A couple of years after the philosopher of art Richard Wollheim’s death I went to a memorial panel at a meeting of the American Philosophy Association. Attending a conference is among my rarest and least favorite activities, while falling asleep during lectures (mostly other people’s) is one of my habitual pleasures. I don’t remember who was on the panel other than the philosopher and psychoanalyst Jonathan Lear, whose writings on Aristotle, psychoanalysis, and moral psychology have been among my regular reading for over thirty years. As my eyes drooped during someone else’s presentation, I noticed Lear looking at my intently. I was alarmed, though not enough to keep me awake, because I knew that Lear often illustrated psychoanalytic points with his own observed vignettes. I briefly wondered whether an account of my dozing would someday open an essay by Lear on resistance or stupidity.
Unsurprisingly to me, Lear’s new book opens with a description of something he witnessed after a lecture. Having heard a lecture on the Anthropocene suggesting that the age in which humans dominate the Earth is coming to an end, “a young academic stood up and said simply, “Let me tell you something: We will not be missed!” She then sat down. There was laughter throughout the audience. It was over in a moment.” (p. 1) The first chapter is a philosophical reflection of astonishing brilliance and profundity on the remark. Lear first notes that the ‘official meaning’ of the statement is of cosmic justice, in that we humans, a greedy, aggressive, earth-destroying species, won’t be missed because “we do not deserve to be missed”. (p. 2) We the guilty species deserve to be punished, but since the joke itself is our imaginary construct, in saying it and laughing we get to construct and enact the punishment on ourselves, and enjoy doing it. (p. 5) Lear then notes that the manner of ‘not being missed’ is atypical of human life, where the disappearance someone who ‘is not missed’ means that life can return to normal, and whatever damage was done by that person can be mourned. But if we know now that we won’t be missed, why not start mourning now? Because, Lear suggests, the joke ‘says’ that it’s too late to mourn. If there’s no ‘us’ in the future, mourning now is of no value, as there will be no future us to follow the normal course and end of mourning, which ends with the return to normality. So the joke is also an attack on the value and possibility of our contemporary morning, and so “is an expression of despair.” (p. 7) Why do we despair? Take your pick: the pandemic; the end of democracy; climate change; human-induced mass extinctions; the poisoning and destruction of the environment.
Lear’s response to the joke, and the contemporary sense of despair that makes it seem funny and inevitable, is first of all to mount a philosophical defense of mourning as a sign of human health. The materials for this defense are provided by Lear’s constant sources, Sigmund Freud and Aristotle. For the remainder of the first chapter attempts to ‘take the energy out of despair’ by recalling basic points from those two authors. In ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ Freud notes that humans have ‘a capacity for love’, and that mourning a lost loved one is an exercise of this capacity wherein we transform the pain of loss into a livable and flourishing psychology of memories, emotions, and acts of imagination related to the loved one. Adapting the opening of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, the announcement that all humans by nature desire to understand, Lear then asserts that in the suffering of mourning we are striving to understand the meaning of our loving attachments. Immediately generalizing to the doctrine of Hans Loewald, his own teacher in psychoanalysis, Lear asserts that “mourning broadly understood is pervasive in human life. Indeed, it is constitutive of human development.” (p. 12; see also Lear (2017), p. 194) So mourning is part of human flourishing at every stage of life, as in every moment of human development there is a “bidding adieu to earlier forms of experiencing.” (p. 13)
None of this as yet constitutes an answer that disables the power of the joke, since if human life does not deserve to continue, it hardly matters what counts as its flourishing. What is the value of, and the value in, human life, the absence of which is a supreme reason for regret, and the presence of which gives human life a justified and self-justifying quality? Aristotle thought that the highest good of human life was eudaimonia or ‘happiness’, which consists in having had a fortunate upbringing, developing one’s character, and living in a manner that involves the regular and sustained exercise of a number of virtues or ‘excellences’. A happy life is ‘kalon’, a Greek term which cannot be well translated with a single term, and is usually translated as something like ‘noble/beautiful/fine’. (p. 16) The kalon ‘shines forth’ in the characteristic actions of a happy life, and such a life is “itself satisfying, experienced as meaningful and worthwhile and, as such, pleasure.” (p. 17, with regard to a generous person living generously) Mourning and the kalon are intertwined: mourning is itself kalon, and mourning the kalon is what the joke fails to recognize, that our capacity to anticipate the kalon going out of existence allows us to mourn the impoverished universe without us (ibid). The recognition of this destroys the charm of the joke and “drain[s] the humor right out of it.” (p. 19)
Much of the rest of the book develops this ‘expanded idea of mourning’ (p. 143) in short essays starting from particular incidents, such as a remark by Meghan Markle or Lincoln’s delivery of the Gettysburg Address, or from writings, including a startling re-interpretation of Freud’s great meditation ‘On Transience’. A final chapter turns to the emotion of gratitude and investigates the senses in which it, like mourning, is part of the basic moral psychology of humans. Whereas mourning is an expression of the on-going ways in which humans transform mere change in meaning, gratitude is a basic way in which humans create a realm of freedom together: the recipient of a gift freely given co-creates with the giver a relationship promising an “open space of generosity and its recognition” wherein “there are no set rules to follow”, and tinged with the hope of a quasi-timeless cycle of further “developments, re-creations, and repairs.” (pp. 128-9) Lear triumphantly concludes that with the expanded idea of mourning and the recognition of the ever-present possibility, and sometimes practice of gratitude “loneliness is out of the question . . . It [mourning (and together with gratitude)] is an openness to being a beneficiary via activities of imagination and memory, receptiveness, and acknowledgement.” (p. 143) This openness is part of what gives meaning and value to individual human lives and to human life as a whole, and so is part of what is attacked in the joking ‘We will not be missed’.
