The Ontology of Love - Panel Discussion

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I've been asked to introduce myself and then briefly briefly myself than the other speakers I'm John Cottingham and professor emeritus of philosophy at the University of Reading I worked many years and since retirement have been at Heath Rock College London the University of London now sadly closed and currently professor of philosophy and religion at roehampton university also in London I work mainly on 17th century philosophy for most of my career but more recently on the philosophy of religion including a book called the spiritual dimension and one called philosophy of religion towards a more humane approach but now to get to our main panelists starting from farthest away from me though only only in terms of spatial matters not philosophically necessarily is Douglas Headley who's professor of philosophy of religion at Kant here at Cambridge Cambridge Faculty of Divinity and he's currently principal investigator for a project funded by the Arts and & Humanities Research Council on Cambridge platonism and we've heard something about that in some of to some of the papers for this colloquium and he specializes as well as in neoplatonism in the notion of the imagination and probably best known for his trilogy on the imagination which includes the iconic imagination 2016 and then as sacrifice imagined violence atonement and the sacred living forms of the imagination and book focusing on Coleridge aides to reflection and the mirror of the Spirit then Simon May in the middle of the Trinity of speakers is visiting professor at King's College London and his books include love a new understanding of an ancient emotion which has just come out this year published by Oxford University Press and this is a follow up to a book that has influenced many of us called love a history published by Yale University Press in 2011 he's also written on a wide variety of other topics including Nietzsche's ethics and a collection of his own aphorisms called thinking aloud and then nearest to me is Roger Scruton University of Buckingham sir Roger Scruton as a writer and philosopher who's published over 40 books in philosophy in aesthetics and politics and is widely translated he's a fellow of the British Academy and a fellow of the Royal Society of literature and teaches both in England and America and as a senior fellow at the roses at the ethics and publish public policy Center in Washington DC so let us begin I've been helpfully given a list of possible topics for our speakers which have the virtue that they implicitly pick out one of a one of the three so I'll I'll start by giving each of the three speakers a chance to to speaker not a length but in a unrestricted way about the the topics that interest them and then there'll be opportunity for the panelists to respond to each other and then I may raise some questions before opening it to the floor so I hope that sounds a reasonable pattern so this is I think mainly directed towards Simon why is love connected to our need for routes so in my own thinking I went through the I surveyed the history of the ways people have understood love and I came to the conclusion that there were about six distinct ways of conceiving love one was the love was a response to the beauty we see in an object or in a person another was that love was a response to the virtues of character that we see so we love those who have virtues of character of a certain kind and a similar to our own another was that love is grounded in sexual desire in a desire for sexual intimacy with another person and so on and I came to when I then came to ask myself almost in a sort of private dialogue with myself I said well you know when you love a person or when you love a piece of music or when you love a landscape or when you love God which I've done on and off quite intensely in my life I asked myself you know what is it that actually you're feeling I mean what is it that really the the that this love is grounded in and I and I came to the conclusion and others might agree or they might disagree that it's essentially the idea that the loved one was grounding me in a world that I supremely valued and that that was what that was the thing about them so I might see several people who are very beautiful with who I might wish to be very intimate and indeed to spend a great deal of time but only one of them gave me this feeling of deep love and I just threw so to speak introspection came to that view and I then thought well you know I shouldn't be to solipsistic about this I should go out and see if this if this account of my own experience is replicated out there in in any in anyone else's and the first place to go are it seemed to me to be you know the great mythical stories that have are the foundation of our Western consciousness and I you know going through the Bible through Homer and so on I came to see such well-known myths as Odysseus's return to if occur as paper hams called to canaan even proofs you know the when when Marcel sees the gaggle of girls on the beach and there's one in whom he says he sees this new life he sees this new pot this whole new a new possibility new possibilities for being a whole new world opens to him they're all beautiful the girls on the beach they're all charming in fact at first he says you know I don't know which one I would alight on but then he sees in Albertine this and he describes it as a new world development so I could give you many examples from MIT and from literature but I won't take your time too much time in doing that which it seems to me express this idea but in those we love we find this world that suddenly me realizes the world we want to live in somehow promised and this idea of promise sets up this rich intentional structure of love because it's always a movement into the future into