Simon May - What is Love?

[Music] very great pleasure to introduce Simon May who's professor of philosophy at King's College London Simon has has an unusual distinction among analytical philosophers which is that he he writes books that are actually interesting they several books now on Nietzsche there's one on cuteness one in Japan one of the European Union and more I think and he's just finishing a true vol project on the history of love which is made immense effect around the world I think it's now either has been translated or is being translated into 11 languages or so it's one of the great works one of the classics on this subject already I've heard talks on this once or twice and it's really one of the most interesting things happening at the moment in philosophy in my own view so I thank you Samuel let me know how much I owe you for that introduction and nobody except for professor Robinson may go to sleep he's warned me he's going to sleep because he's just coming from America but that's the only excuse that will be accepted so I suppose the place I'd like to start is is this that one of the most remarkable facts about the philosophy of love today is that people almost never ask the question what grounds love in and therefore they don't really ask the question what love is there's an enormous amount of work on what I would call the watt of love so that means if you know what are the characteristics of a successful relationship of love what other virtues internal to such a relationship what are the dispositions that mark that mark genuine love and so on but the grounding of love is almost completely ignored today by philosophers and what has somehow got lost is an account of love specific motivation that shows how it is distinct from any other emotion or relationship of devotion intimacy attachment benevolence altruism or indeed sexual intoxication so love I think should not be as it very often is reduced to any one of these or any combination of these things as if it were for example no more than a synonym for benevolence now benevolence for example can be certainly a fruit of love once it's got going or rather it can be a fruit sometimes because it isn't necessarily even if it's most genuine so clearly we aren't always kind or altruistic or caring to those we love equally those we love aren't necessarily always kind and loyal respectful and caring of us nor are such generous qualities in others necessary let alone sufficient to inspire our love so two people might be equally kind and devoted to us but clearly you know it's absolutely possible indeed its usual to love only one of them and so the emotions of caring which play such a major role in defining love these days cannot in themselves account for why it's inspired by some and stubbornly not by others moreover such qualities like benevolence and respect can speak of love but they can also speak of virtues of character social solidarity Duty and civic feelings and so again they neither describe what's unique to love nor can they be invoked to explain why we love just the people and things that we do now as a starting point for understanding how it's possible that the question what is the ground of love is so rarely asked these days let's turn to a famous observation by Nietzsche from 1888 where he says quote almost 2,000 years and yet not a single new God but for once Nietzsche was wrong in his diagnosis of his age otherwise he was the great diagnostician of modernity in my view the new God was there indeed it was right under his nose especially in the Germany of his time this new God was of course human love after all this was the period of late Romanticism and Tristan is older no valises hymns to the night good as Wouter and so on had all been composed already the thinker Frieda Schlegel had already written that through love quote human nature returns to its original state of divinity and he had declared what he called the birth of the religion of love today even more than when Nietzsche wrote human love and here I'm only talking of love in the Western world which is all I'm competent to comment on is widely tasked with achieving what once only divine love was thought to be capable of namely to be our ultimate source of meaning and of happiness and of power over suffering and disappointment not as the rarest of exceptions as most philosophers and writers until then took it to be but as a possibility open to practically all who have faith in it not as the result of being infused into us by a creator God as thinkers from Augustine to Luther aka Gore had insisted or possible only for those of requisite attention or virtue as thinkers from Plato through C Mon they held it to be but as a sport of spontaneous and intuitive power to which with to some degree with which to some degree we're all endowed now this faith in love as the one universal form of salvation opened to us moderns is the result of a long religious and specifically Christian history that saw divine love as the source of human love and as the model for love to imitate but the real triumph of Christian love or rather of what Christianity came to regard by the time of the Reformation as genuine love I don't think there is a single thing called Christian love has paradoxically come about because of the decline of Christianity because of the so-called death of God also famously noted by Nietzsche it's been possible only because since the end of the 18th century and culminating in the late 19th love increasingly filled the vacuum left by the retreat of religious faith I mean human love around that time the formula God is love found in the first letter of John the Evangelist became inverted into its seeming opposite love is God as we just seen a Schlegel for example as one spokesman of that so that now it is perhaps the West's only genuinely accepted religion now what does this really mean I think it means that in cultures formed out of the Christian tradition genuine love tends to get modeled on a certain background picture of divine love that makes sense if we are if we believe the whole Christian theological structure but doesn't if we don't and what I'm focusing on is the secularists who take who secularize a model of Christian a gothic love but dispense with the theological structure which i think is an illegitimate move the first thing is that human love is taken to be unconditional which is a cliche these days just as divine love is taken to be in the particular Christian tradition to which I'm referring in that it is supposedly in no way conditional on anything about the loved ones so we value her on this view because we love her but we don't love her because we value her and I can give you many examples of contemporary philosophers who say this as for example the MIT philosopher who recently died as he put it