Laying Down the Law

We seem never to ask ‘Why do you know?’ or ‘How do you believe?’

J. L. Austin, ‘Other Minds’

I

When Oscar Wilde famously said that the problem with socialism was that it took up too many evenings, he was reminding us that there may always be things we care about more than the things we care about most; and that, however much we care about something, there are always other things that we want to do. That, inevitably, there is something forbidding about socialism; it may want us to give up too much. Just like any of our commitments there is much that it excludes, and much that it rejects. Whatever we permit ourselves we are forbidding ourselves something else. All our ideals for ourselves – all our aims and aspirations and beliefs – are by definition restrictive. And that is their point and their purpose. But for Wilde, in this all too ordinary fact – we can’t do everything, believe everything, love and desire everyone – there is a troubling and absurd selective inattention. We may be a little too keen to make the necessary sacrifices; we may relish giving things up. Indeed, we may do what we do because of what we have to give up in order to do it.

Something is made possible – or so it seems, Wilde intimated – by making many other things impossible; or even unthinkable, inconceivable. And yet we are strangely haunted by some of the things and people we are persuaded to exclude. To forbid something is to make it unforgettable (children must not cross the road without looking; adults must not think too much about sex, or the wrong kind of sex). At its best and at its worst to forbid is to coerce attention and to guarantee interest. It is to arrange a haunting. We must always be mindful, somewhere in ourselves, of what we have been forbidden, of what we have forbidden ourselves; being out of control is the way we tend to describe our doing of these forbidden things; though it does not follow that when we do unforbidden things we are in control. It is, in fact, only because we have created forbidden things that we have created the idea of being in control. Our ideas and experiences of pleasure have been muddled by being associated with control. So when we speak of unforbidden pleasures, we should note, we no longer need the language of control, of discipline and punishment. We can forget about those particular words. This is what Wilde was referring to when he wrote, in ‘The Critic as Artist’ (1891), ‘We teach people how to remember, we never teach them how to grow.’ We may not be able to teach people how to grow, but in order to grow there are things you need to be able to forget.

It is, of course, Wilde’s point that socialism interferes with sociability. And that, by implication, we can use commitment, conviction, strong belief – and, Wilde will assert, morals and purposes – to narrow our minds (and stunt our growth). As though there is always a temptation, or a desire, to forget the multifariousness of our pleasures; to simplify (and sanitize) our hedonism in the service of traditional safeties; the forgetting of pleasures being one form that the renunciation of pleasure can take (the one formalized by psychoanalysis). As though we are always laying down the law for ourselves, and the law forces our attention (tells us what we should and shouldn’t be looking at, who we should and shouldn’t be listening to). We are taught to remember everything except our pleasures, Wilde implied. And this is where art comes in: ‘All art is immoral,’ Wilde said, and so it is in art that we recover our real pleasures; we recover everything morality forces us to renounce. What Wilde called ‘recognising no position as final’ means not taking the forbidders too seriously; that is, not taking them on their own terms. Significant changes in manners and morals – periods of significant change in personal and cultural history – always involve the redescription of previously forbidden desires. One way or another the forbidden becomes the less forbidden, or even the unforbidden, and so provides a different kind of pleasure (we are released into enjoying previously forbidden things in different ways: released into what Kathleen Stewart calls, in Ordinary Affects, a new ‘tangle of potential connections’). And some forbidden pleasures remain just that, forbidden, because our lives would be intolerable otherwise. But we should, Wilde suggested, seek out the immoral in order to see what we think and feel about it, and this is where art comes in. We need to be able to think and talk about where our real enjoyment is, and why it might be where it is. We need to find out whether we can replace what we should enjoy with what we do enjoy.

Wilde wondered why we were so impressed by, so serious about, forbidden pleasures; why, that is to say, we might want to be intimidated by morality and tantalized by pleasure, and to so relish suffering the consequences of our renunciations. If we could believe, if we could live as if, as he put it, ‘Aesthetics are higher than ethics … Even a colour-sense is more important, in the development of the individual, than a sense of right and wrong,’ he believed our lives would be better. We might, for example, be able to enjoy living in a world of unpredictable consequences, or of what Bernard Williams calls ‘moral luck’, if we preferred aesthetics to ethics. Ethics is prophetic, Wilde implied, in a way that aesthetics need not be; it is prescriptive, it aspires to determine causes and consequences. It attempts to predict the future. By telling us what our lives should be like, morality often claims to be telling us what our lives are really like (even though we are often left feeling that we are failing to live our lives as they really are). What would our lives be like, Wilde’s heroes want us to imagine, if we found the forbidden a little less forbidding; if we used the idea of forbidden pleasure to think with, rather than to stop our selves thinking (or talking)? Perhaps the whole idea of forbidden pleasure brings out the worst in us. What could our lives be like if we took seriously what Walter Pater – Wilde’s erstwhile aesthetic hero – wrote in his 1866 essay on Coleridge: ‘Hard and abstract moralities are yielding to a more exact estimate of the subtlety and complexity of our life.’ The implication being that the subtlety and complexity of our (modern) lives are not suited to hard and abstract moralities.

What became known as the Aesthetic Movement in England in the later nineteenth century – broadly speaking, the work of Pater and Wilde and their rewriting of the work of John Ruskin, John Henry Newman and Matthew Arnold and the romanticism that preceded them – we can see now as, among other things, an attempt to change an inherited vocabulary; of finding a new way of describing what we are doing and not doing by following a rule (as though we might decide what we want to inherit, and what we want to do with our inheritance: in this case the inheritance of moral vocabularies, of rules and manners, and the forms of life they intend for us, as they speak on our behalf). ‘The Aesthetic Movement,’ David DeLaura wrote in Hebrew and Hellene in Victorian England, was ‘a serious and respectable attempt to provide fullness of life to a society increasingly aware, as Arnold put it, that the immense inherited “system of institutions, established facts, accredited dogmas, customs, rules,” fails to correspond to the wants of modern life.’ An attempt by these late Victorians, as Arnold was to put it in his essay ‘Democracy’, ‘to gain a more vivid sense of their own life and activity.’ If, instead of the words ‘good’ or ‘right’ (or ‘sacred’) we use the words ‘beautiful’ or ‘pleasurable’ or ‘enlivening’ – though not, for Wilde, the other late-nineteenth-century candidates ‘useful’ or ‘profitable’ – how would our lives be different? Once the power of redescription is acknowledged, words like ‘true’, ‘good’, ‘right’, ‘sacred’ – and, of course, ‘forbidden’ – are among the first casualties. You change the conventional absolutes by changing the conventions. Another way of saying this – a less earnest, more casually pragmatic, way – is: forget certain words and use less familiar ones instead, and see what happens. If, as Pater wrote, habit is a form of failure, we should try out new habits, different ways of speaking.

