Abstract:
In this account of American science fiction writer Philip K. Dick's work, the aim has been to describe the involvement
of assumptions inherited from philosophical and scientific discourse in both the understanding and experience of
subjectivity. It is argued that Dick's representations of identity both picture the tensions engendered by the prevalent
reality standard with which he had to deal and, in their development, come to articulate a path beyond the impasse
this standard presents. The fundamental insufficiency of the world view Dick's fiction both encounters and embodies
is epitomised by the twin questions with which he characterised his work: 'what is human?' and 'what is real?' In
coming to terms with the significance of these questions the work of the Austrian philosopher and scientist Rudolf
Steiner has been engaged as a critical foil to Dick's fictionalising. Special attention is given to the epistemological
basis of Steiner's anthroposophy and its account of the world and our peculiar situation in it that, far from asserting
any external and unvarying standard of truth, describes a process essentially evolutionary and unfixed. It is claimed
that in Steiner, as in Dick, the human contribution to both identity and reality constitutes the validity of each, a matrix
of subject and object from which one's self is delivered, in each instance a new beginning.
