The Dice Man

I am reading a fascinating book. It is called The Dice Man, and it written by a person called Luke Rhinehart. The plot is roughly as follows. A bored middle aged psychiatrist discovers a new way to live his life. He has wealth, a family and is respected by his peers. However, the nature of his boredom is existential. Various events makes him discover the meaninglessness of his life, of society, convention and of the pursuits of his fellow psychologists. One night he comes to a simple realisation which not only relieves his existential boredom, but fuels a new theory of human choice and the nature of human selfood.

The realisation is that to make his life exciting again, he must surrender his personal choices to the whim of a dice roll. His method is to select a range of options, some favourable but most importantly some which are not, and allocate different outcomes of the dice to them. He rolls the dice and the outcome determines his course of action.

He find the dice liberating - by letting the dice determine his course of action he removes his responsibility. Not only this, but by surrendering his choices to the dice, he removes himself from the equation. Hence, he becomes a random man. We like to think that lack of determinism implies freedom - that a free choice is that which is not controlled by external forces. The Dice Man provokes you to examine this belief.

This lifestyle, of course, has some interesting and quite amusing effects on his life and his practice as a psychoanalyst. He convinces himself that human change is possible through dice therapy - that is, when a subject frees themselves from the choices they associate with "themselves" they can learn to be new people.

I am not finished with the book, but i am finding it deeply intriguing. Indeed, my last two posts were inspired by this reading. What of my obsession with selfhood and subjectivity? Well, for this I invoke a general philosophical curiosity - much of modern philosophy is concerned with the status of the subject, and this book has got me starting to think about it again.

I leave you with an except:

"I gurgled with anticipation: the next half year of my life, perhaps even more, trembled in my hand. The dice tumbled across the desk; there was a six and there was a...three. Nine - survival, anticlimax, inconclusion, even dissapointment; the dice had ordered me to decide anew each month what my special fate would be."