Session 3 24.261 Philosophy of Love in the Western World

a little fuzzy but um let me start it please this way um Adriana is going to give a presentation today before that I want to correct my Mis quotation from the short poem by darthy Parker that I mentioned last week uh you'll remember it when I finished reading you the authentic version which reads oh life is a glorious cycle of song A medley of extemporanea and love is a thing that can never go wrong and I am Maria of Romania that's what I was trying to remember um and as I mentioned Maria of Romania was the queen of that country at that time so you get the idea that the speaker is a little uh confused in her mind you remember the context When U Veronica was talking about love uh which can have various virtues without at the moment discussing all of the drawbacks all right today Adriana is going to take over so What why don't you start now and do you mind being interrupted or not no not at all that applies to the rest of you as well as me okay so we read two chapters from The Pursuit Of Love we read the chapter on sexual love and the chapter on love and Society so first I would like to make some comments on the chapter of sexual love um you didn't go very deep into the concept of sexual love in the religious aspect so I would like to elaborate a little bit on how this evolved entire entirely fitting but for next week you'll be reading a chapter called religious Love yeah this is just but it doesn't matter it doesn't matter in fact maybe it's better for you to try out your own ideas before you read that chapter um so first of all Aristotle derived the term filia from Plato's uh arrow and he redefined love as something that is more dependent on reason than on passion what on than passion uh more dependent on reason than on passion than on passion but what does the idea filia referred to more like friendship friendship that's the big difference it actually means friendship in Greek St Roose say it again it actually means friendship exactly yes exactly right as in philanthropic friendly sort of relationship not necessarily a passionate one at all so there are some people who have a passion for philanth philanthropy that's you see a complication but um my point here is that then filia gave rise to Agape Christian philosophy and in in this concept erotic love is repressed and what is emphasized is the union of the souls okay I think at this point I should interrupt for uh one of my manyi lectures that I hope you'll help me to keep short in the um Trilogy the nature of love talking about Christian love they're several hundred pages on Christian love I distinguish among four different concepts that applied all of the words coming from the Greek not all of the ideas did but the words did the words are love as eras and I'll explain that to you love as filia love as noos and love as Agape Agape you've already encountered in this in this book haven't you yes all right I say love as but the truth is that the medieval system of thought was inherently a synthesis and this idea of the synthesis of these different properties of Love or ingredients in love then became part of the controversy that um erupted in the reformation and the Schism between the Catholics and the Protestants and that has never been overcome because they became more and more Protestants different sects but uh the idea of there being one kind of Christianity um I don't think anyone can affirm anymore there may be ecumenical efforts to communicate there may be a sense of identity as Christians but still they are different sects and that's related to the question of the synthesis among those four ingredients of medieval love which is still exists as ingredients in Catholic theology follow me all right the first one AOS AOS as Adriana just point pointed out is a platonic idea and it refers to the way in which the human soul is always striving to improve itself to make itself better why because Plato thought that that's in the nature of the universe everything wants to be better um nobody wants something that is inferior uh given a choice between um something that's good and something that's best everybody wants what's best at that applies not only uh in advertisements for automobiles and and uh food at home but also in terms of the nature of the self the soul the soul always wants to improve itself to make itself better and better better it's striving for Perfection and that's built into everything in the universe according to Plato uh and most evident and most interesting in human beings why because human beings are created in the image of God and God is perfect God not only is perfect but it's part of the uh tradition the Christian tradition that uh God is perfection and also that God since he is perfect loves himself now that sounds as if uh there's some kind of um copsis or some kind of U selfishness being wrapped up in yourself or or narcissism I guess like you remember the Greek myth of narcissist who fell in love with his own image the idea is that God is spiritually perfect and consequently falling in love with himself or being in love with not falling in love because that's separate concept remember in my analysis but uh uh love for Perfection is a manifestation of the P spiritual Purity that is true in God in a way that it's not true in anybody else and yet that's what we strive for in loving God uh Demetri you wanted to say something yeah well you said that according to Plato love is the pursuit of perfection How could a perfect being be in pursuit of perfection or love that's a very big problem in Plato um on the platonic view which was not uncommon at that time um the gods didn't love because they were perfect to love is to seek for something better than yourself something outside yourself which will make you better but if you are already perfect you know there is there is no place for there to be loved so the traditional view was that the gods did not love because they were already perfect uh the mythological source is in the sort of mythological character of the god called AAS who is the god of love the son of Aphrodite the uh the uh goddess of love um and the point about AOS is that he is always Wayward he's very imperfect he is a an individual who will shoot his arrows of Desire wherever he feels like uh he's a kind of Rogue a kind of um jigo you might even think of him as a kind of Don Juan who will simply uh for reasons of his own cause people to fall in love not because he is makes them better but because that is in his nature right all right the now Plato picks this up and says that this typ typifies the way in which only an imperfect person could love and love in the sense of striving to attain something that is better rather than what one is or worse than what one is the gods being perfect they're different from Aros and uh they don't don't love they are the object of Love Mortals uh inferior uh imperfect creatures like us want to emulate the gods to be like them right uh 2,000 years later um n says in one place um if um um the gods are perfect how can I not want to be one of them myself I want in other words to be God and then s picks this up and says that the futility of the human race is that all men and women all people want to be perfect but there is only one creature who entity who can be perfect and that's god with the capital G now because it's 20th century and uh nature concludes but God does not exist and therefore the human search to be God which devout religious person would call blasphemous that search according to sat uh is futile and so humanity is futile that's SRA uh going far beyond n and n playing upon this idea of imperfect creatures searching to be like the perfect ones but the only perfect ones be being the gods or God um Demetri again do you you want to say something yeah I I can see I can see this argument but uh certainly it doesn't mean that you can get much better than you are um the real question is whether you can truly emulate God because God belongs to a different domain uh he is inherently perfect and we're inherently imperfect he is Immortal and we're Immortal um all sorts of ways in which God is infinite in his goodness his wisdom his power and we are finite and the um fact that you want to be like that doesn't change the state the nature of The Human Condition that's that's the problem we don't have to go through this into too much detail to try to resolve it I wanted to make this little bypass to explain the concept in medieval Christianity which is the concept of AOS the great thinker who interprets the Christian religion in terms of Aras is St Augustine and I have a lot of discussion of him in the first volume of the trilogy uh the whole first volume of the trilogy the part that deals with Christianity which is over over 200 Pages works at this analysis into the four ingredients and the question of whether they can be synthesized or not so if you're really interested for in detail go back to the first volume of the love Trilogy uh St Augustine's idea comes directly out of Plato he was originally a pagan uh uh growing up to be a platonist and then he um saw the word heard the word of God had a revelation sort of and uh converted to Christianity his mother was a Christian his father was a a pagan um and there was this conflict with him he finally became a not only a Christian but also a very prolific writer uh and theologian and uh Bishop uh and finally um he was Sanctified as he was um canonized as a saint and so St Augustine is one of the pillars of the Catholic faith his dominant idea is that all human beings all Christians are defined in terms of their erotic love of a spiritual sort the search to approximate the Perfection of God that was the big emphasis in him now and it came out of Plato Aristotle deals with a problem that Demitri brought up um in a very late dialogue um Plato raises the problem but he doesn't do anything about it uh the problem is that if love um is um Perfection it's the best condition one can imagine meaning by that the love of the highest forms the good the beautiful which Christianity interpreted as God Divinity then Plato says um how is it possible that loving that should not be a perfection in itself so the whole question of Love consisting for a search for Perfection but love not being perfect is raised in that um dialogue of Plato's but he doesn't resolve it Aristotle does resolve it Aristotle says um it is because love is a Perfection that anybody um who searches for the best will also experience and embody the nature of love so that all makes a sharp change from Plato uh Aristotle didn't write very much about the Panorama of loves there's hardly any discussion of sexual love or love uh um between um uh friends marching together as in Plato in their search for the the good but he does have a very important chapter in his book The Nick and McKean ethics on the nature of friendship and he defines friendship as a kind of love but it's the kind that is at its best when you have two virtuous individuals that is two people who are inherently good morally good and that'll be he thinks among those who are fully developed in their rationality so that this gets back to the point Arana was making about love for Aristotle being a form of Reason um to that extent emotions passion all of which a throbbing in Plato Plato is really a uh almost a romantic poet he was a great writer a literary writer of the search for the good you know could bring about what he called the Divine Madness in which you Lo lose your reason because you're transported into a different realm and you can see 19th century Romanticism uh earning learning a great deal from Plato uh in Aristotle you don't get much of that but you get a really very interesting analysis about different kinds of friendship I don't want to get into it right now there's a chapter on our stotle in the first volume and a long chapter on Plato uh uh in the one kind that I want to emphasize is the idea of filia being friendship among people who are alike in their virtuous search for the good and who live together in a community so Aristotle is almost a political theorist when he talks about love that love is a way of unifying the city state and being uh managed properly by the people who are capable of being friends and who who know the difference between right and wrong it's almost a constitutional view about the nature of love and in fact Aristotle did write constitutions for a large number of cities States throughout the Greek Empire um that's filia Medi Christianity appropriates that and in the first years uh of Christianity first century 2 Century ad there were little societies who communes as we would call them since like the communes of 1960 in which men and women would live together uh in a loving friendship one problem is what did love involve do you have to uh subjugate all of your physical desires your sexual desires was this free love uh among Christians a lot of them uh seem to have bordered on that or even turned into that and they were considered heretical and thousands and thousands of them were murdered by uh those who thought that that wasn't good Christianity there were all the Cru States against the alians but against the um cathars and other people uh on the grounds that they desecrated the Christian religion they were sort of too friendly to each other uh but then there were others who like in a NY or Monastery or a Christian commune um subjugated uh conquered their sexual desires and liveed together as brother and sisters or as intimate friends uh within Christ the idea of filia therefore was being applied by them and it continued as an important element in Christian ideas about the nature of Love of religious Love um stos oh yeah so is that the reason why monasteries are all men and or did they originate from the I think the upshot of that conflict was the need to separate the sexes in order to keep The Devout Believers purified uh at the same time uh the Church of course recognized that there wouldn't be any uh future Generations unless something of that sort