some future consummation and of course it's something that depends crucially then on relationship and developing the richness of relationship that will make it possible to bring this about and it's not just about meeting a great need like that and I think when we have a sense of that such a promise is offered to us it unleashes from us the greatest self giving of which human beings are capable potentially culminating in self-sacrifice that's how great the need is and I've mentioned a few examples and with this next one I'll stop to me the ultimate example of a loved one that grounds us in the world that we supreme value is and this is the tradition I come from so perhaps it's the one that most naturally comes to me is the monotheistic God so God promises God is our full conceived as the source of our being and the source of our being to which we yearn to return I mean that the yearning to return to God something expressed in innumerable texts mystics for example speak of it all the time Augustine does many many many many people too so God for me is the ultimate you don't even have to believe in God to see the point that God is the ultimate source and form and promise of home in a world that clearly is to be supremely valued so that's in a summary my connection between love and roots thank you thank you very much Simon we'll come back to that I'm sure in the discussion the second question that's been suggested is one that I think is particularly directed towards some of Rogers work which is the question what role does or should death play in the way we think about love well this is obviously something which I have thought about I I don't want to advance a metaphysical thesis quite as a as ambitious as Simon's I would say that there is a non accidental connection between love and death and maybe it's true to say as I do say in my book on Tristan is older that love the erotic kind is a relation between dying things as I say it's only that which dies that can can feel this emotion in the way that that we understand it and this has to do in the fact that that love love of this kind at least is a form of cherishing you want to care for the other you're alarmed by the others of ulnar ability and at attitudes of protectiveness possessiveness of closeness and of clinging these are not an accidental part of the love they are really what the love consists in and it's only because the other is mortal and vulnerable that these attitudes make sense and I think in the extreme forms of erotic passion the death isn't just a precondition but it becomes or threatens to become the actual object of the passion that's what Tristan and Isolda is all about or the this supreme fixation on the other and as the vulnerable recipient of your care gradually becomes wound together with the thought of her death and of death itself as the consummation this is the thing towards which sure everything is tending the thing which will actually release the object of your care from all the anxiety which has preceded it whether maybe that's a a romantic a specific romantic conception of love that's involved in that drama but on the other hand I don't think you can in all the other forms of love simply push the idea of death aside either you know it's the vulnerability of your child which it which principally sparks off in you that the extremes of tenderness the desire to stand between the child under faith that would otherwise await it and maybe you this creates a a theological problem can the Angels love each other as we do you know these immortal beings which don't fear any any wish which undergo no risks in the in the Greek theology the gods have human relations ways that human relations to each other they're supposed to love each other and be resentful towards each other and all the rest we see it all happening in in the Iliad but actually it never makes sense even Zeus and Hera and the famous married couple the only bits that you read are convinced by other quarrels and there's the idea there is a love between these immortals is kind of fantasy is you feel there's a kind of an insuperable coldness in their relation which comes from the fact that they can't really arm each other or protect each other from harm so I would like to say that at some stage we we have to recognize that our mortality is built into our conception of love and love is partly what one of our recourse the rift courses in the face of mortality very different and as you say perhaps romantically inspired conception to contrast with Simon's more religious and metaphysical the grounded one but the before we come on to that let's go to Douglas Headley our third speaker and the question that's been suggested here is how can love be understood as a form of play well perhaps if I could start by referring to the German playwright and poet and philosopher Schiller in his letters on ascetic education where he enigmatic Lee says that man only plays when properly human and were only human properly when we play now behind that utterance is clearly a thought about what the Germans called building which is a beautiful word that we don't possess in English I've had education I think is much more limited and the reason being that this this word building has a sense of formation of cultivation of the the shaping of the personality and Shella felt very strongly that the appreciation of beauty is a very important part of this cultivation of the human being and we've had much discussion about the link between the notion of beauty and love but my main reason for starting off with the conception of play in Schiller is because I think that boy singer was right in his wonderfully named book homo Luden's man the player to claim that the real opposition between here is not between play and seriousness there are lots of serious forms of play and you only have to look at children to see how seriously they