cover image Happiness, Death, and the Remainder of Life

Happiness, Death, and the Remainder of Life

Jonathan Lear. Harvard University Press, $26 (189pp) ISBN 978-0-674-00329-3

Originally presented at Harvard as a three-part Tanner Lectures on Human Values, Lear's (Open Minded: Working Out the Logic of the Soul) latest book meditates on life's meaning. ""What difference does psychoanalysis make,"" Lear asks at the outset, ""to our understanding of human existence?"" Drawing on both psychoanalytic theory and the history of philosophy--by way of Aristotle and Freud--he teases out a usable answer to this question. Treating, one by one, the subjects of happiness, death and everything else--the ""remainder"" of life--Lear, a philosopher at the University of Chicago as well as a practicing psychoanalyst, reconsiders along the way Freud's theory of the unconscious, Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics and a host of the classic philosophical notions. Freud's idea of the unconscious, Lear argues, offered a radically new idea of human character--one that could finally compete with that described by Aristotle. But because of the teleological weak spots (which he considers at length) in both theories, neither thinker alone provides a sufficient guide to living or to thinking about life. Aristotle, he argues, skirts around the explicit idea of happiness; Freud, he incisively suggests (turning Freudian critiques back on their inventor), repressed his own insights into the death urge. In the end, Lear ties the ideas of these two rather different thinkers together in a cogent, if not necessarily revelatory, way. Complex in theory and filled with dense language (""enigmatic signifiers,"" ""the metaphysics of aggression""), this text is more suited to an academic than a popular audience. (Sept.)