Professor Jeremy Carrette Inaugural Lecture Recording of Professor Jeremy Carrette Inaugural Lecture View media transcript Welcome. Please be seated. A very warm welcome to everyone to the opening lecture of the School of Divinity for the Academic year 2024, 2025. My name is Professor Sarah Prescott. I'm a Professor of literature. I'm Vice Principal and Head of the College of Arts and Humanities and Social Sciences, of which the School of Divinity is one of our 11 schools. So we have a real range of disciplines across the college from history, archaeology, and classics to philosophy again, language sciences, and also Edinburgh College of Art, lots of practise based work around film and music amongst lots of other things. I'm delighted that the opening lecture of the School of Divinity is joined with the inaugural lecture of Professor Jeremy Carrot. It is a great occasion to open the academic year and welcome all the new students, as well as to celebrate the professorial appointment of Jeremy Coret in the School of Divinity. Now, before Professor Coret delivers his lecture, I'm going to just talk about some of his amazing achievements over his career. Professor arret joined us a year ago, and it's been an absolute delight to work with him as the head of school over the last year. I'll start with some academic achievements. Professor Corett was born in Cheshire, south of Manchester, and brought up in New Castle Upon Tye. He holds a BA degree in theology from the University of Manchester, 1983 to 1986, completing a final year dissertation across the departments of Theology and psychiatry with social ethicist, Professor Anthony Dyson, and psychiatrist doctor Robert Hobson. He then completed an MPL on the psychology of religion at the University of Lancaster in 1990 with doctor Adrien Cunningham, where he examined the work of Swiss psychiatrist Carl Young. He completed his PhD in 1997, in the philosophy of religion at the University of Manchester, with a study of the work of Michelle Fuca under the supervision of Professor Grace Jansen. Grace Anson remained an inspiration to his philosophical work, and He edited with Professor Maori Joy of the University of Calgary the posthumous, multi volumed work of her feminist philosophical study of death and beauty in Western Philosophy. As I mentioned, Jeremy Cort became head of the School of Divinity and Professor of Philosophy, religion, and Culture here at the University of Edinburgh in August 2023. He had previously been dean for Europe at the University of Kent, where he managed the postgraduate centres, in Paris, Brussels, Rome, and Athens, and was previously appointed to a personal chair in 2008 as Professor of Philosophy, religion, and culture, teaching in both the Department of Religion and the Department of Philosophy. He was also head of the School of European language culture and language, and head of religious Studies at the University of Kent. He was previously head of religious studies at the University of Sterling 2023-2004, where he worked from 1997. He'd also previously taught psychoanalysis at Goldsmiths University of London, 199-03-9905, and he's also worked as a specialist teacher for autistic children. Moving on now to give you an overview of Professor Corets research, which focuses on interdisciplinary aspects of religion, philosophy, psychology, culture, and politics, as his trajectory and life has shown in the outline I've just given you. His research is built on the philosophical foundation of knowledge as relation, developed through his study of Michel Fuca and William James, who both followed the French philosopher, Charles Rinovier, in seeing the central category of knowledge after CNT as relation. Professor Caret explores these relations by seeking to examine the silence part of religious thought to build new relationships, and an ethical sensibility for the body and social justice. His work takes inspiration also from his father, Reverend Canon David Coret, who as an Anglican priest, sought to listen to the marginalised and rejected, both inside the church and in wider society. Professor Coret has published numerous books and articles on the work of the French philosopher Michael Fuca, including Michelle Fuca and Religion, 2000, the edited collection of translated papers, Michelle Fuca on religion, and edited with James Bernier, Michel Fuca and Theology. He's also published extensively on William James, including editing with Eugene Taylor, the centenary edition, of the varieties of religious experience and edit the related collection as well. He subsequently published his study, William James' Hidden religious Imagination, at University of Relations in 2013. Professor Cort gave the 2002 Cunningham lectures at the University of Edinburgh, which were then published as religion and critical psychology, religious experience in the Knowledge economy in 2007. With his friend and colleague, Richard King, he published a critical reading of neoliberalism and religion. In their work, selling spirituality, the silent takeover of religion, and there's a tenth anniversary edition due to appear next year. 2009-2013, he led an AHRC ESRC large grant project with Professor Hugh Mile on religious NGOs and the United Nations in New York and Geneva, which resulted in the jointly edited work, religion, NGOs, and the United Nations visible and invisible actors in power, Bloomsbury, 2017, and also a special study of Quaker international activity at the UN. Professor Cort's present research includes articles on Archbishop William Temple and Land ethics, a review of Anglicans and the environment, as well as working towards his next monograph on William James's pragmatic theory of love, which I think we hear more about this afternoon. With the Late Professor Robert Morris and the Late Timothy Sprigg of the University of Edinburgh Schools of Psychology and Philosophy. Professor Corett organised the centenary Conference of William James' 1902 Gifford lectures, the varieties of religious experience, which took place in old College in 2002. He also gave the prestigious Harvard Divinity School, William James Lecture in 2013 and has presented the keynote addresses to the Brazilian National Conference on Religion and Psychology in both 2012 and 2017. He is also co founder and co director with Professor Kenneth Fincham of the Centre for Anglican History and Theology. 