play but between play and work and work in an instrumental sense I work for a particular end or purpose because perhaps there's a pointlessness in play that it shares with love at its highest level so here I'm thinking of the great German mystic meister eckhart where he frequently refers to the true nature of the divine in his middle high german as oliveramber as being owner of a home or without of why the love of god is in a sense pointless its non-instrumental it just is what it is it emerges out the divine plenitude and perhaps loved in the human context if it is properly loved has a reflection an image of this pointlessness of true love but a pointlessness which is coming out of plenitude rather than need well thank you thank you very much then so many questions raised by each of those but maybe I can go back in reverse order before we open it out to the floor so starting with Douglas the pointlessness I mean I suppose the initial perhaps naive question that occurred to me is does this rob love of the ethical dimension the sense that love is closely connected with value and valuing rather than notions like play which could be enjoyable but I'll thought of is necessarily connected with finding oneself in a moral or ethical sense well obviously I think we have to be careful about the various meanings of play and of course there are some meanings here that are not helpful at all in this context and that's why I started off by mentioning Schiller but it seems to me that our culture is still very much dominated by utilitarianism and by an essentially economic view of life and what this very rich tradition of play which by the way is not confined to the West but in many ways it's even more deeply grounded in the east and in the the Hindu tradition in particular I recently went to the Holi festival in Mathura which is matera is the holy city of Lord Krishna and the carnival like activity on the day of the festival very water and paint and being generally anarchic is meant to be an image a reflection of the spontaneous joy in the divine and I think in our highly utilitarian goal orientated aims an objective transferable skills culture the stress on this dimension of life and essential component of love which is of a non instrumental non-utilitarian nature I think is is very significant certainly when one sees some philosophy departments under the cosh of the government-sponsored research assessment exercise one wonders if spontaneity and joy gone out of the window altogether so just moving to Raja I thought it's interesting that you illustrated the point about mortality and it's connection with love by referring to the case of angels and what it would be like to them but actually of course as you know some of our progressive friends one thinks immediately of California I don't know why I hope that we will soon be immortal or at any rate that we will live for a couple of hundred years for starters and people investing a lot of money in this and working actively towards it would you would your view predict that this would lead to a diminution of erotic and other forms of passionate value well certainly I would have thought the little bit of imaginative evidence that we have for this from Aldous Huxley and others seems to suggest that that these at least this kind of immortality which is just a a prolongation of our earthly existence leads to a loveless as a form of society because there there is no need anymore for each other there is each up each person becomes steadily eroded as a person to become a consumable thing you know something that we can take pleasure in and actually does it describes this brilliantly in freo new world I have I can't understand how and people can actually want to do all this once they've read that book I mean it's a testimony course to the to the literary decline of our culture that they probably haven't read this book but I mean if if illiteracy was the only thing wrong with California the world would be a lot better than it is yes I would just just like to say to Roger I mean I'm not sure that I agree that to get rid of immortality would in some sense pull the roof rug from under love as such I mean it's certainly in a society that's you know deeply utilitarian and where it's all about you know preserving the body as healthy for as long as possible so and I can imagine that in that kind of spirit there would be no room for love but the need the all the needs for example either the particular reasons that I've summarized before why people historically have thought you know love is needed all those would remain I mean / we would still we would still wish to find beauty we were still wish to find virtue in my view we would still wish to need to be ontologically grounded in the world of which we find ourselves we would still be erotically attracted to others so I didn't think immortality and if I could just that's one point in another point on on death which I think you're absolutely right is absolutely bound up with love and for perhaps even several other reasons I mean one is the most obvious one is there anything that we deeply want a sub and we which we do in a great love in the thought of loss immediately comes into our feelings we cannot help because we live in the world that's contingent and subject to loss the ultimate loss being death we cannot help thinking of death as present not in a depressive sense but is in it as inevitably present and secondly we live in a culture that is you know as whitehead service sort of footnote to Plato and Plato does give us the idea that we just find impossible I think to get rid of and I don't think we want to get rid of it but many people do which is the idea that love ultimately aims for the absolute for the unchanging absolute perfection beauty and goodness that is beyond the world of space and time beyond the world of individuals and that is a