they are. But on Heidegger’s interpretation, the concept of “world” makes sense only if the practices and assumptions that make it up are shared by other Daseins. For instance, to return to Heidegger’s example, the hammer shows up to the carpenter as a hammer only if there exists a set of cultural practices—what are often referred to as cultural ‘norms’—that includes the practice hammering. Dasein therefore has not only the character of ‘Being-in,’ but also that of ‘Being-with’ (Mitsein). At this point, however, a question arises as to Heidegger’s attitude toward Dasein’s social character. Clearly, in an important way, Dasein is constituted by the shared practices of the cultural world in which and by which it exists. In its everyday life, Dasein does everything from brush its teeth to carry on a conversation, from order a cappuccino to drive home from work, only because it has a familiarity with the culture and its norms. Yet at the same time, in Division II of Being and Time Heidegger appears ill-disposed to the person who conforms too readily to the practices of her culture. Some scholars have emphasized Heidegger’s apparent contempt for what he calls “das Man,” often translated “the ‘they’” or, on Hubert L. Dreyfus’ translation, “the ‘one.’” The ‘they’ is neither a particular person nor the sum of all people who inhabit a particular culture, but instead is the personified ‘average’ of a culture’s collected norms. (Dreyfus’ translation “the ‘one’” is helpful here, as Heidegger’s use of the term das Man is reflected well in the common English phraseology, “doing what one does”—e.g., “One should never forget to send a card on Mother’s Day.”) According to Heidegger, Dasein’s pursuit of “authenticity” involves asserting some degree of individuality by combating the tendency of the “they” to “level” all meaningful differences. On this apparent tension in Heidegger, see Hubert L. Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time, Division I (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991), 141-62.

[ix] “The Origin of the Work of Art,” 71.

[x] Ibid., 42-3.

[xi] Ibid.

[xii] It should be noted here that Heidegger might criticize the emphasis that Wallace places on the role of the individual in opening up new ways of understanding the world. Like Nietzsche, who looked forward to a day in which certain human beings would find within themselves the strength and courage to reject the feeble values of their culture and create new ones, our speaker seems to believe that it lies within the power of the individual to choose for herself those aspects of culture that are of supreme importance. But as the Heidegger scholar Hubert L. Dreyfus points out, Heidegger offers the critique that “once we see that we posit values, we also see that we can equally ‘unposit’ them. Thus they lose all authority for us” (“Heidegger on the Connection between Nihilism, Art, Technology and Politics,” The Department of Philosophy, University of California, Berkeley, accessed on 17 Mar. 2014, http://socrates.berkeley.edu, p. 8 of available PDF). For Heidegger, those elements of life that are of utmost importance must come to us from the outside, that is, they must precede the individual by holding a place within the already-existing cultural understanding of world. This is why, in Heidegger’s mind, there are relatively few truly great works of art to speak of: it is rare indeed that an artist’s work will prove to have the culture-defining effect of a Greek temple or medieval cathedral. Still, it is our belief that the obvious similarity between Heidegger’s statements on the value of art and Wallace’s remarks in the McCaffery interview render the comparison a fruitful one. Also, it should be recognized that Wallace makes a point of directing his listeners to the “worlds” defined by such long-standing cultural traditions as Christianity, Islam and Buddhism, saying that “pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.”

[xiii] “An Interview with David Foster Wallace.”

[xiv] For the preceding discussion of Heidegger’s phenomenological method, we have referenced, generally, Taylor Carman’s recent Foreword to John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson’s translation of Being and Time (New York: Harper & Row, 2008), xiii-xxi, as well as Michael Wheeler’s commentary in Michael Wheeler, “Martin Heidegger,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 12 Oct. 2011, accessed on 17 Aug 2013, plato.stanford.edu.

[xv] Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” translated by W. Lovitt with revisions by D. F. Krell, in Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings, Revised and Expanded Edition, ed. D. F. Krell, (London: Routledge, 1993), 320-25.

[xvi] Martin Heidegger, “What is Called Thinking?,” translated by F. D. Wieck and J. Glenn Gray (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), excerpt published under the title “What Calls for Thinking?,” in Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings, revised and expanded edition, ed. D. F. Krell, (London: Routledge, 1993), 379.

Works Cited

Carman, Taylor. Foreword to Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper & Row, 2008.

Dreyfus, Hubert L. Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time, Division I. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991.

_____. “Heidegger on the Connection between Nihilism, Art, Technology and Politics.” The

Department of Philosophy, University of California, Berkeley , accessed on March 17, 2014, http://socrates.berkeley.edu/.

Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1962.

_____. “The Origin of the Work of Art.” Translated by Albert Hofstadter. In Poetry, Language, Thought. New York: Harper & Row, 1971.

_____. “The Question Concerning Technology.” Translated by W. Lovitt with revisions by D. F.

Krell. In Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings, Revised and Expanded Edition, edited by D. F. Krell, 311-41. London: Routledge, 1993.

_____. “What Calls for Thinking?” Translated by F. D. Wieck and J. Glenn Gray. In Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings, edited by D. F. Krell, 369-91. London: Routledge, 1993.

Wallace, David Foster. “An Interview with David Foster Wallace.” By Larry McCaffery. The Review of Contemporary Fiction 13.2 (1993): 127-50.

_____. “This is Water.” Keynote address delivered at Kenyon College for the Commencement of the 2005 Graduating Class, Gambier, OH, May 21, 2005.

Wheeler, Michael. “Martin Heidegger.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, October 12, 2011, accessed on August 17, 2013, plato.stanford.edu/.

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