There is a great deal of interest in the detailed analyses beyond what I’ve summarized here. I would not wish to have skipped a single page of the book. I would like to call attention to two further interrelated points in the book. Part of the claim about the nature and value of mourning is embedded within an account of what here and elsewhere Lear refers to as a ‘crisis of intelligibility’, a socio-cultural phenomenon that he had previously explored at some length in the book Radical Hope. Such crises are collective, not individual; social, not psychological; and practical, not theoretical. The crisis occurs when an entrenched, habitual way of living, and in particular the concepts and institutions central to that kind of life, lose their viability. A simple example of such a crisis would when the institution of marriage dies out; then a broad range of attitudes, practices, rituals, ideals, etc. loses its social viability. With the loss of the institution of marriage people would still understand a great deal of what marriage had been, but would lose the sense of how to carry on in many situations. So the present seems disconnected from the past, and there seems no authoritative guidance in how to act in and for the future. One might think with Lear that widespread reactions to the pandemic or the vivid contemporary awareness of the late Anthropocene’s environmental destructiveness are signs of such crises. So mourning and expressing gratitude are ways of carrying on, and instances of cultural creativity that undo something of the sense of disorientation characteristic of crises of intelligibility. The second closely connected point concerns Lear’s emphasis on radical renewal. The use of the term ‘radical’ points to the (alleged) fact that such crises are crises of a way of life as a whole. So a viable response to the crisis must not merely tinker with parts of the way of life or reform one or another sphere of life, but must re-think and re-imagine the way of life in its entirety, at least in the sense of re-doing concepts, practices, and institutions that seem to pervade that manner of living and give it something of its distinctive character. I note this because at times it seems that Lear struggles, and not successfully, to get these two points about crises of intelligibility and radical renewal into focus, in particular because of the lack of a sociological dimension of his thinking, which would bring a more differentiated set of concepts to bear upon the issues. For example, when Alasdair MacIntyre addressed epistemological crises or the nature of intelligibility (see MacIntyre (2006), originally published in 1977, and (1986)) he notes that intelligibility is conferred not just by the role that an action plays in an established routine, but also in a variety of traditions (themselves involving internal contestations about the application, meaning, and significance of central concepts) and narratives. Lear’s use of the term ‘intelligibility’ by contrast makes no distinction among these kinds of intelligibility, and he seems to be referring at times to one, at other times to others, and at times indiscriminately among them. Nothing about this, it seems to me, damages any important remark or analysis in the book in a way that could not be remedied with some further clarifications. In any case I hope that this new masterwork by Lear finds the wide and appreciative audience it deserves.
References:
Aristotle, Nicomachaean Ethics and Metaphysics
Sigmund Freud, ‘On Transience’ (1916)
-----‘Mourning and Melancholia’ (1917)
Jonathan Lear, Radical Hope (2006)
-----‘Mourning and Moral Psychology’ in Wisdom Won from Illness: Essays in Philosophy and Psychoanalysis (2017)
-----Imagining the End: Mourning and Ethical Life (2022)
Alasdair MacIntyre, ‘Epistemological crises, dramatic narrative, and the philosophy of science’ in The Tasks of Philosophy: Selected Essays, Volume 1 (2006)
-----‘The Intelligibility of Action’ in Rationality, Relativism and the Human Sciences (1986), ed. Margolis, Krausz, and Burian