Crossing Bounds with Dr. Alex Moseley

A foundational discussion in the philosophy of love with Prof Alex Moseley.

Check out the Philosophy of Love encyclopedia article here. Or his other articles.

More at What is Love?

The three kinds of love we discuss here are eros, agape, and philia. More on this at readings in the philosophy of Love.

Here is the website for Alex and his YouTube Channel.

Transcript preview:
Andrea: [00:00:00] Hey everybody. So glad you're here. Today we're talking to. Professor Alex Mosley. He's a teacher. He's also a coach. He also wrote the encyclopedia entry for love and philosophy. So who better to talk to? We'll link to the internet encyclopedia entry on that in the show notes. So be sure to check it out and. Here we talk about love and we tried to go past traditional boundaries. Both of us were trained in philosophy, both analytic and continental, but both of us also have a--what shall I say--more explorative side as well, when it comes to trying to understand the world. So we just sorta let it all go where it would. We meander and go into all kinds of [00:01:00] different ideas, some of them, which analytic philosophers might not like, but, also some of them which make me uncomfortable, but you know, that's part of the show is just trying to see where we can go and how we can find new ways to look at these things that seem not to go together or seem to make us uncomfortable....

Transcript

AlexAndreaLPVideo

Andrea: [00:00:00] Hey everybody. So glad you're here. Today we're talking to. Professor. Alex Mosley. He's a teacher. He's also a coach. He also wrote the encyclopedia entry. For love and philosophy. So who better to talk to? Well, linked to the internet encyclopedia entry on that in the show notes. So be sure to check it out and. Uh, hope you enjoy this conversation. We just talked about love and we tried to go past disciplines. So both of us were trained in philosophy, both analytic and continental and both of us also have a , what shall I say, explorative side about trying to understand the world. So we just sorta let it all go where it would. And it's a bit meandering and. We go into all kinds of [00:01:00] different, Ideas, some of them, which analytic philosophers might not like, but, and also some of them which make me uncomfortable, but you know, that's part of the show is just trying to see where we can go and how we can find new ways to look at these things that seem not to go together or seem to make us uncomfortable. In any case, have a listen or look at some of the shorts that I posted, if you don't want to listen to though. An hour and a half year, it was actually two and a half hours and I cut it down. But ha. Okay. See you later

well, hi Alex. It's great to meet you and thanks for coming on the show. 

Alex: Well, thank you very much for inviting me. It's going to be a pleasure. I'm sure. 

Andrea: Yes. How could it not be to talk about love and philosophy?

Alex: I know it's a never ending subject. 

Andrea: Just to start, I was thinking about your article that you wrote, which we're going to link to, but in that article you talk about, There's a lot of issues around this question of what is love. It's quite a big question, right?

It's one we don't even ask too much, even though we think about love all the time, in different ways, or try not to think about it, or [00:02:00] whatever the case may be. But just in terms of philosophy, what are some of these issues around this question of what is 

Alex: love? 

It's the beginning for any philosophical discourse, isn't it?

 Where we start examining, like Socrates did over 2, 000 years ago, he started asking questions about what people thought they knew about a subject. And as philosophers, the way I see philosophy, it's like a stepping stone to understanding deeper things. It's stretching our ability to reason through things, but it also has that a limitation, that reason gets stuck sometimes.

It meets a glass ceiling of its own and we're looking through it and there's something more. And love is a perfect instantiation of that. Because when you've been in love, or you've loved somebody, or you've lost somebody that you loved, we know what we mean. We know what we're talking about.

And we understand each other when we say, I'm currently in love. It's very nice, it could be an emotional thing that we're watching or some kind of behavior or just an expression. I'm in love. But the phrase, yeah, what [00:03:00] is love when we actually start focusing on it, it becomes a bit slippery, like most words in philosophy because behind the very word.

It's a history, a context. It's like baggage in your backpack. You're bringing along, unbeknownst to you, a history of the word and its connotations, its associations in our culture, in our current place wherever we are on the planet, in our language, in the games we play with words. Um, it's not real love. Oh, it's real love.

It's genuine love. What do you mean by that? Come on, what is love? And of course it's the name of many songs. Especially modern songs. A few go through the head when you say, what is love? You try to grasp it, don't you? Any philosophical topic. So we're opening up this word and this in a sense stops some philosophers immediately.

No, no, please don't go there. Love is untouchable. You don't want to touch it. 

Andrea: An uncomfortable place then. Yeah, it's like. 

Alex: There's a sort of, sanctuary in the [00:04:00] word that we don't want to go into. It's like entering the holy of the holies, as they talk in religious terms.

Um, just leave it as it is. Don't analyze. Yet we are very critical thinking, curious beings. And we want to delve deeper because we realize as soon as we start listening. And thinking about love, it has many nuances. It has many degrees. It has different connotations, different cultures, as well as in our own culture.

Oh yeah. I love him. What's that mean? Yeah. You're good friends. You're having sex with him or something. Is it intimate? Is it romantic? No, no, no. And you start backpedaling or you start, well, yeah, I do. Yeah. And it's great. And we need more context explained to us from when somebody says, I love that person.

Which is amazing. So when we start looking at the word, as the ancient Greeks did, um, and I do fall back on the Western tradition, , in the article, and also when I've looked at Eastern traditions, they are not dissimilar. There's enough [00:05:00] of an overlap for me to stay on my Homeground, because I've read a lot of the ancient Greek stuff, I've studied ancient Greek philosophy, the pre Socratics, the works of Plato, the works of Aristotle, and they have great insights trying to literally break into that holy of holies and say, hang on, what do we mean by friendship?

What do we mean by love, etc? What is desire? And. Like enjoying a piece of music or an artwork, sometimes you don't want to go there, but when we do, we understand more, and we take ourselves up a level, and we understand where other people are coming from, or we help them understand. And the Greeks touched on this very easily in some respects and what we can call the sort of classical definition of love.

If you break down the word love, which comes from a Sanskrit word. It's a deep word in, in the, I think I mentioned this in the article, um, on the internet encyclopedia that it comes from lube. However you pronounce it because it's Sanskrit, you know, 4, 000, We don't know. Yeah. [00:06:00] We hear it in German and Germanic language, Lieber.

Ich liebe dich, liebend, love, lube, lieb, very similar, love, louver, in middle English, Shakespeare's time it may have been pronounced louver. You've got that etymology, that history of the word, which we bring with us, but the Greeks look in at... love, looked at the nuances. And so they recognized the notion of a sexual desire or a passionate desire for somebody called eros.

It's still in the Greek, um, eros in modern

Greek, meaning a desire. Now there's an interesting aspect of this. It's that turning of the head from what we understand in sort of modern. English or modern thinking. It's that, ooh, we, we see somebody and there's a desire for that person. It's like the animalistic turning of the head. Wow. That person. I want to mate with that person almost, or that person's compatible with me or [00:07:00] wow, that's a beautiful person. is the funny aspect of Eros because Plato talks a lot about it.

And he's saying, yes, you've got a desire for somebody, but that's that desire is hinting at something bigger than you. He's saying you're getting a glimpse of something bigger.

Andrea: So you're kind of saying this is the more of the Eros. In compared to, what are the other kind of love, That's it, 

Alex: yes, so, um, and just on the notion of Eros, just a thought came through my head of a very good friend of mine who one would call asexual, not interested, in sexuality at all, but whose head was turned once or twice by beautiful people.

 The aesthetics of somebody and go, wow. 

Andrea: It gets your attention. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There's something aesthetically that gets your attention. 

Alex: Exactly. Now, with Eros, we get the word erotic and erotica, which obviously leans into the sexuality, but it doesn't have to. It is that head turning, there's a beautiful person walking down the street.

 I spent some [00:08:00] time in Paris once at a conference, uh, and afterwards we went out in the cafes. And it's on the street and you watch Parisian life go by. Now where I come from in England, we don't see people very well dressed. And it looked to me like the art gallery was in motion, people walking past in beautiful costumes, male and female. And my colleagues, philosophical colleagues said, Alex, will you close your mouth? So I'm just like, I don't see this where I live. This is incredibly beautiful. I'm like, wow. The next level up is a sense of friendship and companionship. 

Andrea: I have to say one thing before we go to this, before we go to, but um, we talked in just now mostly about sight, you know, and there's other kinds of Eros

 it's not just about looking at something and seeing beauty. There's also the scent. There's also touch. There's a lot of different elements we don't have to go into it here, but I just wanted to say that because I think it's also a little limiting to just think of it as.

Turning your head, catching 

Alex: your eyes. You're absolutely right. And it's one of the criticisms of Western [00:09:00] science and philosophy that we're very perceptual in the sense of just eyesight. Um, I can fall in love with somebody's voice. And right, uh, or the smell of something. Hmm, that's very interesting.

Mm hmm. A flower, we can fall in love with a flower. 

Andrea: Yeah, or a landscape. Landscape. The particular landscape has probably a certain... erotic nature in a way. I mean, it's not only, as you were saying, it's not only, um, about human sexual desire. There's many other ways that this word is used, which we'd have to do a whole episode just on that.