genuine love quote is a gratuitous bestowal of value not based on any appraisal of the qualities of the loved one like divine agape this is now me talking this bestow love love is spontaneous and causa soui and singer goes on to admonish anything have been beginning with Plato and Aristotle who fails to recognize this primacy of bestow and who instead holds that lovers response to the value that the lover season loved ones such as goodness or virtue and this distinction between bestow and appraisal is repeated in many many different ways by other secular thinkers Harry Frankfort at Princeton is an example is one of them so he says almost exactly the same formula it's not as a result of recognizing their value that we love things rather what we love necessarily acquires value for us because we love it and there are many other thinkers I won't go through them all now because I want to make this shorter but the irony is that many of these thinkers say that they are able to say this because they are I mean for example only Kant's formula French thinker because he quotes he says because I'm an atheist and freed from God which is absurd because the distinction between love that's aroused by value and the love and love that the lover simply sees that the lover simply bestows on the loved one is a restatement of the old eros Agra peda kata me as articulated by theologians like and as nygren or indeed by CS lewis and his famous distinction between need love and gift love so the problem as I've already suggested with this secular conception of love is that it rejects the theological framework from which such distinctions between eros and Agra peda arrive and in which alone they can make sense in my view and in doing so the secularization of agape dispenses with any doctrine of modesty about the human capacity to love for now human love at its best is regarded as intrinsically unconditional without obviously any help from a divine being and though I would maintain nothing intrinsically human can be unconditioned such uncondition allottee is taken to be love's defining feature secondly and allied to this belief that genuine love must be unconditional and is unconditional is a second closely related conviction that love is fundamentally selfless or disinterested in other words that it seeks it expects nothing for itself but it's never motivated by the joys it might afford or by the deep needs and it might meet Herry Frankfurt again speaks for this view when he writes that love quote consists most basically in a disinterested concern for the well-being or flourishing of the person who is loved unquote he and he goes on love is not driven by any ulterior purpose but seeks the good of the beloved for its own sake and so in no way for the sake of anything that the lover may derive either from the beloved or from loving home so not surprisingly this conception of love divorces it is from any theology goes together with a throwing up of hands when challenged to say exactly what inspires it so as Frankfurt puts it I love this woman in virtue of our whole lovable nature that inexplicable quality which I cannot give an account and other philosophers of love which I write I could go into but I won't now because of time like Alexander nameís say very similar very similar things now if on condition allottee and disinterestedness are the first to prevailing assumptions about the nature of love the third is that in martha nussbaum words love affirms the loved one in his or her full particularity but once again quasi divine powers are uninhibitedly attributed to natural human love namely the omniscience of grasping the full particularity of another person and over and above that conceit the ability comprehensively to affirm everything we see in them notwithstanding of course the myriad prejudices and perspective to which human judgment is always prisoner and the fourth prevailing assumption in this picture is that love necessarily endures so that if it doesn't it couldn't have been true in the first place now we know that not everything Kerr has thought that for example Aristotle maintained that love being conditional certain virtues of character of the loved one not only can decline but actually he maintained should decline if those virtues have character undergo contain a decline so to sum up where I've just got to now I'm just suggesting that today a powerful consensus has formed around this prevailing essentially secularized agar peak model of love as unconditional disinterested all affirming and intrinsically enduring and so great I think is that our need for this hubristic model of love that the last century if we look at the history of philosophy at the last century we see that despite all the revolutions in the practice of love that have occurred there's actually been very little in the way of any new theory or understanding of what love is about so that strangely as it were free love has not freed love in the sense of giving us new conceptions of it with one crucial proviso which is that but this is not the conception of love this is more about the privileged object of love romantic love is to some degree being supplanted I think by parental love as the highest expression of love as so conceived so the child rather than the romantic lover is increasingly taken to be the privileged object of love thought of on exactly this model and again 'harry Frankfurt expresses this new conventional wisdom concisely the love of parents for their infancy says is the species of caring and that comes closest to offering recognizably pure instances of love so though I I'm not saying that romantic love is in any way dead I'm just saying that the archetypal object of love which of course was once the consensus was that it was God it then became the romantic lover towards the end of the 18th century gradually these things are always very gradual and I think now the primacy the romantic as in turn being supplanted by the primacy of the child and that's a whole long story which I won't go into now you've heard it before but essentially the child I think is the first truly modern object of love in the sense that the love for the child is not parasitic on any journalistic concepts but you know we can take that up and discussion if that interests you now as I've said one key consequence of this sort of rough consensus of what pure genuine love is is these days is that no answer can be given to the question why do we love this particular person or indeed work of art or landscape I mean clearly if love isn't inspired by any specific intrinsic qualities there no answer can be given to that question but obviously through the history of love until fairly recently answers were most certainly given to that question and I just want to canter through six distinct ways in which love has been taken