went on and so they made a big thing about the San sanctity um the sacrament of marriage so in marriage what you couldn't be could do out could not do outside was not only free and and uh um recommended it was triy to part of the beauty of marriage which is I always think is a very great anomaly particularly nowadays when marriage is crumbling all around um why can't you do outside of marriage what you're encouraged to do inside of marriage well this is something we can come back there um filia then is the second ingredient of the Catholic synthesis in the Middle Ages the third ingredient uh doesn't come from Greek philosophy it comes from the other parent of Christianity which is Judaism in the Old Testament there is the idea of God's law and uh man being ordained to be willing to submit to God's law not doing it grudging in L but doing it with a good will doing it lovingly and that there love would show itself in uh living up to God's Commandments and God's laws so uh that was the third ingredient the fourth ingredient is agape Agape is God because Agape is God's love and and God is defined as love and that involves what I call in the chapter in the first volume the Divine bestow God bestows love upon the world first in creating it out of nothing no reason why there had to be a world and no reason why there had to be human beings this was a bestow of God's goodness in creating this beautiful world as it used to be and allowing people to enjoy life as they sometimes still do try to do try to do um second bestow occurs when God seeing how weak and feeble morally and spiritually people are um how sinful they are he nevertheless instead of just wiping them off the face of the globe um he sends his own son and the meaning of the son word son is metaphoric it refers to the a second person as it's called now for me all of this language is very hard to understand and I'm not sure that it is really uh understandable um what sense is uh Christ something like a son uh and if Christ is the second person of God what is the meaning of person anymore you one doesn't one thinks of the Pagan image of Janice with the faces you know pointing in different directions two-faced creature but it's more more complicated than that um and then the third person is the Holy Ghost which sometimes is now called the Holy Spirit um now the point about the Holy Spirit is that it itself is defined in terms of God's Agape it itself is the purity of his besto upon the world however we interpret the three persons that God is since Catholicism is TR Arian and of course later prant sex sex will not be and Judaism was not um the second bestow of goodness upon the world occurs when he sends his own son for God hath sent his own son um to save the world um save the world from what from its own sinfulness so God so Christ dies as a way of taking away the sins of humanity one can always say why how does that happen why just just because Christ dies how are the sins taken away how can you erase reality what occurs is is infinite infinitely unerasable because it is what it is it happened that sin existed you know sort how can you erase it um all of this is is a mystery that the theologians uh agree cannot be fully understood to our feeble Minds but it's and it's part of the Dogma so I won't I won't try to make too much sense out of that uh for me the um oh and then finally uh the Third Kind of a sto is that when uh the Sinners die they aren't all thrown into hell uh that God tries his best to be merciful and to spare as many as possible and uh that uh is part of the function of Christ and he intervenes with his mother um but there can't be a spiritual mother God doesn't have a wife it's the mother of Jesus who to in whose person uh Christ appears and then somehow she becomes more than just a saint uh kind of goddess in fact um and he intervene people will inter can intervene with her to be spared to get favors to have mercies per formed and so will Christ all of this being a a third illustration of God's infinite bestow upon the world um I in the book I present all of this as sympathetically as I can because as I keep saying being a philosopher means trying to help people to make their ideas clear it's not uh going around with a uh kind of intellectual machete cutting down all of uh the people who don't agree with with you that's the way you can get to be a professor but it's not it's not the true to the spirit of philosophy uh what why then do I pay so much attention to this because for me it's all magnificent mythology it's all a beautiful picture of the world beautiful not in the sense that the world is shown to be beautiful but rather because the doing of it is beautiful the Act is D it's an artistic conceptual artistic feat to think of the world in terms of these categories and in terms of these different ingredients and I'm fascinated by that but I'm also fascinated being pluralistic uh and not you know I'm not faithful to any one religion uh I love them all and they're all different and there are many more that aren't religious at all and I feel the same way about it about them uh at least I aspired to that um we won't we later in the course we may get to that I'll just briefly mention that that's what I mean by having the love of Love or the love of the love in everything that that then becomes for me as it did for George santiana whom I mentioned to you and others becomes the basis of a humanistic uh non-theistic religion very different from the established religions but it's the equivalent of an of a religion um that being my motive what I want to do is to stand Christianity on its head or if I'm right stand it on its feet by saying these ideas of bestow are simply Expressions metaphoric versions of something that human beings do not just God the all of love can be understood in terms of a system of bestow and then having got that um I then contrast with sto with appraisal having made the contrast I then try to show the harmonization between Theo and appraisal and then after that there are other distinctions and the matter gets to be more and more complicated as you'll see when you get to the book called Explorations in love and sex um my first acquaintance with the idea of Agape of God's pistol came to me in the in a great work by a Protestant Bishop the bishop of Lun uh whose name was um nigr I forget now what his first name was and the n y g re n um and the book is called agape and and it's a marvelous history of Western philosop Christian Philosophy from the point of view of the um two ways of thinking entering into the thought of Christians that's where I got the idea the Christian idea of of bestow and then not being a devout believer like uh nigran uh I be I wanted to see how this could be an expression of the mythologizing idealizing aspect of human nature then I had to explain what it was to idealize what how imagination comes into it and so on all of that drives out of this early exploration uh for me all right so here we have the four Concepts I'm sorry this so lengthy Adriana you will have all the time you want very shortly um four four concepts of AOS filia nomos and Agape the great Genius of the Catholic world uh was St Thomas aquinus um in books in you know more I don't know if one call them books sort of monuments like uh sumica some the high highest summation of of theology um in the uh in the I guess the 14th century is when he lived right am I right or was it it wasn't the 13th um he um formulated what became the basis of all subsequent Catholicism and Central in that was the idea that God is all of these that all of these are Christian Concepts and and they are entirely compatible they're they are synthesized and he he created a synthesis by welding them into each other right all right uh in the case of Luther now was jumping to the Reformation Luther um couldn't believe all four of them he thought that God was Agape for him that was the basis of Christianity but uh AOS he me means thought of no matter what St Augustine said uh is selfish it's somebody wanting to get better something better so given a choice between a lesser spiritual good which is what human beings would have and a better higher spiritual good which is what a Divinity would have God then uh a Lusty selfish man will try to make himself better so that he can get the best there is nobody wants an inferior thing but that's selfishness according uh to Luther uh in he was originally in his life in a a austinian monastery um and he lost his faith in Catholicism there um he went through all of the rituals self- flatulation and all of the very difficult hardships that were supposed to purify oneself of the longings of the flesh uh make one more and more spiritual and um you know he suffered in the proper manner but um he writes um the more I did that the more I realize that how sinful I was because of my desire to do that uh it I couldn't eliminate that uh and why well if I could if I did eliminate that I would if I did the job properly the way I'm being trained in the monastery I'd become a saint but uh for the wrong reasons and there's one line I've always remembered from his description of those days he said I concluded um uh oh devil the devil you'll make you'll you'll make a saint of me yet W you that there was something infinitely sinful and evil in the very idea of anybody wanting to make himself into his Saint if you become one it's not because of anything you do it's because of God's grace God's grace is outflowing from his um Agape his Theo of Love um and your striving to get it is no better than you're striving to make a fortune or um to make love to a very large number of women all of that is evil the spirit that's it's a kind of spiritual evil as opposed to more M material evils on that basis uh Luther began by separating AOS out of Christianity um and um the uh living up to the laws and he thought that was the the uh reason why the Jews U were finally uh dismissed by God and a new religion had to be created because you would live up to the law laws inevitably out of obedience not out of love so that took care of nomos filia uh was uh a little better but not much because you could have a society of robbers or murderers or Sinners so just the Friendship among people who are imperfect doesn't yet bring one into the religious condition one wants the only thing that would would be Agape but man can't have agape and therefore uh life on Earth human nature is evil inherently and the Lutheran nowadays really seem to believe that I don't know if any of you listen to um um Prairie Home Companion on radio do does that not popular thing to you for all of you it's on all the public broadcasting stations at the same time Saturday at 6 o00 when I'm in New Hampshire because where I happen to be located i' pick up about six or seven different public broadcasting stations Albany um uh ammer Boston and two in New Hampshire you know all of them and at 6:00 they all play this thing because it's so popular uh and the it uh the the um the master ceremonies who is very famous but whose name I've now forgot what is what is his name you don't know um in any event he has a a monologue about life in his hometown which is a fictional place somewhere in Minnesota uh called Lake wagon now the name itself and it's where everybody is a Lutheran and all being Lutheran they're all sure of their own their own sinfulness that everything they do is Tainted and uh since uh presumably he's a Lutheran and he's very comical uh it's done with a good spirit nobody seems to think this is a kind of Lutheran baiting uh but the point is that that goes back to Luther's belief that uh human nature is inherently evil he doesn't give up however because God being infinitely good bestows his love uh upon the world and uh give rewards those who have faith in him not for their Good Deeds because you do good deeds you're scheming um uh but rather uh because it's God's grace which can fall on anybody without the person knowing about it so you have a very different conception from St um uh Thomas aquinus is all right and that results in the splitting of the synthesis that's what those pages of mine are about the creation of the synthesis and the splitting of the synthesis when the uh first volume came out I thought you know I was doing a good philosophical job my colleagues the American philosophers would recognize the Brilliance of my analysis uh and the historian would see uh how insightful I was as a historian of ideas uh but I was afraid the religious people would be horrified at my standing their religion on its head and then chopping it up and for the sake of this argument that I was developing I was completely wrong the philosophers completely ignored it and the religious people thought there was something of interest and nowadays I think that's still the case that um is it has a great Fair reputation among my whereas other books of mine have been totally neglected but um I think mainly by by people who take religion seriously they didn't mind the fact that I was an outsider a humanist um so I'm very I'm happy to have been of service to that extent though I'm sorry that philosophy has gone off in its own in its own Wayward manner Adriana have you forgotten everything that you wanted to say um not not really have I I hope I haven't deterred you no then let's go back you were saying about RS filia yes and uh well you already talked about what I was going to say about how St Austine made the distinction between the body and soul based on Plato PL dous view of the world and he praised the soul and sustained the body so Christianity takes this and gives rise to to Christian and Catholic morals and deres the concept of Sin from uh disdaining the body and uh I just wanted to mention that because this is the reason why sometimes s sexuality is treated as as sort of a taboo topic um and it it wasn't very it wasn't mentioned on that chapter so I just wanted to no this is worth developing does anyone want to say anything about that uh St uh I think why sexuality is considered a taboo by Christians is because it was