Session 4 24.261 Philosophy of Love in the Western World

all right today we begin the third part of the course the first part remember dealt with questions related to your reading in my book the pursuit of love the second dealing with the myths of love in the case of two famous myths Don Juan and Kristen in his subtle and today we go into a different dimension because you're reading will be coming out of my recent book explorations and love and sex and at the time that book was published three years ago it was the most advanced for a state of my philosophy about love so it fits into the course and I'm eager to know what you think of it two things first notice that I said the latest stage there are at least two reasons for that one of which is that as time goes on my thinking changes I get new ideas and second because I don't believe that there is any single big idea about the nature of love that I am willing to espouse as my philosophy that's a view that comes from the rationalist tradition in which life is thought to be a problem and it's a job of a philosopher to deal with that problem at its deepest levels I don't think life is a problem and in terms of a deep level that varies a great deal with the circumstances it would the individual if somebody is dying of cancer it's a deep problem to get the right medication to find something that will keep an eye on our lives which will vary from period to period and the more the more difficult questions about the meaning of life who or what the meaning of death is will not have the same kind of me importance so it's very hard to notice what's meant by the deeper problems that philosophers are supposed to deal with in any event if you mean by that traditional problems about the origin of being the nature of being I don't find those problems very interesting for me the question is the Socratic one how to live how to make sense of one's life how to recognize the fact that there isn't any single solution because different people from different points of view have a different meaning in their lives and make sense in different ways so that my kind of philosopher is more empirical less rationalistic more pluralistic in a sense he is she doesn't expect to find a single answer and more investigatory also in my particular case that the investigation proceeds on the nature of my own talents which is mainly as an esthetician somebody who is sensitive to the immediacy of life as particularly as represented by works of art so for me philosophy becomes a work of art expressing one's own point of view but in ways that will be meaningful to other people and there will vary from stage to stage of one's artistic development as you all know about great artists and they were the same at the end as they are at the beginning it's not that they've gone any further it's just that they have developed in that direction or if they weren't in that direction it would be at the end and some people will say oh what a pity his great period was his middle period and others will say oh no it's his last period think of the music of Beethoven the last quartets are considered to be the greatest court sets have written and also a level of profundity that Beethoven it never reached before so much so that they are said to be more spiritual well in some way they are more spiritual in a traditional way but I think of them being more spiritual in my sense of the word spirit which is that spirit is that part of nature which belongs to us as human beings aspiring to get the aam nature aspiring to satisfy values and ideals that are very important to us as human beings where do those values and ideals come from not beyond nature but rather from within our nature in the pluralistic way that I keep talking about of each of us trying to make sense of the world in a way that we matter to us and if we're lucky we'll matter to other people I see that in Beethoven ascribing all that to the the religion he held which is very unclear he wrote them religious traditional religious music and some of it the church can accept as being authentic but in his own feelings what I find more representative is the sense of humanity that he expresses in his one operand and a great opera one of the greatest hoppers but the only one he wrote called Fidelio which is all about political prisoners being liberated it could have been written during the Second World War and the tyrants being overcome because of married love florists and is a political prisoner in the dungeon and his wife leanora transvestites dressed ourselves up herself up as a boy in order to get a job in the jail and finally she succeeded in finding him florists land and liberating him from the jail keeper who was the tyrant who was about to murder him so that its political social and very much concerned about married love it's a great opera one of few great operas about married love especially interesting because Beethoven the we got married I always wanted to but never could find the right woman let me just finish this slight digression after he died one of his great friends and the poet grillparzer made a talk at the burial and he said of Beethoven he was a unique individual he could never find anyone like himself and that's why he never married so that when has built into that a whole romantic inception about the nature of marriage which is not untrue to Beethoven's ideas and his own experience it's in that period in that kind of work that I find a Tovin at his most spiritual or a different kind of spirituality from the last four tests or the religious the religious oratorios that he that he wrote now this is this is related to the fact that what I was saying was that the book that you're reading for the next few weeks explorations in love and sex merely represents the state that I was at when that book was published I it's not that I've renounced most of that some of it I thought through but I've gone beyond it in ways that are will be talking about one way just briefly is in terms of the fundamental category of creativity which pervades all my writings about love and which I've never been able to write about in a way that satisfies me that I'm now trying to write about in a book that I hope the right call the nature of creativity so that I'm different from what I was then and there isn't that I'm closer to the truth I'm further along in my own development which may be of no use to the universe next future generations people may never have heard of me or else they may pick up something and say oh this is interesting and then they'll have their development but it isn't as if there will be 15 answer as I think I may have mentioned to you another book I wrote at that time called feeling and imagination this is so they came out in 2001 I know that that al gianna has looked at the book because she mentioned in the first paper in that book of the concluding chapter tries to argue that there is no answer there is no everything for that we should find knowledge of because we don't even know what we're looking for and we don't know what that everything would consist in that is fundamental in the kind of pluralism that I have been developing and that you're now reading alright so that's the preface to the status so to speak of the reading for today another point about that is I singled out the long chapter called them praise on the stove revisited is now too tight like David it was it's really you know you better look it up isn't that how it is Oh nature in what is the nature of the nation pursuit of love revisiting a lot of a deals with appraisal of the stone you've read the book called the suit of love and then the references to the nature of love the trilogy which preceded of the pursuit of love that I haven't asked you to read and this is the revisiting its revisiting on the occasion of that three-day symposium about my work but above all it's more accurately titled as it was in the Proceedings of that symposium they replied to my critics and friendly commentators the reason I'm calling attention to that is in the process of giving that reply I have to confront problems that are real important because other people raise them and therefore I couldn't simply ignore them these were problems that i often hadn't thought of and it's not very clear that they're always relevant to what i'm doing but i try very hard to make sense of the questions and criticisms from the point of view of the person who's making them and i try harder still to rethink every bit of my theorization in relation to these criticisms that i was lucky enough to get the result is that this is I think some of my best analytical that is less poetic and less freewheeling writing then then it's only the best of that sort that I've done I had to be analytical because I'd be precise about what they were saying and since they were talking about specific issues I had to investigate them those issues precisely analytical philosophy is way of doing philosophy as if you were writing a contract so that you have to analyze everything you say in view of any possibility of misinterpretation or occurrence varied occurrences in the world you can't let your spirit soar in order to make a grand generalizations that might be harder to make detailed and explicit that's the glory of contemporary 21 20th century 21st century analytical philosophy and it's the prevalent way of doing philosophy not only in this department but in the american philosophical association as a whole i'm i'm on the peripheries of that because though i was trained as an analytical philosophy as you know my writing is is very often not like that and i move across various fields so writing this I had to think as an analytical philosopher I had a benefit for these credits criticism some of which were excellent and I had make revisions and amplifications and for instance on in the question of the stole I think this is the more complete I expression abhi stole than anything you've read previously in this course and at the same time I have to confess as I do that it's a very difficult idea and I'm not surprised my critics of misunderstood me and that they have lingering problems with that the the case of annoy is a good instance of that but it's true throughout and that that is the reason why I wanted to start your reading in the book explorations loving sex with that rather than that chapter rather than anything else all right instead of one of you doing the presentation today I said that I would do so you can stop me at any point and this might be a good point just in any fat name order any random way what among the critics who among the credits do you think was most telling and what did you find more interesting in this wholly different arena of philosophizing from what you've been reading I was kind of intrigued to know more about vannoy and the so she say he hit his view is kind of like Freud right that that love reduces unmanly to appraisal on my interpretation of Freud by the time van Noy worked out his you he had already read my book from the trilogy to nature book and knew my ideas about throwing and that's what he picked up in order to develop that aspect of my thinking in criticism of my trying to go beyond it by so he thought that the soul could be reduced to appraisal it's a fair it's a fair criticism let me tell you a little about the history of this the book the only book I think that van or a road I say rotor and as if I wasn't he may have read more but I haven't heard of them and I'm not even sure that he's still alive I don't haven't heard much about him in any event the only book he wrote that i know of is called sex without love a philosophical exploration i think it is is that sternum all right that came out in the 1980s and is very hard-hitting in a sense of being very analytical but what you can do and in any argues he has two sections what is called on the philosophy of sex and the others on the philosophy love and his own thesis is that sex is better without love rather than with love and it isn't love that provides the basis for the goodness in sex the title is almost self exploring explanatory at the end of the part of the book last few chapters of frost half on the philosophy of love he has a chapter called something I forget the exact title for philosophers of love colon Plato pretty sure it's play-doh saw is it Freud I think it might be for I'm not sure