Happiness, Death, and the Remainder of Life / Jonathan Lear.
Lear, Jonathan, author.
2009
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Title Happiness, Death, and the Remainder of Life / Jonathan Lear.
Author Lear, Jonathan, author.
ISBN 9780674040038
DOI https://doi.org/10.4159/9780674040038
Published Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, [2009]
Copyright ©2002
Language English
Language Note In English.
Description 1 online resource (204 p.)
Item Number 10.4159/9780674040038 doi
Summary 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.
Access Note Access limited to authorized users.
System Details Note Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.
Digital File Characteristics text file PDF
Source of Description Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 01. Dez 2022)
Series Tanner lectures on human values : 31
In Harvard University Press eBook Package Backlist 2000-2013
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Record Appears in Online Resources > Ebooks
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Frontmatter
CONTENTS
1. Happiness
2. Death
3. The Remainder of Life
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index

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