a pagan uh they wanted to you know make pagans they didn't want to have Pagan traits in their religion and pagans used to have I mean in ancient Greek these big ories and you know sex and you know loving of the woman was part of um the whole Pagan uh religion so Christians in their effort to try to you know shun paganism made sex a taboo and made the woman inferior to man um I think that may have been a second idea because even if um you shun sex doesn't make women inferior I was just there were there were goddesses F fertility goddesses among ancient people and maybe that was thought to be competitive with the one God that Christianity believed in but they could just as easily have said that um sex is bad because of the men as well as because of the women in terms of the history of the different versions of Christianity Catholicism has always been much friendlier to sexuality than Protestant protestantism until the 20th century I think uh in the last 100 years or maybe maybe that was part of the influence of 19th century Romanticism uh which we haven't got to yet um uh really I mean the analysis of um the origin of romantis 19 century Romanticism out of Christian religion I haven't touched on uh I don't think it I go into it much in this book that there are hundreds of pages on that in the second volume I'll spare you that today um we'll come back to it but uh in recent times there have been Protestant sects that say God is love and the U nature of our uh Christianity is to try to emulate God and to establish a loving communion uh with other people so there ideas of filia but um they don't say the way they did in the 17th century or or 16th century uh that uh sex itself is bad they say well maybe that's a way of loving other people and therefore emulating God whereas and in Catholicism which had ties to Pagan religion uh in many ways uh sex was not ruled out the gustiness the enjoyment of sex it had to be uh controlled by the church it had to occur in marriage it had to occur uh it had to be Sanctified uh but in itself it was simply um a way of propagating the race and what could be wrong with that in accordance with God's laws so you get this interesting reversal that um protestantism uh was reaction kind of often a puritanical reaction against that uh until recently when many pro Protestant beliefs sects are quite happy with the idea many pro sects I mean divisions within Protestant are happy with the idea of sex and in Pro and in Catholicism until re uh recently also uh often there was a kind of puritanism of a Catholic sort in Ireland for instance if I don't know any you know the work of the great novelist James Joyce he grew up in uh Catholic um uh Society in which sex was uh uh thought of the way the Puritans would have and he reacted and for that he was condemned and in fact his books were occasionally banned um maybe they I don't know if they still are in Ireland but for a long time they you couldn't read ulyses which has a lot of sex in it uh in Ireland uh and even could be U sold in the United States until uh about 12 years or so after was written it was banned it was seized by the uh by the immigration people and destroyed goad did you want to say something yeah I've thought about this a lot in terms of Plato and um there's kind of two key dialogues if you want to it's it's the Symposium in the Fus and uh the Fus is very strange because U um in in describing love he makes he makes this metaphor or he makes this metaphor of the soul that the soul is like a charioteer with two horses and that you mind if I get into this no if adri doesn't so one of the horses is uh Noble and well bred and well-mannered follows the lead of The Chariot here and the other one is unruly and wild and has its own kind of very chaotic nature and The Chariot here is supposed to be reason and I think the noble seed supposed to be something like the spirited element of the soul and the uh the wild SE is supposed to be um I don't know what it's called kind of Bas this oh no the white was spiritual and the black horse was Bas yeah some kind of and Chariot here would be reason trying to keep them in control yeah and so in in this in this metaphor when when when you come upon somebody that uh so first of all the idea of this soul is that this Chariot was wandering around in heaven around uh true beauty and truth and God and uh then it fell down into a body and so now when you uh see somebody who uh who has some of the a reflection of that truth that you saw there uh you're in awe and you try to uh spend time with them and to remember remember this beautiful world that you fell from but uh the point about sex is that this this wild Ste when you come to a person Plato thinks this wild Ste says you know forget about what's beautiful and true about them grab them jump onto them and this he thinks is the very base and and vulgar part of man so you should try to control this Ste and beat him keep him in check something like this okay more I anything about this so why to continue [Music] um you define sexual love in terms of three concepts the libidinal the erotic and the Romantic uh the libidinal is the animal part the erotic is more of the imagination part and here I want to stop because at some point you say that with the erotic we can enjoy the presence of someone for whom we don't have Lial desire so I wanted to ask you if this means that erotism has two aspects the aspect of um when when the Beloved is not involved and you can um you can see someone who for whom you have no Lial desire and then the other aspect is when the erotic comes together with the theal and the Romantic to give rise to the meaning of life as you say and this only happens in the Beloved so right um the um the analysis you're referring to is between the libidinal the erotic and the Romantic you didn't say get to the Romantic yet um like all of my analyses these are conceptual tools and in terms of me as a thinker I I think of myself as a Craftsman or Carpenter uh in a shop and uh suddenly he needs something done and he grabs for a tool that'll do it uh um I don't lay any importance on the uh Concepts themselves they're just tools to help clarify some job that I want uh and that I think is relevant to what you were saying about there being two kinds one in which AOS is combined with the libidinal and the other in which it's purified and separated from the libidinal um in a sense one might say that um all three of them happen or can happen simultaneously you could have a relationship which is lital erotic and romantic and also spiritual so that one having made the artificial distinction I don't want to be a slave to it just that that will give me a certain Insight which I can then walk around in order to show the complexity of human nature um the uh also I'm not sure that they ever occur in any kind of Purity is there such a thing as a leidal interest devoid of other things like the erotic for instance see the point about Freud is that Freud came from a scientific tradition uh which you will all recognize uh that's called reductivism that is if you can well um Arthur you're nodding maybe you should explain it well something we were just talking about to talk so everything is is you take just an idea and break it down to a single set of unanalyzable Rock Bottom bases exactly then you can find out all there is to know about it or at least everything about it can be derived from those from that set of principles right now that's um a an attitude that has um intrigued me all my life and I finally came to grips with it in a book of M feeling and Imagination where I try to express my doubts about their being make if it making any sense what would it be like to get to the Rock Bottom about anything maybe there is no Rock Bottom you know who said that the world uh uh can be understood can be reduced to any principle that will enable us to know everything or know anything in fact um the search for the meaning of everything right uh and String Theory comes into this because maybe just as a matter of advertising but maybe it's fundamental in their concept there there it's they describe themselves is the theory of everything that they they want to find a rock bottom solution to the nature of the physical universe but maybe there isn't any Rock Bottom maybe we don't even know what we're looking for maybe uh we'll never be able to find it doesn't mean that we couldn't pick up some interesting facts and theories on the way and that's for scientists to determine um but often scientists are fooled by their own propaganda uh that is fundraising which is to say we're we've reached a very interesting uh conclusion here and if we only are given enough funds and allowed to continue maybe 10,000 50,000 years we'll get to the Bottom of Everything we'll find out what everything is like you know it's accelarating and some people will pay for that acceleration um but otherwise maybe simply a big mistake in scientific theory to assume that there is a rock bottom um Freud did that in 19th century people were very optimistic about the hard Sciences physics and chemistry in particular and his idea was to create a psychology on the model of that to make psychology into a hard science and to reduce all of the psychological appearances to some rock bottom ideas and one idea I don't want to go through the whole Freudian structure if you're interested I I keep I apologize but it's all I know I'm I'm so limited uh look at the third volum of the trilogy uh where I have a 70 page chapter on Freud as a philosopher uh and a philosopher of Love uh the one of the element El one of quite a number of these elements uh is the idea of libido uh and that's where why I use the word the libidol to separate myself from Freud while also talking about things similar to what he does when he talks about the libido his idea is that the the liido is a field of force which he gets from schopenhauer uh and as he admits and um it um is just sheer energy it explains the nature of passion why because people are uh laidly attracted to each other um it's mindless uh it's not civilized on the contrary it can be very dangerous to civilization when uh for reasons of leidal love people do foolish things and endanger the species who knows you know all sorts of examples uh but without it one wouldn't be able to explain human feelings affect uh or the way in which human beings are capable of loving now the reason I mentioned this is because uh I want to make sure that Adriana was right in her presentation of my analysis it isn't as if there is a separate thing which is the the leidal that would would be like saying that there is a rock bottom uh energy which is uh um uh liido is Freud reduces love to right um it's a useful concept it's a tool it enables me to set up the contrast enables me to make the analysis because in the process I think I can illuminate different aspects of human nature leidal the erotic and then later we'll get through the Romantic but if somebody said well why can't they all interact I'll would say that's fine let's try that out um and I make a few I have a couple of paragraphs on that I I don't know how far I can go well maybe in a sense I've skirting been skirting around that in many places uh or if someone says well you know these are so antagonistic um they're going to interfere with each other and certainly can find exam extreme examples um a man who for reasons of his own libidinal impulse rapes a woman can't just say well you know it's a part of love we all believe in love and this is my contribution to the cause uh in mozarts oper Donovan know you know about that at least right the greatest Opera many people say that was ever written he his servant lapello takes um Donavan aside at one point the beginning of the second act and says to him look what are you doing don't you realize you seduce all of these women and then you abandon them and some of them are in misery you know they're not all flirts they really treat love seriously and they fall in love with you and you just ditch them you do a great deal of harm right to which Donavan replies in Italian I'll translate it but you can figure it out he says you got the idea but it's all love right well the point is that uh love can do a great deal of harm and if you refuse to say it's just love you then are in the position to say that the LI libidinal at its worst can do a great deal of harm and can be evil and just because you have a libidinal interests uh which in Men in particular involves physical aggressiveness because both are based on St around uh and then you feel well you know I'm just uh doing what I was made to do that no justification that that's wrong that's evil the greatest evil in rape is not in um entering the body of a non willing woman uh it's violating her will it's it's violating her being by not doing what she wants you to do even if you con even if you convince yourself that's what she really wants that always comes up in rape cases where the uh defense of the U of the Raper tries to convince the court that the woman really wanted it that's a male myth both women probably great majority who are raped don't want it and the crime which doesn't enter into the Law Courts because it's such a an abstract philosophical crime uh is violating her will violating her personhood violating her autonomy but of course that's too much for the law court so they talk about her body being uh invaded without against her choice without her compliance non-consensual sex so physical but it's the idea of the of the consensuality and its destruction that seems to me to be the basic thing uh about the evil of rape so physical violence is exactly the same thing violence is what exactly the same kind of thing um robbery or anything well VI if by violence you mean uh nonconceptual harm done to another person mean no I mean there's a lot of violence in football and people are not to prison for that I me that's part of the game you run that risk so you see it's non non-consensual violence can the other types of Love have this kind of negative side to them as the I think