who the major who's who are those did any wouldn't happen to look at that Oh Schopenhauer I think it's play-doh Chopin our software and singer yeah who could ask for anything more and he's very respectful of sailor which is more than singer deserves and he also formulates in an early version of the thesis of a stolid being reducible to appraisal he also argues that I am internally inconsistent because I keep emphasizing the aesthetic quality and character of love and he thinks that means that instead of really pursuing anything I'm using the love of I'm thinking of love love object as a work of art and therefore not accepting him or at his or her face value and therefore not be sewing so that has various complaints about the concept of imagination in my philosophy of love which is already formulated in the first volume of the trilogy in the more much more much later book feeling an imagination I have a chapter on imagination because I too felt I hadn't done the subject then hadn't done vented well enough and therefore it needed further explorations and then when i started i found all sorts of new things that i could never have thought it before and that's what went into that into that chapter but then i has criticisms of the fundamental concept of imagination as it appears in the first volume of the trilogy I don't forget what other criticism if these are big criticisms and he argues them very well and at that time the third volume of the nature of life religious trilogy had yet to come out and in that I introduced a 10 or 15 page rebuttal of vanoise attack on me and during Manu tlie through his points and showing how he misunderstands my position but if I were to go back to it now and I haven't looked for that for some time I find him looking at my older writing gets in a way of my doing new writing I bet i would find ways in which my thought had changed and developed thanks to his criticism hey I was happy to have it and to be able to reformulate in the present when I had said in a more preliminary way in the past in as you know from the reading of this chapter in explorations in love and sex of the paper that of vanoise that was submitted for the symposium answers my critique trucos beyond it and renews his in greater detail much more carefully and I'm proud that I contributed to that his view about the soul being reducible to appraisal and then in my reply as you see I was sorry to see that he never eaten directly reply to me but when I had presented his own view which is all right and that's what I dealt with in the in my reply alright so that's the van Olli since you mentioned in the history background event oh it's a long prison early to your point which you cannot present I guess you wrote about this decir from scenario that it sounds like he presented right and I mean I love the dog I guess I'm curious the context to achieve seriously for that to that because it seems like a civil unions played extremely simplest really i kin seems silly to me i tried very very hard to be fair in representing the position of the people i was answering on the assumption that that symposium would not be read but possibly if i could rework my reply it will book belong to a book of mine and people who might be interested in being I wouldn't want to slog their way through that a very long other book of the papers of the other people you know that's the kind of egoistic point of view of mine why should they not do so maybe those people are worth reading more than I am in a event I try very hard to present their position so that anyone could follow what I was dealing with and that I would be accurate and I didn't think at the time that what van oi was saying was so unprofitable certainly is helpful to me getting me to answering the way I did tell me why you thought think it is um well I just I think maybe the views of appraisal in that case aren't necessarily so unrealistic in terms of light high school seniors right but i don't i don't think that i like all forms of human male reduced to like examples of that scenario well why I'm sometime you know being a philosopher one means that you don't know what you believe at any one moment and you're free change because the problems are so difficult and all possible answers must be so ambiguous and the times I feel you're maybe they're right the maybe it's it's all appraisal why because putting myself into position of a teenager trying to remember what I was like would I go for the ugly girls I go for the most beautiful would I go for somebody that the others considered it a key or whatever they call it nowadays Getty no I would go for the cheerleader you know the one who attracted everyone's attention who's most flamboyant and and all the boy all the other boys that's another thing the competitive element it's not just a matter of the one who looks to me appraised of Lee most desirable but the one who is desired which gives her an appraisal value it's a social appraisal and they're there for just to be competitive successful pathetic competitively that's be the girl I would really want to get close to know I have to agree with him that that seems kind of like something that a teenager does and that actually what you're doing there is not loving the cheerleader but the sewing love upon yourself because you want to seem like a greater person amongst your peers so you're not actually like there's nothing to say that you would actually be able to love that person but it's more of a selfish trying to say i want the one that everyone else also wants that's a very good point because sure i asked you first the room she saw Brooklyn I just want to say you can't it's not always about high school teen years okay so after you grew up I think the camera might have trouble with you check your voicemail okay it's not always about I don't show you okay when you're a teenager or you go after the cheerleader and stuff but it's not like that thing stops after after high school like when you're the 20s you know you want you also look obviously for beauty but you look for in I mean who's smart and stuff is this the values you look for a change but the beauty and but again you're going against your peers it's the the rules of the game are the same I think it's just the qualities you look for it might be a little different but it doesn't mean that when you're like 25 you don't still feel antagonistic to the rest of your peers Oh matter oh there is also a phenomenon that I find pervasive in human nature and that plato was the first really to capitalize on which is that people always want what is good if you're you're a restaurant you know order the worst-tasting quarter horse cooked meal you want the very best if you are confronted with different articles of food let's say on the table never leave her to choose very best in my family life this was often a big problem for me because as the father I felt no I should leave the better food for the children you know I have four children so they will gobble a lot up even if I'm given first choice should I choose the Apple it looks best so should I choose the one that looks least on the assumptions of children should have what his best and this for me who is a source of conflict i naturally left to myself if i were at a restaurant given a choice i would choose the very best that is built into us as purpose of creatures and that's what plato understood extremely well done basis of his whole metaphysics which ends up with the ultimate form of the highest form being good not not the mediocre not least good and so that would be a natural reaction just acting from one's own selfish point of view the question then is is love contrary to that is love something that takes for beyond one's selfishness which is what you're now raising the it's between acting selfishly and acting out of love the question then the question is how did you related whether acting out of love which is not selfish ezel is part of one's self love which is the view even if Plato Plato says for reasons of self-love we should not be selfish because the word we all want three as good as you can and that means off and resisting our selfishness so that there is a kind of selfishness you might call it which is self-love but it's so different from ordinary selfishness it's got to be a different category and that is more related to the nature of love then then all inary selfishness in the question of the cheerleader it isn't just that you want just bet to have selfishness but selfishly to have the most desired person available woman in this male oriented example it's because love consists in that that's the view of Van owing Mike the basis of my criticism as I understand it is that the people are complex and it's an ambivalent situation and so we have to find a way of accommodating both of these tendencies and sure enough appraisal applies in the case of getting the best most desirable female and bestow applies in a sense of having a relationship to her that is not reducible merely to her being the best female so that so that instead of reducing abasolo to appraisal the wave an early recommends what I want to work out is dynamic of their interrelationship when I make that step which is big threshold to get across then I find a great variety of ways in which this can happen and being a pluralist I don't want to reduce any of them to each other I just want to draw a very large comprehensive map in which we can find our way through this quagmire of the human experience with the difficulties in language and in these enormous concepts that we've created without knowing what really what we're talking about you're the most the best possible with the best of female you are you you up there is appraisal and you're saying there's bestow but what about the case when you end up with a female that's not the the best I mean does be small not coming to play a lot more than appraisal and maybe through bestow all love comes instead of through appraisal well I know what it man i would say remember i have two kinds of appraisal what is individual or the other is social individual appraisal give us a person higher ranking in terms of the praise of value on the basis of what is good for you individually and so vannoy could very well say that's what happens when the cheerleader marries the football hero is it and and therefore is unavailable and you end up Mary marrying the plane of type who becomes a schoolteacher and who's very nice but not as beautiful as the cheerleader right for you that may be the best you can hope for that may be the best for you you may not be able to cope with the syrtis so much power as the cheerleader generates she this other woman it may be just what you're able to deal with so it's more comfortable to live her she helps you in ways that a glittering starlet like the cheerleader wouldn't even be able to appreciate she's not vain problem as a cheerleader maybe and she hasn't had to cope with a kind of experience as cheerleader has for you that might be the best thing mess didn't be the best thing or at least the best thing that you could have hoped again I mean no I mean that would be vanoise supply that Eve even in this lesser situation appraisal explains what I try to explain by means of the stove do you remember my ads with this kind of criticism in van oil and the others um in my usual fashion Stavros since you just talk when I cover my eyes could you take a poll and tell me how many have read today's reading including yourself i can't i'm sorry what shots take my hands away on the only six people I could count backwards in this time I think I've seen at six out of seven how what is it I've been done for a while I'm sorry tell me what the calculation is that's good that's fine now hope the seventh will be encouraged to go on and finish it or doing well but then you must have some idea of how I try to counter the vinoy kind of criticism you want to have as away put it by Dorothy incidentally are you all confident you can move closer to the wall well I know you try to say that everyone is capable of being loved so that in a way you can't rule out anyone as far as that we can bestow love upon anyone as long as we are able to appraise the goodness that's within that so like the bag lady who van Noy says can never be loved because she's not beautiful does not have those characteristics that she you claim that she actually