Jonathan Lear, who died last month at his home in Hyde Park, Chicago, was, in addition to being a distinguished professor in the University of Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought and the author of several celebrated works of philosophy, a teacher and mentor for many of us at The Point. He was a member of our editorial board when the magazine was founded in 2009, and later contributed two essays. “Being remembered, mourned, honored is a persisting good,” he wrote in one of them, which later appeared in his final book, Imagining the End: Mourning and Ethical Life. We agree, and have collected here remembrances from a few of his students, colleagues and friends.
—The Editors
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It was the fall of 1996. Jonathan Lear had just arrived at UChicago, and I, an undergraduate beginning my senior year, was on my way out. I didn’t know anything about him, except that he was offering a two-quarter class on Plato’s Republic; that was enough. I did the calculation: three hundred pages over ten weeks at two classes per week for two quarters meant that we would cover just 7.5 pages per class. Excessive, absurd, indulgent—and therefore irresistible. I wasn’t the only one who felt that way: the class was oversubscribed. Jonathan didn’t want it to get bigger than twenty students, but he also didn’t want to turn anyone away, so he ended up duplicating it. He taught two courses on Plato’s Republic, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. At eighty minutes per class, 7.5 pages, taught two times, that meant that he was personally spending 21.3 minutes of class time per page of Plato’s Republic.
I’m sure the class itself was great, but I don’t remember very much about it. I remember feeling nervous in class, especially when Jonathan looked at me—his stare was a blinding light I felt the need to look away from. I remember being disappointed that he didn’t like my papers more—I usually got As on my papers in college, whereas Jonathan gave me, I think, a B+ on each. I didn’t even improve over time. But all my other memories about the class have been eclipsed by a single encounter with Jonathan, no more than thirty seconds long. It took place after class sometime during winter quarter.
I had a conflict with my section of the class—though I no longer remember what the conflict was, or whether I was in the morning or afternoon section—so I attended the other section instead. At the end of class, Jonathan came up to me and asked me why I was in the wrong section, I explained the conflict, and he said, “Don’t ever do that again. The classroom is a community.” That was it, that was the whole encounter, or at least my memory ends there, as though time stopped after his words.
I was shocked that he cared which section I showed up to, shocked that he was willing to reveal that fact and, above all, shocked by his sentence, “The classroom is a community.” It echoed in my head and morphed into a series of questions: Is it true that the classroom is a community? If yes, how could I just be learning that now, in the winter quarter of my final year of college? Can people just walk up to each other and tell each other moral facts? What other moral facts was I missing, because no one had told them to me? And: why is it that the classroom often doesn’t feel like a community?
A few months after the class ended, I left UChicago for UC Berkeley. Just as I stopped being Jonathan’s student, I started being his reader. First, I read his collection Open Minded, to find out what he really thought about Plato. A few years later, I was deep in the kind of despair typical of graduate school—I would never really connect with Aristotle’s ideas, I would always be handling them with scholarly tongs, from an alienated distance—when I read Jonathan’s Aristotle book, and realized I actually loved Aristotle. After that it became a pattern: his Freud book, A Case for Irony, Radical Hope—each one was a major event in my intellectual life, an infusion of energy toward a new topic.
Somewhere in there—after the Freud book but before the Irony book—I returned to UChicago as Jonathan’s colleague, and he became a person who showed up in my life: at department meetings, conferences, family picnics. On those occasions when my life was a swirling mass of confusion, in the amazing round turret room, connected to his office, where he saw patients as a psychoanalyst, I’d describe my predicament, and he would listen and ask the right questions. When, in 2011, I gave a public talk on campus about the breakup of my marriage and the ontological shock of falling in love, I invited all my colleagues, but Jonathan is the one whose presence mattered to me, and Jonathan was the one who came. A year later, Jonathan and Gabriel came to my wedding; eventually our sons became close friends.
A lot has happened between us in the 29 years since that Republic class, and I hadn’t had much time or reason to think back on “The classroom is a community” until two weeks after he died.
A few of Jonathan’s colleagues had gathered for the second session of an impromptu reading group on Jonathan’s last book, Imagining the End. We organized the group in the aftermath of his sudden death, not knowing what to do, reasoning that Jonathan would know, and that this was how he could help us. We were discussing chapter three, “Exemplars and the End of the World.” I had agreed to be responsible for the initial presentation of that chapter, but at the last minute I asked my colleague to switch with me—could she present three and I’d present four, because I’d spent more time reviewing it? She agreed. I’d make nothing of this detail if I didn’t have Jonathan in my head asking, was it a coincidence that you prepared the “wrong” chapter, or could it be that you were avoiding chapter three…?
Chapter three is about mentors, and in it Jonathan describes a formative encounter in the schoolyard. He was ten years old, a classmate overheard him saying, “Goddammit,” and reported this to the teacher. Here is Jonathan’s account of what happened next:
Mr. McMahon turned around, and he started walking toward me. He was wearing a trench coat, belted in the middle. His hair was in a crew cut, common among men at that time. He might have been a police detective in a television show. He came over, looked me in the eyes, and said in a low, calm voice: “We do not use profane language on the playground.” He then turned around and walked away.
When Mr. McMahon walked up to him, young Jonathan expected to be punished. Indeed, the details of the description—the crew cut, the trench coat, the belt, “police detective”—lead the reader to expect that young Jonathan will be punished. But Mr. McMahon evidently saw it as sufficient to tell Jonathan what he had done wrong, and leave it at that. Jonathan was amazed to be addressed by an authority figure in that way: as someone who could learn how to be better just by being told.
And so of course you see what I saw when we finally came to that example in our discussion group. I blurted out in surprise: “I had a Mr. McMahon moment, too—and it was with Jonathan!” I described my early encounter with Jonathan, how he corrected me, seriously, directly, as though that were the sort of thing one person could do for another. I repeated Jonathan’s words, “The classroom is a community,” and enjoyed hearing them come out of my own mouth. I left our discussion group with the realization that so many of my hopes and fears about my own teaching were encapsulated in that sentence. Was my classroom a community? Could I make it more of one?
It is no accident that it was Jonathan who became my Mr. McMahon. Over the course of the chapter, Jonathan describes how their encounter initiated what he calls “a structure of repetition” that has reverberated through his career as a teacher and a psychoanalyst: “on my side of the dyad, time and again, I am called back to nonretaliation as a way to be.” For Freud, “repetition” is a bad thing. He used the word to describe a pathological compulsion to reenact a trauma, contrasting repetition with the healthy responses of remembering and working through. Jonathan, however, proposed that there is a good, healthy kind of repetition that takes place between an exemplar and the person whose admiration they inspire. He says, of Mr. McMahon: “He took up residence in my imagination. Not only can I call him to mind, but ‘he’ can come alive in my mind, as it were, of ‘his’ own accord. He then continues to exert an exemplary influence.” If Mr. McMahon could come out in Jonathan, then that gives me hope that the structure of repetition might continue.
—Agnes Callard, University of Chicago
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My first contact with Jonathan Lear came in 1994, the year I became chair of the Committee on Social Thought. Jonathan, I came to discover, was, with typical generosity of spirit, in the habit of writing to authors he had not met but whose work he admired and had learned from. He wrote me one such note (a letter not an email) about a book I had published in 1982, Kant’s Theory of Form. The note was both appreciative of the notion of form I had defended and obviously deeply well informed. Coincidentally, at the beginning of my term as chair, the Committee faculty, which still counted among its members Saul Bellow, Leszek Kołakowski and Charles Rosen and still had active participation from emeritus faculty David Grene and Edward Shils, had become superannuated, and we were actively looking for senior faculty, the only rank we ever search. As it happened, I had read both his book on Aristotle (Aristotle: The Desire to Understand) and his 1990 book on Freud, Love and its Place in Nature, admired both a great deal, and on impulse called him up at Yale and asked him if there was any imaginable situation in which he might be persuaded to leave Yale and move to Chicago. He said there just might be. I consulted my colleagues and circulated his work, and we decided to invite him out for a talk. His visit was a huge success. He lectured on aspects of his Freud interpretation, and his clarity, brilliance and enthusiasm, his general love of discussing ideas, were all so obvious that we all knew we had found someone perfect for the Committee. I grew to know him well and to like him very much in the course of what turned out to be very complicated negotiations to arrange his relocation to Chicago. That finally occurred in 1996, and over the next thirty years we became very close.
The Committee meets as a full department (there are no committees of the Committee) to discuss at length student qualifying exams, dissertation proposals and recruitment and appointment issues. In these discussions, Jonathan’s contributions were, and I think this word characterizes his general mode of being, “thoughtful.” “Depth” of thought has no obvious measure; one knows it when one experiences it, and I came to admire greatly the seriousness with which Jonathan took our discussions of student and candidate material, and the probing, and often unusual, original kinds of questions he posed for anyone. I learned a great deal from him in those discussions, as well as from sitting in on his courses, teaching Freud and Nietzsche with him, and from attending his lectures.
He was also great company. Our constant recruiting meant that we were all out to dinner a few times a month and Jonathan was always, as ever, both a thoughtful interlocutor and rollicking good fun, full of wonderful anecdotes, warmly appreciative of good stories and wisely tolerant of the frailties of others. He never took himself too seriously, always treated his students as equals, and had acquired from his many years in England various turns of phrase and forms of politeness characteristic of British academics.
He also had a great deal of academic courage. Jonathan was educated at elite universities, and while at Cambridge studied with the very best anglophone philosophers then working on ancient philosophy, moral theory, ethics, and ancient logic. His graduate work was supervised by Saul Kripke, and he started teaching as someone au fait with all the latest work in philosophy. But he knew, first, that working seriously on Freud would set him apart from mainstream philosophy (these were the days when Adolf Grünbaum and Frederick Crews were leading a campaign to expose Freud as a fraud) but he simply didn’t care, going so far as to train as a lay analyst in New England and to begin to see patients. The same was true of his decision to try to understand meaning failure by visiting and getting to know well the Crow tribe for his book Radical Hope, one of the most important books of the second half of the twentieth century. This book made for another connection between us, since Jonathan’s supervising teacher in psychoanalysis was Hans Loewald, one of the first thinkers to import many of Heidegger’s ideas to America.
Although Jonathan had been ill, his prognosis for recovery was good, and the suddenness and unexpectedness of his death has been very hard for those who knew and loved him to process. His loss seems a complete vanishing, and his absence seems palpable daily. Someone extremely important in all our lives has inexplicably gone missing.
—Robert Pippin, University of Chicago
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After Jonathan Lear died, the first book of his that I went back to was Happiness, Death, and the Remainder of Life (2000), which is the published version of three lectures he gave as part of the Tanner Lectures on Human Values. Roughly speaking, the first lecture is about Aristotle and happiness, the second is about Freud and the death drive, and the third is about the self-disrupting quality of the human mind that makes every effort to identify a final telos—i.e. to say what all of our struggles are “really about,” in the end—a kind of self-delusion. Both Freud and Aristotle had in their different ways tried to come up with just such an account, but (according to Jonathan) what this meant was that they had each succumbed to the same mistake, which is essentially that they had allowed themselves to think that life makes more sense than it does. The truth is that our psyches are constitutively unstable, he suggested. We are born into a condition of helplessness, pressurized and overwhelmed from the very start, and although by and large—in psychological terms—we successfully organize ourselves in response to this predicament, our success is always provisional. Moreover, because of these fraught formative conditions we are always susceptible thereafter to the illusion that there is somehow a state of being “beyond” all tension and strife that all of our desires are pointing us toward, and which in some way is the thing we want more deeply than anything else. “Human-mindedness, at its heart,” wrote Jonathan, “is constituted by various fantasies of release from the pressure of life.” But, as he went on to remark, it would be more precise to say that this pressure is just what life is, and of course, in one way or another, it always proves to be too much for us eventually.
