Sublime

The idea that life has an aim, or that happiness is what we want, may be simply a way of narrowing one’s mind, of oversimplifying oneself.

The alternative is known as anti-Humeanism,

And these, we might say, are two ways of murdering the world: making it impotent or making it unreal. If this was quantifiable we would say that the good life proposed by psychoanalysis is one in which there is just the right amount of frustration.

As he got older he developed his own ideas in virtual disregard of the traditional languages of psychoanalysis.

What aliveness and its alternatives might be may perhaps be among our abiding preoccupations, among what Borges calls ‘our essential perplexities’.

Foucault

All the new thinking, like all the old thinking, is about sacrifice, about what we should give up to get the lives we should want.

distinctly human about our lives seems to depend upon our viewing one another as autonomous persons,

They acknowledge that the meaning of what they do in their lives rests on the implicit assumption that the world is relatively more lasting than they are—those parts of it, at least, to which they give their time, energy, and love.