Episode #252 ... Slaughterhouse-Five - Kurt Vonnegut

Today we talk about Kurt Vonnegut’s book Slaughterhouse-Five. How war stories can distort the reality of war, how trauma can fracture our experience of time and identity, and why Billy Pilgrim becomes attracted to the strange philosophy of the Tralfamadorians. Hope you love it. :) Thank you so much for listening! Could never do this without your help. Website: https://www.philosophizethis.org/ Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/philosophizethis Social: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/philosophizethispodcast X: https://twitter.com/iamstephenwest Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/philosophizethisshow Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Hello everyone, I'm Stephen West. This is Philosophize This. Patreon.com/PhilosophizeThis. Philosophical writing on Substack at @PhilosophizeThis on there. I hope you loved the show today. So I want to start today by telling you about a guy named Kurt Vonnegut. Kurt Vonnegut was an author, born in the US, year 1922, which was an interesting year to be born because it placed him in perfect position to be coming of age during the opening stages of the Second World War. And being in this spot, the choice he makes is, rather than sit around and wait to be called up and drafted into the military by force, he decides he's just gonna enlist and at least have some kind of marginal control over what his own fate's gonna be. When he gets to the war, he's assigned to the 106 Infantry Division as an intelligence scout,

• 0:43Speaker 00

  which meant that for his job, he would often be a guy that's on the battlefield and he'd have to push forward, sometimes behind enemy lines, to secretly get information about the position of the enemy. Now, on December 19th, 1944, Vonnegut was fighting in the very famous now Battle of the Bulge. In the middle of the battle, his whole unit becomes encircled by a bunch of Nazis he was fighting. So typical of those guys. So he was captured and he was transported to a German POW camp to be held until they knew what to do with him next. Now, from this point, he seems to have gotten shuffled around quite a bit. They put him on a train and sent him to the city of Dresden, where he's made to be part of what's called a labor detachment. Now, what this meant is that he would spend his days doing forced labor for the Germans. In this case, he was forced to make malt syrup, specially designed for pregnant women to get nutrition during wartime.

• 1:28Speaker 00

  All throughout his time doing this, his temporary housing as a prisoner while he lived there was in a slaughterhouse complex, known only at the time as Slaughterhouse Five. So he keeps working with all the other captured prisoners around him, until a couple of months later in February of 1945, there's the infamous attack on the city of Dresden by the Royal Air Force and the rest of the Allies. When the attack starts that day, it sends him and everybody else working around him fleeing underground of this slaughterhouse complex, all hiding in a meat locker, just hoping the bombs wouldn't blast through the ground enough to get to them. Now, the history of Dresden as an attack that went on has been well documented by historians at this point. For two days, apparently, the city was bombed from above in waves. There were over 22,000 dead, many of them civilians.

• 2:11Speaker 00

  It's often seen as one of the most violent attacks by the Allies in all of the Second World War. People still talk about it to this day. And when Vonnegut and the rest of the prisoners emerged from under the slaughterhouse and saw the city of Dresden left in ruins, well, the sight of it all was only the beginning, because the German officers then put him and all the rest of his fellow prisoners to work digging bodies out of the basements of the destroyed city. Fast forward a bit, once Kurt Vonnegut got home after the war, he wanted to write a book about all the experiences he had, especially this one in Dresden. But for 20 years, Vonnegut struggled to find the right way to do it. So much so, that when he died in the year 2007, few different people have gone through all of his manuscripts and his notes, and they found out after the fact that he had multiple serious attempts at writing this book over the years, but that he abandoned almost all of them partway through

• 2:55Speaker 00

  because something just wasn't right about it to him. The one that he didn't abandon, though, the one that he eventually published, became among the most popular books of the 20th century called Slaughterhouse Five. It's one of the most requested books I've ever been asked to cover on this podcast over the years. It's got a bit of everything in it. Time travel, humor, alien abductions, where the aliens give the main character kind of a hot stone massage and then explain their whole theory of the universe to him. It's obvious why this book is so loved by people who are interested in getting into philosophy more. And while it'd be silly to treat this book like it's an ambitious philosophical work that's trying to do the same thing Kant was doing, or Plato, or something, I do think it can be valuable to talk about where the philosophy in it begins and ends. In fact, at some points, I think it's even valuable