It will surprise no one who knew Jonathan to discover that even this diagnosis was something that he drew optimism from. In the tributes that I’ve read so far, it’s striking how consistently people are moved to comment not just on his intellectual gifts but on the affective power that he had. There are teachers who are brilliant thinkers, and who can give you a lot in certain ways, but who nonetheless aren’t catalysts that make you excited about your own mind. But that’s just what Jonathan was. To me, he was an intellectual exemplar in the deepest sense of the term, in that through his example he made you more alive to—and motivated by—the possibilities of your own intellectual life. I also think that this generative capacity existed on a continuum in some way with the outwardly tragic idea that we’re all hopelessly besieged and unstable creatures. As Jonathan knew in great detail from his psychoanalytic work, one of the most poignant and distinctive sources of human unhappiness is how profoundly vulnerable we are to trapping ourselves inside falsely rigid images of reality. (As he put it in the same book: “Every neurotic treats his world as the world; every neurotic treats his unconscious fantasies as giving him the entire universe of possibilities.”) But if life is always too much for us somehow, and if the psychic structures we’ve built to deal with it are all basically contingent, then that means that the cages inside us aren’t fixed either. I think there was an intimation of that in how Jonathan made people feel in his teaching, the sense that he could help you see just beyond the boundaries of what you thought had to be true about yourself.
Another thing that Jonathan once said that I’ve thought about a lot over the years is that every child is a philosopher who doesn’t yet have the command of reason. It’s a characteristic phrase, in that it’s both immediately memorable and yet you can spend a long time teasing out its implications. One of the things I’ve taken from it is a reminder that intellectual life is of a piece with the most primal emotions we have, that what we’re doing when we try to understand and order our thoughts is not fundamentally separate from our overwhelming (and never abandoned) desires to be loved, nourished, recognized, capable of autonomy and creation, or with what it takes to have trust in the world’s goodness, in spite of everything. There’s nothing as senseless as the death of a loved one, and it’s not as though for Jonathan’s friends and family there’s any real answer to reality being torn apart as it has. But it’s only to repeat his lessons to say that even the most agonizing loss is an occasion for new possibilities, if we only have the endurance to let it be.
—Ben Jeffery, University of Chicago
Contributing editor, The Point
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Though I was years older than him, Jonathan treated me more or less as a younger brother, not hesitating to show his disapproval when I engaged with subjects he thought unworthy of a serious person’s attention. It amused me but probably did me good to be steered away from irrelevance in this way.
Ten summers ago Jonathan and I, with our respective families, spent a vacation together in Catalonia, where he hired a massive black car which he alone was allowed to drive. One day he managed to get the car stuck in a narrow archway in the old city of Girona, unable to move an inch forward or back. With sweat pouring down his face, he addressed his passengers: “Let’s just walk away from this blankety-blank pile of **** and let Hertz take care of it!” It was pure regression: a man who lived by the dictum Know thyself switching under stress into an irresponsible child. It was a moment to cherish, as I cherish all moments when this beloved man of reason allowed himself to dip a toe in the waters of unreason.
—J. M. Coetzee
Novelist
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As I cast about for Jonathan’s presence in the days following his death, my mind turned to an email he had written me a few years back—a reproach.
When Jon Baskin, Etay Zwick and I were thinking of starting The Point, back in 2008, Jonathan, who was one of our professors in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago as well as my dissertation advisor, was one of the first people to give us any real encouragement. Practically speaking, he put us in touch with various people, lent us the use of his name, and allowed me to get away with barely working on my dissertation for the first year of the magazine’s life. Philosophically, though, his influence on The Point ran much deeper than that.
The Point was born of disappointment with the intellectual poverty of longform journalism and the existential poverty of academic journals. Jonathan was skeptical of the professionalization of intellectual life and a dogged patron of oddballs who did their own thing, so I think he appreciated our attempt to forge a new path. Better that than giving in or whining: when I complained that contemporary philosophy often felt like a meaningless game, he told me not to worry about what other people were doing—just find a way of doing something you find genuinely valuable, and the rest will follow.
His own career path was so individual as to be impossible to emulate. Institutionally speaking, he had completed two undergraduate degrees, one in history and the other in philosophy, followed by two graduate degrees, the first a Ph.D. on Aristotle’s logic under the supervision of Saul Kripke—a prodigy in contemporary logic and metaphysics who was only eight years older than Jonathan, had no expertise in Aristotle and only ever supervised one other dissertation—and the second a professional qualification in psychoanalysis that licensed him to treat patients clinically. His philosophical interlocutors were many and various, among them Plato, Aristotle, Kierkegaard, Freud, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Williams, J. M. Coetzee and Marilynne Robinson, but he was no dilettante. He wanted to understand what it meant to be human, and he simply followed that question wherever it took him. Without end, I should add: he took up the study of ancient Hebrew in his mid-seventies because he had become so puzzled by the treatment of the prophet Balaam that he wanted to make sure he wasn’t missing anything in translation!
That ethos of constant self-development was central to what you might call Jonathan’s philosophy of life. Some people use the term “perpetual student” pejoratively; for Jonathan, being open to learning from the world was the key to human flourishing. As he told matriculating undergraduates in a 2009 address, “the aim of education is to teach us how to be students.” In the preface to Open Minded, he wrote that achieving tenure at Cambridge in his twenties freed him from professional pressures to such an extent that he was forced to confront the meaning of his own existence. “I realized that before I died, I wanted to be in intimate touch with some of the world’s greatest thinkers, with some of the deepest thoughts which humans have encountered. I wanted to think thoughts—and also to write something which mattered to me.”
That sense of mattering pervaded Jonathan’s work: it’s hard to imagine anyone asking the “so what?” question of anything he wrote. There was always a point. The truth is, though, that until he died I hadn’t read all that much of what Jonathan had written—I always felt the need to protect myself from my teachers that way. So it wasn’t that The Point actively set out to institutionalize something that Jonathan was doing in his own writing. I would instead describe his influence as magnetic. He had a kind of electricity about him, an energy in his eyes; his mere presence made conversations more intense. He was irrepressibly idealistic about the life of the mind, and when you caught his gaze you felt called to live up to his ideals. In class he would often describe himself as trying to grasp what it means for human beings to live in relationship with ideals. Having grown up in a British culture that mistook cynicism for sophistication, I found Jonathan’s earnestness liberating. Wanting to find a way to harness that energy without directly following in Jonathan’s footsteps, I designed a dissertation project on accurate perception as an ideal, and then a different one on Heidegger and ideals, before finally settling on the relation between ideals and critique in Plato’s metaphysics and political philosophy. Since The Point’s signature symposium format—“What is X for?”—came directly out of that project, the whole structure of the magazine would have been different without Jonathan’s idealism.
Another thing we took from Jonathan’s idealism, however unconsciously, might be filed under the heading of ethos. One thing that sets The Point apart from other literary magazines, at least in our own self-conception, is that we always encourage writers to focus on the good. We want them to explore what they find valuable in a given cultural phenomenon, and hence what they themselves truly care about, rather than to hide behind the superior stance that comes so easily to critics.
Jonathan didn’t suffer fools gladly—in fact they seemed to make him itch—but unlike most philosophers he never allowed himself to make trivial or sadistic objections. When responding to a public lecture, he would always be the one to put his finger on the most fundamental and generative question. Since his death I have come to appreciate how deliberate he was in that respect. Reading Love and Its Place in Nature by way of mourning, I saw how attuned he had always been to the tension between critical voices and the creative spirit, and I recalled his way of teaching. At the deepest level, teaching for him was a matter of orienting the soul (or psyche) toward certain goods. This process took place through the student “taking the teacher in” as a voice and resource in their own self-understanding. A good teacher was someone who could be internalized both as a negative, critical force that holds the student to high standards and at the same time as a positive, loving force that encourages exploration and experimentation.
For anyone trained in analytic philosophy, the latter is the hard part. In a recent interview with Die Zeit, Jonathan was asked the individuals he felt most grateful to as a philosopher and analyst. He responded by citing Bob Dylan, “who has such infinite appreciation for human creativity and takes incomparable joy in the art of others.” There must be many professional philosophers who are Dylan fans, but few would think to praise Dylan for his ability to appreciate other people’s creativity and even fewer would treat that as exemplary for their own work in philosophy. Jonathan was right about Dylan, though, and in his loving interpretation of him I think he found a psychic resource to orient himself by as a writer and teacher.
Jonathan certainly served that function for others, including myself—and I believe he knew that. When my doctorate was finally approved, my other professors congratulated me. Jonathan looked me in the eye and told me I should make it better. I took that as an expression of care and a sign of faith. He was telling me there was untapped potential, both in what I had written and in me personally, that he trusted me to realize that potential by myself, and that he would be watching from afar. I rewrote the whole thing from start to finish with those words ringing in my head.
That brings me to Jonathan’s reproach, which came almost a decade after I had left Chicago. In the intervening years we had often been in touch, but our relationship no longer felt like that of student and teacher. I did still live in relation to his voice, both critical and enabling, but that relationship took place in my own head. Out of the blue, having never commented on any of our articles before, he wrote to object to a review he had just come across in The Point. It turned out he really was watching! Not only that, but he was calling us back to our ideals with a clarity that few could muster. What Jonathan admired about The Point, he wrote, was “its openness—its welcome to thinking.” But it was precisely because he valued that openness that he was troubled by what he had just read: “I think of the first moments when the kallipolis falls apart and what the guardians must guard against. I think you should be on guard against the snide and the envious—and they come up in subtle ways, especially in basically sophisticated reviewers. The very genre of review attracts the envious.” When I defended the article by pointing to its insight and verve, Jonathan said he actually agreed: “I just keep a nervous eye out for those first signs…” This wasn’t criticism in any normal sense, then. He wasn’t trying to stand in judgment or to have the final word. It was criticism of the deepest kind, criticism as an act of love—a love that will never leave me, death be damned.
—Jonny Thakkar, Swarthmore College
Founding editor, The Point
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Jonathan Lear was for me, and always will be, after decades of loving friendship, the man who in the matter of hope and happiness refused to take no for an answer. There have been many philosophers who devised theories of hope and happiness—more about happiness than about hope, actually—but Jonathan’s work on these themes had a beautiful obstinacy about it. Auden famously wrote that “about suffering they were never wrong, / The Old Masters,” but I dare say, without in any way diminishing the brilliance of the ancients, which would be particularly heretical in Hyde Park, that suffering, too, has a history, and that we have learned things from modern suffering that we may not have known before, and in the urgency with which he studied the consequences of pain, and the possibilities of release from it, Jonathan was profoundly a man of his time, and of his time’s many invitations to despair. What is “radical hope” if not hope after hope, hope beyond the reach of refutation? The phenomenal sweetness of Jonathan’s temperament was itself a blow against despair.
