Session 1 24.261 Philosophy of Love in the Western World

do I look my photo photogenic best yes otherwise we can't proceed it all um this I'm Irving singer uh the course is problems no it's not that problems it's just philosophy of loveing the western world uh there are lots of problems as you'll discover and we meet between 2 to 5 on Mondays in this room anyone have any problem about the room or the date the hour okay let's stay on that uh I've handed out uh the reading list and I'll go through each of the items shortly uh but there are two uh B matters of business I want to attend to first uh I want to know about you so that we can dis discuss what you're interested in today and I can get to know you as soon as POS possible and you can get to know each other and also I distributed um something relevant to what is on the reading list for today September 13th introduction uh marriage same sex and opposite sex so I want to explain what that is it U is um an essay that I wrote couple of months ago and that is is being published next month um as part of what the Publishers call the Expanded Edition of a book of mine entitled sex a philosophical primer uh which is not on your reading list um but this is what I'm giving you is really independent uh a sex uh philosophical PR came out in 2001 there was very little about marriage um and virually nothing on um homosexuality or um sexual orientation it's a different kind of book about the in the philosophy of sex it seemed to the Publishers and I agreed with him that the reprinting of that now would be enhanced by having this essay the essay is primarily on the problem the controversy of same-sex marriage that you all know about and I was glad to put it in because it has such immediate relevance uh the rest of the book and in fact most of my writings um is uh very speculative and therefore isn't time limited it isn't time datting it doesn't have the urgency that this particular question has one of the uh things I discuss in the um essay on same-sex marriage is that hardly any philosophers in fact hardly any people ever discussed this in the past it's a very very recent uh issue not many philosophers have talked about the philosophy of sex not many philosophers in the 20th and 21st century have talked about the philosophy of Love is a great literature uh in philosophy and literat in uh creative writing literature um uh about the nature of love but very little on either sex or sexual orientation so that the what I thought that in this course instead of going in a boring chronological order uh we could very well start with the present and then work back and and forth throughout throughout the course in accordance with what you're interested in in general I would like this to be a course in what you are interested in and so as soon as uh I give you a chance um I'm eager to see what to write down on on the cards and then we can talk about that before I do that let me just say a couple of words of introduction and then I'll uh continue later on as with most of my it's all of my courses nowadays um they are expressions of my philosophical development as you as you can see I don't lecture from notes I don't prepare what I'm going to say uh one reason I can do that is because I only teach um what I'm myself working on uh MIT has been very good to me in letting me avoid bread and butter courses needed to educate the young which is a a cause I believe in but don't feel any desire to further anymore I I'm allowed to write and to teach exactly what I want so that what I do right comes out of me now there is one justification for that which is based on the nature of philosophy philosophy is not like other subjects even in the humanities philosophy doesn't have right and wrong answers the way you have in engineering if get the wrong answer the bridge falls down so you got to get the right answer there is no right and wrong answer in philosophy and I extrapolate from that by arguing in various places that there's no right and wrong answer about life or how to live life life is not like ma a mathematical problem saying that is already a radical statement in the history of philosophy because many philosophers going back to the greatest of all of us which is Plato uh thought that there was a problem in life and that if you develop reason properly and one way of developing reason properly is to master mathematics that's on the the latter that he he um describes in the Republic uh you will get the right answer and he can in intuitive he thinks so he can point you in the direction of getting the right answer to the nature of life and and it's not by chance related getting the right answer in mathematics I don't believe that uh I don't know how many people nowadays do believe it there is a rationalist way of doing philosophy uh which shows itself in uh the way that cognitive science and cognitive science philosophy have developed in the last 20 years um it's different from Plato but it's based on certain conceptions about the nature of reason and reasoning and rationality uh that are not unrelated to Plato and to the Grand tradition in Western philosophy that comes out of Plato um I don't agree with that I don't belong to that school of thought for me life is not not a problem there's no one solution um and from that I dve a view that I like others call pluralism which is that there are many solutions to where all of life's problems and living a good life means developing a solution that is acceptable to you and that you can get away with because if it's acceptable to you um if you're let's say a psychopath but not acceptable to anybody else then you're going to have troubles with rest of society so that you have to um not only be a pluralist in general but pluralist in relationship to his large gamut of interests that different individuals might have from their their own points of view so it's it's a very sophisticated kind of pluralism not because there is anyone right answer but rather because people can work out adequate solutions for themselves and they can do it well and they can do it badly where does the philosopher come into this the Philosopher's job is to help people to do it well how do you do it well one answer to that is given by the father of Socrates uh I mean the philosophical father of Socrates I mean philos of Plato the philosophical father of Plato who was Socrates Socrates never published anything we only know what others uh wrote about him and above all what Plato did so Socrates would spend his days the way I do talking and also without any notes only he did it much better and uh talking in the agura the city square of Athens to anybody who came along uh and working at problems as human problems practical problems that he being a refined thinker could analyze and help other people to analyze for themselves the principle he acted on was the job of philosophy is to help us make our ideas clear not to provide knowledge that would make it scientific which it isn't uh not to convince people of certain desirable actions that would make it propaganda or prizz um rhetor rhetoric was invented about that time and practiced by a school of people who were called philosophers but really weren't uh the the SOP the sophists were uh people who were who hired themselves out to teach um uh the elect members of the society how to become politically successful in other words they were um speech writers or logicians who help people learn how to make their ideas conveyable to to others whom they wanted to influence Socrates isn't doing that he's trying to get people to think for themselves by clarifying their ideas his point is we all know what reality is because we're immersed in it but we also have language and language means that there are ambiguities that words are hard to understand and very easy to manipulate uh and consequently what we need is someone a logician of sort that he was to help us to straight out our Thinking by clarifying our use of language now there are very various techniques that Socrates introduced and then became part of the subject that we call logic another part came in with Aristotle and later thinkers uh I won't don't want to go into that right now except to say that to prepare you for what I do um I think of myself as a disciple of Socrates Socrates said the most important question is how to live how to really to live how to exist how to have a good life how to live with other people how to live with your family he had a wife who was uh notorious as a shrew and um there's one anecdote about her throwing the U the uh garbage out the window the way they did in Athens on his head and after berading him and he said I knew that after all that Thunder there would be lightning rain no there would be light there would be rain something like that I knew that after all that Thunder there would be rain um but this is a problem that he's concerned with by getting us to clarify our ideas about what it is to be a family man to have children to have a wife in principle he doesn't tell you what conclusions to reach now as a matter of fact if you study the dialogues that are called Socratic dialogues that Plato wrote down uh sacares pretty pretty well knows where he is going and often leads the uh the audience so to speak to get to the conclusions that he has in mind and sometimes it's disingenuous and there are all sorts of uh questions one might have about the ultimate honesty of everything Socrates did but in principle the idea was to help people to make their ideas clear because they all knew what reality was what they didn't know was how to deal with it given the language we use and the confusions that we as human beings get into all the time in modern psychology this is this is a truism that U for all sorts of Social and individual reasons we perceive differently uh we um use languages differently we can reach conclusions and that it's a matter of what's going on in US rather than what's going on in reality and so the job of the scientist is to work at the structure of these confusions and the job of the philosophy of the socratic sword is to help us to clarify our minds given our inclination to have these uh confusions that's what I will be doing with you uh that's what I do with all of the 20 books that are listed in that that front matter that I gave to to you it's an attempt to work out problems that I face as a thinker not it's not autobiographical it's not confessional but it all comes out of me and it comes out of my life and if somebody knows the uh the the clues the uh code he can derive a good deal of my personal life but that's not what I write about and that's not what I'm interested in disclosing I I have this past summer written the volume of Memoirs that's all about me but that's not philosophy in the philosophy it's something very different uh it is personal it doesn't purport to be scientific or to have any kind of mathematical certitude but it's it it might help some people might not I think of art as as sorry I think of philosophy as an art form comparable to to poetry or music it's a conceptual art form to to practice it you need two ingredients one of which is to be very highly trained in logic history of philosophy academic uh subjects of the sort that you have to study as a graduate student as I was at Harvard and Oxford um and um that as a graduate student you have to excel in enough so that you can get a PhD and you need the PHD as a union card so that what the people who don't have this kind of rational preparation are filtered out automatically they don't get the union card and so you know it's as if they are astrologers instead of astronomers um and I think that is important it it's not simply a question of talking about feelings that everybody has and life what is it in some abstract General maybe popularized way uh first need is to talk about it in a highly refined highly trained way based upon reason of a special sort that can be taught in other other courses that in this department and in every philosophy Department in America uh they teach you that more more explicitly than I do my hope is that you'll pick it up from me and uh in writing your papers uh it will show the development of that I don't presuppose any philosophy courses any preparation at all so don't feel uh embarrassed if you say oh but I haven't ever studied logic uh you don't need it uh the second the second thing is that is uh what what it is that makes philosophy into an art form at least My Philosophy um and that is the uh the fact that there is something about the nature of the Fine Arts the the humanities in general uh that lends itself concerning about what life is in general I have to I want to refine that one little bit more when I say Humanities I really mean humanistic subjects because there is some subjects that are called Humanities and are Humanities like um um the study of um syntax or the study of um Greek um Greek uh forms of poetry just the forms they belong to Humanities but they're not necessarily humanistic they can be done in a very technical way that doesn't throw much life on light on what human existence and human interest and human beings are like the humanistic attitude which is more often in the humanities but are only a part of humanities uh the humanistic attitude is concerned with the socratic questions about how to live now this is what is done by all of the Arts in their own ways the Arts too of course have two divisions you can't doic music uh just by humming any tune you have to learn how to um deal with scales you have to learn a great deal of technical information I was about to say you have to learn how to read music uh but there' have been great musicians uh luchano Pavarotti for instance the famous opera tener who never learned he's never learned how to read music uh he's still a