II

‘We are punished for our refusals,’ Lord Henry Wotton says in Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891); ‘Every impulse that we strive to strangle broods in the mind, and poisons us … The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. The glancing allusion to William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790) is deliberate, Wilde being a keen reader of Blake: ‘He who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence.’ In these familiar reversals of Wilde’s – ‘We are punished for our refusals’; ‘the only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it’ – we are being shown language as an area of freedom, and this freedom as a certain kind of amusement. We have been bewitched not by a picture but by a way of putting things; by certain words in a certain order. Particular ways of performing our language have held us captive (habit can be a great deadener of pleasures, forbidden and otherwise). The language that formulates the forbidden can reformulate it: ‘A Truth in art,’ Wilde wrote in ‘The Truth of Masks’ (1891), ‘is that whose contradictory is also true.’ Once we start having it both ways we can see how many ways there may be. This is what Wilde wants to impress upon us. We have taken as orders things better heard as suggestions; we have sought information when we might have preferred evocation, or wanted facts when impressions may have been more conducive. Any given vocabulary is a secret and not so secret moralizer of experience, at once a curse and a blessing, a form of instruction. ‘Wilde,’ his biographer Richard Ellmann writes, ‘was a moralist, in a school where Blake, Nietzsche, and even Freud were his fellows. The object of life is not to simplify it. As our conflicting impulses coincide, as our repressed feelings vie with our expressed ones, as our solid views disclose unexpected striations, we are all secret dramatists.’ Even Ellmann, perhaps unsurprisingly, has recourse to what, for Wilde, was the old vocabulary: Wilde, he says, was a moralist (Ellmann uses Wilde’s ‘Aesthetics are higher than ethics’ as the epigraph to his chapter on Dorian Gray). But the tradition that Ellmann creates for Wilde – and in this he was preceded by Harold Bloom – is instructive. We could construe each of these very different writers, from very different cultural traditions, as saying: laying down the law, any law, is stranger and crueller than it looks; the forbidden is always a provocation, whatever else it is; and therefore we should forget certain words and try to remember other ones instead. Extricate yourself, in so far as you can, from the vocabulary that doesn’t suit you, that doesn’t get you the life you want. Think of the languages you prefer; think of language as a pleasure and not a penance, as a celebration and not a sacrifice. Each of these writers has their key words, their own distinctive idiom, a vocabulary by which we recognize them; and each of these writers, not incidentally, had distinctive things to say about memory; about the useful, the purposeful, the pleasurable forgetting of words.

We want to narrow our minds – we want to speak and write in particular ways – because we want to set limits to our wanting, to our sense of possibility. So it is not incidental that when Wilde came to actually write about socialism, say, in ‘The Soul of Man under Socialism’ (1891), he writes about many other things as well, and mostly about Art and Individualism – about Art as Individualism – and about pleasure as the point of the Art and the Individualism that he capitalizes, and capitalizes on, in this extraordinary essay (‘Socialism,’ Wilde remarked in conversation, ‘is enjoyment’). When he writes about socialism he wants to write about what he takes it that the socialists of his day were in danger of forgetting, and what indeed they should forget about. Intimating that the socialists of his day, in their ideological fervour, had misunderstood what kind of sociability socialism might, or could, entail. Or what kinds of things people might really enjoy doing together. ‘The chief advantage that would result from the establishment of Socialism is,’ Wilde begins his essay,

undoubtedly, the fact that Socialism would relieve us from that sordid necessity of living for others which, in the present condition of things, presses so hardly upon almost everybody. In fact, scarcely anyone at all escapes.

Living for others is not the same as living with others; indeed, living for others, Wilde suggested, might sabotage pleasurable coexistence. Wilde as a classicist would know that ‘sordid’ – in ‘that sordid necessity of living for others’ – came from the Latin sordidus, ‘dirty’, and was associated with filth and waste matter. A sordid necessity is then at once wasteful and contaminating. Living for others, which ‘scarcely anyone at all escapes’, means for Wilde a range of things, from the Christian ethic of self-sacrifice, through the altruism of utilitarianism (doing whatever is conducive to the greatest happiness of the greatest number), to the more modern-sounding notion of simply being what others want us to be; these others to whom we wish to conform being specific and significant, and to some extent chosen (Nietzsche, another critic of Christian altruism, wrote in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883), ‘Please unlearn this “for”, you creators: it is precisely your virtue that you shall do no thing for’). The phrase ‘living for others’ suggests that we can live on behalf of other people’s desires, or that we can live in their place or in place of them, or for their benefit, or for their very survival. That we can, as it were, forget ourselves in order to remember them, those others for whom we are living. As though every life was a sacrifice to both the previous generation and to our contemporaries in some infinite regress of obligation and indebtedness (Freud, of course, would write in Civilization and Its Discontents (1930) of societies as profoundly and necessarily compromising for the individual and her desire). ‘Living for others’, with its myriad associations and connotations, is, we might say, integral to the moral vocabulary Wilde inherited; what do these others that we are living for forbid, and encourage? Which others are we living for, and why? If we are not living for others, what or who are we living for? Why does living involve living for? What is it about life – the then modern life – that required justification, or reasons, or foundations, or endorsements? Is it possible that we might begin to believe that there is nothing or no one to live for? And how, if at all, would we live then? These are the kinds of questions that certain ways of using the inherited vocabulary might dissuade us from asking (and that Blake, Nietzsche, Freud, Wilde and many others were asking). What have we got to do with other people? And what do we really enjoy doing with them?