But I just 

Alex: want to at least open it up. It's a just a note to that. There is a very good philosophy book on the philosophy of taste, I think it is. It's in my library, which is in storage, which is a bit annoying. And yes, to say, you know, we're very focused on the eyes, like the Greeks were.

If you think about their statues, et cetera, very beautiful. The human format, it's ideal. You had to see it. Okay, you could go and touch it and things, obviously. So, the next level above that for the classical or the ancient Greek way of looking at things, which I would argue hasn't gone away, is that [00:10:00] notion of friendship and companionship, where, we begin to love each other as friends.

with or without sexuality. Again, sexuality is almost a different thing. Um, it can be there. It doesn't have to be. It's not necessary for a great friendship. And the Greek word for it was philia, which also leans into filial in Latin to do with the family. And it's that closeness of the clan, the tribe. We love each other because of our connections, um, and of course in the modern world because of our tribes and our clans etc have all been mixed up with modern transportation and movement over the past few hundred years, especially the last 200 years.

Um, we then fall in, not fall in love, but have a love for our colleagues and our friends and um, people generally that we like spending time with. There's an enjoyment. And we say, yeah, I love my friend. He's a great guy. They have a great time together. And there's still that element, um, critically that overlaps [00:11:00] with that desire or personal pleasure I gain from the friendship.

Interesting ad lib conversation I had with a musician on the pavement today he said, I've always been listening to somebody who sees It as a contractual relationship. And you may have come across that like, love is contractual. That's relationships. There's something in it for me, something for you, to a point, but if that.

relationship changes because of X, Y, Z conditions, you know, then that friendship dies or that love dies. So there's still that sort of self interested aspect. I think the Greeks were pretty good at explaining, especially Aristotle in his notions on friendship, very good at explaining we gain pleasure from this friendship.

But that pleasure is still ephemeral. It could still go. Right? It's transient. The highest level the Greeks got to in their rationalization of what is love. Um, the notion of unconditional love, which connects with a Christian element, uh, the Greeks called it agape, and the [00:12:00] Christians took it up and made it famous, as it were, in philosophy.

It's often connected, associated with, because that baggage we carry with Christian theology. And again, I, I'm not an Islamic or Judaic scholar, so I, I would assume there are similar elements, uh, overlapping elements in our, Um, philosophical histories there in the history of ideas, but Agape is that unconditional love, the highest level that the Greeks could see.

So the Greeks put things down in print, which allow us to critique and analyze, try to get some mileage out of it and see if those beliefs, those definitions are useful or not. And agape, the highest level. that the Christians took up, as I was saying, is the brotherly love, that you love your neighbor as you do yourself, which is an ancient and worldly, ethic, seen in all deeper religions and deeper cultures.

 You want to be treated like others treat you, sort of thing. But the person in the street who walks past you, you love them for who they are, and you see, you start to see a beauty in them. [00:13:00] Right? So even, the cheeky little chaps I may teach at a school. You still love them for, for who they are, for their humanity. And that's the Agape level. But then you've got this friction. It's like, well, if I'm going to... Follow Agape in the Greek ideal, then I need to love everybody.

How can I love one person more than anybody else? There's a friction between the partiality, the partial love that I have for my wife, for example, and my children over others, and this notion of, I love everybody equally. 

Andrea: Does this get to, does this connect at all to Plato's ideas of elevations and different kind of levels of love?

Alex: Yeah, if we dip into Plato, um, the. mentor to some extent, but the philosopher for Aristotle, so his teacher in a way, um, and that is a whole area of how they were similar, how they're dissimilar. But Plato, following his reading of Socrates, um, if we just say it's Plato's philosophy makes it simpler, said there are [00:14:00] ways of looking when we see beauty and our head is turned, the Eros notion, we are Partaking, we're getting a glimpse of different words, different interpretations throughout history of something greater than ourselves, as I was mentioned earlier.

So I'm seeing the beauty of the landscape behind me on, on the, on the background, which is outside my house. And I go, wow, that awesomeness, that reverence I have for it. I see the beauty in each of us. I go, wow, look at that. And it's, we are partaking or getting that glimpse, that little word, the glimpse of sort of a little peak.

But something greater, something which is for Plato in the world of forms, which Christians may translate it as part of heaven. We're seeing a glimpse of heaven, right? Because for Plato, the physicality of the things we see is just an echo or reflection of the greater world that is bigger than us in modern parlance in a different dimension.

for theological parlance in heaven, and we just get that little understanding for a [00:15:00] second. Wow. And so our head is turned when we recognize that we're seeing something greater than ourselves, from another dimension for the physicalists who may follow quantum theory or something, or notions of multi dimensions or different universes, or for the theologians.

We get a glimpse of God, or a glimpse of spirit, or the angels. Hence we use that language with children. You know, we're an angel, lovely, you know. Uh, it makes us smile, and we can't help it. And Plato's sort of tapping into that. And then, being Plato, he's got this grandiose metaphysics that this world is just, um, again, using modern cultural references, like a matrix of something greater than us, um, or the world is not real, the big reality is beyond us, and we're just seeing glimpses of it through beauty, and we realize there is something greater, and that philosophy, that idea has not gone away. there's something bigger than us, something more beautiful.

Whenever we read literature, the poetry or listen to the [00:16:00] music, um, going through the centuries, we hear that platonic, dare I say, a drumbeat. It comes back to us, or a heartbeat would be better, wouldn't it? A bit more romantic. Boom, boom, boom, boom. It's still there.

Andrea: So we talked about three different kinds of love, um, just eros, philia, and agape. And can we think of those as. different levels in this way?

Like, would you start with something like desire and then end up with some, something like what you're talking about, where you just have an almost spiritual love of everyone? Are they continuous do you think?

Alex: Yeah, continuous, like a spectrum. Again, this is my personal reading of it, um, over, I mean, when I was writing on the philosophy of love, researching the philosophy of love formally. libraries, encyclopedias, um, you get a certain analytical glimpse and then you start reading about love through literature, through the poetry, etc., um, through psychology, of course.

But you still feel the same philosophies there. And, like [00:17:00] I, I've explained to students over decades is, first and foremost, let's look at our biochemistry. We are instantiated as a human being. Whatever our metaphysics, whatever our theology about what we are, the human condition, if we start with our biochemistry, and in terms of love, That biochemistry is empowered by somebody beautiful that we think, Ooh, they're compatible with me.

We would have great kids or laugh subconsciously. And you don't even know why you know, it's very attractive to me, very appealing. And it's, it's almost like my tummy rumbling at that sort of physical level. Right. Some people 

Andrea: like to call that animal level, which I don't really 

Alex: like that.

Yeah, animal level. But of course, we are reasoning, thinking, generally most of us think about something, especially in philosophy. And we start to examine and analyze it. What is it about that person? And you start saying, well. You know, she makes me laugh. She gives me, brings me joy. She's a great friend or he's an absolute brilliant mate.

We can like mate in the English word, like [00:18:00] general great friend, best friend, best buddies. We enjoy so much in common. We've got that overlap. You start to analyze it at a slightly higher level. Um, Tapping into our rationality and our critique, our analytical, dare I say spreadsheet, cost benefit analysis.

Like a comment I mentioned earlier that my, uh, friend I bumped into was talking about, and I was like, yeah, the relationship went there when I was the contract. Yeah. Yeah. It's a contractual relationship, which again, is in a lot of modern thinking about love and sexuality

Andrea: what are we doing trying to understand love? 

 We're missing something that I, I think Plato and Socrates are addressing too, which is that there's a, something else that happens.

You might. Be attracted on this level, the animal level, but you also get attached and then there's the possibility of a lot of pain or, um, not getting what you want or just getting your senses getting too tied to your object of desire. I think they talk about, about this a lot and some of it's even kind of.

 Ancient self help of trying to find [00:19:00] a way to not be obsessed or controlled by this 

desire. 

Alex: Absolutely. Yeah. Absolutely. I personally agree with that massively. And also the philosophy, I think, reflects that tension, whether, what level we should stay at. Different philosophers are going to have different opinions, et cetera.

Some may be very, very happy to stay at the physicality of it. Behaviorists, for example, who. Don't agree with the notion of an inner self. Whereas most philosophers have tapped into the idea of the inner self and then you've got the inner self as the ego which is that Little monkey inside of us that wants things and desires things fear things and has needs to control or demand respect Etc on the darker side of it, of course and then there's the more spiritual sense that breaks through the rationality breaks through the contractual element and Plato had a a tripartite, a three way division of the, the person out, the human condition, the soul.

Um, likewise with Freud. Right, so the ego, the id, the superego, [00:20:00] etc. Something about threes. Yeah, it's three again. It's very easy to remember three, isn't it? So yeah, if you think about that level, go from animal to human and then to a spiritual or whatever word we want to use. A sort of hyper rational level.

I guess 

Andrea: what I'm trying to get at is, we are affected by other people or even by ideas. You can fall in love with some kind of idea or, and it can be overwhelming and we try to find ways to deal with it. Or it can also be kind of a portal.

I almost heard you saying that we could think of some of these loves as portals into the continuum. And then maybe you want to elevate and somehow, grow as a person and be able to kind of handle, what seems overwhelming, at times or, or just, it becomes a way to get beyond your usual bounds in many different ways.

