life of compassion, perhaps the most consistently rewarding of the
ideals, is available to all of us, beginning now.
This study considers the ideals in their purest, most intense
forms: courage in Hector and Achilles; compassion in Jesus, the
Buddha, and Confucius; contemplation in Plato and Emerson;
imagination in Blake. The objective is to off er visions of the ideal
that leave as little as possi ble in doubt. Few are those who will be
able to adopt an ideal without reserve. There will almost always be
some need for the protective armor of Self. (Though in the very best
and most exemplary of lives, the Self hood barely exists.) Even those
of us most enclosed in Self can expand our beings with the sim-
plest acts of courage or compassion, or with a true eff ort at thought.
And after that initial expansion, who knows what might befall?
Perhaps too there are those who ought to have nothing to do with
ideals, and will still manage to live lives of deep satisfaction—at least
to themselves. Even Thoreau says that he has no desire to convert the
ones “who fi nd their encouragement and inspiration in precisely
the pre sent condition of things, and cherish it with the fondness and
enthusiasm of lovers” (58). Strong idealist that he can be, Thoreau
even reckons himself to be to some extent in their number.
Naturally the ideals have had their detractors, including one even
more potent than Freud and Nietz sche. At its halfway point, this
book takes on a historical dimension with refl ections on William
Shakespeare. Why Shakespeare? Harold Bloom tells us that
Shakespeare “invents the human.” It is a provocative observation
though fi nally not quite an accurate one.
Surely Shakespeare brings extraordinary psychological insight
to the stage: Bloom says that he gives us characters who overhear
what they say and, based on that overhearing, change. They are both
therapist and patient to themselves. It’s not certain that this is com-
prehensively true of Shakespeare’s heroes. What is true is that
10 Polemical Introduction