to be grounded in Western history and they are though they can coexist in one heart so to speak they are distinct as conceptions so the first way of conceiving love we originates in the Old Testament where we get the idea that to love is to make ourselves available to anyone else in our community including resident aliens and even enemies based on their needs in Leviticus 19:18 we famously find the command to love your neighbor as yourself which in one formulation or another is still at the heart of Western morality I think whenever foundations it might now seek for normativity so you know whether you died monistic or rational utilitarian or otherwise and to the further question why love our neighbor the answer is of course for the sake of God in other words because we love with our love for God is in every sense prior and because God commands it because our neighbor like us is made in the image of God or belongs with us to a community of faith in God the second broad answer to the question what is love that we find in Western history we get again from Scripture but even more explicitly from Plato this is the idea that love is the yearning for perfection for the absolute for the highest good for scripture the highest good is of course God and though an insuperable distance remains between the human being and God the well lived life is structured by desire to be oriented towards God in his law in Plato as I'm sure you all know we read that the highest good is absolute beauty and that love is the desire perpetually to possess the beautiful in order to create in beauty and this I won't run through this because I'm sure you're all familiar with with with this aspect of the both the symposium and the fee drous the only point I'd like to point to hit now is that such a realm of absolute beauty or absolute goodness which are sort of synonymous in the symposium is of course beyond life and the very conditions of life such as space time and individuality so that this conception of love can morph into a death Drive seeking a consummation for love that is not of this world and in which all individuality has been subsumed into oneness and the sort of the paradoxical result of that is that the primal life force eros ends up craving nothing more fervently than death which is what we see in 19th century divas thought so death is the gateway to love's union a view that is ultimately the combination of the Artemis ladder of love the third I mean this is now extremely condensed obviously you know I could give a lecture on each one of these but the third sort of conception of love that we see in Western history again articulated by Plato is that love is a search for our unique other half and here the reason why we love someone is not at all because they are beautiful or good over but because their innate or all because they're a neighbor but because we in some sense find completion or wholeness with them so crucially love is now not an aesthetic or moral journey but rather the yearning to end the agony of separateness by finding and securing if necessary by foul means as well as fair one with whom we feel a predetermined fit the fourth and again very different way of conceiving love that's been articulated is the view of love as devotion to the well-being of a very specific person so not any neighbor but a very specific person who is so like us in certain crucial ways and whose flourishing matters so much to us that we experience them as a second self and though we find this sort of love again in Scripture for example between Jonathan and David or Ruth and Naomi it's of course most paradigmatically articulated by Aristotle and his conception of perfect for Nia and the grounding of love here is shared virtues of character and to that degree a deep oneness of mind and your friend becomes a second self that who becomes an effect kind of mirror to yourself enables you to better know yourself to love yourself to understand and enjoy and endorse what you most deeply care about what really guides your life and provides your ultimate ends so in contemporary parlance which obviously would be completely alien to Aristotle your friendship encourages you to become an affirmance in our so to speak to discover and shape a personal identity and narrative of your life that is true to your potential and through which you can flourish to the full and Aristotelian philia perfect for years it's a it's a complex concept so anyway I'm not going to go into all that now because that would take too long the fifth basic idea of love in Western history is that it's nothing more than our sexual drive seeking satisfaction or procreation so obviously utterly different to the previous four in other words love or at least erratically driven love is is how we idealize those whom we sexually or erotic ly desire or whom we regard as ideal mates for producing and raising children and virtue and goodness again clearly neither inspire it nor unnecessarily fostered by it and it's certainly no privilege root either to spiritual achievement or to redemption from suffering and evil its purpose is sexual pleasure or to produce the next generation not to overcome the pain of separateness cultivate the larvas characters enable them to discover their identity or launch them on a journey towards the absolute now this view of course is very popular in our own time whether it's through psychoanalytic schools of thought or through evolutionary psychology which absolutely use these these concepts but they like all the concepts of Nava I'm talking about they go back to ancient times and we find those in and we find this for example paradigmatically and Lucretia tsa's work Dereham Natura we also find it on the way in Schopenhauer's conception of erotic love not in his conception of characters but Schopenhauer basically is that one of the first that just directly secularized the Protestant view of Eros and agape so he has two types of love that he talks about and one is eros which is basically a reproductive drive as he describes it and the other is agape which is compassion as he articulates it so these these five ways of love of conceiving love have all existed since ancient times and there is no reason one of the reasons why loving is so complex why they shouldn't so to speak coexist in the same breasts in the form of in the in the rich intentionality of love finally and to return to my opening theme there's been a sixths approach to love in the West which we owe to religious tradition Jewish and Christian and that concerns how an idea Islam but I don't know anything about Islam and that concerns how God is said to love and as I already indicated this conception or family of conceptions has historically been far richer than the straightforward picture of a divine love that is unconditional unchanging selfless