great tenor um and Irving Berlin who uh the songwriter you probably heard of um he never learned how to read music he would improvise on a special piano that was made for him uh and Pavarotti uh listens to the to to the um Aras he's supposed to sing and learns them but he doesn't read the music that's fine if it works nevertheless there in there are all sorts of technical things about the nature of pitch and about the use of the voice in the case of Irving Berlin about chord structures that you have to acquire else you wouldn't be a musician at the same time there's something in music and in poetry and in painting and architecture and sculpture uh rug weaving maybe too the Panorama of Arts is much greater than most people realize uh that goes beyond the mere technique if you limit yourself to your a composer who limits himself to technique um you're not going to be a great composer you're more likely to make studies like studies for the piano uh exercises for the piano you can do that with knowledge of technique to be a great composer you really have to have a way of seeing the world a way of feeling what it is to be a human being who both sees and hears the world a way of conve conveying your musical ideas into the feelings of people who may not be musicians and in that sense conveying your own feelings all of this is humanistic rather than merely being a branch of the humanities all right the um the what you'll be reading because I you may a lot of what you read is from me but it's true of the others as well uh is are as a series of humanistic approaches to questions about the nature of love in well maybe I should stop right here um because I can talk endlessly and I do want to get to know you and um give you a chance to make out your cards oh you have the cards Could you um could you follow these instructions first put your last name first no no I'm sorry first put uh philosophy of love and then after that 24 261 and after that uh fall 2004 on the next line your last last name um written or printed so I can read it easily comma and then your first name and after that parenthesis what no don't we don't put down the parenthesis yet any nickname by which you want to be called if you have one otherwise if you don't want one don't put it down I can't see you uh should you um change because I tend to look to the left for some reason um all right after that write your year with a number at MIT or anywhere wherever you are 1 2 3 4 whatever you're all undergraduates I assume all right 1 2 3 4 or five um if um you're not at MIT uh write um you're at brandise so write brandise you prefer being there rather than here uh where where if you were here I'd see you more easily okay um you have to bring your own chair um I under that write not the uh number but the words to describe your major electrical engineering or computer science or philosophy I gather um whatever it is you ready uh under that write your local address if it's like fraternity or or um dormatory or if it's not the street address that you live in any place where you can get mail that I may be sending to you like your papers under that right um your telephone numbers in order of accessibility I mean you some of you work in the lab and do one thing and another and have several phone numbers or you have cell phones as well as uh the oldfashioned kind um write all those numbers down in order of accessibility right the the one that I most likely reach you at first did anyone write down a fraternity with just the Greek letters oh you give the street address that's good um oh your email address everybody has an email address I I someday they'll throw away U Social Security numbers only use email addresses I think or you'll get one at Birth um under that any courses that you've taken that are in any way remotely related to this one so I'll get a feeling for what your preparation is but as I said you don't need any preparation to get into this course for I think that could if you could give me your cards now I'd like to get to know you why don't we start with you because I couldn't hear everything before uh so I'm an alumni from brandise I graduated last May and uh I studied philosophy there and I'm start again so I uh I graduated from Brandon nice uh I studied philosophy and European cultural studies so I'm just sitting in on this course that's fine and I've um tell me tell me your name Dimitri CR oh that's right I remember now your email message okay Demetri what um were you looking for why why are you here like well like the like the philosophical question right sure I certainly agree with you I think philosophy is about trying to get a sense of what the good life is and I think uh think love is one of the uh very powerful questions in in that and I've thought about it a lot and read hold on just one can the camera pick him up cuz his voice is very quiet I can hear you come across I can speak up and therefore the audience worldwide will be able to hear him right okay go ahead uh I was I was really taken with Plato's account of love in the Symposium in Fus and I think uh uh it's it's become something of the foundation for my thinking about ethics and and uh other things as well I elaborate more sometime later it's you didn't do graduate work at brandise did you no what did you major in philosophy and no I mean no I'm sorry no I didn't no I don't I'm you told you told me that what I meant was did you write a thesis and what did you what were you what area of philosophy were you concentrating in um it would be difficult to exactly pin it down to some subject like philosophy of language but the the thesis was called Eros and language Eros and language that's interesting and I was looking at this tension between uh in German it's her Faron and leness maybe you know this distinction but it's a it's a or or maybe in the way you put it in your essay it's a erotic love versus marriage which is kind of a a social versus math uh marriage marriage I'm sorry which is kind of a social conception of Love or political love uhhuh um do you want to explain the German words for those sure who may never have heard this yeah so uh we actually have this distinction in English both of the words translate into English as experience uh but what we mean when we say experience there's actually two things one is uh somebody gains experience or has experience of something for example if you're a shoe maker or a cameraman something like this you have experience which is a certain system of understanding something way of dealing with the world so that's her Faron her leness is uh when we say something like I had an experience or I went and this was a real experience and we mean by that actually the opposite we mean something that was outside of our system of understanding which we now have to deal with so Aeros is maybe the quintessential uh a labess or experience and language is a Faron in a lot of ways that's what I want well would be more than would be more like aess it' be leading to it leading to it right um do do you know the work of the Great American philosopher John Dewey no you didn't study that at all when I was young he was what was called the dean of American philosophy um and in fact at Harvard I wrote my undergraduate thesis um pretty long 125 pages I think for long for an undergraduate thesis on his theory of value and uh for me he was a great model he was about 90 getting close to 90 I think um he died in his 90s and um he he was a man who did everything he was on social committees he was very active in daily life he created um uh schools um and in fact uh invented of progressive education in America and wrote books about that uh so he he wrote in philosophy of education but he also had a log wrote a couple books on Logic on knowledge on I mean epistemology on everything and a great deal on moral philosophy the reason I mentioned it is because he also had a book on Aesthetics which um uh he wrote in his middle 70s I think and originally as a series of lectures at Harvard um he had he had most of his life he was a professor at the Chicago and then uh Colombia where he is still celebrated as the great man the book on Aesthetics is entitled art as experience um so it it BR bro it it uh covers both of the two c that you were mentioning from the German his what he meant by an experience was something exceptional something is if you say something is an experien then it is aesthetic and being the radical empiricist that he was uh and PR and the one of the great pragmatists uh in the company with people like William James um he insisted that that was the meaning of Aesthetics Aesthetics wasn't something apart from ordinary life but rather it was an aspect of ordinary life of practical existence that had to be analyzed in ways were different from anything that was traditionally being done Aesthetics began in Germany and was treated in very abstract ways until the pragmatists and then uh 20th century empiricists and people like me started doing something very different uh Dewey's idea is that the aesthetic is understood only in terms of something that we say is an experience that really is an experience right um along the lines of what he was saying um and let me tell you a little anecdote I gave a lecture at the University of Granada about I know 7 or eight years ago in in Spain and um pre before that I had like two or three days earlier I'd given a lecture in Malaga on the on the coast to get from Malaga to to um Granada there was only one way and that was to take the bus I didn't have a car I suppose I could have driven but I took a bus and the bus goes over the mountains um and uh I the Spanish buses are very comfortable and very pleasant I don't know to many any of who know them they're really they're wide they're they're very enjoyable plenty of uh leg room and I always traveled with my laptop computer and um opened it and started what I generally do in my spare time which is writing a letter to my children to the family uh on these visits the letters sometimes are 50 pages long so they're really very they're they're very comprehensive any I was happy um working on the computer in this letter to the to the children and um there was enormous thunderstorm a tremendous storm a really very powerful one that uh broke out in the middle of the mountains as we were going through them and I loved that I felt very safe we were uh we were uh traveling along there was no hesitation comfortable and here was this uh marvelous display taking place out outside all right uh I got to Granada and I gave a lecture on American philosophy and in which I talked about George santiana and and also about uh John Dewey and in talking about John Dewey I gave his philosophy of Aesthetics and the concept of an experience and I Illustrated it by saying on the bus coming up from Malaga was this tremendous thund story thunderstorm and that was an experience that was aesthetic you know I enjoyed it very much it was not frightening it was an experience after the lecture one of the professors who who had heard me came up and said I like what you were saying about John Dewey's ideas of the aesthetic uh and the notion of having an experience because uh we in Granada have had a drought for the last nine months and that thunderstorm really was UN experien all right why don't you continue yeah I mean I guess I guess one of the real tensions in this problem is that uh a labess or gained experience language is the means to it's the means that you understand what's unfamiliar when you first see it it's the way you start to understand it through speaking thinking about it uh it also in some ways covers up and prevents you from having experience if you think about what well what is the experience that it prevents you from having uh What about love that's that's that probably very good example for example uh that's like the song in my fair lady don't what is it don't [Music] don't say do you love me don't don't tell that don't say anything show me you know that song that's I think that's the name of the tune show me but I mean uh for example people generally have something like this experience that they uh they know somebody for a very long time and because they've known this person for a very long time they have no uh real new or fresh way of looking at them they think they understand them they think they're familiar and so is that a language though is it because of their language that they take the other for granted um I think it's because they have a language they think they have a language for describing this person in other words uh if if you were to I think one way of breaking out of this would be to say to them well so you think you understand this friend of yours well who who are they and try to make them say it and then show them that given their actions they actually don't have a complete understanding of them this will lead them into a kind of reflection and Intrigue about no I I recognize the problem what I am unclear about still but we can come back to this is how it is that language necessarily prevents the expression of authentic love if that's what we're talking about um so I guess it's it's actually it's not that it prevents it it's that belief that you have a complete description of something that prevents it again I don't see why a complete description if you could have that maybe you can't have it for example prevent it maybe maybe with God would be a good example when when somebody believes to have a complete image of God like this statue or this this book then uh then it's very hard to say that they really have a that they're intrigued with God or in love with God or something like that well let's not bring bring God into it again uh anyhow that that was your undergraduate thesis on AOS and language um in the it submitted in philosophy no it was