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Wisdom Won from Illness: Essays in Philosophy and Psychoanalysis
Wisdom Won from Illness brings into conversation two fields of humane inquiry―psychoanalysis and moral philosophy―that seem to have little to say to each other but which, taken together, form a basis for engaged ethical thought about how to live.
Jonathan Lear begins by looking to the ancient Greek philosophers for insight into what constitutes the life well lived. Socrates said the human psyche should be ruled by reason, and much philosophy as well as psychology hangs on what he meant. For Aristotle, reason organized and presided over the harmonious soul; a wise person is someone capable of a full, happy, and healthy existence. Freud, plumbing the depths of unconscious desires and pre-linguistic thoughts, revealed just how unharmonious the psyche could be. Attuned to the stresses of modern existence, he investigated the myriad ways people fall ill and fail to thrive. Yet he inherited from Plato and Aristotle a key that the irrational part of the soul is not simply opposed to reason. It is a different manner of a creative intelligence that distorts what it seeks to understand.
Can reason absorb the psyche’s nonrational elements into a whole conception of the flourishing, fully realized human being? Without a good answer to that question, Lear says, philosophy is cut from its moorings in human life. Wisdom Won from Illness illuminates the role of literature in shaping ethical thought about nonrational aspects of the mind, offering rich readings of Shakespeare, Kierkegaard, J. M. Coetzee, Marilynne Robinson, and others.
Jonathan Lear begins by looking to the ancient Greek philosophers for insight into what constitutes the life well lived. Socrates said the human psyche should be ruled by reason, and much philosophy as well as psychology hangs on what he meant. For Aristotle, reason organized and presided over the harmonious soul; a wise person is someone capable of a full, happy, and healthy existence. Freud, plumbing the depths of unconscious desires and pre-linguistic thoughts, revealed just how unharmonious the psyche could be. Attuned to the stresses of modern existence, he investigated the myriad ways people fall ill and fail to thrive. Yet he inherited from Plato and Aristotle a key that the irrational part of the soul is not simply opposed to reason. It is a different manner of a creative intelligence that distorts what it seeks to understand.
Can reason absorb the psyche’s nonrational elements into a whole conception of the flourishing, fully realized human being? Without a good answer to that question, Lear says, philosophy is cut from its moorings in human life. Wisdom Won from Illness illuminates the role of literature in shaping ethical thought about nonrational aspects of the mind, offering rich readings of Shakespeare, Kierkegaard, J. M. Coetzee, Marilynne Robinson, and others.
- GenresPhilosophyPsychology
344 pages, Hardcover
Published January 2, 2017
About the author
Jonathan Lear
30 books78 followersJonathan Lear is an American philosopher and psychoanalyst. He is the John U. Nef Distinguished Service Professor in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago and served as the Roman Family Director of the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society from 2014 to 2022.
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January 13, 2025
This wasn’t the sort of book I was anticipating or looking for. I was directed here by a suggestion that getting into this contemporary thinker of Freud would benefit my work. I’ve read Lear’s introduction to Freud (which was okay; I prefer Richard Wollheim’s and Sebastian Gardner’s over his) a while ago already and thought that in this collection of essays, Lear might add detail to his account of Freud’s conception of mind as he did there. He does not. The essays are sometimes very loosely related, or not at all, and those which deal with psychoanalytic theory proceed in the fashion of just assuming certain general tenets of psychoanalysis (e.g., unconscious fantasies are the psychologically real entities which explain apparently irrational behavior; we often undergo ‘transference’ which consists of literally just seeing a present person in terms of a particular other person)—rather then critically engaging with them or trying to find the more specific or literal claims which are more likely to be true which are suggested by these vague claims.
The bulk of most of his essays consist in not critical engagement, but rather in giving details of case studies which are supposed to support these vague claims (but which are usually under-determined regarding offering that support), quoting or interpreting passages in works of fiction which appear to be related to these claims, or exploring relations between these claims and comparable ones found in either Plato or Aristotle.
These “exploratory” essays are usually framed under certain ethical questions, like how can wild romantic love be reconciled with stable commitment in marriage; how to make sense of Plato’s claims about education and moral development in light of psychoanalytic ideas; or does psychoanalytic therapy aim at curing a person, and if so, what is that supposed to look like. For readers interested in ethics, this anthology might be appealing or meaningful. But if you’re looking for insights about nature of mind afforded by psychoanalytic theory, you won’t find that here.
There were at least two thought-provoking points going through this anthology raised for me. In essay 1 “Wisdom won from illness” Lear points out that when a person is apparently irrational, often (prior to being enlightened by psychoanalytic theory) we’d posit a particular belief and say the person is unconscious of having this belief, in explaining this behavior. Lear claims that it is not particular unconscious beliefs which are psychologically real, but rather unconscious “fantasies.” He says a few things about fantasies in defining them: they shape your perceptual experiences and beliefs systematically; they could be summed in sentences like “I am inferior” or “Women are unreliable.”
