Jonathan Lear was the Spinoza Professor in March and April 2016; he died on 22 September, aged 76. Obituaries have been published in many of the leading newspapers, and they all praise Lear as having been one of the most distinctive intellectual voices in America and among the most original and brilliant philosophers of his generation.

One of the reasons for his originality lies in the fact he was not only a philosopher but also a trained psychoanalyst. He brought Freud and psychoanalysis into contemporary philosophical discussion, and combined insights from psychoanalysis on the illness of the psyche with those of Aristotelean reflections on the good life – demonstrating that wisdom can be won from illness, as the title of one of his books suggests. This rare combination of philosophy and psychoanalysis is something which left its mark on all of his writings. They are characterised by a deep insight into fundamental questions of human life, and the combination of ethics, social philosophy, and psychoanalysis led him to shed new light on aspects of the human condition, obvious also in his essayistic and yet argumentative, thoughful, and convincing style of writing.

This was especially poignant in his book Radical Hope. Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation which is an analysis of the process of a culture dying, being killed and yet transforming. It is a book on and with the indigenous Crow people and their history from a free hunting people to a life forced into a reservation. Radical Hope is probably one of Lear’s most influential and broadly discussed books and keeps shaping debates about colonialism, culture and identity, and recognition, as is obvious already in the 2007 review of the book by Charles Taylor (in the NYRB).

Jonathan Lear has written many impressive books, on Freud, on Love, and, famously, on Irony; but he was also just an incredibly kind, friendly, open and approachable person. During his stay in Amsterdam, he was always willing to talk to staff and students, as well as to people from outside the university, like journalists or fellow psychoanalysts. His Spinoza lectures on The Idea of a Philosophical Anthropology (unfortunately out of print) attracted a full auditorium and stimulated many questions, on both evenings. Together with Axel Honneth, he was one of the two speakers in a workshop we organized on the problem of recognition, and Jonathan gave a paper on “The Freudian Sabbath” (which he described himself as a good mixture of Hegelian and Kierkegaardian themes as well as about Freud and psychoanalysis) which sparked a wonderfully inspiring and stimulating debate.

Jonathans last book was entitled Imagining the End: Mourning and Ethical Life (2022), and in a chapter with the title We will not be missed he argues, in the context of climate change, against giving up the idea of loss and mourning, and about their relation to meaning and hope: Mourning is a distinctively human way of responding to loss. It is a special manner of expressing grief—an insistence that what happened was not a mere change. The loss is testament to our previous attachments—love and hate, care and entanglements—and constitutes us as beings with a history, a history that continues to matter. In response to loss, we make meaning: re-creating in memory and imagination what we have lost and reanimating forms of life that might otherwise disappear. This seems to me a wondrous response to love and loss; a wonderous response to caring and finitude in general.

Those of us who met him in 2016 will miss him, as a person and as an incomporable philosophical interlocutor. And everyone might want to (re)read (in the library) his Spinoza lectures on The Idea of a Philosophical Anthropology.

Beate Roessler