Pedro Franco*

In a section of an episode of the second season of The White Lotus (episode 6: “Abductions”), a young lad from Essex and a Californian au pair of sorts find themselves sitting idly at a dock in sunny Sicily, drinking beer and eating ice cream. They are having a meaningful, yet unusual discussion given the superficial relationship they entertain: Portia, the Californian girl, is wondering whether her friend Jack has any “goals”, to which he responds with perplexity: what does she mean by that? Portia’s blurry conception of a life goal seems rather unsatisfactory: “Be satisfied. That’d be nice.” Her desire to be one level up is contrasted by Jack’s one-day-at-a-time kind of attitude. Jack’s carelessness is (perhaps artificially) grounded on the impossibility of controlling the future, whether one will continue to live tomorrow or not, and then the debate shifts to a fundamental disagreement about the state of the world: while Portia thinks that the world is a “fucked up place”, Jack à-la-Pangloss thinks we live in the best one possible. After all, humans live in the greatest planet in the universe, and it is a miracle that we have survived centuries of mutual destruction, he says.

Portia and Jack are not the only ones who struggle with this type of quandary. The White Lotus (especially Season 2) presents us with other characters who cannot take away from their heads the imminent and rueful end of life on this planet (and of course parodies those who can). Jonathan Lear’s most recent essay captures this momentum with stringent effect and – what is rarer in this type of essay – tries to give an answer to it; it goes all the way in the “diagnosis”, that is, the diagnosis itself is an attempt at curing the problem that is diagnosed. And this is probably due to the fact that Lear is not just an essayist or a philosopher, but also a trained and experienced psychoanalyst. Imagining the End: Mourning and Ethical Life deals with the search for meaning in the face of dreary events, events that make our life seem wholly incoherent and senseless. It proposes a kind of mourning connected with that rather undefined disposition which is gratitude and hope (the latter being a predilection of Lear’s essay topics at least ever since Radical Hope, 2006). I shall argue that the connection with gratitude, though promising, needs some qualification.

To begin with, what I find remarkable in Lear’s essay is the ability to philosophize from simple memories from his whole life, such as a joke someone told at a conference he attended not long ago or the reprehension of a teacher at school when he was ten years old. He does not limit himself to an exegetic exercise, as he takes what he considers to be Aristotle’s and Freud’s brightest insights to talk about things that matter in life – and the end of human life is no small business. Indeed, Lear’s essay opens with an important distinction between the two meanings we attribute to the word “end”: that of finality, telos, and that of termination of a sequence. For Lear, the problem is that humanity is getting closer to the end as termination of life (with issues such as the consequences of man-made climate change becoming ever more unavoidable) because we lost sight of our telos on the way – this is precisely what is suggested with the White Lotus’ characters’ dialogue just mentioned.

This is a critique that we have otherwise seen being woven by philosophers such as Alasdair MacIntyre and Charles Taylor, even though MacIntyre does not dwell on the issue of an imminent end because, for him, we are already remainders of a larger catastrophe, a moral one. Lear in turn argues that we cannot clear the end of life from our imagination because we have not been clever enough to come together and find out the best ends for human life, what is best for human flourishing, and try to act and govern accordingly, but he does hope that something can be done about it. Understandably, he writes, there is a sentiment of revolt in those who notice this state of affairs. His striking move, though, is to ask who this “we” we are talking about is, when we deem we did wrong. When I say “we”, do I realize the consequences of being a part of this we?, Lear asks. He thinks that in a Freudian way the “I” suppresses this part of the reasoning, because it leads to a suffering that is too much to handle. Hence the importance of mourning, and more than that, the importance of learning a new way to mourn: by mourning, humans find a way to get to grips with the inevitability of loss which affects them, instead of avoiding it (namely, by externalization).

This new conception of mourning has repetition at its core: not only as its source, but also as the way to learn it. In fact, picking up on Freud’s short essay “On Transience”, Lear discovers a positive meaning for repetition, something we wouldn’t expect from Freud, who considered it a form of self-disillusionment. Lear thinks that repetition in this unusual Freudian text leads to hope, a more sustainable form of fantasy-making (no depreciation intended) than the self-aggrandizing ones that WWI destroyed. Since destruction and loss are inevitable, so is this repetition of suffering and mourning, but this repetition may be lived with a sense of hope in building better next time. Importantly, it is not what Marx famously said about History repeating itself first as a tragedy and then as a farce. There is novelty in repetition, Lear argues. And so, in the face of inevitable repetition and loss, there are two possible reactions: melancholia, in which one responds with fury, and mourning, which takes in the inevitability of repetition with hope.

Obviously, we cannot snap our fingers and choose to be either in melancholia or hopeful mourning, as Lear explains, and this is where the importance of exemplars comes in – and with it, the centrality of repetition in learning (what seems to be) a virtue. Assuming that virtue is a disposition that is trained throughout life, and that the right way of mourning is a virtue (in hope and gratitude), we get that disposition from clear examples or instantiations of what that virtue is. Hence the need for people who teach us by showing instead of telling, since we learn virtues by 1) observation, 2) memory, which is repetition in the mind, along with imagination, and then 3) imitation, that is, repetition in action, in life, gaining new meanings according to the novel situation. Those persons do not need to be ultimate examples of perfection, they just have to show us a glimpse of what virtue is. So, an ethical reasoning such as “What would Mr. McMahon do?” is not as limited as one would think. A person like Mr. McMahon, Lear’s fourth grade teacher, is a (most probably unknowing) representative of the kalon, i.e., of what is admirable or noble in an Aristotelian sense. The reality of a virtuous person who acts in a kalon way entails the possibility of us becoming kalon.

