delude themselves in love, Eros is another ideal bound to fail.
Like the ideals of courage and compassion, the ideal of love is a
source of stunting illusions.
In the early twentieth century, Freud defends the integrity of the
Self against the blandishments of another state of being, which we
might call the State of Soul. Freud stands in the tradition of Mon-
taigne, affi rming the belief that the life of skeptical, humane detach-
ment is the best of possi ble lives. This anti- idealist ideal remains a
moving one. In what’s perceived to be an age of rampant war, pov-
erty, terror, and uncertainty, it is not surprising that men and women
gravitate to a life of what one might call enlightened Self. They prize
decency, justice, and economic opportunity for all. In Freud, in
Montaigne, in Orwell, we encounter the lineaments of a life of hu-
mane Self. And it must be respected. In this book’s fi nal chapter, I
hope to say what can be said on behalf of such a life. Surely the life
of ideals can devolve into delusion. (Maybe ideals are nothing but
delusions.) Yet the question remains. How quickly can a life of Self
collapse under pressure into a life of self- centeredness and greed?
Freud is an impressive polemical enemy of all the Soul States. He
deploys his intellectual energy and insight against Compassion,
Romantic Love (and the creative acts that might rise from it),
Heroism, and (with reservations) the quest for Truth. Freud, we
might say, is the great champion of Self over Soul.
William Blake, Walt Whitman, and William Butler Yeats all write
with visionary acumen about the tensions between Self and Soul,
though the meanings they impart to the terms vary somewhat. For
Blake we habitually exist in the State of Self. We live for our per-
sonal desires; we want food and sex, money and power and pres-
tige. We aspire to health; we want to live forever in the fl esh, or for
as long as possi ble. But we can also pass into another state, the State
of Soul. Then we live not for desire but for hope. We live for the ful-
14 Polemical Introduction