Small review of Jonathan Lear's Happiness, Death, and the Remainder of Life

The following is written in memory of Jonathan Lear, whose writings live on as a remainder of his own life, come to an end a week before this.

This is a small book with themes writ large. At just under a 170 pages of main text, the title alone gives a good idea of what’s in store, although it’s worth taking a moment to pause and really sit with the grouping: happiness, death, and life (the remainder of). Is this not the range of philosophy itself? And I want to say: it is, and Lear covers it all, making good on the promise of what what it means to ask: what is it to live? And where, if anywhere, is the promise of happiness among this thing we call living? Taking as his loadstars the writings of Aristotle and Freud - the inaugural philosopher and the inaugural psychoanalyst - Lear explores how each, in their adventures to trace the shape of human life, stumbled upon a certain remainder that they never were quite able to square with their quest for principles, a reminder in whose excess Lear locates the very possibility of happiness itself.

To wit, if for Aristotle, it was happiness to which our lives are oriented, Freud instead found the principle of life in pleasure. Happiness or pleasure then - not the worst lot for humans, if we were to believe either. Yet neither quite believed in themselves as it turns out: for happiness hit on the snag of human mortality, which compromised the happy life with both its end and its continual effort at upkeep, while pleasure found its limit in the traumatic returns of self-sabotaging neurosis, evidenced everywhere in Freud’s post-war patients. Still, each attempted to account for this snag in their own way: for Aristotle, only the Gods could lay claim to happiness in the full sense, eternal as they were and unbowed by finitude, while Freud, ever opposed to the Gods, instituted a second principle, at odds with the first, grounded in nothing less than a gnawing impulse to return to the inanimate: the death drive.

Thus: principle and compromise, and between the two is life of humanity played out. For Lear however, a scholar of Aristotle who made a turn to psychoanalysis in the middle of his career, the move from the one to the other was not without advance. In the psychoanalytic schema, unlike the philosophical one, the source of psychic compromise was at least terrestrial and not celestial: it’s not on account of our unlikeness to the Gods that our happiness can’t be fulfilled, but by way of a drive internal to the human itself, churning beneath any and all striving for pleasure. Nonetheless - and here’s the crux - in this too does Lear find something of a failure of nerve, a desire to put down to principle - even a principle of death - what instead ought to be left open to interpretation. In other words, why institute a death drive, a ‘directedness’ to compromise, rather than simply admit that… disruptions to life can happen for no reason at all?

This then, is the ‘remainder of life’ sought after by the book’s narrative: the ‘unprincipled’ which exceeds or escapes all principle, even Freud’s ‘principalizing’ of death itself, already too religious in its desire to transform pure contingency into underground necessity. Reading the history of psychoanalysis itself as a kind of recoil against its own discovery, Lear insists upon the unbound core of remaindered life, irresolvable into overarching schemas, philosophical or otherwise. Informed too, by his own clinical experience, Lear renders a beautiful account of how this remainder plays out on the couch, itself offering the opportunity - but not the guarantee - for the promotion of happiness. There’s more here too - on the seductive role of concepts, on the Socratic death drive embodied in the ‘disruption’ of the Athenian polity, the invention of philosophy as Plato’s mourning … and more. A treasure of a book in the size of a gem.