Imagining the End - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Imagining the End write by Jonathan Lear. This book was released on 2022-11-15. Imagining the End available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. 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.
Radical Hope
Radical Hope - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Radical Hope write by Jonathan Lear. This book was released on 2009-06-30. Radical Hope available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Presents the story of Plenty Coups, the last great Chief of the Crow Nation. This title contains a philosophical and ethical inquiry into a people faced with the end of their way of life.
Imagining the End
Imagining the End - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Imagining the End write by Jonathan Lear. This book was released on 2022-11-15. Imagining the End available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. A Washington Post Notable Work of Nonfiction “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.” —J. M. Coetzee, Nobel Laureate A leading philosopher explores the ethics and psychology of flourishing during times of personal and collective crisis. Imagine the end of the world. Now think about the end—the purpose—of life. They’re different exercises, but in Jonathan Lear’s profound reflection on mourning and meaning, these two kinds of thinking are also connected: related ways of exploring some of our deepest questions about individual and collective values and the enigmatic nature of the good. Lear is one of the most distinctive intellectual voices in America, 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, or fail to, in a world of flux and finitude that we only weakly control. His range is on full display in Imagining the End as he explores seemingly disparate concerns to challenge how we respond to loss, crisis, and hope. He considers our bewilderment in the face of planetary catastrophe. He examines the role of the humanities in expanding our imaginative and emotional repertoire. He asks how we might live with the realization that cultures, to which we traditionally turn for solace, are themselves vulnerable. He explores 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.
Happiness, Death, and the Remainder of Life
Happiness, Death, and the Remainder of Life - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Happiness, Death, and the Remainder of Life write by Jonathan Lear. This book was released on 2002-02-15. Happiness, Death, and the Remainder of Life available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Separated by millennia, Aristotle and Sigmund Freud gave us disparate but compelling pictures of the human condition. But if, with Jonathan Lear, we scrutinize these thinkers' attempts to explain human behavior in terms of a higher principle--whether happiness or death--the pictures fall apart. Aristotle attempted to ground ethical life in human striving for happiness, yet he didn't understand what happiness is any better than we do. Happiness became an enigmatic, always unattainable, means of seducing humankind into living an ethical life. Freud fared no better when he tried to ground human striving, aggression, and destructiveness in the death drive, like Aristotle attributing purpose where none exists. Neither overarching principle can guide or govern "the remainder of life," in which our inherently disruptive unconscious moves in breaks and swerves to affect who and how we are. Lear exposes this tendency to self-disruption for what it is: an opening, an opportunity for new possibilities. His insights have profound consequences not only for analysis but for our understanding of civilization and its discontent.
A Case for Irony
A Case for Irony - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook A Case for Irony write by Jonathan Lear. This book was released on 2011-10-24. A Case for Irony available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. In 2001, Vanity Fair declared that the Age of Irony was over. Joan Didion has lamented that the United States in the era of Barack Obama has become an "irony-free zone." Jonathan Lear in his 2006 book Radical Hope looked into America’s heart to ask how might we dispose ourselves if we came to feel our way of life was coming to an end. Here, he mobilizes a squad of philosophers and a psychoanalyst to once again forge a radical way forward, by arguing that no genuinely human life is possible without irony. Becoming human should not be taken for granted, Lear writes. It is something we accomplish, something we get the hang of, and like Kierkegaard and Plato, Lear claims that irony is one of the essential tools we use to do this. For Lear and the participants in his Socratic dialogue, irony is not about being cool and detached like a player in a Woody Allen film. That, as Johannes Climacus, one of Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous authors, puts it, “is something only assistant professors assume.” Instead, it is a renewed commitment to living seriously, to experiencing every disruption that shakes us out of our habitual ways of tuning out of life, with all its vicissitudes. While many over the centuries have argued differently, Lear claims that our feelings and desires tend toward order, a structure that irony shakes us into seeing. Lear’s exchanges with his interlocutors strengthen his claims, while his experiences as a practicing psychoanalyst bring an emotionally gripping dimension to what is at stake—the psychic costs and benefits of living with irony.
