Richard Rorty's review of Jonathan Lear's Happiness, Death, and the Remainder of Life. It's a decade old but shows no signs of aging:
Philosophy and psychoanalysis are related as fusion is to fission. Philosophers seek commonalities, psychoanalysts idiosyncrasies. Ever since Plato, philosophers have been trying to answer the question ''What is a good life for a human being?'' This question presupposes that one size fits all -- that we all have the same built-in mechanism (''reason,'' ''human nature'') that steers us toward the same goal. We are all here for the same purpose. Philosophy will help us understand what that purpose is. It will do so by turning us away from appearance toward reality -- from the way the world looks from some merely subjective point of view to the way it objectively is, and thus from what merely seems good to what truly is good.
Jonathan Lear, who is both a professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago and a psychoanalyst, started out as a commentator on Plato and Aristotle, but soon became fascinated by Freud. Freud tells us that each of us is steered through life by a different mechanism, a unique set of quirky, largely unconscious fantasies. These fantasies were installed in us early on as a result of the interaction of our genes with our infantile experiences, our family circumstances and the like. They determine what each of us will count as a happy, fulfilling life.
Lear has spent much of his intellectual career trying to cope with the tension between Plato and Aristotle's claim that some goals are natural to human beings and Freud's doubt that we can rank the lives of the foot fetishist, the gold-hoarding miser, the self-flagellating penitent, the pedophile, the Socratic lover of wisdom, the Romantic poet and the would-be ruler of the world in terms of greater or less naturalness. Freud can of course grant that society must step in to prevent the realization of some of these goals (the pedophile's and the would-be ruler's, for example). But apart from social utility, there is little room in Freud's thinking for an objective, neutral, fantasy-free point of view from which the pedophile's, the penitent's and the philosopher's goals can be hierarchically ordered.
I also enjoyed his 1995 interview, "Toward a Post-Metaphysical Culture", and his conversation with Donald Davidson (~60 mins).
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