can be if we look beyond just her physical appearance and appraise her value is more than just like a sexual or you know beautiful object but because of the other things that she has run a fan I think that's a big part of the answer several I think irrelevant example is what we saw last time my fair lady we're on the cabbage girl turns into a matta cabbage cabbage leaf how's Lisa yes the cabbage leaf turns into you know a lady a lady and people you know lots we noticed that whereas before at least the movie doesn't show us that anybody likes her after lots of people are interested in her soap I do think it does have to do with I think appraisal comes before must old um I think in order to be able to this in order to get to know someone I think the it's initial attraction and the beauty that brings two people together and then it's bestow latakia never make or break the relationship because if you find out that the person is beautiful but otherwise there's nothing in common with you you know after I don't know a few months or something then you will not continue but if you find that but still happens that there is bustillo then you know it's a good relationship so I think that when a life have become salado lady who sought to be a highborn lady is there more the soul isn't she a praise tire yes that's what I'm say so in that example she was ignored earlier because her appraisal was so low at the end she was at man ready to shoot themselves because her appraisal was so high exactly but that but that the point I wanted to make is different from that that even the cabbage leaf can be loved with a low appraisal because there is the element of a soul that comes in but I'm saying she the problem thing is hurt her character did not change um it was she had the same character throughout her transformation the difference is that before she wasn't appraised so she she didn't have the chance to experience love but after she was appraised so she did have the chance to experience love so what I'm saying is that you can be loved through bestow but there has to be some appraisal in order for no no I agree but the point my point is these are two different points 1 whether appraisal comes first in some sense of the word first and second whether people who are lonely appraised can't be loved until they become more highly praised and that that's let's separate them I entirely agree that without appraisal there can't be the sole they can't be loved that's the reason why we hesitate to say that amoeba love amoebas probably praise in their own me to like sort of way if they come to a clump Rajan is in biology so if I misrepresent something let me know they come upon a clump of something and they sort of circle it to see whether it's worth digesting if it isn't they go on to the next bit of food they don't waste their time on some inedible thing from their point of view that's a kind of a appraisal animal let's do that all the time and they were there highly acute oh factory and and auditory powers and sometimes visual powers much greater than ours they can detect what's worthy of their attention or not does it smell like for my cats the smell like fresh fish Wow or is it you know something that doesn't really touch their appetite and so they ignore it that's that's the system of appraisal without without which there could be no life no purpose of existence there could not be the orders of nature that we're all familiar with the peculiar thing about human beings is that we have developed powers of imagination which create patterns of bestow beyond what other people do and it's at that point that the appraised attitude can turn into a loving attitude because of the combination between the stolen appraisal but the stole itself would never occur unless we're some prior condition of appraisal now you might say appraisal also is based on approach the soul of a very sort of metaphysical sort because why should it be that we as human beings appraise the way that we do there's something in our beating something in our nature such that we do appraise the way we do so it get the but and this is the problem the people of often raised that I've never been able to solve because it looks to me as if there's an infinite regress every the soul is based on an appraisal but every appraisal some I was related to a prior bestow but that too is related to an appraisal and some philosophers say huh and infinite regress is something wrong with your reasoning we can't have they can't have an infinite regress but whoever told them the universe lends itself to ultimate solutions I accept it in all of its unclarity as including conditions that we can only understand in terms of an infinite regress if that's what our analysis leads us to so I'm not trouble with that I don't feel the need to resolve that problem about the infinite regress it's only people who have faith in their reason being able to show forth reality to explain how everything is think go there must be an answer and so we must try to get it beyond the regress I face that there are lots of issues in life about which I suspend judgment because I see life as this chaotic soften random phenomenon I was watching a documentary about Mark Twain last night and at the very end of his life where he had suffered terribly in loss of one or two of his children and and his wife and he saw the world in very bleak materialistic ways and I grew up on that maybe that's the reason why I am NOT an idealist and material is because I love Mark Twain but what I noticed especially last night was the wording in which he tried to express this he says almost like a 20th century existentialist he says ultimately there's nothing there's nothing there's no God there's no meaning there is just this horrible life that we have there is nothing and that struck me is very different from the way I always have seen things for me there's always something as long as there is life as long as there is life this always something that fascinates and intrigues man hurts me and excites me and frustrates me and makes me miserable but it's not because there's nothing now if you say well does that mean you're not a materialist that after there or you know you you die you're going to spring back to life with till the the the lighter you know the lighter concept that God has the finger on the lighter you die and he flicked on that flight again which is your life you know what is the term I'm cigarette lighter the cigarette lighter view of human mortality I don't have that view I don't then prepare it to believe that afterlife there will be nothing for me ever again and I regret it and feel the pain of it but it's not because that means that there's nothing the universe as long as I'm alive there's an awful lot and as long as other people alive as long as life goes on it generates the meaning from within itself and so I found the terminology of Mark Twain hustling so the overall material is viewer and I'm used to this is to the question of of philosophy overcoming infinite regress 'as the fact of an infantry dress means there's something but it's something that my mind which is very small and my imagination very limited and my place in the universe infinitely small you know infinitesimal can't cope with so that's how it is and the question is to make do as best we can a Mark Twain with one of the commentators said Mark Twain was a depressant well I don't know what that means but if you are not psychologically depressed you always find some something meaningful even if it's an infinite regress so that on this question of appraisal and the stove oh I'm willing to see that as an infinite regress on the question of reducing all appraisals all appraisal I mean all the stoa recruiting all bestow to some appraisal that I think is a is a problem that I can work with and that's where I continue to disagree with critics like family unfortunately van hoy doesn't answer as far as I know at least not in writing he hasn't given any answer to my reply to him at that symposium and I don't know whether he's even alive so if so if you accept somebody with his faults initially do you think that it's possible that these faults you actually end up after a long time appraising these folks do you think it's an engineer is not you're right here is this dynamic between the soul and appraisal so that having bestowed upon somebody you find that that person becomes appraisal e different why what because you're bestow is a gift of life which is so portant for us it can make life meaningful to you being loved is something we all want Freud is wonderful on that for him that's a fundamental of fact you know there are other facts he may ignore it but that everybody wants to be loved well if you get it even undeservedly you might say oh I don't deserve that well don't don't count your blessings you're lucky you got it you then change in response to that you begin to believe it or better yet you interact with a person such that you do change toward something closer to your own ideal and possibly to the other person's ideal and once that happens then the dialectic continues the appraisal is greater and that causes and that causes a higher level of the soul and that is something beautiful in a sense it's an ideal it's an ideal of satisfied love what we might even think of as married love marriage is an institution sort of based upon this as a possibility right and one might argue if one is acidic but rarely satisfied most marriages are not like that why because people are imperfect they're incapable of enacting the dialectic in a profitable wedding may be true that's a sociological question and I don't really feel any need to talk with that any length about that I talk around that in the paper you read earlier in the course on marriage same-sex and opposite-sex remember I sort of try to debunk the importance of marriage has for people who are either a homosexual heterosexual or homosexual right that that name not that be it may be an ideal that one shouldn't glorify too much it's nevertheless a great ideal and when one encounters people who say I met so and so we fell in love at first sight and we've been happy ever after I can't imagine and being myself without him or her you know I I don't know that I believe any of that but I understand what they're saying and insofar as it's true it is a beautiful ideal that human beings are sometimes capable of let me go into another little digression over the weekend I watched a documentary about the French philosopher who is who died about a month ago I think Jacques Derrida and who is very prominent or has been prominent in continental circles and among literary people in America the analytical school done I don't think pay much attention to him he's interested in nature of being and that's not a fashionable topic you've all any of you heard of him well the reason I mentioned now is because we see his wife 40 years Mary they look like a good couple they don't talk about their love and he said no no is something one can't talk about I'm not going to tell you anything on the camera and like which I can understand and ate but he does say it in one in context you know there's one person I've loved perfectly all my life and that's my sister my sister and I have had a love for each other which is completely perfect completely pure kept emphasizing this kind of terminology no quarrels never fights we've always had a wonderful perfect relationship right as if in contrast to most of his other relationships maybe even his wife but he's not going into his wife and so I wouldn't want to speculate about that but he emphasizes the sister right and then one hears the voice of the interviewer saying really what about the time when you set fire to her crib and they has no answer to that yes but smiles and looks so comfortable haven't the camera cuts to something else so so however perfect anybody thinks a a relationship maybe or you know you can't be sure that you can take it at face right right even if that was the only time of difficulty with his sister is it likely that the two of them are forgotten that or the nest if it's the later relationship it's something to be considered and he won't consider it let me go I'm saying that in terms of the ambiguity between appraisal and bestow that however much one can work out the dialectic successfully there isn't going to be a