And it can also be dangerous in that way. The philosophers also talk about the dangers of it, socrates basically died for his love, right? [00:21:00] His love of knowledge. I want to dig into that kind of messiness

Alex: it was going through my mind very quickly there that some of the ancients and Medieval, uh, modernist, uh, post modernist philosophers who tap into that and Hegel to some extent, you know, playing with the absolute spirit.

Look at the portal and go, well, if we go through there, what's it going to be like? And, and the leaning into the mystical element. Of the human experience, which happens to perhaps more people than we recognize, especially in a modern world where everything's physical. And if it's not measurable, or you can't weigh it in some respect, it doesn't exist.

Yet, most of us, um, I think, according to opinion polls as well, you know, people have been asked. We, we might not want to admit it in public. I don't mind admitting it, but I've had spiritual experiences and gone, there's more to the world than this. There's more to the world than meets the eyes.

Shakespeare's Hamlet, you know, um, and the Greeks that got there, some of them, like Aristotle, [00:22:00] Almost ran back to his rational mind because he was so rationally scientifically oriented. He's like, ah, that was scary. It is scary, yeah. Yeah, his metaphysics has caused so much, um, anguish and, and trying to understand what he was getting at.

And it's almost as if he touched something higher, retreated back and left the words a little bit ambiguous. Hence, controversy. Some of the greatest scholars who've looked at his metaphysics have gone, Ah! Others are happy to break through. So if you imagine some of the enlightened people, the saints in the Christian tradition, for example, or in the Buddhist tradition, they break through and they go, Yeah, don't worry about it.

It's fine on the other side.

Andrea: This sort of almost goes into the Eastern notion of, of getting past opposites. Trying to get out of this, um, this lower kind of level where your senses [00:23:00] are in control of you or something to go with Plato too and the appetite or, and to try to Find some way to be able to sit with those feelings and maybe even use them as a portal of some kind.

Alex: , I'm with you. I'm with you. The physicality of attraction as a, as a human being, let's say we instantiate as a human being thrown into the world. Existentialist idea or, born into this body, whatever we look at, you know, from the metaphysical point of view, the physicality. The physical attraction that we have has a role to play because it'd be pointless living with somebody and being best friends with somebody who is repulsive to you and you have to get over it for some internal subjective political correctness.

 I have to be attracted to this person. You know, I want to be friends with this person. And what's the point? Your body is telling you. And perhaps it's more than your body. So if we go to the next level, um, your intuition, your subconscious, just who you are, is not compatible with this person here, [00:24:00] even though they may make you laugh, like, yeah, yeah.

They make me laugh, but I need my own space after 20 minutes., I need to find my own way. But then when we find compatibility, as Aristotle said in his friendship, you just love each other's company for who each other is, there's mutual respect. There's no sort of. Well, I'm only with you because you please me, or you make me laugh, or, you know, we enter business contracts together, or we play sports together.

There's something deeper, and it's that calmness, which, yeah, does lend into sort of Buddhist notions, or metaphysical notions, spiritual notions of the silence. You can just be silent with one another, look at a landscape. In the Buddhist sense, just be. So there is that, uh, and the Western philosophers who've reached that level, retreat back to try and explain that to us in some respect.

So if they have felt that quasi mystical or mystical experience, however we term it, still need to, as teachers, explain it to us. That there is something more than desire. Desire is ephemeral. And [00:25:00] the problem with Desire and Eros is, especially with our hormones kicking off as teenagers, and anything that walks becomes sexually attractive almost.

And then you start discriminating, like, what's that about? I'm just overwhelmed by the beauty of the opposite sex or the same sex, if we're homosexual, etc. How sexuality doesn't I'm just overwhelmed.

And then been in a sweet shop, everything's shouting at me, this is great, it's beautiful, wow, wow, wow, wow, great friend or great mate, right, partner, wahey. And then it starts to get more fine tuned, we start looking at the fine grained aspects of each other. It's like we love the same music, we go back to that, we start finding that compatibility, that connection, which is longer lasting.

Mm hmm. I 

Andrea: think it's interesting a few times you've brought up this kind of Cartesian notion. I mean, behaviorism, for example, where they don't even want to talk about consciousness. They only, everything is behavior. And so, you know, don't really look into mind. What's so called mind, but this kind of Cartesian thing between mind and body as if it's different.

So what you're talking about [00:26:00] now sounds like the body's, kind of first, and then there's something else called mind, which comes in, but actually we could also think of that as a continuous Or continuum too, can't we, absolutely. Then what you're trying to do with philosophy even is...

Um, the body is developing a way to have more control over itself or something. So this could be kind of what philosophy is this, in a way similar to how we might want to elevate our love. We're trying to elevate what we can experience and handle

Alex: I am, again, very much with you. I think I'm, I'm working on the, the paradigms of Western philosophy and your questions are very much in the line of how I look at the world. And to me, mind, body, there's, there's no difference. I often joke, with Descartes, who allegedly separated the two.

That's how we teach it in philosophy, that there's two worlds, there's a dualism. Um, to my mind, they're interconnected, you know, my body creates the mind. It gives me the apparatus from which I understand the world, different genetics, different. biological [00:27:00] background. That biological inheritance has given me the ability to pursue a passion that's within me.

To educate and to be educated and to share that education with others. And I always go back to that, why am I here? And it keeps coming back loud and clear from whatever element, whether we call it subconscious, spirit, universe, god, whatever. You're here to educate.

Andrea: Yeah, that's interesting. That's like this love of knowledge, right? The philosophy, coming back to that. And also, I think it speaks to what you were saying a bit about Aristotle maybe running away from the mystical. It's not, sometimes it's not that you're running away from the mystical so much that you need a scaffolding or grounding because, um, we can let our senses, go wild in a way where we'll kind of see what we want to see, sense what we want to sense.

Um, so there's, there is some kind of a bodily. Balance, but actually, I want to get to Plato again, because, you know, he's kind of the initiator right of this Western style. And in his [00:28:00] work, there's a few really key things that people probably who never even read Plato, but they affect our idea of love. I think, for example, um, I think it's Aristophanes, right?

 Part that's missing its other half or something, or like the body that was split and needs its other half. I mean, this is almost like the most kind 

Alex: of, in a while since I did that or 20 years. 

Andrea: Yes. Yeah. But this idea that, really motivates, as you were saying, a lot of our music, a lot of our movies, we're looking for our missing half, we were born as one with three limbs or something.

 So there's that, it's 

Alex: like a creation myth, isn't it? I am a bit 

Andrea: split at the beginning and we need to find our other half, and 

Alex: it's that notion that we, we see in so many romance movies, I've got to find the one and he's the one or she's the one. 

Andrea: Yeah. There's one other person only in this, in this tale.

Alex: Yeah. Whereas I, I quite enjoy, um, the work of Um, Alison Armstrong, an American lady who looks at, uh, sort of, um, anthropological, [00:29:00] sociological, psychological development of men and of women and relationships, a bit like, you know, men from Mars, women from Venus sort of thing. And, and it's quite entertaining.

She says, that idea that there's only one is so stressful. I was like, why would there be only one? She says, imagine. Let's say you're heterosexual. Okay, you divide your country into half, right? 50 percent are female, 50 percent are male. So, wow, you've got in this, where I live, about 30 million females. Uh, and obviously then some are underage, some are overage, you know, or not with your incompatibility.

So you filter through. She says it's a filtering exercise, but that Plato ideal is still with us. It still 

Andrea: jumps up. It's a strange frame, right? That, that we almost assume there's only one other. Uh, even, even the most rational, like there's an assumption of, oh, there's one other person or something. On the planet.

Yeah, which is a of this continuum where you would, or even the kind of agape or the, some of the mystical stuff that you've, that we've touched on where what you're really trying to do is develop a a love of many and everything in a way and become aware of [00:30:00] others as part of you, you know, that kind of love.

Right. Absolutely. That seems very contradictory to this. Okay, there's, we've been split and we have to find our other half. And there's only that one particular puzzle piece that will fit. Yeah. And hence tragedy. It seems like maybe the source of a lot of 

Alex: pain. Yeah. Tragedy. Um. I was going to mention when you, when you mentioned that earlier about, um, Aristotle talked about love as excess feeling.

Uh, so we use the word passion from the French, et cetera, passion. Um, the German I looked up, was, uh, die Leidenschaft. Leidenschaft The root meaning of Leiden is suffering.

 That suffers me. So it was almost Buddhist, isn't it? It's the notions of attachment and when you attach to one person, wow, you're going to suffer a lot. Like the source of most of our tragedies. So the Germanic Tristan and Isolde, Romeo and Juliet, etc. Um, I remember watching, I can't remember his name, he's on a lot of YouTube videos, an Indian [00:31:00] chap and he's sort of giggling and he says, why do the great romances, they only last one night?

And he sort of giggled like a kid. He says, then they die. He says, because they don't have to wake up and come to terms with each other and try to work out who they are and grow. He says, there are these great romances gone. 

Andrea: Like Tristan and Isolde. Yeah. But, um, yeah, so that's kind of this frame, isn't it?