2020-2023, and from this led a series of conferences and publications on radical Theology, examining the work of William Temple, John Robinson, and Don C Kupe. So there's an overview of Professor Curet's amazing academic and career achievements. But I also want to note that in his spare time, it's a sort of euphemism, I suppose as being head of school. He's also a keen runner, a very good runner, I think, as well. He also supports Newcastle United Football Club and has a love of Brittany lighthouses, as well as enjoying with his French wife and children the South Coast of France. I'd now like to welcome you all and introduce Oppressor Cort, who is going to deliver his inaugural lecture, which is entitled a Philosophy of Love, Nietzsche, Lualme, and William James. I'm going to sit at the front so I can see the slides. Thank you so much, Sarah. And thank you for all of those words of which the core is that all that I am is built on relation. And the tributes to all of the academics that I've worked with are, in many ways echoing through everything that I do. And on the note of relation, I just want to say a thank you to all of you who have taken time out of your busy schedules to be here this afternoon. And I understand that as part of this academic year, we're also opening this to new students. And so to all of the new students, I want to particularly say, welcome to the University of Edinburgh, and I hope that a lecture on the Philosophy of Love is a good beginning to your academic careers. I also would like to take a particular thanks to all of the colleagues and friends who are here, some from previous universities, some who've travelled far and wide. It's great to share this moment. And also, particularly to friends who've come from France, and I want to particular thank you to Joe and Fred for coming who sustained our childcare through our time in Paris. It's great to see you here. Our daughters are not here, but they did promise to watch the video, so. Thank you, Lauri, for recording. I also would like to thank Fiona Smith, the Principal Clark of the Church of Scotland for this use of this beautiful space today. Really appreciate that, and it's good that you're here. But above all, on a talk of love, I would wish to thank my wife for being here. And I think that when all the words of love that I put forward in academic phrases, I think only you know what they mean in the lived reality. Thank you. Love. Love is an issue in philosophy. But first, I want to begin with the words of love in every day. The Scottish psychiatrist, an existential thinker, ARD Lang, following a very successful, diological, and poetic book called Knotts in 1970, which looked at the entanglements of human interactions. Also published a very little text called Do you Love me in 1976. Later republished as Do you really Love me? With the words really scribbled in red above the original title. The words, do you really love me were the final parts of a dialogue between lovers doubting whether they were physically and emotionally loved by each other. More to the point, they were words about whether different parts of their body were loved and liked by the lover. To the point of questioning whether which eyebrow was more preferred, the left or the right, to which the skillful lover responds. But if I say one, the other will be jealous. A. This set of reflections by this psychiatrist was trying to understand the level of insecurity and doubts that we have about our body image and our intimacy and the fundamental question of whether we feel worthy of being loved, the physical anxiety, and all of this in the face of love's fragility. It shows how the words, I love you have a powerful force rooted in our everyday communications. Likewise, the French structuralist Roland Bart explored the fears of anxieties of everyday love, in his work in 1977, a lover's discourse. Examining a range of positions in love from being overwhelmed and terrified by love to those ascetic and guilt ridden denial of love, to the rejections and embarrassments, to its mystical fusions, and, and I quote, the thunderstruck gaze across the cafe. No doubt Bart knew the best Parisian left bank cafes for such exchanges. But what he makes clear in all of these examples is that love reaches a point where language is both too much and too little. And it's on this sense of too much and too little that it is to remember on this day, which is September 11, the poignancy, that, as many people have now recorded, that some of the final things that were text by the victims in their final moments were in a general sense, Remember, I love you. Such a force of final words led the musician Marc Koffler of the group Dia Straits to write in 2006 and perform with Emma Lou Harris, the song, if this is goodbye. With the words, if I love you, that is all that matters with equally powerful music in tribute to those who lost their lives and those who remained. But what those words do is to echo the fundamental understanding of the too much and too little of the words of love. These powerful examples are ones that challenge us in philosophy, to question whether it is actually possible to think philosophically about love when it's detached from its existential and lived realities in those very painful and sharp moments. We might ask whether philosophers, particularly male philosophers, particularly with weird moustaches and beards, of the male type that dominate 19th century philosophy are adequate for us and whether they fully understand the specificness of the field of use and the gendered specificity of expressions of love. Indeed, Mark Shaffer, and sorry Andrew Shafer, amusing collection, great philosophers who failed at love shows that really, philosophers may not be the best people to ask. As he said, a lover of wisdom and a wise lover are, it turns out, two different things. Of course, not all philosophers fail at love, and there are great accounts of love and the love letters of philosophers. I put here just two examples. John Stewart Mills love for miss Harriet Taylor, though she was married, and he had a friendship with her for 21 years. He did eventually marry her and wrote lovingly in his autobiography of what he called the most valuable friendship of my life. There are also incredible love letters between the French feminist Simon De Bouvoi and the American writer Nelson Algrn, a Transatlantic love affair of some 17 years, which, if you read it has all of that deep passion and tenderness of those who are clearly in love. No doubt, the philosopher and also lover of Simon De Bavi, Jean Pul Sart, was forgotten during these moments of writing. But then Jean Pul Sart did say in his 1944 play, no exit. Hell is other people. Yeah. Despite the challenges and complexity and the philosopher's