point of perfection and those who claim to have established that harmonious dialectic may or may not be telling the truth but if if that is something that you care about that's an ideal that matters to you then that's that's be taken at face value many people have made their lives meaningful either because they found that other self unlike Beethoven and in the case of Beethoven he didn't cause he was so special and so difficult and and so hard to live with but or you didn't find it but you kept looking the pursuit of it was a pursuit that made life meaningful to you in the one or two of your papers youth speak of Don Juan is somebody who was always in the pursuit of love well that can make a life meaningful if you're pursuing a perfect marriage and are able to work out the dialectic in that context fine why not if that if it doesn't mean that much you or you decided i'm not good at the marriage business but I want to find I want to create a perfect work of art you never do but you keep working at that well that will make your life meaningful to to you as well there isn't anyone answer either to the meaning in life or two what should count as being a viable love have we gone far too far from where we started in terms of either of you you're the only too well in terraces said much the three of you what about the rest of you do you want to pursue the soul and appraisal further well then let's see everybody wants the cheerleader or you know the football player whatever you know well not not exclusively yeah well that that's like everyone's kind of ideal but it's an ideal that we all have in one way or another and you said that well some people the plane school teacher is the better type of person for them and they would be more comfortable or you know that satisfies their needs but does that mean then that even when you're with the school teacher you still have the ideal of someone else who you think could be better that can ruin a marriage that you're over she says it isn't me you're in love with it's your first wife or it isn't me you're in love with its that incredible fixation on that let's say they were in high school together on Betty or whatever her name is you're not thinking me you're still thinking about Betty why are you you know hung up on that why can't you ever get beyond it in order to appreciate me that that would be a real problem in a marriage I agree but it's not inevitable for the two reasons one is because people change a great deal and looking back you might have said she may have been gorgeous right but I don't think I could have lived with her what I get out of you is so much better your patient you're kind you're gentle is sweet and you're a great cook or great in mathematics and that's what I need in my profession and so I'm glad I didn't give in to that infantile or juvenile interest in facial beauty and sex appeal because people do change that way second which is something I'll come back to in a minute Stavros well you're saying that after you've presumably been married to her for lots of years of bending the third for lots of years so you really don't have any idea how it would have been with the other person at all I mean the only way you don't the only way you saw the cheerleader was you know you've never have you never actually attracted too closely you saw her walking around you knew her you went out with or whatever you never actually lived with her for 10 years so right but you don't remember that the negative part you only remember a slice of it which had an effect on you well I I think saying stuff like like that where I might as I probably better off that I went with you I think that's kind of trying to convince yourself that you are better off without really believing it well I don't know I occasionally talk another something think of one young woman I knew in college who had all the makings of what I cared about without necessarily being explicit and who so would have a very admiring way in looking at me she's pretty she was wealthy she came from the right stock all the things I've never been and I found her very attractive at the time why didn't she probably is a grandmother now she married the right man man out of her own circle but she always looked at me as if I was very special right and then I went on and married somebody else and occasionally I think of her and then I it's little pleasure I sort of indulgent but then I always laugh at myself and say you hardly knew her this is just an image and you nothing could have might have come of it if you she really did get to know you better you spent time with her if you tried to get close to her and if you got married it might have been a disaster you know nothing about her really or about yourself in relation to her and anyhow it's only one of those things and therefore its of no importance so that the same thing could be said about the cheerleader one could say well yeah that was an image I had at the time but it it it is in my reality cuz I went on in very different ways since you weren't married the football player it's a little like a cartoon I've always remembered of a man a portly gentleman lying on the couch and the psychiatrist's behind him and the man is saying i could have bought IVM at five dollars a share we all have that kind of a feeling of having Pharaoh because you know we didn't do a miraculously wonderful thing right I even had it recently because school which is so something I believed in four years google it's just marvelous it's a great achievement of the modern world whenever I want to learn about anything i just got gogrid google it came on the market and it ended up about a year ago I think it was at 88 and I've long since stopped thinking of speculating on the stock market but I there was part of my life and I didn't do anything and then within a year I think it's now doubled and even though I don't speculate and I don't care about what I would have made well what I was done with that money I still have the feeling i could have bought google it 88 that's just you know part of the human imagination it's got nothing to do with the realities but go into whom one loves and whom one could be happy in love with that's one answer to your point we change in that respect and but having the lingering hangover of the past without which we wouldn't have an imagination that's part of our creativity that we create these fantasies and so I don't demean them any more than I demean soap operas I think I mentioned that in the in what you read this is people dealing with life and my job as of losses to try to understand it I get bored by soap operas so I never watch them but that I don't demean the fact that this is relevant to life okay that's one thing I wanted to say the second was this was where I was about to say when Stavros started talking and please interrupt me again at any point we not only changed in that respect but we also change in our ability to receive the good and the beautiful and having reached old age I find that nowadays and for quiet in quite a number of years but not but something I could never have done earlier I have a way of discovering beauty in people in women in and in men but in different ways because the sexual orientation is always present even if it's not active and so I look at women differently from the way look at men but I look at both men and the extent that I'm capable of doing it animals I look at them and perceive phenomena about them that I could never received before and beauties about them so that when some people say to me you know can you find old women beautiful I always add sir I think beauty exists at every age it's simply a question of your being able to receive it and in most people there is some kind of beauty usually of an unexpected sort one that I would never have been able to perceive that on the basis of a life devoted to this it has been with me there are all sorts of beauties that come out that are for me very valuable that I cherish and that the person herself or himself might not even recognize I find that I find that in my relation my cygnets I perceive things that I couldn't have before I'm still an egocentric but I still know how to look into the eyes of the people and talking to and perceives what's going on to some extent in in their minds and that is a cause of creating in myself the ability to the stove value which then gives them a greater appraisal value and that is the function of human development in my case I'm sure it's very limited and a saint whatever the religion may be because the religion is simply a way of authorizing this kind of process you can have it without the religion it's the process that for me matters most of all but the happy news the words st. for the kind of person I'm talking about whether or not the person is nay theists a saint can do it better than most people if same can do it better than I can that's very nice I'm not a saint and I then covered myself and say yeah but Saints don't write books so I have something to say to another doesn't have but the two are not unrelated it's the discretion of yourself that underlies his ability than talking about and the ability shows how the stole which is so M vague and amorphous can create develop and exist creatively throughout a person's life and get better and better I wish mine were better than it is you notice I stare at you all the time I'm beginning to wonder whether that's why often when I'm in the street and I told you that I have this habit I and staring at everything and other people don't they seem wrapped up in themselves or ashamed or oh the women don't like to look at men because then men will hit on them so it's a protective protective pretence to be in you know on observing that women Abbott women are very good to observe suppling what they want to observe but they don't stare with the kind of fixation that I do trying to make contact with whatever is going on even if I never talked to the person or touched a person or anything to do with a person for me that's that's a creative gift related to the soul that I'm struggling to bring about but don't succeed very well but what I notice is that people smile at night and I think oh is this somebody I know my forgotten a student who's a former student of mine because I'm terrible that like all professors forgetting who their students were or is it because there's a look of a look on my face which elicits that maybe I'm even smiling because I'm concentrating I don't frown when I do that and so there's a smile back and sometimes they talk to me and I look as if they know me and that then I have it's embarrassing I was in the country in New Hampshire this weekend where I have a summer place and a man in Walmart's I was in Walmart's and written in the aisle man smiled at me and I wondered is this my neighbor and I forgotten who he is what should I say to him and you know I didn't want to cut him I didn't want ignore him and I no idea he looked a little like somebody but I know that's not him so I fabricated I said isn't a terrible the tax rate going up 12 and a half percent thank you that's something everybody would be concerned about and he said well it's always going up and he probably had realized that he had smiled in an idiot escape for free I have no way of knowing it's part of the peril of living this way that I do and say it can be even worse nevertheless that's the second way in which the soul can creatively discover appraised values that one might not have had might not have recognized and therefore that if nobody recognizes they don't exist because the appraised value has to belong to some community of appraisers and so there are people who may be beautiful in one sense but not in the sense of being appraised very high eunos nobody meant perceive his or her beauty should we take a little break yeah we've been going on for almost an hour and a half why don't we take a little break stop now I would be very easier to hear any other comments and criticisms you might have about could be the same subject we've been talking about appraisal and bestow or anything else related to this reading for today have you've read the pursuit of love and you must have noticed how different this writing is how how later it is from the time that the pursuit of love was written as a matter of fact it's about the same period it's just that I hadn't didn't have