impartial and capable of affirming everything about the loved one so the least that can be said is that this somewhat sanitized picture of divine love faces stiff competition from another manifestation of divine love as deeply conditional on merit or good behavior as destroyed or overwritten by God's wrath which as Jesus insists can be eternal as is inscrutably partial in how it dispenses grace and therefore by no means as intrinsically all-forgiving or unconditional I realize this is controversial and Theological circles but anyway this is this is my obviously just my point of view far from being troubled by these intensely contradictory images of divine love in Scripture and theology I suggest that they present a more complete and therefore a more accurate view of the nature of love as manifested in divine favoritism vengeance and destructiveness and the terror they evoke in those who love God then do the pious platitudes of today's secular received view of love indeed I think we might learn something about the real nature of human love by attending to these complexities and contradictions in how for much of history God has been said to love but even if we were to insist on what on this what I call more sanitized version of divine love which I think only comes to fruition in the 19th century with people like Google one thing is clear noting licenses the view that purely unaided human love can share these characteristics so this is a model of human loving that if it makes any sense at all could only do so if we accept the theology that deems genuine human love to be inspired by and dependent on the grace of a God who is taken to possess just such characteristics with which he then infuses us now the reason why I think we need a new conception of love is that none of these six ways of conceiving it since ancient times supplies are specific enough answer to the question why do we love you know what is the aim and inspiration of love what is the ground of love so to take the first theory love for neighbors so this might this is rooted in love for God but as philosophers we need to ask what motivates that love beauty or goodness cannot be the ultimate inspiration of love to take the second broad way of thinking about it as we manifestly do not love all those we find beautiful or good so if love is as Plato reports in the symposium or Socrates he makes Socrates report inspired by Beauty how is it that we love far fewer people or things than we find beautiful and moreover how is it that we fail to love them in proportion to their beauty and I think that's just as much of a question to ask of the autumn so to speak than the famous Gregory vlastos point about the fungibility of love in other words that if love is is is if we love people in proportion say people in proportion their beauty wiser that we don't simply abandon one person for the next one who we regard is more beautiful a question that many people have turned against Plato or against the Ottomans theory of love to turn to our third theory of love yearning for our unique other half is indeed how we often experience love but this doesn't explain of course why we love one person rather than the next row just begs the question why does only one or at most a few out of the innumerable people we meet feel like our other half fourth Aristotle's wonderful conception of sylia reminds us how central a shared ethical world is to the inspiration and goal of any deep relationship of love it teaches us that to build and cohabit a shared ethical world we love with one we love can inspire us to explore understand to become that world in a way we could never do alone and it also crucially and Aristotle is the practical philosopher lays emphasis on the diachronic nature of love it's not just a stance or an attitude it's something that develops over the course of two intertwined lives and projects but I think that the question about specificity is still raised by it because like beauty and goodness the reality is that similar virtues of character do not necessarily inspire us to love so many people will possess them whom we don't whom we don't love and nor conversely do we only genuinely love those who we find virtuous and their many great novelists like Dostoevsky they're magnificent witness to this fifth lovers sexual intimacy or idealizing a suitable mate well here again we clearly encounter the problem of love specificity I mean few of us need reminding about what a perilous guide to love sexual intoxication can be how we can be unable to love those who sexually inebriated and deeply love others who don't do so at all and finally love and secularized agape well we've already said why this now dominant conception of ideal love fails the specificity test altogether for on its own admission it can't account for why we love one person rather than another so what might loves inspiration and purpose be and I want to just very briefly articulate what's the time and how much time great okay an alternative conception of the ground and nature of of love and I want to propose that love we love those whose presence and I'll explain what I mean by this in a moment whose presence seems deeply to ground us in the world to endorse the quiddity of our lives to lead us out of our repeated and inevitable sense of Exile into a sense of home in other words this phenomenological in this phenomenological account which it is love is our rapture for those whom we experience as offering us a promise of such an indestructible grounding for our life in that particular world in which we yearn to be grounded so that's the particular world in which we feel the possibility the real field of possibilities for our flourishing it's a world that we experience as not only supremely valuable but as one that only love can open up for us now it might be another world real or fictional to the one we now inhabit it might be another epoch or perhaps the world that transcends this one like the Kingdom of Heaven or in a certain conception of romantic love it might be death indeed there are moments when we feel that only in and through the love one can the world in which we yearn to be grounded or rooted come into clear view at all only in and through them can we hope to approach it and to grasp it as in for example la Vita Nuova Beatrice is Dante's guide and traveling companion in his striving for the heavenly realms so she is the indispensable guide to a realm of supreme value on this model by which she is herself transcended so that to lose the loved one would be no longer to have access to that world or to be able to orient ourselves within it as a result any possibility of being grounded there would disappear perhaps this is also what Walter Benjamin points to employing vast the different image to Dante's in his aphorism first aid as to