• 3:38Speaker 00

  to take the philosophy a couple of levels deeper than it goes in the book as a way of understanding the real depth of the questions posed by Vonnegut here, even if it's only alluded to. At the very least, we're gonna familiarize ourselves with a classic here today, one that without question dramatizes certain pieces of philosophy far better than many philosophers or textbooks ever manage to do. This is a book where the images in it stick with you, whether you like it or not, which is usually a sign of great writing. That said, to get started on this, when Kurt Vonnegut finally settles on what he thought was at least an okay way to write this book, he ends up writing a story that's like very few other stories you will ever read in your life. Most of the book is written following the main character, a guy named Billy Pilgrim, where from the perspective of the main character all throughout the book,

• 4:19Speaker 00

  he seems to be someone who is unpredictably and almost constantly shifting through moments in his life, like he's skipping around in time throughout the book. The way it's described is that Billy Pilgrim is, quote, "unstuck in time," end quote. What this looks like is that one day he'll be in his childhood, he'll go to sleep and he might wake up on his wedding day, cut to him again, and all of a sudden, he's in the middle of a war zone as a soldier. To be clear, he can't control any of this that's going on, but this is how he experiences his life. So it becomes clear to us as readers that this is also gonna have to be the way we become familiar with him if we want to get to know him. So for the sake of clarity, as your philosophical sherpa, I'm gonna take some of these events that are usually skipping all around in the book, and I'm gonna put them into more of a chronological order

• 5:01Speaker 00

  so that we can first get to why Vonnegut chooses to present them exactly in this way, which will then set us up for the philosophy. What you see very quickly in the book is that the main character, Billy Pilgrim, has a lot of similarities to Vonnegut himself, but he's also different in ways that will become important, too. See, Billy was also born in 1922, but he was born into a town called Elium, New York. He grows up, goes to optometry school, and then during World War II, he gets drafted into the army, trained as a chaplain's assistant of all things, and eventually he gets sent over to Europe where he's thrown under the front lines of the war. And when we get descriptions of the kind of warrior Billy is, how he faces combat on the battlefield when he's out there, well, it's part of the whole comedy of the book. It's actually pretty hilarious.

• 5:43Speaker 00

  Most of the time, he's this really passive soldier, doesn't wanna fight, doesn't really know how, doesn't even have a gun most of the time to be able to fight with. So it's important to know that to most of the people around him, they see him as only a burden, when one day he finds himself wandering behind enemy lines alongside two scouts that are looking for the enemy, and one other young soldier named Roland Weary. Now, Roland Weary in this book is a whole nother level of pathetic, but it's a different brand of pathetic than Billy is. See, this kid, I mean, picture an 18-year-old young gentleman, sent to a war zone, who's fully bought into this story that he's a heroic warrior that's saving the world, constantly showing off all his weapons, talking about how he's gonna torture him some Nazis whenever he finds them.

• 6:27Speaker 00

  Now, in direct contrast to this, there's Billy, who, with his spirit dwindling at this point, you know, he didn't even want to be in this war in the first place. He decides at a certain point that he's just done with the war. He's gonna sit down, lay in the fetal position. He asks the whole group to leave him behind so he doesn't mess with them any more than he already has. Roland Weary, being the self-appointed hero of this war, stays back to try to save him. And in the whole process of all this, the two scouts they were with get killed by the enemy, and Billy and Roland get captured. Now, the soldiers they're captured by on the German side are hardly what you'd expect when you think of grizzled warriors as well. It's five people in total. There's two teenage boys, two old men, and one exhausted middle-aged corporal, who has already been wounded several times in the war so far.