“Dealing with life’s issues,” Jonathan wrote in his last book, “is not preliminary to living a happy life; it is a happy life.” He was glossing Aristotle’s account of happiness, but it might have been his credo. His double life as a philosopher and a psychoanalyst I always regarded as a measure of the seriousness with which he took the “dealing with.” He visited the welter of the mind and the instincts in the same spirit as he visited the Crow Nation—to get closer to the problems that demanded philosophical reflection, to familiarize himself with the empirical contours of the difficulties, to keep the inquiry human. And once he visited, he never left. What united his practice of philosophy and his practice of psychology was a faith in the possibility of recuperation and strength, a high ideal of thoughtful therapy. Hope and happiness, however they are construed, are both states in which the sense of possibility has somehow been secured. They represent the victory over breakdown. The ancient conception of philosophy as therapy became in Jonathan’s unconventional hands a practical program for individual relief, a clinical opportunity to make ethical use of his Greek.
We bonded immediately, and over many things, and our families also bonded; and one of the things over which Jonathan and I bonded was our rampant admiration for a small text, eight paragraphs long, composed in 1915 and published the following year in a commemorative volume about Goethe. It was Freud’s “On Transience,” which, until it turns to a psycho-technical discussion of the libido’s dissociation from its object in mourning, a mode of discourse to which Jonathan kindled more than I did, really does belong in the tradition of wisdom literature. It tells the story of a summer hike in the mountains that the great man enjoyed in the company of a famous but unidentified poet, most likely Rilke—enjoyed, that is, until the poet expressed the dour (and quite Rilkean) view that his bitter awareness of the transience of the natural beauty that he beheld ruined it for him. Later, in his study, Freud analyzed the poet’s bleakness as an unacknowledged expression of mourning, but there, in the woods near the clouds, he proceeded to make a stirring defense of transience not as the enemy of beauty but as the condition of beauty.
I could not see my way to dispute the transience of all things, nor could I insist upon an exception in favor of what is beautiful and perfect. But I did dispute the pessimistic poet’s view that the transience of what is beautiful involves any loss in its worth.
On the contrary, an increase! Transience value is scarcity value in time. Limitation in the possibility of an enjoyment raises the value of an enjoyment. It was incomprehensible, I declared, that the thought of the transience of beauty should interfere with our joy in it.
In our conversations Jonathan and I often returned to this text, and to its vindication of temporality. I had discovered this saving interpretation of evanescence when over the years the cherry blossoms flowered, and then died, and then flowered, and then died, at the Tidal Basin in Washington, D.C., a breathtaking and philosophically primary spectacle to which I make pilgrimages. One freezing winter afternoon, after a session of the seminar on The Guide of the Perplexed that I was teaching at the Committee on Social Thought (not as it was customarily taught in Foster Hall), I showed Jonathan some almost unbearably delicate blossom poems by Tu Fu and Li Po on exactly Freud’s theme, and the ice storm vanished into spring. Later in our friendship, as Jonathan became increasingly interested in Judaism, we sometimes pondered a passage in the prayerbook for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, which is probably my favorite passage in the entirety of Jewish liturgy: “[Humankind] is like a broken potsherd, and like a parched patch of grass, and like a wilted blossom, and like a passing shadow, and like a fleeting cloud, and like a gust of wind, and like a floating mote of dust, and like a dream that slips away.” The passage, drawn from biblical and midrashic sources, is an unembellished inventory of the figurative acceptances of finitude.
I offer all these quotations not only as a tribute to Jonathan’s learning but also out of a sense of obligation: in Judaism it is a time-honored mourner’s custom to sanctify the soul of the departed by studying a text in his or her memory, and let us for now leave aside the metaphysics of the custom. In the aftermath of Jonathan’s death, however, I must admit that these metaphorical celebrations of human ephemerality feel a little sour. The cosmic framework is harder to maintain when the fleeting cloud has a face and the mote of dust has a name.
How could somebody so sweet be so rigorous? How could somebody so rigorous be so sweet? I always noticed Jonathan’s wondrous, almost paradoxical combination of qualities. It shattered certain stereotypes about the life of the mind. Forbidding philosophers, after all, are a dime a dozen; I can still feel my recoil from philosophy at Oxford fifty years ago, where love letters had to be composed in logical notation. Richard Avedon once took a photograph of Isaiah Berlin, his spectacles in the pocket of his jacket and a scarf around his neck, looking sternly, almost aggressively, into the camera, and the sitter hated the image. He said it made him look ferocious, which he preferred not to be. I told him that in my view he had not been represented with perfect accuracy by the other photographs that showed him as the kindly, almost avuncular humanist; that there was an unwavering strictness in his thinking, as there must be in all philosophical thinking, which, if it is to retain its proper grandeur, will sometimes make people nervous and even afraid; that the ferocity of his commitment to what he believed, and of his opposition to what he did not believe, was a lesson for me; and that Avedon’s image did not distort him, it merely filled in a part of the picture that many preferred to ignore. He was kindly and ferocious. He ringingly denounced falsehood even as he broke new ground in intellectual empathy. He did not suffer fools but he was interested in everybody. Jonathan was like this. Like Isaiah, Jonathan was more often kindly than ferocious, and he, too, knew when to be which, and this had the effect of making his spells of impatience more delicious, as in his many tirades about the hideous meteor-like 225-foot shrine to himself (it is not a presidential library!) that Barack Obama is inflicting on the lakeshore pastoral outside Jonathan Lear’s very window. Transience is hardly the direst threat to beauty.
One last kaddish quotation, a text as a kaddish, a kaddish-text, from 2 Samuel 1:26:
I grieve for you, my brother Jonathan,
Very dear you were to me.
—Leon Wieseltier
Editor, Liberties
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In a text exchange this summer, Jonathan mentioned he was writing about Balaam’s ass. After I learned about his death, I remembered our texts and that he had sent me a manuscript draft of an essay about Balaam’s ass titled “Pin the Tale on the Donkey” a year earlier.
The essay recounts his rereading of Freud’s “Notes upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis” on the occasion of a revised edition of the Complete Psychological Works. The revised edition had no changes but he does catch something that had been peripheral in his earlier study of the case: Freud’s casual comparison of the patient, Mr. R, to an “an inverted Balaam.” Jonathan admits that for years he had not paid much attention to this Balaam or the fact of Freud’s reference. Only in rereading and returning to this citation did he note the gap between his own ignorance of Balaam’s identity and Freud’s confidence in Balaam as common knowledge. In Jonathan’s survey of contemporary colleagues, psychoanalysts and academics (save for biblical scholars) he confirmed that his ignorance of Balaam was widely shared. To remedy this first form of forgetting Balaam, he turns to the Hebrew Bible. What he finds “amazed” him. There are three incompatible versions of Balaam: a holy, a comic and an evil. Freud’s casual reference is to the comic/evil Balaam. The common knowledge Balaam of Freud’s time had thus completely cancelled the holy non-Israelite Balaam—a contender, Jonathan notes, for the most truly holy man in the Hebrew Bible.
The essay works the miracle so central to Jonathan’s methodology. He catches onto a detail that others would have missed, including, in this case, his earlier self. Where there had at first been nothing remarkable or a dead end, he opens up another world and new depths of possible meaning. In this way his approach is Freudian: there are no innocent details. But unlike Freud his rigorous process of teasing out the meaning of an anecdote or utterance always surprises. The pleasure of reading his work, for me, is how suspense builds in his detailed, painstaking and gripping analysis. The careful reader who has followed the argument through the rigors of its twists and turns is rewarded with a new understanding of human flourishing. In an intellectual milieu of fashionable, clever anti-humanism he remained stubbornly, blessedly alive to the possibility of human generosity and dedicated to helping people get better at the work of being fully human.
Toward the end of his essay on Balaam, his argument over, Jonathan introduces a personal note—or in psychoanalytic parlance—he concludes with experiences of transference in reading and writing about Balaam’s ass.
What if all these stories of Balaam, in and out of the Bible, do trace their way back to a single, remarkable human being? Who was he? Of course, it is overwhelmingly unlikely we will ever learn more about him than we know now. But I realize that the possible reality of Balaam triggered in me is not just a desire to know more about him, but an inchoate sense of injustice and justice. It is one thing for a fictional character to be tossed and turned as it flows down the currents of cultural and historical transformations; it is another for there to have been a real living human being, who lived a remarkable life, and is now dead. Our stories now become purported memories—or something functioning in the place of memory or covering over the idea that anything is missing. I feel some call of responsibility, for the memory of a dead man who cannot answer back. We seem to be downstream of a river of envious distortions, wishful idealizations, and comic interruptions, and there is no way to reach the source. We have no idea to what extent he has been slandered, his memory mangled. Is this just wistfulness, or should we mourn the fact that we cannot mourn?
Mourning, he explains in Imagining the End: Mourning and Ethical Life, is a uniquely human form of flourishing. Mourning our inability to mourn (in the case of Balaam) means mourning that we cannot “get busy emotionally, imaginatively, and cognitively and at least try to make sense of what has happened by creating a meaningful account of who the other person was, what the relationship has meant, and how it continues to matter.”
Rereading a friend’s work after his death is uncanny, particularly when that dead friend speaks in the first person about a feeling he cannot quite pin down about a figure “now dead.” Wondering about Jonathan’s relationship to holy Balaam is the activity I am busy with now, my way of working on a meaningful account of “who the other person was.” The passage stands out for me because of its evident notes of frustration and because he admits to an “inchoate” sense of injustice and justice. The frustration seems to be directed at: 1. Our collective venality and the lack of moral imagination that inclines us to default to the least generous readings of people, ultimately at humanity’s expense because it reduces our store of examples of kalon—the ability to admire the beauty of those who live generously. 2. The fact of death itself; there having been “a real living human being, who lived a remarkable life, and is now dead.”
I have been haunted by a conversation we had about Montaigne, years ago, over a meal. After describing my fascination with how early-modern scholars used to ponder their vanity and death with skulls in their studies, I asked him what he thought about mortality. “I hate it,” he said quickly and conclusively. There was an element of comic timing in his not pausing to consider the question. But he was also serious; it was a conversational dead end and we moved on. I now associate that “I hate it” with his inchoate sense of justice and injustice in relation to Balaam, and it gives me an idea of how I can mourn Jonathan.
In Montaigne’s essay on vanity, he expresses a responsibility toward the dead that is similar to the work of mourning: “I pay greater service to the dead [than the living]. They can no longer help themselves; therefore they need my help all the more, it seems to me . . . Those who have deserved friendship and gratitude from me have never lost it through being no longer there.”
Montaigne’s almost naïve dedication to service of the dead introduces friendship into the work of mourning. Jonathan was a terrific friend to me and a great friend generally: the kind of friend who witnesses qualities you don’t necessarily associate with yourself); the kind of friend “who cheers you on”—his warm, unpretentious mode of encouragement that got me through so many difficult chapters. My “transitional object” is to imagine that Jonathan needs me and my friendship now more than ever. I want to keep extending it by taking up the unfinished business of Jonathan’s Balaam and his donkey.
The transference Jonathan recounts is not only with Balaam, but also his donkey, whom he admires as the “psychoanalytic ego ideal” whose patience under the unfair beating of comic/evil Balaam he likens to the psychoanalyst in the counter-transference process. The transference with both Balaam and the donkey meet in the last line of the essay: “as I look over at Balaam I want to say: I realize that I am bearing a load of imaginative possibilities that I will never figure out.”