vulnerability in writing about love. Love is too big an issue for a philosopher to ignore. And it has, as an issue, been erratically explored across Western philosophy. Indeed, from Plato, it has been a core issue. In many ways, Whitehead's statement that philosophy is a footnote to Plato stands out very strongly when we reflect on the question of love, because in Plato's symposium and Phaedrus, there are, of course, key parts of an issue about love, which Ivan Singer in his three volume study of Love has demonstrated. And more recently, Adriane Martin's collection has also acknowledged that significant place of Plato. But despite Plato, love remains an elusive term, though not sufficient, analytical philosophy has attempted to demarcate it. As we see, Robert Brown, in his book, analysing Love, said, there is no public criteria for what love is, but rather a spectrum of words across caring, loving, respecting, attracting, and affection. The spectrum of words returns, of course, to that big question in Greek philosophy, which has taught us many, many things, but it has shown us that love is diverse across Eros, Agape, amplia, desire, care, and friendship. It has also been widened in the Greek tradition to refer to Storge and Pragma, family love and enduring love. Indeed, this diversity of loves in the Greek tradition was picked up by the Canadian psychologist John Lee, in his book, Colours of Love, and exploration of ways of loving to show that diversity of forms and interconnections of different forms of loving. Indeed, the Florist website blog, FTD, also took the idea and said, after demarcating the types of love, why not show it by sending some flowers? One should not underestimate sending flowers, of course. Words for love are diverse and translating love from other cultural and religious traditions can often be distorting. Across a diversity of uses in a variety of different religious traditions. There is a devotional notion of love. There are notions of love related to compassion, states of consciousness, and a wide set of moral consciousness. But my focus here is on the Western philosophical account of love. But even in the Western philosophical account, we have to understand the plurality of positions and also build a critical context for thinking about love. Indeed, modern philosophers have provided a critique of the dominant forms of love and a critique of the imagination of love. Hannah Arnt, for example, in her doctral work, opened up an in depth study of Augustine's theory of love across the dynamics of the love of God and the love of neighbour and argued that there was a fundamental question around the political force and lack of it in Augustine's work. Of course, Foucau has also underlined the historical conditions of love, desire, and pleasure in his new economy for sex, same sex, love. And Bel Hook's inclusive trilogy of work on Love has underlined a whole series of new questions that have been incredibly insightful. From her book all about love, she offered a personal exploration of how we needed to define love and its vitality. In the next volume, Communion, the female Search for Love, she showed the social positioning of women in discourses of love. In her book, salvation, Black People and Love, she called for a renewal of thinking about love, lost as an answer for Black communities and social justice, reviving Martin Luther King's 1963 work speeches on Love. As Bel Hooks rightly indicates, without justice, there can be no love. The correlation between love and justice is, of course, a one oh one complex question in the study of philosophy and religion. It's one to which I will return because the demands by which we think about love require us to understand its ethical implications. Finally, there's also the work of the French feminist Los riga in her construction of the third space for love, a love that transforms our rationality to overcome the patriarchal ego. Instead of love being I love you, she wants a shift to I love to you as an act as a becoming as an acknowledgment of the space between and not a possessiveness of the male ego. These pluralities and complexities lead us to a challenge to the notion of romantic love, and there have been creative explorations of romantic love. Quite recently, Carrie Jenkins, in her work, what is Love, which builds on the work of Bertrand Russell's 1929 study marriage and morals, sought to provide an analytical metaphysics of Polyandry queer and interracial loving. She believes that romantic love can be reshaped and involved to be inclusive. And while I welcome the inclusivity, I think with Lauren Balant in her book, Desire love, that we need to suspend the logic of romantic love and understand the ideology on which it is built, stylized as it is, according to a structure of yearning, conflict resolution, longing for union, a sense of lack, and, as Balant indicates, feeling as a form of destiny. But there are other forms of intimate love and forms of love that are not based upon fusion or a sense of lack. We can explore these models. But I think we need to also suspend the notion of romantic in itself. I think this comes forward in terms of Carrie Jenkins other work, sad love, romance and the search for meaning, of which she tries to explore and overcome the over inflated hopes about love of the happy ever after and to show the problems of the palsity of thinking about intimate connections. Though, I think her work is important in reshaping some of those questions. And of course, we shouldn't underestimate the market driven desire for romantic love in many films and other outlets. I can confirm from a recent visit this summer to Verona, that the Casa Du Julieta, the House of Juliet, which is built on the imaginings of the story of Romeo and Juliet, is an intriguing place. As the tourist guide indicates, although most everything about this house is fiction, the emotions that draw people here are very real. The balcony was added in the 1930s for effect. And later commercial outlets, and, of course, the tourist cues are also being added, though I have to confess with my wife, that we did buy a wonderful pair of heart coloured oven gloves. But what I like about that is that it's a blend of the imaginary and the practical in love. However, in this broad set of issues of the philosophy of love, there is one underlying tension that I wish to explore, and that is love in a Post Darwinian 19th century world, which is rarely considered, but which I would like to open up in a number of ways. I want to call this the problem of the Plato Darwin philosophical