Bill Hayes at The American Scholar:
In Immanuel Kant’s Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics (1783), Oliver sounded almost comically exasperated as he responded to a rambling critique Kant makes of David Hume (whom Oliver revered): “Immanuel,” he wrote, as if speaking directly to the philosopher across the centuries, “you are totally confused!”
He had conflicted feelings about Sigmund Freud, all of whose published works lined his shelves. Oliver recognized Freud as the genius and groundbreaker he was. And as a writer, Oliver was clearly inspired by Freud’s published case histories. But he did not always agree with Freud’s theories, often commenting “No!” in the margins of a book and stating why he felt Freud had gotten something utterly wrong.
Sometimes, Oliver was moved enough by what he read to suggest to Freud a concept of his own. In the margins of Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, Oliver responded to the closing of chapter four, “The Mechanism of Pleasure and the Psychogenesis of Jokes,” by posing a provocative question (which he revised, striking through one word and replacing it with another): “Beside ‘conceptual’ jokes can one (not) have ‘natural’ jokes—jokes in Nature. … One can certainly have Humour, Wit, and Fun—which are certainly infinitely economical: indeed this is the heart of the world—its wit, its fun. … But this is not a Freudian ‘unconscious’ of depressed affect; but a primordial ‘preconscious’ of polymorphous potential—an Original Jest.”
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