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In his profound and practical book, Imagining the End: Mourning and Ethical Life, Jonathan Lear1 examines human despair and disorientation, and points the way to human flourishing, showing readers how the mentors, philosophers and psychoanalysts that he has internalized have pointed the way for him. He draws on “ordinary fleeting moments” from his own life, both as a boy and as an adult, along with great thinkers and writers—psychoanalysts Freud, Winnicott, Klein, and Edna O'Shaughnessy, philosophers Plato, Aristotle, and Cora Diamond, and poets Homer and Ted Hughes—to show how everyday experiences can be woven together with insights from the great works of the humanities to enrich our search for purpose and to clarify challenging questions of how to live and flourish in difficult times. Lear is a well-known and distinguished psychoanalyst and professor of philosophy. His book manages to feel both clinically useful and engaging of the big, ancient questions. It was named by the Washington Post as one of the fifty notable nonfiction books of 2022.
The book centers on the human quest to live a good life, the uncertainty about what this entails, and the obstacles that threaten to confuse and thwart us during times of catastrophic change and upheaval. Lear centers his arguments around the Greek word kalon, a word meaning “noble” “beautiful” or “fine.” He uses this as an aspirational and enigmatic descriptor of the type of life one can aim to live. As it was in his 2006 book Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation, human imagination is a central human capacity for Lear. He discusses its power to awaken us to possibilities to create and recreate, but also its ability to obscure and distort our vision, and to orient us around falsehoods leading to waste and destruction. Lear says that mourning is also essential to human flourishing, but it too can go awry.
The author presents us with people, real and fictional, who have tried to find their way forward amidst