problem of love, which in its extremes ranges from indeed Plato's symposium, Around 37380 BCE, two, of course, in its other extreme form, which will be well known, Desmond Morris' 1967 text, the naked ape, which is a text reducing all forms of love to a form of coupling and survival instinct. But in order to do this, I want to take you on a little journey. In order to grasp the full weight of my philosophical problem. And I want to take you to Italy. I want to take you to this particular place of the Italian Lakes and Lake Oto. Because this is an intriguing place of the Sacraonte, the sacred Mount, which is a world heritage site from 2003, and you can ascend from the lake up the hill past 20 chapels dotted at various stages, where you will see a life sized terra cotta statues depicting the life of St. Francis. From birth to canonization. Began in 15 83 and finished in 17 88. As the Italian Ministry of Culture website states, the beauty of the landscape, the silence and harmonious balance between art, architecture and nature, mirror the essence of Franciscan spirituality. Such an artistic legacy holds the life of the St., a theological community, and many strands of love. The love of the monastic community, the love of the monks, the love of creation, the love of God, all captured in this beautiful walk. The site is undoubtedly significant as devotion to St. Francis and carries a tradition layered with discourses from the Biblical tradition. If you go to Chapel eight, You will see on the Sacred mount, this chapel to St. Francis, with paintings of the vision of Azekel, the apparition of Christ by the disciples, Alijah kidnapped on the chariot of Fire, and Solomon's parents watching an angel going to Haven. And standing in front of these is a remarkable terracotta suspended statue of St. Francis in a chariot. And there below are the friars in awe and Loving gaze seeing Francis on the chariot. Now, the chariot is significant in this artwork and carries a distinct cultural symbolism, which as Stuart Piggott has noted in his 1992 text, has always been from the very early oxen cart from around 3,000 2000 BCE, a very long and prestigious form in ancient ritual. He had the capacity to depict power and transcendence and became embedded in the Greek and Roman and Christian tradition, and the symbolism of the chariot took on a new force. Indeed, my fellow biblical scholars will be able to give more detail on that significance of the chart in the Biblical text. But what is significant here is as much the biblical illusion as the fact that it also calls out another chariot, the chariot that links to Plato's Phaedrus, perhaps captured in the loving gaze of the monks. In Plato's Phaedrus, you actually see that the soul is represented by three components, the charioteer, reason, managing the two flying horses, representing the spirit of the will, and the appetite, desire, a combination of forces that wherever we are, we have to manage within ourselves at varying levels of success throughout our lives. The chariot emerges as a fundamental symbol of love in the Phaedrus. Around that time, Plato constructed his own work, the symposium, the discussion about love, beauty, and truth. Now, St. Francis's chariot of devotional and transcendent love and Plato's associated love of mind, beauty, and truth are not the only links of chariots. That we can find in this association to the Monte Sacre. This place is also significant for modern philosophical love. Because, although it being not a chariot, but rather a cart, it is exact a symbol of the love that happened between the German philosopher Frederick Nietzsche and his love of the young Russian Lou Salame on the trip of May 18 82. When it appeared that they gathered with the writer Paul Ray and constructed, you'll see here in the bottom right corner, a particular photograph which became notorious within the philosophical circle, capturing a particular depiction of the three companions. Nietzche had met Lu Salame in Rome in April 2082. Lu Salame was 21, and Nite was 38. But they shared a curiosity, a curiosity about philosophy and became strong intellectual companions. On the walk of the Sacraone, there was a moment of intimacy. Indeed, Frederick Nietzsche proposed marriage, on three occasions to Lou, on all three occasions, she rejected it. Of course, this was of a concern to Paul Rae, who had also tried to win over Lu Salame. And also a question of dispute of Nietzsche's sister, Elizabeth, who disliked the rejections of her brother. This is an intriguing moment, not least because the chariot has become a cart. Whatever happened up on the Monte Sacre, whether they kissed is an enigma of the biographies, but what it does depict is a particular and important set of shifts. The feminist scholar Babette Babich examined this photograph of the three figures and said that rather than linking it to Plato or even to the biblical illusions, that we should rather link it to the Greek myth and the significance of the power of woman and the particular story of Cleobis and Biton in the bottom left. The two sons who took their priestess mother to the temple at Hera without the available horsepower, the two sons pulled the carriage to the temple. And as a reward, they were given the eternal sleep of death. While Babie's reading adds another layer, moving it into a domestic sphere. One thing is very clear in our shift from chariot to cart. We have here a problem of the relationship between love as transcendent, eternal, and related to death, and love as earthed, embodied, and lived. My argument here is that this shift becomes acute after Darwin, and that my three figures, Nietzsche, Salome, and James, help us provide a resolution. Love after Darwin. But what did Darwin say of love? Darwin refers to love in a very general sense. It's principally an idea of the instincts. It's touched on very briefly in 18 59 origins of the species, but it's the later work, the descent of man, and more specifically the expressions of emotion in man and animals in 18 72, where love is associated with animal behaviours. He uses the word love in a very direct sense as relating to mating and what he calls the love antics, such as dancing and plumage displays of certain birds. He also includes his attempt to explore it in a moral sense of love, and the idea of the concept of sympathy in social animals, which, of course, comes directly from some of the discussions of the Scottish philosopher, Alexander Bain, who, as philosophers might wish to know, was the founder of the journal Mind. More significantly, in the study of