In Wilde’s pagan socialism no one would be compliant or servile or modest. They would be, in the very best sense, self-centred, there being no other real centre from which they could live (‘For out of ourselves we can never pass,’ Wilde wrote in ‘The Critic as Artist’, ‘nor can there be in creation what in the creator was not’; the creator and creation here secularizing and parodying what Wilde took to be the increasingly outworn vocabulary of Christianity: Christianity being a language – despite, or because of, his youthful flirtation with Catholicism – he found it intermittently more difficult to speak with conviction). In Wilde’s socialism the artist is exemplary, and exemplary in his disregard of what others want from him. One thing the others want from him being a certain way of talking and writing. What Wilde often referred to as ‘Public Opinion’ in ‘The Soul of Man under Socialism’ is always laying down the law; public opinion being defined by Wilde as, ‘an attempt to organize the ignorance of the community, and to elevate it to the dignity of physical force’. It is the being forcefully organized that Wilde resents as much as the ignorance cultivated. ‘Whenever a community or a powerful section of a community, or a government of any kind, attempts to dictate to the artist what he is to do,’ he wrote,

Art either entirely vanishes, or becomes stereotyped, or degenerates into a low and ignoble form of craft. A work of art is the unique result of a unique temperament. Its beauty comes from the fact that the author is what he is. It has nothing to do with the fact that other people want what they want. Indeed, the moment that an artist takes notice of what other people want, and tries to supply the demand, he ceases to be an artist, and becomes a dull or an amusing craftsman, an honest or a dishonest tradesman. He has no further claim to be considered as an artist. Art is the most intense mode of Individualism that the world has known. I am inclined to say that it is the only real mode of Individualism that the world has known … alone, without any reference to his neighbours, without any interference, the artist can fashion a beautiful thing; and if he does not do it solely for his own pleasure, he is not an artist at all.

This, of course, is not a fashionable view, at least not in universities, nor among socialists. It was a view, paradoxically, that would ultimately be exploited by a voracious art market. But what I am interested in here, both historically and psychologically, is what Wilde took to be the preconditions for both Art and Individualism: turning a blind eye to other people and what they want (in his wonderful poem ‘The Notebooks of Robinson Crusoe’, Ian Crichton Smith writes, ‘Language is other people’). Wilde’s artist does not ask the contemporary question, ‘How can I make myself worth investing in?’, but asks instead, ‘What do I really want to make?’ As Wilde put it further on in ‘The Soul of Man under Socialism’, ‘A true artist takes no notice whatever of the public. The public to him are non-existent…’; he makes art ‘for his own pleasure, and has never asked the public what they wanted, has never cared to know what they wanted’. Wilde is so insistent, we might presume or conjecture, partly because he was all too aware of his own all too compromising desire to please; and of the predations of the market that were commodifying art at an unprecedented rate. The artist, for Wilde, becomes that strange, improbable creature, a law unto himself, supposedly untrammelled by the laws of others. People start to have fantasies about more private languages when the public languages don’t do the trick. People start idealizing outlaws when the law is felt to be unduly excluding. The desire for freedom is the desire for new rules. And new rules mean new names for things.

The kind of pleasure, the kind of language, Wilde is wanting and promoting is sabotaged by being or doing what other people want from him (and often, for Wilde, by being encouraged to do rather than just to be). The whole notion of the forbidden, of course, prescribes the individual’s legitimate pleasures. And organizes what people can legitimately want from each other (what people are wanting from, and for, each other being the way in which ‘the problem’ is always formulated). Indeed, what other people might want from the artist, Wilde suggests, destroys him as an artist; his art ‘has nothing to do with the fact that other people want what they want’. It is the Art that ‘vanishes’, that ‘degenerates’ once the artist starts attending to other people’s wants, once he abrogates what Wilde called in ‘The Decay of Lying’ (1891), ‘that healthy natural vanity which is the secret of existence’. Whether it is called the mother or the market, Mama or Mammon, what other people want, at least from the artist, is the saboteur of art and growth. When Ernest suggests, in the dialogue that is ‘The Critic as Artist’, that ‘great artists work unconsciously [and] that they were “wiser than they knew”’, his friend Gilbert, the more overtly ‘Wildean’ character of the two, replies, ‘It is really not so, Ernest. All fine imaginative work is self-conscious and deliberate. No poet sings because he must sing … A great poet sings because he chooses to sing.’ The great artist is self-conscious and deliberate; but in this story the artist can be conscious of himself only by forgetting the existence of other people (the public, to the Wildean artist, are ‘non-existent’). Other people, in other words, distract us from our selves; what they want from us – and other people are relentless wanters for Wilde, monstrous in their greed, and in their greed for reassurance – distorts and pre-empts what the artist wants from and for himself. In this purity-and-danger version of art and individualism, the artist is always endangered by other people. He is in danger of forgetting himself; and endangered by the kind of pleasure – the masochistic pleasure – compliance can bring. To avert this catastrophe he must forget about other people. He must live as if – implausible as it might sound – other people, particularly the arbiters of taste, do not exist. It is, though, a version of what every child has to be able to do when necessary – pretend he has no parents, or pretend that his parents are not really his parents: the child choosing his future by choosing his inheritance; the child at once wanting to be what the parents apparently need him to be – wanting to restore the parents to their lost perfection – and doing something else entirely. The child as double agent.

III

We can see Wilde as, among other things, trying to find ways of recovering people’s pleasure in each other’s company (his plays make us enjoy people talking to each other, for example, in quite new ways; as though it was a terrible thing to make talking uninteresting). Something about a certain fantasy concerning the individual and individualism, about what was deemed to be valuable regarding the self and sociability, was felt to be under threat by Wilde, and many of his late-nineteenth-century contemporaries. Indeed, in 1859, the year Darwin published On the Origin of Species , John Stuart Mill had written, in what became the manifesto of modern liberalism, On Liberty, in a chapter entitled ‘Of Individuality’, ‘He who lets the world, or his own portion of it, choose his plan of life for him, has no need of any other faculty than the ape-like one of imitation.’ Mill’s On Liberty – in which ‘the tyranny of the majority’, a newly monstrous ‘public opinion’, threatened to stifle what he called ‘The only freedom which deserves the name … pursuing our own good in our own way’ – was the importantly earnest precursor of Wilde’s rather more alluringly stylish preoccupations.

So we might ask, more simplistically, what was the problem that Wilde’s particular version of aestheticism was a solution to? Was it the precariousness of the modern individual finding out, and holding on to, what matters most to him? Or the difficulty of living in a world in which collaboration is assumed to be unavailable or unavailing? Or the fear, perhaps, that there may be nothing that matters most, or much, or even enough? Or is it that the whole project of wanting to be a law unto oneself exposes one’s fear of other people and how powerful they can be, or seem to be? Indeed, one’s morality could turn into no more and no less than one’s defiance of other people’s moralities. Or it could turn into a new-found moral inventiveness; not merely, as Blake proposed, by the inventing of one’s own system to avoid being oppressed by another man’s, but also by the finding of new, unoppressive moralities: moralities that are not systems; moralities that could be objects of desire more akin to sexual or aesthetic objects; moralities that could be both relished and exhilarating; moralities that might inspire rather than humiliate. Moralities that might make what people want from each other pleasurable rather than punishing; and might, indeed, change what people want from each other.