At least in modern culture and I mean, a little bit in philosophy too, as we're seeing, but I think also Socrates was trying to get over that too, or Plato, his writings it is a similar kind of endeavor, and just 

Alex: to mention that where Socrates or Plato, Socrates was pushing through to that, look, get beyond the one.

Let's look to the beauty that's in every single one of us. Sometimes it glows more for the want of the word as an expression. It glows more in some than others. Hence our heads turning. Aristotle, again, going back to him, you sort of feel that he touches it and then comes back to the rationalization of it with this friendship, where he talks about two [00:32:00] bodies, one soul.

So it's a sort of inversion, or that's still platonic. from that myth that we were once three legged people. We got split. We've got to come back together. And some people think he's referring to, Alexander and I've forgotten Alexander's best mate or Achilles and Patroclus in the Iliad.

We seem to be like two bodies, but one soul. And Aristotle talked about the great soul person, the great love as, as connecting that again, it runs through, it's still platonic. Yeah. And 

Andrea: again, we have this dichotomy of only two, but then we always have the answer being somehow in three. We're trying to open it up, the way we were talking about that a relationship with another person or even this idea of dichotomy or even dualism can be a way a tool for awakening, but it's not the end point. That's where it gets complicated too, right? Because yeah, jealousy and desire they have a lot of power. This gets to the kind of harder aspects of society of why, People feel a lot of pain or even do a lot of harm to themselves or [00:33:00] others often stem from yeah from that kind of attachment to so it's a serious issue here. Very, 

Alex: very, because. When we are jilted or dumped or, you know, we go through a lot of pain, and we have to recognize, well, what is it we're in pain for?

What is that, that Leidenschaft, the suffering we're going through? So to love somebody is to suffer, as the Buddha would say. 

Andrea: I think that's pretty much standard in all the philosophy, isn't it? Yeah. At least the first level, it's suffering. 

Alex: Absolutely. Absolutely. Absolutely. But we're still getting into that notion of ego and.

My pride has been hurt, I'm now angry, I'm frustrated because you're not reciprocating the love that I give you unconditionally, but you must do what I 

Andrea: want. Right, or you did this to hurt me, or something. Yeah, 

Alex: yeah. And we've, you know, most of us have been through relationships like that, where there's a control element, or a fear element, or we'll...

Perhaps she'll change or perhaps he'll change or [00:34:00] something and things will be different if only if Uh, and this that's hugely connected to attachment and dualism sort of breaking into Even if it is that cost benefit analysis, well, what would be the worst thing that would happen if you left this person?

Andrea: Trying to anticipate all the possible Yeah. Pain and suffering that could come . 

Alex: Absolutely. Um, is it, what's her name? Brown. She got, the name goes backwards to me. Is it De Denny Brenny Brown or 

Andrea: something? Bren Brene Brown. Yeah. Yeah. Brene Brown. That's, yeah, I was getting the name. She's talking about like, be brave.

Being brave or something. 

Alex: Courage. Yeah. Being brave and, and playing with the dichotomy of, or what if scenarios. Mm-hmm. , I like the scenarios of. Um, like the two parts to ourselves working on that duality, that there's one aspect of ourselves or parts analysis saying, I want to be with this person because they're the greatest person.

They're absolutely gorgeous. I love them, love them. And the other side, they're really jealous and they're always moaning at me. And, you know, we're not really compatible [00:35:00] with certain things. And you try to bring that together. So whether it's Philosophical Cartesian dualism of mind body you bring it together and things gel a bit more because when you're in sync with who you are Deep down whatever we mean by that because that becomes philosophical spiritual or whatever But it just resonates and you go this is a great relationship, And it's fine And if she wants to go off or he wants to go off and do their own thing and the relationship splits I don't care.

I still love them. I love them for who they are 

Andrea: That's a different level, isn't it what kind of love is that in the Greek sense, when you actually love someone enough that they can be free to be who they are and you're still going to love them? Yeah, 

Alex: because you may be, you know, let's say it's a typical relations split, you're angry, yeah, and then you grieve, and you go through the psychological elements of all that anger, denial has not happened, and yeah, the psychologists are very good at that.

Um, but they're still dealing with the more bodily, biochemical, uh, associative, cultural associations we have about what is a relationship and what I should be in. It's suddenly [00:36:00] taken away. But that becomes the ego. A higher level of love is having to let go of all that, which is in a lot of theology and high level philosophy.

Because if you let go of the attachment to the word love, for example, or you let go of this notion that there has to be one person on the planet of seven plus billion people that you have to find, I mean, 

Andrea: hilarious. And they only find you. They are never attracted to anyone else ever. Exactly. 

Alex: Yeah. All the variations.

Andrea: This is switching gears a little bit, but it's actually on this dichotomy. Do you think love and hate are opposites?

Because. And or love and war because as you were just describing, there's actually a lot of war and what we might think of as hate involved in these relationships that we call love relationships. So do you think of them as opposites or how do you see that? 

Alex: Um, to me, everything's on the spectrum. It's like turning the volume up, right?

Um, all is fair in love and war is something I work on for my academic work on the philosophy of war. Absolutely. [00:37:00] So, uh, when we give up the ethical notions of what is a just war theory, how to treat the other, the enemy, and there's that phrase, all is fair in love and war. And my joke there is like, how would you treat somebody that you supposedly love?

If you say, well, anything's fair, I will use any means the art 

Andrea: of war 

Alex: style. Yeah. To control this 

Andrea: person. In love. Sounds very destructive. It is destructive. For both 

Alex: people. Yeah, and that's where, as Westerners going back to the beginning of what, why we look at a definition and start to unravel it and say, hang on, there are levels here.

And I think there's levels of being in love, of being in the world and consciousness anyway. But we start to realize that a lot of loving relationships are controlling and there's hate there, or there's fear, there's anger, I need to control you. There's a lot of relationships 

Andrea: like that. It's goes back to that where you feel something so moving and so.

Amazing and so sensory and then maybe you're just in it and but [00:38:00] then when you're when you start to think about it later Like you start to realize oh, maybe I'm gonna lose it or maybe I'm not good enough You know, there's a lot about that and yeah 

Alex: Which is another Greek problem. 

Andrea: So it almost It kind of reminds me again of what you said about Aristotle running away from the mysticism.

There's something scary about This powerful kind of whatever it is this feeling at one with someone or something or the or the world There's something scary about it 

Alex: I've had that feeling. I don't know about you. Uh, I mean, please reply because, um, 17, 18, I had it twice and minor events since where I just look at the world like the world behind me.

And it's just one. It's just a spiritual. I only saw it written down by an American astronaut. Who, and I can't remember his name, but on the way back in the, the module, um, he looked at the earth and suddenly he realized that everything he was seeing around him was just one. And the way he wrote it, I was like, oh my God, somebody else has felt that. Mm-hmm. . And once you've. Touch [00:39:00] that you realize there is something more and so Argued with it because I'm quite rational.

I'm analytical philosophical. Obviously, I argue with what does that mean and trying to dissect it? And only in the last two or three years or so After doing some sort of self work and getting beliefs I mean, I study beliefs, but actually throwing my own beliefs onto paper and analyzing them and going, where the heck did that come from?

What does that mean? Probably from a book. 

Andrea: Yeah. A book. Someone 

Alex: else. Cultural upbringing. You know, my parents generation, you left work at the, you know, you left school, started work at 16, 17. You got married at 20. You had kids at 

Andrea: 24. That sort of thing. This is all that stuff in the backpack that we carry.

Yeah. The backpack, 

Alex: the momentum. And then all my own crazy beliefs and fears and worries and all those fears and worries are in that lower level of, I'm afraid of the universe, but I always knew that the universe is a benign place overall, it's always kind of a neutral.

Yeah. [00:40:00] Neutral is a very good powerful 

Andrea: energy, but not necessarily positive or negative. No, 

Alex: that's it. And if you see that, you can then look at the others. You walk past in the street and go beautiful person. And maybe you're going back to Plato, obviously, but I'm saying no, there's, we're all connected at that level.

Andrea: I think most people's most important, experiences or memories, no matter how nerdy. We are usually have some connection to feeling like you're part of something larger, even if it's just that you recognize a way that you felt in some philosophical text that was expressed by someone else.

I mean, in a way that's already this expansion, isn't it? Right. But when it comes to philosophy, we're not really allowed to talk about it in certain terms, right? Or you get. It's not serious anymore, in science too, right, where you can't go too far with and still be taken seriously when you talk about these things that they, I think it is hard.

I mean, there are reasons why, [00:41:00] because it is so easy to go overboard or use it, um, in negative ways. Uh, so there's reasons for it. But , it is hard to, as you're saying, to express these things, in philosophical terms without alienating one side or the other of this kind of spectrum, 

Alex: especially in the bubbles we've created, the academic bubbles, the scientific bubbles alleged, because when you start finding the true thinkers.

Within any of our realms and disciplines and science, particularly, they do keep their heads down a little bit, but then you start feeling that, uh, especially since the quantum revolutions, um, that they play with these ideas in scientific terms, that there's something bigger so they can speak the language.