emotions, Darwin includes a chapter on joy, high spirits, love, tender feelings, and devotion, in which love is correlated with contact or sensation, the quality of touch, habits of nurture, pleasured contact, as seen in cats and dogs, My cat, our cat, will affectionally follow us around the garden, and rub herself along our feet, sit on our lap, purr with contentment, and carry out a great sense of engagement in contact and caress. My dog, as a child, would enjoy its tummy being rubbed for hours and jump up in excitement, lick my face as I entered the door, which for any human display of emotion would be rather excessive. For Darwin, these gestures of my cats and my dogs are love. They are fundamentally the base of physical affirmative contact. If love is classified in these terms according to Darwin, then connection and contact at its primary level is key, and transcendence is marginalised. However, Darwin does also recognise that sympathy is a core part of our species, and that there is a quality of a theory of mind that we also have, which is a sense of understanding the other as another agent with feeling. He also recognises that it's an emotional quality, a bit like the vibrations that are created on music on the body. There is a behavioural and emotional code. He even goes further, but rejects those commentators of his day who suggest that the devotion of looking upwards is, in fact, a correlation between the emotion of love and religion. But he doesn't feel that there's enough empirical evidence at this point. Darwin presents us with a very different kind of love to that that we've seen in St. Francis's community in Lacata, to that of Plato, and we now have to understand the problem of how it was resolved by philosophers. Firstly, to Frederick Nietzsche. Nitzsche is known as a nihilistic philosopher. He is misogynist and takes stereotypical assumptions about women, and above all, is overly sceptical about many things. Why on Earth would we approach him for a question on love? And in many senses, you're right to ask that question. But Nitzsche is a complex and difficult thinker, but he does take us one step along the way for understanding this problem. Even if I think it's not a fully adequate one. First of all, he has a force of thinking related to a dnsian understanding of life, and embracing of life against all odds. He sees Greek philosophy, that of Socrates and Plato, as fundamentally as he says, symptoms of decay. What he wants to do is to rescue what he calls a judgement of life in Greek philosophy, to rescue it what he says as being perceived as worthless, a bit like Cleobis and Bytan, in the analogy earlier. In this way, what Niche seeks to do is to have a Darwinian inspired logic about the body and life. As John Richardson's Nises new Darwinism has indicated in 2004, what he wants to do is to fuse with Darwin at the same time as rejecting Darwin. He ejects all forms of system. In rescuing life, Nietzsche questions idealism and transcendence, as he states. If one shifts the centre of gravity out of life into a beyond into nothingness, one has deprived life of its own centre of gravity. Nate is doing is moving that external reference into the biological force as a way of counteracting the neglect of life. One of the difficulties of course with Nise is that his thinking about love is scattered and fragmented, and indeed, some writers like Ulric Beer in 2020, have tried to bring these together in a book of aphorisms. But in my view, these decontextualized Niche and we lose the project of NTC's thinking across time. A project which began from his inspiration from Wagner and Schopenhauer, and that birth of tragedy where Apollo and Dionysius were reunited into a form of romanticism. Where he says, and I quote, the deepest insights are gained only out of love. But such positivity is soon removed. In his enlightenment, scientific understandings in Human A to Human in 18 78, a work, which Lou Salame had grounded as his positivist work. Love loses its value and becomes empty. It is broken in familiarity and what he calls the wicked game of change. Here we see that he recognises that there's a problem in the idealisation of love, though, somewhat problematically he says that women created this, but also are trapped by it. He then shifts into an aphoristic style in the joyful science of 18 82 and equates love entirely with greed. Greed and possessiveness. He sees love as undistinguishable from these biological forces. But by the time we get to thus spoke Zarathustra, the text here, in 18 83, love is partly rescued as an act of of overcoming a kind w to power, trying to live beyond oneself. Finally, in the Twilight of the idols of 18 89, he comes back to the Greeks and says powerfully, the spiritualizing of sensuality is called love. This is to bring love down to earth. It's against the Greek tradition. It's instinctual, it's Darwinian inspired. But it's highly problematic in so far that he cannot move beyond instinct, and he cannot move beyond masculine forms of possessiveness, and even friendship he says is not compatible with erotic love. Such is the sadness of Nitzsche. If love is limited, as Nietzsche would say, he just about rescues that in thus spoke Zarathustra. And Strikingly, that is the text that he acknowledges was influenced in part by Lou Salame, the moment when he saw the possibility of love. Indeed, love is registered in some positive way there. But in order to understand Niche, I think we have to go to the first commentary of Niche and that first book on Niche was written by Louis Salame, a long and forgotten text from 18 94, where she understands fundamentally that life and philosophy are linked, and she actually recognises that his inability to grasp something of life is that his philosophy is built on suffering and loneliness, and his own maxim, that what does not destroy me makes me stronger. Importantly, she understood that beneath all of that, rejection was a religious quest. Indeed, the attempt to find meaning in suffering and through suffering was his own religious quest. But for the complete picture, we cannot stay in the commentaries of Nitzsche. We have to move to Lus Salme's own voice on love. Indeed, one of the intriguing things about scholarship around love is that trying to get to the heart of Lou Salame, thinking about love is always layered by having to get through Nitzsche because everybody puts Nietzche before Lou Salame. Indeed, it's striking that some of the biographies of Lou Salame indeed always fall back into the men that she's been associated with. Indeed, Julia