I think that the the analysis is made in such a broad way because I want you to you know see what what you know it's like somebody with a with a net let's see what we'll pick up with it and so I want it to be a big net but I'm I don't think the mind works at least not my mind uh Works in such a way that um it can have necessary and sufficient conditions so that U there will be no overl overlap uh mathematics can do that logic is based on that and modern a lot of modern philosophy which I don't subscribe to is based on logic um but the world as I see it is a fluid mess it's uh well the subtitle is of the book feeling and Imagination is the vibrant flux of our existence life human life and the and reality is a flux but it can be vibrant because there are values and that's what the book is about um so that you're right um there would be more than just what is at the core of these Concepts and they can overlap in all sorts of various ways AR uh I had another question about the erotic before I move on remember but you haven't say anything about the erotic we hardly got started on the libidinal what what do you mean by erotic what do I how do you interpret my use of it since we're working out of my book I interpret it as the use of imagination to exalt the Beloved or to appreciate the beautiful of things that is the interpretation imagination comes into it but I give the analogy which is opening a enormous can of worms um with gravity gravity is a concept that Newton used that is still thought of as being one of the laws of nature but the whole trend of 20th and 21st century is to get far beyond the Reliance upon that concept of gravity what Newton observed was um the Apple falling on his head um the bodies seem to get attracted the Apple not aiming for him but aiming for the Earth that objects that are height are pulled to the Earth but it's it's it's a mystical sort of thing you don't see it have you ever seen gravity no um it's a force and yet without it Newton says we can't explain how the planets go around the Sun how the the Sun stays where it is or all the movement in the in the heavens um gravity therefore is a very important law of nature for him um now what intrigues me is that um it's a mysterious thing no matter how much scientists May dress it up it's a great mystery about why should things pull at each other why should there be Fe why should these fields of forces somehow be interrelated in a dynamic way of sort a gravitational sort of way and then I think about people I mean uh a man and a woman um they gravitate to each other and sometimes dramatically well this is so far be before your time um there was a a cartoon in my childhood um called uh Gerald MCB Bo and that sound it is Bo suddenly something will strike his mind or something like that you know you know get the idea of vibrations like that well but that's the way people often do relate to each other not always but sometimes man is walking down the street and then at least uh metaphoric I mean met metaphorically and also um mythologically uh it strikes him and and he's in love this is a constant theme in the movies you know no explanation no accounting for such things but it's such a force that he has to live live in it and it's more than just sexual libido which is a biological thing related to reproduction of the species and involves certain changes um in uh the body this is suddenly a feeling that this is my girl this is the one for me and it one it find it's very hard to know how it happens or why it happens could be because she looks like uh his mother Freud tended that way or it could be she doesn't look like his mother and he's reacting against his mother so it's always subject to some kind of interpretation but people do get attracted to to one another it usually doesn't end up being falling in love or being that dramatic you know but rather it could be friendship or you know somehow I can communicate with that person or we have something in common or I feel for him um you know and it varies it varies um the feeling can become be strong sometimes weak at other times can be disappointed this lead to disappointments it can lead to ecstasies the uh so for me the erotic is this sort of gravitational phenomenon in relation to somebody else but having said that I can see how this would also apply not just to other persons but to other um things um a work of art um a work of carpentry you know just the shape of that or um you know the smoothness of this the surface of a table you sort of gravitate towards that that you this is it's what you like it somehow comes down to the whole system of likings which seem to be very different from love but this Aros is only the erotic I mean is only one of the elements in love but it's the part of love that explains our attachment to various things um it can be the result of the passage of time um you the old people having lived together a long time become very attached they get used to each other they get habituated uh they become a habit for each other uh the line in My Fair Lady um I've become accustomed to her face her UPS or Downs or Smiles or frowns um that's seems to have nothing to do with libido but it and it looks as if one could say well but you know break the Habit why why do you call this love but there's something in the in an attachment to another person which is part of love and the attachment can come in this bizarre way that is comparable to gravity that I call the erotic yeah I guess it just I don't know if I really understand what you're saying by the I don't know whether I do either or the habituation really is a form of love because I guess even nowadays people seem to think more rather than in the past oh there is one person meant for me but now there's you know a lot of people that divorce and do those types of things and it seems that just because you are getting used to someone that doesn't mean that love really is there well but why could you say instead of gravitating toward your one and only you gravitate toward many people oh I guess so I mean uh the universe is infinite it goes off in all directions why does it have to be limited to a linear progression to what you were saying about the getting accustomed to someone that being a part of the uh of the erotic that's how we were like I just don't see how that's a part of that love well it works it works the way people have thought about love uh the uh line comes particularly the way I was badly mauling it uh comes from the musical My Fair Lady uh it doesn't uh exist in the same way in George Bernard Shaw's play which you're going to reading it occurred to me pig ban that's right um and in the case the difference between the play and the musical is that at the end of the musical there is a kind of romance a love that's developed between them and maybe um who knows they might even get married afterwards they don't nothing like that happens in any of the versions but uh it's much more romantic than the play was um so that um just for the there to be the erotic attachment doesn't mean it's going to be love of of a romantic sort or of a marital sort but it's a kind of love if you're gravitating towards somebody um that's not hostility hostility goes in the opposite direction or and it's not indifference which means you don't even feel anything for the other person don't even notice the other person but I don't want to you know create these artificial principalities I just want to make a concept which itself is analyzable into more uh fi refined uh Concepts that to the extent that they have help us to think better I think in various places in that book in particular I say that um of course they're going there will be subdivisions and and that it isn't if everything will be alike but that gives you an idea of a a fact a phenomenon related to love um that people might not have been able to think about as clearly without this kind of analysis and my hope is to help them to make these difficult ideas a little more clear thank your question was more like gravitation is part of like kind love at first sight no that's kind of what I was thinking the well like the gravitation pull towards someone is kind of like instantaneous almost as opposed to uh as if you're with someone for a long time it's not you know instant no let's let's get on to the Romantic was that there it's more relevant what you're saying I think um about the imagination I think of that as belonging to Eros and but it isn't as if that is enough for that defines AOS the erotic I'm sorry I shouldn't say AOS I mean the erotic I was very careful to call these with these adjectival forms not to get it confused with what Plato had said or what Freud had said uh when the book came out it got a very favorable review uh by someone who is a philosopher but a literary philosopher and in a literary journal and she sent me her review before it came out and I was horrified this she said sing a distinguishes between libido Eros and romance and so I quickly wrote is saying no no no that were liido is Freud Aros is Plato I'm talking about I call it the leidal the erotic rantic in order to indicate I'm saying something different and when the review was published she had it right so again here I keep saying erors but I mean the ironic an imagination I I think is important that does anybody want to say anything about that there's a chapter on imagination in feeling and Imagination but I I better not get into that how about Romance the third okay um be before we move on to romance I just wanted to ask you a question about the erotic you say that without the erotic there would be no civilization and no desecration of it and it wasn't clear to me why what you meant well I often see nowadays not as much but well you all know all of the graffiti that appears in public places um I live in the Back Bay and in a part of the U of Mass Avenue part south of u b Street I think it was they did a lot of resurfacing of the concrete sidewalks and I was horrified that everybody felt the need to put in his or her uh initials and sometimes with hearts and dates and it's got me thinking you know you know what's happening there they're using their imagination to imag so I think of a Time who knows 20 years I don't know how big an imagination they have 50 years when people are going to see that and it'll mean something to them of course people won't know what in the world was going on in those days or who these who JT and LW are nobody will know they themselves probably will fall fall out of love in two months and will regret it and it won't mean anything to them later on or might it might maybe they'll come back with their children and say this was what we were you know in play in in Shakespeare uh uh for instance in as you like it that play um there is the young man who's fallen in love with um the heroine rosalin and um he's very he feels worthless and carried away by his love and uh he takes it out on the trees when I talked about the innocent trees well he carves their initials in the trees and hearts probably and sort of desecrates the beauty of these natural entities um whom I love very much but you know it's as if somebody uh captured you and uh engraved on your farhead uh LW loves c c CM or something something has nothing to do with you so you could go through the world advertising This Love that he has um and why should the trees be forced into that condition well because they can't help it they're they're they're not mobile they're stabile people can just go up and do to them whatever they can get away with uh that it's an act of imagination in thinking that this is going to me anything it's like an artist who expresses himself in his painting uh it's an expression of him but also takes imagination to make it a good painting So this expresses what the young lovers feel and they have enough imagination to think it might matter to somebody else but they don't have enough imagination to to realize how ridiculous it makes them uh and how unfair it is to everybody else to have to be confronted with this it it's a a kind of exhibitionism which if it were with parts of the body would be criminal and I suppose it probably is Criminal to do it to the poor innocent side cement in the sidewalk but it takes imagination that's all I meant okay I guess I just feel that's still a very strong statement to say that without the erotic there would be no civilization yeah um I think so because the erotic is a way of I mean civilization is a way of creating objects that Express the interests of the creators for the enjoyment and and uh glorification of what other people also care about so that the uh person the prince who built the Taj Mahal you know the story of that or why do you tell that he built it for his wife or his wife you know and who he had loved I don't really know much about the story actually but who died and he was so grief stricken uh he wanted to make some kind of Tomb or Temple but he also wanted it to be an expression of her goodness and Beauty and the great love that they had for each other and that's part of the account it all may be mythological but at least that's the account and so we made the This Magnificent U Muslim style or H what is it it must be Muslim because it's curved like Muslim uh in any event um Indian style u uh Palace it's not it's not a tomb uh it's not a mosum but it's a beautiful building that expresses what he felt for that woman and that adds to civilization I mean we stand there if we go there and uh watch it look at it with awe becomes a tourist attraction it makes life more interesting think of all the millions of people who spent money and time just to go see the Taj Maha well that's what civilization is like it's without imagination and without the erotic uh it wouldn't it wouldn't occur Sor I just I feel like there's so much more to civilization though than just those things so I just don't think that statement can really be the the U the graffiti the graffiti are a kind of uh vulgarization of civilization and they do it out in public they do it so everybody will see or the uh