Jonathan Lear (1948–2025)

I can hardly praise this book too highly. It’s truly exceptional. A few years ago, after reading many of Plato’s dialogues, I decided to try tackling Aristotle and got the Modern Library Basic Works. But where to start? With Plato it’s fairly easy – early, then middle, then late dialogues, and beginning with those centered on Socrates’ death. And Plato’s a literary great – his art draws you into his philosophy. Aristotle’s a far harder case: his extant works are probably show more lecture notes, famously dry. And there’s no obvious point of entry or sequence of study. But concepts that are spread throughout his work are integral to an understanding of the parts and the whole.

I was at a loss until I found Lear’s book. He’s clearly spent many years contemplating Aristotle’s thought, with the result being breadth and depth of knowledge and understanding, fortuitously combined with lucidity in explication and an inspired choice of the sequence of topics. Then he adds invaluably to this by making reading suggestions at each chapter and most subheads. I followed these suggestions, so it took a while to get through the book – getting through hundreds of pages of Aristotle in the process – but Lear shines all the more when taking that approach. I highly recommend it.

This will necessarily be overly simple, but I’ll give a sense of the book’s content and flow. It starts with Aristotle’s view of man as the rational animal, having a desire to understand - the product (and reflection, more or less) of an intelligible cosmos. So this desire is integral to the nature of the cosmos. Lear very clearly explains Aristotle’s complex and nuanced causality – something pretty foreign to the modern mind but important throughout Aristotle’s thought, as is his affinity for the mean and for finding solutions through the middle of conundrums. Lear takes us through fundamental Aristotelian concepts from his Physics – the nature and structure of the physical cosmos and of time and change (critical issues in Pre-Socratic philosophy), of life (from the biological works) and the soul and mind. Then ethics and the good life (primarily from the Nicomachean Ethics and Politics), leading through the logical works (a great achievement) to the heart of the Metaphysics.

It gets dense here, but Lear’s paved the way brilliantly. This last part revolves around substance and essence; Aristotle’s God, his activity and relationship to the cosmos; the concept that all things “desire” God, however unconsciously, and are most fully actualized in pursuing this desire; and that man is most fully actualized, paradoxically, by transcending his nature (as a political and social, i.e. ethical, animal) and becoming the most God-like he can be through the contemplative life. Lear points out that some of this is conjecture on his part and varies from some common traditional understandings of the Metaphysics.

There’s much in Aristotle’s conception of God I don’t accept, and I have problems with aspects of his conceptions of the good life and the best life, along with some other things in his thought. But studying Aristotle has been richly rewarding and has given me concepts and perspectives I hadn’t even conceived of before (as with Plato). I don’t know how I would have approached Aristotle or processed much of it without Lear’s help. Perhaps the book weakens slightly at the end as Lear seems to want to tidily wrap up Aristotle’s philosophy as a self-consistent, reasonable and fairly comprehensive whole. Perhaps. But that’s a minor quibble and maybe not even a fair or accurate one. I’d have to study Aristotle longer and more deeply to better judge that. Regardless, if you’re looking for a guide to Aristotle’s philosophy, Lear’s outstanding and I imagine you could hardly find a better one than him. show less

I bought this insightful and mostly fascinating book because of another LTer's excellent review earlier this year and, rather than repeating a lot of what he said, I will mostly focus on my reactions to the book.

The author, Jonathan Lear, is both a philosopher and a psychoanalyst (nonpracticing, I believe), and he approaches Freud's key ideas primarily from a philosophical perspective. Neither an apologist for Freud nor a dismisser of him, he is not afraid to criticize Freud for ideas that show more haven't held up or weren't well thought out in the first place, but he also isn't afraid to applaud him for his innovative and creative theories. As he notes:

"It is worth reminding ourselves that the central concepts of psychoanalysis emerge as a response to human suffering. Freud listened to ordinary people who came to him in pain, and his ideas emerged from what he heard. Some of his ideas are speculative extravagances and deserve to be discarded, but the central concepts of psychoanalysis are closely tied to clinical reality. One aim of this book is to bring the reader back to clinical moments and show how theoretical ideas develop out of them. . . .

Just as a doctor probes for the hidden causes of physical diseases, so Freud took himself to be probing the unconscious for hidden meanings making the patient ill. With the benefit of hindsight, we can now see that a certain clinical brutality flows from this self-understanding. . . . It also blinds him to the profound philosophical and ethical significance of his discoveries. Another aim of this book is to bring this significance to light." pp. 9-10

In successive chapters, Lear explores Freud's ideas on interpreting the unconscious, sexuality, interpreting dreams, transference, mental functioning, the structure of the psyche, and morality and religion. I found the first chapters the most compelling, the ones in which Lear discusses the ideas at the heart of psychoanalysis, and the later ones, in which Lear discusses and mostly criticizes Freud's broader theories, less interesting. It was fascinating to learn about how anxiety can prevent us from examining our true motivations, how many of our strategies for avoiding troubling ideas extend back into childhood, how astoundingly complex many of the associations from our dreams can be, how we can repeat behaviors without realizing we're repeating them, and much more. I also liked the way Lear describes some of the people Freud treated (always acknowledging that he relied on Freud's notes, not on knowing the people himself), focusing on how they presented themselves in the clinical setting.

I was also interested in the way Lear brings in philosophical concepts, including those of ethics and freedom, and the way he illustrates how philosophers such as Socrates thought of the psyche. I know a little more about psychiatry than I do about philosophy (about which I know almost nothing) and I found Lear's philosophical discussions fascinating.

Unfortunately, I stopped reading this book for several weeks in the middle of it, and so some of the most interesting material isn't fresh in my mind. But for the most part I found it well-written, intriguing, compassionate, and perceptive.

