Copyright Chicago Tribune
Jonathan Lear was a longtime University of Chicago philosophy professor and psychoanalyst whose areas of study encompassed figures from Aristotle to Sigmund Freud and love, suffering, death and hope. “He was interested very much in using psychoanalysis and philosophy to think about what it means to flourish as a human being, but he also lived what he thought about and wrote about,” said Kay Long, a professor of psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine and a onetime classmate of Lear’s. “He was a man who was flourishing in the sense of being so warmly, openly curious about others, and he was full of good ideas but he also was very interested in other people’s ideas.” Lear, 76, died of complications from abdominal cancer on Sept. 22 at his home, said his wife of 22 years, U. of C. philosophy professor Gabriel Richardson Lear. He had been a longtime Hyde Park resident. Born in New York City in 1948, Lear moved with his family to West Hartford, Connecticut, when he was a boy. Lear graduated from Conard High School in West Hartford and earned a bachelor’s degree in history from Yale University in 1970. Lear won a fellowship to study at Clare College at the University of Cambridge in England, where he earned degrees in 1973 and 1976. “That was really a turning point in his life,” Lear’s wife said. “While there, he decided to do philosophy and I know that in the beginning he was interested in logic and the philosophy of language.” Upon returning to the U.S., Lear enrolled at Rockefeller University in New York City, where he worked with noted analytic philosopher Saul Kripke and earned a Ph.D. in 1978. He returned to Cambridge on a research fellowship at Trinity Hall and then taught at Yale University, in part to be near his ailing father, before returning once again to Cambridge, this time as a fellow of Clare College and a lecturer on the philosophy faculty. Upon Lear’s father’s death in 1978, his father’s cousin, famed TV producer and writer Norman Lear, paid for Lear to see a psychoanalyst. That experience eventually prompted Lear to train as a psychoanalyst at the Western New England Institute for Psychoanalysis; in addition to being an academic, Lear saw patients in his office for the rest of his life. In 1996, the U. of C. recruited Lear to leave Yale to join the faculty of the philosophy department’s Committee on Social Thought, a U. of C. interdisciplinary committee that grants Ph.D.s. “Depth of thought has no obvious measure; one knows it when one experiences it, and I came to admire greatly the seriousness with which Jonathan took our discussions of students and candidate material, and the probing, and often unusual, original kinds of questions he posed for anyone,” said U. of C. philosophy professor Robert Pippin, who was chair of the Committee on Social Thought when it hired Lear in 1996. “I learned a great deal from him in those discussions, as well as from sitting in on his courses, teaching Freud and Nietzsche with him, and from attending his lectures. He was also great company… both a thoughtful interlocutor and rollicking good fun, full of wonderful anecdotes, warmly appreciative of good stories and wisely tolerant of the frailties of others. He never took himself too seriously (and) always treated his students as equals.” Amy Levine, who earned a Ph.D. from the U. of C. in philosophy in 2024, had Lear as her doctoral adviser. She recalled taking his course on psychoanalysis and philosophy. “As an adviser, Jonathan was tough and honest, but unfailingly supportive and kind,” Levine said. “He waited patiently as I tried to find a way to write philosophically about something that I cared deeply about, and encouraged me to work to say what I meant, rather than to settle for something I could say. His honesty and authenticity — even frankness or uninhibitedness — stand out to me as what made him truly remarkable as a philosopher and adviser. He wrote about the value of holding oneself to enigmatic ideals, to be open to discovering the meaning of what one aims at in the striving. At the same time, as he held himself, his students (and) philosophy to standards that were difficult to meet, that I fell short of continuously, he was the biggest cheerleader for everyone who shared his world, about everything.” Lear’s early writings were devoted to Aristotle and logic, including the 1980 book “Aristotle and Logical Theory” and “Aristotle: The Desire to Understand,” which was published in 1988. Lear’s involvement with psychoanalysis sparked a greater interest in Freud, whom much of academia has dismissed. Lear, however, found himself intrigued by Freud’s understanding of the depths of the mind and soul — an understanding for which he felt Freud had seldom received credit. “He knew … that working seriously on Freud would set him apart from mainstream philosophy, but he simply didn’t care,” Pippin said. Lear’s defense of Freud centered on what he felt were “three related elements whose significance we have only begun to understand: a science of subjectivity; the discovery of an archaic form of mental functioning; (and) the positing of Love as a basic force in nature,” he wrote in his 1990 book, “Love and Its Place in Nature: A Philosophical Interpretation of Freudian Psychoanalysis.” “Psychoanalysis, Freud once said, is a cure through love,” Lear wrote. “On the manifest level, Freud meant that psychoanalytic therapy requires the analysand’s emotional engagement with the analyst and the analyst’s empathic understanding of his patient. But the latent content of this remark, which Freud only gradually discovered, and then through a glass darkly, is that psychoanalysis in its essence promotes individuation. In that sense, psychoanalysis is itself a manifestation of love. And the emergence of psychoanalysis onto the human scene must, from this perspective, be part of love’s developmental history.” Other works Lear penned include “Freud,” a 2005 introduction to the famed psychiatrist’s work, and “Happiness, Death and the Remainder of Life,” a 2000 examination of Aristotle and Freud’s respective attempts to explain human behavior through the lenses of each thinker’s higher principles, whether happiness or death. Lear also authored the 2006 book “Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation,” about the Crow Nation, a Native American tribe in the Western U.S., and the ethical questions surrounding the loss of their culture after the tribe — once a hunting nation — was pressured by white settlements to cede vast ranges of the U.S. and enter a reservation in the late 1800s. Pippin called “Radical Hope “one of the most important books of the second half of the 20th century.” Colorado College philosophy professor John Riker labeled Lear “simply brilliant” with “a gift for prose that is rare in both philosophy and psychoanalysis.” “His ‘Love and Its Place in Nature’ remains the best book ever written on Freud,” Riker said. “And his ‘Happiness, Death and the Remainder of Life’ is a compelling analysis of how the concept of the unconscious negates all attempts to construct a vision of human life that seeks wholeness or completion. His ‘Radical Hope’ is a groundbreaking work in both philosophy and psychoanalysis. I teach all these books as they are the best intersections of philosophy and psychoanalysis that are available.” Alaka Wali, a former curator of American anthropology at the Field Museum of Natural History, came to know Lear amid workshops in the mid-2010s on the changing relationships between the Field Museum and Native Americans. She recalled Lear’s “generosity of spirit and his enthusiasm for creating spaces of dialogue that brought academic and non-academic knowledge generators together.” “He demonstrated deep respect for people from different worlds than his own,” Wali said. “(The Crow people’s) trust in him enabled us at the Field Museum to build our relationship with them and co-organize the joint exhibit ‘Apsaalooke Women and Warriors,’ the first exhibit at the Field Museum curated by a Native American. (He was) an inspiration for what a true intellectual should be — open, generous, passionate and compassionate.” Lear’s final book, “Imagining the End: Mourning and Ethical Life,” was published in 2022 and analyzes people’s thoughts about the end of the world and their ability or inability to mourn what they have lost. The book explores everything from gallows humor about global warming to moral exemplars to how humans respond to the notion that cultures are vulnerable. Lear never retired. A first marriage to Cynthia Farrar ended in divorce. In addition to his wife, Lear is survived by a son, Samuel; a daughter, Sophia; and a sister, Judith. A memorial service is being planned. Bob Goldsborough is a freelance reporter.