for the pursuit of love I didn't have the kind of stimulus that was given to me by participating in the symposium which for me is as I think I may have told you it was a very creative experience did I tell you about that how I used to sit in the first row with a chair in front of me and take off my shoes and comment on the papers that people were giving and they eventually got into the habit of calling on me first and that my entire effort was to help their them make their ideas clear and I don't know how well I succeeded or whether I'm even good at doing that but I could notice that they were surprised the usual setting for such a thing is that everybody is trying to impress everybody else everybody's trying to one-up everybody else everybody is using this as an opportunity to present ideas of his own as if they were original and here I was encouraging them to attack me and being happy to work at the difficulties I think I may have told you stop me if I have told this to you about one person who afterwards sent in his essay for publication and the editors asked me to look at them and I wrote him saying you know you you're you're too flattering to me you don't you don't agree with me on various points and you ought to develop them and I sort of gave him hints about how to attack Irving singer and his writing and he took me up on that and then what that published was a much less favorable paper not only because he was attacking me which is fine but also he limited places places in which he was praising me too much so I was a little different in a sense little disappointed but also I realized that that was right I can live without the praise but the world would benefit from his expressing his contrary point of view and in that respect it was all very creative for me I had an audience I had people I could work with and it would it immediately come came out in a publication but that's why I'm encouraging you to let me know your views you know it all come out on in roc w this is your chance to be on filmed making it a telling comment that Erickson who can't replied to a van criticism I agree with you in that we shouldn't try to change the beloved and then we should accept him or her as they are but I think that there is some kind of paternalism for the other person in the sense that if we didn't do anything to change something that we can see is hurting our beloved it would be almost like not caring so it's not trying to impose our values but it's just looking for the betterment of that other person that matters to us no I think you're putting a finger exactly on the problem which is where do you draw the line between acceptance as an expression of your pasola vol ability to love and we're in going beyond that are you and in extending that are you losing interest or showing a lack of interest or appearing to and if you go beyond it aren't you being paternalistic and that undermines your loving you know if you tell a person don't do that you want to do it but I won't love you fall hate you for it or it's wrong for you to do that it might be good advice but it is necessarily an expression of love this is a problem that people face not only in their intimate relationship in adulthood but it's it's systemic to the relationship between parents and children because if you are if you love your children then you should accept with all these childish things they do but somehow the children can't understand why you dumb they take it as an act of love when you say no you mustn't set fire to the cat or or your sisters quit and you know what I'm not doing anything wrong i'm just playing playing a little game which involves inside the aries from the child's point of view the the very fact that parents have authority that they can tell you what's right and what's wrong they can punish you they can control your choices in life some of which they can't possibly understand because they are so much older that indicate to the child that the parent doesn't really love them and as if this is part of the queasiness and ambiguity and being human I don't think there's any solution to that I think it's at this point the statement of the Buddha comes in you know the Buddha's count people in the in the stories about the Buddha they come to him for advice about difficult questions and he ends up saying work out your salvation with diligence which isn't for bit you want that a yes or a No what should I do and there is a no yes or a No life doesn't lend itself to that and this is one area I think in which that's true you can't draw a line the art line is artificial it's like the artificiality and most of our laws about human behavior I mean we agree that you mustn't murder other people unless unless it's done because your soldier then it's alright but there error when you're not a soldier you can't even kill people let alone murder them why well society would fall apart from abstract reasons like that they're very good abstract reasons i'm not in favor of eliminating laws against murder but it's very hard to know how to adjudicate in the case of sex that's it's even more so most states in this country have laws to protect juveniles from a sexual behavior of a consensual sort that the child might make on the grounds of the child isn't as an age in which he or she can make a mature rational decision all right children do have to be protected but at what age often if there is from community community it certainly varies in other countries should be 18 should it be 14 should it be 12 in India they used to maybe they still do have a marriage at the age of 11 and I don't know if that's the result of choice but then marriage might not be as a result of choice anyhow it's very hard to know what the ages and I don't have any recommendations now if my feeling is like the Buddhist there's a story not unrelated to this a course of the Buddha having created a man and the first man and eventually after a while the man goes to the Buddha and says thank you very much for having created me the trouble is I'm lonely I'm all alone by myself and Buddha said oh all right I'll take care of that su creates a woman and men very grateful and they go off and after a while the man comes back and says that you were very good to me and giving me a woman as my companion but I can't live with her I was so different and we argue in coral and so the the Buddha says oh well that's all right i'll create divorce you can divorce when things are going badly so they divorce and then the man comes back with a woman and says the Buddha you gave me I was lonely without a woman you gave me the woman and I couldn't live with her now we're divorced and I can't live without her and this is the problem for the Buddha and so the Buddhists smiled benignly and says you can't live with each other you can't live without each other work out your salvation with diligence which seems to me like a impossible answer except that it's really a right answer if it's a different indicates there's no right and wrong you've got to do the best you can that's the way nature as structured our most important aspects you there's no guarantee that children must be 18 before they they're consensual admittance into sex isn't called rape it depends on what people think and what the society allows and what will work in any particular society even in the Casa question about sanity you know the Miller ruling of the Supreme Court about obscenity in movies or literature or anything has one of the criteria what is acceptable to a community so in some parts of this country one kind of activity or or production or work of art is called obscene and people can be put in prison for it and then and in other other parts it's perfectly all right and even extends to prostitution which is legal in places parts of Nevada and very illegal most of the country or bigamy there isn't any answer there i mean our answers there isn't any assurance that there's a right way in the wrong way that applies to everyone you can find out what's the right way for you perhaps if you're lucky or your society can through trial and error but I because of the structure of reality because of some religious ultimate which is supposed to reveal the nature of being that that I feel is the wrong way of approaching the situation so what can we do with this how would you resolve the question about the journalism and love in personal love and the long of a couple because you're saying that children regard the adults as having the authority but I think that in a love relationship when when someone tells the partner I mean when the partner tells the other partner you should do this he or she is not imposing that it's just a suggestion so and I think the other person doesn't regard his or her partner as being an authority I think it's more a situation of equals well but what if an example that cold uses the wife is addicted to nicotine let's say and doesn't want to be he knows she doesn't want to be but she is addicted does he have a right to steal or cigarettes to force her in some violent way even not to smoke does he have right to take it out of her mouth or ball her out out of love saying I wouldn't want you to have it let's say that she has set in you know I if I'm ever have a serious disease I just don't want to go through with it I don't want to live and suffer I just assumed I right now from his point of view this may sound suicidal let's say that she keeps in her medicine Chad one day opens the medicine chest to her let's say she has a separate separate bathroom and in her medicine chest he sees a bottle of poison and he thinks it's because she would she'd really would take it if she ever went to the doctor and he said you have an incurable cancer right out of love for her and is evenness to keep her alive does he have a right to steal the poison and empty it does he have a right to interfere with our desire under these circumstances I think that's where the issue comes in it would be paternalistic but cones argument is that if you really care about somebody you can't just stand by and ignore the hazards you have to act paternalistic alee out of love your love requires you to be paternalistic do you want to carry this further do you agree with him or not yes there's a limit to the extent to which we can take that the journalism I don't know about the situation with the poison but about the situation with the cigarettes if we know that that is what the other person wants to quit then I think helping helping her and giving her support will would help her achieve that goal of quitting it might or might not you know Adam it's a my argument would be out of love you could make a very strong effort you might use their imagination to think of ways in which you might control her addiction for reminder that nowadays people who come who are diagnosed with serious cancers often don't die of it because there are so many medical and surgical interventions that can ruin a person's life and people who succeed in that are glad that they go through it you can make that kind of effort out of love and if you didn't one would say did you really love her you would yeah we really use you agree with her that if you if you're going to have to face the ordeal of curing your cancer life isn't worth living looks as if maybe you don't care about it maybe you don't but if you force that kind of view the need to perpetuate life under those circumstances of honor that doesn't look like glove love costs alone consistent accepting the other person as he or she is rather than regulating her or him in accordance to the ideals of yours that may not match hers in this case and this applies to children and I think in the case of children's it's much much worse because with adults who are capable of loving each other they have enough rationality that often have a lot of experience to have feelings they be confused about their feelings but they may also know pretty much what they want to get out of life they don't doesn't mean that they know the meaning in life but they you know the woman might be in a position to say I've seen people suffering and I don't think life is worth it I think I'd rather not suffer this is something a mature rational person might say as opposed to two alternatives one the person is out of her mind in a psychotic episode has gone mad is on I'm not in control of a rationality in which case