submitted in the European cultural studies Department there's no one in philosophy who does that sort of thing am iers at Brandis um no I mean the head of of the European cultural Department was my advisor because not surprised and it's not it's not a reflection on brandise I'm the only one in at MIT who does it there's nobody there's nobody at Harvard who does what I do and in most American universities it has been the case which is now changing to my surprise and Delight that um questions about the nature of feeling which includes love friendship sex uh questions about human relations of that sorts are not philosophical issues but you can write about them in your spare time but uh if you want to make that into a philosophical theme for your speculations um you're going to endanger your profession I mean your professional standing in other words you won't get a job if you write a thesis of PhD thesis on one of those subjects if you write it on details of cognitive science nowadays or previously logic or philosophy of language that is respectable um you can be dreary but it'll be acceptable and you'll get a job if you write a brilliant thing not that it's necessarily going to be brilliant I mean even if it's a brilliant thing on those areas um you'll have a hard time surviving uh so I'm not surprised that there may not be anybody at Brandis I haven't heard of anybody Brandis who who does I think I might have to go into German in literature after all um well people in literature German above all maybe because in recent years in America at Le least U many of the The Faculty members are women they uh they allowed realize the importance of what women can contribute much earlier than many other fields so at Harvard I know quite a number of women at MIT uh who are in Germany language in literature and I think partly because uh German literature lend itself to this but also because women have been wiser and more sophisticated about these problems that um they would be amenable to dealing with them at that level trouble is women were excluded from philosophy and consequently it's only the very most recent uh group of young women who would do philosophy of Love or or sex so there aren't uh as many as they going to be I'm happy to say anyhow go ahead what else should I say no that was fine anyone want to talk to Demetri about what he's just discussing well I guess maybe I say also that I I taught a class on a very similar subject at MIT for high school kids through the education program it was on Plato and Shakespeare and niches and Herman Brook's conception of love where do you take this uh I taught it here oh you taught it yeah for high school kids oh high school kids that's right you mention that in there's an education program here for good I'm glad to hear that um why don't I'll find the card as we go along why don't you tell me your name Don Jac I'm a senior here in MIT I'm trying to fulfill my my concentration requirements and I thought that uh the philosophy of love is kind of the most interesting one of all the topics I could have chosen from and probably most let me let me you're Donald jenet yes okay go ahead colorful well what what we apart from apart from meeting the requirements what were you hoping to get out of the class um I don't know probably few more out I mean I have my own outlooks on love but um for instance I don't know can ask more specific question um have you read anything that would be of interest to the class that you want to talk about no that's all right you you you will you will talk about it later I predict um I'm Veronica all right just for you're in biology yes and um I'm a senior here at MIT as well and um I actually didn't really know anything about philosophy till I came here and then my freshman year I took the intro philosophy class and I got really interested or my spark went off or something so I've taken a couple of other philosophy classes since then and then um actually the reason I decided to take this class was because uh at the end of the year uh MIT Library sells like books for really cheap and I found your pursuit of love and started reading it over the summer and then I saw that you were teaching this class so I thought it would be interesting to be able to talk to you about it it's an economy you don't have to get another copy I know so um that's kind of I guess mainly the reason that I'm here just because I was kind of interested by and then I realized that you were actually teaching class so um did did you say you read the book I read about the first half oh well okay the point is you can use read the second half yeah it's now and it'll be fun reading to me also um you will get a context for that book um later on in order to show you what's going on I'll talk about the place of reading in in my case at least because there are other authors um my own development The Pursuit Of Love which was published in 1994 comes has a very special Niche I'll explain that to you later do you want to say anything else about philosophy or what you want to get out of it um not really it's just kind of basic no it's all right well what intrigued you in your first class in philos um I don't know I thought that everything I like the I guess the idea of being able to break down a problem and look at it more just in the way of I guess the the humanistic feelings and how you know everything doesn't have exactly a right answer because I guess coming here I mean we at it tea and you know that is kind of what you get everywhere you know the the right or the wrong but the idea that there's so many issues in life that you can look at in so many different ways and I know I guess I've just never really been that type of person I've always been very straightforward you know it's like this is what I'm going to do this is not what I'm going to do and the idea that that you know those aren't always the options I guess was kind of interesting and then I took metaphysics which was which was one I was almost a little bit too much I guess for me which means it was too much it was you know more along the lines of you know what is an object and how you know and that was even harder for me to grasp so I think being able to take a class more like this where it is going to I guess go back more towards you know dealing with life and you know more pertinent things to how we live um but is that the course that the S hang teaches and when she's interested in what an object is am I wrong in thinking that it's because she's concerned about the nature of objective ification and that women have been objectified and that that that's a problem from within feminist philosophy um she didn't really bring that up too much like the I think if she would have done that I probably would have been able to place that a little bit more you know and been able to understand it a little bit more but now it was very almost scientific in the way she approached it and I guess that was kind of of what was hard for me it's because I wasn't looking for that in the class I was you know wanting something a little bit different right well I hope you will find it here um tell me I'm [Music] M um is that the right did I say it right is if the ey doesn't come Ina m m and um is Gonzalez the last name or Vega well um Vega it's hyphen well I don't hyphen I'm Hispanic so it's like Vega is my dad's last name gonalez is my mom's last name and women don't change their last name so I just keep both of their last names as my last name my kids will have my last name in The originally would have been Vega e Gonzalez wouldn't it uh May argue is it Mexico the country which is your country um I no I just do we just do both last names and then when I get married I would keep both of my last names and I would do they my husbands mhm so I would have three which country I'm from Puerto Rico from where Puerto Rico Puerto Rico so that's American I already um no I think in Spain it would have been Vega e okay and you're in mechanical engineering and you're also in the fourth year yes and you've had theology at I think no I I went to a I've went to Catholic school since pre kinder to like I graduated so once your past sixth grade you just do like theology all year every year until your senior year so you go like very much into like were the schools taught by Jesuits yes well some of them it was like our the parish that the parish was like an open one so like we had different types like different order in Puerto Rico in Puerto the Jesuits um are the most learned order in the Catholic church and the ones I've known when some of them were in graduate school with me were extremely well trained and uh academically um very learned very learned men um and so I always felt that that would be a good way to get a rigorous education if you could somehow expand Beyond it but uh that would be a matter of face and so I'm not you know I I I never resolved that question they were very like I came here and like every time and be like oh I went to Classic like oh you have like definitely like this is the way it is and this can't be that but they were very liberal thinkers oh well yes in America Catholicism has been very open and liberal just like Beyond liberal because they like they're very much into like teaching it for like teenagers like this well in in American philosophy one of the big issues of the 19th and early 20th centuries was the harmonization between science and religion and it was a problem for the dominant culture which was Protestant because of uh of an inherent conflict if you uh if you were religious then that would tell you the truth like as for fundamentalists whereas scientists would say something contradictory and the Catholics um tended to be much broader about that uh their idea was what's the conflict science tells you the truth because the truth is about nature and God created nature and therefore there is no inherent split if no if that's the Criterion of being open and uh less sidebound the Catholics were much more open than the protest Protestants were now on other issues like abortion or or homosexuality until recent well even now and same-sex marriage then that's then there is another that's those things don't work out exactly that way but in terms of the traditional problems in philosophy uh the Catholics weren't necessarily as narrow minded as people think nowadays yeah that's and what do you what do we do for you well I took an intro class and like it was pretty much like a little bit of everything and um I guess the two things that most interested me were like the I guess the philosophical way of trying to Define like good and wrong and all that stuff and then what they think about like love so I took ethics which deals with like do did love come into the doors they just like they like right no I know Define good at Define that's that was 24 231 or 2402 2402 is the intro what is the best way to live so it's like oh what is the best way to live uh was that Rafe um no it was once Casper Casper took it yeah so it was last year right and then um right and then e and then now I want to like look against like love and all that stuff from like more of a philosophical that and like a Rel standpoint right um well it it is philosophical I hope but uh it's a different kind of philosophy right right so I just want those were the two main issues that interested me when I took the intro class so I want to be like okay so I took this then I want to take this one right um wait a minute I I can predict what your name is Adriana um tavar is that right it's yes but looks like a V but it's pronounced oh it's a j oh I see taka okay um and you're you don't write the year you're here do oh I I wrote Oh three we were three we were a junior and you were in biology too incidentally um um Adriana and um Veronica um when you study biology here it's not human biology is it molecular there are human biology courses but I think most of the time if you're Premed student you tend to take most of those but I'm more of a molecular in cell biology right and behavioral biology nobody does I guess that kind of ends up falling into psychology almost here oh you can brain and cognitive Sciences oh so you can do uh ethology and behavioral biology in in somewhere in MIT yes that's uh there's a brain and cognitive science major and I think they that didn't used to be the case Harvard used to have a huge Department of biology that did everything the whole Spectrum from entomology to um to ethology and behavioral biology and MRT didn't but I'm glad that there are ways in which you can get that in MIT as well now actually I think the only biology MIT doesn't touch at all is plant biology for some reason like plants don't exist here but everything else is's pretty much an area yeah in some way my wife majored in Biology at Harvard as an undergraduate that's where I met her and she left after she had done her thesis on uh um what disum I forget the name of the plant that she was working on that didn't interest her or anybody else I think uh she was disgusted and felt that studying biology the trouble with studying used to say the trouble with studying biology is it doesn't tell you anything about life um and and ever since she has developed a great deal of sophistication about behavioral psychology uh primatology and the ethology and um that the that for her and then I acquired The Taste and sophistication thanks to her is what we really look for in biology and the th that area of biology certainly has relations to the kind of work that we're doing in this course and I've devoted my life to about human feelings and about human relations and different kinds of uh social responses so I hope the course will supplement what you're doing you you're you also do molecular right um in a way that you'll find beneficial do you want to say anything