Table Talk

On Moral Perfectionism

Abstract

Plato, Aristotle, St. Matthew, St. Augustine, William Shakespeare, Blaise Pascal, Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Schlegel, Heinrich von Kleist, John Stuart Mill, Henrik Ibsen, Matthew Arnold, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Marx, Henry David Thoreau, Oscar Wilde, Sigmund Freud, George Bernard Shaw, John Dewey, Martin Heidegger, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Samuel Beckett.

As a prospective list of fantasy dinner party guests, it would be hard to imagine a more illustrious and stimulating group of companions with whom to share an evening of food and conversation. So, if to this list were added Ovid, Dante, Montaigne, Spinoza, Milton, Moliere, Schiller, Rousseau, Goethe, Hegel, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Kierkegaard, Walt Whitman, Melville, Dickens, Twain, D.H. Lawrence, and William and Henry James, one might start to feel that an already rich diet of shared physical and intellectual nourishment risked becoming one of uncomfortably indulgent excess. And if invitations were then extended to certain directors and stars of Hollywood’s Golden Age, like George Cukor, King Vidor, Frank Capra, Howard Hawks, Preston Sturges, Max Ophüls, Joan Fontaine, Ingrid Bergman, Bette Davis, Paul Heinreid, Claude Rains, Barbara Stanwyck, Clark Gable, Claudette Colbert, Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant, Irene Dunne, Spencer Tracy, James Stewart and Henry Fonda, one might well be forgiven for thinking that one’s host was either guilty of succumbing to considerations of glitz and the claims of so-called popular culture at the expense of intellectual and artistic seriousness; or had instead abandoned any (further?) attempt to construct a coherent list of guests so as to create an atmosphere of such seriousness, thereby trading the exclusive for the arbitrary.