Vicker's study in her biography looks at a text which she says is inspired by Freud Nets and Rilke, the poet, all who had differing friendships and associations with her. And Angela Livingston's in her own biography is a refusal to prioritise Nitzsche in her own study, preferring a whole different set of relationships, which she regarded as more important. This negativity around Lu Salame in the biographical literature and in academic texts is quite remarkable. Indeed, in the Sea of Faith series and by the philosopher Don Cupid, in an otherwise brilliant series of reflections of which I recently had a conference, introduces Lucame in a very complex way, and actually says that this was the person who seriously disturbed the Bachelor life of Nisa. And that she was framed, and I quote as volatile and difficult. But we may ask, to whom? Was she volatile and difficult and is not rather the problem of Nietzche and a better description of Nitza. Biographers have also referred to her as a wayward disciple of Nitzsche. Indeed, as has been pointed out by NASA and Yesdal, in their were women philosophers of the long 19th century, Salame was more than a, a mentor, and a collector of male genuses. She was a philosopher in her own right. Lu was supported by the German educational feminist Malvea Von Mismburg, who introduced her to the Intellectual Word of Europe and introduced her, indeed to Nitzsche and Paul Ree, the writer in the picture. Following leaving her German speaking home in St. Petersburg in Russia, she went to study in Zurich, one of the only institutions available for women to study at that time. She was of German Baltic and Huguenot descent and established life of intellectual enrichment. She resisted marriage for many years, but though would marry eventually the linguist Frederick Carl Andreas in 18 87, only because of his emotional threats. She refused relationships with him and remained independent to travel and study and to explore the world. Indeed, she did eventually have lovers, including the Poet Rilke in 18 97, and became a major friend of Freud, trained as a psychoanalyst, and the greatest honour that Freud could pay her was to allow her after his own analysis of his daughter Anna to allow Luclem to become the analyst of Anna. These are all recontextualizing and rescuing the voice of Lou love. Lou, in many ways, is ahead of her time, to a large extent, as Matthew Del Navva has argued, she was anticipating many of the French feminists and the post structuralist in her theories of sexual difference. She pushed against Freudian theory and resisted the reduction to see motherhood as the defining feature of the physiology of woman. While largely ignored in Juliet Mitchell's F feminism of 1974, she was, as Gary Winship has indicated, a founding figure in the Post Freudian object relations theory movement. Her studies on Love appear principally in two articles, the Love problem of 1,900, and in her book, the Erotic commissioned for a series published by the Jewish Dological philosopher, Martin Buber. While her own thinking on love holds many Darwinian aspects and anticipates a later Freudian structure, she resists what she calls the one sided approach to love. What she seeks to do is to widen love to a broad set of ideas. What she wants to get behind is the total grasp and the purpose of love, the totality of its phenomena, as she says. She wants to hold onto the sublime and the basis elements in that study of the erotic. Indeed, what she does is to develop three dimensions of love, the physological, the psychical, and the social. She says, inch is not the relevant point. The point is their interaction of these different levels in the emergence of love. Rather than see love reduced to the erotic, what she wants to do is to say that the psychological state determines that space. Lou Slam believed that love was governed by two forces, the law of the diminishment of excitement and the desire for change. Interestingly, the thing that destroyed Nietzsche. For Lou, she saw that there was in love an ascension to something much more powerful, much more vital. And what she wants to do is to integrate the notions of consciousness and mind when we think about love. The full meaning requires what she says is to understand that which propels us towards another person. And she argues that love holds in that propulsion a social significance, a social significance about community, and the sanctioning of a relationship, and the validation of a relationship by the social conditions, which shape the social conditions of woman. In the interaction of the different dimensions of love, Lucaname argues fundamentally that it's a creative act, not unlike the psychoanalyst Eric F in his 1956, the art of loving. There is imagination in love, and the physiology is brought into a higher level. She also believes intriguingly, that there's an instinct for idealisation within us based on the act of human consciousness, that it's an act of exhaltation of life, that within the meeting, there is a creation and adoration and a joy in the experience of another person before us. It's this quality, which she sees as the giving of oneself to something outside of ourselves that creates a form of transcendence, an act of becoming, which was there a little bit. I poke Zathustra. In this sense, she wants to argue that love holds a realm of the religious. But for her, this is not something beyond life, but is actually part of life. And what she wants to guard against is the very sense that there is a potential for an illusion about the nature of the amorous instinct, because linked always to the fantasy is the reality. And it's the play of these two forces that she wants to explore. As she says, If our dreams of love take us to such heights, then the more powerful those dreams have been in us, the better able they are to make that leap as if from a diving board which leads from the sky to the Earth. Localms transcendent is always back to earth, but in life, in the rapture of love and in the lifelong union, and as a distinct part of the every day. This is a totality of love, and she concludes in that shift and paradox of love, and I quote, for all life exists only as a miracle that constantly renounces its miraculousness. The miracle is always a miracle brought back to earth, a bit like Adi Lang's reflections at the beginning in, Do you really love me? They're about every day, and there are life falls. But in this bringing together of these different dimensions, there's still something missing in our philosophical resolution. And this is where we need