Wallace's "This Is Water": Thought, Belief, and Education

Wallace's Argument: Education as Control of Thought

In his commencement speech, David Foster Wallace makes the claim that the "real value of a real education...has almost nothing to do with knowledge" (Wallace, 2005). Instead, Wallace believes that college education is about training the mind to think — giving students "not the capacity to think, but rather the choice of what to think about," or, as he phrases it later in the speech, "learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think."

He clarifies this by painting a larger picture of how, in his view, the mind works. For Wallace, the human mind is "hard-wired" for self-centeredness, and virtuous behavior consists in learning how to override the mind's "default setting" and redirect attention outward. His examples mostly concern experiences that he believes undergraduates have not yet encountered — such as the tedium and "petty frustration" of waiting in line at a supermarket after a long workday. Drawing on his experience as a novelist, Wallace paints two hypothetical pictures of such a situation: one in which the mind's default mode of self-centeredness causes the individual to view every other person encountered with contempt and hostility, and another in which the mind extends an imaginative sympathy, viewing other people according to the most generous possible assumptions about their own difficulties in life.

This imaginative generosity can lead, in Wallace's view, to a kind of religious acceptance of transcendent meaning within tedium and frustration: "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."

The Fish and the Atheist: Two Anecdotes Examined

The difficulty with Wallace's view is that he seems to blur the distinction between thought and belief. The first two anecdotes he uses by way of illustration are, in themselves, a good indication of how this blurring works. The first anecdote — presented in an appealingly self-effacing fashion, with full awareness that it is the sort of story one expects at a commencement speech — involves two young, naïve fish swimming along when an older fish asks them, "How's the water?" One of the young fish turns to the other and says, "What the hell is water?" This story illustrates how the most immediate facts of our environment, or of our psychological make-up, may not even enter our consciousness. As Wallace phrases it, "the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about." This is certainly true, and one of the great values of education is training the mind to be critical and evaluative.

The second anecdote, however, is slightly different. It involves a committed atheist and a committed religious believer having a drink together in Alaska. The atheist mentions that he once "experimented with the whole God and prayer thing" — lost in a blizzard and certain to freeze to death, he cried out to God for help. The religious believer sees this as proof that should have converted the atheist. The atheist counters that his prayer merely attracted the attention of some nearby Eskimos, who showed him the way back to camp.

For Wallace, the story illustrates how the meaning of events is constructed according to "individual templates and beliefs." But this already begins to blur the distinction between thought and belief. In the first anecdote, the young fish simply have not yet learned to think critically about their environment. No one, however, would say that the atheist and the religious believer in the second anecdote have failed to think. For Wallace, each has a "different belief template," and "how we construct meaning [is] not actually a matter of personal intentional choice." Yet Wallace ultimately elides the difference between thought and belief altogether, defining the choice of how to think in terms of a choice in what to believe: "You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship." He then goes further, suggesting that everything qualifies in some sense as a form of "worship" — that "there is no such thing as not worshipping" and "the only choice we get is what to worship."