subway cars which uh used to in New York in particular and you don't see it so often nowadays but you've probably seen in the movies or heard of it the cars covered with graffiti well those graffiti are a kind of calligraphy very curved uh elaborate designs uh possibly with the initials of people that they know but nobody else could know uh it's and they do it as a kind of expression of their feelings or their love or even maybe the love of their life in New York for all to see well that's it may be varization but it's still a vulgarization of civilization civilization progresses that way and the parts that we cherish as great works of art um usually come out of that the way the way I inter it is I mean not so much civilization like you know organized government but it gives to culture and uh aesthetic Beauty which is essentially civilization in quotes like if there wasn't the era the ironic everything would just be very cold and there would be no aesthetic Beauty everybody would just be you know a the way I picture it at Le it would just be a robot just you know doing stuff and there would be no pleasure or art or any sorts of expression of human feeling that's what how I see me you're going to be reading about certain aspect of Freud's Philosophy for next time and my criticism of it I don't think I go into this but sudden it curs me from what suatu was saying that this it's worth telling you about it Freud wrote a couple of articles on Aesthetics except there the psychology of art uh and um he apologizes as I'm not a Phil excuse me I'm not a philosopher I'm just a psychologist but I have ideas about the psych olical development that goes into the being of art so he starts out with the fact that the artist is a biological entity like everyone else and that um he wants and it's always from the man's point of view that's what Freud is like uh he wants what everybody wants what is it that everybody wants they're all men what is it all men want they want money they want Power they want the love of women money power and the love of women right um the artist Freud says is you usually somebody who has a defect most people if you want money you want Power uh you go to school you become an accountant uh you work your way up up the hierarchy of the business and then you end up being the CEO and you got more money than you know what to do with lots of power and the love of women they the women flock around those who have money and power that's the normal healthy ordinary way of going about things according to Freud but uh if you're a little different for whatever reason um you um just can't compete on that level but if you are not and if you can't compete and that's the end of it then you're Misfit or you become sick or or a loser in life if however you're not only different in that respect but also you can do something that no one else can do you have a knack for instance for drawing for instance or you have perfect pitch or you have uh a certain kind of Acuity in your body I suppose this could apply to the athlete as well but he's talking about artists and if you then are recognize for that and it's developed in you then you start making things that nobody else can make right and if you do it well enough people will pay attention to what your you've done and they'll give you money and if you're a good enough artist like a Picasso you get so much money you'll have power with it and with the money and the power there'll be the women who will throw themselves at your feet the way they did with great artists for instance in in the 19th century uh list and chopan other Heroes because they were such uh great musicians uh and even nowadays there are the rock singers that women Swoon over uh there are uh the musical Stars they're not similar to the ones in the 20th century but they can have all the groupies and all the all the apperences of great wealth and power Freud Freud's solution is that what the artist can't get directly he gets indirectly that is he can't go up through the ladder of business but he gets it indirectly because by pursuing his Knack he creates things for which people will reward him um now the reason this this um is related to what stus was saying I think is because there's always this lust or love that Freud is talking about the Love of Money the love of power the love of women and if you can't get it directly you can you might get it indirectly but those are the people who create civilization civilization itself on Freud's view is an indirect accumulation of the love that everybody wants there's a book of his called one of his I think great books that everybody should be forced to read before graduating from college like the Republic everyone should be reading and that is civilization and its discontents I strongly recommend it you it's only about 800 pages long and in it he says that Civilization uh arises out out of the love of beauty but then uh it separates one from the satisfaction the in love and sex that one really wants so there's a conflict between civilization and sexuality that's the issue that Freud talks about I don't agree with the the basic argument but that doesn't matter uh my point is that whatever the outcome of civilization is it originates in a kind of love and that's what I try to explain through the erotic and through the idea of the imagination so that's where that comes in okay um it's must be getting on yeah it is should we take a break now or should we talk about the romantic we can talk about the what do you tell me what does class want do you want to take a break you want to talk about the Romantic all right let's go on to the Romantic there is Lial derotic in the Romantic the Romantic the way I perceive the Romantic is the it is what unifies the libidinal with the erotic but it also needs a sense of uh uh of Perpetual um of continuous love um and here give the example of of the Moon the Moon cycle and how um the lovers identify that the moon cycle and the appearance of the Moon with something that is constant and that they want to associate with their love okay does anyone else want to say anything about romantic I think Veronica was talking about the Romantic last time when you were talking about falling in love uh there are two principles that seem to me to be definitive for the Romantic one is this the well before I get to that um the one and only there's only it isn't something you can have with everybody at least not at the same time uh it's having an attachment to at least or let's say to one other person and the second principle is to have having that intimate relationship forever so the the idea of forever or as the religions say or The Poets say eternity whatever that means right um is built into the idea of the Romantic and also that there's something unique in the attachment into one and only person now this is also very enormous net because um why one I've thought an awful lot about that and it occurs to me that if you can find just one who really would be totally satisfying whom you can love as much as you're capable and who can love you as much as you're capable I think you wouldn't feel the need for anything more this was tested in the 1960s by the communes in which uh there would be um sharing of uh bed bed fellows of wife swapping but also with people who weren't married the idea that why be exclusive well I think most human beings at least seem to feel that one is enough because if it's done if it's an adequate one it'll satisfy all your needs and with democracy as I think I mentioned that there's a kind of democratization of love where one other person uh is expected to do everything it's a what do you call um an all uh what is it all all purpose an allpurpose solution to Life's problems um now as a matter of fact it it may be hard to Hope ever to find any one person who can do all of that and in in in a way that is not inconsistent with that most I think probably statistically most people have um sought for love with more than one other person one other partner whole cultures are built up out of the idea of polygamy for the men or polygyny even not too many but some for women that is men have polygamy is men having many wives women having many husbands or in monogamous societies um that um a man will have two establishments one for his wife and another for his mistress in France in the 19th and probably still in many ways it was common place that uh you would marry the right woman but then you would also satisfy your sexual needs with some other woman even having a second family and even sometimes with a wife knowing about it in other words adultery was built into the matrimonial system but whether or not it's that rigorously organized uh adultery is not uncommon uh and even if men don't indulge and are faithful to their wives there is the tradition um embodied in the saying I love my wife but oh you kid you know that you the night that comes from the 1920s I loved my wife but oh you kid meaning there's a part of me that would like to indulge itself with you sexually um prostitute or girlfriend or a mistress or some beautiful woman I'm talking again it's always from the man's point of view um or the woman too you know I love my husband but there are all these beautiful boys lying around uh there is that sentiment which is very common so why does it have to be one and only well if you can find just one and it's perfect just right you you know for most people that might be enough also it gets to be a question of economics how many households can you support and how do you keep the wives from getting jealous jealousy is a very important phenomenon uh some people even try to Define love in terms of jealousy about competitors but if then if they're going to be jealous then the this multiple kind of arrangement isn't going to be a very happy one but that I think was part of what was going on in the 19th and 20th Century concepts of romantic love with the capital r right the Romantic the other princip of um perpetuity uh is explained by the fact that um you don't want to put in all the energy with somebody who's going to ditch you the next day or who you know you're going to be tired of uh men in particular we also women are notoriously faithless this idea of being permanent you know I'll be I'll that well that's right I I'm um C the cold porter songer but I'm always true to you darling right that's the dream but uh because it's cold porter was very humorously cynical uh the next part of it is um do you know it I'm I will I'll I'll be I will always be true to you darling in my fashion right so that that that is an escape Clause enabling the the person to uh uh the woman in particular to find what she wants in love with other people but that is that's very common uh at the same time there's something beautiful about the Romantic in the purple rose of Cairo do you know that movie of Woody Woody Allen uh I'll be showing it tomorrow from 2: to 5: in my film course uh uh which is about philosophy of film um and what I just thought of there's a scene in which the perfect man the actor who comes off the out of the screen descends into the movie audience it's a fantasy and falls in love with Cecilia who's just a plain ordinary um married woman um and um declares his complete romantic love for her and he's he's pure he's absolutely innocent he really believes it he feels it uh at one point he's separated in This Strange New World off the screen um and ends up uh being accosted by a very pleasant woman who is a prostitute and says would you like to see where I work and he's always oh yes that's interesting I really like to see where you work you look like such a fine person and so they go to brothel and there he meets other other girls and they all try to entice him and he he doesn't respond he it's not in his character it's not the way he was made it was made in the movie um and uh they try to explain to him and he he finally sort of gets a rough idea and says oh well no I I have to tell you fine ladies um I I love Celia and uh I couldn't do what you're saying and they say oh well we're not talking about love you can love Celia we're talking about making love and then he does really seem to understand where he is and what what's at stake and he says oh you don't understand Celia is for me everything she is all that I've ever wanted she is for me Perfection I wouldn't want to do any of those things with anybody else and the scene ends when the first very likable young woman who's uh taking him there uh looks in amazement and says are there any other men out there like that it's a very funny Woody Allen movie and I think it's one of his very best uh well that I think that's the point uh to get somebody who will be perfect and who will with whom you will be perfectly alied May really be unrealizable but it's that's part of the Romantic that's why I tell that story dur I each to repeat it oh wait a minute this is a good point for me to close my eyes Adriana could you take a hedg count of how many have done today's reading yes sir but I'm not interested in names I just want to know how many okay seven can I open how many seven that's pretty good um then possibly remember the George S calman remark to Irving Berlin calman was very famous playright uh wrote the uh screenplays for Groucho Mark for the gr the the Mark's Brother movies and um various uh successes on Broadway he and Irving Berlin wrote the song always and I mentioned that but do you know what the song sounds like I'll be loving you always very sentimental romantic song with a love that's true always right all right the wit and cynic calman says Irving I think you should change that title or change that song you ought to make it I'll be loving you Thursday well it's funny because it wouldn't be romantic right okay anything else about the Romantic um well I wanted to mention how this Rel reles to uh the myth you mention uh I mean the the speech uh by Socrates and Aristotle's um um I forgot the name um well in any case um where uh Socrates is asked to Define what love is and he says that it is the it it means the