Happiness, Death, and the Remainder of Life

I wasn't really paying attention, but it didn't blow me away

The writer Lear, who discussed the principle of virtue in Aristotle with happiness, the principle of life in Freud with death, and psychoanalysis in general.

For Aristotle, the virtuous being/acting by reinforcing the principle of Divinity, philosophy, according to Freud said happiness with life, with death by explaining human nature, happiness and sorrow and being happy motivation before and taken up psychoanalysis, of melancholy revealed that the differences between similar spots. However, without being trapped between the concepts of happiness and death, Lear is a writer who focuses on questioning and thinking about the Decaying part of life.

Books in which Philosophy and Psychology come together impress me Decently. It provides both a good resource, a good starting point, as well as access to new questions and thoughts that capture the day through thought. I can say that this book is exactly of this nature. Lear makes us question with his questions how we who live in today's control society can go beyond the boundaries of our changing perceptions of happiness and life.

Brilliant psychoanalytic readings of Freud, Aristotle, and Plato demonstrating how an enigmatic outside seduces all three in into propounding metaphysics that fail to due justice to the "break", the essential human experience of having the field of possibilities disturbed. Attunement to and acceptance of this is a sort of virtue that is beyond good and evil, and may (among other things) be precisely what psychoanalysis provides a space for and why psychoanalysis cannot be reduced to an ethics, or used to supplement another ethics with explanations of unconscious motives. The break is not subject to such explanations. Happiness here appears as an event, a lucky stroke, rather than something habituation can reliably secure for us--via virtue ethics, for example. Lear exposes the fantasies and excesses in Aristotle's teleological ethics of a life considered as a whole (culminating in contemplation as the ultimate end) and Freud's late speculations on the death drive, but does not seek merely to refute these texts. The symptomatic readings use these texts to open a space to consider the place of happiness and the meaning of a good life. Lear is not propounding a new and improved Theory of Happiness, and to not give in to the temptation to do so is itself the point of the lectures.

There IS an outside to the cave. It's called the world.

Lear contrasts the overarching principles of Aristotelian happiness and Freudian death instinct as would-be explanations for all of human psychology, pointing out that they don't cover everything and that there are always exceptions or "breaks" in the narrative. This is the "remainder" in his book title.

"The answer to the question ‘What is happiness?’ [in Aristotle’s Ethics] is that it is a ‘something’ that lies outside the ethical life itself. Now the point of the ethical life is to get outside it. And given that contemplation is praised for being the most solitary and ultimate self-sufficient human activity, it is hard to resist the conclusion that, for Aristotle, the fundamental good of ethics is to get as far away from your neighbors as possible. The less you have to do with them the better! Even in the midst of ethical life, its real value, when correctly understood, is that someday it will allow you to get away from it.
* * *
According to Aristotle, the goal of all human striving is happiness; according to Freud, ‘the aim of all life is death.’ In each case, as we have seen, there is something disruptive to the system, something which the system cannot itself contain. The mistake would be to think that our task is to think of another principle that would at last capture this leftover. That would be to engage in a repetition. For it is precisely the invocation of a principle that allows the formation of a conception of a ‘beyond.’ ... So if there is such a thing as ‘living life without remainder,’ it is likely that it will be achieved not by finally finding a principle which captures that remainder, but by finding acceptable ways of living without a principle." (pp. 53, 106)

Exactly what it means to live without a principle in an acceptable manner is nearly impossible to pin down. How do we know what is acceptable thought and behavior without any principle by which to evaluate it? That is the problem. Lear writes about this in terms of "teleology," i.e. the interpretation that all or most activities are directed toward some purpose.

"By now it should be clear that there are certain structural similarities between Aristotle’s treatment of happiness and Freud’s treatment of death. Happiness and death are each invoked as the purported aim of all striving. Aristotle and Freud’s project is to grasp the totality — to say what all human striving is a striving toward. The assumption is that nothing gets left out, that a teleological organized system will explain what is important about human existence. Now each thinker, in the very activity of describing human directedness, realizes that there is something important outside of that directedness. But he tries to capture that outside in teleological terms. Aristotle begins by setting happiness as a constituent end of ethical life, but he concludes that the deepest understanding of ethical life must see it as pointing beyond itself. Thus he is led to formulate two grades of happiness: the second-rate happiness of the ethical life, and the first-rate happiness of the life that is oriented toward contemplation. It is important for Aristotle that contemplation is a higher form of activity, but from our point of view the important feature is that ethical life is directed toward a form of existence that lies outside the ethical and is in itself totally impractical. Freud begins by thinking he can capture all human striving (conscious and unconscious) in terms of the pleasure principle and its variant, the reality principle. But he too comes to realize that much of human existence lies beyond (or before) such striving: in particular, the activities of installing the various capacities to be directed and primitive attacks upon those capacities. He himself tries to install the death drive as a more general principle which will both capture the strivings of the pleasure principle and give a conceptual framework in which the ‘beyond’ of the pleasure principle can itself be seen as a bizarre sort of striving on its own. Each in his own way sees a ‘beyond’ of teleology; each in his own way is reluctant to leave teleology behind." (pp. 98-99)

He flags a tension in Aristotle: Happiness is found in living virtuously and, better yet, in examining what it means to live virtuously. Are we really happy in our lives if we are examining ourselves in a detached manner? Isn't such contemplation, a readiness to criticize and analyze our own well-being, a recipe for seeking unhappiness?

