Jonathan Lear, Local Exemplar

My guest on the show today is Jonny Thakkar. Jonny is an Assistant Professor in Political Science at Swarthmore College and one of the founding editors of The Point. He’s the author of various articles, most recently “Beyond Equality” in the newest issue of the Point, and the 2018 book Plato as Critical Theorist.

I asked Jonny on to talk about his late friend and mentor the philosopher and psychoanalyst Jonathan Lear, who was his advisor at the University of Chicago Committee on Social Thought and, as you’ll hear in our discussion, his occasional advisor on matters of the heart.

He wrote about Lear, after his death, along with a collection of other remembrances from friends and colleagues of Lear’s:

His own career path was so individual as to be impossible to emulate. Institutionally speaking, he had completed two undergraduate degrees, one in history and the other in philosophy, followed by two graduate degrees, the first a Ph.D. on Aristotle’s logic under the supervision of Saul Kripke—a prodigy in contemporary logic and metaphysics who was only eight years older than Jonathan, had no expertise in Aristotle and only ever supervised one other dissertation—and the second a professional qualification in psychoanalysis that licensed him to treat patients clinically. His philosophical interlocutors were many and various, among them Plato, Aristotle, Kierkegaard, Freud, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Williams, J. M. Coetzee and Marilynne Robinson, but he was no dilettante. He wanted to understand what it meant to be human, and he simply followed that question wherever it took him. Without end, I should add: he took up the study of ancient Hebrew in his mid-seventies because he had become so puzzled by the treatment of the prophet Balaam that he wanted to make sure he wasn’t missing anything in translation!

That ethos of constant self-development was central to what you might call Jonathan’s philosophy of life. Some people use the term “perpetual student” pejoratively; for Jonathan, being open to learning from the world was the key to human flourishing. As he told matriculating undergraduates in a 2009 address, “the aim of education is to teach us how to be students.” In the preface to Open Minded, he wrote that achieving tenure at Cambridge in his twenties freed him from professional pressures to such an extent that he was forced to confront the meaning of his own existence. “I realized that before I died, I wanted to be in intimate touch with some of the world’s greatest thinkers, with some of the deepest thoughts which humans have encountered. I wanted to think thoughts—and also to write something which mattered to me.”

We talk about Lear’s work, but also about what it means to be, or be influenced by, what Lear called a “local exemplar,” which is someone who has a profound influence on the people around him or her. An exemplar could be a real mentor in the classic sense, as Lear was for Jonny and other students of his, or a writer who affects other people just through text, which is how he functioned in my life. It could also be someone who just said or did something once or a few times that stays with us, imprints itself on us, and changes us in ways that unfold over time.

So we talk about how Lear played that role in our lives, but also about the ways in which Thakkar may be playing the role of local exemplar, as a teacher, in the lives of his students, and more generally what it is about someone, or something, that makes it capable of influencing us in these ways.

One reason we ended up in this space, I think, is that I’ve been wrestling a lot, lately, with the question of how writing does or doesn’t influence people, because I’m writing a book, on relationships and therapy, that edges into the territory of self-help, and I’ve become moderately obsessed with not replicating the mistake that so many self-help books make on this front, which is thinking that in order to help people, the thing to do is give them straightforward advice on how to do or be better.

This always seems to me like a fundamental misunderstanding of how texts change people, and in some ways an odd one to make in particular for the therapists and psychologists who write so many of these books. If anyone should understand that the human psyche is tricky and that real change tends be a product of close relationships and communal structures playing out over time, rather than advice distilled to words, it should be therapists.

Texts do change people’s lives, but it’s indirect. They’re poetic. They’re narrative. They’re allusive and elusive. They’re not precision tools to achieve a predictable outcome in readers.

Lear understood this. I asked him once if the style of his essays was deliberately looping and associative because he was trying to emulate something about the rhythms of psychoanalytic practice, and his response was surprise. I just try to write clearly, he said, and the more I think the more I believe him. I think there was something so integrated in the way he did all these things – teach, write, practice psychoanalysis – that his version of writing clearly became this thing that I perceived as indirect, and that it is because of this, in some sense, that his writing has the capacity to affect people in a way that most self-help literature doesn’t.

I didn’t know Lear well, as a person, but he had, and continues to have, a big influence on me. That’s even more the case for Jonny, as you’ll hear. I don’t think he’s for everyone, but if he might be for you, I really encourage you to pick up one of his books or find one of his essays online. I’ll drop in some links to a few of below. He was a remarkable person.

Hope you enjoy. Peace.

Jonathan Lear articles:

* “Aims of Education”

* “Inside and Outside the Republic”

* “A Case for Irony”

* “Wisdom Won from Illness” [this is actually the whole text of one of his books]

* “Transience and hope: A return to Freud in a time of pandemic”

* “Jumping from the Couch: An Essay on Phantasy and Emotional Structure”

* “Can the virtuous person exist in the modern world?”

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