Nevertheless, my problem with Lear’s argument (and one which I cannot thoroughly answer) is the apparent circularity of the kalon, of what is noble or admirable – a problem of which he is well aware and which reminds us of Euthyphro’s dilemma: are admirable people admirable because we admire them (namely through our imagination) or is it because they are in the possession of something in their character which makes them admirable? Both options can’t be right, and from this question, several others arise. What makes me capable of recognizing the kalon when I am still far from achieving a consolidated virtuous character? How or why does a child or a rascal admire a noble person? Also, it is hard to believe that the kalon in Aristotle’s society is the same as in our time, so it should not be something unchangeable and completely universal, at least in its manifestation. In other words, what makes one person or action more admirable than the other? How does the kalon shine forth strictly speaking? This is a general problem with Aristotelian Ethics and one which we will not get rid of easily. Facing this question, Lear responds (once again) with a “rigorous hope” of finding a common value among different cultures and epochs, which has consistently been distorted by succeeding forms of structural injustice. This belief reminds us of St. Paul’s speech on love (1 Cor 13:12)[1], where quite significantly hope is presented as a theological virtue, but Lear prefers to say that his spirit is rather Platonic (see end of chapter 4). For this reason, I don’t see how we can mourn without valorization, as Lear tries to suggest on chapter 5. Mourning seems to be impregnated with value. Of course, we can mourn Confederate soldiers if we focus on our shared humanity and not on the contingent “values” they represented, but apparently mourning will always be intimately tied with value – in the best-case scenario, with those Humanistic values that Lear tries to envision.

Turning now to gratitude, Lear tells us two things that are noteworthy about this disposition: there is a difference between the freedom we find in Aristotle’s description of gratitude (hence, gratuitousness) and our usual way of conceiving gratitude, which implies a retribution. As I read this distinction, I remembered theories of gift economy such as Marcel Mauss’, where the gift binds the other person in some way (it creates an “obligation of reciprocation”, in Lear’s terms), which is at the root of ideas as the Welfare State and more recently a universal basic income. Gratitude as an additional condition of eudaimonia, the good life, beyond justice (eye for eye, bottle of wine for dinner invitation if you will) seems like a very necessary point to make for those who live in market economies. Importantly, the joint recognition of generosity and gratitude (as gratuitousness) buttresses a sense of community. Secondly, Lear distinguishes gratitude as an emotion and gratitude as a more general attunement to the world, a way of living. Gratitude as emotion (as Aristotle describes it) is directed towards a concrete benefactor in a specific situation, whereas gratitude as attunement to the world is more problematic: if it is directed to the world; its output is not clear. Lear says it is in the origin of prayer and religious feeling, and perhaps, he argues, this explains Wittgenstein’s predisposition to the religious attitude in the face of Ethics’ ineffability: we cannot get rid of value in our lives even if we cannot define it or put it logically.

For all this talk, we can easily see how gratitude relates to mourning. The mourner will more easily find a healthy response to loss and suffering if he focuses on the good that was received, the gifts of who or what is now or will soon be gone as it were, and not in the hard fact of loss. Even though Lear does not mention it (he shyly mentions a religious aspect in his theory towards the end) the Catholic Catechism has a whole lot to say about this, but I will focus on what it says precisely about current ecological disasters, to stick with our example (and Lears’ in the opening of this essay): in the face of ecological imbalances and catastrophes, the believer should act in the way of caring for creation with hope and gratefulness (precisely what Lear is proposing) instead of fear (which is most dominant). We could add that the Catholic Church teaches believers to put their community before individualistic impulses, and to always focus on the past, on the inheritance, rather than solely on the future, on the end of times, because the future can only be understood under the light of the history of God’s relation with His people. It is true, if we take this reasoning to the secular world, that perhaps by focusing on the past, we can better secure our future, and that collective action is more effective than individual choices (these are indeed truisms). But is this focus on grateful memory an adequate response in the face of problems for which time is running out? Isn’t anticipated mourning (even if hopeful and grateful) a dangerous proposal in such a case, leading to inertia or defeatism, as Lear noticed in the joke he heard at that conference he attended?

The way I see it, there is a clear objection to the mourning-cum-gratitude proposal: it might discourage action too soon. We can think again about climate action. There is no possible hope for humans in a planet without human life, not even the opportunity to build back better as Freud imagined about post-war Europe. But on this occasion, I fondly remember a Jesuit friend who once answered my nervous questions about the efficaciousness of big, international climate negotiations: climate summits are doomed to be a failure, he said. “What is most important is that you stick with your community, gather around the table and share the wine.” This belief coupled with the fact that he continued to participate and talk in these climate summits and that he does not give up on his community in the climate-chastised Philippines tells me of a kind of hopeful repetition I think is promising: one which necessarily pushes us again and again to action (and not just prayer or the like), not as an obligation, but, in freedom, as a determination to protect and care for the places and the people that I love, even if against all odds (and all the better if you have a love for Humanity and the planet via the concrete persons and places that you love). So, Jack’s reason for carelessness is, on the contrary, a reason to care after all: our endeavours might work out in the end, but only if one does it not just for oneself and, of course, if and only if one bothers to try.

 [1] “Now we see but a dim reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.” (BSB)

*PhD financed by FCT (SFRH/BD/146796/2019). Programa em Teoria da Literatura da Faculdade de Letras da Universidade Lisboa. Email: pedro.franco@campus.ul.pt.

REFERÊNCIA:

Lear, Jonathan. Imagining the End: Mourning and Ethical Life. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2022.