As Lear notes in his conclusion:

"The aim of psychoanalysis is not to promote homogenization of the soul but to establish active communication between what hitherto had been disparate and warring parts. These lines of communication serve a bridging function -- uniting the psyche by bringing its different voices into an common conversation. Conflicts will still arise. It is a condition of life itself that the psyche will never be a conflict-free zone. But when they do arise, they will be experienced as conflicts -- rather than in some disguise. . . . .

Plato, who did so much to bring philosophy to life, was ever wary of the myriad ways it could go dead. . . . Philosophy, he said, was not so much a matter of acquiring beliefs as of turning the soul away from fantasy and towards reality. It seems to me that Freud -- whatever mistakes he made, whatever warts he showed -- made a significant and lasting contribution to our understanding of what soul-turning might be." pp. 222-223 show less

Psychoanalysis is in essence a cure through love. -Sigmund Freud, Letter to Carl Jung, 1906

Surely the work of [[Sigmund Freud]] isn’t relevant anymore, or, at least, has been surpassed and corrected by newer psychoanalysts and others? Surely Freud was mostly wrong about the human psyche and its attendant neuroses and psychoses? And surely Freud, writing during the transitional period from the nineteenth to twentieth centuries, lacked the necessary scientific insights into the brain and the show more mind to make the astounding claims he did?

Well, yes and no, according to Jonathan Lear in his wonderful introduction to Freud. According to Lear, Freud is definitely still relevant today, despite advances made in psychoanalysis and “corrections” to his theories. (I put “corrections” in quotation marks, as many of the later emendations of Freud’s work have themselves been of dubious value). Freud, although not the first researcher into the human psyche, was a pioneer, and pioneers often make mistakes. Despite these missteps, Freud provided (and still provides) useful grist to the psychoanalytic mill; his definitions are still widely used (though often misunderstood), and his insights are valued by many working in the fields of mental illness. And, despite not having access to MRI scanners and whatnot, Freud was still able to come to insightful conclusions concerning the human mind. Not all of his insights were correct; it would be quite surprising if they were. Yet Freud provided a useful base-camp for further explorations into the human mind.

Lear doesn’t set out to write an apologetics for Freud, and neither do I. Lear is very critical of some of Freud’s ideas, including the much-maligned Oedipus complex and Freud’s view of the psyche as sometimes (for example, when causing neuroses) consisting of more than one “mind” (Freud doesn’t mean multiple personalities, but the way that the unconscious can sometimes seem to oppose the conscious mind). Lear’s remit is to write a philosophical introduction to Freud (the book is, after all, part of the Routledge Philosophers series). That being the case, Lear focusses a lot on the philosophical implications of Freud’s work, especially as concerns philosophy of mind, but also Freud’s thoughts on issues of religion and morality. Lear makes generous use of Freud’s writings, especially his case histories (Dora, the Rat Man, Elizabeth von R are all here), which anchors the philosophical discussions in real-life examples. Lear is careful to make clear that he did not have access to these persons (they are all long dead), only Freud’s case histories, so his conclusions are only tentative conjectures. That said, many of these discussions seem very convincing to me as a layperson who knows quite a bit about philosophy, but not about psychoanalysis.

The first section is concerned with the unconscious and how Freud defines this. I’ve already mentioned Lear’s main criticism of Freud’s theory of the unconscious, but Lear also has many positive things to say about Freud’s theory, praising, for example, Freud’s insight that the unconscious is “timeless”, i.e. it reaches back into childhood (for example) and is not fundamentally bound by contemporary or momentary issues and problems. Lear then goes on to discuss the prominence of sexuality in Freudian psychoanalysis, making the important point that, for Freud, “sexuality” encompassed far more than merely one’s sex life. It is, in fact, closer to the Greek / Platonic idea of Eros, which Freud saw as a basic drive of life (i.e. it is more than an animal instinct).

One of the most interesting sections is the one on Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams. Lear notes that Freud seemed to view this as his most important book, one which he was constantly emendating and enlarging. Lear also notes that, in contrast to what most people think, Freud wasn’t particularly interested in dream symbols (e.g. why do we dream about our teeth falling out so often?). To quote Lear:

“Freud is primarily concerned not with the interpretation of dreams, but the self-interpretation of dreamers. It is for the dreamers to say what their dreams mean, and they do this by explaining (to themselves) how the dream fits into their lives as a whole and why it matters.”

Lear then goes on to more abstruse Freudian concepts, such as transference, the principles of mental functioning (including the pleasure and reality principles, as well as the death drive) and the structure of the psyche. I won't try to go into these concepts, as they are quite involved, despite Lear explaining them concisely. The final section on morality and religion, however, requires some comment. Lear views Freud’s comments on morality and religion as problematic. Freud dismisses morality and religion for various reasons, all of which Lear questions. Lear does not, however, question them because of any religious or moral bias on his part. Rather, he notes that Freud was not widely-read in the philosophical tradition, and therefore does not realise how weak most of his arguments concerning both religion and morality are. The arguments, which boil down to a reductionist view of morality and religion arising in a Darwinian fashion, are convincing on the surface, but a little digging reveals their weaknesses. This is not to claim that atheism and amorality are necessarily ill-conceived, just that Freud’s arguments for them are.

This was a great introduction to the philosophical concepts that underpin psychoanalysis. Lear is very insightful and an interesting writer, and he certainly “brought Freud back from the dead”, at least for me. show less

A very good book about Aristotle—maybe not as an introduction, but if you know a bit about him, this is a wonderful read. The final paragraph encapsulates the essence of the matter: "Man's innate need for understanding drives him onward through a lifetime of exploration and experience, ultimately leading him to recognize his true nature."