“The Life You Want” by Adam Phillips

In this short collection of essays, Phillips contrasts the methods that psychoanalysis and pragmatism use to help a person get the life that they “truly” want. “What ‘getting a life’ now involves has become an essential perplexity, partly dependent on the stories about lives that are available to us, but always beginning in the families or social groups we grow up in…. Beginning with our mothers, we are the targets and the recipients and interpreters of often confounding messages about what is wanted of us, what we are wanted for, and what we are encouraged and discouraged from wanting…. Without always knowing what they are doing, the people who look after children – mostly the parents, but not always – recognize and sustain the parts, the versions, the aspects of the child they prefer…. We then spend our lives seeking recognition for, and avoiding recognition of, the aspects of ourselves that our parents – and the societies they are part of – couldn’t face…. We are haunted by the versions of ourselves we have been unable to be.”

Phillips spends a lot of time deconstructing both Freud and Rorty’s thoughts: on the nature of the human mind, on the Self, and on the ways humans cope with living their lives in general. “Both Freud’s psychoanalysis and Rorty’s pragmatism tell us, in their different ways, why wanting matters…. Pragmatism wants us to ask: what is the life we want—or think we want (and then, sometimes as an afterthought, why we want it)? Whereas psychoanalysis wants us to ask: why do we not want to know what we want?” Phillips suggests both men were preeminently concerned with Freud’s conception of the unconscious. Funnily, they did not agree on what Freud meant. Or rather, Rorty had chosen to reinterpret Freud’s meaning to suit his own purposes, in pragmatic fashion. “The unconscious described by Freud was a ‘reservoir’—his word—of representations of instinctual life, and a form of thinking he would call primary process and that finds its most vivid exemplar and illustration in dreams…. Freud’s unconscious refers to our fundamental and founding unknownness to ourselves; to the bodily desire that ineluctably drives our development; so in Freud’s story we are not suffering from original sin, but from original frustration. His biologically based unconscious is, as it were, an enigmatic and insistent presence and pressure in ourselves, and in our lives…. The unconscious is in this story our hidden truth, our hidden drama going on behind the scenes; a truth and a drama we are often unable and unwilling to bear, and are by definition surprised if not shocked by…. For Freud, what keeps us and gets us going are our desires for our objects of desire; for Rorty, it is our purposes. These are two very different things; our purposes are made up by us, our desires not quite, or not only, made up by us…. Freud, as Rorty knows, redescribed our ideas about autonomy and the self in ways that virtually discredited them as in any way useful fictions, Rorty took them for granted…. Rorty is determined to reject the idea of the Freudian unconscious as some bewildering ‘primitive’ force driving us through our lives. A predatory voraciousness is replaced by what might be a visionary company; exploitation is made a virtue; an enemy is superseded by a potential friend…. Freud’s question is: what, if anything, can we do with our instincts? And then: what are our instincts doing to, and with, us? Rorty’s rather different question is: what do we want to make of ourselves?”

In Phillips’ view, it would seem that pragmatism and psychoanalysis are diametrically opposed, “What Rorty calls trying to get the life you want, to be what you wish to be, Freud could only be radically sceptical about; ‘the life you want’, for Freud, would be something you are by definition unconscious of – you have worked very hard not to know what the life is you want…. And in describing the life you want, you may be merely the ventriloquist’s dummy of your culture. Describing the life we want can sometimes be the most compliant – i.e., defensive – thing we ever do…. And not only are we unconscious of what we want and plagued by wishfulness, but there is a powerful force inside us, which Freud would eventually call the death instinct, that both wants us not to want, and wants us to harm ourselves and others; that wants the life we don’t want.” Phillips continues, “The pragmatist wants to assume that people want to get on, in both senses; the psychoanalyst assumes that people resist getting on…. In psychoanalysis, there is the unconscious and there are our ego-ideals; and psychoanalytic treatment is about how we fit them together, how we fit together who we seem to be with who we want to be…. Pragmatism tells us that we can only know, or surmise, who we want to be (not who we really are), and then make experiments in living to find out whether we are right…. So if pragmatism’s insistent preoccupation is about how we can, voluntarily, get the lives we want, then psychoanalysis’s preoccupation is about how we can survive and sufficiently enjoy our largely unconscious desires and determinisms…. Our nature as described by psychoanalysis – makes us radically unsuited to the lives we are capable of living (the very things that sustain us – our appetite, our desire – are the very things that torment us). And there is also, perhaps fortunately, a life instinct that contends with this death instinct in the unending war that, according to Freud, our lives really are.”