else out the other um well last term I took a class about feelings and and I wrote my term paper um Quality do you hear the squeak I apologize I I don't really need this except for some students who are very quiet I wrote my term paper on quality and human relationships because we had analyzed quality in different aspects throughout the term and for the for my final paper I chose this topic and I ended up focusing on friendship and love and um I thought that it was very interesting to see how the concept of love has evolved in different cultures and how it relates to um works of art and um concepts of religion well you're you're in the right place um where did you get take that course uh here at MIT it's a course 9 uh Brin cognitive science who who told it stepen corer cor I don't know um what's the first name again stepen Steven caran yes oh oh oh does no he's an old friend of mine I thought he had retired no he's still teaching oh I didn't know that he he used to teach a course called affect yes it's that one oh it's still oh he's still doing that CU I didn't see it in the catalog for several years after he retired he's come back I guess it's it's that one but they' changed the name at it has this long name called affect uh biological psychological and sociological aspects of feelings great no no we were we were in a uh faculty study group together a few years ago and um I know him very well well I'm glad that that he's doing teach teaching after some after retirement he's probably just does that one course uh I think he does also um behaviors um I don't remember if behavioral psychology or sociology one of the two but I haven't taken that one right um I have a choice between Arthur and Mike which are you I'm Arthur Arthur okay Arthur is uh in physics second year and you've had problems with philosophy what are you looking for um well to be frank uh sounded kind of interesting and it fit my schedule so that's all right uh I'm not really sure it sounded like an interesting course I me I think at this point of life I haven't really looked at the concept of love from a philosophical point of view so it might be interesting right um at this point let me insert something that I always get around to we're all interested in love even if even if uh our professions or main interests you know so in life defines itself differently you know if you go looking if you're go to find a job let's say an odd a summer job uh working in a shoe store and the um the employer says why do you want to work here and you say because I'm interested in the nature of love you Pro you may not get the job but whatever your interests are uh you can also have and most people I think do have an interest in the nature of love that's one reason why uh at a time when uh I was encouraged not to study this as I was telling you I was being a little autobiographical at that point that this uh in the profession this isn't the way to survive I was explicitly told by my uh um mentors at Harvard as a graduate student don't don't do this you'll ruin your career if you study sex you study love that you know that won't uh enable you to survive in the profession um and I did it anyhow but and I've survived but um others have not survived and I wouldn't recommend it for anybody now uh as a basis for professional advancement unless it's like going into the ministry you've got to do it because you hear you have a mission you you feel you can't do anything else or like me it's so dumb you can't do anything else uh but nevertheless it's something that everybody is interested in and and people generally go into philosophy because they're interested in big problems they want to know what is the meaning of life they want to know how to live they want to know have their thinking about the universe enlarged Beyond technical um studies so it's one thing to study astronomy and that's uh kind of uh um show in the sky you you get fascinated by the colors and the lights and all of that um but it doesn't really answer the big questions is why is there a Sky why why uh why is there this Cosmos why is there any Cosmos uh or why are we here those are the questions people going into Philosophy for then they they realize that they're not going to get any answers so they become very disolution uh because the study of philosophy hasn't uh organized itself that way well that I think is related to the fact that everyone's interested in love and in our age in the last 100 years at least maybe always everyone's interested in sex it's just that the that interest has become uh public and flashed into your face more in America than ever before I think you mustn't be uh misled about the fact that so much of American culture are music the literature advertising above all the advertising all appeals to some aspect of our sexual interests it's been it's more true of the United States than ever before and more true of the last 100 years than ever before and there never was anybody who um made the efforts that Freud did and created a whole field based on his interest in the nature of sex so it's not surprising but everybody is always to some extent in the above all nowadays everybody is interested in sex um if you take a course in it um you you may find that it's either very technical it's going to be in biology and then it's mainly what the animals do and if it's u in Humanities it's not going to be probing because the people who are trained to probe which mainly the philosophers have been discouraged from doing that for fear of losing their life their livelihood so that uh your interest in in this just because it's sex or because it's love seems to be absolutely wholesome and right and and the failing is not in you it's in the in the academic world in some ways MIT is better at that because MIT has defined itself so much out of the mainstream originally out of mainstream of universities that are Arts and Sciences that it tolerates all sorts of things that others other universities uh wouldn't um so that but but that's a special case anyhow how anything in particular that you want to say no really okay then why don't we go on to Mike okay I'm uh I'm a senior here um I uh I computer science yeah I uh I did take 242 with Professor Wedgewood um two years ago he he is now in Oxford yeah yeah he that was his last year I believe um Casper hair replac okay and uh I I took uh last fall philosophy of science with Professor maglo who I think is still around yeah I'm taking that now Professor Who U maglo he's Kofi maglo oh Kofi yeah right um so you know to uh I'm I'm a pretty technical person to so to finish out my concentration I I could have taken you know logic or quantum physics or something like that but uh I figured I'd I'd uh take something I don't know anything about um I I think a lot of my life experiences so far have demonstrated that whatever I think I know about love is AB borly wrong so uh so yeah I thought I would just sort of jump into the pool and you know well you know that's a good beginning set that on the table that's a good beginning Socrates was executed on the grounds of seducing the Youth of Athens how by teaching them uh false things about the gods because he investigated questions in religion um though he claims never having denied there were Gods he didn't he he didn't call himself an atheist but that was the charge and second by misleading the youths of Athens by getting them to examine the nature of the state and he did that that as part of his search for the good life to get them to think what they should be doing in life um so that that was why he was executed before he was executing um Somebody went to the article at delos and said who is the wisest man um alive and the article said Socrates and this came back to Athens and Socrates said he couldn't believe it that uh uh he didn't know anything how could it be that he would be considered to be the wisest man and in a sense his saying that was very sophisticated because he meant partly what I was saying that he didn't know any of the scientific truths that's not the nature of philosophizing everybody he knew only what everyone knows by being immersed in reality it's just that he had this ability to examine ideas and people could use that to live a good life if they wanted to and if they did it on their own so he he said he was confused um all of this comes out in his speech to the court which Plato recorded in a dialogue called the apology and it's not at all apologetic he Socrates refuses to apologize he says he's falsely accused he even says instead of being executed he should be rewarded they should build a statute to him because he helped uh keep Athens Free Spirit Alive um in any event in that description in the apology he says when he heard what the Del arle had said uh he went around to all of the uh successful people in the society The Poets the uh sculptors Craftsmen and he asked each of them you know tell me what is it you do and they didn't know they knew how to do poetry but they didn't know what the nature of poetry was they knew how to make statues but they didn't know what what art was and Sak these came very he said these people seem to have a knack as he called it but they have no knowledge they don't know the basis of their important activities and then he concluded that maybe that's what the delphic article meant because he knew that he didn't know anything whereas they thought they knew everything and therefore they knew nothing and the one thing he knew was that he did not know anything and that that's seems to be the right attitude to do philosophy to realize how little we know and how important the investigation is that's the point that it's not you're not going to learn facts You're simply going to deal with ideas and Concepts and language in a way that some people may find helpful but it it's it's the doing of it that's important so it's like an art work in that way and at getting Beyond such ocres what I would say is these po these great poets and playwrights and and um sculptures and all those they weren't wrong in in showing how little they knew of their art because they knew how to do the art they didn't know what it was they were doing but they did it nevertheless and that was the basis of their genius uh you don't have to be um a great philosopher to turn into a Mozart Mozart is a good example because Mozart who was this stupendous genius was not a literary man at all I don't he's sort of person who wouldn't read books uh he was very very intelligent but it isn't it isn't a kind of uh literary academic humanistic or even well humanistic because of the of the music but otherwise uh not a philosophical uh concept ctual Brilliance but that's right that's all right that's he didn't need that it might have gotten his way what if he what if he had ideas that convinced him that he was doing his music all wrong better that he did it spontaneously um turning on the faucet in his case and letting it pour out there it doesn't mean that you can't also be an intellectual Beethoven for instance uh who was you know in the class of of moart but very different Beethoven invented musical forms and he worked worked very hard working out the structure and the music musical analysis of what he was doing uh moar didn't mozar just picked up ideas that were standard and then did new Innovative beautiful things with him that nobody was able to do but it wasn't because he was as as thorough an analyst of music as Beethoven was there were different kinds being an analyst doesn't prevent you from being a great composer but being a great composer doesn't require you to be such a great analyst and this division has recurred throughout the history of Music Brahms was like uh Beethoven uh but other people were not uh they they simply heard sounds and had feelings and learned how to put the two in harmony and that's all you need um what I getting Beyond Socrates I was saying is that uh it isn't as if you have to know what Socrates knew which was that he didn't know anything but he knew how to investigate uh to be a a great artist um all you they can those those people who are disappointed him knew how to perform their art and maybe that's all it is to be to make something into work of art you can can be intellectual too but it isn't required so uh this is a way of assuring you that you're coming in with the right kind of preparation if you feel you don't know anything um should we take a little break in general I become very oblivious of time time is oblivious of me um it won't go on forever and I want to uh so I have to be stopped usually um it occurs to me though this is a good point should we take a break feel free to make any suggestions of that sort that you want or of any sort what I want to do now is to go down the reading list with you I don't know whether you have had time to study the paragraph at the bottom that covers most of the mechanics in the in the course and um this is the time for you to tell me if there's any problem with what you read there the your attendance is is very important because I want to work this have keep this as a workshop and you can't split in and out if you miss one meeting you're missing the whole week and um just doing the reading is not enough on the other hand I'm not going to be controlling your reading in the sense of giving you exams and but I hope that you will do it uh preferably before the date that it's du but if necessary afterwards and then coming honestly and say you haven't done it and then we'll work something out in the hope that you'll be encouraged to but I'm not going to give you electric shocks the requirements are then this um perfect attendance and the two papers the first paper is described the second paper will I'll explain to you later on and I will help you in class with both papers it's something it's part