Perpetual possession of the good right and it also emphasizes that it has to be Perpetual uh like do here and that's what Christianity picks up out of platonism because God is perpetually good and has in a sense the Perpetual possession of the good without platonism and Greek philosophy wouldn't be any Christianity wouldn't have got any religion of that sort uh Judaism comes into it because of the Bible um but um the those Greek concepts are really very special they out of them the Christian religion generates and anyhow what do we mean by the Christian religion we mean the U religion of the western world and Greek philosophy is the beginning of the Western World all right we now could take a break or we can go on for another half hour we don't have to stay for the full three hours cuz in principle the course lasts for 50 minutes times three so you tell me what we what you would like I'm having a good time I yeah I may faint in any moment do you want to drink or do you want to go out anywhere to well then should we continue all right um anything anybody wants to say about that chapter on sexual love and should we go on to the one on stages of Love uh loving Society yes um in in this chapter of love in society you define different kinds of relationships and how love is different in these relationships sh and um first of all I would like to say that uh you you talk a lot about friendship and you mention that you disagree with Aristotle's notion of friendship occurring only between two virtuous human beings true friendship true friendship because he talks about other kinds yes I don't do do I I don't go into them uh no but you just mentioned that um you don't agree with this notion because uh then we would be disregarding the capacity of love to treat someone better than he is and I wanted to mention that I don't agree with this you give the example of being friends with a criminal for example and sort of disregarding the The Faults of that person and still being able to achieve yeah do you think you can't be friends with a Criminal I think that having more or less the same morals and and the same values as someone else is very important for a friendship to if um you can quantify values I mean it's you is there anybody that you have the same values with we usually share values in some respects but not with others and uh if you feel friendly you ignore that um for instance I I in a very low at a very low level I find in my case I find it very easy to be friendly with people I talk with for couple of minutes on the the bus or in the street there's a kind of insipient friendliness that usually doesn't amount to anything um and it's because we have different values there there's a very limited number of people I could really spend much time with I get bored with them they get bored with me you know I don't um anymore I used to when I was young but nowadays I don't care about of football heroes or baseball uh players um basketball I never paid much attention to I'm not see I'm not I never I don't drink beer I'm I'm I'm not a regular guy in any of those ways so how could I expect those who are which is most people normal people um to be friends with me and yet in a casual incipient way I find I can be friends with a great great many it's by disregarding all of the other values that's one thing I wanted to say second thing if you think about Hollywood movies the uh the people in them are often either criminals or else they're robbers and and uh violent or troubled um they they um they fall in with somebody who might get them out of their troubles or they're thrown together in a a romantic P pattern that I discuss I think toward the end of the this book um which they're both caught in so that they have no interest in each other and sometimes a lot of hostility but but because they're in it together they have to escape by means of each other and so they become friends I mean you all can think of dozens of examples of this very common movie theme um now if in that event their values are not alike at the end they might if they're different Sexes they might uh get married or they might become lovers or well we'll be talking about this in case of pigan where they don't do either of those things but they become sort of comrades together um and that seems to me to be built into the structure of of friendship that you come to accept the other person for what that other person is in other words there's the idea of bestow uh even if that person is different from yourself you share some values but maybe not too many not as many as is needed to fall in love and to get married and to live in a happy married relationship loving relationship ever after that's is that what you don't agree with [Music] um not exactly I I'm not saying that they need to be exactly the same but I think that there needs to be at least some sort of similarity between the concepts of good and bad because um these are important for trust to exist and I think that if trust doesn't exist between between two peoples and no true friendship can arise between now I see the truth in what you're saying uh I could never be friends with anybody who does that who uh you know goes out with a BB gun and shoots cats or you know something how can you be friends with a monster of that sort uh that you see in some respects so it's surely true that one can't imagine being friends on the other hand the U the the political Monsters of modern history people like Stalin and Hitler musolini Saddam Hussein they they were very friendly to people had friends who recognized what they were uh so that uh some people are able to overcome their horror at what they also do but do you think those were true friends cuz when someone has power many people can pretend I know to be friends but then that's true in any event that's true of any kind of friendship or any kind of relationship it doesn't necessarily follow from a sharing of the uh of the uh of the morals as you said but I see a point in Aristotle's idea of true friendship people are alike in virtue so they can really respect each other um but uh it also means you're going to limit the number of friends you're going to have you're not going to have too many well you're not going to have too many true friends you can have but that's by definition that's the definition of the word true oh no I'm I'm a true friend of uh a man I meet casually and you know we talk briefly and I'll never see him again uh it's a very limit it's not that I'm not a true friend that I'm trying to use him or trying to get him to please me and some way I may I'm within those very narrow limits it's a kind of true friendship it's not as broad as it is with the kind of people that Aristotle is talking about when one is how much how many people there are like that and really how much you get out of them um so when you when you say true friend you just mean a friend who has no other Shady purpose or a person when you the true friend I don't true friendship you mean somebody who is friendly to someone for no you know other reason except for the pleasure me of conversing with them or sharing ideas not let you know up but you know I this is very interesting um I was just thinking about true friends I've had while we were talking because as as I keep telling you I learned from being with you uh I may not be able to use it too well and I don't believe anything I've written is the last word of any sort I'm I think if anything with last word that would be wholly unphilosophical the world is not the last word there's no remember there's no mathematical it's not like a mathematical problem so there's no solution and the what I just thought of was um a man who is not was not much older than me who um I who was um a young faculty member Harvard When I Was An undergraduate and then graduate student and he became a mentor he was a mentor of mine and I knew him for the rest of his life he died about three years ago and I always thought of him and said about him he's maybe the only person who has never defeated any expectation of mine he's never betrayed me or let me me down um I always think of him as a true friend now it wasn't because and we also conversed and there were there were limits there were things I couldn't talk with him about and things he didn't talk to me about you know it wasn't as if it was a loving a romantic relationship you know the way it is would be between uh lovers or husband and wife there were definite limits um not arbitrarily imposed just the things I wouldn't ask him that I might ask my wife um but it seems to be the definition seems to be my he not never his never having let me down now was I using him or is this a testament to the true nature of or of the relationship from my point of view I might he might have said Irving has let me down uh he hasn't done this or that I don't know what uh he he never complained to me and I never really never complained to him I never felt there was anything I wanted to change but it was but the the Criterion that I seem to have used was that he never led me down I mean but so you're saying that you can't be a true friend with somebody if he if he let you down I mean letting you down you might have I don't know your first concert and you really wanted your friend to be there and uh he didn't come because I don't know he was snowed snowed in in Chicago or something I mean he'd let you down no not if he was snowed in or no if he forgot if he if he said I'll be there tomorrow night and then uh you know he met a a lovely young lady and said well he won't notice I'm not at this concert I he could have let me down but um if so if he did you what what's wrong with that that he never did let me down I'm not saying it's wrong I'm just saying is that defining what's makes it a true friendship no I'm asking you I'm asking so if somebody if somebody let you down he can't be a true friend of yours is that I would yeah yeah I think that's an element how big an element I'm not clear yet but let's say you do have a relationship with somebody who continually lets you down say he's not a true friend continually is different well continually is different from once or twice so cuz I mean you were saying that you're well everybody is is fine I mean we're all Immortal uh occasionally they might let you down in some unimportant way but the my image is that he didn't let me down and I'm but I hav improved it of somebody might have said oh but remember this or that but it couldn't have been too important or I would have remembered okay so not letting you doubt it it important way okay I'm just trying to see what you mean by true friend but U I don't know how far this is going to take us in terms of the concept of true friendship Adana Demetri would or Arthur would you say something uh you talked about this idea of the that uh somebody may be very God in various ways a criminal any number of things uh however you can just forgive that and love them as as they are something like this so my question is um I I had this had this sense that the reason that you are friends with somebody or you love them is because of some good in them that you wish to uh either be near or have some or or uh become like well so my question is can somebody be uh that's not my okay goad so can somebody lack uh all virtue whatsoever and can you still have this love of bestow in which you forgive them the fact that they have absolutely no beauty or virtue at all and yeah all these limiting cases are always hard for me to imagine because I never encounter them in the world have you ever met anybody who had no redeeming virtues whatsoever okay or somebody who who had uh nothing but redeeming virtues were all you know a little in between fair enough we're we're a mixture um if the if the um nastiness is too great we can't stand the person but a little nastiness we can put up with and even humor and even enjoy um so we're all mix thinking terms of the middle that way you get closer close to what the world is like I guess my real question is that when you have one of these let's suppose you have a friend who is very brave on the other hand he is uh terrible in every other way he's a Neo-Nazi you know any number of things but very brave so I could certainly see that you could love that aspect of love his his his courage in action and things like this but but you that take the think of um uh one of the Hitler Youth a young fellow who uh is a fanatic who is totally dedicated to the cause uh he knows that what it asks him to do is horrible to most people and it'll cause pain to a great many uh but uh for reasons of Duty he he will be unswerving and this is not only when he is in control but when he is asked to risk his life and he's prepared really prepared to die for that cause right um can you be a friend with such a person even though you admire his bravery and Fidelity to cause I would think probably not so it's matter of it's a matter of degree uh the um the more you are horrified by what he has turned into um the less likely it'll be for you to be a friend even though you admire some of his remaining virtues but but if you ask me how many you know or where do we draw the line I would say uh here I am Holding On by my fingertips s in the flux of existence you know swirling All Around Me With Me part of the stream and you ask me you know you got the idea yeah I can't answer that yeah this not what I mean my question is whether you can love anything but a good part of a person can you love any part of a person other than their virtue or their Excellence oh well I think um because you seem to say that you can you kind of forgive and you love them completely something like that I think yes you can love you can bestow love upon Him despite his lack of perfection I think in not not in this book in the other in volume one uh I give you example of the man who um loves the U blemish on the face of his beloved a mole or something like that it's not that it makes her more beautiful it's not that he uh goes through life looking for molds because he's a specialist in the in the in the beauty of