But in their personal thoughts, um, reminiscences, memoirs, or whatever conversations, they are leaning into something greater than themselves. Something that, uh, a pure consciousness that runs through the universe, which is obviously a metaphysical theory which philosophers have [00:42:00] entertained. The notion that the world is just a consciousness and everything we see is just ideas anyway, or Yeah, it doesn't 

Andrea: Even putting consciousness on it from someone who's studied neuroscience and philosophy of mind even that term itself 

 in a way that's already part of a dichotomy of this mind body thing. But I think that's why it's so hard when you do have these experiences Like you've said you've had and I've had to where you, you don't need to have your sense of self, but you're fully, fully sensorily awake, and it's not like drug induced or whatever, which is fine too. But I mean, it's more like, okay, you just realize, oh, there's a lot more to life and you want more of it. So you want to read more books or you want to run more or whatever whatever it is, it's gotten you to that place.

Maybe it's even a relationship. But we do always come up against some kind of, obstacles to that, don't we? I mean, you don't just live in that space so easily, right? Or do you, I don't know. 

Alex: Yes, it's navigating the world with who we are in this body, this [00:43:00] personality. In the wants of words here, again, we're sort of going into the mystical level. Some just leave that and just are quite happy to. wander around the world with a big grin on their face, just enjoying it for what it is. I was joking with some of my friends and colleagues on the course, it was a bunch of people that were so on the same wavelength that had similar experiences. Yeah, we're talking about the business world, et cetera. So it wasn't spreadsheet. It wasn't rational. It was beyond that. And I said, yeah, enlightenment sounds good, but I don't want to get there cause I've got to put food on the table for the family.

Andrea: Yeah. Why do we think, why did they think those are opposites? It's very, it's almost like there's a kind of a point where if you start making too much money by. By these ideas, then it's much easier to start using them in the wrong way or something, there's something very difficult about it 

Alex: if it's like the money side of the equation, that duality, people who are wealthy can't be spiritual, which is a joke. Kind of crazy. Yeah, I've met people who are very well off, who are very [00:44:00] spiritual and very charitable and loving, and it's a higher level from my own consciousness, sort of, yeah, everything in the world.

Like, yeah, so do I. And they've just attracted money, you know, and yeah. 

Andrea: Well, that's kind of wealth, I guess. Yeah. Yeah. Prosperity and a different 

Alex: people who are extremely poor can be very, very much in that agape level of loving everybody, but they don't have the wherewithal. And there comes a point like in the lives of the saints, et cetera, and the similar, the Buddhist traditions whereby they don't care about the material world.

It's just a game and it's fun. And I think however we look at love, uh, the Greeks had a word for it, ludus. Which playful playful love. We have a playful body like when we dance and listen to music or something. What's a great film with playful. Why can't love be like that? It doesn't have to be serious and the same with life.

, and even though, I mean, uh,, without going to bio, autobiographical details, I've gone through hell over the last few years, the extreme challenges, but I'm still here. I'm resilient and carrying on and I look [00:45:00] at it and go, what a bloody game is this? Can I change the rules? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, 

Andrea: yeah. So I understand you.

I mean, even just today there were some kind of, difficult feelings, and it's good to feel that sometimes because then you realize you can be challenged. Um, you just remember what it's like when you are suffering or when someone does hurt you.

what it's really like, you do kind of go back into your body and there, I was just watching myself and I was like, wow, I really want to get angry or I want to lash out or just like watching how the body reacts.

It made me think about Plato and Socrates and how helpful it can be to have people who've gone through things like that and then share their experiences. That's what you want in those moments. Right. And that 

Alex: that's, yeah, um, just. There was an element of love I wanted to mention, the, um, the standard stoical characterization, the archetype of Mr. Spock on Star Trek, with his funny fingers, and his sense of, you [00:46:00] know, one episode he has to go back for a marriage ceremony and a mating ceremony because they have to reproduce, but it was a rational decision. And that misses out on all the emotions and the stoics. whom we lean into for our rationality and keeping the emotions down stiff upper lip was a an Anglo American phrase.

Somebody said it came from America first, but keep your emotions to yourself boy. Very stoical. Yeah. And as you said, if you tap into yourself, you've got those. Emotions. And if we know from psychology, if we repress them, we're going to cause problems. So if we're in a relationship and it breaks up, we are going to go through the body will do our context will do anger, grief, et cetera, denial and whatever.

Um, and what the hell's happening to me and the fear I'll never meet that other one. That must be how there must be two then. Well, that's it. I'm going to be alone, you know, for the rest of my life. And Oh my God, what's going to happen now? And I get depressed, et cetera. We have to go through that. Uh, and that's where reason education can help us and understand what others have gone through and the [00:47:00] psychology of love can help us break through those elements to say, no, we can be courageous or we can just be neutral about life and people around us before we gain that courage again, that encouragement to look again, because we've recovered.

Just like if a fall over broke my leg, it's going to take a while to mend. And just 

Andrea: We were talking about dichotomies, love, hate, and the desire and the pain and on the other side of love and the past, like you said, you've been through some hard things in the past years.

 Is it necessary in some way to wake up or to , come to know yourself in a way where you can handle more? Of those kind of situations, and maybe give more? 

Alex: Yeah, you're touching on something ironically that I was reading earlier today.

My wife was at a suffering place called The Dentist. Oh! Yeah, she came out. 

Andrea: My husband hates The Dentist. Yeah, yeah. He's starting to like it more now, but yeah, 

Alex: yeah, it sounded medieval anyway, I was reading a semi [00:48:00] spiritual, well, no, I'll say spiritual, uh, whatever book on the Akashic records, the records of everything we do according to this theory in a philosopher, it's a theory, right?

That everything we do, everything we think. Everything that's happened to us now and in past lives, even is in the records and they call it the Akashic or Akashic records and you can tap into it., I was like, okay, this is interesting, and, uh, what are the lessons to learn? And it is that the notion you mentioned earlier about going into yourself and you see, oh, I'm doing anger at the moment and doing grief.

That's interesting. Well, what if we can tap into something greater than ourselves that other higher than reasoned self or higher than or subconscious if psychologists prefer that you tap into that. And then you listen to those voices that come through and say, yes, this challenge is here because it's an opportunity for you to grow and you're not growing at the moment.

And I've argued back, it's like, do I have to go through another challenge? Come on, I'm bored of challenges. Like the number I've had in the last month has just been... You're kidding. 

Andrea: That reminds me of, you were talking about Brene Brown, I think, and um, that made me think of Oprah, [00:49:00] the great Oprah.

And I think she says once, like, she prayed for, courage or and she's never going to pray for it again because the next year was just so full of challenges.

Alex: Cause.

Courage is getting over challenges. Yeah, 

Andrea: then you're going to get the challenges, so you become stronger and more courageous. 

Alex: Yeah, you've got to be careful what you wish for, sort of thing, 

because, uh, some of the quantum physicists who do crossover with psychology say, you know, what we think and what we desire goes out.

There's that there just like at the biological level again, like, um, as a female, you're probably more intuited to, if a man stares at you with desirous, lustful eyes, you'll just get more 

Andrea: used to it. I think 

Alex: so. Yeah, whatever. 

Andrea: I mean, it shouldn't be like that,

but you 

Alex: know when the eyes are turned on to you and you feel like the deer in headlights for a second. Yeah. Who's looking at me? Whereas male to male it's more aggressive. Again, I can't talk about homosexual community, but you know, that'd be a 

Andrea: fascinating conversation. Well, I think the gaze, whether feminine or male, that when it's turned on you in a certain way, you.

It's 

Alex: yeah, you wake [00:50:00] up to it. Yeah. Yeah. Be interesting conversations, my gay colleagues and friends. But this lady that was reading, I can't remember her name, but she said, we're on this planet to Go through the challenges, and every challenge, and I've had some steep ones recently, I mean, we've all gone through grief, where we've lost somebody, and you realize the ephemeral nature of that love we have for the other. A relative, a friend, and you go through the loss and, and you realize the rites and rituals of our society that we create has helped to support us to get through it, et cetera.

But it never goes away. It never goes away. 

Andrea: And it's just such a strange thing that someone is there and then they're not there. It's really strange. 

Alex: Which. I mean, you touched on, you know, my, my interest in the philosophy of war and love. There's also death and love because often like the Freud talks 

Andrea: a bit about that.

Alex: Right? Yeah, because we know if we are lovers, um, one day one of us will die. Um, and that's where our love, I'm like, I don't want you to die. You know, I need you. There's that fear. [00:51:00] And it's instinctual and understandable, or we can take a so called high level or different theory, if we want, philosophically speaking, and say, well, don't worry, we're going to come back again.

Or I'm just energy and I'm going to come back to a different body. And this is 

Andrea: just a flow. You don't get away from that. I mean, especially if you're with someone all the time Like we're saying mind and love. These are body things. And when your body is around another body, you become connected, and, and the loss of that,

Alex: yeah, and it's that frightening phrase to go back to where we are because what you brought up is again, attachments and the Buddhists say you've got to drop. Yoda in Star Wars, you know, says attachments lead to, I don't know, whatever, desire, fear, and anger, and the dark side, you know.

And 

Andrea: Plato and Socrates, that was a lot about attachment. Yeah. Love to bodies, you know. I mean, the Greek obsession with the body is for real. there. 