Finally, Phillips suggests that in fighting to get the life that we actually want we often use our interactions with others to offer up a kind of resistance as cope, “Ordinary everyday behaviour may be an unconscious probe to find out what the other person will do with what I do or don’t do, with what I say or don’t say, whether they can imagine and articulate the need in it; whether they can see something in it that I can’t. Whether they can see what is being resisted and what is being invited. As though ordinary life is a performance art in front of, initially, the parents and then anyone else who could be interested in one’s wants and needs, in one’s preoccupations…. So we don’t always know – are unconscious of – what we may be resisting, and that we are resisting; and we are dependent on the recognition of others who by their words and their actions show us our resistances…. We resist articulating our needs to ourselves and to others; and we resist the experiment in living that expressing one’s needs often entails…. We are most likely to resist what is most important to us. That is how we know it is important to us; we resist acknowledging it.”

“Transcription” by Ben Lerner

This short novel is Lerner auto-fiction at its best. So many crisp sentences; so much mystery about what is fact and what is fiction. The play of memory and how the past works on the narrative present. How much of this novel is about that Rosemarie Waldrop 2024 Paris Review interview on poetry? How much of the character of “Thomas” is actually Lerner’s other mentor and collaborator, Alexander Kluge? What details in the novel are true? Does it even matter?

The conceit of the novel is the narrator drops his iPhone into his hotel sink on the way to interview his mentor, in the age of post-covid, at his home just off Brown’s campus in Providence. Much of the novel revolves obliquely around humanity’s present relationship with technology. “I was almost due at Thomas’s…. To tell him the truth seemed impossible. How was it that even though I’d been concerned about bungling the technology I hadn’t borrowed a backup recording device from my anthropologist wife? In my head a poet friend who was retraining as an analyst suggested I’d been unconsciously driven to sabotage my interview.”

As the narrator, Lerner, walks across Brown’s campus to Thomas’ home, his relationships with time and technology synch, “I was experiencing a withdrawal indistinguishable from mild intoxication, the landscape made strange, the stones stonier, by my being suddenly offline, incapable of taking pictures, sending or receiving data packets, sharing my location, getting a MyChart alert or a work email or a small toxic hit of news or shitposting; I was having an unusual experience of presence—more aware of silicates glittering in the asphalt, the little plumes of vapor that were my breath, the articulation of branches and their shadows on the sidewalk—but I was also walking into my past, because this was a landscape so dense with formative memories and events, and because only in the past would I be deviceless.”

Thomas is a formidable presence in everyone’s life whom he touches. “I’d always encountered Thomas in medias res: when you visited, you were swept into some task or conversation, skipping over the conventional greetings. This was a relief because Thomas was one of those people I didn’t know how to touch; a handshake would seem too businesslike; a hug was impossible—the word in my head was French.” Thomas is not one for small talk, “We extend the dream when we share it. You call it fiction, but it is more…. But politics is when we sit around the fire and make the dream social, no? And that is a test of the fire, of the culture. This is better than psychoanalysis, which makes it property of the individual. So we should continue our dreaming now.”