• 7:09Speaker 00

  Some of them are obviously wearing the clothes of people who have recently been killed. And one of the first things they have Billy and Roland do when they capture them is to restage the moment of their capture for the camera so they can send the propaganda photo out to be distributed among the people, just saying, "far from some highly trained elite unit that's operating on honor and justice." And from here, the story of Billy and Roland starts to resemble Vonnegut's own story. Sent to Dresden, refuge in a slaughterhouse, made to dig out bodies after the city has been destroyed. And most importantly, the moment we're told over and over again in the book is gonna be the climax of everything that happens. A fellow prisoner that's helping to dig out the bodies from under all the rubble of Dresden, when he's working one day and steals a teapot from some of the rubble that hadn't been destroyed,

• 7:52Speaker 00

  with no trial, he is executed on sight for looting as a way to maintain the order of things during wartime. Now, let's pause for a moment and talk about what Vonnegut intends by all this going on so far in the book. An important detail for context on all of this is that when Vonnegut's doing the prep work to be able to write this book, he decided to visit one of his old war buds, and he got into a conversation with his wife, a woman named Mary O'Hare. Mary says something to Vonnegut in that conversation that would stick with him as one of the most crucial messages that needs to be delivered in this book. And she tells it to him by talking about typical depictions of war that go on in media. She says, "You know what's wrong with all those books about war out there? All of them glamorize the whole thing into something that's just or heroic, when in reality, it's usually fought by people like what the two of you were when you were in it.

• 8:37Speaker 00

  It's just a bunch of kids," she says. What Vonnegut realizes is that war, when you really consider all that we're talking about when we say the word "war," war is something that has such massive consequences. I mean, the sheer absurdity of all the real parties involved in something as gruesome and widespread as this, anybody that wants to try to capture what a war is in something like a story, has a job that may as well be impossible. Because to write a story, you usually gotta reduce whatever events you're talking about down into a neat plot arc where a story can actually take place. In other words, you gotta take the true absurdity of it all, that maybe can't be captured in words, and turn it into something that has characters, and a beginning, middle, and end, a moral to the story.

• 9:20Speaker 00

  You gotta make it match the same structure as something like The Little Mermaid. But he thought, whenever you do that, you're already flattening and distorting war into something that it's not. He thought that to find something like glory or honor inside of a war zone, that's something that's really only possible when you're looking at the war from a distance. The more you zoom in, the more you focus on the real individuals who are actually fighting the war, the more he thinks you start to see the actual kids that are fighting. How much of what goes on doesn't consider honor in the slightest? You start seeing things like the staged propaganda photos by people wearing the clothes of the dead, people using their helmet as a toilet, people who are so exhausted by the whole thing, they can't remember why they're even there in the first place, just saying "war"

• 10:03Speaker 00

  is often far from some heroic quest, where people are writing home every day about the resolve they have for the cause. And this is one of the reasons why it's important that it's the Nazis that are on the other side of the battlefield. For Vonnegut, as far as narratives may go about war being justified or defending against evil, the Nazis may be one of the most clear examples we have. They didn't give people much of a choice. And yet, he thinks still, you should resist the temptation to turn this situation into some nice, clean story where the good guys have to take out the bad guys. This narrative temptation is something that, again, only flattens the world and what's going on. I mean, whether you have your clean story about it or not, you don't really have a grasp of the magnitude of what's happening here, even if it makes you feel better.

• 10:46Speaker 00

  But more than that, these kinds of stories are almost always used to manipulate the next generation of kids to become fodder for the whims of all the higher-ups that can manage to tell a convincing story like this. These stories are told on the news to entire nations of people, to get them supportive of something that they aren't even close to understanding. But, look, you could say back to all this, "Yeah, okay, but aren't there obviously moral differences between the different sides of a conflict?" What is he trying to say? Because of the complexity of war, we can't talk about moral asymmetries anymore? Sometimes you just have to defend yourself, Vonnegut. And he'd say, "That's not the problem. We can and should make normative judgments like that." What he's more concerned with is, again, this reductive narrative tendency we have

• 11:29Speaker 00

  that's connected to a very common response we have whenever tragedy strikes. When something horrible happens in life, we often try to find the meaning in whatever it is that happened. Take any example of something bad that's happened in your life. You know, say I'm the assistant manager of a Dairy Queen, and I'm in my one-bedroom apartment pacing around at night, plotting how to make the people that work for me as miserable as I possibly can. And as I lift my foot to walk past the coffee table, my pinky toe catches one of the legs of the table, shatters in 12 places, and all of a sudden, I'm wearing a cast and I'm unable to work for six to eight weeks. Now, say in those few weeks, I study really hard about, you know, ice cream-making machines and how they work. And say, I come back to the store, and I save my Dairy Queen with all my newfound knowledge.