one has to intervene intervene because she can't make a decision and you have to and you'll make it in accordance with what you consider best for her but at the moment it's not going to be what she thinks is best for her because there if she did then things would be different and the second alternative is if she hasn't developed enough to be rational she might be she might be rationally defective or she may be in the condition of children which means that her powers of ration the fashion allottee haven't yet matured children are not psychotic or defective or when they're irrational and childhood but we know it takes a little time so what do we do math in we love them we want what's best for them and they often have enough rationality to disagree with us and even to defeat our hopes for what we consider best for them and then of course all that whole intervening period in adolescence when children are very strong in that respect or you know can put up a good fight out of life of them should would one say well okay you know you want to go roller skating on the edge of a precipice of what if what am I to say I hope you survive right looks as if it's not luck or out of love do we simply have to give up and say they're right they know the dangers and we have to accept them as they are then I don't find an easy solution every the every person is different every age is different every situation is different some of the hazards are themselves a function of temporary conditions of society at one time women in particular girls in particular were there their freedom was tremendously restrained so that they don't have a child out of wedlock unmarried when they might be capable of love they might be capable of very strong emotional sexual feelings but if they got knocked up which itself shows it's a derogatory word then they're ruined for the rest of their lives and also probably ruining the family and all sorts of consequences that would that was a reality that parents had to face within less within my lifetime certainly it isn't that it's still reality in many parts of the world in many societies is it isn't anymore in America today so when the problem about love in conflict with freedom doesn't have an acceptance and can't in conflict with freedom doesn't quite to have a constant answer it varies and if anyone lays down a rule however golden they call that rule it seems to me to be laden not a golden rule but a dead rule that should be avoided that's why I'm a pluralist one has to work out one salvation with delivered Jin's knowing that there is no one way of doing that no no single way of doing that I don't know how as I think I mentioned in the reply to colds critique too many people this sounds wishy-washy and my students often do say I'm wishy-washy and I don't have any fixed rooms or the right answers but that's precisely because of the way I see the world I don't want to be anything other than wish you watch the except for the you know the overtones some of that oh I don't know whether what I say in response to coal is satisfying anybody want to comment on there then let me tell you how that got written had a meeting of the american philosophical association one year some are just by chance i sat down at lunch and he was this person I didn't know do you know anything about him named the herb it cold and when I told him my name he said urban singer Wow I'm meeting Irving singer like this and they said or what do you mean he said well I've been invited to participate in a symposium on your philosophy of love the one the one you know that and we got to talking and spent about an hour and a half or so talking very well very intimately about things not unrelated to what we were just saying it all comes out more impersonal of course in the writing became strong in terms of his own life and others and and it was friendship is really a very nice thing to experience at the symposium he submitted a paper which he had written for some other occasion on the concept of caring about and i think i mentioned that and then mentioned may you're hardly i don't know even even that should be in the paper but we were on such good terms when I saw this I said him look you had these other ideas that are in conflict with mine why can't you put that into your paper or if you want just published a paper which is interesting and then have a postscript in which you attack me because that's obviously relevant and I showed our out of the paper you one could derive views that would be in conflict with mine and he did he wrote a paper 10-15 pages long I mean an addendum which he called PostScript and that's what I was responding to and that the both papers the both parts appeared in the volume and I felt really very good about that and then I hadn't thought about these issues but now I had to and now I confronted them because here was the person who was very sympathetic to me and not an idiot far very far from the enid Ian but who had ideas I had to respect and did respect but had and thought about responding to and that was very grateful he felt this is a wonderful opportunity I mentioned this to you because being students you are have a chronic pathology the forced upon you which is just because you're students you were expect to be the recipient of the criticisms of these older people who not only criticize you but also grade you yes and influence your future life because you get a final score and that might cause you not to go to grad schools no getting to graduate law school medical school engineering and this terrible condition they put you in as if you were children again who have to be told how to live and it's a terrible place now the counterbalance that is if you're lucky they'll criticize you in ways that will help you develop your mind I'm not good at that so when you read my comments on your paper particularly the first one they're usually not very helpful but some people devote their lives through working out that kind of criticism and you should cherish them and I cherish this opportunity of being attacked because that's how one of the ways in which one learns it brings out the creativity in you because you have to respond and that the response is itself part of the creativity welcome I'll come back to that another time anybody want to defend Cole against me also that there were payoffs to for me because the sequel to the pursuit of love is the book I think I've mentioned called the harmony of nature and spirit and there are several chapters on the nature of happiness and it turns out that Cole had written several papers on that and I asked him to send them to me I wouldn't have known him or thought about them and I use those papers I remember if they were criticizing but they've fructified my thinking and some this kind of interrelationship if it's done properly and cultivated it can be very very beneficial and i encourage you to think it out to develop your minds and your souls not to be afraid that's the idea people are going to be attacking you or then I'll continue a little long this vein while I was working on the book called harmony of Nations spirit I gave a public lecture at the University of Madrid in Spain very big audience and translates to read a paper or delivered it they going to talk my papers the way I talk to you in English to large audience but there was a simultaneous translation so that people who didn't know any English understood exactly what i was saying and that was very very gratifying afterwards the professor of metaphysics after you at the car at the competency which is big University in Madrid who would introduce man was the host he questions and his question was you know when I listen to you talking about life and the good life and morals even religion I have the feeling you don't believe in any ethics you don't believe in good and evil there there is nothing that you convey is your articles of ethical faith and they and I said is that true and I said well you know in the context of what I was saying but you know you're familiar with now I won't repeat it it is true I don't believe in any and he said well if a student comes to me and gives me a problem a moral problem says what should i do I tell him or hurt I tell him that's why he or she comes to me to help and I tell him what is right and what is wrong and you you can't do that well I said no I don't do that that's my and that in keeping with my philosophy and he was sort of shocked to this as if you know I run run through the street committing crimes whenever I can get away with it so if I was myself without any morals oh no i think i said i have an ethics of my own that i'm very strict about that i live in accordance with but i don't try to get to proselytize you get other people to agree with me I think that I may have said something like that and then that was the end of it afterwards I was very upset I thought I agreed to readily I hadn't really worked at the problem and I didn't know quite how to work on it then I was still writing the harmony of nature and spirit and it kept lingering in me and the result was that one of the major chapters came out in which I defended my philosophy it's a chapter at the end and it's a little technical and then maybe I don't know if it would interest you or not it's called the aesthetic foundations of religion and morality and there I was confronting this problem that the professor of metaphysics had with me and defending it as best I can as fully and the as honestly as I think I've ever been able to it would not have I don't know maybe it would never have come into existence if I hadn't if he hadn't made those critical comments about me and my ideas what other papers or criticisms and thinkin we talked about the noise on the soil and appraisal we've talked about coal on acceptance versus freedom I mean young freedom no way or is it freedom paternalism I'm sorry lack of freedom it's acceptance of free acceptance of freedom versus paternalism which limits the freedom of the other person whether it's literally paternalism in relation to children which is that we don't talk about very much in that place Oh or in love between two adults right what else there's so much more that I think goes into those pages what about the questions about religion several of the people there were Jesuits and/or well no were priests mr. Noda home I there is no tact and LTA isn't nota mr. dota was I think a polis not a Jesuit but principe was a very prominent Jesuit at maybe the head of the print of the whatever they call it at the University of Toronto devoted to Catholic theology and then there were people who talked on historical topics cute regard for instance none of that exciting you love of things you know that's right that's come up in the course here this is this is I think the simply a most extensive discussion of it that I'm capable of running so far or build it certainly comes out of what you were writing in terms of Ward center which is normal but this is later development of my ideas about the love of things um personally I can't I don't think I uh I do believe you can love things but I guess it's sort of love in a loose term just because you love what they give to you you don't actually love them for what they are like you can't love the bookshelf for what it right thank was part of that's in your paper is my I mean I feel stupid repeating it no no please do not repeat it develop it well I mean I feel that you you love something because you love what it does to you you can't I mean there's no possible way you can love oh I guess bookshelf or a couch I mean you love the couch why because you um you sit on it you're comfortable but I think we see love for lack of a better word I mean well it's a different kind of love simply because it's not responded to or if I love my car and think the car loves me back I'm cold crazy anyone who feels that way has to be institutionalized or given some glee some psychotherapy cars our things and things are incapable of having feelings of the sort that we do so it's a one-way love but that doesn't mean that I can't love it because of what it does for me sure it does and that's why I love for people that's the appraised of element it's because of what she does too for me as T's the casual phrase he or she does something for me right that I love it love her it's and that use is similar to a woman going into a