to turn to William James. William James, like Lucaname, holds love at multiple levels, but he adds one other distinctive element, the element of ethical critique, a critique of the claim to love Bave as he argues, has many distortions. To fully understand this journey of William James into the question of love, you first have to ground his thinking in physiology. He's a physological philosopher. And in his work, the Principles of Psychology in 18 90, he built a Darwinian model of the Theory of emotions, of which the most famous of from 18 84 is the emotion built around the theory of the Bar. Which I have to ask ping at the camera is that my daughter doing GCSE questioned William James' theory of love from 18 84, based on the fact that she also thought the mind was part of it, not just the body. I then had to point out, of course, that William James had later explanations of love, which included the mind, such as my justification for William James. However, what James does is to create a multi dimensional form of love, physical, cognitive and social like Lu Salame, and that he is driven by a post Darwinian reflexar of the construction of our reality based on sensation perception, attention, and conception, and volition and action. The running figure is running from the Bar, by the way. The physological response. Not running from love. This is our claims to Love, therefore, have to be built across the instinctive arc and built onto a pragmatic framework. Because it ends in action. Volition. And that is because William James is a pragmatist and builds his thinking upon the basis that it's the fruits and not the roots that are of value. You can hear the echo to Matthew 720. We see here that what William James does is hold Darwinian instinct against conscious and ethical action and reflection. Love is no longer an ideal to be reached, but something created in action. Body and perception form emotion, but it is also checked by the conscious state of mind. It's always the agent that is reflecting on the body in a social space. Love, therefore, is both emotional and rational, which is a point also made by Troy Jolly More in her book Love's vision. But the point that William James wants to make, that even if love and emotion are joined in the will is that not all love is good for you. Rather, in his pragmatic evaluation, what William James wants to do is to recognise that we have to morally reflect on love, pragmatically reflect on love and ask whether it holds insight, philosophical reasonableness, and moral helpfulness. We have to ask, does it enhance life? That is trained as a doctor, the physician's logic. One example in a literary sense, for my colleagues working on literature and religion is that the problem of love is best articulated in this context of James to the 1981 story by the American writer Raymond Carver. When we talk what we talk about, when we talk about love, a short story in a collection of the same name, where two couples are discussing the nature of love and drinking gin at a table, reflecting on as the afternoon goes on about the nature of love. One of the characters, Terry talks about her previous abusive relationship and suggests that even though these actions that she experienced were evident, her partner still really loved her. Another character in the story, Mel argues that such behaviour cannot be love, and so the conversation evolves as to what is right love. Does the narcissistic state of somebody saying, I love you, but act in a different way? Is that a justified form of loving? This story explores the perversity of love. William James also explored the perversity of love in looking at the religious lifes of various saints. He looked at the way that inflatations, and punishments, and cruelties and sufferings were inflicted in the name of love, and wanted to differentiate these from those actions within the religious traditions which were life affirming and embracing a value to the community and enriching. Ultimately, James says, Love has to be critically evaluated. To conclude. What I wanted to show is that in a Post Darwinian world, philosophy has to respond in a variety of different ways. In this sense, we can recall the radical challenge that Darwin presents to philosophy. John Dewey, another pragmatist, in 1910 wrote an essay called the influence of Darwinism on philosophy. Darwinian science, he said, change is the logic of philosophy. First, it is a shift from essence to change, the problem of time. Second, it's a movement from external reference to specific conditions of meaning, the problem of the individual and history. And third, he says, it's a shift from impotency to responsibility, the problem of choice, critique, and action. I'd like to suggest that Jewes radical reading of the philosophy post Darwin is seen as one that is highly relevant to the same shifts we see in the idea of love. Love moves in the 19th century, from essence to evolution, Naze's instinct, from external form to historical and individual behaviour, Lu Salam's psychological and social forms to one of choice and action as James's theory of the emotion and action and will. They are shifts to what I see as a potential pragmatic form of love. We might note that Cornell West, in an often forgotten text of 1989, the American evasion of Philosophy, outlined a genealogy of American pragmatism by saying that there were three distinct features. One, the disenchantment with the transcendent, two, a relation of knowledge to society, and three, a focus on history as a futuristic evaluative space. It is evident from this that we see that that shift of love happens within those pragmatic conditions. And what I haven't done in my discussion of Darwin and deliberately, so is that I haven't focused on the concept of evolution itself. But there was a pragmatist, Charles Sanders Puss, who did examine this very question in his 18 92 essay evolutionary love, and an extraordinary little piece which showed that there could be a progressive and positive love of agapism evolving through history, and rather than seeing evolution as some negative survival mechanism, of course, Pers was already anticipating Tila de Chardin. Finally, what Nitzsche Luc Aime and Nietzche provide is new ways to think of love after Darwin. But before we throw away Plato, we must consider its form, as well as its content. The symposium of Plato is dological. There are seven guests debating love, offering different models of love. And though privileged, Socrates is just one voice speaking on love, including the absent voice of Diatma, the priestess, who