• 12:14Speaker 00

  Now, I'm the manager of that Dairy Queen. It is so tempting to turn this whole thing into some kind of a plot arc, where I needed to go through this bad experience so that I could become the manager I am today. And we do this with all sorts of stuff, he thinks. We try to find the meaning in whatever it is that happened. And taking nothing away from how useful this can be at a personal level in some cases, Vonnegut might want to point out how this can also be a tendency that does us a pretty big disservice as well. Because sometimes things in this universe can't be neatly explained, and that that's okay. Sometimes stuff that happens doesn't make sense. Sometimes life isn't something that's glamorous. Sometimes you just broke your toe on a coffee table one night, and that's all it was.

• 12:58Speaker 00

  So Vonnegut wants to offer up a whole different strategy we should have when it comes to tragic events that happen to us. And when he thinks of the bombing of Dresden, and the sheer absurdity of the war that went on more generally, instead of trying to find the meaning in it, why not try to create something meaningful out of it? Instead of spending your limited effort trying to tie a bow on the whole thing with a story that makes everything that happened necessary, why not try to use this situation as fuel to actually do something productive? Now, both of these approaches honor what happened in different ways. But again, one of these doesn't risk leaving entire generations of people in a state of moral confusion, that the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of people was somehow honorable if, if only you knew the full story behind it.

• 13:42Speaker 00

  This book becomes Vonnegut's way of trying to make something meaningful out of Dresden, without having to reduce any piece of the war to some naive story about good versus evil. And one of the really interesting questions you can ask as you're reading this book is, what other parts of our lives are just as complex as war is? Where it may be a mistake for us to spend too much of our effort trying to come up with a story that makes absurdity like this feel a bit more glamorous. So anyway, to get back to the story here, the war ends, Billy goes home, and almost as soon as he touches down, he starts to realize that something's very wrong with him now that he's seen the things he has during wartime. One of the first things he does when he gets home is he goes back to school. And in his last year of classes to become an optometrist, Vonnegut puts it in pretty

• 14:24Speaker 00

  vague terms in the book on purpose, but it's clear that Billy starts to feel like his whole life just has stopped seeming meaningful in the way that it used to, like he's massively depressed every day for no reason. And the best decision he can think of at the time is to check himself into a psychiatric hospital specially created for veterans. Now, while he's in the hospital, the course of his whole life is gonna change. Because while he's inside, he meets a fellow patient who's also struggling with his own mental stuff, where through all their conversations together, this patient turns Billy on to a favorite science fiction author of his, a guy named Kilgore Trout. The actual science fiction stories that Kilgore Trout writes, apparently, they're pretty terrible. But that's not the point of why they're reading them anyway. The reason they both start to love this guy so much is because the crazy worlds that

• 15:08Speaker 00

  he paints in these books to do his science fiction, it gives these two patients a language they can use to deal with the bizarre world they're having trouble navigating mentally. Science fiction becomes an alternate framing of the world, where their experience starts to feel like something that actually fits into it. Smash cut in the book to years later in Billy's life, after he gets married, he has a couple of kids, and a random sequence of events leads him to a spot where he ends up meeting this Kilgore Trout guy in person. Billy's so excited to meet him that he takes a huge shot in the dark, and he invites this total stranger to come to his 18th wedding anniversary, which is coming up in a couple weeks. Kilgore Trout agrees and ends up coming. And on the night of the anniversary party, everyone's standing around with their drinks, they're mingling, celebrating the day.