an absolute world that can only be accessed even an imagination via the thought of death because it's the death of our existence in space and time and individuality only that makes possible the attainment of that ultimate object of love so in that sense I think in our culture and all the cultures that our inheritors of Plato the relation between love and death is absolutely intimate and and it's very hard to escape from so those are just two other thoughts on love and death I yes I'm not entirely persuaded by what you've just said I'm though it sort of obviously full of important observations if we're honest to look at that the the history the individual history of love where does it all begin obviously there is that moment of vulnerability the birth of the individual into this world where you cling to the thing that gives you nurture and support and protection and that primordial experience of being protected is one that haunts you through your life thereafter you're always wanting to recover it and indeed if I were to be psychoanalytical about your idea of the ground of being I would say that's what it is that's ultimately where we we're all going yes but you know fundamental to that relationship is the sense of the complete vulnerability of the child and growing up for that for the child growing up is coming to see that the mother that provides everything is just as a vulnerable as you and so you have to give back in some way and then of course you know Dage is the whole situation is reversed and I think that that was precisely my first point right well then next Johnny could we agree so either shut up right oh yeah okay if I may interject yeah about in in relation to play it's there's a very interesting book by Robert Bellah called religion in human evolution and one of the points that Bella makes is that play links ours in very interesting ways to other mammals and one of the distinctive aspects of play here is that it requires security you can't play without having a relatively safe environment so III think that that also has again a psychological implication here that those that don't have the security to in their very early phases are often very troubled adults so there's a lot of child psychology literature here about the significance of play for the development of the robust and strong individual mature adult psyche good thank you I mean since we were moving a bit towards the psychological aspects of these matters perhaps I can just bring this back to Simon from the question for him about what he's just what he said in his presentation I mean it seemed to me that you gave a very concise and eloquent presentation of which you would you do in your books of course of the existential yearning of the human soul for full completion which clearly is part of powerful aspect of what it is to be human but one might ask so how does that actually connect with love the ordinary on the ordinary but with human love between two people is it that love between two people is so sublimated form of or an easy way of trying to get over this more deep religious question of where we're supposed to be where we're heading in relation to our maker our creator or how we are to achieve the selves that we're meant to be or is there a is there a close connection between that sort of religion strive and they drive the two people that draws two people together I think I mean I think there is a very close connection the the drive that draws two people together I mean the drive that causes you to you know having encountered three or four beautiful people say or extremely virtuous people to choose one of them I think does have something to do with the promise that you know that Marcel felt on the beach when he saw that girl whether he turned out to be right or wrong another point but just that he saw in that girl a world that he wanted to become part of with her and the idea was you know this is the world in which I will make my life and perhaps if you believe in concepts like authenticity which is a very modern concepts this really state innocence Rousseau since the 18th century you know I will discover in that in discovering my own world I will discover my own inner world by an inner self Who I am who I'm supposed to be but doesn't that have your narrative have embedded within it the very Western idea that integral to love at least of the erotic kind is the falling in love the moment you know in in Hindu culture it's not like that your parents negotiate the deal and you might be discovering your lifelong companion for the first time on the morning of your marriage yes but if the deal is being properly worked out and everybody's been attentive to their due to you it works it seems to last longer I mean many of us many people think is precisely this emphasis on the you know the the Epiphany there's the sudden illumination the sudden moment of rejoicing in another under and clinging to it which makes our marriage is so impairment well no I agree but I mean I mean my emphasis is not on love at first sight I didn't even think those words are used at all in either of my books ever my emphasis is much I mean I keep using the word glimpse in the sense that we know we glimpse and the word glimpse suggests that it's pretty provisional and it's just a tentative thing but my real emphasis is much more on a sort of the Aristotelian type of then engaging and living together and trying to live in this shared world together and to develop knives that sounds romantic boundary it's much more like a labor that you engage in together which a devotion yeah a mutual devotion but it's but whether or not that coming together is tricky is arranged or happens by serendipity is secondary in my own account this might be a good moment to ask if anyone would like to come in on any of the topics raised yes I think well it could do obviously in its it's part of the