05.12.07
Happiness, Death & The Remainder of Life
This is the title of a book by Jonathan Lear that I began reading again after I wrote about Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation. I first read Happiness, which evolved from The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, an award Lear received in 1999, when it was published, but I remember little from that time perhaps because Lear’s style isn’t transparent — but well worth the effort — and also because I’m getting older and older.
The name of the author is the first to go
followed obediently by the title, the plot,
the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel
which suddenly becomes one you have never read,
never even heard ofFrom Billy Collins’ “Forgetfulness”
While I’ve only just begun to reread Happiness, my sense is that it’s a dialectical investigation in which Lear examines Aristotle’s thesis that what we do for “the good” brings us happiness and Freud’s antithesis that we’re subconsciously influenced by “the death drive.” Finally, Lear arrives at a synthesis, I think, that relates to including what Lear feels has been a previously excluded middle, which is what we do with the “remainder of life.”
The idea certainly seems interesting, but I may have this all wrong, so more with updates and corrections as I read.