The third and last section of the novel switches the narrator to Thomas’ son, with whom Thomas had a complicated relationship. The setup is that it is a chat between the son and Lerner, but it reads like a long monologue, with only the briefest of interjections interspersed. The son, Max, visits Thomas at Brown after he has been released from a Providence hospital after almost dying from covid. Max had said his last goodbyes over an iPhone call arranged by Thomas’ nurse, which has turned out to not have actually been the end. “All he recalled of the ordeal was being ‘awoken’ by the EMTs, as if he’d just been dozing in his chair, and then he recalled ‘the cacophony’ of the hospital, but mostly it was ‘empty space, just a long and dreamless sleep’ until he was off the ventilator, feeling sore and woozy. He wasn’t much changed, and yet he was utterly changed…. I remember thinking as I sat there drinking my coffee, scanning the walls, the piles of books, that the change might well have been in me—that I’d been altered by what I’d said, even if he’d never heard it or couldn’t remember it (are those the same thing?). I’d never had the chance to say goodbye to my mom and now I’d said goodbye to my dad but he’d come back from the dead and here I was to check on him.”

Finally, Max makes his own sort of mirrored confession to the Lerner character, “You’re not understanding. I’d already plugged my phone charger into the outlet near the table, one of those wireless chargers where you just lay your phone against the plate. I pressed record on my voice memo app and set it down on the charger. It was obscured from his view by the lamp—not that he would have paid much attention to it anyway…. No, I didn’t tell him that I was recording, I have no real reason to think he suspected anything, and I just lobbed some questions at him about his past—‘I can’t remember who cooked in your house growing up, was it only your mother?’—and then let him hold forth…. I was only half listening—I’d let my device do the listening as I sipped my wine and nodded—so I felt freed up to really look at him.”

“The Glance of Medusa: The Physiognomy of Mysticism” by Laszlo Foldenyi (translated by Jozefina Komporaly)

This book is a collection of Foldenyi’s essays on the common themes of transcendence, godliness, metaphysics, and myth. He introduces his own writings by quoting Heinrich von Kleist, “We would have to eat once more of the tree of knowledge in order to fall back into the state of innocence…. That is the final chapter in the history of the world.” Then Heidegger, “Ever since being got interpreted as Idea, thinking about the being of beings has been metaphysical, and metaphysics has been theological.” Foldenyi, himself, continues, “Traditional metaphysics is underpinned by a belief in a supposedly final and positive meaning, which meaning, by virtue of its very nature, also differentiates itself from everything that it invests with meaning. This traditional understanding of meaning, the abyss between Being and Be-ing, entices us with the prospect of a new world that, although available to all, can only be accessed if one renounces everything there is, and abandons what appears to be without meaning…. In lieu of an earthly, and hence fractured, Self-image, metaphysical thinking is fascinated by a solid and definitive, hence divine, Self-image…. Individuality is the endless reflection of mirrors reflecting one another, while, above all, actually reflecting the divine…. Human beings are doomed to metaphysics owing to their awareness of their own mortality.”

Foldenyi’s first essay is titled “Divine Experience and Divine Faith (Where the Bars of the Cross Intersect).” It begins with an epigraph from Nietzsche, “You go your own way of greatness; here no one shall sneak along after you! Your foot itself erased the path behind you, and above it stands written: impossibility.” Foldenyi begins by explaining mysticism, “The ‘personal encounter with God,’ known as the key characteristic of mysticism, is the seemingly moderate expression to convey the experience of mystics who have simultaneously lived a given moment (the moment of ‘conversion’) as deprivation and excessive fulfillment.” Heidegger asks, “Why are there beings at all, and why not nothing?” Foldenyi continues, “In the course of divine experience, what cannot be experienced becomes the subject of experience—excess appears within the parameters of moderation—while divine faith separates knowledge and experience, and differentiates moderation from excess…. Divine experience is intense, heated, momentary, and it makes no allowance for past or future, since it makes no allowance for time either…. Divine experience is incompatible with moderation…. In moments such as divine experience, when the individual breaks away from community and is all alone facing the incomprehensible, on the one hand, there are countless things to say, and, on the other, the mouth can barely utter anything.”