deal whatever the nature of the of the eight whatever the age of the partners is part of the deal that that this is an arrangement between mortals and you're not going to be able to foretell exactly whether they will go through life always together that is but I don't know i mean i think i think when you're all you're aware of course of you have a vision of what life will be like without the other and what life would be like for the other without you but that vision is like a sort of a misty landscape beyond the the area in which you are conducting your life it doesn't it doesn't impact on it in the same in any direct way and I think that see that's even so for people who are living so you know one of the partners is has a really difficult disease or a mortal disease or something it's put out of mind because it doesn't have a role to play in the love acceptance of iris creating some of the circumstances with a love I think him but all the caring that were that two people have for each other is predicated upon the fact that they're both vulnerable and it's perhaps the vulnerability more than the mortality that matters yes I think actually just got to go back to them to what Douglas said about plays if that's okay yes I think it's not so open right I totally agree with witnesses view that that Schiller is a really important thinker in this area and he said he emphasizes play you know rather different way from the way which will be emphasized by a psychologist I mean for him it was a paradigm of an activity performed for its own sake this he says in business and pursuing of one's needs man a man is merely in earnest but with beauty he plays so that this was his way of saying that that play is the way we should understand the entire range of things that are meaningful in themselves things which which contain their meaning within them beauty and that's that is the idea of beauty for him and and this is true of of love as well so that the modern sentimental emphasis on love as the meaning of everything is actually it's a bit nauseating in the way has become a cliche introduced into every discussion it is another way of going back to what Schiller was trying to say that we only find meaning in life if we find those things which have value in for their own sake intrinsically in other words when we have moved out of instrumental reasoning into contemplating the world as it is and love has that element in it you know there is no further reason why you love some except that he or she is the person that he is and that so a love becomes a paradigm of this if you like a rescue that we can all achieve from the world of instrumental thinking so as to be able to see the world as an end in itself and ourselves as a justified within that and so I I think that's an aspect of love which is really important and it is just to continue what I was thinking about the way in which love becomes this all cuddly cliche that that is an abuse of love that is putting love back into the instrumental picture you know the consumer society the consumer version of love and the cuddles available relative from the supermarket shelf and love as properly understood is that thing that she'll is trying to get at which is another instance of beauty as such and if I may pursue the scrutiny and thought a bit further that's the reason why the notion of love not just in our Western tradition but in other traditions as well is is often closely associated with the sacred yes yes that's another we haven't touched on that yet that's a really good topic obviously going back to the hindu marriage what's absolutely vital in the hindu marriage is not the that that the aspect of choice or anything like that is is that this is a sacrament that's what makes it the infinitely valuable thing that it is not the fact that that you know that the glance across a crowded room has met his match or anything like that it is this performance in which the whole community is involved and that's the making sacred as you you would obviously that's your your topic the making sacred of something by our own sacrificial behavior which in turn connects I suppose with with Simon's idea of that being called in a certain direction the self we are meant to be and there may be a tension there between the spontaneity of play and the spontaneity of some kinds of love where people are finding the way for themselves in a in a free and unconstrained way between that and the idea of the vacation that the the right direction which you might try and get out of but ultimately you're called to go that way and only there in that pre laid down goal whether you find completion yes well that's great so we were talking about it earlier today they had and the notion of the call they could hide a gariand notion of the call which is also there in live in us and so on the summons to be yourself and I think that that connects also with the with the whole turd falling in love tradition that you're being called to to be what you truly are by the other and the problem is we'd all agree with ejected but whether a survey cannot design all of you how do we clearly learn as children in the first instance time a by receiving love we didn't ask for and we'd learn about it before we fully understand it and as we were discussing this morning and Descartes who's often thought of Rene Descartes is often thought of as the champion of the perfectly transparent mind with its clear and distinct ideas actually said about the passions and he's single he included the passion of love that they're often very hard for us to understand because they're joined without us knowing it to both to physiological responses which have been laid down way back and with psychologically with experiences of early childhood for example of being parented which are now only dimly if at all remembered there was a problematic aspect to love because of that