I want to share the burden by unpacking the imaginative possibilities of Jonathan’s relationship to Balaam. What is it about Balaam? The essay lingers on holy Balaam’s speech and how his “speaking out” is expressive of his complete unity with God’s will. Whenever Balaam needs God, he is there; their relationship is one of intimacy. When he speaks from his own point of view it is also God’s view. This is an experience of integration that, unlike psychoanalytic models, is inclusive of the sacred. Is that, I wonder, where Jonathan was headed?
—Laura Baudot, Oberlin College
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In a series of classes I took with Jonathan Lear at the outset of my doctoral studies just over a decade ago he would require that two students take a “protocol” at each meeting: a kind of expanded “minutes” of the class to be circulated among the participants before the next session. Volunteers were not always forthcoming. On one occasion he noted, with a mischievous smile, that as an analyst he was incredibly comfortable with long silences. A moment later the smile was replaced by a perfectly neutral expression. I can’t recall who eventually cracked; I do recall thinking that someone who had mastered silence may have mastered much else besides.
Jonathan’s work in philosophy speaks for itself. For one who was lucky enough to be his student for a stretch of time, what stays with me most is what he did not put into words.
It is a pedagogical cliché that effective teachers refrain from merely imparting their preferred doctrine. The teacher sensitively guides the student’s Bildung so that they emerge an autonomous intellect: a thinker in their own right. Jonathan’s pedagogical gift—internally related to his analytic gift—was to stop bright young minds, if just for a moment, from indulging in the incessant formulation of points, arguments, “takes.” Encountering silence where one might expect an affirmative nod, a respectful rejoinder or even a cutting rebuke (anything but that silence!) forced us to confront the possibility we had nothing to say, had in fact not yet begun thinking at all.
The atmosphere of tense excitement in Jonathan’s classes (think the first day of school, but every day of school) was the product of the high expectation placed on anyone in the room—we were there to think. But what is it to think seriously for oneself? It’s the kind of question Jonathan gravitated toward—existentially immediate, a question one cannot fail to have a stake in—and one certain to trigger avoidance. The threat of fleeing the opportunity for serious thought was, I think, the source of his intense dislike of jargon—a suspicion many academics profess while in reality directing it selectively toward the jargon of opposed schools. Jonathan’s most hated jargons were associated with some of the thinkers (or rather, their self-appointed disciples) he held dearest: Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Wittgenstein and of course Freud.
Silence inevitably invites projection. What was he thinking? One imagined contempt, incomprehension, or worse: indifference, boredom. In our anxiety, we would often attempt to counter silence through dint of sheer cognitive activity: filling it with ever more words. Just the kind of avoidant reaction, in other words, which threatened further silence (or a close relative: I can still hear Jonathan’s uncannily neutral “okay”). You do not find this in pedagogy manuals; there silence is a nurturing place where the timid grow bold, the hasty more reflective. This cut a little closer.
When a student is thrown back on themselves they confront, in place of the autonomous thinker they thought they were, a kind of emptiness—not words and ideas, but silence. As Jonathan no doubt knew well, whether such emptiness proves sterile or fecund pertains to human freedom and is inherently unpredictable. A true self-reckoning—free of avoidance—might open up a possibility of genuine thought; alternatively, it could simply sting. (Socrates taught Plato—but also Alcibiades). I saw the same struggle in my classmates that I myself felt. Sometimes we shined—finding a foothold, however momentary, in something real. (Jonathan was against blather and bluster, not the first steps, tentative and often inchoate, of thinking in good faith). I wanted to do well—but if I felt stung, the temptation was to simply dismiss the experience, the class and, of course, the teacher.
By the end of the coursework part of my doctorate I had spent a lot of time thinking about psychoanalysis and its relation to various philosophical issues. I knew my interests ultimately lay elsewhere, but I wanted to write something substantial before ending that chapter of my intellectual life. I met with Jonathan to discuss possibilities. After I gave a kind of pitch for a paper, he leant back in his chair, silent. I recast my thoughts a second time, now realizing, and eventually confessing, that I didn’t have a concrete direction. I was bereft of ideas and had nothing else to say. I left his office with a sense of freedom and gratitude that rekindled itself whenever we spoke afterwards.
—Rory O’Connell, UC Irvine
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Here’s how I recall it, anyway.
Jonathan had been invited to an event at the United Nations headquarters in New York, which had the curious title “Conference on Information.” Curiouser still, he had been invited to speak on Freud.
Jonathan recounted the story at a dinner party at the Hyde Park home of Katia Mitova. In those days—this would have been the early to mid 2000s—Katia frequently hosted small gatherings of friends, typically all associated with the Committee on Social Thought. The guest list might have included, in addition to Jonathan, Gabriel Richardson, Ewa Atanassow, Mark Strand and Glenn Most. We were ostensibly celebrating the arrival in Chicago of several cases of wine that Jonathan had purchased some dozen or so years earlier, using the advance on royalties he had received for Love and Its Place in Nature. The wine had been in storage at a shop in New Haven, and its time had now come.
The conference at the UN, Jonathan explained, had taken place in a room that resembled in layout the great hall of the General Assembly, but on a smaller scale. He was seated at the dais, and his panel was to begin shortly.
I had to pee. And I wasn’t sure whether I should hold it in or try to go before the panel started. At the last possible minute, I decided to go. I went to the nearest door, which opened into a long empty hallway, which I followed. That hallway then turned into another long hallway, and then another. I followed along, making several turns—left, right, right, left—all the hallways looking virtually identical. It was almost time for my panel to begin, and I was about to give up, when I saw the sign. So I finally get to the bathroom, step up to the urinal… and of course it’s just a trickle. I’m washing my hands when I hear the announcement that my panel is starting. I leave the bathroom, walk as fast as I can… down the hallway…left, right… or was it right, left? All the hallways look the same! I go one way, then another, try another, and finally I find what I think is the right doorway. I rush into the room and head for the dais. But it turns out I’ve walked into the great hall of the General Assembly. And they’re debating the war in Bosnia.
I forget how the story ended. Presumably a guard intervened and Jonathan was taken to the proper room in time to give his talk.
When I heard that Jonathan had died, my first thought was that the world had lost a great raconteur. One doesn’t have to be a Freudian (or a Kafkan) to see why that story would stick in my mind. But it’s one of so many—some that are told in his luminous writings, others that I recall him telling in seminars or at the Social Thought Sherry Hour (there once was such a thing) or on the many other occasions outside of canonical hours when he made it his business, and his pleasure, to spend time with colleagues and students.
Storytelling was a common thread in Jonathan’s diverse professional activities—scholar, teacher, psychoanalyst. Lost on the page is the infectious and palpable delight he took in both the telling and the interpreting of stories. The boyish smile, the brilliant flashing eyes, the deft comic timing. And the conspiracy. Above all, the conspiracy! When Jonathan told a story (or interpreted one), you felt like you were in on something: in on the joke, the irony, the secret, the hidden sense. Through stories, he drew you into his world of experience, his world of thought and imagination. And in doing so, he illuminated, brought light to, the shared world, showed you that it was more comprehensible than you had realized. But also, that it was stranger than you had ever anticipated.
At the end of one particularly high-spirited seminar, around the time he was writing “Eros and Unknowing,” Jonathan shared with the students his ambivalence about inviting us to his home for a celebratory dinner. On one hand, he said, he loved the idea of keeping the conversation going; on the other hand, he knew it’s always best to end a party while everyone’s still having a good time. It’s hard not to feel that he departed too soon. But how grateful one is to have been in on the conspiracy.
—Thomas Bartscherer, Bard College
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In the summer of 2023, on the fifth day of a workshop for undergraduates on “the future,” we read Jonathan Lear’s essay, “We Will Not Be Missed!” I mean it literally when I say “we” read it. We went page by page through the essay, with the students reading out loud the passages that they had previously underlined.
For the first four days of the workshop, as we read writing by Roy Scranton, Justin Smith-Ruiu, Joy Williams, Amitav Ghosh and Jia Tolentino, the keynote of the workshop had been pessimism. Our students lamented the country’s sclerotic politics, their feeling of being entrapped by an ever-more-degraded algorithmic culture, and their sense that their career and life paths were narrowing. Hanging over it all was the prospect of climate change, and the pervasive suspicion that, if the future were to be radically different from the present, it would probably be radically worse. My co-teacher and I worried over the repetitive tenor of some of the discussions: How could we get the students to think outside the constraints of these dreadful prospects that were, after all, perfectly possible? It turned out that the answer was already on the syllabus.
“We Will Not Be Missed!” begins with Lear recounting a lecture on climate change he attended around the beginning of the pandemic. The lecture went, he writes, “as one might expect”:
There was a warning of impending ecological catastrophe and talk of the “Anthropocene,” suggesting that our age—the age in which humans dominate the earth—is coming to an end. At the end of the talk there was a discussion period. At one point a young academic stood up and said simply, “Let me tell you something: we will not be missed!” She then sat down. There was laughter through the audience. It was over in a moment.
The rest of the essay is an analysis of that moment—both the joke and the laughter it elicited. The joke, as Lear observes, trades on an idea of cosmic justice: “We will not be missed because we do not deserve to be missed.” It suggests that humans are so greedy, thoughtless, and self-destructive that “the rest of the world is better off without us.” The laughter that the joke elicits indicates that this perspective on human beings is shared. Lear calls this understanding “despair,” and he contends that we live in an intellectual culture that valorizes it as a “form of truthfulness.” Yet this despair, he argues, trades on a fantasy. If only there were nothing about ourselves to miss, then there would be no need to worry about the prospect of our extinction. If human beings were nothing but greed, avariciousness and ignorance, then it would be a good thing that there would be nothing to “mourn”—a crucial word for Lear—in our disappearance. Why would we want to be released from mourning? Because mourning is more complicated and painful than the nihilistic attitude that is suggested by the joke: it requires, first of all, that we recognize what is being lost to be of some value. In this case, it requires us to acknowledge that we human beings are of some value.
Although I had already read Lear’s essay several times by myself, I had never fully appreciated, until we read it out loud with the students, how vividly it reflects and reproduces, sentence by sentence, the admirable human capacities that Lear argues the joke obscures—”our capacity,” as he puts it, “for generosity and kindness, for stunning acts of creativity, achievements of discovery and knowledge, for art and love, for our capacity to self-consciously understand and appreciate the world in which we live.” Above all the essay not only emphasizes but offers a beautiful illustration of this last point, which Lear later describes as being “active trying to understand the meanings of our attachments.” That we do not stop doing this even when we are afraid of losing things, or indeed when we are suffering through the loss of them, is the condition for the possibility of mourning. It is also, Lear argues, one of the distinctive conditions of being the particular kind of animal that is capable of “missing” something in the first place.
Reading “We Will Not Be Missed!” did not allay our students’ concerns about the future; it did not make them suddenly believe in progress or become techno-optimists. What it did do was reframe their anxiety and dread about the future in terms of the things they wished to preserve in the present. Taking our cue from Lear, my co-teacher and I asked them what they would “miss,” if humanity were to end tomorrow. After being momentarily stumped, they started to name things: friendship, hiking, music, philosophical conversation, political organizing, writing, jumping into the ocean at night. One by one, they located the language to describe not the terrible things that might happen in the future, but the attachments and pleasures that were threatened by the possibility of these terrible things happening. This experience colored the rest of our time together. If we could not, in that room, forestall any of the potential obstacles that the students saw hovering on the horizon, we could at least learn to articulate what mattered to us in ways that made the joke’s self-abnegating cynicism impossible.
