I hope that all of you have enjoyed the dinner. I wanted to bring you together because I think far too little conversation exists today over serious subjects.
P. I am glad to hear you say it. My teacher Socrates suffered for insisting on serious conversation, but time has vindicated his view that the unexamined life is not worth living.
I. That is why I want to ask you this: What is worth knowing? As great thinkers, surely you must have the answer. Help me with my question.
F. We could all do worse than go back to the Sybil's injunction to know thyself--an injunction famously inscribed on the temple at Delphi. Now. What is the self? I believe it is human psychology--nothing if not vexed. It has a component of self-destruction or inward preoccupation on one hand, and an aggressive/constructive component on the other (Freud 25).
I. If you ask me, the inward and outward components of that pursuit cannot be reconciled.
F. Then I should put it a different way. Aggression, which is an aspect of instinct for self-preservation, is a result of the feeling produced because of the anxiety connected with impulse toward self-destruction. But there is also a human impulse for life--extension and self-preservation that is enacted by means of love, sexuality, reproduction, or by means of the libido (and the self-interested ego) projected both into the world in general and onto the love/sex/erotic object in particular. "Neurosis," I have explained, "was regarded as the outcome of a struggle between the interest of self-preservation and the demands of the libido, a struggle in which the ego had been victorious but at the price of severe sufferings and renunciations" (Freud 76). That argues neurosis as central to human experience, as well as the story of social structure, but awareness of the complexity of human experience thus seems to me worth knowing.
D. If I may--you talk of complexity and contingency, when what is at issue is rat...