Abstract
How should we mourn dead Confederate soldiers, if at all? What can Meghan Markle teach us about post-loss growth? What does healthy grief look like in the face of climate-based human extinction? In this lightning rod of a book, Jonathan Lear explores key questions about the ethics of grief from the individual to the cosmic level. Lear addresses contemporary issues such as these (and much more) with his considerable breadth of philosophical and psychoanalytic knowledge, forming a work that is discursive and diverting without losing thematic unity. Rather than being prescriptive or relegating mourning to a clinically specific concern, Imagining the End is unified by its desire to understand grief as central to human experience and culture.
Lear begins the first chapter of his book “at the end,” examining our implicit cultural attitudes toward the prospect of a climate change-induced apocalypse. He discusses the moralistic statement (variations of which are often heard in classrooms and on social media) that “we will not be missed,” showing how such expressions of fatalism represent a refusal to mourn, a negation of the good (i.e., Aristotle’s kalon, variously translated as that which is noble, beautiful, or fine) that humans have been able to realize in their time on Earth. Lear goes on to point out that we do not merely mourn the loss of the human kalon, but that the way in which we mourn its loss can be conceived of as an expression of the kalon itself.
As if climate-based extinction was not a weighty enough topic, Lear moves on the COVID-19 pandemic in Chapter 2. Drawing parallels to Freud’s reaction to World War I, Lear demonstrates that another difficulty in the mourning process is the refusal to enter into cycles of repetition. For Freud, the tragedy of World War I was not just the lives lost, but also the fact that it shattered his notion that modern culture’s scientific march toward progress was a guarantee against global catastrophe. Lear posits that Freud not only believed in civilization’s scientific march of progress, but strongly identified himself with it. At both the individual and cultural levels, the difference between mourning and melancholia is the refusal to transition from intense identification with the lost object into a cycle of creative reconstruction. Lear suggests that our reactions toward the COVID-19 pandemic may be similar, as they can reflect either a nonacceptance that life will never be the same, or a refusal to reinstantiate new forms of what has been lost in the wake of catastrophe.
In his third chapter, Lear brings us into the world of myth and personal fable, describing how both the Iliad’s King Priam and one of Lear’s elementary school teachers served as exemplars of kalon ways of behavior in the face of problems in living. Whether it is Priam’s action of humbling himself before his enemies to complete the process of grieving a dead son, or Mr. McMahon’s compassionate remonstration of the author for using bad language on a playground, Lear shows that we learn how to make transitions into new ways of being not by logical deduction, but by imitation and rehearsal of “local exemplars” of excellent action. Lear expands this principle to apply to how we “rehearse” for our own anticipated losses, be they personal or cultural. The wealth of culture is revealed as the ability to apply the process of other heroes (both personal and mythical) to our own tragedies.
Chapters 4 and 5 continue Lear’s tendency toward an eclectic balance of the whimsical and the weighty in a discussion of reinvention through repetition. How does Meghan Markle retain notions of the sacred in marriage while saying goodbye to formalistic ceremonial enactments? How do we reimagine what constitutes the “canon” of literature without descending into ideologically based exclusion? How did Lincoln strike a balance between honoring the dead writ large and at the same time affirming the supremacy of the values of the Union in the Gettysburg address? Throughout all of these examples, Lear retains an emphasis on learning from the process of each decision, rather than fixating on the content of the “right answer.”
In his final two chapters, Lear catapults his discussion of grief into the realm of the metaphysical. Chapter 6 concerns the impossibility of treating concepts like the passage of time and death as problems tractable in an empirical or pragmatic framework. Borrowing heavily from Cora Diamond’s work, Lear asserts that such issues are not just “one problem among many” but difficulties of reality itself. Rather than relying on mere philosophical jargon to make his point, Lear makes a refreshing turn toward phenomenology, expanding on Diamond’s use of a poem by Ted Hughes about the experience of viewing a photograph of deceased soldiers when they were young men. Lear’s ability to make philosophical ideas an immanent phenomenological reality peaks in this chapter, providing what is possibly the most gripping piece in the sequence. At the close of Chapter 6, Lear poses the question of how to live well in light of the intractable difficulties of reality.
Chapter 7 provides an answer to this question: gratitude. In this chapter, Lear shows how Klein and Bion’s developmental theories point us toward gratitude as a fundamental developmental phenomenon--the meeting of a need without expectation of reciprocity that allows not just satiety, but also the ability to make sense of experience itself. Lear then integrates Wittgenstein’s work to show that this principle applies not just to childhood, but that it is repeated throughout the course of life, allowing for the possibility of gratitude in the face of the gratuity of being itself. Completing his own cycle of repetition, Lear concludes that such gratitude is the only truly human way to grieve the possible demise of our species.
Some of my colleagues in clinical psychology may fault this book for its lack of reference to empirical literature on grief as a clinical issue. However, I believe that Lear’s focus on the philosophical and psychoanalytic traditions as well as the humanities is a refreshing turn from many contemporary books that base their claims to truth merely on statistical figures and the latest research. Clinicians will find none of its assertions at odds with good evidence-based practice for syndromes such as prolonged grief disorder (PGD). Indeed, Lear’s focus on oscillation between restoration-oriented coping and loss-preoccupied coping forms the theoretical foundation for one of the best-known evidence-based practices for PGD, Complicated Grief Treatment (CGT; Shear et al., 2014). Perhaps most importantly, Lear’s tonality and style invite us to examine grief phenomenologically, inviting a human approach to a truly human endeavor.
This book is also important for broader cultural reasons. Lear chooses highly polarizing contemporary issues (e.g., systemic racism, climate change, educational policy, COVID-19) as the substrate of his discussion. Throughout, he continually raises questions about how to remain true to the ideal of the kalon within each issue. However, instead of focusing on the where the kalon lies (e.g., content-based questions about which books should be included in the “canon” of literature), the author remains committed to a focus on how kalon might be realized in terms of process, i.e., how best to go about making such decisions. In a contemporary culture rife with political polarization that is obsessionally focused about what the “right” beliefs are, Lear’s writing itself is kalon, serving as an exemplar of the right process for navigating the world of belief itself. This is not just good writing and thinking--it is also a hallmark of good therapy.