Alex: Yeah, because our body's changing, which is one of the things we see with people who want to be loved [00:52:00] for what they look like is that eros erotica desire, but it's ephemeral, it's going to change. Uh, and the French age gracefully in Paris. They tend to dress accordingly to their age. So they've nailed that one. A lot of us English people sort of go frumpy.

I don't know. I work out. I believe in keeping my body good and strong. Yeah, because I think I'm sort of Greek in my aesthetic leanings. I think, yeah, you got a great, body, make it look good, and be strong. Um, but we know that's ephemeral. Excellence, 

Andrea: this thing of excellence. 

Alex: Yeah, absolutely pursuit of excellence.

I like the peak performance idea. Um, and, and when it comes to the love aspect, you love your body. And Aristotle touched on this as well. You love yourself first. And this woman was saying about the challenges we accept as this body. Hers is an interesting reincarnation philosophy or mysticism that when you enter this body, Which would resonate with people from the Eastern traditions [00:53:00] and non Western scientific traditions.

You make choices about what kind of life you're going to have. I was like, what? Really? 

Andrea: Yeah. What I liked about what she said. So now we're in reincarnation, which is something that most Western philosophers would not touch. No. But we put at the same time would kind of talk about metaphorically for sure.

And exactly, 

Alex: exactly. If you put something on the table, that's all I say. It's like, as a theory, we put anything on the table, such as George Barclay's ideas. Um, Barclay or Berkeley from the American accent. Um, he was Irish. So who knows how they said it? you know, George Berkeley. Um, the notion that everything's ideas, that there's no physical reality out there is an ancient philosophical idea.

The notion that we reincarnate was in the ancient Greeks. It was in early Christianity. The resurrection is also reincarnation ideal. So we can still put it on the table. Yeah. But what I liked about what she said is that you, you chose a purpose. And when you tap into it, you know, Hence going back to that love of education I have and love of educating [00:54:00] people.

Mm-hmm. , I'd educate a tree if nobody is around. or, or 

Andrea: maybe the tree could educate you as well. Exactly. 

Alex: I, I've had that. Mm-hmm. , I've looked, that happens to, yeah. The, the, uh, analogy of the tree's growth and what it's doing and how it's living, it's evolution and why it's there. There's a quantum 

Andrea: physical or just physical presence, you know, too.

Yeah, yeah. There's a quantum physical that it's there and been there for probably a lot longer than, exactly, than you or me. 

Alex: I don't mind admitting on a very, very difficult time I had with a very strange student, very, very dark, really dark, you know, somebody who's, oh, you could feel it. Um, this is very strange.

I had to go and hug a tree and say, excuse me, tree, can you help me? I mean, as a philosopher, as a lot. 

Andrea: I have no, uh, I'm not shy about saying that trees and, I mean, I'm at the sea right now, uh, not in my house. I would show you, but it's out the window. Um, and it helps. I mean, today, even as I was telling you when I had this kind of difficult You know when you go look at the sea and you think, oh look, there's a little boat there.

[00:55:00] That's my problem. You know, and then there's this huge sea. It's like so much more. Yeah. You little boat on the sea. She's hugging a tree. I get it. No problem. Yeah, absolutely. Probably helps 

Alex: you. The sea is brilliant because you're up, you're down, the life goes in and out with you. Mm-hmm. , you've got rhythms of life, which is wonderful when you sit at the sea.

Yeah. And understand that rhythm of life that we're all going through. but yeah, this, this woman, just to finish off that, that comment. Regardless of the reincarnation story, you know, you have a purpose, you tap into it. It could be a subconscious, could be who you are genetically, who cares, right?

The theories we can create there are manifested in philosophy. But she says, every time you come across a challenge, your challenge is to realize you have to love yourself. Because if you can't love yourself, you can't love others. And that was 

Andrea: Aristotle. It seems so simple and it's so basic, but it's so easy to forget.

And it's so hard. And weirdly loving yourself is kind of loving everyone. It's kind of connected. 

Alex: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, because you love here inside yourself and I'm pointing to my heart, which is because I think that's where I am. Why am I there? It could be my little toe, but it could be [00:56:00] this aura around me.

I don't know. But coming back to that self love, um, which Aristotle taps into, which is part of the Western tradition and something I realized or intuited when I was about 17, first girlfriend, you know, and I remember her saying that she didn't love herself.

And I was like, Back of my head was going, Oh, that's a problem. 

Andrea: How can she love me then? Yeah, 

Alex: exactly. And later on, I read it in Aristotle. Ooh, somebody with a big brain said the same thing, you know, but it makes sense because if you're connected with your body with whatever we call that inner self or the big S self or subconscious or whatever it is, who we are deep down, then we connect with others immediately.

 And we may do that on an energetic, conscious plane or just a relationship plane, transactional if you want to call it, who cares. Various metaphors for how we explain our communication and love with others. 

Andrea: To just pick that up for a second, you feel it when someone loves, loves, right?

Because if, if you can love yourself and you can love [00:57:00] others, you do feel different around. You feel different around yourself when you feel that way. And of course you feel different around people this gets again to this very hard question of what is love.

But if it's this kind of love where you don't need anything, don't judge anything, but you feel really sense, sincerely awake and, um, welcoming, there's a difference. There's a difference, uh, that happens and yeah, it is a nice place to live. That's I like 

Alex: that phrase welcoming. Because some people don't want to be welcomed into your life.

 So those are the people who's, whether we are reading on the physical level, their mannerisms, the way they're holding themselves, there's an anger, there's a frustration, there's a grief, there's an introvertedness about them, they're shy. 

Andrea: Kind of like you said though, where they don't... They're hiding or something, you said that earlier.

They're hiding themselves, yeah. Or they just don't feel good about themselves, right? Yeah, yeah. Self doubting, or somebody said, told them they're ugly and terrible. [00:58:00] And they're trying not to believe it, you know. Yeah, 

Alex: and some of the great children's stories or romances, etc. One that comes to mind is a beautiful, beautiful book, Anne of Green Gables, Louise Montgomery, and her, how she comes into the realm of a family who adopt her and just allows the love to flow.

That actually brings tears to my eyes. It's like listening to a beautiful piece of music. It's like, oh, that's so gorgeous. And you look at somebody who is not looking after themselves, who are victimized themselves, or they're in a bad state, or they're in just a bad mood. And you think, yeah, there's something beautiful in you.

We just have to reach it. You feel that connection. And then when you're welcoming somebody who wants to be welcomed, wow, the energy just flows. Uh, and there's a compatibility on a rational sort of level. The heart is reading somebody else, which is why people who are intuitive at that level, and that is a philosophy, we can study intuitivism. How do we know we're in love? Well, I can intuit it. And it's just a proposition. You [00:59:00] can't question it. You can't measure it. It just is kind of Buddhist. So there's an overlap there between that mystical and that rational philosophical tradition that we follow and analyze, the depths of.

books. So when we're with somebody who is, that lovely word, I love it, welcoming, bienvenue, coming in, 

Andrea: willkommen. No, and not like you have to come, just if you want to, it's kind of open, it's open, it's not like you have to. I mean, welcoming doesn't mean that you're forced. 

Alex: No, and the anthropologists will say, yes, it's because you're giving off certain mannerisms of being a mammal, which all the other mammals do as well. They would go down to the physicality and look at that level, but there's also something intuitive, which perhaps we can't again, going back to the notion of love.

What is it? Is it something beyond? Is it something connected? But you just know at that level, this person I can trust. Right. Now, when we're going through it, just to pull back one, one little section, when we go through those anger and grief, et cetera, we've, we fall into that human monkey side of us or [01:00:00] anger and frustration.

 And it is a challenge and it's that realization. We're still, hopefully people start to, uh be educated on this or get counseling or just friends helping them that we're okay. Inside because ultimately we are so when we see people who are suffering, um, the Romeos or whatever, all the people who are suffering medically or whatever, or just emotionally, mental health, et cetera, you want to reach out to them, say, look, you're okay.

You are okay. Yeah, things are a challenge. But if you can connect down into that self love, that autophilia, I think it's gonna, philautia, it's the other way around, philautia, I've just got to check that on there. So it's not a word that comes to my vocabulary that often, but self love in English is, yeah, you're okay.

And then you can grow again. And then we go through that period of the rebound and then you start looking at other people or whatever, if it's grief or widowhood or something, and you start to realize, okay, I can now get on my life. I still miss my partner, I've lost them, et cetera, [01:01:00] but I'm still alive and I can still express my love for others.

Doesn't have to be intimate, and love for the world, and put that energy into other things, so I can get back to that level. And that's something we try to educate people on, we do as a society, we've got, mechanisms in society, whether it's going to church or something, or going to the counsellors, to bring us back up in that energy, in that connectedness, that it's okay, I've been through it.

Yeah. So when I've read similar experiences, I'm like, Oh my God, somebody else has had that. I thought it was just me. I thought it was weird. You 

Andrea: know? Are we not just being around someone who, takes you for what you are and that's okay? some people don't have that experience where you're okay. Like your parents actually love you just for whatever you are, you know, I mean, a lot of us do have that experience too, but there are some good. Yeah. Some, sometimes it's just like that backpack. Like I keep coming back to this backpack and the, in the path, a lot of us have completely different experiences with having felt that space or knowing that space exists where it's okay to be who [01:02:00] you are.