her fur where he describes how someone we love can instantly give us orientation in a place that as long remain strange to us often even usually without them realizing that they're doing so so then their mere presence suffice it's not something that they necessarily consciously offering us as Benjamin puts it that I quote I mean in his rather tangled way of writing a highly confusing neighborhood a network of streets that I had avoided for years was clarified to me at a stroke when one day a beloved person moved in there It was as if a searchlight was set up in his window and dissected the area with clusters of light so that's it that's that's the whole aphorism so the loved one in Benjamin's aphorism might be not merely providing orientation in an actual city rather he is at a stroke orienting the loved one in the sphere of life as such the loved one is illuminating neighborhoods in which his lover feels called to live neighborhoods that until the moment he appeared his lover as he says in the aphorism had avoided finding them confusing unclear and shrouded in darkness as with Augustine the city is also a metaphor for allegory of life itself in other words the life world in which we must find our bearings and seek out home comes into view and our relationship to it comes to be mapped only in and through the face the presence of the beloved yeah I'd like just to remind here tu-tu-tu-tu-tu-tu remark here how love is both totally focused on an individual and this is no this is grounding us in this whole supremely valued world and in being thus focused is it so facto oriented towards that wider world beyond the individual so I mean we saw that in the don t example in other words how loves focus is simultaneously immanent and transcendent both focused on the particular loved one no sleeping is allowed unless you've been on a plane last night and threw her on the whole world to which she points so as I say imminence and transcendence are not alternatives of my understanding of love they go together now this this life world this home might be experienced as an entirely new territory this is emphasized a phenomenological account okay so it's about how the structure of experience of love might be experienced as an entirely new territory like the promised land towards which God commands Abraham to travel in the Bible a promised land which as the Bible depicts it is at the heart of a covenant of love or the fledgling city of Rome to which Virgil tells us Aeneas the son of Aphrodite is commanded by the gods to travel a city by the way that in the poem he explicitly calls his love his homeland his love come at his homeland my love rather my homeland he says even before he has set foot in it and of course he doesn't know it so this is an example of where love is at a completely new territory or by contrast so there at least well there I'm going to say that they're combined in most accounts of love or by contrast the journey might lead to a fresh encounter with a place from which we set out a return that enables us to us discover a new relationship to a traditional home that we never made our own all the possibilities of which we never fully lived as it does in in the Odyssey where for all the temptations of love and sex and immorality that Odysseus encounters in his long voyage home some of which of course he briefly succumbs he yearns to return to Penelope to his kingship and to the land of his lineage and birth if occur so both these foundational myths of the Western world Abraham's journey to Canaan in the Bible and Odysseus is returned to Ithaca in the Odyssey can be rejected can be read I suggest as connecting love precisely with the promise of and the search for ontological groundedness in a world that the lover supremely values or else and this is what I think happens in the majority of cases the realm might be experienced as both new and old to be reached by going forward to an unknown world and by returning afresh to an origin as I think it is in many account mystical accounts of mystical in many mystical account encounters with the divine as well so again in many accounts of mystical encounters with the divine from those of Oregon in the third century to st. Teresa of ávila said John of the Cross in the sixteenth encounters in which as John writes and I quote the soul journeys toward that divine light of perfect union with God which is achieved insofar as possible in this life through love a union that is also a return are going down or above or within to God as the original source so both are going forward and are going back and we find this dual movement of returner going forward in much erotic romantic love which has thinkers from Plato to Freud have pointed out centrally involves the experience of return or regression to a primitive source but which is that is at the same time a movement or development towards a future consummation or unity or integration so famously there the symposium speaks of the backward pull in the myth of Aristophanes but it also speaks of the ultimate there are off the off the of the forward edge described in the Altimas account of the ascent of laughter contemplating absolute beauty and in fact the backward pull alone to the static union of two individuals would as if Isis suggests be sterile you know when he asked the lovers what do you intend to achieve through this I mean just become melded into one I'll do it if you want to but you know are you gonna be happy with that so just the backward pull the nostalgic pool is a sterile is sterile unless there's a rediscovery like with Odysseus of the of the original home the same Augustine who speaks of lovers return to our spiritual roots also sees it as always related to the future as striving for what he calls our sufficiency in other words by which I think he means for maximum being we see this trope again and again and again Rousseau in the Romantic tradition that he inaugurates describes love as a journey inwards so now the the new ideal of authenticity that gets born or at least of which he's a great spokesman Rousseau is a great spokesman it gets born around that time becomes a journey inwards towards discovering and in the process becoming the being that one originally or authentically is beginning of modern talk about authenticity another example will be Nietzsche's ideal of a more farty so the idea here is that love affirms not only the path backwards but also the future that this chain of that this deterministic chain of contingency has set out for us we see it also in Freud where love catalyzes not only regression as in the oceanic feeling where he talks about the idea of love involving the phenomenology of regression but also as Jonathan Lear emphasizes development so this is the differentiation and integration of psychic states in which erotic instincts