I thought about that day in the workshop when I learned Jonathan Lear had died, and not only because the essay we had read was about mourning. Jonathan was my professor in graduate school, and I can testify, as many others have already done, to the distinctive quality of personal conversation with him, including the sometimes unnerving way he forced on you the question of whether, or to what extent, you really meant what you were saying. Remarkable as this quality was in person, I think it even more remarkable that his virtues as a teacher and conversation partner were so present in his written work, whether about Aristotle or Freud, Kierkegaard or Winnicott, Plenty Coups or a joke at an academic panel. When people talk, during these challenging times for intellectual life (though I can hear Jonathan asking, when have the times not been challenging?), about what it is most important to preserve and pass on of our humanistic tradition, I often think of the way that Lear’s passionate readings in this tradition so often impelled me into a more honest, creative and critical relationship with my own intellectual life. Part of my satisfaction that day in the workshop, I think, was connected to the feeling that I was, merely by bringing this new group of students into contact with my teacher’s words, playing some small part in the long chain of transmission, as he had done for so many of his students, between the figures and ideas that mattered most to him and their own intellectual and moral lives. If the world were to end tomorrow, it’s a moment I would miss.
—Jon Baskin
Founding editor, The Point
Photo credit: Erielle Bakkum
Jonathan Lear, who died last month at his home in Hyde Park, Chicago, was, in addition to being a distinguished professor in the University of Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought and the author of several celebrated works of philosophy, a teacher and mentor for many of us at The Point. He was a member of our editorial board when the magazine was founded in 2009, and later contributed two essays. “Being remembered, mourned, honored is a persisting good,” he wrote in one of them, which later appeared in his final book, Imagining the End: Mourning and Ethical Life. We agree, and have collected here remembrances from a few of his students, colleagues and friends.
—The Editors
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It was the fall of 1996. Jonathan Lear had just arrived at UChicago, and I, an undergraduate beginning my senior year, was on my way out. I didn’t know anything about him, except that he was offering a two-quarter class on Plato’s Republic; that was enough. I did the calculation: three hundred pages over ten weeks at two classes per week for two quarters meant that we would cover just 7.5 pages per class. Excessive, absurd, indulgent—and therefore irresistible. I wasn’t the only one who felt that way: the class was oversubscribed. Jonathan didn’t want it to get bigger than twenty students, but he also didn’t want to turn anyone away, so he ended up duplicating it. He taught two courses on Plato’s Republic, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. At eighty minutes per class, 7.5 pages, taught two times, that meant that he was personally spending 21.3 minutes of class time per page of Plato’s Republic.
I’m sure the class itself was great, but I don’t remember very much about it. I remember feeling nervous in class, especially when Jonathan looked at me—his stare was a blinding light I felt the need to look away from. I remember being disappointed that he didn’t like my papers more—I usually got As on my papers in college, whereas Jonathan gave me, I think, a B+ on each. I didn’t even improve over time. But all my other memories about the class have been eclipsed by a single encounter with Jonathan, no more than thirty seconds long. It took place after class sometime during winter quarter.
I had a conflict with my section of the class—though I no longer remember what the conflict was, or whether I was in the morning or afternoon section—so I attended the other section instead. At the end of class, Jonathan came up to me and asked me why I was in the wrong section, I explained the conflict, and he said, “Don’t ever do that again. The classroom is a community.” That was it, that was the whole encounter, or at least my memory ends there, as though time stopped after his words.
I was shocked that he cared which section I showed up to, shocked that he was willing to reveal that fact and, above all, shocked by his sentence, “The classroom is a community.” It echoed in my head and morphed into a series of questions: Is it true that the classroom is a community? If yes, how could I just be learning that now, in the winter quarter of my final year of college? Can people just walk up to each other and tell each other moral facts? What other moral facts was I missing, because no one had told them to me? And: why is it that the classroom often doesn’t feel like a community?
A few months after the class ended, I left UChicago for UC Berkeley. Just as I stopped being Jonathan’s student, I started being his reader. First, I read his collection Open Minded, to find out what he really thought about Plato. A few years later, I was deep in the kind of despair typical of graduate school—I would never really connect with Aristotle’s ideas, I would always be handling them with scholarly tongs, from an alienated distance—when I read Jonathan’s Aristotle book, and realized I actually loved Aristotle. After that it became a pattern: his Freud book, A Case for Irony, Radical Hope—each one was a major event in my intellectual life, an infusion of energy toward a new topic.
Somewhere in there—after the Freud book but before the Irony book—I returned to UChicago as Jonathan’s colleague, and he became a person who showed up in my life: at department meetings, conferences, family picnics. On those occasions when my life was a swirling mass of confusion, in the amazing round turret room, connected to his office, where he saw patients as a psychoanalyst, I’d describe my predicament, and he would listen and ask the right questions. When, in 2011, I gave a public talk on campus about the breakup of my marriage and the ontological shock of falling in love, I invited all my colleagues, but Jonathan is the one whose presence mattered to me, and Jonathan was the one who came. A year later, Jonathan and Gabriel came to my wedding; eventually our sons became close friends.
A lot has happened between us in the 29 years since that Republic class, and I hadn’t had much time or reason to think back on “The classroom is a community” until two weeks after he died.
A few of Jonathan’s colleagues had gathered for the second session of an impromptu reading group on Jonathan’s last book, Imagining the End. We organized the group in the aftermath of his sudden death, not knowing what to do, reasoning that Jonathan would know, and that this was how he could help us. We were discussing chapter three, “Exemplars and the End of the World.” I had agreed to be responsible for the initial presentation of that chapter, but at the last minute I asked my colleague to switch with me—could she present three and I’d present four, because I’d spent more time reviewing it? She agreed. I’d make nothing of this detail if I didn’t have Jonathan in my head asking, was it a coincidence that you prepared the “wrong” chapter, or could it be that you were avoiding chapter three…?
Chapter three is about mentors, and in it Jonathan describes a formative encounter in the schoolyard. He was ten years old, a classmate overheard him saying, “Goddammit,” and reported this to the teacher. Here is Jonathan’s account of what happened next:
When Mr. McMahon walked up to him, young Jonathan expected to be punished. Indeed, the details of the description—the crew cut, the trench coat, the belt, “police detective”—lead the reader to expect that young Jonathan will be punished. But Mr. McMahon evidently saw it as sufficient to tell Jonathan what he had done wrong, and leave it at that. Jonathan was amazed to be addressed by an authority figure in that way: as someone who could learn how to be better just by being told.
And so of course you see what I saw when we finally came to that example in our discussion group. I blurted out in surprise: “I had a Mr. McMahon moment, too—and it was with Jonathan!” I described my early encounter with Jonathan, how he corrected me, seriously, directly, as though that were the sort of thing one person could do for another. I repeated Jonathan’s words, “The classroom is a community,” and enjoyed hearing them come out of my own mouth. I left our discussion group with the realization that so many of my hopes and fears about my own teaching were encapsulated in that sentence. Was my classroom a community? Could I make it more of one?
It is no accident that it was Jonathan who became my Mr. McMahon. Over the course of the chapter, Jonathan describes how their encounter initiated what he calls “a structure of repetition” that has reverberated through his career as a teacher and a psychoanalyst: “on my side of the dyad, time and again, I am called back to nonretaliation as a way to be.” For Freud, “repetition” is a bad thing. He used the word to describe a pathological compulsion to reenact a trauma, contrasting repetition with the healthy responses of remembering and working through. Jonathan, however, proposed that there is a good, healthy kind of repetition that takes place between an exemplar and the person whose admiration they inspire. He says, of Mr. McMahon: “He took up residence in my imagination. Not only can I call him to mind, but ‘he’ can come alive in my mind, as it were, of ‘his’ own accord. He then continues to exert an exemplary influence.” If Mr. McMahon could come out in Jonathan, then that gives me hope that the structure of repetition might continue.
—Agnes Callard, University of Chicago
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My first contact with Jonathan Lear came in 1994, the year I became chair of the Committee on Social Thought. Jonathan, I came to discover, was, with typical generosity of spirit, in the habit of writing to authors he had not met but whose work he admired and had learned from. He wrote me one such note (a letter not an email) about a book I had published in 1982, Kant’s Theory of Form. The note was both appreciative of the notion of form I had defended and obviously deeply well informed. Coincidentally, at the beginning of my term as chair, the Committee faculty, which still counted among its members Saul Bellow, Leszek Kołakowski and Charles Rosen and still had active participation from emeritus faculty David Grene and Edward Shils, had become superannuated, and we were actively looking for senior faculty, the only rank we ever search. As it happened, I had read both his book on Aristotle (Aristotle: The Desire to Understand) and his 1990 book on Freud, Love and its Place in Nature, admired both a great deal, and on impulse called him up at Yale and asked him if there was any imaginable situation in which he might be persuaded to leave Yale and move to Chicago. He said there just might be. I consulted my colleagues and circulated his work, and we decided to invite him out for a talk. His visit was a huge success. He lectured on aspects of his Freud interpretation, and his clarity, brilliance and enthusiasm, his general love of discussing ideas, were all so obvious that we all knew we had found someone perfect for the Committee. I grew to know him well and to like him very much in the course of what turned out to be very complicated negotiations to arrange his relocation to Chicago. That finally occurred in 1996, and over the next thirty years we became very close.
The Committee meets as a full department (there are no committees of the Committee) to discuss at length student qualifying exams, dissertation proposals and recruitment and appointment issues. In these discussions, Jonathan’s contributions were, and I think this word characterizes his general mode of being, “thoughtful.” “Depth” of thought has no obvious measure; one knows it when one experiences it, and I came to admire greatly the seriousness with which Jonathan took our discussions of student and candidate material, and the probing, and often unusual, original kinds of questions he posed for anyone. I learned a great deal from him in those discussions, as well as from sitting in on his courses, teaching Freud and Nietzsche with him, and from attending his lectures.
He was also great company. Our constant recruiting meant that we were all out to dinner a few times a month and Jonathan was always, as ever, both a thoughtful interlocutor and rollicking good fun, full of wonderful anecdotes, warmly appreciative of good stories and wisely tolerant of the frailties of others. He never took himself too seriously, always treated his students as equals, and had acquired from his many years in England various turns of phrase and forms of politeness characteristic of British academics.
He also had a great deal of academic courage. Jonathan was educated at elite universities, and while at Cambridge studied with the very best anglophone philosophers then working on ancient philosophy, moral theory, ethics, and ancient logic. His graduate work was supervised by Saul Kripke, and he started teaching as someone au fait with all the latest work in philosophy. But he knew, first, that working seriously on Freud would set him apart from mainstream philosophy (these were the days when Adolf Grünbaum and Frederick Crews were leading a campaign to expose Freud as a fraud) but he simply didn’t care, going so far as to train as a lay analyst in New England and to begin to see patients. The same was true of his decision to try to understand meaning failure by visiting and getting to know well the Crow tribe for his book Radical Hope, one of the most important books of the second half of the twentieth century. This book made for another connection between us, since Jonathan’s supervising teacher in psychoanalysis was Hans Loewald, one of the first thinkers to import many of Heidegger’s ideas to America.