them um or you know it's not that it applies to anybody else but it's her mole and though it's undesirable in general and he and if she wants to remove it he will encourage her to do it and let you know say he has lots of money give her money to get an operation because that's what she wants apart from that he may love that little mole just because it signifies her it indicates what she is but not because it's good in itself so could he love her cowardice I think he can love anything that sets her Apart Her cowardice no women are are often allowed to be cowardly when men are not that's not a good example would he love her uh uh uh snotty attitude or uh biting uh uh way of talking about people particularly himself can he love her enough to uh love her for her vicious attacks on him well vicious attacks might be good depending on whether they're philosophical well they may be well done but you mean good in what sense good for him or beneficial to him yeah I mean you know if it's a critique or if it's a critique or if it's a if it's not just it may be but what if it's just the fault of hers MH and uh does that make it impossible for him to love her probably not there'll be other I don't mean to love her I mean to love Arthur is shaking his head I I think if you if you love a person I mean it goes back to the the reading from last time if you love a person it's it might have been a quote in at this time it's acceptance of their entire person so what do you mean by acceptance the bad along with the good right even though you recognize the bad is bad and if there were some way of helping her to overcome that part of herself assuming she wants to you would be eager to cooperate I think yeah I think that's right that's at least that's part of my idea of Love um at times I think I'm I'm crazy but um it's seems to be the only view that I can take that if you love somebody you love that person even if that person is not good for you even if that person um does things that you wouldn't approve of um and even if um she doesn't love you as much as some she loves somebody else which is from your point of view a great fault on her her part but uh if that's if she's the person you love then you have to accept it because that's what she wants that's one reason why love is not always happy because just loving the other person there's no guarantee that both of you are going to be fully satisfied with what happens to each of you can can I just ask him one more question sure when you say that you accept these uh faults in a person uh what do you mean uh do you mean simply that you don't try to change to help improve this person or uh uh what would it mean not to accept them you not try to change them this was mentioned this was mentioned in in in the reading from this time you not try to change them unless they themselves wanted it changed if if that person thinks if that person thinks it's a flaw of theirs then and then they're trying to change it then you would support that let's say you had a friend who uh was very deluded in his way of thinking and uh you saw that he was going about something the wrong way would you attempt to improve him in this or would you wait him to choose no Arthur the real problem comes up if the person the object is this young fanatic you who kills people innocent people uh who is simp makes himself into a machine a thing to carry out the orders of those who um uh have power in the cause that he believes in can you really love that person I think if the person is such a polar opposite from the ideals that you hold no I didn't understand even even a an admirable quality such as The fanatic's Bravery you the person is such a such a bad person from your point of view that you would almost contrive The Bravery to be foolishness that um but can't you imagine that you're at a certain point you're saying I just can't tolerate being near this kind of person anymore I uh love why think I capable of loving that kind of monster but sometimes you might try to see why he became like that and in the case of the hler you might but then why should you because you see that I mean he's been been the case that we're talking about he's been brainwashed obviously because that's what they did from 7 years old they took them in and you know told them various things and you might see you know some traits that and if you you may make the connection that you see some traits in the person and you see that he kills a bunch of people in birds and I don't know does whatever but you see some traits in him that and then you might think well what would have happened if uh he didn't undergo this brainwashing and and I mean you may start to really you know love him for those traits and maybe love some an other an other image of him really and in your love try to maybe change him that's one scenario but there's also another scenario which is you see that eliminating him from reality would be a benefit to the universe and so you but that would mean so you take a revolver and shoot him and having done that somebody said why did you do that uh could you in good faith say it was because I loved him but the point is if you did that if you if you you believe that eliminating him is good for the universe that's your opinion he believes that eliminating other races is good for the universe therefore if you were inclined to do that that means that really your moral beliefs wouldn't differ so much my moral belief would what we're talking about the Hitler Youth and if you said well if you killed him yeah to make the world a better place according to your views your moral beliefs would be exactly the same as his would because no that's true no I agree with that so therefore you could be a friend with him because you had but that doesn't make you a friend because you're going to kill the guy that you murder him you you you execute him put it that way um I I mean as Hamlet says in in that play love does not that way tend or affections do her AFF orilia uh it's not ponus says that to the King after having overheard the conversation between Hamlet and ailia in which Hamlet berates her and tells her to go into a monastery and says she's worthless and uh Pon says his affections do not that way tend I think if you're going to murder somebody one could say well that's not the way to show your love that's affections do not that way tend uh even though it's true that it's because you have different moral systems it may be that the moral the moral difference in the Moral Moral systems causes the death of love love is a fragile thing and can be destroyed because of that kind of difference can be destroyed for all sorts of reasons but that would be one uh but the difficulty would be to say that you could remain a friend or have love for somebody who is so horrible that you really feel it's your obligation to um uh kill him I mean you may I don't I mean you wouldn't really feel the obligation to kill him if you loved him I mean I agree I mean I would feel the obligation to kill anyone it's the other way around you you wouldn't have um killed him if you if you killed him it means you didn't have love yes right in that case but uh what what if he was a a terminally ill patient and you pulled the plug you could kill him that's different now you're getting into the plot of U John Steinbeck's novel Of Mice and Men and the wonderful movie that was made out of that did you see the original oh there's been a recent remake where where the little guy who is is the close friend of this tall somewhat fellow Who U kills a a woman without knowing what he was doing he he just he was sort of stroking her and ended up ringing her neck and sort of didn't know what he was doing uh he was uh criminally in I don't know if you could call it criminally insan he was hardly uh aware of what he was doing but you get the his problem and the the um the local men are out ready to blinch the guy and and uh Mal treat him if they ever caught him and they're about to catch him and so his friend the little one um shoots him and one feels that that was an act of love that it was because he loved him that he could kill him rather than let him be caught by the people who would not understand and would would U do him harm it was a way not of doing allowing no harm to be done merely U killing him so that others cannot kill him now that that's an act of love but that's not what we were talking about before I think we're getting pretty far off the topic of friendship I don't get so I think we're getting pretty far off the topic of well maybe we are um Ariana you want to bring us back let's let's go into the next chapter which is uh more than you have which is um a stage Theory did you notice that do I call it that in the chapter it's a theory of different kinds of Love developing out of each other and some of the higher level is in the stage being impossible unless you've gone through an earlier stage I get the idea for that in the uh primatological research that I mentioned by Harry harlo Harry harlo was a biologist at the University of Wisconsin um about 50 years ago uh who uh did research on the feelings of primates and in a way that nobody else attempted anything like that particularly chimpanzees and Ms um and he put it into a a book of his called learning to love uh which is mainly about um these primates uh to and to some extent with the relevance to the primates that we are uh and in it he reached some conclusions one of which is that if a u juvenile hasn't gone through pure love he or she will find it very hard or impossible to have mature sexual love for you know for a mate or any other person that she might he might want to spend the rest of his life with they and some of them would be clearly schizophrenic so that there is a stage Theory built into analysis or comes out of his analysis which seem to me very suggestive and I play with the idea of there being stages like that among human beings so that if you want to have a happy marriage and being phous because it's not something you can just you know arrange see to it that you have uh lots of friends when you're young and that peer friends and that you develop out of that now this reminds me of another thing that's related in in Israel in the early days I don't know if there are many um of the kabas that existed then uh boys and girls were often brought up in a kind of commune and they would take showers together so that nudity was not a problem of any sort uh and they thought of each other uh the way little children do in in the family with their little brothers and little sisters what the sociologist discovered was that once they got through puberty and started looking for a mate and falling in love um they didn't fall in love with each other they had to go outside and fall in love with somebody else there was a kind of extension of the U in incest taboo uh about not only well I yes it is the incept had do with a a sibling the way the incest to do is usually with a parent and child uh so that um the pure love wouldn't automatically issue into the later phase of love that's that was why I thought of that because CH as children they might have had this pure love they just because they live together so intimately but that wouldn't necessarily wouldn't cause um statistically issue into their loving in in a more mature sense so so this is a complication in any stage Theory I don't think I'd take it very far incidentally did any of you who are more scientific than me get ideas about how you could do it better I'm sure you could well I understood it I I see it more as being that because you experience pure your love then you are able to move on to the next stage but not necessarily with the same person is that what you're saying or no you mean it's a necessary condition but not sufficient that may be that may be a way of handling it that without pure love you'll find it very hard to have mature love but it's no guarantee that you would or would not that's but it's just that it's a necessary condition for the mature love but might be well that's a weakly situation condition but that may be all the one can say of this so but the way I I read about those kabes they're called um k i BB u t I read them in the Contex of an article that that was actually talking about this phenomenon called genetic sexual attraction who was the author of that uh I I don't recall I I've been reading on the internet a couple months ago but it's just several by a man I I met I think they're classic now maybe phenomenon where um um a mother who separated from her son at Birth for example right um gave gave him up for adoption or something and they're they're reunited many years later um in in some sort of uh disturbingly High statistical sense like there's some kind of sexual attraction between them when they meet um and and so this this article was was talking about this from a psychological perspective that there seem that genetically there seems to be some kind of circuitry or something that that can sort of um like deactivate like the sexual attraction when when there're sort of that peer or that or that mother son relationship through through the that's interesting I didn't know about that research yeah that's related to my emphasis upon self-love as being the fundamental um stage of love that without that there is no love um it's my reaction against the uh what was Comon when I started out writing about love the idea that love means self-sacrifice the ability to sacrifice yourself for somebody else being um a definitive condition for there to be love and as again said it seemed to me that uh without selflove uh there won't be any kind of love and uh in a a complete mature harmonious happy you know very successful love there has to be a great deal of selfishness or it isn't going to work uh in the uh first volume of the trilogy uh I attack Freud all over the place uh he was the great man of into which I was born on these subjects uh and so it was natural for me to deal with him and and since my views are different to attack him what I attacked him for was his ignorance of