Review of Imagining the End: Mourning and Ethical Life by Jonathan Lear. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. 2022 ISBN 978-0-674-27259-0

Jonathan Lear, a psychoanalyst who is also a classics scholar at the University of Chicago, has written an elegant set of essays—a combined humanist and psychoanalytic response to the Anthropocene version of the very old and recurrent idea that civilization itself undoes the world and may well bring on the end of humanity. Offering a fresh reading of Freud’s view of mourning, Lear juxtaposes grieving by the individual for the loss of a loved one with collective mourning for the catastrophic loss of the human. Via mourning, he asserts, well-being emerges from despair, and intimate and global worlds are remade afresh as life carries psyche and society forward. Through the creation of meaning for loss, mourning moves individuals and the collective toward human flourishing and, therewith, becomes the foundation of goodness and other of the highest virtues.

Those virtues are for Lear the ethical and aesthetic qualities Aristotle praised and that even today he regards as foundational for the highest of human values. The embodiment of these values are virtues of heroic ethical exemplars. Lear admits to that elevated ethical status Homer’s Priam, the King of Troy and father of the dead Hector, whose body he pleads with the violent, revengeful Achilles to return to Troy so that he can be properly mourned. Also admitted to this ethical status is Sophocles’s Antigone, who refuses to accept the law set by her uncle, the political leader of Thebes, that she may not bury her brother (as is cultural custom required of her) on account of his political aggression against the state. Lincoln at Gettysburg, Lear represents as a more complex and partially failed ethical exemplar. Oddly, Lear’s own fourth grade teacher makes it onto the list, because he responded to the young Lear’s minor transgression without revenge or punishment but as a model of non-violence.

For Lear, Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, no matter its extraordinary power, ultimately fails to include the broadest societal mourning required to heal a broken society, then and now, because it does not include the Confederate dead and does not acknowledge the ethical status of liberated slaves transformed into African American citizens. Nor has an ethical response to the COVID-19 pandemic—which is a current stand-in for natural and man-made disasters of the Anthropocene—materialized that can adequately create ethical significance for societal mourning in order to help heal the nation, transcend the transience of life, and sustain hope in the face of such existential threats that call into question the meaning of loss of life and death itself. For Lear, the humanities hold the potential to become “a special form of mourning” that makes it possible for culture to advance and love to flourish against the “merely instrumental.”

In contrast, Lear adverts to the child psychologist Melanie Klein’s ideas of gratitude and reciprocation as a means of transforming individuals and society to support the highest and most creative virtues. This hard-won wisdom about life (and death) deepens the book’s aesthetic, spiritual, and ethical analysis within the tight concision of its philosophical argument.

Each of the book’s essays is a lapidary exercise in precisely ordered, original, and aesthetically pleasing writing. The emphasis on ethical exemplars drawing on Aristotle’s virtue ethics is also a refreshing departure from the abstract principle-based approach to ethics which dominates, for example, American bioethics. It is closer in that regard to the Chinese tradition’s emphasis on the ethical cultivation of the individual and the social network.

So why, then, did I come away from my reading of this impressive book with the sense that it does not do justice to its subjects: mourning, values in society, and wisdom for the art of living? That it is not adequate as an intellectual approach for addressing our troubled times with a wisdom for the human condition that can stand up to history and is useful for our current global predicaments?

I find it hard to accept Lear’s methodology. He presents the skimpiest details of his ethical exemplars and their worlds in a phrase, sentence, or short paragraph that impose black or white ideal-types that are as remote as can be from the gray zones of life that we all inhabit everyday as divided individuals who are participants in complex local moral worlds where different and contested purposes, commitments, and actions are at stake for us. Aristotle and Lear appear as deus ex machina to sum up these incomparable worlds in a final meaning that, at the end, seems more platitude than compelling interpretation. With the possible exception of Lincoln, greater presence is given to the disembodied, view-from-nowhere ideas than to the exemplars or their constrained and contested moral circumstances. This throwback to authoritative, gods eye-view nineteenth-century writings represents an intellectual hedgehog who believes in psychoanalytic and philosophical truth that can provide a meaning for all occasions. The ontological turn (even in psychoanalysis and philosophy) seems to have passed Lear by. Neither political, economic, or social complexities of the ethical are presented. There are no real human beings here nor a real world. At worst, they are transmogrified into an intellectual game; at best, they are poorly served by this anachronistic and misleading method. I do not remember seeing the words care or care giving given any serious attention; yet, they loom so large in our local moral words and moral life as the main ways we respond morally and emotionally to what life throws at us.

Down here in the choking dust of everyday life, the good and the beautiful are disputed and partial. Here, there are few heroic exemplars, mostly anti-heroes who are struggling to endure. It is care and care giving that see us through the unendurable assault of serious illness, bad accidents, natural and political-economic catastrophes, and the sheer recalcitrance of life. Even the analysts and the humanists must begin with this warped field of contention and striving—and many do, but not Lear.

And yet, despite this crucial objection, there is something of abiding value in Lear’s insistence that ethical ideals do matter. Frustrated by the hypocrisy and cynicism surrounding us in our local moral worlds, many of us aspire to a perspective that is extra- or trans-local that can provide an external value structure by which we can assess and resist the gray zone we occupy. Mourning seems to be one way to proceed. But it must be a greatly different kind of mourning: mourning as human presence, as the centering of relationships, as acknowledgement and affirmation of care for lost loved ones, and as the caring for memories. Such memories, which comprise much of what we mean by bereavement, transform experience—sometimes but not often through meaning alone—from suffering to transcendence or just a way of enduring pain and uncertainty. Mourning needs to be seen as more about how we live and more about life being the source of everything, including values, than about what we mean or how we know.

Author Contribution

Book review of Imagining the End: Mourning and Ethical Life by Jonathan Lear

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