Although Jonathan had been ill, his prognosis for recovery was good, and the suddenness and unexpectedness of his death has been very hard for those who knew and loved him to process. His loss seems a complete vanishing, and his absence seems palpable daily. Someone extremely important in all our lives has inexplicably gone missing.
—Robert Pippin, University of Chicago
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After Jonathan Lear died, the first book of his that I went back to was Happiness, Death, and the Remainder of Life (2000), which is the published version of three lectures he gave as part of the Tanner Lectures on Human Values. Roughly speaking, the first lecture is about Aristotle and happiness, the second is about Freud and the death drive, and the third is about the self-disrupting quality of the human mind that makes every effort to identify a final telos—i.e. to say what all of our struggles are “really about,” in the end—a kind of self-delusion. Both Freud and Aristotle had in their different ways tried to come up with just such an account, but (according to Jonathan) what this meant was that they had each succumbed to the same mistake, which is essentially that they had allowed themselves to think that life makes more sense than it does. The truth is that our psyches are constitutively unstable, he suggested. We are born into a condition of helplessness, pressurized and overwhelmed from the very start, and although by and large—in psychological terms—we successfully organize ourselves in response to this predicament, our success is always provisional. Moreover, because of these fraught formative conditions we are always susceptible thereafter to the illusion that there is somehow a state of being “beyond” all tension and strife that all of our desires are pointing us toward, and which in some way is the thing we want more deeply than anything else. “Human-mindedness, at its heart,” wrote Jonathan, “is constituted by various fantasies of release from the pressure of life.” But, as he went on to remark, it would be more precise to say that this pressure is just what life is, and of course, in one way or another, it always proves to be too much for us eventually.
It will surprise no one who knew Jonathan to discover that even this diagnosis was something that he drew optimism from. In the tributes that I’ve read so far, it’s striking how consistently people are moved to comment not just on his intellectual gifts but on the affective power that he had. There are teachers who are brilliant thinkers, and who can give you a lot in certain ways, but who nonetheless aren’t catalysts that make you excited about your own mind. But that’s just what Jonathan was. To me, he was an intellectual exemplar in the deepest sense of the term, in that through his example he made you more alive to—and motivated by—the possibilities of your own intellectual life. I also think that this generative capacity existed on a continuum in some way with the outwardly tragic idea that we’re all hopelessly besieged and unstable creatures. As Jonathan knew in great detail from his psychoanalytic work, one of the most poignant and distinctive sources of human unhappiness is how profoundly vulnerable we are to trapping ourselves inside falsely rigid images of reality. (As he put it in the same book: “Every neurotic treats his world as the world; every neurotic treats his unconscious fantasies as giving him the entire universe of possibilities.”) But if life is always too much for us somehow, and if the psychic structures we’ve built to deal with it are all basically contingent, then that means that the cages inside us aren’t fixed either. I think there was an intimation of that in how Jonathan made people feel in his teaching, the sense that he could help you see just beyond the boundaries of what you thought had to be true about yourself.
Another thing that Jonathan once said that I’ve thought about a lot over the years is that every child is a philosopher who doesn’t yet have the command of reason. It’s a characteristic phrase, in that it’s both immediately memorable and yet you can spend a long time teasing out its implications. One of the things I’ve taken from it is a reminder that intellectual life is of a piece with the most primal emotions we have, that what we’re doing when we try to understand and order our thoughts is not fundamentally separate from our overwhelming (and never abandoned) desires to be loved, nourished, recognized, capable of autonomy and creation, or with what it takes to have trust in the world’s goodness, in spite of everything. There’s nothing as senseless as the death of a loved one, and it’s not as though for Jonathan’s friends and family there’s any real answer to reality being torn apart as it has. But it’s only to repeat his lessons to say that even the most agonizing loss is an occasion for new possibilities, if we only have the endurance to let it be.
—Ben Jeffery, University of Chicago
Contributing editor, The Point
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Though I was years older than him, Jonathan treated me more or less as a younger brother, not hesitating to show his disapproval when I engaged with subjects he thought unworthy of a serious person’s attention. It amused me but probably did me good to be steered away from irrelevance in this way.
Ten summers ago Jonathan and I, with our respective families, spent a vacation together in Catalonia, where he hired a massive black car which he alone was allowed to drive. One day he managed to get the car stuck in a narrow archway in the old city of Girona, unable to move an inch forward or back. With sweat pouring down his face, he addressed his passengers: “Let’s just walk away from this blankety-blank pile of **** and let Hertz take care of it!” It was pure regression: a man who lived by the dictum Know thyself switching under stress into an irresponsible child. It was a moment to cherish, as I cherish all moments when this beloved man of reason allowed himself to dip a toe in the waters of unreason.
—J. M. Coetzee
Novelist
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As I cast about for Jonathan’s presence in the days following his death, my mind turned to an email he had written me a few years back—a reproach.
When Jon Baskin, Etay Zwick and I were thinking of starting The Point, back in 2008, Jonathan, who was one of our professors in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago as well as my dissertation advisor, was one of the first people to give us any real encouragement. Practically speaking, he put us in touch with various people, lent us the use of his name, and allowed me to get away with barely working on my dissertation for the first year of the magazine’s life. Philosophically, though, his influence on The Point ran much deeper than that.
The Point was born of disappointment with the intellectual poverty of longform journalism and the existential poverty of academic journals. Jonathan was skeptical of the professionalization of intellectual life and a dogged patron of oddballs who did their own thing, so I think he appreciated our attempt to forge a new path. Better that than giving in or whining: when I complained that contemporary philosophy often felt like a meaningless game, he told me not to worry about what other people were doing—just find a way of doing something you find genuinely valuable, and the rest will follow.
His own career path was so individual as to be impossible to emulate. Institutionally speaking, he had completed two undergraduate degrees, one in history and the other in philosophy, followed by two graduate degrees, the first a Ph.D. on Aristotle’s logic under the supervision of Saul Kripke—a prodigy in contemporary logic and metaphysics who was only eight years older than Jonathan, had no expertise in Aristotle and only ever supervised one other dissertation—and the second a professional qualification in psychoanalysis that licensed him to treat patients clinically. His philosophical interlocutors were many and various, among them Plato, Aristotle, Kierkegaard, Freud, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Williams, J. M. Coetzee and Marilynne Robinson, but he was no dilettante. He wanted to understand what it meant to be human, and he simply followed that question wherever it took him. Without end, I should add: he took up the study of ancient Hebrew in his mid-seventies because he had become so puzzled by the treatment of the prophet Balaam that he wanted to make sure he wasn’t missing anything in translation!
That ethos of constant self-development was central to what you might call Jonathan’s philosophy of life. Some people use the term “perpetual student” pejoratively; for Jonathan, being open to learning from the world was the key to human flourishing. As he told matriculating undergraduates in a 2009 address, “the aim of education is to teach us how to be students.” In the preface to Open Minded, he wrote that achieving tenure at Cambridge in his twenties freed him from professional pressures to such an extent that he was forced to confront the meaning of his own existence. “I realized that before I died, I wanted to be in intimate touch with some of the world’s greatest thinkers, with some of the deepest thoughts which humans have encountered. I wanted to think thoughts—and also to write something which mattered to me.”
That sense of mattering pervaded Jonathan’s work: it’s hard to imagine anyone asking the “so what?” question of anything he wrote. There was always a point. The truth is, though, that until he died I hadn’t read all that much of what Jonathan had written—I always felt the need to protect myself from my teachers that way. So it wasn’t that The Point actively set out to institutionalize something that Jonathan was doing in his own writing. I would instead describe his influence as magnetic. He had a kind of electricity about him, an energy in his eyes; his mere presence made conversations more intense. He was irrepressibly idealistic about the life of the mind, and when you caught his gaze you felt called to live up to his ideals. In class he would often describe himself as trying to grasp what it means for human beings to live in relationship with ideals. Having grown up in a British culture that mistook cynicism for sophistication, I found Jonathan’s earnestness liberating. Wanting to find a way to harness that energy without directly following in Jonathan’s footsteps, I designed a dissertation project on accurate perception as an ideal, and then a different one on Heidegger and ideals, before finally settling on the relation between ideals and critique in Plato’s metaphysics and political philosophy. Since The Point’s signature symposium format—“What is X for?”—came directly out of that project, the whole structure of the magazine would have been different without Jonathan’s idealism.
Another thing we took from Jonathan’s idealism, however unconsciously, might be filed under the heading of ethos. One thing that sets The Point apart from other literary magazines, at least in our own self-conception, is that we always encourage writers to focus on the good. We want them to explore what they find valuable in a given cultural phenomenon, and hence what they themselves truly care about, rather than to hide behind the superior stance that comes so easily to critics.
Jonathan didn’t suffer fools gladly—in fact they seemed to make him itch—but unlike most philosophers he never allowed himself to make trivial or sadistic objections. When responding to a public lecture, he would always be the one to put his finger on the most fundamental and generative question. Since his death I have come to appreciate how deliberate he was in that respect. Reading Love and Its Place in Nature by way of mourning, I saw how attuned he had always been to the tension between critical voices and the creative spirit, and I recalled his way of teaching. At the deepest level, teaching for him was a matter of orienting the soul (or psyche) toward certain goods. This process took place through the student “taking the teacher in” as a voice and resource in their own self-understanding. A good teacher was someone who could be internalized both as a negative, critical force that holds the student to high standards and at the same time as a positive, loving force that encourages exploration and experimentation.
For anyone trained in analytic philosophy, the latter is the hard part. In a recent interview with Die Zeit, Jonathan was asked the individuals he felt most grateful to as a philosopher and analyst. He responded by citing Bob Dylan, “who has such infinite appreciation for human creativity and takes incomparable joy in the art of others.” There must be many professional philosophers who are Dylan fans, but few would think to praise Dylan for his ability to appreciate other people’s creativity and even fewer would treat that as exemplary for their own work in philosophy. Jonathan was right about Dylan, though, and in his loving interpretation of him I think he found a psychic resource to orient himself by as a writer and teacher.
Jonathan certainly served that function for others, including myself—and I believe he knew that. When my doctorate was finally approved, my other professors congratulated me. Jonathan looked me in the eye and told me I should make it better. I took that as an expression of care and a sign of faith. He was telling me there was untapped potential, both in what I had written and in me personally, that he trusted me to realize that potential by myself, and that he would be watching from afar. I rewrote the whole thing from start to finish with those words ringing in my head.
That brings me to Jonathan’s reproach, which came almost a decade after I had left Chicago. In the intervening years we had often been in touch, but our relationship no longer felt like that of student and teacher. I did still live in relation to his voice, both critical and enabling, but that relationship took place in my own head. Out of the blue, having never commented on any of our articles before, he wrote to object to a review he had just come across in The Point. It turned out he really was watching! Not only that, but he was calling us back to our ideals with a clarity that few could muster. What Jonathan admired about The Point, he wrote, was “its openness—its welcome to thinking.” But it was precisely because he valued that openness that he was troubled by what he had just read: “I think of the first moments when the kallipolis falls apart and what the guardians must guard against. I think you should be on guard against the snide and the envious—and they come up in subtle ways, especially in basically sophisticated reviewers. The very genre of review attracts the envious.” When I defended the article by pointing to its insight and verve, Jonathan said he actually agreed: “I just keep a nervous eye out for those first signs…” This wasn’t criticism in any normal sense, then. He wasn’t trying to stand in judgment or to have the final word. It was criticism of the deepest kind, criticism as an act of love—a love that will never leave me, death be damned.
