Happiness, Death, and the Remainder of Life. Jonathan Lear. Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 2000.  189 pp.

“What difference does psychoanalysis make to our understanding of ethical life?” This question is the focus of Lear's new book, the text of the three Tanner Lectures on Human Values which he recently delivered at Cambridge University—a place where, Lear notes in his

concluding acknowledgments, he discovered as a young man that philosophy is “an activity of the soul,” rather than merely the study of other people's thought. This commitment to philosophy as a way of life and a determinant of character rather than an abstract intellectual exercise pervades this book and informs the dialogue with psychoanalysis which Lear continues to advance so eloquently. With richness and depth, and a deceptively simple elegance, Lear addresses issues that arise in the consideration of Classical ethical theories, as he attempts to enhance our philosophical understanding of human nature (the basis for any theory about how human beings should live) with Freudian insights about the unconscious. In the process, he raises intriguing questions and suggests novel ways of thinking about some of the most fundamental concepts of both philosophy and psychoanalysis.

In his first chapter, Lear concentrates on “Happiness”—the goal and the identifying characteristic of the ethical life, according to Aristotle. As a philosopher/psychoanalyst, he is particularly taken with the Aristotelian emphasis on ethics as character-formation. As Lear explains, “The attraction of this character-based approach is that it purports to account for ethical life in terms of the lived realities of human motivation and judgment” (p. 2). Yet, he contends, although it may seem reasonable at first to assume that it might be possible to retain an ethics which is “Aristotelian in spirit” even as we incorporate the unconscious into our view of human nature, such an approach fails in the final analysis because “the unconscious is too disruptive to be contained in any straightforward account of character formation” (p. 3).

Lear