department store and trying on a dress and the saleswoman says together to buy it you know it really does something for you or together to buy a more expensive dress say no don't get that it doesn't it doesn't do anything for you right the idea that the dress does something for you makes a great deal of sense but it's the way in which your relationship with something somebody does something for you if however that the dress doesn't respond or the car being things they can't respond the way that people can beyond that then it can't be called anything like a lot of persons but and it is a lot of things that you have you have the love of the things and they don't love you back in the same way but they can do things for you I love my computer because of the way in which it helps me to think and saves me all sorts of tedious operations it's not because i think it's doing this in a way that a person would help me to think or save operations by doing things for me it's just a bit soon as that i'm not sure if I understood what you said before you said that when you love somebody you love for what he he or she does for you is that that's the appraised of element you won't so bestow love upon her or him and you can bestow love upon up on things it happens all the time that's what people like me don't part one of the reasons don't part with their own car so it sort of always you know not the love relationship to them this is part of what we mean by sentiment family why are people sent a medal it's called save the stowed value upon things that once matter to them and probably don't do other people if they overdo it then we say they're sentimental but the nostalgia which is a love of the past is very deep in human beings may be regrettable sometimes and their whole schools of literature the thought that I discuss in relationship to James Joyce who has no sentiment but no no no nostalgia me whereas notice soldier who was fighting this soldier in order to be a realist observing the world as it is right and Orson Welles am i right about who struggles with nostalgia in himself there it is something you don't not at all artists accept but it's a phenomenon in human nature to be nostalgic well that's the soul of importance upon things that are past which may have once add immediate importance Meridian in terms of your feelings and emotions but don't anymore right but those things don't reciprocate how crudely but we have a kind of love for them which is a very important element human life the love of money which is supposed to be the root of all evil it's not the root of all evil because they're great many evils have nothing to do with money it can be the root of all philanthropy and all goodness if only because the people who have devoted themselves out of a love of money then create foundations they don't know how to how to bestow the money to their liking so they make foundations that do good friend to rid of it the root of it oh forget about them the root of it is act of goodness is the love of money I wonder if we're going to hear a message all right it stopped but please continue don't you don't agree I could take it off the hook I thought this is worth it I see ice what you're saying I mean it's just that for me I guess just the word love for me just means the love of persons I mean you I guess you sort of you categorize little person look things but i am and what i love my deal sure which is the extremely part important part of human nature people wouldn't be murdering and killing each other righteously as they do in war if there were this love of ideals particularly modern wars where all the suicide bombers are dying for some ideal and democratic countries like ours justify their behavior by saying there's the ideal of bringing democracy to these people the ideal world war one making the idea was to make the safe for democracy that was the idea of underlying World War one ideals are very important it isn't the in the good old days when one tribe would slaughter another in order to get their wives and chattels but even then they had ideals that Jehovah ordained it it's the love of God that we chosen people should dominate the rest of the world which seems to me a ludicrous idea but that was the ideal or the Crusaders that Christianity must be spread and eliminates these infidels infidels means people without faith they have their own faith and then they call the Christians infidels with course they claim they weren't people of faith so that on both sides the religion created by its very nature system of ideals that justified a great deal or and people acted out of a lot of those ideals they didn't show sat casually out of a love of those ideals even if they were motivated by economic reasons the way the Crusaders obviously were and everyone assumed and I think can still justify that we are in the middle east with our high ideals at least partly because we're afraid of being deprived of the oil that runs our industries so the love of idea was a very important part of life I always view that ideals are sort of another opium of the people I mean to convince people to do stuff I don't know I think it's so deeply ingrained in human nature but that's part of the tragedy of life that we can't just lump it all the insulin no III agree with you that is so it so that's what I'm saying it's so deeply engraved that you can convince people to go to war in a totally different country where they have really nothing to gain but everything to lose just for the level I agree with and they do it to not because of brainwashing in the Second World War people couldn't make sense out of the kamikaze pilots who were suicide bombers we accept that I'd play of them you know their planes for the bombs that they were somehow fanatics that they were brainwashed that they you know is someone in a kind of drug-induced stupor um the ideals that these people had a love of ideals their ideals and were heroic in acting that way was never recognized by people on the other side of the Americans for instance and if they had recognized it it might have been more realistic to beware of this kind of devotion to ideals as I think I said before they only had about 2,000 kamikaze pilots but if they had had more they would have won them said they would have destroyed American Navy because they were so successful I it's just that as far as love my ideals lot of things that buffer persons I guess it's just up my definition of love what I've learned for love to me can only be it I can only use it for love of persons I mean why why you have to limit yourself well it's not so much this is more of a words issue I mean love of ideals i would call passion for ideals I wouldn't I mean I don't know I just I always viewed I always view on love as a two-way Road so I just it's just my problem that it's hard for me to call it's true I deals like things don't love us back we create them but once we've created them then there is love we can add for them just as a parent can love a child one of the strongest emotions is a love of one's children not everyone has it that it doesn't last very long perhaps but I I'm just about a month ago I became a parent a grandparent for the first time which I'd always wanted my children weren't that other things to do in life I became a grandparent and what has struck me is what a profound feeling and emotion that is created in me I couldn't have foreseen that it's something I somehow wanted but you look here's this a grandchild I have now that's very deep now the love of children is again a love of something you have created because it's been through your behavior that this biological process issued into a new form of life now you might say oh but the grandchild is alive and the cars and ideals are not alive that's true I know there are different kinds of responses but they are like in one respect that they're all created by human beings in one way or another like I kind of have there's oftentimes someone who like you can love someone a lot and they don't love you back but does that mean that you don't really love them because you're not getting like a like a reciprocation from them and like you know that I mean that can happen like at any point life and then also there could be like you love someone and then I think we've talked about the case before is like what if they get really sick or they get like Alzheimer's disease and forget who you are or they go into a coma and you could still love them even though they have like no I you know they don't love you at all back anymore so there's like still a love you can almost call that person a thing now that they're like a vegetable sitting there that you know they have no control over themselves but you still love them for Blake your luvin for the fact that they are not just a thing they're also there were they there are the relics the remains of a person whom you've had experience with so that there are all of these different varieties or what you're emphasizing the thing that I presuppose is that love isn't a single thing I never give a definition of love i only talk about i make distinctions which enable want to talk about it from different points of view i'm a maker of distinctions that's the great variety in life and I relish that unrealistic and I don't know whether this is personal because I have very wide appetites and food for instance I may be the way I was brought up to enjoy all kinds of food and I've got in-principle I relish all kinds of animal forms now I'm very limited of course and some people i can't understand and can tolerate but that's a short coming online but the idea of loving everything is fundamental to to my nature just like not very good at it well i mean just in response to veronica i wanted to say that first of all if you love somebody without him loving you back I guess I believe that you can't love somebody until until you've experienced him or her in a love relationship if they stop letting okay like you've been in love and then they'll love you okay well if they stop loving you and you love them obviously it turns into more of an obsession I guess instead of love I don't know I mean um just sort of you I guess you sort of love them just because you I don't think you really can't believe inside you that they've stopped loving you and therefore you might know inside where is the inside there isn't any inside there isn't any insight to life it's all here right around us all the time it's like one of those Internet's I don't have what is it dsl one of those that's open all the time and there were they advertise it's always on that's that's what life is like is no inside and outside I mean some that actually harder a hidden or gate but in principle nothing is hidden everything is there so what do you mean inside that person who has turned into a vegetable really loves you well as far as as far as the vegetables knows I think that you sort of hope I guess you you continue loving them just because just because you know that if they were better they would pay what if the relationship would be as before I mean it's sort of a circumstance that's not too common so it's it's a hypothetical condition it's a I just say that it can be I'm saying love is a two-way thing but the problem is it's not the patient's fault that he doesn't love you I missed it it's just that he there was some circumstances that caused him to home you know not be able to proceed or something why do you think love is always a two-way thing because I guess when you when you love someone you sort of you care about them and caring about them doesn't only mean you care about them because if something happens to them something happens to you you just care about them because it's just engraved I guess in your heart I don't know not the way but that's a one-way statement okay of course I have two way street I thought you meant that the object loves you back yeah so if you have told you sometimes it happens sometimes it doesn't somebody who loves you that is different from love which is not reciprocated these are different kinds of love worth analyzing on their own but I wouldn't want to say that only one is long yeah there's not that's why we talk about reciprocal love and you might say that though it's much better yes but the other kind also exists okay I said it was mostly a definition problem I guess I do agree that it's just for