"And while it looks on the surface that ‘happiness’ is a profound organizing principle for human life, just under the surface we begin to see that its injection into life has a profoundly disturbing effect. For although it was originally deployed to show that the ethical life was a happy one, by encouraging us to think about the value of our lives taken as a whole Aristotle creates the conditions in which it is possible to formulate the fantasy of real happiness lying just outside. In this way, ‘happiness’ creates its own discontent. Now, Aristotle is too deep and honest a thinker simply to ignore this pressure, and he tries to contain it within the overall framework of his teleological system. But, as I think I have shown, it just doesn’t work. The teleological system cannot contain the expression of discontent and breaking-out which it itself generates. The question then becomes: How should we understand this discontent?" (p. 60)

This book draws on Classical resources in order to use understandings of happiness and sadness as they are communicated through the ages. Plato figures in largely throughout the text, and accepting the majority of his views is necessary in order to keep yourself from pulling out your hair. If that is something you can do, then, by all means, take a peek through these pages. The author brings the argument into Kant and tests the waters with slightly more contemporary influences, but his associations are fledgling at best.

The question "What is the purpose of our existence?" longs for an overarching principle that can encompass all human striving. But what if there isn't such a principle to human existence? What if we have to tolerate, as Lear says, a peculiar kind of anxiety, which is to tolerate life without a principle?

If you're interested in psychoanalysis and philosophy, and the question of why we desire a meaning of life, then this is a very intriguing read. Lear offers an interesting perspective on why human existence is devoid of any grand explanatory principles, and says that our task is to find acceptable ways of living without them. This is to tolerate the intrinsic anxiety that accompanies life.

According to Lear, it’s typical of humans to attribute purpose where none exists. Lear basically says that anything of meaning to us, which we inject into our lives, is a psychological structure that is inherently vulnerable to disruption because it’s always incomplete and we constantly fantasize about something more.

Lear writes, “it is constitutive of human life […] that there is an experience that there is something more to life, something left out. There is an inchoate sense that there is a remainder to life, something that is not captured in life as it is so far experienced. Thus there is pressure to construct an image of what lies outside.”

“The mistake would be to think that our task is to think of another principle that would at last capture this leftover. […] if there is such a thing as “living life without remainder,” it is likely that it will be achieved not by finally finding a principle which captures that remainder, but by finding acceptable ways of living without principle.”

Freud KO's Plato
This was the title of Richard Rorty's NYT review on this book. Well, does he do that? It depends entirely on whether you accept Lear's Freudian interpretation.
The first chapter 'Happiness' puts Aristotle's conception of happiness and teleology into question. This criticism was done pretty concisely. Lear explains how by placing the concept of Happiness and The Good in front of us Aristotle "seduces" us into falling into a constricted way of looking at life. While Aristotle pretends as if Happiness and Good are conceptions that we are already familiar with and considers to of importance, what happens is that they start occupying the central view restricting all other possibilities that may open up if we don't try to explain everything that we do based on these terms. Also, Lear points out how Aristotle after painstakingly walking us through the virtuous life, and asks us to use phronesis to aid us in this endeavor suddenly takes a turn and starts talking about the contemplative life which is the ultimate good. Lear asks what was the point of all this virtuous actions if at the end its going to be considered as second rate happiness that just aids the contemplative life. Lear sees this a a form of fantasy that Aristotle creates something akin to the 'outside' in Plato's cave allegory. A much more detailed explanation regarding these topics are given in the first chapter.

In the second chapter 'Death', Lear leans on Freud to disrupt this fantasy. He points out how Freud himself tried to use the Death drive to create a teleological narrative and explain human nature, and this is something that Lear resists. If you can wade through all the Freudianism and make peace with certain ideas, then, from this Lear draws out a disruption of this teleology. And this disruption should not be in any way filled in using any alternative or pre-existing narrative but should be left open, thus facilitating various ' acceptable ways of living' over one grand principle that orders our life. This conclusion is reached at the end of the last chapter 'The Remainder of Life', which is filled with Freudian musings on Christianity and Judaism. Lear also interprets Socrates's death and Plato's response to this through a Freudian lens.

At the end there will always be some kind of remainders left out through the disruptions that will inevitably fall on our lives narratives. We shouldn't merely explain them away but see through them possibilities that will open up in our lives, and we must learn to live and cope with them.

These were the basic ideas that stayed with me there were a lot more Freudian and Psychoanalytic ideas that I left out since I am not the biggest fan. Yet, I am not entirely dismissive of them just okay with them, and my interest for them depends entirely on it capturing my attention. Overall it was a good book.