Jonathan Lear, an idiosyncratic and intellectually playful philosopher who melded the ideas of ancient Greek thinkers with Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theory to explore the meaning of love, hope and loss, died on Sept. 22 at his home in Chicago. He was 76.
His death was announced by the University of Chicago, where he had taught since 1996. He had abdominal cancer, his wife, the philosopher Gabriel Richardson Lear, said.
Professor Lear defied certain scholarly norms. He championed Freud, a figure held in disregard by many in academia, and even trained to become a psychoanalyst. He studied resilience by visiting the Crow reservation in Montana — an unorthodox approach for a philosopher.
“That was Jonathan to a T,” Kay Long, a professor of psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine who studied psychoanalysis with Professor Lear, said in an interview. “He was interested in intellectual ideas, but not just as intellectual ideas. It was lived experience that he was really interested in — what it means to be human from a deeply humanistic point of view.”
Professor Lear’s early scholarship focused on classical Greek philosophy. In his books “Aristotle and Logical Theory” (1980) and “Aristotle: The Desire to Understand” (1988), he explored how the longing for knowledge provides the contours of a flourishing life.
Reading Aristotle, he was struck by the philosopher’s somewhat underappreciated descriptions of the natural world: the lives of shepherds, the hierarchy of bees, the frost that rolls in at dusk.
“What captured my imagination was not only the brilliance of his thinking, but also his commitment to life,” Professor Lear wrote in “Wisdom Won From Illness” (2017), a collection of essays. “This showed up in the meticulous detail with which he observed the natural world and the vibrant way his philosophy grew out of those observations. I wanted to imitate this way of living.”
But how?
“I’m not that interested, to be honest, in looking at the fine leaf structure or the structures of teeth of different animals,” he said in 2020 on the podcast “Five Questions.” “I wanted to do something that was actually kind of detailed and meticulous and engaged with the larger world as a way of doing philosophy.”
One day in the early 1980s, when he was teaching at the University of Cambridge in England, a colleague mentioned Freud, and Professor Lear’s mind flashed back to his father’s death a few years earlier, when he had been overcome with sorrow.
At the funeral, his father’s cousin, the TV writer and producer Norman Lear, told him, “This would be a good time to talk to somebody about your feelings.”
Professor Lear had gone to see a psychologist and found the experience therapeutic and intellectually absorbing, but hadn’t seen its connection to his own work.
Now, at the mention of Freud, the thought hit him: “What would it mean for us to have an inner world, and how would it work?” he told the University of Chicago Magazine in 2007. “What is it about a conversation that might make it therapeutic?”
The human psyche — especially the unconscious motivations and behaviors Freud sought to explore through psychoanalysis — was fertile ground for a philosopher, he realized.
While teaching at Yale in the mid-1990s, he enrolled at the Western New England Institute for Psychoanalysis in New Haven, Conn. As part of his training, he underwent his own analysis, and he began seeing patients at a nearby Department of Veterans Affairs hospital, juggling that work with his teaching.
“It was very unusual to have someone train in psychoanalysis who had no background in mental health,” Professor Long said. “But he realized that you really have to do it to know it.”
Professor Lear’s intellectual embrace of Freud put him squarely at odds with much of academia, in which psychoanalysis had become widely unfashionable. In 1995, he defended Freud in a lengthy article in The New Republic, “The Shrink Is In.”
“Freud is a deep explorer of the human condition, working in a tradition which goes back to Sophocles and which extends through Plato, Saint Augustine and Shakespeare to Proust and Nietzsche,” Professor Lear wrote.
In “Love and Its Place in Nature: A Philosophical Interpretation of Freudian Psychoanalysis” (1990), he contended that philosophers have a “tendency to investigate the structure of the human soul in isolation from any consideration of how that structure came about.”
“Psychoanalysis is itself a manifestation of love,” he wrote. “And the emergence of psychoanalysis onto the human scene must, from this perspective, be part of love’s developmental history.”
In his review for The New York Times, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt said the book “not only offers a form of spiritual nutriment for the self, it also defines that self with a clear profundity that few readers will have encountered before.”
Jonathan David Lear was born on Oct. 9, 1948, in New York City and grew up in West Hartford, Conn. His parents, Harold Lear, a urologist, and Dorothy (Stillman) Lear, divorced when he was 10.
As an undergraduate at Yale, he majored in history and helped start The New Journal, a student magazine of investigative journalism still published today. After graduating in 1970, he felt uncertain of his next steps and enrolled at the University of Cambridge to “try out philosophy,” as he later put it. He earned his doctorate in philosophy from the Rockefeller University in 1978.
Professor Lear saw patients throughout his career: artists, other professors, those who couldn’t afford to pay a fancy therapist $400 an hour. In that way, he was like the man he revered.
“Freud was willing to listen to anyone who came into his office,” he wrote in “Freud” (2005). “He listened to ordinary people and, on the basis of what he heard, he transformed our conception of the human.”
Professor Lear’s marriage to Cynthia Farrar ended in divorce. He married Gabriel Richardson, who also taught at the University of Chicago, in 2003.
In addition to her, he is survived by their son, Samuel Lear, and a daughter, Sophia Lear, from his marriage to Ms. Farrar.
Among Professor Lear’s 11 books, “Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation” (2008) was his best known. The impetus was a quote from Chief Plenty Coups, of the Crow Nation.
“When the buffalo went away, the hearts of my people fell to the ground, and they could not lift them up again,” Plenty Coups told a friend before dying in 1932. “After this, nothing happened.”
That “lodged within me and never left,” Professor Lear wrote in “Radical Hope.” “This book was motivated in significant part as an attempt to figure out why these words have mattered.”
His effort began with a call to Timothy McCleary, the dean of academics at Little Big Horn College, on the Crow reservation.
“I get a lot of calls from people from all walks of life who want information, but getting a call from a philosopher was definitely different,” Professor McCleary said in an interview.
Professor Lear flew there soon after, in the first of several long research trips.
“Jonathan was a very kind person, very humble, which is something that Crow people respect about anybody,” Professor McCleary said. “He was inquisitive and really wanted to understand.”
Professor Lear detected a unique hope among the Crow people, born of their long suffering.
“It is beyond question,” he wrote, “that the hope was a remarkable human accomplishment — in no small part because it avoided despair.”
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