which of course Freud and others knew picked up yes I mean learning to love is an interesting idea the in erotic love there has to be that large element of instinct the immediacy of just wanting that other person in in physical way and the way of tenderness and so on but that's not enough and everybody then has to learn how to love properly say in a marriage as the as the erotic fires die down there is - there is the day-to-day nothing which is a really hard part of it and I think you know that that's true also with other kinds of love obviously ghetto gods writings about the works of love concern agape not eros and his view is essentially that you only love properly the other if God is the middle term and that means there's a constant labor to bring God into the relation constant looking up towards the ways in which your relation with the other word embody an ideal of love and that is work is can I just add to what Roger said I think learning to love is less about although it can be about other one to knock it you know the ten steps to a good relationship with all the things you hear about listening and so on which is very important but the the one thing that seems to me is the real object of Education in love or of learning is attentiveness and attentiveness is I mean some people think I think I'm right in saying Seymour bear thought that love just is attentiveness I mean when you are attentive something you love it I don't take that view I think that love is motivated by other things but that attentiveness is the absolute key to love going beyond an attitude to a relationship and I do think attentiveness can be learnt it can be trained it subverts you and it's perhaps that one of the hardest of all the votes used to train and it's needed to do anything properly in life not just to love and the second point I'm making connection with that is you know the mysterious thing the commandment in the Bible to love God and to love your neighbor as yourself you know in the old so the question was raised in their context how on earth can love be commanded I mean it has to be in some sense voluntary and if it's not then it's not the real thing and it's I actually I mean my own answer to that it's just a provisional answer I didn't even know is the right it's the right thing is to say actually no love can't be commanded but what can be commanded is attentiveness and that you can be commanded and that's the thing that being naturally lazy creatures we're like Italy you know we're very happy to either be told to in the arranged marriage situation to be told you know this is your wife on husband or to fall in love across the crowded room but the hard work of attentiveness is something that laziness naturally sets aside and I think bear that can both be commanded and educated very much agree with that and just to add a footnote to what Simon's been saying it seems to me attentiveness is connected with the right word is recognition that's to say recognizing the person you love for as they are looking as iris looking yes looking yes taking the time and this is immensely difficult rather than projecting onto them what you think they ought to be or projecting your needs onto them but but seeing them as a different individual who is different from you and that difference is it is essential to it seems to me to the proper functioning of love if yeah if you can forgive me for going off at a tangent as well it seems to me there's also something particularly interesting in the phenomenon of intellectual love I that curiosity that is part of our being that the desire to know as Aristotle possibly are more dear intellectual Alice of Spinoza the author the new Cerrone of Latinos I mean and in a way it seems to me that part of the crisis of the Mon University is the loss of this sense of the love that is part of our curiousness about agree with you and I'll also play in Thor exactly it's all become you know producing these papers and publishing I mean any decent writing I always feel is you are playing you have to enjoy it and and and it's a form of play and I totally agree with you relationship yes I don't think I develop that in great detail but as I think I think it's covered by my point about the you know learning how to see learning how to be attentive but that's not unique to laugh you know that could be learning how to I mean the most important thing for example when you're playing a musical instrument I mean assuming that you can basically master it is to listen to yourself and unless you don't learn how to listen and it requires unbelievable concentration I just said that as an amateur I find that this far more difficult than getting across the keyboard is remembering to listen it just goes you know you can go within two minutes you're just playing and I think in love you know I think what luck and everything is really no different to anything else this is something that ideally you should be taught yes I mean I would institute that at a very young age teaching people how to listen teaching people how to attend as part of everything they do that's really all I meant there I think yes I mean carefully construed obviously I'd want to avoid some of the misleading associations of play so I'm drawing quite consciously on this particular exactly this particular philosophical tradition absolutely absolutely yes yes also I think it's interesting that it in a way play is prior to culture and yet paradoxically the highest forms of culture are themselves forms of play I think there there is an interesting contrast here between working together and playing together you know workmates have a tasks that they share and people who work together in a you know on a building site for say three years become very close but not in the way that people become immediately close when playing a game together the or chamber-music years and so on and there's