Imagining The End (mourning And Ethical Life)

By (author) Lear Jonathan
Short description/annotation:
Jonathan Lear’s insightful meditation joins the end of the world to the end—that is, the purpose—of living. How to persist in the face of planetary catastrophe and the realization that even cultures can die? Lear sees in mourning an avenue of thriving and turns to a handful of moral exemplars to refine our sense of the good we can yet achieve.
Description:

A Washington Post Notable Work of Nonfiction
A Chronicle of Higher Education Best Scholarly Book

“A deeply insightful and thought-enriching work by one of the most original philosophers writing today. Imagining the End is acutely aware of the danger we stand in of finding ourselves on an uninhabitable planet. But Lear is also aware of how the consciousness of impending loss can bring out the illumination inherent in meaningful life, often occluded in day-to-day living.”
–Charles Taylor, author of A Secular Age

“Lear is a lovely and subtle writer, someone who has a rare capacity to introduce ways of seeing and interrogating the world that dignify our confusion and pain while also opening up new possibilities for moving forward.”–Daniel Oppenheimer, Washington Post

The range of Jonathan Lear’s abilities—as a philosopher and psychoanalyst who draws from ancient and modern thought, personal history, and everyday experience to help us think about how we can flourish in a world of flux and finitude—is on full display in Imagining the End. Lear masterfully explores how we respond to loss, crisis, and hope, considering our bewilderment in the face of planetary catastrophe. He examines the role of the humanities in expanding our imaginative and emotional repertoire.

How might we live, he asks, when we realize just how vulnerable the cultures to which we traditionally turn for solace might be? He addresses how mourning can help us thrive, the role of moral exemplars in shaping our sense of the good, and the place of gratitude in human life. Along the way, he touches on figures as diverse as Aristotle, Abraham Lincoln, Sigmund Freud, and the British royals Harry and Meghan. Written with Lear’s characteristic elegance, philosophical depth, and psychological perceptiveness, Imagining the End is a powerful meditation on persistence in an age of turbulence and anxiety.

Review quote:
Lear is a lovely and subtle writer, someone who has a rare capacity to introduce ways of seeing and interrogating the world that dignify our confusion and pain while also opening up new possibilities for moving forward…There are no answers in Imagining the End, or in most of Lear’s work. There are no recipes for maturity. Or plans for a stable peace in Ukraine. What his work does give us is an example of how to engage in the world with extraordinary care.
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Lear moves agilely among the ideas of such philosophers as Aristotle, Kant, and Wittgenstein while using the insights of psychoanalysis to explore the human drive to create meaning…[A] wondrous and humanizing book.
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Offers provocative reflections on flourishing in the face of existential and civilizational challenges.
Review quote:
Imagining the End suggests, in a sober yet hopeful spirit, how mourning, rightly understood, can give meaning to our lives in the disenchanted times in which we find ourselves. In exploring the hopes that have failed us, the projects that have run into the sand, the loves we have lost, the attachments that have come to an end—a work of what amounts to creative mourning—we can develop a stance in the here and how from which the psyche can look outward and flourish. As he did earlier in his explorations of what it can mean to hope, Jonathan Lear here expands and deepens our understanding of what it can mean to mourn.