Colonizing the World with Meaning
One short story by Philip K. Dick, set in a dystopian world, follows a space crew that intends to colonize Mars. As humanity expands its colonial presence on the planet, the crew encounters a strange creature that is defenseless and harmless, yet they cannot make sense of it. Due to their different languages and the creature’s unusual appearance, some crew members want to kill and eat it, thinking that it is a dumb and useless creature. However, as it turns out, this creature is highly intelligent and seeks to communicate with them in order to share its centuries of knowledge. Some members try to understand it and stop the others from murdering and destroying this precious being. However, they are unsuccessful, and the creature is later killed violently.
This is similar to how people view the world nowadays: as something to be observed and made sense of. If some part of it does not make sense, they want to destroy it. In Richard Rorty’s quote, the intention to interpret and understand the world is narrowed down to a puzzle that people desire to solve. However, there is no straightforward answer, and people must create new ways of understanding this complex creation rather than rupturing it with meaningless allegories.
1. Colonizing the World with Interpretation
When the crew first comes across the creature, they inspect it from afar with a prejudiced gaze. This gaze is, in a way, parallel to Sartre’s concept of the Look, which creates a hierarchical structure between the gazed upon and the gazer. Specifically, the gazer holds power over the gazed upon, who must discipline their actions when they are being watched.
From Richard Rorty’s perspective, mankind is the gazer observing the world, while from Dick’s perspective, the crew is the gazer observing the creature. This power over the gazed upon gives the gazer the illusion that his rules apply and that his hierarchical superiority makes his ways correct. However, in both of these cases, the creature knows better, and the world is not a puzzle to be analyzed.
Even though mankind, or the crew, intends to find meaning in this Deleuzian interaction of desire channels, it encounters the fact that these specific points are not the key elements of creation in this sense, but rather parts of a mistaken interpretation. The crew initially wants to kill the creature because they mistake it for a less intelligent being and view it with pity. Later, this attitude turns into envy and jealousy of its wisdom. This overturns the hierarchical balance presupposed in the human mind and threatens human authority.
As Rorty states, this “does not mean that the world speaks Newtonian,” but rather that we cannot understand what the world speaks because it simply does not speak. There will eventually be a time when we surpass Newtonian physics, just as we have somewhat surpassed Aristotelian philosophy. The hierarchical power of the gaze weakens not only through the inability to understand but also through the shifting of the gaze itself.
1.1. The Shift of the Gaze
The shift in the gaze of the human observer occurs when the observer recognizes that they are also among those being observed. This illusion of authority shatters within the human mind as people try to make sense of themselves as part of the Earth. One cannot make sense of the world without considering oneself.
This shift results in another blow to humanity’s self-assigned authority and power, as mankind once again encounters the question of interpretation. In Dick’s story, this occurs when the crew begins to divide itself between two radical opinions: killing the creature or preserving it for its information.
This division creates doubt within the crew, which they want to suppress quickly. Therefore, they turn to violence among themselves. They argue and fight with one another to assert their power, similarly to how a person contradicts themselves and fights with their own thoughts inside their mind. This crew allegorically represents the mind of the questioning human being.
However, there is a simple solution to this, which is to go through ego death. One must detach oneself from the ego and from all hierarchical desires in order to finally become equal to one’s surroundings and surrender oneself to understanding.
As Rorty states, “the world does not speak,” so listening is ineffective. One must internalize and interpret in order to understand. Within this desire for interpretation, mankind has interpreted its surroundings in different ways: through internal meaning and external meaning. These interpretations of meaning create the self within mankind rather than offering a wholehearted explanation.
2. Deconstructed Meaning: Telepathy
A deconstructed way of understanding one’s surroundings requires a technique that does not restrict them. Derridean deconstruction plays an effective role in this and has an intense correlation with it.
A deconstructive understanding does not require or expect a person to make complete sense of their surroundings or to find one fixed meaning within them, because it recognizes that this may not be possible. Rather than trying to find the essence of its surroundings, it intends to ask the right questions in order to understand how meaning is constructed.