this is a form both of these are forms of togetherness which are not yet love and you know you might nevertheless nurture your whole life on this you know there are people for whom playing in the team every Saturday that is their life and it's replaces love in a way because it is also fills their life with a sense that there are something which is an end in itself even if it only comes around on Saturday strong strength creations and acts actually as it were it's wholly honest it's not hard work he has to rest on the responses in the song strange games and there's the notion of Sofia of wisdom and the rather enigmatic reference in our proverbs - to wisdom soft and translators playing at the dawn of creation that gets picked up in by the Russians particularly some of the olds and others I thought is you speaking James you know the valleys shouldst and so thick with corn that they shall laugh and sing all the woods in the forest shall sing for joy but in that line from the Psalms immediately follows for he comes he comes to judge the earth comes back there rejoicing at justice and so the resolution of this contradiction I would say that of course that there's hard work involved but it is for an end and that end is something more akin to play them to work you know you've got to work to get into the situation where you can renounce work and just sit and be yes John was saying just be by the fireside so I suspect there's no real contradiction here but obviously everything that is being treated as a means is hard work and it's when you've got through to the other side that the worth of the play aspect I mean not we won't want to not want to call it play say it's the fruition of being I'd suspect the term the conversation is taking maybe a hint that we ought to be thinking about drawing our discussion to a close we've been going for well over an hour but we have time for particularly for anyone who Labor's and resting whether this idea that the idea of the Sabbath of course is very important is sacred time time which is set aside from the rest of the week and God's loving work of creation allows for that sacred space therefore for human beings any parent who kept their child at it seven days a week would not be a loving parent and they were almost by definition actually the the Sabbath idea I think is fundamental to understanding love in the end it's like what yesterday I was I talked about the the smile you know smiling at someone is a way of being with that person but not in any way using them it's a sort of blessing conferred on the other saying it is good that you are and I think that's what to what people do when they're in a proper loving relation that they are conferring on each other the blessing of a smile saying you know I am towards you in this way because it's good you are and I think the Sabbath is a way of of understanding the whole world like that you for a brief moment use you lay aside the instrumental way of thinking and see the world as God sees it and say it is good and there's a collective smile this is one of the great triumphs of the Jewish religion I think too implanted that smile in their half of ordinary life and I think if I were to go on moralizing I would say it is one of the worst things that's happened in my lifetime is the abolition of Sunday you know the abolition of the day of rest and the day that is set aside not to do things but to appreciate the world but that but I think the lab has a lot to do with that you know the I was brought up I said we all work in a world in which Sunday was reserved for the family and for the loving relations and in which you were embedded and you Sunday lunch was a very important episode in which you celebrated this fact that my father was so appalling that I only wanted to run away it's a minor difficulty in my life I never have the number of novels Victorian novels can't cite chapter and verse where sunday is a pretty grim here because they're not not only I mean they can't go to work but they're not allowed to play either you know I sit and read and improve or of course Massachusetts experienced themselves at last from the old world where they I [Laughter] think you're trying to to disagree weather is probably not that much I mean certainly not about Sunday and as far as love is concerned yes I mean I think that love can be aroused whether we're we do not perceive beauty in an object but I think that the moment we love somebody we will then see beauty we will then impose beauty on them and that's you know but I know that my distinguished panelists disagree with that they're not going to rise to it I think except I would say of course well I know what take this on too long but of course there's the complexity of the notion of beauty and the complexity of as Frisby very eloquently mentioned in the you know the beauty of Socrates and the paradox of that beauty that nevertheless bids but but it's a notion of beauty that is tied to a certain notion of a training of the soul so perhaps we disagreements are less pronounced good well I sense Mia we had we've reached the Kombi where I'm able to get out of the calm waters despite James valiant attempt but it's been a very interesting discussion and obviously food for further thoughts I'd really like to thank James for organizing the the panel and our three panelists Douglas Headley Simon May and Roger Scruton for a most fruitful discussion and and above all thank you all in the audience for coming and for and for your your questions and keeping us at it thank you [Applause]
Info
Channel: CRASSH Cambridge
Views: 4,661
Rating: 4.9629631 out of 5
Keywords: CRASSH, Divinity, Ontology of Love, Roger Scruton, John Cottingham, Douglas Hedley, Simon May, James Bryson
Id: hPAFBZvYfLU
Channel Id: undefined
Length: 64min 7sec (3847 seconds)
Published: Wed May 15 2019
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