This desire for different moralities could make one want to change the game by changing the language game; by finding new things to value, and new kinds of evaluation (and new things to say about evaluation). And all of this would sustain the possibility that both Wilde and Nietzsche refer to: the possibility that one could love being alive. The issue for them was not the difficulty of living, but the difficulty of really enjoying living. They both suggest, in their different ways, that we have been misinformed about our real pleasures (if authorities are people who tell us what we should enjoy, we have to wonder what it might mean to be encouraged to enjoy something). Will developing a colour-sense, Wilde asks, keep you going better than a sense of right and wrong (a version of the question: what are the difficulties involved in changing one’s vocabulary, and changing one’s vocabulary such that it really changes one’s life?)? In his account of the artist, and of the critic as artist, of the artist as the exemplary individual, Wilde is attempting to sustain the idea of the individual through art; as though art were the ultimate proof, or guarantor, of the existence of the individual, and his greatest pleasure. As though individualism, or the pleasure of individualism, was now in doubt, might in fact go under, or even disappear. And the artist was the only person – or represented the only person – who could withstand the intimidation of consensus; who could resist being deformed by opinions and money (what Wilde referred to as the ‘vulgar’, the ‘common’). What we have to be wary of now, he suggests, is having too much in common with other people, and indeed with ourselves. We must be wary of being too knowing about knowingness.

Art, for Wilde, was by definition not rational, because so-called rationality was a species of conformism. ‘There are two ways of disliking art,’ Gilbert says in ‘The Critic as Artist’; ‘One is to dislike it. The other, to like it rationally. For Art, as Plato saw, and not without regret, creates in listener and spectator a form of divine madness. It does not spring from inspiration, but it makes others inspired. Reason is not the faculty to which it appeals.’ So art drives us mad. Or rather, art helps us to be as mad as we need to be to feel fully alive. Art wants to dispel rationality, the rationality that estranges people from their inspiration. So only bad art in his view can be understood or explained. And this in itself, of course, redescribes the critic’s project; the critic in Wilde’s account is both akin to the artist and in many ways even superior to the artist – ‘criticism is more creative than creation’. The critic is freer to make more of the artist’s art than the artist himself is capable of doing. In this account the Wildean critic takes the work of art further than the artist is able to do (explanation and understanding being the enemy of this process, the enemy of the artist’s real project). ‘The critic,’ Gilbert says, is ‘in his own way as creative as the artist, whose work, indeed, may be merely of value in so far as it gives to the critic a suggestion for some new mood of thought and feeling which he can realise with equal, or perhaps greater, distinction of form, and, through the use of a fresh medium of expression, make differently beautiful and more perfect.’ The art is a pretext for the critic’s artistry. The critic creates new evocations in response to the artwork; the criticism itself then becoming a work of art in its turn. But, for the Wildean critic, it needs to be stressed that explaining and understanding a work of art is to miss the point. A real work of art should be strangely affecting; and it need not be in any way informative. John Ashbery’s remark that ‘the worse your art is, the easier it is to talk about’ refers us back to Wilde’s ‘The Critic as Artist’.

Great art, in Wilde’s view – and Wilde always explicitly privileges the literary arts – enables us to forget ourselves, our rational, conforming, intelligible, law-abiding, too timid, explaining selves. And this forgetting makes other things possible. But the artist, we should note, in Wilde’s view, neither loses himself nor forgets himself – art ‘does not spring from inspiration’: the artist is ‘self-conscious and deliberate’ – he just needs to forget about other people. Wilde’s artist is in this sense both conscious and self-conscious, without at least wanting to be merely a propagandist (though of course the Wildean hero is always, paradoxically, too knowing, even though it is often his knowingness that undoes him: Dorian Gray kills himself; Lord Henry Wotton does not). So mindful is Wilde of the power of language that he seeks to use it with deliberation and calculation in the full knowledge that language is virtually defined by its unintended consequences.

The ‘influence’ – to use one of Wilde’s key words – of language is inexplicable but decisive; Wilde wrote, for example, in The Portrait of Mr W. H. (1889) that the Symposium is Plato’s most ‘perfect’ because the most ‘poetical’ of the dialogues, which ‘began to exercise a strange influence over men, and to colour their words and thoughts, and manner of living’. By colouring people’s ‘words and thoughts, and manner of living’, Plato’s words (in Marsilio Ficino’s translation) developed people’s colour-sense. But though Wilde tries to tell us what the effect was, the word ‘strange’ in ‘strange influence’ by definition keeps his options open and unfamiliar (‘strange’ was another of Wilde’s key words, as it was for his erstwhile idol Pater). ‘Strange’ meaning ‘foreign’, ‘alien’, ‘uncanny’; as though language estranges us in its very familiarity.

There was propaganda and there were enigmatic objects. Wilde, one could say, in his paradoxical way, was always propagandizing for the enigmatic object, the supreme enigmatic object being language itself, and its strange influence; with the (albeit contentious) implication that if we were to treat morality as an enigmatic object, and not as propaganda, our lives – not to mention our conversations about morality – would be more satisfying. We would be more genuinely puzzled about what we are using morality to do, and about what kinds of pleasure our different moralities might involve us in. And also more intrigued about what kinds of pleasure our different languages make possible. Wilde’s ‘rhetoric’, the critic Linda Dowling writes in Language and Decadence in the Victorian Fin de Siecle, ‘describes the autonomous life of literary language, hinting at the dangerous effects that such language can have on human life and consciousness’. The danger she describes is of course directed at conventional morality. This dangerous ‘autonomous life of literary language’ makes the language itself sound like an outlaw, and these ‘dangerous effects’ of ‘such language’ that Dowling refers to were to be fateful for Wilde himself.