—Jonny Thakkar, Swarthmore College
Founding editor, The Point
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Jonathan Lear was for me, and always will be, after decades of loving friendship, the man who in the matter of hope and happiness refused to take no for an answer. There have been many philosophers who devised theories of hope and happiness—more about happiness than about hope, actually—but Jonathan’s work on these themes had a beautiful obstinacy about it. Auden famously wrote that “about suffering they were never wrong, / The Old Masters,” but I dare say, without in any way diminishing the brilliance of the ancients, which would be particularly heretical in Hyde Park, that suffering, too, has a history, and that we have learned things from modern suffering that we may not have known before, and in the urgency with which he studied the consequences of pain, and the possibilities of release from it, Jonathan was profoundly a man of his time, and of his time’s many invitations to despair. What is “radical hope” if not hope after hope, hope beyond the reach of refutation? The phenomenal sweetness of Jonathan’s temperament was itself a blow against despair.
“Dealing with life’s issues,” Jonathan wrote in his last book, “is not preliminary to living a happy life; it is a happy life.” He was glossing Aristotle’s account of happiness, but it might have been his credo. His double life as a philosopher and a psychoanalyst I always regarded as a measure of the seriousness with which he took the “dealing with.” He visited the welter of the mind and the instincts in the same spirit as he visited the Crow Nation—to get closer to the problems that demanded philosophical reflection, to familiarize himself with the empirical contours of the difficulties, to keep the inquiry human. And once he visited, he never left. What united his practice of philosophy and his practice of psychology was a faith in the possibility of recuperation and strength, a high ideal of thoughtful therapy. Hope and happiness, however they are construed, are both states in which the sense of possibility has somehow been secured. They represent the victory over breakdown. The ancient conception of philosophy as therapy became in Jonathan’s unconventional hands a practical program for individual relief, a clinical opportunity to make ethical use of his Greek.
We bonded immediately, and over many things, and our families also bonded; and one of the things over which Jonathan and I bonded was our rampant admiration for a small text, eight paragraphs long, composed in 1915 and published the following year in a commemorative volume about Goethe. It was Freud’s “On Transience,” which, until it turns to a psycho-technical discussion of the libido’s dissociation from its object in mourning, a mode of discourse to which Jonathan kindled more than I did, really does belong in the tradition of wisdom literature. It tells the story of a summer hike in the mountains that the great man enjoyed in the company of a famous but unidentified poet, most likely Rilke—enjoyed, that is, until the poet expressed the dour (and quite Rilkean) view that his bitter awareness of the transience of the natural beauty that he beheld ruined it for him. Later, in his study, Freud analyzed the poet’s bleakness as an unacknowledged expression of mourning, but there, in the woods near the clouds, he proceeded to make a stirring defense of transience not as the enemy of beauty but as the condition of beauty.
In our conversations Jonathan and I often returned to this text, and to its vindication of temporality. I had discovered this saving interpretation of evanescence when over the years the cherry blossoms flowered, and then died, and then flowered, and then died, at the Tidal Basin in Washington, D.C., a breathtaking and philosophically primary spectacle to which I make pilgrimages. One freezing winter afternoon, after a session of the seminar on The Guide of the Perplexed that I was teaching at the Committee on Social Thought (not as it was customarily taught in Foster Hall), I showed Jonathan some almost unbearably delicate blossom poems by Tu Fu and Li Po on exactly Freud’s theme, and the ice storm vanished into spring. Later in our friendship, as Jonathan became increasingly interested in Judaism, we sometimes pondered a passage in the prayerbook for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, which is probably my favorite passage in the entirety of Jewish liturgy: “[Humankind] is like a broken potsherd, and like a parched patch of grass, and like a wilted blossom, and like a passing shadow, and like a fleeting cloud, and like a gust of wind, and like a floating mote of dust, and like a dream that slips away.” The passage, drawn from biblical and midrashic sources, is an unembellished inventory of the figurative acceptances of finitude.
I offer all these quotations not only as a tribute to Jonathan’s learning but also out of a sense of obligation: in Judaism it is a time-honored mourner’s custom to sanctify the soul of the departed by studying a text in his or her memory, and let us for now leave aside the metaphysics of the custom. In the aftermath of Jonathan’s death, however, I must admit that these metaphorical celebrations of human ephemerality feel a little sour. The cosmic framework is harder to maintain when the fleeting cloud has a face and the mote of dust has a name.
How could somebody so sweet be so rigorous? How could somebody so rigorous be so sweet? I always noticed Jonathan’s wondrous, almost paradoxical combination of qualities. It shattered certain stereotypes about the life of the mind. Forbidding philosophers, after all, are a dime a dozen; I can still feel my recoil from philosophy at Oxford fifty years ago, where love letters had to be composed in logical notation. Richard Avedon once took a photograph of Isaiah Berlin, his spectacles in the pocket of his jacket and a scarf around his neck, looking sternly, almost aggressively, into the camera, and the sitter hated the image. He said it made him look ferocious, which he preferred not to be. I told him that in my view he had not been represented with perfect accuracy by the other photographs that showed him as the kindly, almost avuncular humanist; that there was an unwavering strictness in his thinking, as there must be in all philosophical thinking, which, if it is to retain its proper grandeur, will sometimes make people nervous and even afraid; that the ferocity of his commitment to what he believed, and of his opposition to what he did not believe, was a lesson for me; and that Avedon’s image did not distort him, it merely filled in a part of the picture that many preferred to ignore. He was kindly and ferocious. He ringingly denounced falsehood even as he broke new ground in intellectual empathy. He did not suffer fools but he was interested in everybody. Jonathan was like this. Like Isaiah, Jonathan was more often kindly than ferocious, and he, too, knew when to be which, and this had the effect of making his spells of impatience more delicious, as in his many tirades about the hideous meteor-like 225-foot shrine to himself (it is not a presidential library!) that Barack Obama is inflicting on the lakeshore pastoral outside Jonathan Lear’s very window. Transience is hardly the direst threat to beauty.
One last kaddish quotation, a text as a kaddish, a kaddish-text, from 2 Samuel 1:26:
—Leon Wieseltier
Editor, Liberties
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In a text exchange this summer, Jonathan mentioned he was writing about Balaam’s ass. After I learned about his death, I remembered our texts and that he had sent me a manuscript draft of an essay about Balaam’s ass titled “Pin the Tale on the Donkey” a year earlier.
The essay recounts his rereading of Freud’s “Notes upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis” on the occasion of a revised edition of the Complete Psychological Works. The revised edition had no changes but he does catch something that had been peripheral in his earlier study of the case: Freud’s casual comparison of the patient, Mr. R, to an “an inverted Balaam.” Jonathan admits that for years he had not paid much attention to this Balaam or the fact of Freud’s reference. Only in rereading and returning to this citation did he note the gap between his own ignorance of Balaam’s identity and Freud’s confidence in Balaam as common knowledge. In Jonathan’s survey of contemporary colleagues, psychoanalysts and academics (save for biblical scholars) he confirmed that his ignorance of Balaam was widely shared. To remedy this first form of forgetting Balaam, he turns to the Hebrew Bible. What he finds “amazed” him. There are three incompatible versions of Balaam: a holy, a comic and an evil. Freud’s casual reference is to the comic/evil Balaam. The common knowledge Balaam of Freud’s time had thus completely cancelled the holy non-Israelite Balaam—a contender, Jonathan notes, for the most truly holy man in the Hebrew Bible.
The essay works the miracle so central to Jonathan’s methodology. He catches onto a detail that others would have missed, including, in this case, his earlier self. Where there had at first been nothing remarkable or a dead end, he opens up another world and new depths of possible meaning. In this way his approach is Freudian: there are no innocent details. But unlike Freud his rigorous process of teasing out the meaning of an anecdote or utterance always surprises. The pleasure of reading his work, for me, is how suspense builds in his detailed, painstaking and gripping analysis. The careful reader who has followed the argument through the rigors of its twists and turns is rewarded with a new understanding of human flourishing. In an intellectual milieu of fashionable, clever anti-humanism he remained stubbornly, blessedly alive to the possibility of human generosity and dedicated to helping people get better at the work of being fully human.
Toward the end of his essay on Balaam, his argument over, Jonathan introduces a personal note—or in psychoanalytic parlance—he concludes with experiences of transference in reading and writing about Balaam’s ass.
Mourning, he explains in Imagining the End: Mourning and Ethical Life, is a uniquely human form of flourishing. Mourning our inability to mourn (in the case of Balaam) means mourning that we cannot “get busy emotionally, imaginatively, and cognitively and at least try to make sense of what has happened by creating a meaningful account of who the other person was, what the relationship has meant, and how it continues to matter.”
Rereading a friend’s work after his death is uncanny, particularly when that dead friend speaks in the first person about a feeling he cannot quite pin down about a figure “now dead.” Wondering about Jonathan’s relationship to holy Balaam is the activity I am busy with now, my way of working on a meaningful account of “who the other person was.” The passage stands out for me because of its evident notes of frustration and because he admits to an “inchoate” sense of injustice and justice. The frustration seems to be directed at: 1. Our collective venality and the lack of moral imagination that inclines us to default to the least generous readings of people, ultimately at humanity’s expense because it reduces our store of examples of kalon—the ability to admire the beauty of those who live generously. 2. The fact of death itself; there having been “a real living human being, who lived a remarkable life, and is now dead.”
I have been haunted by a conversation we had about Montaigne, years ago, over a meal. After describing my fascination with how early-modern scholars used to ponder their vanity and death with skulls in their studies, I asked him what he thought about mortality. “I hate it,” he said quickly and conclusively. There was an element of comic timing in his not pausing to consider the question. But he was also serious; it was a conversational dead end and we moved on. I now associate that “I hate it” with his inchoate sense of justice and injustice in relation to Balaam, and it gives me an idea of how I can mourn Jonathan.
In Montaigne’s essay on vanity, he expresses a responsibility toward the dead that is similar to the work of mourning: “I pay greater service to the dead [than the living]. They can no longer help themselves; therefore they need my help all the more, it seems to me . . . Those who have deserved friendship and gratitude from me have never lost it through being no longer there.”
Montaigne’s almost naïve dedication to service of the dead introduces friendship into the work of mourning. Jonathan was a terrific friend to me and a great friend generally: the kind of friend who witnesses qualities you don’t necessarily associate with yourself); the kind of friend “who cheers you on”—his warm, unpretentious mode of encouragement that got me through so many difficult chapters. My “transitional object” is to imagine that Jonathan needs me and my friendship now more than ever. I want to keep extending it by taking up the unfinished business of Jonathan’s Balaam and his donkey.
The transference Jonathan recounts is not only with Balaam, but also his donkey, whom he admires as the “psychoanalytic ego ideal” whose patience under the unfair beating of comic/evil Balaam he likens to the psychoanalyst in the counter-transference process. The transference with both Balaam and the donkey meet in the last line of the essay: “as I look over at Balaam I want to say: I realize that I am bearing a load of imaginative possibilities that I will never figure out.”
I want to share the burden by unpacking the imaginative possibilities of Jonathan’s relationship to Balaam. What is it about Balaam? The essay lingers on holy Balaam’s speech and how his “speaking out” is expressive of his complete unity with God’s will. Whenever Balaam needs God, he is there; their relationship is one of intimacy. When he speaks from his own point of view it is also God’s view. This is an experience of integration that, unlike psychoanalytic models, is inclusive of the sacred. Is that, I wonder, where Jonathan was headed?
