Dennis Biba

A jellyfish drifts in the ocean. This is how Ursula K. Le Guin’s novel The Lathe of Heaven begins, but anyone looking forward to post-humanist jellyfish science fiction will be disappointed after one page, because the jellyfish is just a metaphor for the fragile yet powerful subconscious in the sea of dreams.

Portland in the distant year 2002: drug addict George Orr (not Orwell, he’s already dead) has strange dreams, dreams that change reality. The idealistic psychiatrist Dr Haber is supposed to help and soon senses in George a powerful instrument for saving the world. But with every attempt to influence George’s dreams, their control slips away a little more…

In Le Guin’s SF novel, we are confronted with two types of idealism. On the one hand, there is ethical idealism in the everyday sense of the word, as demonstrated by Dr Haber: the will to make the crisis-ridden world a better place. In the initial situation at the beginning of the novel, this involves drastic overpopulation and climate change that has already passed all tipping points – a danger that Le Guin was already aware of in 1971. However, the novel vividly illustrates how little people are able to anticipate the consequences of their actions, even when they try to save the world (in contrast the 1980 film version is content to have George and Haber look out of the window in shock and shout ‘six billion!!!’). Le Guin’s aim is obviously to shift our view of what we usually understand by human agency from an intentional power of action to a non-intentional power of action, i.e. to put activist creative will in its place a little, because what happens when individual idealists are given too much power can also be illustrated today by the example of various tech billionaires.

On the other hand, idealism in the philosophical sense, from Plato’s theory of ideas to Kant, Fichte and Schelling and finally to the everyday philosophy of the present day, which is still significantly influenced by G. W. F. Hegel: Consciousness determines being, which means that the material world is based on an immaterial idea. Le Guin takes this idea, which has been criticised by generations of Marxists, literally and constructs a scenario in which (sub)consciousness can actually make direct changes to the material world – with devastating consequences. When Le Guin writes this, Hegel has already been dead for 140 years and psychoanalysis provides theoretical explanations for how repressed desires and fears become visible again in dreams. The great ideas and ideologies of the 19th and 20th centuries have erupted in two world wars and several revolutions. But is Le Guin’s novel a critical exaggeration of the Hegelian view of the world, which ends in total chaos instead of a harmonious synthesis of thesis and antithesis? Such a reading certainly has its appeal. However, the text makes no further attempt to criticise idealism, but on the contrary leads to the individualistic view that it would be best for everyone involved to concentrate on themselves in order to avoid major catastrophes. With this very liberal conclusion, the novel remains deliberately apolitical in the end, in the spirit of Margaret Thatcher (there is no society, only individuals and their families), refusing to take a sociological perspective. Although George clearly belongs to the underprivileged section of the population at all times, one searches in vain for anything like class consciousness. The individual stands alone against the injustice of the world – in this regard escapism into the realm of dreams seems almost human again.