What kind of ‘moralist’, to use Ellmann’s word, was Wilde? What kind of moralist can anyone be once they acknowledge, or even want to celebrate, the unintended consequences of language, the strange influence of certain people’s words? Or even language itself as a potential outlaw? And if they prefer the aesthetic to ethics, beauty to morality, and so are seeking ways to live aside from the law, or beyond good and evil? The whole idea of the forbidden, of course, gives us an apparently coherent set of causes and consequences – of parameters – by giving us a set of rules and prohibitions, all of which need to be sufficiently understandable to guarantee our obedience. The language of prohibition is the dream of a language of straightforward influence, not strange influence; a language of orders, not impressions. A language of rules, not suggestions. Language as effective propaganda. And yet, of course, as Wilde would reveal again and again – would indeed relish exposing – to forbid something is to make it desirable. The forbidden coerces desire. It makes something strangely alluring. It may make us obedient, but it also makes us dream (often at the same time). To abide by a rule you have to have in mind what it would be to break it.

‘It is always,’ Wilde wrote in ‘The Decay of Lying’, ‘the unreadable that occurs.’ Not, that is, what we have supposedly understood. Whether or not this is strictly true, it reminds us of the pleasures of an amused scepticism. There may be lots of reasons why something is unreadable, but to be unreadable someone must have tried to read it first. Language has its effect, its strange influence, Wilde intimates, even when we are unable to read it. The rules – and especially in their most absolute form as the forbidden, the taboo – have to be readable and unforgettable, accessible and memorable. We have to be able to know what the rules are, and to think of this knowing as, in part, an understanding of what we do with them. We want, depending on our prejudices and preferences, some of the readable to occur, and some of it not to. And, Wilde adds, ‘It is always the unreadable that occurs.’ What we don’t know, what we haven’t understood, can be the realest thing about us. It can be what happens.

So I want to read Wilde as encouraging us to forget, or to unlearn, certain words and phrases; to forget a vocabulary – words like ‘seriousness’, ‘duty’, ‘explanation’, ‘fact’ and ‘imitation’, and phrases like ‘living for others’, and ‘making oneself useful’ (‘The sure way of knowing nothing about life,’ Wilde wrote, ‘is to try to make oneself useful’) – and to use words like ‘beauty’, ‘disobedience’, ‘development’, ‘pleasure’ and ‘perfection’, and phrases like ‘the beauty of life’ and ‘the joy of living’ instead. To forget (or to unlearn) a vocabulary is to foster a remembering of a different self – the enigmatic self, the only self we are ever going to have, if we want to have a self – and its plenitudes and pleasures (‘the have-nots and the yearning ones … have formed linguistic usage’, Nietzsche remarks in 1887 in The Gay Science). It is to a celebration of so-called selfishness – his own redescription of ‘selfishness’ – that Wilde invites us; to the laying down of a different kind of law.

IV

‘A man is called selfish,’ Wilde said in ‘The Soul of Man under Socialism’,

if he lives in the manner that seems to him most suitable for the full realisation of his own personality; if, in fact, the primary aim of his life is self-development … Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live. And unselfishness is letting other people’s lives alone, not interfering with them. Selfishness always aims at creating around it an absolute uniformity of type. Unselfishness recognizes infinite variety of type as a delightful thing … enjoys it. It is not selfish to think for oneself. A man who does not think for himself does not think at all. It is grossly selfish to require of one’s neighbour that he should think in the same way, and hold the same opinions.

‘Infinite variety of type’ is a paradoxical phrase, acknowledging that, though there may be types, there may at least be an infinite variety of them. In describing the primary aim of life as self-development – or growth, as he sometimes calls it – Wilde is incorporating ideas from nineteenth-century biology and Darwinism into his aestheticism. And by describing it as ‘grossly selfish’ to require one’s neighbour to think as one does oneself, he is giving a commentary on Christ’s injunction to love thy neighbour as thyself; which could also be described as grossly selfish. In all these Wildean stipulations, no one imposes anything on anyone else: it is that virtually unthinkable thing, a morality without intimidation, that Wilde is wanting to conjure up. He is wary, above all, of collusion, of the simulation of shared worlds through intimidation. For Wilde, it is as though the then modern individual was being forced to forget that he might have his own thoughts, his own desires, his own development. As though the pressures of uniformity were becoming unbearable (in Nietzsche’s language the instinct for life was being replaced by ‘the herd instinct’). What was needed was a redescription, a rewording of selfishness; and so, by definition, of whatever the self was deemed to be. And, by the same token, a reappraisal of what a rule or a law was deemed to be. There can be no self without rules, and vice versa. Wilde writes as though people might forget that they had a so-called self, that he or she had his or her own thoughts, personality and development; and that this was what the laws they lived by had led them to (as though conformity had become the new individualism). Wilde’s aestheticism, in other words, was an attempt to avert the elegiac; to persuade people to always prefer the next good thing. He wanted what his near-contemporary Nietzsche called ‘more life’; his object of desire, again like Nietzsche, was the future, not the past.

With less earnestness, and far less portentousness, Wilde was – in Zarathustra’s words from Nietzsche’s great book – not sitting and waiting like the prophetic Zarathustra, but talking and writing, ‘with old shattered tablets around [him] as well as new half-inscribed tablets’. But Wilde, like Nietzsche (like everyone else) could speak the language of the future only by using in new ways the language of the past. Neither of them wanted any more tablets of law, any more exact and overexacting commandments of good and evil. And both of them realized that all tablets are only ever half inscribed, always to be completed, and never to be completable, in what are always unknowable futures. That morality – and morality is only ever the language in which it finds its form – could no longer be used to stop time. Or talk. Or development. If God is dead, the phrase ‘become who you are’, as used by Nietzsche and endorsed in a different way by Wilde (as ‘the full realization of his own personality’), necessarily involves, in another of Nietzsche’s phrases, ‘a transvaluation of all values’. ‘Who you are’ no longer means who you have been essentially defined as by an omniscient authority. The forbidden begins to lose its grip; or one set of forbidden things simply replaces another. For both Nietzsche and Wilde, man, as he was then called, is the evaluating animal, not merely the obedient animal. So the questions were no longer which of man’s evaluations are true, but rather, what is he doing when he is evaluating? Or, not what is forbidden, and why, but rather, why is this forbidden now, and to what purpose? Who is doing the forbidding, and who is consenting, and what kind of pleasure does it give them? What is the making forbidden a way of doing? What are we making when we make something forbidden, when we lay down the law in no uncertain terms?