• 15:51Speaker 00

  And one of the attractions Billy and his wife have set up at this party is that four of their optometrist friends are gonna get together as a barber shop quartet, and they're gonna sing a really old song about love and friendship, you know, commemorate the night a bit. They get up on stage, but when they start singing, Billy notices something severe is starting to happen to him. He's starting to have some kind of an event emotionally, and he doesn't know exactly what it is. He starts to become really upset by the song they're singing, by the whole party itself. He starts having this overwhelming, strange feeling of nostalgia, but nostalgia for friends that he never even had in the first place. He has no idea what's happening to him in the moment. People think he's having a heart attack. And after the night ends, and he's trying to do a retrospective and assess what happened,

• 16:35Speaker 00

  he would make the connection that the four singers that night, with their mouths and faces moving exactly like they were, they for some reason brought him back to the faces of the German guards when they emerged out of the slaughterhouse and saw Dresden destroyed for the first time. This event, at this totally other moment in time, triggered this other event at his 18th wedding anniversary. So scenes like this at the anniversary party really show us something else important that Vonnegut wanted to get across in this book. One of the common ways that scholars interpret the time shifts that go on, where Billy's in one place, and then all of a sudden, he's in his childhood, or the war, or something, one strong theory is that this is meant to be a depiction of how trauma draws people into moments across time in ways that they have zero control over.

• 17:18Speaker 00

  That being snapped violently back into his childhood with no fair warning ahead of time is supposed to be a dramatization of the experience of people who have been through traumatic events, a way to give people access to what it's like for people who have never had to deal with it themselves. From a philosophical perspective, then, the key thing to understand here is that this is Vonnegut subverting a few of the common ways people typically think about identity and subjectivity. You know, what's the more common way people might see a person who has trauma? Well, they might say something like, here's a person who at some other point in their life used to be in a set of really intense experiences, and now what their life is every day is trying to recover from those moments they had in the past. But Billy doesn't experience his life in such a linear, plot-arc sort of way.

• 18:01Speaker 00

  To his experience, he's in one moment, and then some trigger happens, or sometimes it's even nothing, and all of a sudden, it's as if the past has invaded the present moment against his will. And this connects to theories of identity in a way that reminds me of the episode we did fairly recently on Byung-Chul Han's work, The Crisis of Narration, where one of the ideas Han develops in that book is that how we understand ourselves across time is through stories. That what makes something a story that endures and does the work we need it to as narrative creatures, is that there has to be some kind of meaningful correlation it makes that connects past, present, and future together in a way that's satisfying to us. Well, if we accept that as a premise, then if somebody experiences trauma like this,

• 18:42Speaker 00

  when moments from someone's past become things that can show up unexpectedly at any moment in the present, then for Vonnegut, the past becomes something that can't be fully integrated into a story about ourselves, that would then allow us to draw meaning from it, or to move on from it at a level we might otherwise do. In other words, trauma, for Vonnegut, fractures a person's ability to have any kind of real chronological sense of self. The argument is that through the character of Billy Pilgrim, Vonnegut creates a kind of narrative ontology, where to exist with severe trauma is to be somebody that more inhabits a succession of episodes than to be somebody that has a coherent life narrative that they can feel stable in, that trauma leaves someone unable to even metabolize

• 19:25Speaker 00

  the events of their life in a way where they can have an identity that fully feels like them. And this will become important in the book right after he has this attack on the night of his anniversary party, because not long chronologically after that happens, he has one of the most influential moments of his entire life, he gets abducted by aliens from outer space.

• 19:45Speaker 00

  As you can imagine, the scholarship is pretty mixed on exactly how Vonnegut intended the aliens to be interpreted here. And I guess another way you could say that is that the book leaves room for a few different cool takes a reader might have on it. Still, I want to go over some of the more established ones real quickly. Some say that Billy is literally abducted by aliens in the book, while others say that this is meant to be yet another symptom of his declining mental health. Some say this is just meant to be a writing motif that Vonnegut uses to introduce some pretty alien-sounding ideas into the mix that he thought were important for us to consider. It doesn't really matter, honestly. What matters is what the aliens tell Billy here when they take him up into their spaceship. They give him what can sound at first to someone reading like an entirely new philosophy for him to live his life by.

• 20:28Speaker 00

  The aliens are from a race of beings known as the Tralfamadorians. They're about two feet tall, green, their bodies are shaped kind of like a plunger, it's said in the book, with an eye embedded into each one of their hands that they use to see things with. And one of the first things Billy asks them, once he gets in front of them, is something that, I don't know, seems like a really obvious question to ask when you're abducted. "Why me?", he says, to which the aliens essentially respond, "Why you? Well, why anything? Why even ask why in the first place?" They say the very attempt by you to ask why and look for some kind of purpose-driven explanation for what's happening to you is incredibly misguided, and by the way, it's very common among you humans we've been dealing with so far.