the idea of bestow that he always seemed to emphasize appraisal as the method of analysis which made it all look very Mercantile and businesslike um as if um you know you sort of add up the attractions what can she bring into the relationship um uh if she doesn't have enough to offer she doesn't have he isn't beautiful enough smart enough clever enough I mean intelligent enough uh from a good family all that how can I love her right uh that I don't mean that in a sense does Freud in Injustice because this theory is far more sophisticated than that but uh the idea of bestow is a way of creating value through your attachment meaning being an important part of human nature that he didn't he didn't seem to me to get it um in by the time I got to the third volume which is on the 20th century in which there is a a 70 page chap that 7 70 page chapter I mentioned to you I had changed or I began to appreciate what I how much more Freud had done in the world than I had because I was some considered older and I began to see all of the ways in which there was a great deal of wisdom in his ability to show how important appraisal is in human relationship and that uh Med had an effect on that volume partly because the first volume had been misinterpreted by even friendly critics in in thinking that I defined love as witho which I don't of course I don't believe in defining words like love but I emphasized Bou less than appraisal in the third volume I wanted to remedy that and there was Freud who was so shrewd about all these different forms of appraisal so I balanced it better I think in that than I had before uh but also it fits in with this idea in the stage theory of self-love being fundamental at every stage because through self-love you are appraising it self-love of course is ambiguous do you want to get into that ambiguity well before that just one minute if I'm going to appraise another person I do it in terms of what she is worth to me so that's a form of self-love now let's get into the distinction [Music] um I I didn't get the distinction from self love uh you mean is there does self love mean the same as selfishness on my view oh no no no that's my that was the ambiguity I okay okay um selflove is different from selfishness because through selflove we can love other people and with selfishness we are just looking for our own good and not for the for the good of the other person so so if by self-love you mean seeing things from your own point of view and accepting yourself and loving yourself which will involve some S I mean you you will get things that you need out of the other person through appraisal and through a kind of minimal selfishness at least um that seems to me to be a prime condition for there to be love so self- L I think is the foundation but it doesn't have to be selfishness right um because selfishness as you say is pajor to that's right it means getting more for yourself than for somebody else whereas as this is something Aristotle points out I don't know if I mentioned that he has the concept of the magnanimous man the man who is so sure of himself and so confident and so strong and right that um you know he can be gracious and he can tolerate all sorts of other people getting what they want but he does it because he loves himself with such completeness and with and with such good judgment now that that's the magnanimous man that's what I mean by the one who has true self-love and that that's fundamental because if you really hate yourself you won't be able to love anybody but I think that it's also important to distinguish uh that level of self-love with the selflove that makes us love ourselves and accept ourselves but also seek for the Improvement of ourselves and that way seek for love in other person as opposed to selfishness right no I think that's right in a sense that's also what Plato meant because Plato meant that if um the Republic a lot of Plato Plato on love comes out in the Republic as well as Symposium and the feedr since and the Republic is about the construction of a an ideal society and he his point is that um if you do the right thing then um you you won't care about being selfish in all the petty ways if you pursue the good you will be ready to sacrifice these so so everything you do is for your own self worth PL would say but that doesn't mean that you'll try to acquire more wealth you'll be selfish in other ways so that there is a a relationship between that idea in Plato and what I was trying to say uh more immediately however it's what I was trying to say had its roots in nich's idea of the Superman the Superman is so strong and confident and creative that um he doesn't have to be selfish he shows himself forth um uh what n was saying was not as we be you'll see when we get to talking about n not what the Nazis thought that the Superman is superior to everyone else so he trounces trounces them and and uh subjugates them and enslaves them and destroys them that's and they use the word Superman ubych uh because they wanted to use n as a kind of uh credentials for themselves but it was the opposite of what nature meant he meant by the superman the most creative person and that for Superman is not the military person but the artist so it's that the authentically nian idea that inspired me also I was inspired by um primatology which I was studying uh at that time along with my wife and um if I don't know if you've ever watched documentaries about a baboon Colony a tribe of bamboon well it's it it is run like a military dictatorship there is a an oligarchy of three powerful males who run everything and among the three there's one that is the dominant male for the whole troop which means that he gets the best food and the choice females in other words his genes go on and uh he is kept alive for that purpose as he gets weak the uh the other members of the oligarchy who are always snipping at him and attacking him like in Parliament or in Congress you know it's political situation um they once he gets weak enough they get rid of him they drive him away right but while he is dominant male and you see in these documentaries when he walks in front of the through the troop all the juveniles Scurry out of his way the women cower everybody makes room for him he is the creative person who shows forth his love and self-confidence and then of course if the troop is attacked he takes the lead and and he um fights and sometimes gets killed there's a he he he has a a function of that military sort so he has to pay for being so self-confident but in the meantime he shows forth this love of himself and I think it's I stand in admiration in all of that and think that that's what love involves not self sacrifice not the the um Christlike figure who dies for this to take the sins away from other people uh and the idea of sacrifice being not only Christian but also pervading U the Western World and in other cultures too as an Evidence of love for me that's not true for me love starts out as this love of self and then develops in all sorts of different ways one of which might involve s self-sacrifice if you love your country uh just out of a love of your own d and position in the society you may risk your life and or even give your life like PE men in in the um in the war in the in the world war who sometimes uh were in a group with their comrades and a grenade was thrown in and they the individual would throw himself on the grenade so he would got killed in order to prevent all the rest of them from getting killed that's a love that that I really think is great wonderful sign not only of heroism but of love the love of his people a love of everything um thinking of this speaking of this I just thought of suicide bombers maybe maybe what they do has to be thought of as love too you you also mentioned that we have to love ourselves before loving Humanity or for being able to love our country not necessarily temporally I mean this is a nanalysis but usually I mean you don't start the babies don't start out out loving anything so that so it might be temporal too but I I it was the use of the word before that I was wondering about any go on but for the suicide bombers I think that um I I wouldn't call it love because they get brainwashed from the beginning and I don't think that they really are doing it for For the Love of of an ideal I think they are just doing it because that is what is expected of them who knows I mean some probably it's a mixtures some some that way some others some of them may be psychotic who are s going to commit suicide anyhow and so they're in a sense they're told look you're going to kill yourself why do you do us to favor we can use you I mean it surely must include a great number of different elements but I don't want to rule out the possibility of a Jon of Arc who uh will give herself for her people well I mean I mean the myth of Jon ofar was that their reality is more complicated with her too agre on I feel you should be able to answer yes but it's different because she for example Jonah VAR had an idea an ideal and she fought for that ideal and um her love for that ideal made her sacrifice her life and give her life for it but I don't think that suicide bombers have such a clear idea of what they're doing I I've never known a suicide NE there must there must be some of them are idealistic well and their people you mean particularly in the present War have often suffered so much that they feel this is they should do their utmost and this is it the suicide bombers the great suicide bombers that I grew up with are the kamakazi aviators in the second world war you know the Japanese kamakazi you know what they they want to draw a distinction right between the suicide bombers who blow up a nightclub right and and the ones who will you know attack like a military and stuff like that I I think there's a distinction there oh no I'm not denying any distinction beyond the level of question of love I mean you might say that uh uh it's unwise or immoral love isn't always moral um you know that might be but again one doesn't know quite what's the motives are but in the case of the kamakazi Japanese there was no sympathy with them in America they were all said to be uh sort of bizarre creatures who were brainwashed and were out of their minds um I'm sure that in many cases they were just Heroes they're just heroic and if they had if they were the 2000 had 2,000 who got killed that way and they nearly destroyed the American Fleet if they had had 10,000 the Japanese would have won the war so they were heroic if you relate that to the person who D who dives on the hand grenade the person who dives on the hand grenade does so to save the men around him which is just what the kamakazi fighters were doing because if you sink a battleship how many more lives of your men is that going to save yeah right those kind of same same mentality I was going to say about suicide bombers I I just I think that they do have have ideals I mean some of them most of them I think all of them have have the ideal I mean um which whichever ones you take the ones in Iraq or the ones in um I don't know in Israel or wherever they have an ideal of I guess they they see themselves as Freedom Fighters and they have an ideal of either you know um I don't know making a Palestinian state or making some sort of different Iraq than now so they don't they're not just brainwashed I mean you know they they've they've reached a point I mean it's been proven that most of them are just normal people they're not you know crazy people who are inal institutions who have measured the ground how do you know that well I mean hav I've seen lots of uh reports mostly on the uh Palestinian Israeli conflict that they've said that they're just you know uh family members uh you know like a father of a family and stuff um you know I mean they're not people who are in Asylum that's what I'm saying they're not they're not crazy officially but ad's idea of brainwashing didn't mean that they were psychotic they they had been brainwashed that's different from what I don't know I don't I just don't know what the figures are in this well I mean I I I don't I mean brainwashed brainwashed by somebody I I find it hard to believe brainwashed by what they see happening around them yes but brainwash there's some Authority that goes around and brainwashes people as uh they did to the Hitler Youth I don't think that really happens I just think they're brainwashed I mean when they see you know their brother killed or whatever they see a bunch of casualties that are related to them or they see that their dream of whichever whatever dream they have is just you know totally being stomped on and they see they that may be a sort of brainwash but I don't want to call it brainwash I want to call it more well I mean I guess you can't really call it braid wash it's more you're becoming desperate okay why don't we stop there um next week there is the chapter on religious Love and the concluding two chapters who would like to give the presentation I think uh Adriana like Veronica did a very good job and so who would like to continue the tradition okay um one thing that in the chapter on love in society we didn't get to is the distinction between of the analysis of compassion of U love of country we touched on beginning to touch on it here we might could begin there if you want and then that quickly enters into religious love as as as I mentioned at the end of the chapter um and that aspect of compassion of Buddhism uh I find very beautiful and attractive if anyone knows more about Buddhism this would be a good time to think about that so are we is it next do we we meet next week or when is the holiday the holiday is the week after the week after we so we do meet next week and then holidays after that all right so next week Columbus Day yeah yeah that's two apparently that's two weeks so good then I I'll see you there I'm delighted we had no suicide day on September I'm delighted with the work you're doing and the did reading the book so I'll see you then thank you thank you