of the work of the class the paper should come naturally out of you because of what's been happening to your mind the way it's been developing that's the function of this CL class not to give you an awful lot of information not to get force you to read thousands of pages by Irving singer not to uh you know enable you to uh talk at cocktail par Aries with a certain degree of sophistication but rather to develop your own ideas in your own way and that will be a function of how honestly you treat the material and how well we're able to make it important for you so don't worry about any preparation or lack of preparation that you have now or the writing of paper of the paper or or the topic for the second paper we'll work that out in class okay everyone's read the paragraph now you all agree no one's fainting away um today I wanted to give the introduction but I also wanted to call your attention to marriage same sex and opposite sex because that's not something you can buy um as I told you it will be part of the enlargement the well they they don't they don't want to call it enlarg ment for good reason uh the expansion the Expanded Edition of uh the book sex a philosophical prer which will come out um um next next month in October and which you now have you have the page proofs the final page proofs and the reason I wanted to start with that is because it has such a mediate and um it's something that is very close to my heart the way like all parents the youngest one the mother's the baby of the family is what's loved best um something I just finished it's very recent and but more than that in relation to what we were saying in the first half of today's meeting uh it doesn't deal with subject in a way that fits into anyone academic Pursuit and the and the Way It Was Written is very relevant through what this course is about the issue was alive 6 months ago especially not very long maybe a year but that's a real active issue for the whole country fairly recently and so I was is interest in that the way I would be interested in uh important events uh and then it occurred to me here I've devoted my whole life to studying love and sex and married love um uh there must be some way in which I can contribute there must be something I can do and that I can do as a philosopher of the rare sort that exist because hardly anyone in philosophy does much with these with love and sex and and the rest uh why aren't I doing that what would John Dewey be doing I don't know if any of you have heard of John rolls have you well John rolls was a very close friend of mine for about 50 years until he died and I at a time when I had power at MIT single-handedly almost through is hardly anybody here I had I appointed him to MIT he was here for 2 years before he went to Harvin um and he's always been to me a model an older brother of A Sort that I would look up to for sheer honesty and and strength of purpose and so I said what would Jack be doing and then it occurred to me what would Jack be doing jack would be doing exactly what he did when he wrote a chapter in The One book for which he's most famous a theory of Justice you some of you have read him but you or you haven't read it but you know about it that was his first book um in which uh chapter in which he talks about um um segregation in the South and if you study that chapter as I did when it came out I read every word of the book and talked with him and I think I may have startled him but he didn't contradict me I said You Know Jack in that excellent chapter you don't say anything more than Martin Luther King does in the famous letter from Birmingham Jail but what you do is that you present it in a way that dignifies it philosophically in a way that struct gives it a structure and gives it a kind of um place in philosophical thought that King's letter doesn't now it's interesting King was a graduate student in philosophy and the and theology I guess but also in philosophy at pu um that's where he studied uh and so he it is as if he didn't have uh origins in philosophy but by that time he was not a philosopher he was a man of action um and what Jack was doing there I thought was just what philosophers should do which is involve themselves in Practical issues but do so from the point of view of this special expertise that John Ros one of the best there is and or was uh had uh and that other people would not have so it occurred to me why shouldn't I be doing that with sex and love I had never seen any great problems about homosexuality and wrote very little about it um I had I have had uh several friends who were homosexual and um it was just a taste that they had they knew I was not homosexual I knew they were homosexual and um our friendship was established on other lines entirely but in a sense I knew that this was a big problem and I sympathized with him but I never had I never saw anything to write about there was one man uh I don't know if he comes into any of your reading Russell vanoli who um wrote a book called The you'll see this is a going to be a little lengthy this story but you there is a the you'll see the point um get the um sex without love a philosophical exploration I think that was the title of it and at the end of it he had a chapter called four philosophers of love I think there were yeah four Plato Freud SRA and singer if you could believe that uh and in the uh comments on singer the book came out 20 years ago so it was not my later work um he um made uh criticisms and attacked me which is all right um and then in the third volume of my Trilogy the nature of love I spent 10 or 15 pages responding to his attack so it was very very useful thereafter there was um a 3-day Symposium on my work um and that ended up in a book called The the nature and pursuit of love the philosophy of Irving singer edited by something else with all the 20 papers 25 papers that were written no 25 papers but only 20 got up got into the volume and in my reply to my critics I had a reply to Van O's um paper which in and in his paper he was responding to my critique you get the idea there was this Ricochet first he attacked me I replied then he attacks my reply and then there I attacked his reply right and it was all it was fine the point is I didn't have any idea that he was homosexual but at some point um he um said I said to him what are you doing and he said I'm I'm writing a book about in uh on the philosophy of homosexual love and it occurred me really that's i' never read anything like that before what is homos what is the philosophy of homosexual love as opposed to anything else but it occurred to me if you are homosexual and I gathered then that he was and then it was open between us that's just right that's just the thing he should be writing about as a homosexual what the philosophical problems are and so I really encouraged and told him I'm eager to see that but I myself had never done anything about anything about that um it just wasn't a live issue for me any various well little things came came out but nothing much and so the reason I wanted to do this was to see how from my point of view as my kind of philosopher with my knowledge of philosophy of love and sex I could contribute to the um Nationwide furor and and not as well as John Dewey not as well as John rolls but doing the best I could um now if you start with this you won't be prepared for everything of mind that you're going to be reading but I think it'll be a good place for you to start and I'm eager to spend as much time on it as possible it's just that uh I didn't leave a separate week for it and so what I finally thought was I give you the the copy today and tomorrow we can I mean I mean a week from today we can talk about it together with the first 43 pages of The Pursuit Of Love now Veronica doesn't have to read that so maybe um oh you should give a presentation that was something I want would you like to give presentations or would you rather not sometimes people do prefer not to sometimes they don't mind sometimes they like it the advantage of the presentation is that it keeps me from dominating too much because I've written 2500 3,000 pages on these Pro topics or related topics and I can just go on until I've you know bored Bor you to death I can do that quicker too but so would you like to take over with by having the presentations or not a presentation wouldn't have to be written out it's nothing you'd be graded on it would be part of the seminar Workshop atmosphere but it would focus on discussions that the the class could all develop further in the past when I've done it uh most then in the evaluations students seem like it or didn't complain but one said I didn't want didn't like that those presentations because they encouraged me not to do the reading no that's not the idea the idea is for you to do the reading and then pick up on something that one person who has devoted him or herself to that work's reading uh will be calling attention to from your point of view rather than from mine should we try it at least if so I recommend Veron I I recommend Veronica because you the others are expected to read uh the pages of The Pursuit Of Love which are not hard to read and they're not too numerous so it's not too much to read both them and U same sex the marriage thing but okay should we do that M so just kind of more of a discussion leading what you should do no let me tell you don't feel that you have to summarize it so for everyone who's never done the reading because they had problem sets what you do is single out things that look to you especially interesting and important and develop your own ideas as much as possible along those lines so that other people can attack you can can make not choking you're all very polite with each other but uh other people can chime in do that help um before going any further maybe I should just quickly give you an idea of what I do in this uh I make it clear that I'm writing not as a partisan or a critic but as a philosopher as I said I have friends um some of them very famous who I won't name drop uh who were homosexual and um but I've had many friends who are not homosexual and um it's not as if I'm am obligated to defend either side and I'm not homosexual but I don't feel that that enables me to that alone enables me to decide whether um same-sex marriages should be banned or permitted as a civil right it but so it has to be as a philosopher that I'm talking but a pluralist philosoph which which means that I don't come into a discussion assuming that there's a right way and a wrong way and I Know It And so it's attempt to be sympathetic on both sides but but with definite ideas of my own and so I make suggestions and end up with recommendations and conclusions but in the process uh there is a quite a Welter of argument and factual data that many people might not have access to and that the newspapers never deal with properly uh so I I provide that you'll see you'll see how often I'm slipping in things that might not know and yet and others don't talk about but that are relevant and also I talk about a little about the way in which the history of philosophy has completely ignored questions of this sort in fact every all everyone did until very recently um and that it's only in the last I don't know how many years is 15 or 20 years that anything that could be called a homosexual right that is a right to be a homos sexual uh has been accepted in American Juris Prudence before that homosexuality in most States was on the the law books as criminal to behave that way is enough reason legally at least for people to be uh imprisoned in which case everybody else would behave that way on them against their will but you got the idea that this was a crime until very recently there were all sorts of things in sex that were criminal uh a husband and wife engaging in um anal intercourse would be breaking the laws of Massachusetts until maybe it was five years ago very recently and everybody knew about it and laughed at it it was absurd um even if couples never engaged in such Behavior the idea that this should be on the law books was simply an absurdity um then recently it was all changed I'm pretty sure that's not on the law books anymore and a great many things like that even adultery U was illegal in this country until recently misation is still on the law books of some states it was uh considered a crime after the Civil War or maybe a little before the Civil War even uh for there to be marriages between blacks and whites and certainly um sexual intercourse the the whites abused their slaves and but still might there probably was a law about sexual behavior certainly against U intermarriage um the laws still exist I there was recently a case about that but they're applied differently misation is used to mean something different but that's what originally meant and of course all of that's been changed so the in your lifetime which you think of as being eternity because you didn't know anything you haven't had any other experience the world is very different in these areas than it ever was before all right so that's in order to make my contribution I talk about the history of philosophy and history of the philosophy of Love uh on the basis of my expertise and try to show how recent all of this is in terms of the present problems that this country is facing ill ill prepared the way history always is history doesn't happen in school books so that uh people for have 10-year conferences to decide whether to have a nuclear war um it Happ if it's if it happens it happens all of a sudden because there the Japanese uh look as if they might fight to the death and Truman has to make a decision and that's how history make is happens that's the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima um so that um what what was I say