are combined into evermore live substance so that was a quote from Jonathan Lear a rough quote so phenomenologically I'm suggesting it's as if loves yearning where Jane is faced as if it looks in two directions to the past as well as to the future or to the past in order to look to the future so that at the limit it nostalgically seeks to retrieve a lost paradise and here we find the motif of return that appears again and again in the history of love but this return or retrieval is to form the kernel of a hopeful future or even a hope for utopia thus pictured love is directed at a recovery as well as a discovery up to the ground of our beat of once were over of our relation to the ground of our being so it's a recovery of the origin of our being but also a future directed relation to the source of being to a source of being whatever we conceive as as the source of our being indeed it is one of the most powerful ways in which we advance and create a future by revisiting repeating and so renewing what is past so to sum up where we've got to I'm suggesting that love is the emotion whose very nature it is to search for and respond to a promise of home or groundedness of ontological rootedness that is just what I think love is and to return to my specific specificity point so the virtue of benevolence for example becomes loving benevolence or sexual desire becomes loving sexual desire when it is structured by that search for or response to a promise of home so I'm not saying that the six conceptions of love that I've tried to summarize in Western history are wrong I'm just saying they don't have this sufficient specificity and the question is when are they loving and when are they not because but yet because love craves rootedness in an entire world that we supremely value I think because of the limit strives to relate as to or embed us in an entire world to which the lava field called or destined there is also a sense in which the more personal love is the more it also seems to transcend both lover and loved-one and in other words it seems to have an origin subject you I mean phenomenologically beyond beyond the particularity of the lover insofar as love involves experience of a destiny and also to seek or spill over towards a reality transcending the loved one just as Dante's love for Beatrice ultimately points beyond her to the Divine Being precisely in its relentless focus upon her particularity and hers alone for as I've said in responding to a promise of rootedness in the world that we supremely value our love for the other is at the same time a yearning for groundedness in that whole world now there are if we had time I would give you so I'm not saying everyone's wrong and I'm right at all I'm really not saying that I'm just saying we need a new master concept to enable us to sort out those instances say of virtuous benevolence or of sexual desire or of or of similarity of virtue in another in another person the Aristotelian conception of philia we need a master comes in Abel's us to sort out those instances which are loving from those which are not and that's what I'm trying trying to do here so I'm not going to go through all the many examples that I have here for how this gets instantiated I think I've probably given enough and I think actually I'm going to stop there because otherwise are just overloading it but but if you want to ask me about what the elements of ontological return us are I'll be happy to reply to that in questions okay thank you [Applause] so we'll take questions from the audience and my lovely assistant mu choir will take the microphone to you as you see it doesn't actually amplify your voice but I think it captures it for the recording thank you very much I apologize for dozing off slightly because jetlag I we framed at the beginning talked about the Christian love as being disinterested or unconditional and likely those things we repeated so many times that we associated with Christianity later Chris I said there's no single thing as Christian laughs yeah but yes okay sanitized Christian love I called it correct it's exactly what I say it's exactly what I said it's the Protestant and it come in a polite cake had go in the 19th century it takes a long time for us to get to what most people think is Christian love yeah but anyway I agree it's distorted but I said that the whole time yeah oh I see okay so you don't I thought it was absolutely I mean I think one of the things that I think I think I said was that you know we not only do we need to rescue the richness of Christian love which involves ideas of favoritism grace what people see as the horrors of predestination and so on and many other things God's capriciousness merit etc okay well maybe you're neither were capriciousness but any in in any case grace from our point of view has a capricious element precisely as we can't see doesn't mean as a random element I wanted to I mean I'm no theologian but I'm inspired by the richness of Christian writing a love frustrated by it's what I call it sanitization which is very recent and I want to rescue that for re understanding love in an in a not necessarily in a Christian or even religious way because I think we can learn a lot from the richness of Christian love and what's happened as I tried to say at the beginning of my talk in recent philosophy by which I really mean the last half century is not that recent is that this extraordinary slightly moralistic consensus has grown up around effectively the secularization of sources that are not recognized the sources so you know these are quite distinguished sources I've been citing like Frankfurt of NIT NamUs and so on there's not a don't breathe a word about that the remarkable similarity this has to the account of someone like Anders nygren and and others and you know some things some you know some of these processes theologians have a lot to answer for but but these their secular risers who don't realize they're secularizing them having more to answer for and it's become something of a consensus you know people say to each other all the time if you love me unconditionally don't lie anyway I think we're in strong agreement thank you very much I really appreciated the talk my question revolves around you talk about love being a search for groundedness in the world that that makes a lot of sense to me my only question then is you talked a little earlier about the nature of divine love and of course you can't there is you can't predicate that of divine love so in what sense can we use the term love in the same sense between gods so for Humanity and humanity's love for God okay well that's a great question and it's something I go into a great length and I've just published a second volume I mean it's just come out in the stage that's coming out here and in July but it came