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‘To live with human possibility’, writes Jonathan Lear in the concluding sentences of this book, ‘one has to tolerate a peculiar kind of theoretical anxiety: the willingness to live without a principle’. The route that Lear follows in elucidation of this far-reaching and important claim takes us through one of western philosophy's foundational texts, Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, to Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Specifically, Lear shows us some difficulties Aristotle and Freud encounter in their respective reluctances to live without a principle, how each of these sustained attempts to provide a comprehensive teleology of human life collapses, and, more importantly, how instructively their attempts to subsume human striving under a principle fail.
Let us start with Aristotle, where Lear gets to business with the very first—and famously problematic—sentence of the Nicomachean Ethics. By introducing ‘the good’ at this point, Aristotle is participating in what Lear calls ‘a peculiar kind of inaugural instantiation’; he is ‘trying to introduce the concept by means of which it would make sense for humans to take a teleologically oriented interest in their lives’. What Aristotle is doing is important here, what he is drawing us into. This emphasis upon the performative aspect of Aristotle's writing is made clearer with the introduction of happiness, for here, as Lear elegantly demonstrates, Aristotle shows himself to be performing a ‘seduction’. Aristotle is seducing us with enigmatic signifiers, which, like Lacan's hieroglyphs in the desert, we recognize as having a meaning—indeed a special meaning for us—but whose content we do not understand. Reducing 60 closely-reasoned pages to a few sentences, Lear's argument roughly is that Aristotle injects ‘happiness’ as a concept in terms of which one's entire life can and should be evaluated. This telos ‘happiness’, by which we are asked to evaluate human life, lies forever beyond the horizon, beyond the teleological