 Sometimes just knowing, like having someone tell you that or or feeling that space is a, is what someone needs, but it's kind of, can be kind of rare too. Do you think that like philosophy can actually help open that space?

Has it for you? 

Alex: Yeah, absolutely. Perhaps because the nature of my mind that I've inherited or whatever, that it leans into analysis. My first passion, academic passion was economics and politics as well, um, like the way the world was running, et cetera, and getting angry at the world and stuff.

Um, but the passion of economics taught me and and I teach a lot of maths, uh, the analysis we can bring to bear on subjects, including ourselves and our condition. Um, but because that leans into that curious mind, curiosity has led me to probably all the areas in the library, I wander around. I love physical libraries.

Because, yeah, you never know what's going to [01:03:00] attract you. I wander around the stacks and my head gets turned, that Eros almost.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's an interesting book. 

Andrea: I think us nerds know that. 

Alex: It's incredible feeling, isn't it? Um, and one of my students acted as a interlocutor or whatever you want to call it, anamneses, almost for my life. And he was saying, what's that book there on my shelf behind me? And I said, Oh, it's one of my wife's, next week. What's that book there? And it went on for three or four weeks. I said, okay, I'll get it out. I'll have a look at it. Quite interesting. It was, um. M. Scott Peck, uh, the journey, not well traveled or something from the poets, from the, uh, the American 

Andrea: poets. The path, path less traveled from the Frost 

Alex: poem. Yeah, yeah, the road less traveled, I think he, something like that. I opened it up, I couldn't put it down. He's a psychiatrist. So it was what you needed.

Andrea: The student was trying to point you to it. 

Alex: Yeah, interestingly, the lad who kept saying that was artistic, artistic, I should say, because if I say that in school they go, autistic? No, [01:04:00] artistic. 

Andrea: Artistic, yeah, I thought you said autistic too, 

Alex: I wasn't sure. Yeah, I've got to be careful how I say that was Artistic, very much arty, and there's cartoons and great drawings.

And he was just intuiting this book for me. I was like, wow, that's interesting. And I fell in love with the book and fell in love with the ideas. Taught me a lot more about the human condition. So you grow that notion philosophically about the human condition can be looked at philosophically, rationally.

We look at the great traditional works in philosophy. But then we can spread our wings and we can find great gems of philosophy in literature, in writings, in the poets, of course, who always try to stretch our mind into that, which is not spoken of like Wittgenstein. He says of that, which we can't speak.

We should remain silent. It's like, really go to a concert, mate.

Andrea: Yeah, that's true. Music can express, but there are still some things you can't put into words, even if you can put them into music. Yeah. 

Alex: And again, I feel Wittgenstein was hitting that, although he changed some of his ideas, the [01:05:00] later Wittgenstein, of course, there's an analysis on that, that he was hitting that, that glass ceiling I mentioned earlier of reason.

It's like trying to understand anything, whether it's love or whatever. It's like, ah, I can't get any further. So I better shut up. So yeah, philosophy can help.

And I remember actually, cause you're in Holland, uh, the Netherlands, um, there's philosophical cafes or philosophical counseling, which I read about maybe 20 years ago, where people would go and discuss life, death, love, et cetera. Oh. As counseling sessions, so rather than psychoanalytical or, cognitive behavioral psychology or whatever fashionable things going on through psychology, we'll just discuss what do we mean by death?

What do we mean by love? What do we mean by life? Like, where do you come from? What is life? Enables us to unravel, going back to the beginning, what I was saying about, you look at the word love, it's very slippery, it covers that egoistic, desireful, controlling element, as well as that tragic element of love ends in tragedy, or all's fair in love and war, through to, hang on now, what if it's a great benevolence towards [01:06:00] everything?

It's a higher level, and at that level you start to recognize your desirous. Attraction to the erotic, uh, the beautiful people, et cetera, it's just the monkey brain or whatever. It's just ephemeral. And 

Andrea: then you move on to Or it starts to change . I think that speaks to like the, how we were talking about things are continuous.

So when you start to think about those weird. head turns and attractions, they actually start to change to, it's not separate. There's a kind of weird process of becoming aware of what your body is, moving towards and then it changes your what paths are open or what.

What your body wants to move towards. Yeah. So it's this dynamic 

Alex: thing that's that's absolutely, and with as, as philosophers start to delve into, what the heck is that about ? What is going on with the body? That then trains my mind to look at something differently. Is it just experience or is there something else I'm tapping into?

Is it my reasoning, my reflection? Because something about us philosophers is that we reflect on what we learn. And then when [01:07:00] we teach it, like our conversation, we get a feedback about what we've learned and what we think we've understood. And we start to see different angles and we learn more and we expand our understanding of what's going on around us.

Hopefully, 

Andrea: that's sort of what I was trying to get at by asking you if the books help you or whatever, because It does there is a way in which you, that space that we were talking about can be opened by, these kinds of texts, no matter if it's Plato or someone else and seeing how other people have processed it 

Alex: ago. Exactly. I was just about to say that. There was a phrase, I can't remember who, whether it was Quine who mentioned it, somebody, 20th century philosopher mentioned, when we read the great literature, the great philosophers, we are partaking in the great conversation.

And I love that phrase. It's wonderful. Yeah, because the ancient Indian philosophers that we can tap into these days, we're still partaking in something that people were going through. Similar to what we can understand, empathize, sympathize with 2, 000, 2, 500, even 

Andrea: 3, [01:08:00] 000 to 

Alex: me. There's a joy, uh, one of my favorite texts, um, the Odyssey, uh, and the Iliad, uh, Homer's epics.

I mean, they're epics, they're great adventures in life, and they're heroic ideals and what that means. They still speak to us. 

 Heroism or an adventure or love or whatever. Which again connects back , when we talk about love, what was love to the Romans?

When you read Ovid very much erotic, desire. I've gotta have that girl, we can still talk to us, although he may have a different, linguistic landscape with the subtleties and the valuations relative to his society and what was going on there.

Andrea: It still comes with all these difficult things that we've been talking about. Yeah. 

Alex: The desires and the suffering. Yeah. Again. Yeah. The suffering of love that we all go through as teenagers. I'm trying to understand love and yeah, philosophy may help there to say, well, this is what you're going through. It's the desire stage. It's the hormones, et cetera. But you can love people on different levels. But yeah, this, this repressiveness [01:09:00] that we are trying to understand politically today, that I had some great conversations with teenagers who sometimes say it as it is, or they're trying to make humor of, the difficult subjects they're dealing with culturally, such as the LVGTQ plus, uh, identity process we're going through.

I say, it's ancient. I say to me, it's just, it's always been there. Right. People have cross dressed. People have wanted to be the opposite sex. People have 

Andrea: loved each other no matter what you call them. Male, female, whatever. I mean. Exactly. And there's always been a spectrum of male, female. There's never just like one thing. We all have different aspects of that. 

Alex: Absolutely. I had a friend laughing as I was working with a friend today. I just said in passing, I said, I have a very strong feminine and a very strong masculine side. I do judo. I work out. I love watching martial arts and doing martial arts, a judo coach, but I love the ballet and I love opera [01:10:00] and I love beauty and I love art.

Some are more bloke ish, as we say in English, more what do you call it in America, the sort of sports stereotype, the, um, the jock. Yeah, something like that, and there's the more feminine, regardless of sexuality. Some very feminine men are heterosexual, it doesn't matter.

And so this goes throughout history.

Andrea: I think it's important to say that even though it's always been true that many people love each other, no matter the sex and that there's this continuum of masculine and feminine, there has been definitely a lot of people who decide.

From whatever position of power that they're in that one thing or the other is wrong and that people are persecuted That is definitely for real It might not be for real in the sense of like that there was ever the existence of someone only loving in a particular way But we've definitely tried to make rules and design those backpacks right or design those Walking trails or whatever so that you're not supposed to go there or yeah, 

Alex: Because everybody's trying to understand who they are, but when it's politicized, and you have to fall into this [01:11:00] category and that becomes rigid and that Puritanism, funnily enough, it's like, There's only one kind of love, and there's only one kind of sex you can have, and all this, and it's absolutely balmy when we look at the great condition, the human condition, it's on that spectrum again.

It's all over the place. It's, it's, if we want to see it as a circus, it's great fun.

Andrea: Again, I'll bring up the Aristotle running away from the mysticism fear of the agape or whatever. Are we afraid to look into the kind of reality of their being, this continuum, no beginning, no end , does it feel like an abyss or something?

And so we create all these somewhat constricting, sometimes. Why do we do that? It's fear. Yeah. Why 

Alex: do we do it? It's fear. It's being afraid of the other. we dip back into that fear that I shouldn't love this person. We're categorizing. Kind of person, yeah. Yeah, because that's fearful. And having been in many countries and taught different people from various backgrounds, going back to Plato's thoughts, I [01:12:00] started to see the beauty in different kinds of people. The categories that in semi, what we call working class backgrounds, in England, semi working class, lower middle class backgrounds, um, the stereotypes you create, the teenage categories, the fears, the tribalism, the clan, as it were, it's like, oh, it's not part of my clan.