• 21:09Speaker 00

  For the Tralfamadorians, this moment, as it exists right now, from the way they perceive reality, this moment and every other moment simply is, and it's always been the way that it is. See, these aliens are beings that experience reality in four dimensions, the fourth dimension being time. I mean, the same way that we see the spatial difference between something like Seattle, Washington, and Fresno, California, these aliens see time in that same way. Every moment that has ever or will ever exist is right there, visible to them, occupying its own location. Because of this, this race of beings is even aware of how the universe is eventually going to end. They tell Billy, one of their own test pilots back at home, in a totally random occurrence, one day they're just gonna push a button and it's gonna destroy the entire universe,

• 21:54Speaker 00

  to which Billy asks them, "Well, why don't you at least try to stop them from pushing the button?". And they say it's because he's always pressed it, and always will. This is their attitude towards intervening in anything. So the way they see humans like Billy is that it's a bit delusional for him to be asking all these questions about why. They say the way that humans look at the universe is kind of like we're bugs trapped in amber, they say, and that when you start looking at things more like they do, a few things no longer make sense anymore. For one, everything you ever do is already fixed and will play out exactly the way it's already set to. So something like free will is just a human mistake based on our narrow perception of what is. Second thing that changes is that there's no reason to ask why anything ever occurred,

• 22:36Speaker 00

  like, say, the tragedy that went on at Dresden, because asking, "Why did this happen?", instead of something else, assumes there was ever another version of reality that was available. Their ultimate advice for Billy about how we should be living then, this is after putting him in a zoo on their home planet, in an exhibit living with a famous actress they also abducted from Earth. When they return him back to his house, they tell him that when you see time and the universe more in line with their cosmology, death isn't some special moment that deserves us obsessing over it all the time. Death is just one bad moment among all the other moments of your life that always continue to exist. So even when someone dies, they still live on at all these other moments in time. Again, for the aliens, the distinction's more like them just occupying a different place in space.

• 23:19Speaker 00

  More than that, they say, if you were able to see every single moment of your life spatially represented in front of you, well, eventually what you'd start to do is what they do. You try to focus on the positive moments as much as you can and try to ignore the bad ones. That's basically their practical advice for how an intelligent being should be living. Now, let's pause and talk about these aliens for a sec. Their power of positive thinking. I've had a lot of people tell me their thoughts on this book over the years, and one popular way to interpret what the aliens tell Billy in this book is to say something like, "Oh, I think I get it. The aliens here are determinists, right? And their position on how we should be living is just what naturally follows when you believe that events can always be explained by prior causes.

• 24:00Speaker 00

  If you believe that there's one single way that the universe could possibly play out, then this is the sort of conventional wisdom that has to come out of that." For whatever it's worth, this also often comes along with someone saying that after reading this book, "You know, I tend to believe in something like hard determinism, so maybe what the Tralfamadorians are saying here is a whole new framing of things that I can start to live by more in my own life." But it's the first clarifying idea of many here. I just want to say that it's important to recognize, these aliens are not just talking about determinism with this way of seeing things. They're also talking about fatalism, eternalism, and quietism in ways that are important to understand the differences between, because each one of those requires a different philosophical move to justify.

• 24:42Speaker 00

  And it's exciting to see all this in more detail, because there's been plenty of approaches throughout history that live life with different combinations of these four. The Tralfamadorians are not the only beings having this class of conversation. First, let's just describe what all four of these are, and then we can spend some time putting them together in different ways. So determinism, or the kind of determinism people usually mean in conversations like this, causal determinism, is a view about the mechanics of how reality plays out. And important details that it's the only one of these four that's making a case for the machinery of how events are produced from one moment to the next. The assumption here being that if you were to take all the conditions that exist at any single moment, combine those together with the laws of nature, then determinism

• 25:24Speaker 00

  says that only one future can possibly follow from that moment, and that prior causes are capable of explaining that fully. Fatalism, on the other hand, again, also part of the Tralfamadorian philosophy here, is the very different view that certain outcomes are going to happen no matter what. Now, you can see how this is making a claim more from the place of which outcomes are inevitable, regardless of how they happen, or how many possible paths may lead to whatever is inevitably going to happen. Now, the cleanest way to have an example of this is if you believed in a god that has a plan for you. You can imagine someone who believes that there are certain things that are always going to happen in their life. "I'm always gonna meet this person. I'm always gonna lose my leg." These things are always going to happen, even if there may be a ton of variance in the choices I could have taken to get to those moments.