This raises the question of what sorts of person-level mental phenomena could be appealed to as key to explaining irrational behavior, which is opaque to the subject. This chapter shows there are two options, at least: particular beliefs or fantasies. What are others? Or phrased alternatively, what ways are there of conceiving of the structure, form, or dynamics of mental phenomena we typically call “belief or “fantasy”? It doesn’t occur to Lear to ask either question. It’s odd because his description of a fantasy makes it not distinguishable from the commonplace notion of a dispositional (particular) belief, but clearly he wants to rule out that option.
Second, in two of the essays, Lear gets into his previous work on existential and ethical issues surrounding the notion of ways of life (as in his book Radical Hope). A lived world depends upon one’s capacity to continue on with certain practices which manifest one’s values and ideological beliefs. For example, the world of a philosophy student would be lost if that student suddenly lost their access to all reading or writing implements and had no dialogue partners. Lear wants to define the sort of freedom which is supposed to be the teleological aim of psychoanalytic therapy in light of this proposition. Freedom is a matter of being able to see the actual values and beliefs in one’s heart which shape their lived world, such that one can be psychically integrated again. This is odd. It brings out a critique which is often made of Heidegger: it is very conservative. Freedom is no longer a matter of creativity and progress, but is rather a matter of affirming what is already there. I wonder if this view is actually built into most psychoanalytic theory, or whether its tenets about the structure of the mind imply this view. I don’t think they do.
The cleavage between the unconscious and conscious, to my understanding, rather suggests that the mind is potent for one’s creating and changing one’s values; with two “parts” of the mind, we get a scenario not unlike two dialogue partners or two different interest groups, so there can be creative foment between them. This seems to go nicely with Sartre’s conception of freedom, which strikingly contrasts Heidegger’s: freedom is a matter of changing one’s values. I’d reckon that a more precise understanding of the structure of mind, which is suggested but occluded by the vague claims of psychoanalytic theory, could illuminate a more precise understanding of the sort of freedom Sartre put his finger on. Pursuing this line of thought is an attractive prospect.
The bulk of most of his essays consist in not critical engagement, but rather in giving details of case studies which are supposed to support these vague claims (but which are usually under-determined regarding offering that support), quoting or interpreting passages in works of fiction which appear to be related to these claims, or exploring relations between these claims and comparable ones found in either Plato or Aristotle.
These “exploratory” essays are usually framed under certain ethical questions, like how can wild romantic love be reconciled with stable commitment in marriage; how to make sense of Plato’s claims about education and moral development in light of psychoanalytic ideas; or does psychoanalytic therapy aim at curing a person, and if so, what is that supposed to look like. For readers interested in ethics, this anthology might be appealing or meaningful. But if you’re looking for insights about nature of mind afforded by psychoanalytic theory, you won’t find that here.
There were at least two thought-provoking points going through this anthology raised for me. In essay 1 “Wisdom won from illness” Lear points out that when a person is apparently irrational, often (prior to being enlightened by psychoanalytic theory) we’d posit a particular belief and say the person is unconscious of having this belief, in explaining this behavior. Lear claims that it is not particular unconscious beliefs which are psychologically real, but rather unconscious “fantasies.” He says a few things about fantasies in defining them: they shape your perceptual experiences and beliefs systematically; they could be summed in sentences like “I am inferior” or “Women are unreliable.”
This raises the question of what sorts of person-level mental phenomena could be appealed to as key to explaining irrational behavior, which is opaque to the subject. This chapter shows there are two options, at least: particular beliefs or fantasies. What are others? Or phrased alternatively, what ways are there of conceiving of the structure, form, or dynamics of mental phenomena we typically call “belief or “fantasy”? It doesn’t occur to Lear to ask either question. It’s odd because his description of a fantasy makes it not distinguishable from the commonplace notion of a dispositional (particular) belief, but clearly he wants to rule out that option.
Second, in two of the essays, Lear gets into his previous work on existential and ethical issues surrounding the notion of ways of life (as in his book Radical Hope). A lived world depends upon one’s capacity to continue on with certain practices which manifest one’s values and ideological beliefs. For example, the world of a philosophy student would be lost if that student suddenly lost their access to all reading or writing implements and had no dialogue partners. Lear wants to define the sort of freedom which is supposed to be the teleological aim of psychoanalytic therapy in light of this proposition. Freedom is a matter of being able to see the actual values and beliefs in one’s heart which shape their lived world, such that one can be psychically integrated again. This is odd. It brings out a critique which is often made of Heidegger: it is very conservative. Freedom is no longer a matter of creativity and progress, but is rather a matter of affirming what is already there. I wonder if this view is actually built into most psychoanalytic theory, or whether its tenets about the structure of the mind imply this view. I don’t think they do.
The cleavage between the unconscious and conscious, to my understanding, rather suggests that the mind is potent for one’s creating and changing one’s values; with two “parts” of the mind, we get a scenario not unlike two dialogue partners or two different interest groups, so there can be creative foment between them. This seems to go nicely with Sartre’s conception of freedom, which strikingly contrasts Heidegger’s: freedom is a matter of changing one’s values. I’d reckon that a more precise understanding of the structure of mind, which is suggested but occluded by the vague claims of psychoanalytic theory, could illuminate a more precise understanding of the sort of freedom Sartre put his finger on. Pursuing this line of thought is an attractive prospect.
Displaying 1 of 1 review