history isn't made as you think you're what you're experiencing is a very tiny segment of time in human nature but at least knowing about history will give you some um point of Leverage okay I think maybe that's all I should say about that now does anybody want say anything about that all right after that I asked you to read the pursuit of love because it's one of my more readable books and I get fan mails uh from people who think it's um something they like um but I don't think of it as my most important book uh it's useful and and I think you'll won't have any trouble understanding it it was written after I had written um my the trilogy for which I think I'm best well known in academic circles the trilogy is called the nature of love and the first volume is the nature of Love courtly um um Plato to Luther second is nature of Love courtly and romantic the third volume is the nature of love the modern world you can get a an idea of the breakdown uh I don't want to say too much about it it's 1,400 pages long alog together and came out in three volumes go well over a period of time but also it's too long to bring out in one volume and that is something nobody had ever done before and I gather nobody has ever done since and it's the sort of thing that people who have never had anything by me may say oh yeah serving singer you know they've heard the name for that uh I didn't see any way of introducing it into the chorus it would really make it a different kind of chorus but having written that I then felt I wanted to do something that would be more popular more closer to what Ordinary People would get from a philosopher and that was the pursuit of love and it talks a little about some of the themes in the nature of love too so you'll get a little of that sophistication um the nature of love I mean The Pursuit Of Love um came out after I had written another book that also was reaching out for what I thought most people are desperately interested in and that is the meaning of life that book um came out in 199 one or two I can't remember uh the title was meaning in life colon the creation of value it uh when The Pursuit Of Love did well the Publishers agreed to publish a third book that I thought of as the third volume of a Trilogy and to reprint the creation of volume is the first volume so there are two trilogies one is on the nature of Love is the nature of love and the other is called uh meaning and life and volume one of meaning and life is the creation of value volume two is I they then made uh the pursuit of love and then volume three is called the harmony of Nature and spirit philosophically I think nature of Harmony of spirit was the most important philosophical book that I've written up to date but there again I couldn't ask you to read it any of you who want to might write your second paper on that but something can come in and we you might pick it up but um that's how that that's why I thought I'd begin with the pursuit of Love um at the same time I also didn't want to limit the course just to philosophy I wanted it to deal with ph philosophical sources quasi philosophical sources on love uh a great deal that's been written um and done in terms of the concept of love was done by artists and by uh writers and since I don't make any sharp distinctions between philosophy and literature uh or or in general any of the humanities um my kind of philosophy covers all of them um philosophy of mathematics I know nothing about but that's a different kind of approach to the world philosophy of science I know a little about and I've written about it at the end of a another recent book but I'm I'm not trained in science I don't have the aptitude I don't have the patience I don't have the brains uh and therefore I can't write about philosophy science but in the humanities I think I've written about most of the subjects about literature two or three books on film um on uh um Fine Arts and and in Aesthetics philosophical Aesthetics um so I so in doing even the philosophy of love in the trilogy I talk a lot about um literary figures there's a 70 page chapter on Pro there all all sorts of literary F figures that come into that and I thought that would and there's a a 30 I think it a 25 or 30 page on nature who is a kind of literary philosopher like me so I thought your reading nature would be a great experience for you particularly since uh there is an opera by the U great man that n knew uh Richard Vagner the uh composer of the German composer and his Opera Tristan unoda is all about love and was written after uh Vagner had discovered the writings of schopenhauer whom I mention in the marriage thing you'll see um and schopenhauer was the god of nature now n in his later life went beyond note schopenhauer uh Vagner was not a philosopher but there is that whole complex of schopenhauer n Vagner on love that is very fascinating I'll give you uh a lecture on Shop's philosophy and but I thought it would help for you to read nature and for us to watch in class uh excerpts from vogner's Opera so that's what we'll do that week um oh I'm sorry before that U there is the courtly love myth of Tristan and esult uh Tristan and the Z olda of Vagner uh is a 19th century variation on that uh because there were been been literally hundreds of variations of the Tristan and the story uh and in the 19th century a compilation of the medieval versions of four or five the versions was made by a great French scholar uh named beier and it is a very readable novel he does a marvelous job of stitching the pieces together and making it into as readable modern novel as you'll ever find students in previous years have thanked me for getting them to read this wonderful novel but it's in the medieval context uh you Vagner there's the 19th century Concept in the midst of high Romanticism and so the two are significantly different in the second volume of the nature of Love Trilogy I there's a chapter called oh there's a whole 200 Pages called courtly and romantic or from courtly to romantic something yeah the title of the book is nature of Love courtly and romantic that 200 Page segment is from courtly to romantic and I try to show how different courtly love is from romantic love and trace the history of it uh and analyze it from my own point of view um so that seemed like a good thing for you to become immersed in um immediately after uh the pursuit of love but uh there's also another myth of love that's very important and that's the myth of Don Juan that um Demetri knows because he mentioned uh puskins Don Juan um do you do you know you must know Eugen and what's the point about eug oen the great op made into a great and wonderful Opera by chikosi that you might not know um but what what is the point about the character of Eugene onagan he is a DA one if you see him that way then everything falls into place here's a Don Juan who encounters a beautiful virtuous wonderful young girl who resists who was ready to throw herself at his feet but uh he he wouldn't count as a conquest for him so he rejects her and then she develops to a level of superiority Beyond him and he's a Don Juan who for the first time in his life falls in love with her but by that time she's married and strong healthy Virtuous Woman married to an old much older man whom she's devoted to and she rejects the Don Juan and the the ending is ambiguous in chaikovsky it's not clear whether onen who's out of his mind in despair goes out and kills himself or whether he's doomed to suffer Forever After from having fall fallen in love after being a dawn Juan I don't remember what Pushkin sending is do you what happens to Ean after taana has at the end repelled him uh I don't think I think he leaves it off like that in fact you know theer he should leave life without finished uh no he leaves it kind of Unfinished in a sense and the last line I I have trouble hearing it go ahead he he leaves it unfinished at that point after Onan goes and and declares his love for now that's in chovsky and in in in Pushkin yes it's also ambiguous yes okay um now that's what I would expect um you'd all love that Opera it's one of it's very romantic and it's shikovski music that everybody loves and it's a very good opera in manyways um I can't remember whether you told me that you were born in Russia didn't you grew up with pushin and chovi uh no I grew up here I came I came here when I was seven but I was I was in St Petersburg two years ago when I saw the the the Opera there although I think I think the the novel by pushin it's still much better um is throughout the Opera I kept on wanting to just go and read the book okay let's go on um George Bernard Shaw picks up on the dawn Juan oh no before that uh the mo molier version of Da Juan is so one of the most famous and it's still performed in English translation I Cambridge and all over it's very uh successful and a very great play with all sorts of interesting philosophical Concepts that I would like to see what you think about Dawn one is about is the myth about the man who doesn't love and maybe can't love but he's very handsome he's very glamorous and he believes in uh scoring with women um he has a in most of the versions he has a servant in um in well yeah the servant's name is scel in Mozart's version Donavan the Great opera the Opera that many people consider the greatest Opera ever written um the servants it's in Italian and the servants name is leeloo and the the servant lepell scandel whatever his name is keeps a catalog he of the women uh that Don Juan has seduced there's a very famous ARA uh of leelo's do any of you know any of this Opera stuff um it uh it's they call the ARA ARA Del catalo the catalog ARA and lepo lepell in order to get rid of one of the um women that Don Juan is seduced and abandon who is out of her mind and Tra tracking him down uh he shows her the catalog and sometimes on stage there's a long scroll that goes all the way down sometimes this a it's a book um in the Italian it's quo Libro it's a book and he opens up and says uh ma son uh 7 00 in in U in in Italy uh 500 in Germany I forget the exact score and uh 100 in turkey and so he goes through the catalog but then what it's most famous for is the refrain ma in because it takes place in Spain ma that's the the language is Italian but it takes place in Seville in in Spain but in Spain there are already a,3 okay so that's Don Juan um but he never chose the ability to love uh either in the original uh play by Tio um Tio De Molina um uh which is called alur sevilia the trickster of sevil or oh yeah so know the Spanish or in molier or in in Mozart he never falls in love himself and so that's what's interesting a man who knows about love who can charm the birds out of the trees he's such so handsome so Charming so poetic and so successful and there I've known men like that and U one in fact who was an oper an opera star at the Metropolitan who came to dinner one one lunch one time and just looking at him you know the way he he knew how to dress the way he moved the everything about I could say why wouldn't every woman he ever met fall in love with him and no and no nobody acts that way toward me it's a special it's a special talent that some men have and that all men Envy Carrie Grant would be an example of somebody who could have captivated women that way and everybody envied that uh so that's the myth of Don Juan uh the myth of Tristan and isolda is very different there you have the greatest Warrior um who falls in love with the greatest beauty the greatest the woman who's the greatest beauty the trouble is that she's already married to his uncle and in fact uh because he is the hero of the realm the his uncle's devoted Lieutenant he goes in search of a wife for her and brings back this one who thinks he wants her for himself so in some versions she wants to kill him um but they drink a love po potion and then they they're through they're you their lives are over they can't separate they're madly in love with each other and it's a tragedy they commit adultery I it's all fully sexual no question about isn't just mooning and spooning um it's an adulterous relationship and uh everybody's out to destroy them and then they it's a tragic ending um that's very different there you have true love but between the wrong people and because of uh some artificial stimulant the the correct love would be for her to come back and love her husband that's from the point of view of the medieval views about married love uh the church sanctioned relationship is against adultery and the the uh Ten Commandments are against adultery um but that is true love and so they get all of the philosophical questions about that and it goes on for hundreds of years the Triston myth had about 500 versions in the Middle Ages alone and then Vagner comes on the scene and Vagner doesn't believe in marriage at all and at that time was miserably and uh married to a woman he hated and having some kind of relationship with a woman for whom he wrote Triston and he sold it uh and so it's a different point of view entirely it still exists there are movies nowadays in which you get uh versions of of the Triston myth and some in which you get the versions of the Don Juan myth which also has had hundreds really five or 600 versions some of them uh the greatest works of art in the Western World so I wanted you to experience this from the point of view of philosophy in art literature and music rather than merely philosophizing about love now uh in the case of the philosophy about love it's always uh based on my books and that's unfortunate there you could have I could have assigned an anthology but I didn't think it would be as um as useful and of course um uh I don't agree with anybody else so why should you read but that no you can do that and that would be excellent outside reading