• 26:09Speaker 00

  But it should be said, fatalism doesn't need a god or magic to be part of someone's worldview. Fatalism could also be you believing that the universe is inexorably headed in certain directions no matter what any of us do, even saying something like, "The universe will collapse into a singularity one day, and it doesn't matter what else happens between now and then." Even this is a kind of localized fatalism that, as you can see, has very little to do with claims about how those events are gonna play out. Now, this is me making a modal claim about the inevitability of an outcome, not a causal claim about the mechanism that produces it. Another interesting piece of this conversation is that there's some interesting variance of fatalism that seem to only be rooted in formal logic. Aristotle famously wrestled with the problem known as the sea battle problem.

• 26:53Speaker 00

  The short version of it is, you know, if I say the statement, "There will be a sea battle tomorrow", and if we assume that that statement already has to be either true or false today, then if that statement is true today, and it doesn't matter what anybody does between now and then, all of what happens will eventually turn out to be compatible with this statement that is already true. Now, the whole point of this to Aristotle is that he thinks there are moves being made there that we need to examine a lot closer. But for our purposes here today, either way, the important thing to understand about fatalism is that the aliens in the book not only believe that there's a single future that can possibly play out, but that certain things are just going to happen, and it's not simply because of causal mechanics. So the next thing the Tralfamadorians assume in their worldview is something known as

• 27:37Speaker 00

  eternalism, or the idea that past, present, and future moments all equally exist and are all equally real. Now, this is a premise that's a bit different from the other three we're talking about, because this mostly has effects at the level of something like theoretical physics. You know, you can imagine if time works in this way, then the universe becomes something like a four-dimensional block, again, something where time differences exist, similar to the way that we see spatial differences. That said, if somebody was an eternalist, as part of the way they live their life, there's at least some moral implications about how someone might live their life differently. I mean, you can imagine a worldview grown out of this, where if someone believes that all future suffering is every bit as real as the suffering going on right now, then

• 28:18Speaker 00

  they might massively change their behavior now to give greater priority to future suffering, which just scales so much greater, given all the lives that are yet to be lived. The last of the four here, that the aliens in the book are fans of, is quietism, which is the idea that the wisest response to living in reality is to stop trying so hard to intervene in it all the time. Usually comes with an attitude of acceptance, or at the very least, a feeling of being resigned from putting effort into changing things as much as you can. So we have determinism, fatalism, eternalism, and quietism. As you can imagine, all four of these don't have to be linked together for something to be a coherent worldview. For example, you can be a determinist, but not a fatalist. An example of this would be something like ancient Stoicism, where despite them using

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  the word fate so much in the way that they talk about things, they didn't mean what many fatalists mean, that there are outcomes that are going to happen completely separate from what anyone does. I mean, say you get really sick and decide to go to the doctor. A Stoic like Chrysippus from the early Stoic wouldn't say something like, "Well, if it's my fate to get better, then I'll just get better. So why bother doing anything on my end?" No, to the Stoics, everything you do, from deliberation, calling or not calling the doctor, training, taking action, all of that stuff is itself part of the causal chain of what they called the fate that was unfolding. So while the future to them may still be fixed in a deterministic sense, they didn't think that meant that events were going to occur independently of what you did.