out last week in the States and I go into this at length there's a very very short version is that it that it doesn't account for and deliberately doesn't account for God's love for us I mean less you see God is needy and I know there are theologians who do see God as needy I don't follow them exactly in fact my new friend well I won't mention his name but anyway here in Oxford who's a professor here at Oxford believes that God can choose to be needy but I'm assuming that God is not need yet certainly the one thing God doesn't need is ontological grounding he is on but he/she it is by definition ontological e grounded we need ontological grounding so for me the in fact the paradigmatic I have a whole chapter on this but love for God is for me the absolute paradigm of of the search for ontological grounding and there is no greater source of ontological grounding conceptually than the monotheistic God now I I said but I didn't I didn't really have time to go into it I mean would have taken another at least 20 minutes even to summarize it but for me grounding the promise of grab the word promise is extremely important so love is always a love has a very rich intentionality it always involves a trajectory towards it doesn't less you need to involve what no it does need to involve the kind of practical diachronic intertwining of two lives that Aristotle talks about but even so to speak if it doesn't say it's unrequited love say it's love at a distance or say it's unrequited love like love for the dead which I think you know I mean Carol says which I think wonderfully says you know that's the purest instance of love of human love between humans that isn't not depending on how you conceive of death that's not in any way it's not straight forward lyric required but even that the development of love involves this trajectory this in which intentional structure it's not just obviously an attitude so I I argue that love is always defined by a promise and that promise is one of groundedness what is what is grounded is consistent well very briefly I argue consists in four things one is what I call lineage and lineage is about the idea of seeing something the other person that feels like that's where I've come from as I say this is an experiential okay doesn't mean it is actually such a thing so for example you know when Ruth encounters name in the Bible and she comes from a different religious a group that believes in the different God she comes with a different tribe and she falls in love please speak I mean the love declaration is one that sounds like a marriage vow she is not it doesn't have to be your own lineage it can be another person's lineage a completely different lineage but there's something there and I identify that with a question of taste in the book which I go into in some detail but it doesn't matter what the basis of it is but we had we see something that involves that's where I belong that's where I come from really even if I don't actually come from there and I've give various literary examples of that which I claim articulate this point the second element of ontological rootedness that i mentioned i call ethical home an ethical home is not just a well so an ethical home is my ethical home are those virtues and values that I conceive as being essential to my flourishing but and this is there's a crucial qualifier which I see in the other person exemplified is their first nature I'm unable to achieve them on my own that's the crucial point I see them in the other Freud's conception of the ego ideal has some sub residents of this so the ego ideal is essentially those values that I've internalized from my parents that I'm unable that I have not attained and he thinks this goes rise to all kinds of guilt and so on deter and I fall in love with someone in whom I see then in and through whom I see them as attainable so I have a sort of it's something similar to Freud's ego ideal but but that's that's the crucial thing it's not just a sort of narcissistic projection of my own virtues and values in the other person the third element of this flawed logic count is I call existential power so I feel it the other has a kind of life-and-death power over me that in itself has certain origin elements but we can clearly see that in Stockholm Syndrome I mean I mean all lovers are in some ways victims of stock I mean I didn't like the word victim but anyway although in some ways we can call that our hostages experience themselves as hostages you have to see that power in the other and that and that element can also lead to love for evil people if you experience that power in them and then the fourth element I think is the idea of the core of being called by another of experience in them as offering a call now again each of these you know is complex experientially but those are what identity you know just in very brief summary of what I identify as the elements of a promise of ontological rootedness and I you know you can give I just think that literature is full of examples of these things in love stories but they haven't been pulled out and put together so that's what you know I hope my little contribution will be or has been who say that well no well okay so so couple of answers to your point one is the problem with you know the non quality account as you've articulated is it is I want to explain how love gets going and well no it's not just no I mean I mean what love has to get going I mean it has to get going otherwise nothing happens and so the first question you have to ask is why does it get going right if you can't answer that question you haven't passed base one so you have to explain why it gets going now I have absolutely no problem for example is not known I see no problem I mean you know on my theory love for God is a no-brainer to speak because he's the ultimate it's sort of onslaught of a rudeness and every other case of love is a special case of love for God on my theory the theory you're the kind of theory articulating doesn't give us that explanation of why it gets going now what now then the next question is is it durable it might be and it might not be and after all that is the case in practice you know there's no point including people having doubts about even the greatest you know people the greatest faith I mean have their moments you know it would be artificial to say that it's not the love is not genuine unless it you know you know unless it has this sort of continuous uninterrupted that's just not how things work and to me now to me the relationship itself I argue this in my book the relationship itself becomes a source of grounding it's not just habit so yes you know you could not mean like the you know the Bailey memoir virus Murdoch I mean you know the the person who he's loved all his life you know so to speak disintegrating