for your for your second paper and I will advise you about it um the third person other than the that you read of the of the three people of the three or four people uh is George Bernard Shaw you all know about him the great playright uh he has a uh one of nabe his most philosophical Works called Man and Superman uh in which there is um a very long scene that happens in uh one of the U in the second act in one of the places uh in North Africa that the action takes place and it is a dream scene uh Dreamt by the main character whose English name is John Tanner and he is Shaw's version of Don Juan because in Spanish Don Juan's name was Juan Torio so Juan Being John tardio becomes Tanner and what's interesting is that it's a view of Don Juan unlike any other and Brilliant and witty and filled with great philosophical insights that Shaw had and put into the preface so there I want you to read the preface and I want you to read the one uh scene in act three um if you read the whole book but you read the the U play you will enjoy that immensely it's often put on um in Cambridge and other places it's very much worth reading but I didn't want to burden you with too much reading all at once all right uh maybe if the somebody one of you gives a presentation you could do the reading of that and then introduce that to into your remarks if you don't mind but we'll we'll work out our procedure from week to week all right then after that um I had to choose among the eight or nine or 10 books that I've written that are really on love and I chose this recent one Explorations in love and sex which came out in 2001 because it has in it um material in the philosophy of film of uh of love that I thought you would get something out of the first week you read a 60 page or 70 Pages whatever it is 62 page um thing which uh is related to that conf on my work that I told you about um let me say a little about that um the conference took place in Brock University in Canada which I had never heard of but some I got a phone call and he said I'm uh calling I'm a professor of philosophy at Brock University I didn't know who he was I didn't never knew didn't know Canada didn't know what that was do any of you know Brock ever heard of it it's in Ottawa um it's a big provincial University uh big department of philosophy and we would like to have a 3-day Symposium on your uh Trilogy on love uh do you do you would you agree and I said would I agree you do me an honor why shouldn't I agree and he said we we couldn't pay you much money and I said but look you're doing me such an honor why do you worry about the money he said but what we could do if you're willing is invite you to give a couple of lectures and we'll pay you for that and I said sure I'll be happy to do that and they paid me very well right royally not royally but handsomely they paid me well and one of those lectures ended up in the pursuit of love so it all came you know I used it all and you that that would be day before day I forget what of the 3day tril uh 3-day Symposium and I was said fine I'm delighted I'm honored it took place in 19 about I don't remember exactly when 19890 1989 19890 I can't remember oh or 1991 I think it was in any event um I said fine I'll be happy and I went there and had a good time it's right where the the uh town is St Catherine which is on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls if any of you have thought of going over in a barrel that would be place to do it um and what happened was that 25 people were invited to give papers but not me I didn't have to do anything but I'd agreed to give these extra public lectures large audience but not part of the Symposium but to be sure I could hear everything I sat up in the first second row no I think it was the first row and I took off my shoes and put my feet on a chair in front of me and relaxed and had a good time and then uh after the first paper I made I wanted to make a comment and so they of course let me talk and ever after that they immediately turned to me so I was giving a running comment on these papers that I never read had heard for the first time and enjoyed the experience you know it was an ego trip here they are talking about My Philosophy um uh and as it developed I said to myself look don't act like a great man they're treating you very specially don't uh you know be a showof don't do the usual thing that happens in all philosophy meetings I've ever been at where somebody either tears the other person to shreds or else shows off by you know showing how much better you are or how how much scholarship how much you know that nobody else knows don't do anything like that for once in your life Irving be selfless these are people who are trying to work out their own problems see how can be of help to them and I did that whether people attacked me or didn't attack me I in a kind of Socratic way try to get them to develop their ideas and say well you know what if you said they and it turned into a little conversation of this or Symposium and I felt very good about that very good about that um um all right then at the end there was a publisher there and he said he would like to bring out all of the papers would I be willing to um write a reply and I said well I don't know I have to see I don't I don't know what what what I can say I have to see what people write uh I was also very tired but exhilarated um but I didn't promise it all right then the editors got together finally a bunch of very big stack of papers and U I had at that time I was having other problems in my life and about to go to Spain and I said um I can't I think you'd better just bring it out without me um I bring it out or not that's for you to decide but don't count on me I I don't think I can add anything and so don't don't even send it to me I don't care bring you know just publish it um I don't know whe they ever applied to that but I got to Spain where um I stayed in the Palace of an MIT student former student of mine who was a member of one of the elite Spanish families and whose mother had bought a 16th century Palace that she turned into a five-star hotel and uh they put me up in a magnificent room as their guest and uh I uh we had agreed I would stay for a month uh and it was a wonderful month and I was very comfortably settled in when I got in the mail this great big stack of things and or maybe it what no it arrived just before I left America and I took it with me but I had and I didn't think I would do anything they I they didn't comment on what I had said they just sent it to me and then said you know we really would like to have your comments but I told him I don't expect it so I but I took it with me um and then I got intrigued and um started writing out comments and by the end of that month or maybe the month after when I came back to America I had written 20,000 words and that be that became part of the book and I gave it the title of U um uh reply to my friendly commentators and no a no a comment a reply my friendly critics and commentators that was the title of it and that book was published then I had other things and I decide why don't I just take it out of there and put it into this other book and that's what I'm asking you to start out with that's the reading from 105 to 67 um in Explorations in love and sex it has a paragraph explaining what's going on uh but I think I changed I did change the title to uh um I think Bolen appraisal Revisited I forget just the title that I have in any event that's that's what you'll be reading and I thought it would be useful to you because in answering the critics I discuss many of most of the major points in the trilogy the nature of love so you don't have to read it or you can if you want but this way you'll get a lot of that together with the fact that um where my I better do are you you want to get a drink of water huh yeah I've just been up since pardon no it's nothing wrong in you're dozing off I am astounded that you you have such a long day as it is but the thing to do is not to feel ashamed not to feel embarrassed but go and get a drink of war and come back um and then you can s uh one reason I was able to get involved in this was because my thinking had changed a great deal since the writing of the trilogy and some of that had come out when I was sitting with my be my stocking foot feet on the chair in front of me talking to these people about their papers but then I found it s very stimulating I I got new ideas that's the great thing about being attacked and criticized if you're lucky if you got people who are not vicious but who really know how to criticize you it's very very flattering because it means they are taking your ideas that seriously and they're revealing themselves and their ideas even though if they don't realize it and if you learn how to respond to that you will develop a whole new body of ideas that takes you out of your own selfishness and that whole process became for me uh paradigmatic of what the nature of creativity is creativity is that that's why I teach that's why I teach the way I do with you that's why I teach at MIT because at MIT I have these brilliant people I can talk to and develop my ideas with even if I'm only talking and they're listening but I learn just by being able to talk to you the way I do um and that that that was the experience I had in uh the palace in Spain this wonderful uh I mentored him and he became a son to me and and he he's married a couple of years ago had a had a baby and I think of myself as a grandfather through him as if he really were my son and we're have a very very good filial parental relationship and now with his wife whom I've met when they came over to America um what the experience was that I had access to a region of my mind that I didn't know existed that I could work at in response to these other people partly by making sense out of what they made said an attempt to do it better than they could and partly by having to re-examine and discover what I really thought and what I should be doing so there's I in some ways I think of that as my best Pur philosophical writing because I'm dealing with ideas in this responsive way that defines the history of philosophy that's what all there is in the history of philosophy um somebody's saying uh some idiotic thing and it's catching hold and other people attacking him and then uh historians analyzing it and the later generations inheriting it and then that's philosophy that's the history of philosophy well that was what I was trying to do what I thought I did um and that's what I thought you might like reading partly to get a feeling of philosophy uh more thoroughly from what you get from the pursuit of love and um and also um learning about content of the nature of love and how my later thinking developed out of that okay in this in the explorations of love I also uh put two articles um on Kant who is the great great perhaps the greatest philosopher um in the modern world of an astoundingly great Genius of the 18th and early 19th centuries uh who and who been rediscovered and his schools of philosophy particularly here in Cambridge at Harvard and at MIT but elsewhere too uh partly because of uh RS who is instrumental in this RS and I differ because rolls is fundamentally a Conan and I am anti-can so we we're fundamentally different in that way but apart from the fact that he is a great philosopher and I'm not uh we're very close to each other in many other ways um in any event uh the first chapter is called the morality of sex colon Contra Kant Kant writes about uh in the philosophy of sex and I discuss that and attack him um you'll get an idea of kuse in what you're going to be reading for next week because he comes in very briefly in the same-sex marriage business uh and the second one is called uh the morality of compassion Contra Kant and schopenhauer schopenhauer whom you don't know anything about yet but I'll give you a leure on him um but I mentioned him he he uh revered Kant but uh in ethics in particular he was anti-an and wrote a whole book attacking Kant the the book is called the basis of morality uh K defined ethics in terms of Duty uh in terms of respect for another person as a person but all but that both of these ideas being very high abstract U Notions whereas and rationalistic Notions because H was the greatest of all rationalists whereas schopenhauer said the whole point about ethics is that it's a matter of feeling for people care about each other it's a matter of compassion if you don't feel compassionate you can't be ethical about anybody else the nature of Ethics is based on two things one of which is compassion the other which is justice justice is negative it tells you what you shouldn't do but compassion tells you what you should do and what you can do that is ethical so the basis of Ethics is compassion and Kant says very little about compassion and uh it amused me though somehow infuriated me that with the really very Advanced conent scholarship that exists nowadays in America and in England nobody writes about Kant on compassion and I've talked with some of the people have written uh very good books on K with that I've read about whom I say whom should I write about K on who whom should I read on Kon compassion when I was working on this and they didn't know what I was talking about and they hadn't read Shan and they didn't didn't know so I felt that's an opportunity and that's what I put into this essay uh called the nature of compassion uh Contra Kant because I disagree with Kant and Contra and and shopen AR because I disagree with him too in ways that you'll discover now that'll again again give you a kind of contemporary liveliness to this whole subject rather than the the scope of the history of philosophy that goes into the trilogy which is magnificent