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  Your actions themselves are a big part of why the future unfolds the way that it does. Another example, you could be a fatalist without being a determinist. In other words, you could believe that certain outcomes are destined to occur, but that there are many different causal routes that we might take to be able to get there. You could be a fatalist and not a quietist. For example, you could believe that the boat you're on, the Titanic, is absolutely going to sink. There's nothing we can do about it. But you still might think that the right thing to do is to try to help people and get them into lifeboats. You know, intervening in the world is still important, even if there are certain ends we can't fully avoid. One more combination, you could be an eternalist without being a determinist, meaning you

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  could think that every moment in the actual history of the universe is equally real, you know, not privileging the present moment in any way, while also believing that the events that have already happened were not fully caused by just the conditions that came before them. These are separate quadrants we're talking about. So the point is, seeing all these different variations that are possible, I guess the first thing we need to recognize, if we're going to philosophically assess what the Tralfamadorians are saying here, is that what they tell Billy in the book is not just a simple claim they're making about determinism. In fact, if you wanted my analysis, for whatever it's worth, because determinism is talking specifically about how reality unfolds, and not stuff like what exists, what you should do about it, you know, all the stuff the aliens actually talk about in the book, causal

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  determinism is probably the least grounded assumption we can make about this whole worldview. It's just important to place the emphasis on the right parts of what they're saying, I think. The second thing to at least ask here is, do you think Kurt Vonnegut, when he wrote this book, used the aliens almost like Plato uses Socrates in his dialogues? What I mean is, are the aliens supposed to be the voice of wisdom that Vonnegut hopes the people reading the book will ultimately listen to and want to be more like? And it should be said, when this book first came out in 1969, there was a considerable portion of people who read it and felt that way about it. They thought that's what he was doing. But I think it's clear, by this point, for a couple of big reasons, that the point he was trying to make was something a bit more complex than that. I mean, let me explain.

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  Notice something about every single piece of the Tralfamadorian philosophy that we just laid out. All four of these positions are conveniently exactly what Billy Pilgrim needs to feel better about his time in Dresden. Fatalism gives him the comfort that there was never any other Dresden that was ever going to play out anyway. It has eternalism, so anybody who tragically died in the war, well, don't worry, they still exist at other points in time, too. Quietism gives him a pass to stop having to dwell on all those terrible moments, thinking of what he can do about it. And the lack of free will makes it so he doesn't have to ruminate on what he maybe should have done differently. So when we put all these things together, what we get from Vonnegut, it's probably something he sees as not a serious philosophy that someone should live all of their life

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  by, but more like an incredible coping mechanism that seems grounded in philosophy. The kind of thing that absolutely helps someone who's been through something terrible, but the kind of thing that Vonnegut no doubt thought fails as an overall life philosophy. This is also why some of the readings of the book think the entire alien abduction experience is a fabrication of someone reeling from intense trauma and declining mental health. We have good reason to believe that this is how he felt, quite frankly, because he wrote Slaughterhouse-Five. He clearly doesn't think that non-intervention is the wisest way to live your life. And while it seems very clear that he may have used pieces of this to come to terms with the fact that Dresden already happened, and that there's nothing we can do now to change that fact, and that there's no neat story we can write about it that absolves

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  us all and makes the whole thing justified, it is also clear that Vonnegut thought it's a mistake to think that because something has already happened, that nothing can ever be changed. If you really lived by the Tralfamadorian philosophy, it'd be a great coping mechanism that may keep you insulated and safe from difficult moral dimensions of life, but you would never write the book Slaughterhouse-Five. You may never make something meaningful out of the bad stuff that's already happened to you. And more generally, I think, it's interesting to consider when it comes to any philosophy that really draws us in when we hear about it, how much of that may just be something that we're attracted to, because it allows us to cope with whatever the biggest confusions are that we're currently working through. Anyway, this episode's already too long. For obvious reasons, there's no way I can tie a neat narrative bow onto this book like

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  I may have done when we were covering something like Shakespeare. I just recommend to read it yourself, wait a while, and then read it again. This is one of those books where you get different things out of it when you read it at different moments in your life. Highly recommend. As always, if you got the time this week, please let me and the rest of the listeners know your thoughts in the comment section on Patreon, where we like to talk about stuff after the episode. By the way, it's available to anyone that has a Patreon account. You don't got to be a paying member or anything. I can never thank you enough for continuing to make a show like this possible for everyone for so many years, not to mention the life of my family. So, thank you for listening. Talk to you next time.