Happiness, death, and the remainder of life

Bibliographic Information

Happiness, death, and the remainder of life

Jonathan Lear

(The Tanner lectures on human values)

Harvard University Press, 2000

Available at  / 13 libraries

Search this Book/Journal

Note

Includes index

Description and Table of Contents

Description

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 behaviour in terms of a higher principle - whether happiness or death - the pictures fall apart. Aristotle attempted to gound 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.

by "Nielsen BookData"

Related Books: 1-1 of 1

Details

  • NCID
    BA48808442
  • ISBN
    • 0674003292
  • Country Code
    us
  • Title Language Code
    eng
  • Text Language Code
    eng
  • Place of Publication
    Cambridge, Mass.
  • Pages/Volumes
    189 p.
  • Size
    22 cm
  • Classification
  • Parent Bibliography ID
Page Top