before his eyes but that doesn't mean his love disintegrates because you know I mean memory well firstly there was the relationship itself and the memory of the relationship are very powerful grounding factors and you know so so so I don't really think that I'm not saying that the moment there's some kind of decline in in the object of love that love is going to cease at all but I do think that in order to get continuity in love you don't need to have and it makes no sense to have the no quality theory of love any of the no quality theories of love because I you know I have to explain how love gets grounded and how it gets going and as I say I think the relationship itself can become a source of can become a source of grounding but memory above all you know and then of course there are all the psychological realities of attachment which people like John Bowlby have discussed in detail I mean there is such a thing as attached when we become attached to we can you know we become attached to a particular person and again memory comes into our person that person's we remember them so for me you know I do I want to make room for the fact that love can decline and that it's not doesn't cease to be love you know I mean I do think it's wrong to say you know love is not love which alters when it alteration finds I just think that is simply not the case that is saying that it just was never love in the first place and I just can't accept that I think you know whoever Shakespeare was articulating you know whereas your well in I suppose I suppose I mean I suppose empirically I want to say you know I want to say there are all these instances of what love has been taken to be okay and it might not be so speak all love so it could be just sexual love or it could be just love for God and people often think well these are different things we just happen to use same word love as if it were merely a preference you know and is that does get of course the word has been used so promiscuously I love chocolate do you know I love I love Oxford or whatever that it's just been used as a word for a well I value in some way or I have preference for this over that obviously I think you know any of us doing philosophy too I want to rescue the word love from that kind of promiscuous abuse and we want to say no it denotes something very particular very particular probably huben so for example you know there'd be many expire now I'm going to give a little little longer answer than I should to this but there'd be many experiments as a great group in life such as done experiments on chimpanzees and altruism and it's absolutely remarkable what degrees of genuine altruism where there's no you know the researchers cannot find any immediate benefit to the giver of the altruism from their act okay there are also cases with very young I mean extremely young children before the age at which you could really think that there's sufficient self-consciousness for them to actually be aware they're doing a good deed between inverted commas so I want so for example just the reason I'm using that cases so if we generalize now across altruism or benevolence and human beings I want to say as I as I did say you know my remarks that there are cases of this where this is a virtue of character that is not related to love for the other person I mean love for the other person has to have some specialist but it has to be something about the other person you know and and what I want to do is I want to come up with a way of thinking about love that enables us to pick out those instances now and then getting forever I realize I'm not entirely addressing your point because then your next question is but why are you saying that okay fine you'll say to me you're saying that there are certain instances of sexual result and of loving a certain or not this is your altruism their loving their a certain their not but why are you saying that there certain ones in each of those cases is the same kind of thing that's what your question is and my answer is because if because I think that I mean can I justify it I probably can't justify it ultimately but I was saying you know there is a very particular human need I mean if you want you know use an anagram call it oval or something but there's a very particular human need that I think gets expressed in cases of genuine love and I've said paradigmatically love for God that we need that we need a word for we need to name and if you don't want to call it love don't as far as I'm concerned but that's what I want to talk about I think that is in fact what love is I want to name that and I think that when people talk about love I think when Dante talks about love for Beatrice I think that's what he's talking about you know I think when we talk about love for God that's what we're talking about when we for example you know love one work of art rather than another what's it actually doing to us it's presenting the world to us in such a way that we're able to feel at home it's in some way even if it's ugly so even for example if you know there are some you know I mean everyone will have their own examples but you know if you love for example some of you know Picasso's dreadfully distorted pictures of jackeline I mean you know where he's really I mean they're violent and you go well why is it that I'm I actually feel I love this painting it's not because it's beautiful in any conventional way in an Aristotelian or to mystic standards of beauty proportion harmony and what-have-you it's because this picture is presenting to me the age in which I live of solisten height of you know violence of tallness of alienate of alienation in a way that enables me to come to a firm the world in which I happen to have been thrown or born something like that and so in the certain way it's grounding me in my world the only world I have and that is what I think love is about you know I mean I can't really say anymore no no it's not a search for truth as such I mean that's one of the ways it's been considered no but it's a search for what I call this at homeless or grounded is a sense of yes I me you could say that the loved one speaks truly of a certain world in which I feel I need to be grounded I suppose yes you could say that and so far as that's the case as a search for truth but it's not as search for truth in a sort of you know the Platonic idea of truth or God as truth so it's being yeah so I'm going to drool the might have time for questions now so I'm going to draw the Q&A to a close but we have if you have a I think a few more points we can discuss some over drinks at the other end of the hour and there are means only to thank Simon one more time [Applause] [Music]

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Length: 69min 0sec (4140 seconds)

Published: Thu May 23 2019