To forbid can be both protective and intimidating, superstitious and realistic, sadistic and masochistic, vengeful and comforting, imaginative and narrow-minded, optimistic and pessimistic, terrified, arrogant, kind, omniscient and humble. Without the forbidden as traditionally conceived, in other words – the forbidden as that which, because it must not be contested, apparently can’t be contested – we lose all our preferred dramas. We lose a hallowed vocabulary (unforbidden pleasures pale in comparison). When Wilde and Nietzsche in their different ways ask us to talk differently about the forbidden and the forbidders, they ask us to consider our pleasures anew. If religion and its structures of moral authority were to be no longer objects of desire – and towards the end of the nineteenth century, unlike today, this seemed like a distinct possibility – where could those desires be satisfied, or how could the desires themselves change, or be modified? Could we want new things, and in different ways? What would wanting be like if other things were forbidden – if, say, ‘vulgarity’, or ‘dullness’, or ‘earnestness’ were forbidden, as both Wilde and Nietzsche would have preferred – or even if there were no things we were forbidden to want? We do not have laws because we have desires: we have desires because we have laws, they want us to believe. The law arranges our wanting for us. These were the kinds of intimations of mortality that the new writing of the later nineteenth century was beginning to encourage. Wilde and Nietzsche, and later Freud (among others), allowed us to wonder, in an interestingly secular way, what it was that the forbidders wanted, and why we had needed to deify them in order to take them seriously.

V

‘Man feels himself to be a more various and richly-endowed animal than the old religious theory of human life allowed,’ Matthew Arnold wrote in a letter to Ernest Fontanès in March 1881, ‘and he is endeavouring to give satisfaction to the long suppressed and still imperfectly-understood instincts of this varied nature.’ Arnold is clear that something is dawning which has been, in his view, ‘long suppressed’ (and suppressed primarily by Christianity), and which modern Darwinian biology is allowing people to recognize in new ways. What has been suppressed, in Arnold’s view, is something of the sensual spontaneity, the life-affirming intellectual curiosity of the ancient Greeks (the Greeks, that is, as Arnold and some of his contemporaries conceived them to be). Instincts and their satisfaction are now the issue, not faith and doubt, or duty and compassion, or morality and grace. And the instincts are not so much new as long buried. A ‘more various and richly-endowed animal’ is at once expansive, unfrightened and full of excited apprehension; there is no mention of selves or souls. Arnold is announcing a renaissance of something both ancient and unprecedented.

There is, in one of the old religious theories of human life, a self made by God, which is living for this God who lays down the laws of life. But once people begin to feel and believe that they may be what Arnold calls, ‘more various and richly-endowed’ animals – animals, that is to say, as described by Darwin, among others, and therefore no longer selves in the traditional sense – they have to imagine what a self not made by God, not providentially informed, might be like; and how, if at all, the word ‘self’ still applies. And, by the same token, they have to ask what a law is like, and its laying down, when it is imposed not by a god but by a human animal. And with this, of course, comes the possibility that our so-called selves might be quite different from the divinely created selves that we have inherited (that is, that we have been persuaded to believe in); and, indeed, that being or having a self may be just one among many ways of describing what we are.

We are all too familiar by now with a wide-ranging scepticism about what, if anything, the word ‘self’ (or ‘individual’) can refer to, or include and preclude; and about what hidden agendas the idea of the self can be used to sponsor or maintain (what old, religious theory of human life the self, and all the assumptions about the self, might bring in its wake). And we are also becoming familiar with descriptive vocabularies – in some versions of psychoanalysis, in structuralism, in neurobiology – that can, and want to, dispense with the term ‘self’ altogether (though not to dispense, it seems, with the laying down of laws). As though, for example, the anachronism of the self may be keeping us in some sense religious, connected to those selves that were created, and as part of a sacred order; at once too servile and too arrogant, too knowing and too serious, too reverential and too defiant, too self-important and too self-deceiving. As though the Judeo-Christian God and the selves He supposedly made were really a radically misleading picture of – the wrong, or out-dated, vocabulary for – the kind of creatures we are, the kind of creatures we were turning out to be, or wanted to be; creatures that evolved, creatures that could be more or less self-fashioning (Nietzsche’s injunction ‘become who you are’ depends entirely on the language you have for what you might be, or take yourself to be). This, at least, is what the names Wilde, Nietzsche and Freud, among many others, stand for in the great nineteenth-century awakening, in which directions for a possible and unprecedented secularism are beginning to be worked out. And what is at stake is how, if at all, the competing accounts of what a person is, and what a life, and indeed a good life, entails, can be linked up. And whether a compelling account can be given of who people are in terms of what they want, or feel the lack of, an account which capitalism exploited in a particular way.

In psychoanalysis – a discipline contemporary, in its beginnings, with other traditions of aestheticism, and significantly and strangely influenced by Nietzsche; a discipline trying to put together pleasure and morality in new ways – the use of the word ‘self’ can feel like a throwback, a nostalgic, almost regressive, attempt to unify the ineluctably conflicted individual that Freud described (as, indeed, in their different ways, had Wilde and Nietzsche). Freud frightened even psychoanalysts with his unconventional (that is, secular) description of a person as having everything except a self – instincts, conscience, an ego, but nothing that could put it all together, nothing that could use the word ‘I’ with conviction or any kind of real authority. Psychoanalysis could help us forget the self, and help us talk about conflicting desires and punitive internal authorities instead; or competing pleasures; or competing evaluations of pleasure, a Death Instinct that wants to destroy the possibility of pleasure, and a Life Instinct that will go to great lengths to sustain pleasure (once again there being no single sovereign authority). It could encourage us, at its most unsettling, to allow for a great deal of disarray and drive, of incoherence and unintelligibility, of pleasure found at all costs. Like Wilde and Nietzsche, Freud was to urge on us a newish vocabulary that would make us wonder what we are doing in moralizing ourselves and others; what kind of pleasure moralizing was; how the forbidden forbids us the language to talk and think about what we are doing when we forbid; and why we might be wanting one God rather than many; and why we would be wanting any gods at all.