me it doesnt sit well with me to have loved be such a a wide come gamma of things right what are you against a wide angle camera is the way I was I guess the way my character developed am Not sure I don't think you can just call love this and called love that in common love well you see there there is the practical consequence and that's what comes out in father notas paper against me he says I think of a love of things as an authentic love whereas he says the only true love is love of persons and that's because it's a reflection of spiritual of religious love so on his dogma God loves us and we attain love by emulating God right that's the traditional view not very revolutionary but it goes against ordinary language and falsifies the phenomenology and the whole structure of what we mean when we talk about love now there is a difference in the sense that one might say when there are kinds of loads of things that aren't really look isn't really love so if somebody says I just love hamburgers right well that just means you like them very much maybe even compulsively my brother when he was I guess an adolescent he loved hamburgers so much she felt the need to cure himself and the Cure consisted in gorging on hamburgers through a point on one occasion when it became very sick of him and that cured him that was the end of it after that he he didn't have a love of hamburgers well one might say that he never really he didn't have a love of hamburgers and sense in which an artist loves his materials because it was addictive and it was something that came out of him in a way that he wasn't comfortable with but if I have a love of my computer I don't feel that's just liking my computer very much it's a real an ongoing deep intimate relationship so that you can distinguish among different kinds of love of things well and maybe a lot of where I'm saying to you have never written out because I didn't have any human beings to write them out for now and you're providing me that presence you can do much better ensure by working at these ideas or better going beyond them let me just off the spot off the bat right here I think that the reason why I'm inclined to want to sort of narrow down what what loved what love me what we mean by saying love is that when there is an interpersonal love there it's a very special thing and if you say if you say that oh you know I love her and I also love computers and I also love bookcases and out some of cars and i also love freedom or whatever it seems like you're kind of just something even though everybody knows that you mean them sort of you know you everybody realizes that love of things is different from love of persons it's just by subconsciously you're sort of just making your love for her and her love for you you're making it less important because it's melissa moyer less important yeah because it's not that rare I made your day do you understand however I don't know talking about to say well now you're getting back to the anecdote I told at a lecture in Canada I think it was that I report on in the pursuit of love and a student afterwards said do you love your wife as much as you love your dog and I hadn't mentioned my wife and happened mention my dog and I I was on I flustered and said well my dog doesn't criticize me and the whole big great big auditorium the whole audience burst out laughing I had been realized I had said something so funny and ridiculous and but once they laughed I could turn to another question and afterwards I felt very uncomfortable I hadn't faced up to this and then I do so in that chapter which gathered oh so you're forgotten by now because you read it in the pursuit of love at the end somewhere and what i end up with is the idea that among persons there are different kinds so loving the door who is a person i always might my dog for me was certainly a person and their other dogs have more difficulties thinking of as persons i look in their eyes and I don't know what's going on but with my dog I always knew I was going on and we can be you negated and he had talents that I recognized and imagination of a limited sort but still an imagination and so he was a person more so than a zygote so I'm not in favor of banning abortion because I go to call human the human that doesn't mean there persons and that that's enough reason to kill them when persons are going to be harmed by not killing them nevertheless my dog is not the same kind of person as my wife and my love of her as a person couldn't possibly the same as my love of him as a person so there Fernandez is to be analyzed where do we draw the line between how do we distinguish between them within the category of a lot of persons as think from a lover of things so that's one complication well I can't do recognize all three and and then it all these qualifications you have be built into them in terms of different examples of each audrianna hasn't that much chance about your you and Veronica both that you hand up same time I was just going to say that we can love a person we can love a thing and we can love an ideal but it's just a matter of setting our priorities so a love a thing doesn't necessarily need to undermine our love for a person well I agree to that and I say something like that that I'm not opposed to the setting of the priorities but you shouldn't assume that for all people there is a fixed hierarchy the way the church does let's say I have a love of persons and that's why I give money to Oxfam which feed starving people in Africa fences in underdeveloped countries and I feel well this is related to my love of persons but I don't give much thought to them and my son bought me a brand-new a kind of DVD that he recommends and it was like a toy is there a child getting a toy and I loved this thing and still love it I love it as a thing it hasn't quite become a person for me yet but that love in some respect for the moment least is greater than my love for the people whom I hope box fam is taken care of on my behalf and then love of ideals varies so that one has to show the variability it for different people for different times for different situations of these loves that's why the whole question of love is so complicated and so little has been done by philosophers because philosophers like to say yes or no you know symbolic logic is the basis of mathematics and mathematics is a wonderful art form and has all sorts of practical ramifications in science and technology but one reason is because this is all yes to know you have to have that kind of yes and no mentality with the Gidget digital world is yes in the world isn't it all right am I not right life is not like that and my life is certainly not lecture so that I don't need I don't know what to do with priorities I live in accordance with certain priorities as I have to confront them but to set them up in a rigid way that an institution like a religion does means nothing to me I certainly wouldn't want to pose that upon anybody vary from person to person but I just said this because the fact that you love something else doesn't mean that doesn't make your love for a person less special well yeah it will but if it's a hierarchy it's less important than that constrain its lower on the hierarchy huh yes all right but therefore it is less important well if your love for the person is hiring and priority then the first thing well the point is you see look for some persons you know if someone said to me how can you be so overjoyed at your new at your DVD player when they're all those starving people in Africa you know how can you sit down watching the television while you're having a good meal and it's showing all of these innocent people in Iraq being killed because of the kind of war that's being waged how can you tolerate that well apparently I'm not sensitive enough to the person's don't have same kind of love of them as I do and having a love of a good meal and I think it's true of everybody we are compartmentalized and yet our feelings overlap in there all sorts of interesting ways or important ways oh I mean you imagine that you you loved your DVD player but you have personified it yet whereas your dog you have personified so this I don't have the nitrous on if I did I think he is a person okay um I hope be a personified name well I'm not I guess assuming I I'm assuming that you have say I was a person yeah I'm assuming that you have some things that you personify that you love that are things though and some that you have it personified that you love I guess I don't know if this is true how you getting closer to the use of loving things which means liking very much I just want to say that just just the fact that you actually distinguish between the love of I don't know a witch you personified and the love of B which you haven't personified yet as you mentioned about the DVD player base that you believe that some some love of things is more important is deeper and more important that some other love of things well the love of my computer is more important because the computer responds to me it learns my way of thinking it contributes to it when I miss found something when I go on to google my shrine it will say did you mean you know if I miss Gelder thank you you're familiar with that and that that's that's kinda almost a kind of love that I can't find among many people I mean that's the computer just doing whatever it's automatically been poor do its knowledge is doing it just for you or like other it's oh you know nobody right now I'm gonna like respond to you because I like you it's just that is what it has to do know it's funny is the sign of buying a thing I'm not going to say that about human beings now people who believe in AI artificial intelligence some of them think that we are things and their mission is to show how the brain works sudden and that is the mind the mind is the working of the brain and how if we only could figure it all out in terms of the chemical physical and behavioral scientific elements cognitive Elvis we know all there is no about human being because human beings is not a person in a sense different from what an article ideally and artificial intelligence could provide another author of modifications some some say no machine will IRA duplicate a human being but it will be able to perceive human feelings and respond to them as a machine can but we ourselves and not just machines this is again one of that unsolvable areas and I'm happy to live in ignorance whether the we will ever be able to reduce consciousness to bodily materiality because consciousness seems to be different but we know how much it depends upon the body is it not a problem the way some philosophers say because there's no way of reducing one to the other or is it simply a matter of cognitive science advancing enough and then they'll do there'll be nothing left in that empty category of person that will all be reducible in two things and then I want to know what is the nature of the concept of reducibility so it's still in great flux and I don't feel troubled I don't feel the need to try to reduce it or not to reduce it that may be a limitation for me for that reason most philosophers in America probably aren't interested in my word that's all right I have things I think I can do and I want to do it but it doesn't require me to solve this kind of problem they were to solve any problem or well the problem is how to be imaginative creative intelligent communicative some others understanding ended in the formulating or my distinctions as pluralistic Lee as possible that's a big problem but it's a very different order of problem from the other one I I guess I just wanted to say that because you I guess gone back to my former point that because you you just think with you person to personify some things and you don't personify something some other things but you love them and you realize that your love of computer is more important than your love of the bookcase for instance that in fact you are doing without the omniscient because you are making a high some sort of hierarchy of love right so why don't we stop here Veronica start to give the presentation next week and I look forward to it and we've crashed through enough today to count as a very full menu for your work on to think about it unless somebody wants to say something further all right then why do we stop for today