Self as Experiment

Plethora leads ...

It was inevitable that these new versions of nature would complicate traditional moralities. Conflict, chance, survival, reproduction, the family, sexual satisfaction and death were newly minted words in these stories, quickly shedding some of their more familiar associations. Darwin and Freud had produced scientific and quasi-scientific redescriptions of nature as continual flux. There was no longer such a thing as a relatively fixed and consistent person — a person with a recognizable identity — confronting a potentially predictable world, but rather two turbulences enmeshed with each other. If through increasingly sophisticated scientific experiments a new nature was emerging, the new nature was revealing that lives themselves were more like experiments than anything else.

Adam Phillips. Darwin's Worms: On Life Stories and Death Stories

And so for day 2108
20.09.2012