Freud would redescribe ‘good’ and ‘evil’ – or Wilde’s language of the ‘beautiful’ and the ‘vulgar’, or ‘ugly’ – as, initially, the more blandly secular (and bodily) ‘acceptable’ and ‘unacceptable’, what we can take in and what we can’t swallow and want to spit out. And then, later in our development, he would describe us as internalizing our parents’ versions of good and evil, the ‘superego’ being Freud’s new word for the part of ourselves that forbids us what we most want and mustn’t have (the superego guarding us against and punishing us for the incestuous desires of the Oedipus complex). He would see us as riddled with severe, unduly punitive and forbidding internal authorities that we use to obscure ourselves, to hide and even attack the versions of ourselves that may matter most to us. For Freud, any moral clarity we have is a temporary suppression of the complexity of our desires. Morality, as Wilde and Nietzsche would also say, was a servile oversimplification of ourselves in the service of self-protection. Freud’s psychoanalysis would be an attempt to work out an alternative to this protection racket. And for Freud, as for Wilde and Nietzsche, amusement was somehow the key. Certain kinds of pleasure, usually previously forbidden, had to be recycled. And certain things needed to be forgotten so that certain other things could be remembered instead.

So we should note that of Freud’s two references to Wilde in his work one of them links Nietzsche and Wilde together. In, appropriately enough, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901), Freud referred to a patient that his colleague Sándor Ferenczi had told him about: ‘A lady,’ he wrote, ‘who had heard something about psychoanalysis, could not recall the name of the psychiatrist Jung. The following names came to her mind instead’, among them Wilde and Nietzsche. Freud continued:

As a common characterization of Wilde and Nietzsche she named ‘insanity’. Then she said chaffingly: ‘You Freudians will go on looking for the causes of insanity until you are insane yourselves.’ Then: ‘I can’t bear Wilde and Nietzsche. I don’t understand them. I hear they were both homosexuals. Wilde had dealings with young people.’

Freud reports this – and it is, of course, of interest that he wants Nietzsche and Wilde named in his text, and linked in this way – in a section of his book about what he calls ‘the forgetting of names’ and the ‘motives’ for such forgettings. I want to suggest that Wilde, Nietzsche and Freud himself were all, in their different ways, encouraging the forgetting of certain names and the wish to replace these forgotten names with other names (‘goodness’ replaced by ‘beauty’, ‘duty’ replaced by ‘delight’, ‘punishment’ by ‘sexual pleasure’, and so on). And, unsurprisingly, as Freud unconsciously suggests, this was considered, even by them, as somehow disreputable and disturbing (insane, homosexual, paedophiliac). As the patient says, looking for the causes of insanity could make you insane. This was what Wilde called the ‘strange influence’ of words. You forget one word and you come up with another. One word leads to another. You forget a name (Jung) and the next thing you know you are talking about paedophilia. The patient got from Jung to the young via Wilde and Nietzsche. The forgetting of names and what they might be replaced by – what the forgetting might lead you into – was clearly dangerous. When you lose one intention you always find some more. Forgetting, Freud would suggest, was a way forward. Only by forgetting a name can you come up with another one.

VI

When Nietzsche wanted to describe the day the world changed in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, he invented the day of an ultimate forgetting, the day when God forgot Himself. In the history of the forgetting of names this was one day, Nietzsche believed, that should stand out. Indeed, on the day that God, the one Judeo-Christian God, forgot Himself, all the other gods died – of laughter. This, at least, is Nietzsche’s fable of the end of the old religions, and perhaps, Nietzsche hopes, the death of religions altogether and their vocabulary of what he calls ‘life-hatred’, ‘world-hatred’, ‘world-slander’. In this book that is, in the words of philosopher Robert Pippin in his Introductions to Nietzsche, ‘both a prophetic book and a kind of send-up of a prophetic book’ that both presents Zarathustra as ‘a teacher and [parodies] his attempt to play that role’ – that is to say, not unlike many of Wilde’s fictions – we have to be as attentive to tone as to content. The sounds of words and voices make their own kind of sense; and tone can be at odds with intended meanings (another meaning of Wilde’s ‘strange influence’ of language, and one that Freud endorses). ‘For with the old Gods things came to an end long ago,’ Nietzsche wrote in the section entitled ‘On Apostates’:

– and verily, they had a good and joyful Gods’ end!

– and verily, they had a good and joyful Gods’ end!

Theirs was no mere ‘twilight’ death – that is a lie! Rather: one day they – laughed themselves to death!

This happened when the most godless words issued from a God himself – the words: ‘There is one God! Thou shalt have no other God before me!’ –

– an old wrath-beard of a God, most jealous, forgot himself thus: –

And thereupon all the Gods laughed and rocked on their chairs and shouted: ‘Is just this not Godliness, that there are Gods, but no God?’

He that hath ears let him hear.

In Exodus 20:3–5, God introduces the Ten Commandments by saying, ‘Thou shalt have no other gods before me … For I the Lord thy God am a jealous God.’ This is what makes them the commandments that they are supposed to be; not guidelines, or suggestions, or talking points, but a list of unarguably forbidden things. This is the canonical formulation of the idea of living for others prescribed by what we might call our most significant other. In the Ten Commandments it is made explicit both what and who we are living for. It is the idea of there being one law that is clearly anathema, so to speak, to Nietzsche and his pagan gods. But the idea of the only God as a jealous god is itself something of a giveaway; as though the joke was on God without His realizing it. If God was really omniscient and omnipotent He would have nothing to be jealous about, so the qualification seems unnecessary. Jealousy, one could say, is the real acknowledgement that there are other gods; and that if there are other gods one may not be the God that one thought one was.

The ‘Gods’ end’ was not a ‘mere “twilight” death’, as in Wagner’s Ring Cycle – Wagner having been one of the young Nietzsche’s gods, but now dead to him as an idol – it was nothing so serious, so portentous. Indeed, it was a laughing matter. God forgot Himself by laying down the law – the law of His own unique sovereignty that invalidates all other authority. By misnaming Himself He had misnamed everyone else as well. It was, at least in Wilde’s terms, the ultimate selfishness of needing everyone to agree with you.

For the pagan gods, godliness was by definition polytheism; a conflict and collaboration between essentially hedonistic deities (like Wilde, and in a sense Freud, Nietzsche took his moral and aesthetic compass from the ancient Greeks – though each of them, of course, had a different ancient Greece). So when the Judeo-Christian God declares His unique sovereignty, the other gods, the earlier gods, can only burst out laughing at the absurdity of His claim, its self-importance, its arrogance, its tyrannical cruelty, its patent and ridiculous untruth. As Blake was to write in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, in words that Nietzsche and Wilde would clearly have endorsed, ‘one law for the lion and ox is oppression’. Nietzsche’s fable includes, of course, a nice homey picture of the gods rocking on their chairs, as if to say: those pagan gods were much more like us; whereas this God of the old and new tablets is a monster! He’d never burst out laughing and rock on His chair! Why, though, would this pronouncement finish off all the gods, albeit with amusement? And why does Nietzsche suggest that God ‘forgot’ Himself in making this pronouncement? What would He have said if He had remembered Himself?