To exemplify, a Derridean deconstruction of a chair would not only examine how ergonomic its back is or how sturdy its legs are in order to carry the weight of the person sitting on it. It would also question the assumptions that allow us to define it as a chair in the first place. It could ask why the human body is treated as the center of the chair’s meaning, whether an object that cannot be sat upon can still be called a chair, and whether the hierarchy between the active human user and the passive object is truly stable. It may also investigate the materials and craftsmanship involved in creating it, while questioning how these qualities contribute to the construction of its meaning.
Dick’s interpretation of this would be telepathy. The wise creature communicates with the crew through telepathy and intends to create a bridge between them in order to construct an understanding. This is a Derridean form of deconstruction in the sense that the creature creates another part of the rhizomatic connection between the two species.
The wise creature does not learn the language of mankind, nor does it manipulate their thoughts. It simply intends to persuade them telepathically by understanding their intentions. This deconstructive technique is the way mankind must analyze the world, rather than trying to listen to it while expecting it to speak in a language the human mind can understand.
The world, similarly to the creature, should not change or adapt itself to mankind. Instead, mankind must find a way of living and continue its ongoing attempt to interpret the world’s signals. Rorty intends to create this effect by mentioning that “only we do,” explaining that only mankind performs the act of interpretation. There is no single interpretation that is the most fitting; rather, there are interpretations that help us more than others.
2.1. Personal Understanding: The Fight
The human desire to interpret and find meaning arises from, or gives rise to, the desire to understand oneself. Aristotelian philosophy and Newtonian physics separately depict the world in their own ways, but neither leads to a completely conclusive explanation. As Rorty states, what mankind longs for does not come from “predicting” the world, but rather from learning how to explain it.
Mankind is, in some way, an extension of the world and therefore carries the desire for understanding within itself. Throughout history and philosophy, mankind has attempted to interpret itself in order to interpret the world.
A recent example would be existentialism on non-religious grounds with Sartre, and on religious, specifically Christian, grounds with Kierkegaard. Throughout the history of philosophy, mankind has created many ways of trying to understand itself. However, in both Sartrean and Kierkegaardian perspectives, existence precedes any fixed essence.
The essence of man is not something to be found. Rather, man must be understood through actions. Sartre depicts this as a restrictive feature because it creates responsibility for one’s actions, similar to the fight within the crew. Those who want to understand the creature create the conflict, showing that inner struggle is what creates understanding on a deeper level.
Kierkegaard interprets this understanding in relation to religion, specifically Christianity. The interpretation of a fixed essence becomes, in some way, opposed to God because it creates a form of divinity within the individual: one that appears complete, controls the person’s actions, and is treated as conclusive. Kierkegaard views this as being against God and therefore relatively incorrect.
Parallel to the inner conflict of the crew, a person must fight within themselves in order to create an interpretation, even if that interpretation is not necessarily the most optimal one.
3. Desire Channels: Death upon the Creature
As Rorty states, the world does not speak, but people do. Therefore, in order to create meaning, one must develop a way of using the data coming from the world for human benefit. One must understand and deconstruct an idea before later reconstructing it in order to create meaning.
In this process, one must not try to find the essence but instead find out how to live. However, interpreting the world as a non-speaking and non-communicating source is not inherently meaningful in every sense. Even the creature creates a channel of communication with the crew in order to keep itself alive, so why would the world not do the same?
Our interactions with nature and its rules are obvious, so how could the world not be part of such a channel in some way? Inherently, the world does speak. We can hear it squeal when we attempt to kill it.
Similar to the creature, our personal interpretations do not and cannot defy external meaning. Therefore, our understanding of the world affects us, but it does not completely affect the world itself. It is as if we have found an escape route from the Deleuzian desire channel between ourselves and the world. Therefore, one must create more connections and more channels in order to interlink this relationship further.
Mankind must not simply wait for the world to speak. Rather, mankind must create the language itself in order to open up the non-verbal world. In order to sustain human life and plural ways of living, mankind must learn and interpret rather than create meaningless connections and channels.
Author’s Note
This essay was originally written for the Turkish National Philosophy Olympiad, where I placed second nationally and was selected to represent Türkiye at the International Philosophy Olympiad in Warsaw.
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