and I love loved spending 15 or 20 years working on that but that's history and and this will give you something that might be closer to your world um though romantic love I think is very much alive in any your world all right and then um I forget what the latter of those later pages are from 47 to 104 and 217 to 24 um there are other writings of mine on uh on the philosophy of sex and love so that's what that's what this is about um we don't have much time so let me turn things over to you in terms of any questions or any comments or any uh developments that you want to start making as the term goes on you'll be making more and more I hope and taking over more and more because the crucial thing is not what I say but what you develop in your own mind do you know U medieval art do you know oh this comes you'll be reading about this come I use this image in The Pursuit Of Love um St Sebastian you know who St Sebastian you were well you have a Catholic origin you should you know he he um was martyred by being tied to a stake or a pillar and archers shot arrows into his body is that what you were going to say were you were saying Veronica I was thinking he was set on fire um it it's a favorite theme in medieval and Renaissance painting to show this naked man with a loin cloth uh being tied having been tied to a uh a post and archers sh shooting into him right well what I I I think I say there is that it seems to me the real role of the philosopher or the writer is is to be an Archer to be not the Archer to be St Sebastian who is whom people are criticizing and attack that and I interpret this is not just St Sebastian's martyrdom but also his saintliness because his eyes are always rolling towards heaven and he accepts this he acquiesces is and his being dying because of his faith in God uh and so that's his saintliness well the saintliness of a teacher and that now this is how I got into it is to be here to present myself in all my nudity my ideas in all their nudity and for you to attack them in any way that will strengthen your your archery whatever that might be so uh uh attack me um but if you're going to attack me you ought to sit next time sit right across from me because I have you're the only one I'm having trouble hearing I'll speak up so you okay can you shout at me imagine you're on the stage and declaiming so I I guess you can stand up and start to to question you should get some sense of already better what you believe about some questions so the first one I have is what do you think about sex how do you understand what do I think about sex yeah how do you understand it I are you remind me of that uh remark of um um WC Fields the comedian in the maybe it's beyond past year he was a famous comedian in the 1930s uh and he had a red nose and it was obviously drunker and made comments like this one uh in one of his movies what do you uh what do you think about children and he says on toast I love them I'd love them I like them very much for breakfast I like them very much for breakfast on toast particularly on toast okay that's something like that I like them very much on on for breakfast particularly on toast now about sex I don't know is that the kind of answer you want I like it when it's good I don't like it it's when it's bad I'm a philosopher I'm not a I'm not a Stripes artist okay I guess this is this is the problem in my mind uh I all all in favor of sex what perhaps one way that it's that it's presented is in in Genesis when uh when man gains knowledge of Good and Evil and the first thing that he does is covers himself um he covers himself because he realizes he is naked and he's ashamed of his nudity and the question for a philosopher is why is nudity so shameful why would God think that being naked is so shameful and why would where did Adam get that idea the other creatures weren't wearing fig leaves you know they were naked why his being there in the Garden of Eden which is blissful and peaceful and all the animals are telling jokes to each other in a friendly way um it's just it's one smart alec the the serpent who makes troubles for people but um and but he's not wearing a fig Leaf either why why should Adam be ashamed I think for me that's a real conundrum there's no mention about sex uh St Augustine discusses this with a great um um Catholic philosopher and Mystic and whose confessions are wonderful reading and whose book books particularly the city uh this city of God um uh is you know very important book in the history of Theology and the history of thought everything St Augustine says um when um Adam and Eve were in the garden they had sex because that's part of being human but they didn't have sexual desire because that's evil so somehow you're supposed to have the idea of of them you know like crossing the street looking both ways before they cross the street they did it for some reason though we don't know what the reason was uh but they didn't do it because they wanted to or or because they cared or because they had any sex drive they just did it because that you know that was what you do with those orians which is a little ridiculous and then after the fall when they became ashamed of their nudity then sex became taboo because they had discovered as a result of eating of the Apple um they had knowledge of Good and Evil and they learn that sex is evil now there again one can say it's it's um you know incredible that in the Garden of Eden they should be ashamed of being naked but why would it be evil to be naked why would it be evil to have sex how can sex be evil that however has been the traditional view of all Christians Catholic Church Protestant church uh many fundamentalists nowadays many people think that sex by its very nature is sinful and that was the view that Kant grew up with and he went far beyond his um Protestant Origins as a philosopher but he retained that that sex is somehow inherently sinful the problem that see Kant is really a very great man uh do you mind should I go on or I wanted you to talk but maybe talking about k a little with help Kant wrote what may be the most important book of the modern world called uh the critique of pure reason it's an attack on what reason which is the faculty that dayart and the history of philosophy thought could solve all the problems about the universe the metaphysic through the metaphysics that reason that access to which itself was a view that went back to Plato um and Kant coming after uh the early beginnings of Romanticism in the end of the 18th century he thought there was something different the reason maybe was not that important he was he was a great admirer of rouso from whom he was very different but he admired Riso and his book is an attempt to show that reason can't really solve any problems it's a critique of pure reason deductive reason having gone through that he then had to reconstruct all of our thinking and that took two more great books the critique of practical reason the critique critique of judgment but in critique of pure reason he starts out with a fundamental question is how is it possible for there to be the world now think what kind of question this is and it's it's really staggeringly profound question that only a very pure and perfect intellect mind like Hans could possibly entertain how is it possibly the world you mean maybe it could be impossible what is he mean by that and then out comes this very carefully systematic structure that is is a beauty for that kind for the right kind of philosopher read I mentioned this because on sex and you'll be reading this in my chapter or you can jump ahead K says all the all the great poets and all many philosophers in the history of philosophy of Love have said that sexual love is is a beautiful thing and a wonderful thing and maybe even the only moral thing but how is it possible not only for to be good but for there to be such a thing as sexual love without a contradiction it's how is it logically possible for there to be anything that could be called sexual love why because love means being concerned about another person it's what in other works of his he calls human love treating another as as a person as an end as feeling respect for that person as a person which I think is a very profound Insight which for me is the beginning of wisdom all wisdom and ethical philosophy it's something I believe in my heart and soul and is very close to the nature of My Religion whatever it is the or the content of whatever religion I may have to treat another person as a person um all persons doesn't matter you know all the way we differentiate among persons that's what love is is love is the capacity to care about the welfare of another person which all of which needs great deal of analysis but you got the idea sex however is an appetite it's like eating a chicken you don't eat chickens for the good of the chicken you know when you put your hand in the refrigerator you're not thinking how can I benefit that creature that's there cooked and Frozen it's been put there uh because you somebody foresaw that you would want to make use of it for a selfish purpose and that we take for granted we don't consider it immoral somehow uh it's perfectly proper to kill chickens and to eat them why well we couldn't survive otherwise vegetarians might not want to but then they kill vegetables or uproot them or they do something or else they die of die of starvation and and uh if they have children that may be immoral in itself and so on so it's not natural and inevitable and I make a big fuss about it that we are all inherently selfish it's a part of our being to be selfish and nothing to be ashamed of you whether you're wearing a fig leaf or not uh acting out of yourself for yourself is normal and natural it may not constitute to the kind of love you're interested in what human love because that may involve another person but um it's selfish to want to use other persons for your own good and Kant says that's just what sex is and sex is nothing else sex is an appetite like hunger in which you're going to use some else usually a living thing even if it's only a vegetable as a commodity for your own benefit your own selfish benefit so if a man and he always talks from the man's point of view if a man lusts after a woman he wants to use her to satisfy his sexual desire once he's used her it's like sucking a lemon or sucking a lemon dry it's an interesting image I don't want to pursue that but it's it's lemon have uh sucked he doesn't even say squeeze I think he says sucking a lemon dry and then you throw it away and people can't be treated that way another person is a person therefore sex is inherently immoral immoral not immoral and and if one acts on it one is doing something that is evil it's a sinful sinful though he he doesn't want to rely on religion he wants to construct religion out of Ethics it's uh it's um evil whereas love is a great good we admire people who are loving uh love is one of the great good things in life and therefore we have in the concept of sexual love a contradiction in terms either you lust after another person and it's all sex or notice tone of voice cuz we use the lower register sex you know it's sex which means is it's meaningless it's physiological it's satisfying a drive an instinct a hormonal impulse has nothing to do with love nothing to do with the other person even the sort of uh forgive me for even quoting it the uh male statement that recurs in all sort of variations all women are alike in the dark right uh it's vulgar and disgusting but it's a reflection of the idea that they're there for the sexual use of the male and in fact there is the institution of prostitution in which millions and millions of women have been subjugated sometimes willingly but in an economic situation and social situation in which they had no choice so that even if they willing ly did it and maybe didn't even suffer because they didn't take it seriously or for whatever reason or became richer than their johnes they did it willingly but even then they did it in a situation that they didn't themselves choose and now when women have a choice they clearly don't want it the way they were willing to submit to it before anyhow in that Civilization women were there to be used K viw is enlightened liberated and he says if that is what sex is sex is evil and so how can there be sexual love and yet that's what all the poets talk about now it takes a great genius in philosophy to approach the problem in that way and then he works at it and reaches his resolution I can tell you the conclusion if you want or I can leave you in suspense uh and what he ends up with is to me for me an absurd solution so I attack him on those grounds but the formation of the problem is brilliant and wonderful and I'm happy to have had access to this kant's mind even uh in my kind of attack and most people hardly anybody would nowadays would agree with kant's conclusions but they're they're stimulating so it's about 5:00 so uh you tell me at the beginning of next class whether you want to hear about con conclusion whether you've been dying of suspense or else you you have to get my book and and I apologize because it's still in paperback in hard cover the paperback is coming out but hasn't yet and so it costs some money uh it's probably on reserve anyhow I apologize for the cost of it if you turn to that chapter in expirations love and sex you'll see what his view is and what my contrary view is okay then I'll see and tell me you'll all be here next week okay now I have to sign the form for some of you at least the rest of you have enrolled except forward toet great and if as I said um anyone who you know would be willing to treat the rest of the course seriously is still welcome but be on time and in this room here him him and her him or her and and you