Nietzsche is saying, I think, that this declaration by God of His unique omnipotence and omniscience makes a mockery of the whole notion of deity. It exposes the ambitions of deity and therefore exposes the worst ambitions of men. It is as if Nietzsche is saying: when I propose the ‘overcoming of the human’ – Nietzsche’s abiding preoccupation – I am not proposing that we should become in any way like our gods; in fact our gods, whom we have invented, should be our negative ideals when it comes to our ambitions for ourselves; when we forget ourselves – forget our best or preferred selves – we are likely to say things like ‘There is one God! Thou shalt have no other gods before ME!’ When we are autocratic, tyrannical and arrogant – when, that is to say, we are being a certain version of forbidding – we are actively attacking our better self; when we lay down the law as the only law, we have become lawless (the outlaw as psychopath). We have been corrupted (or misled, waylaid) in Nietzsche’s view, by the wrong vocabulary, the wrong picture of what it is to be fully alive (in Wilde’s terms we need to recover our best selfishness by redescribing the bad press selfishness has traditionally been given). The ‘exemplars’, to use Nietzsche’s word, that we seek are those people, not gods, who enable us to become who we are. God, in Nietzsche’s fabulation, forgot Himself, and even His own name; He thought He was God, THE God, when He was simply one among many others (inner superiority means we are on the wrong track, it means we are too intimidated). ‘With you,’ his Shadow says to Zarathustra,

‘I strove to enter everything forbidden, the worst, and farthest: and if there is anything of virtue in me, it is that I have feared no prohibition.

‘With you I shattered whatever my heart had revered …

‘With you I unlearned my belief in words and values and great names.’

It was the unlearning of the greatest name of all, God, that Zarathustra taught; and the torrent of unnaming that this unleashed. And this great unnaming, this shattering of whatever the heart had revered, would make people prone, as Nietzsche knew, to recovering themselves with new narrowings of the mind. ‘Beware that some narrow belief, a harsh, severe illusion, does not catch you in the end!’ Zarathustra warns his Shadow. ‘For you are now seduced and tempted by anything that is narrow and firm.’ If we give up one set of laws, Nietzsche warns us, we are likely to be tempted to pick up another similar set of laws, but to call them new. Our freedom may be merely a new version of our old confinement. And what we can’t give up or get over is our desire for the law, for something ‘narrow and firm’, to keep us in place; as though the laws never really change because our desire for particular kinds of laws remains the same. We can never quite get over our fear of ourselves. But we have been made unduly fearful of ourselves, Nietzsche suggests, by those very laws we have consented to. Or rather, more realistically, we don’t know how fearful we should be of ourselves, as we haven’t given ourselves the opportunity to find out. The law forbids being open to an open future; the open future of who we may be, and of who we may want to be.

VII

We have inherited the wrong picture, the wrong vocabulary, for authority, power, vitality, pleasure and language. Laying down this kind of law for ourselves and others is a betrayal of what Nietzsche wants human beings to be (Wilde’s God would say, why not develop your colour-sense? Nietzsche’s God would say, why are we all so obsessed by valuation, by all these old names? Freud’s God would say, only people who don’t want to grow up need gods). There are names we should start wanting to forget, or to unlearn (two different things that need not always be so different); Nietzsche urges us in the Preface to The Gay Science, the book that preceded Thus Spoke Zarathustra, ‘to learn as artists to forget well, to be good at not knowing!’ (which lets us wonder what the difference is between forgetting and unlearning). By forgetting a name we can come up with another one (Freud says, don’t think about gods, think about parents: and then, when you forget about parents, see what you come up with). The patient wanted to think of Jung but was lucky or unlucky enough to think of Wilde and Nietzsche instead. What do we need to forget to say something new? Well, we may need to do that forbidden thing, to forget about the forbidden, at least sometimes and in various different ways. To forget at least some versions of the forbidden and to come up with other names instead. ‘Those with originality,’ Nietzsche wrote in The Gay Science, ‘have usually been the name-givers’. That is, the name-changers.

The American philosopher James Conant, in his remarkable essay ‘Nietzsche’s Perfectionism’, having acknowledged, along with other contemporary philosophers, that Nietzsche’s philosophy is itself a kind of aestheticism – an attempt to find another language for traditional moralities, to find new names and new pleasures for an old ethics – suggests that Nietzsche’s ‘abiding preoccupation (and his evident desire to instil in the reader a similar preoccupation)’ is,

with questions concerning what one should value – questions such as, ‘What sort of person [or persons] should I admire (and what sort of response should such admiration elicit in me)?’ ‘How should I live (if I wish to be worthy of such admiration myself)?’ And, ‘In what ways (and by what means) should I endeavour to shape and change myself?’

We don’t, in the ordinary way of things, talk about remembering ourselves; we talk about forgetting ourselves, either in states of absorption or when we think of ourselves as having acted out of character. As though the self itself – the ‘self’ as an idea, as a word – could be forgotten but not remembered. And then, when ‘it’ is forgotten, new things begin to happen. Conant’s pertinent questions that he takes Nietzsche to be asking suggest something akin to a need to keep ourselves, or something about ourselves, in mind; and particularly to keep in mind the relationship between our self at the moment and our as yet unattained self, our always potentially better self that we are wanting to become. He doesn’t, we can’t help but notice, dispense with the idea of the self, but he does account for the self as wanting always to be something else, something better, something other than it is. It is as though ‘it’ exists only in its transitions; it exists only in a changing, in an aspiring, state. And in describing the self as being preoccupied in this way – in wanting, in Nietzsche’s language, to be ‘overcoming’ itself: to go further with itself but not to try to become something it isn’t – he leaves us wondering what law is being laid down here, what are the rules, so to speak, for becoming the as yet unattained self? ‘We teach people how to remember, we never teach them how to grow,’ Wilde wrote in ‘The Critic as Artist’. The law is that which we must remember. What – or which names – do we need to be able to forget about in order to overcome ourselves, in order to grow? Or, to put it another way: what are we being when we are being obedient? And what are we doing to ourselves?

Copyright © 2015 by Adam Phillips