—Laura Baudot, Oberlin College
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In a series of classes I took with Jonathan Lear at the outset of my doctoral studies just over a decade ago he would require that two students take a “protocol” at each meeting: a kind of expanded “minutes” of the class to be circulated among the participants before the next session. Volunteers were not always forthcoming. On one occasion he noted, with a mischievous smile, that as an analyst he was incredibly comfortable with long silences. A moment later the smile was replaced by a perfectly neutral expression. I can’t recall who eventually cracked; I do recall thinking that someone who had mastered silence may have mastered much else besides.
Jonathan’s work in philosophy speaks for itself. For one who was lucky enough to be his student for a stretch of time, what stays with me most is what he did not put into words.
It is a pedagogical cliché that effective teachers refrain from merely imparting their preferred doctrine. The teacher sensitively guides the student’s Bildung so that they emerge an autonomous intellect: a thinker in their own right. Jonathan’s pedagogical gift—internally related to his analytic gift—was to stop bright young minds, if just for a moment, from indulging in the incessant formulation of points, arguments, “takes.” Encountering silence where one might expect an affirmative nod, a respectful rejoinder or even a cutting rebuke (anything but that silence!) forced us to confront the possibility we had nothing to say, had in fact not yet begun thinking at all.
The atmosphere of tense excitement in Jonathan’s classes (think the first day of school, but every day of school) was the product of the high expectation placed on anyone in the room—we were there to think. But what is it to think seriously for oneself? It’s the kind of question Jonathan gravitated toward—existentially immediate, a question one cannot fail to have a stake in—and one certain to trigger avoidance. The threat of fleeing the opportunity for serious thought was, I think, the source of his intense dislike of jargon—a suspicion many academics profess while in reality directing it selectively toward the jargon of opposed schools. Jonathan’s most hated jargons were associated with some of the thinkers (or rather, their self-appointed disciples) he held dearest: Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Wittgenstein and of course Freud.
Silence inevitably invites projection. What was he thinking? One imagined contempt, incomprehension, or worse: indifference, boredom. In our anxiety, we would often attempt to counter silence through dint of sheer cognitive activity: filling it with ever more words. Just the kind of avoidant reaction, in other words, which threatened further silence (or a close relative: I can still hear Jonathan’s uncannily neutral “okay”). You do not find this in pedagogy manuals; there silence is a nurturing place where the timid grow bold, the hasty more reflective. This cut a little closer.
When a student is thrown back on themselves they confront, in place of the autonomous thinker they thought they were, a kind of emptiness—not words and ideas, but silence. As Jonathan no doubt knew well, whether such emptiness proves sterile or fecund pertains to human freedom and is inherently unpredictable. A true self-reckoning—free of avoidance—might open up a possibility of genuine thought; alternatively, it could simply sting. (Socrates taught Plato—but also Alcibiades). I saw the same struggle in my classmates that I myself felt. Sometimes we shined—finding a foothold, however momentary, in something real. (Jonathan was against blather and bluster, not the first steps, tentative and often inchoate, of thinking in good faith). I wanted to do well—but if I felt stung, the temptation was to simply dismiss the experience, the class and, of course, the teacher.
By the end of the coursework part of my doctorate I had spent a lot of time thinking about psychoanalysis and its relation to various philosophical issues. I knew my interests ultimately lay elsewhere, but I wanted to write something substantial before ending that chapter of my intellectual life. I met with Jonathan to discuss possibilities. After I gave a kind of pitch for a paper, he leant back in his chair, silent. I recast my thoughts a second time, now realizing, and eventually confessing, that I didn’t have a concrete direction. I was bereft of ideas and had nothing else to say. I left his office with a sense of freedom and gratitude that rekindled itself whenever we spoke afterwards.
—Rory O’Connell, UC Irvine
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Here’s how I recall it, anyway.
Jonathan had been invited to an event at the United Nations headquarters in New York, which had the curious title “Conference on Information.” Curiouser still, he had been invited to speak on Freud.
Jonathan recounted the story at a dinner party at the Hyde Park home of Katia Mitova. In those days—this would have been the early to mid 2000s—Katia frequently hosted small gatherings of friends, typically all associated with the Committee on Social Thought. The guest list might have included, in addition to Jonathan, Gabriel Richardson, Ewa Atanassow, Mark Strand and Glenn Most. We were ostensibly celebrating the arrival in Chicago of several cases of wine that Jonathan had purchased some dozen or so years earlier, using the advance on royalties he had received for Love and Its Place in Nature. The wine had been in storage at a shop in New Haven, and its time had now come.
The conference at the UN, Jonathan explained, had taken place in a room that resembled in layout the great hall of the General Assembly, but on a smaller scale. He was seated at the dais, and his panel was to begin shortly.
I forget how the story ended. Presumably a guard intervened and Jonathan was taken to the proper room in time to give his talk.
When I heard that Jonathan had died, my first thought was that the world had lost a great raconteur. One doesn’t have to be a Freudian (or a Kafkan) to see why that story would stick in my mind. But it’s one of so many—some that are told in his luminous writings, others that I recall him telling in seminars or at the Social Thought Sherry Hour (there once was such a thing) or on the many other occasions outside of canonical hours when he made it his business, and his pleasure, to spend time with colleagues and students.
Storytelling was a common thread in Jonathan’s diverse professional activities—scholar, teacher, psychoanalyst. Lost on the page is the infectious and palpable delight he took in both the telling and the interpreting of stories. The boyish smile, the brilliant flashing eyes, the deft comic timing. And the conspiracy. Above all, the conspiracy! When Jonathan told a story (or interpreted one), you felt like you were in on something: in on the joke, the irony, the secret, the hidden sense. Through stories, he drew you into his world of experience, his world of thought and imagination. And in doing so, he illuminated, brought light to, the shared world, showed you that it was more comprehensible than you had realized. But also, that it was stranger than you had ever anticipated.
At the end of one particularly high-spirited seminar, around the time he was writing “Eros and Unknowing,” Jonathan shared with the students his ambivalence about inviting us to his home for a celebratory dinner. On one hand, he said, he loved the idea of keeping the conversation going; on the other hand, he knew it’s always best to end a party while everyone’s still having a good time. It’s hard not to feel that he departed too soon. But how grateful one is to have been in on the conspiracy.
—Thomas Bartscherer, Bard College
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In the summer of 2023, on the fifth day of a workshop for undergraduates on “the future,” we read Jonathan Lear’s essay, “We Will Not Be Missed!” I mean it literally when I say “we” read it. We went page by page through the essay, with the students reading out loud the passages that they had previously underlined.
For the first four days of the workshop, as we read writing by Roy Scranton, Justin Smith-Ruiu, Joy Williams, Amitav Ghosh and Jia Tolentino, the keynote of the workshop had been pessimism. Our students lamented the country’s sclerotic politics, their feeling of being entrapped by an ever-more-degraded algorithmic culture, and their sense that their career and life paths were narrowing. Hanging over it all was the prospect of climate change, and the pervasive suspicion that, if the future were to be radically different from the present, it would probably be radically worse. My co-teacher and I worried over the repetitive tenor of some of the discussions: How could we get the students to think outside the constraints of these dreadful prospects that were, after all, perfectly possible? It turned out that the answer was already on the syllabus.
“We Will Not Be Missed!” begins with Lear recounting a lecture on climate change he attended around the beginning of the pandemic. The lecture went, he writes, “as one might expect”:
The rest of the essay is an analysis of that moment—both the joke and the laughter it elicited. The joke, as Lear observes, trades on an idea of cosmic justice: “We will not be missed because we do not deserve to be missed.” It suggests that humans are so greedy, thoughtless, and self-destructive that “the rest of the world is better off without us.” The laughter that the joke elicits indicates that this perspective on human beings is shared. Lear calls this understanding “despair,” and he contends that we live in an intellectual culture that valorizes it as a “form of truthfulness.” Yet this despair, he argues, trades on a fantasy. If only there were nothing about ourselves to miss, then there would be no need to worry about the prospect of our extinction. If human beings were nothing but greed, avariciousness and ignorance, then it would be a good thing that there would be nothing to “mourn”—a crucial word for Lear—in our disappearance. Why would we want to be released from mourning? Because mourning is more complicated and painful than the nihilistic attitude that is suggested by the joke: it requires, first of all, that we recognize what is being lost to be of some value. In this case, it requires us to acknowledge that we human beings are of some value.
Although I had already read Lear’s essay several times by myself, I had never fully appreciated, until we read it out loud with the students, how vividly it reflects and reproduces, sentence by sentence, the admirable human capacities that Lear argues the joke obscures—”our capacity,” as he puts it, “for generosity and kindness, for stunning acts of creativity, achievements of discovery and knowledge, for art and love, for our capacity to self-consciously understand and appreciate the world in which we live.” Above all the essay not only emphasizes but offers a beautiful illustration of this last point, which Lear later describes as being “active trying to understand the meanings of our attachments.” That we do not stop doing this even when we are afraid of losing things, or indeed when we are suffering through the loss of them, is the condition for the possibility of mourning. It is also, Lear argues, one of the distinctive conditions of being the particular kind of animal that is capable of “missing” something in the first place.
Reading “We Will Not Be Missed!” did not allay our students’ concerns about the future; it did not make them suddenly believe in progress or become techno-optimists. What it did do was reframe their anxiety and dread about the future in terms of the things they wished to preserve in the present. Taking our cue from Lear, my co-teacher and I asked them what they would “miss,” if humanity were to end tomorrow. After being momentarily stumped, they started to name things: friendship, hiking, music, philosophical conversation, political organizing, writing, jumping into the ocean at night. One by one, they located the language to describe not the terrible things that might happen in the future, but the attachments and pleasures that were threatened by the possibility of these terrible things happening. This experience colored the rest of our time together. If we could not, in that room, forestall any of the potential obstacles that the students saw hovering on the horizon, we could at least learn to articulate what mattered to us in ways that made the joke’s self-abnegating cynicism impossible.
I thought about that day in the workshop when I learned Jonathan Lear had died, and not only because the essay we had read was about mourning. Jonathan was my professor in graduate school, and I can testify, as many others have already done, to the distinctive quality of personal conversation with him, including the sometimes unnerving way he forced on you the question of whether, or to what extent, you really meant what you were saying. Remarkable as this quality was in person, I think it even more remarkable that his virtues as a teacher and conversation partner were so present in his written work, whether about Aristotle or Freud, Kierkegaard or Winnicott, Plenty Coups or a joke at an academic panel. When people talk, during these challenging times for intellectual life (though I can hear Jonathan asking, when have the times not been challenging?), about what it is most important to preserve and pass on of our humanistic tradition, I often think of the way that Lear’s passionate readings in this tradition so often impelled me into a more honest, creative and critical relationship with my own intellectual life. Part of my satisfaction that day in the workshop, I think, was connected to the feeling that I was, merely by bringing this new group of students into contact with my teacher’s words, playing some small part in the long chain of transmission, as he had done for so many of his students, between the figures and ideas that mattered most to him and their own intellectual and moral lives. If the world were to end tomorrow, it’s a moment I would miss.
—Jon Baskin
Founding editor, The Point
Photo credit: Erielle Bakkum
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