Many of Foldenyi’s other essays discuss juxtaposition and paradox. He is interested in the moment and the supremely personal. Foldenyi propounds, “Every live face conceals a mask—the mask of the impossible—into which existence as a whole is compressed, so that one can confront something that does not exist and yet is capable of subverting everything.” In another essay, he, again, discusses the concept of moderation, “The human being, by virtue of its sheer existence, is at the mercy of moderation, the limit and the world of order…. In moments of disruption, it becomes apparent that moderation is a prison, and, as its tenant, one is the prisoner of those who surpass existence altogether: Dike and Ananke; in other words, limitlessness and excess. Thus, one has to become limitless and immoderate in order to assess the totality of one’s own existence.” He quotes Heraclitus, “You could not in your going find the ends of the soul, though you travelled the whole way; so deep is its Law (Logos).”

In another essay, titled “The Impossible,” Foldenyi begins by quoting Plato’s uncle, Critias, “Nothing is certain, except that having been born we die, and that in life one cannot avoid disaster.” Foldenyi expands, “One experiences oneself as a banished God and, as a result, finds oneself bedazzled and tends to perceive life as a giant wound…. In unsettling moments, when one is touched by chaos and, having transcended everything, perceives oneself as the divine centre, it rightly feels that one has also become a victim of discord.” This is related to the concepts of Otherness and alienation. “In sacred moments, one gets to one’s inner self via the roundabout way of Otherness, initially moving away from oneself. Hence the expression ‘losing oneself’, since in such situations one is alienated from everything, including oneself…. Every historical period has encountered this alienation of the world from itself…. Relevant in this respect are the Gnostics, who interpreted alienation as a synonym for the so-called trans- or hypercosmic, and experienced an unsurmountable abyss between earthly existence and the alien and unknowable God in charge of this existence.” Getting back to Otherness, “The ‘Other’ is the expression of the impossibility that everything there is, mankind included, owes its origin to something that is not identical with itself. Every existence is charged with its own absence; in everything that there is, something Other is also inherently nestled…. Through existence, one is the depository of a ‘Being’ that guarantees all existence; at the same time, as an individual condemned to decay, one also has to endure the impossibility of this ‘Being’. The impossible, therefore, is not a noun, and is no equivalent to God, as proposed by theologians, or to Being, as perceived by ontologists…. The very usage of the word is misleading, since we are dealing with something that should not in fact be called impossible; a hyphen (-), free-standing brackets ( ) or three dots (…) would better illustrate this concept than words.” Foldenyi concludes by relating this explicitly back to the impossible, “One of the main aims of the European tradition starting with Plato and culminating with Christianity was to equip the individual to handle the temptation of the impossible…. Ideology teaches about the idea, or, to put it differently, about the sensorially visible…. By seeking an explanation for everything, ideologists find themselves attempting to leave aside the impossible, this defining characteristic of existence.” Friedrich Schleiermacher posits, “The more you fade from yourself, the clearer will the universe stand forth before you, the more splendidly will you be recompensed for the horror of self-annihilation through the feeling of the infinite in you.”

Foldenyi concludes, in his essay “The Power of Now,” by riffing, once again, on the essence of life and its momentariness. “What could human life entail if not a unique moment in which the impossible ruptures and something becomes possible? This moment between birth and death is like lightning; a luminous source that suddenly shoots off into the body of darkness. It surpasses everything while it lasts, appears indestructible and timeless, and is destroyer and creator of time. And then it disappears, just as suddenly as it came about, annihilated by the same immeasurability that led to its birth…. While endowed with the gift of life, the individual also feels short-changed, a feeling for which mortality is the most eloquent proof.” We are all out there in this world, but all on our own for this ever-brief moment of time. “In extraordinary moments, it becomes obvious that there is no society to alleviate the burden of the fleetingness of human existence, and that one cannot rely on other in the end.”