And I remember my, um a relative saying that, Oh, you shouldn't date her. She's not one of us. Well, I got my back up, you know, what do you mean one of us, what's that mean? I love this person. Yeah, it's like other, keep away. 

Andrea: Even when we think we don't, we probably do it. 

Alex: Yeah, there's probably that partiality, which we go to agape, the highest love, and it should be unconditional towards everybody or everything and everything.

But then there's that friction, as I mentioned at the beginning, we become partially infatuated or in love with somebody or that compatibility. So you may be attracted instinctively, head turning towards some of the broad grade, of somebody looking good and happy person and go easy, they're sporting or artistic or whatever you like.

 And then you find the fine [01:13:00] grain doesn't really match. And it's kind of a compatibility of. Souls or whatever, or just functionalities, however philosophers want to see that. , but we almost instinctively, tribally, when you look at the ethnology, it's like us versus them. Um, but that humanism, which philosophers can teach.

Even if we disregard the notions of spirituality, mysticism, etc., and we leave that to the priests, or whatever we want to call it, and you get to that high level of reason, as a human, the humanist ethic, realizes that there is something in everybody that we must respect, we should respect, as part of our ethos, as part of our ethic towards others.

As we experience more, read more literature, philosophy, watch films, we see that beauty, we see that element of love in others. Mm-hmm. And you start to see the beauty. 

Andrea: I think that's what books and movies and art does at best, right? It shows us. Yeah. That, oh, actually all these other things are acceptable. Even if our parents said they weren't, once you have like [01:14:00] a hit TV series where there's all these different kinds of people all completely accepted and loving each other, then suddenly you find that more society, society starts to accept it more.

So at its best, it's opening those paths,

gets back to this mind body, what we were talking about, where it's only once you start to maybe question that, that you then realize that you've had those beliefs and that they've guided you actually.

Alex: Yeah. And that brings us nicely to what we do in philosophy is that everything, if we think again, a philosophical statement we can challenge, but we live a life of beliefs, but a lot of those beliefs are hidden. But once we start enunciating them, and it may be a quip, it may be a joke, maybe something somebody else says, and we laugh because we understand where they're coming from.

But we put that belief on the table as philosophers. And we pick it apart. It's like, where does it come from? We could go into the sort of pragmatic, the American pragmatists of, is it a useful belief? Does it do anything for us? Or is it a true belief? Where did it come from? And why do you [01:15:00] accept this?

 If somebody gives you a belief that it's not very nice, would you accept it? You don't have to. So why have you got all this, rubbish in your head? That probably causes a lot of confusion in your mind about what is the nature of love or what is the nature of you, your existence, 

Andrea: uh, the existence of love.

What's okay, what's not okay, how do you know the 

Alex: difference? Yeah, yeah, and you put it down on the table. You've probably gone through this more recently than I have, you sit down philosophy 101 whenever you start it, the tutor, the professor provokes your brain. We try to shift your paradigm, your pattern of thinking.

So you look at things differently. So you follow, you create your own journey rather than somebody else's journey. It's great you 

Andrea: say that because my very first philosophy class, I remember so well and it's exactly like, Oh, I can think about this differently.

It was this, there is something the teacher can give you. I think this brings us back to that education and philosophy, love of knowledge and so on. It really. I was like, Oh, you can think about things differently and make different decisions [01:16:00] based on that, that might actually be more exciting and open you to another life.

Alex: Yes. Um, because of our cultural upbringing, nature versus nurture, you know, it's a dichotomy, which I don't agree with, but there's elements of it, obviously, uh, cultural upbringing, the language we use, go back to that language landscape, the way we look at the world, isn't it? It's the way we look through the world with the language we use.

In our minds, which we've picked up, when we start to challenge it, and I let things flow through me or whatever it is, and then I can reflect and then analyze and bring in my Western tools, et cetera. And yeah, and to emphasize that the experience to be more philosophical about anything, whether it's love, uh, to remind us, it's not just the great texts, that great conversation has a lot to say to us, but it's also listening to the neighbor at times who says something and you go, Ooh, that's.

Deep, even though they might not know it. It may be in a song. 

Andrea: Just being open to seeing things differently. Philosophy can teach you that. So just last [01:17:00] question to wrap this up a little bit for now. How can, I mean, you already started talking about it, but can love get us, it does love have an opposite or can it be something without an opposite?

What do you think? 

Alex: Um I'll answer historically first. Most philosophers say you can't have love without hate, for example. I can't have good without evil and the theodicy idea of there must be a contrast to understand you can't have hot without cold.

 It's an element we understand. We understand the opposites and it helps us frame our mind. Personally, my philosophy is I go back to that idea of volume or spectrum. It's like you can turn love down to almost zero. I don't think you can get to zero love unless. You're inanimate.

Andrea: Yeah, there's something about being alive that is... 

Alex: Yeah, an amoeba loves... Flipping around in a little petri dish, whoopee! Paracellular, yeah, unicellular creatures have been shown by biologists to respond [01:18:00] to cultural environments, etc. and things, and, they respond as conscious beings.

And there's a love there, self love, which they don't think about, we presume. But as we turn up that consciousness within the animal kingdom, within us, et cetera, we're much more conscious, but we can be aware through imagination, we could be of a higher level. So to me, love starts with that beginning of life, that single cell.

is an entity which has a purpose to be itself, that is in a sense a love. We get to the complexity of the human brain and we start creating all this complexity and confusion that we start to introduce hate, rather than, well, that spider that's just dropped down in front of me is what it is.

Doesn't hate me. Why should I be scared? Why should I hate spiders or hate this kind of music or hate these kind of people or hate this in history or hate This school subject. What 

Andrea: is that? I don't understand it. It's kind of what it's saying. Yeah, I'm afraid of [01:19:00] it afraid It's way too different from me.

It has like a completely different body and is moving different in the case of the spider. 

Alex: Exactly And likewise with individuals we meet, they dress differently, what's going on there. 

And if we can connect, there's love and it grows. And I don't think it disappears until, you look at an inanimate object like a pen or something. The pen doesn't love me, although I might love it as a desiring craving. I need this pen. It's mine. Sentimentally. So we can turn it down from my point of view and turn it up, although a lot of philosophy loves that clash because we do like a clash as humans.

We like watching sports as a clash of teams or the martial arts. Yeah, and 

Andrea: maybe, maybe that's okay if we could realize in this way we've touched on a bit like that. That's a kind of, not a game, but it's an exercise or a dance that we're playing so that we can grow, but it's not actually the state of things, that things are much more complex things look different at different points in life, that's for 

Alex: sure. Yeah. Different experience and different thoughts. And I would say with love, [01:20:00] the greatest insights we get are those that are straining at the leash. To explore the ineffable, the things we can't put into words too easily, the poets, the writers, the literary, the greats, the, the Shakespeare's, the Homer's, the Cervantes, the chap who wrote Don Quixote, are straining. And when we read that, we can feel that straining towards a better understanding of love, which is relating back to us the human condition, which the psychologists talk about, which the philosophers then analyze and examine and test the theories and say, no, we need to push this or this doesn't make sense, throw it back to the psychologists.

And the writers are out there on their own. And I think we have to give that due respect to, it's not just the philosophical canon. that gives us like the backbone. We can spread out and then bring that back. Those philosophical insights we get from writers such as Margaret Atwood or or from Homer and the notion of devotion as love of Penelope.

You can hear it in a lyric, as we said earlier, a piece of music, you hear a 

Andrea: [01:21:00] lyric. Music is definitely, yeah, philosophy. A lot of our, influential philosophers are probably doing it through lyrics.

Alex: They are. They're teaching us what the philosophers have said, or every now and again you get a nuance that you think, Hey, that's a really good nuance that teaches us as philosophers who know the canon well. So it doesn't just have to be the philosophical text.

You can get philosophy from across the whole high street of shops that are out there. 

Andrea: I like that a lot. That's definitely like getting. Beyond thinking of it only as some specialized 

Alex: thing. Dry subject, as it were. That dry subject is actually very sexy when you get into it to use.

Oh, 

Andrea: yeah. In many different ways, depending on what turns you on, if you like analytic or continental or... 

Alex: Whatever. Absolutely. So study broadly, but also delve deep every now and again. When you find a philosopher that resonates with you. 

Fall in love with a philosopher, , doesn't matter who it resonates. There's a reason they're in your life. Let yourself 

Andrea: fall in love 

Alex: with it. Yeah. [01:22:00] Yeah. There's a reason you have that 

Andrea: relationship. Even if it's the music, right? The lyrics. Absolutely. But hopefully positive lyrics because sometimes we can also get like a little bit obsessed with the negativity and that can be very bad too if you're not listening over and over again to some negative, the pain of it all, the suffering.

Alex: Yeah. You could go down with them at that level or you could use it as a springboard to go, at least I'm not as bad as that.

Andrea: Um, all right. So now it's been two hours. So I think we have to make ourselves get off of the computer, but I really thank you for this.

It was great.

Alex: Appreciate it and appreciate your time for doing this. It's been fun. It's woken my brain up