“The Marginal Revolutionaries” by Janek Wasserman

This is a history of the Austrian School of economics, starting with Carl Menger and running through the non-Austrian Austrians, such as Israel Kirzner and Murray Rothbard. As such, it details the milieu of fin-de-siecle Vienna, as well as the mass emigration of economists from Austria in the 1930s, as fascism encroached. As a school, Austrian economics focuses on methodological individualism, subjective value, capital and the role of time in that process, uncertainty and the role of the entrepreneur, and, of course, marginal utility. Along with Walras and Jevons, in 1862, Menger rediscovered the marginal utility of value in contradistinction to the prevailing labor theory of value of the day. He explained, “Hence the value to this person of any portion of the whole available quantity of the good is equal to the importance to him of the satisfactions of least importance among those assured by the whole quantity and achieved with an equal portion.” His student Friedrich Wieser would simplify, “Simply put, the value of an individual unit [of a good] is determined by the least valuable of the economically permitted uses of that unit.”

Another student of Menger’s, Eugen von Bohm-Bawerk added the role of time preference, particularly in reference to capital structure and roundabout methods of production. Bohm explained, “That roundabout methods lead to greater results than direct methods is one of the most important and fundamental propositions in the whole theory of production.” In doing so, he posited a reason for a natural rate of interest and the value of present money over future claims on money.  Wasserman also explains that Bohm was one of the first economists to give a prime role in the economy to the entrepreneur. “He defined the entrepreneur sociologically as the class of individuals engaged in speculative ventures. They earned their wealth not through the exploitation of labor or land but through their far-sighted commitment to the production of goods. Their dedication to roundabout production methods for future gain distinguished them from other market participants.”

Ludwig von Mises’ approach to all economics could be boiled down to just one a priori principle, the action axiom: all human action is rational and a purposeful consideration of means and ends. He wrote, “Choosing determines all human decisions. In making his choice man chooses not only between various material things and services. All human values are offered for option. All ends and all means, both material and ideal issues, the sublime and the base, the noble and ignoble, are ranged in a single row and subjected to a decision which picks out one thing and sets aside another.” This was his theory of praxeology, human action. “Its statements and propositions are not derived from experience. They are, like those of logic and mathematics, a priori.” The writer Edward Dolan summarized, “The Austrian method, simply put, is to spin out by verbal deductive reasoning the logical implications of a few fundamental axioms. First among the axioms is the fact of purposeful human action.”

One of Mises’ greatest contributions to business cycle theory was the non-neutral role of the money supply and inflation. Depending on where in the economy the new money was injected, it distorted relative prices, while not adding overall value. Money injection created artificially low interest rates, which precipitated boom and bust cycles, as entrepreneurs were mistakenly signaled into starting capital projects that the natural Wicksellian rate would not have warranted. Mises explained, “The moment must eventually come when no further extension of the circulation of fiduciary media is possible. Then the catastrophe occurs, and its consequences are the worse and the reaction against the bull tendency of the market the stronger, the longer the period during which the rate of interest on loans has been low below the natural rate of interest and the greater the extent to which roundabout processes of production that are not justified by the state of the capital market have been adopted.” Mises was also the Austrian School’s most vociferous critic of socialism. “Once society abandons free pricing of production goods rational production becomes impossible. Every step that leads away from private ownership of the means of production and the use of money is a step away from rational economic activity.”

Friedrich von Hayek stressed the impossibility of calculation in a socialist economy. Calculation of the value of goods is impossible without relative market prices. It is also impossible under socialism because individuals’ subjective values are constantly shifting. There is no objective data of value to compile. The division of knowledge, both technical and of subjective value, is dispersed throughout all of society. In a market economy, Hayek stated, “The spontaneous interaction of a number of people, each possessing only bits of knowledge, brings about a state of affairs in which prices correspond to costs.”

The modern Austrian School of economics is often conflated with the libertarian political persuasion. However, Austrian economists qua economists wanted to keep economics a value-free science. Israel Kirzner explains, “It is quite true that for many in the U.S. the term “Austrian economics” is synonymous with laissez-faire. And I suppose it happens to be true the Austrian economists are generally “in favor of” the free market. But it can, I believe, be maintained (at least I hope so) that Austrian economics by itself does not embody those judgments of value without which, I believe, a case for non-intervention cannot be built.”