offered Socrates his insight on love. She, of course, was part of the uninvited, as Carrie Jenkins and Karla Nappe have argued. Equally, love after Darwin is dological, multilayered, plural, it evolves. It retains what Iriga in her French feminist essay has pointed out as horizontal transcendent, a relational space of intimate connection, a contested ethical space. Where the question at heart in this ethical reflection on love is the quality of relation, the quality of attention, the quality of life's own interrogation about the quality of loving, which takes us precisely back to where I began. The opening words from Ardi Lang's, do you really love me? And that interrogation? It takes us back to Bart's opening words in the cafe and the everyday context of which we use the word love. Love, in this sense, is not an arrival point, it's not and happy ever after. It's not an ideal, but it's something that gives us the capacity to frame what it is to relate to another human being to constantly relate across the registers of our existence, the physical, the psychological, and the social conditions that define who we are and shape our lives. As Lu Salame has said, Love is a creative act, a co creative act of life that will always require our contestation and ultimately our celebration. Thank you. Oct 30 2024 17.00 - 19.00 Professor Jeremy Carrette Inaugural Lecture Professor Jeremy Carrette (Head of the School of Divinity & Professor of Philosophy, Religion & Culture) delivers his Inaugural Lecture 'A Philosophy of Love: Nietzsche, Lou Salomé and William James'.
Professor Jeremy Carrette Inaugural Lecture Recording of Professor Jeremy Carrette Inaugural Lecture View media transcript Welcome. Please be seated. A very warm welcome to everyone to the opening lecture of the School of Divinity for the Academic year 2024, 2025. My name is Professor Sarah Prescott. I'm a Professor of literature. I'm Vice Principal and Head of the College of Arts and Humanities and Social Sciences, of which the School of Divinity is one of our 11 schools. So we have a real range of disciplines across the college from history, archaeology, and classics to philosophy again, language sciences, and also Edinburgh College of Art, lots of practise based work around film and music amongst lots of other things. I'm delighted that the opening lecture of the School of Divinity is joined with the inaugural lecture of Professor Jeremy Carrot. It is a great occasion to open the academic year and welcome all the new students, as well as to celebrate the professorial appointment of Jeremy Coret in the School of Divinity. Now, before Professor Coret delivers his lecture, I'm going to just talk about some of his amazing achievements over his career. Professor arret joined us a year ago, and it's been an absolute delight to work with him as the head of school over the last year. I'll start with some academic achievements. Professor Corett was born in Cheshire, south of Manchester, and brought up in New Castle Upon Tye. He holds a BA degree in theology from the University of Manchester, 1983 to 1986, completing a final year dissertation across the departments of Theology and psychiatry with social ethicist, Professor Anthony Dyson, and psychiatrist doctor Robert Hobson. He then completed an MPL on the psychology of religion at the University of Lancaster in 1990 with doctor Adrien Cunningham, where he examined the work of Swiss psychiatrist Carl Young. He completed his PhD in 1997, in the philosophy of religion at the University of Manchester, with a study of the work of Michelle Fuca under the supervision of Professor Grace Jansen. Grace Anson remained an inspiration to his philosophical work, and He edited with Professor Maori Joy of the University of Calgary the posthumous, multi volumed work of her feminist philosophical study of death and beauty in Western Philosophy. As I mentioned, Jeremy Cort became head of the School of Divinity and Professor of Philosophy, religion, and Culture here at the University of Edinburgh in August 2023. He had previously been dean for Europe at the University of Kent, where he managed the postgraduate centres, in Paris, Brussels, Rome, and Athens, and was previously appointed to a personal chair in 2008 as Professor of Philosophy, religion, and culture, teaching in both the Department of Religion and the Department of Philosophy. He was also head of the School of European language culture and language, and head of religious Studies at the University of Kent. He was previously head of religious studies at the University of Sterling 2023-2004, where he worked from 1997. He'd also previously taught psychoanalysis at Goldsmiths University of London, 199-03-9905, and he's also worked as a specialist teacher for autistic children. Moving on now to give you an overview of Professor Corets research, which focuses on interdisciplinary aspects of religion, philosophy, psychology, culture, and politics, as his trajectory and life has shown in the outline I've just given you. His research is built on the philosophical foundation of knowledge as relation, developed through his study of Michel Fuca and William James, who both followed the French philosopher, Charles Rinovier, in seeing the central category of knowledge after CNT as relation. Professor Caret explores these relations by seeking to examine the silence part of religious thought to build new relationships, and an ethical sensibility for the body and social justice. His work takes inspiration also from his father, Reverend Canon David Coret, who as an Anglican priest, sought to listen to the marginalised and rejected, both inside the church and in wider society. Professor Coret has published numerous books and articles on the work of the French philosopher Michael Fuca, including Michelle Fuca and Religion, 2000, the edited collection of translated papers, Michelle Fuca on religion, and edited with James Bernier, Michel Fuca and Theology. He's also published extensively on William James, including editing with Eugene Taylor, the centenary edition, of the varieties of religious experience and edit the related collection as well. He subsequently published his study, William James' Hidden religious Imagination, at University of Relations in 2013. Professor Cort gave the 2002 Cunningham lectures at the University of Edinburgh, which were then published as religion and critical psychology, religious experience in the Knowledge economy in 2007. With his friend and colleague, Richard King, he published a critical reading of neoliberalism and religion. In their work, selling spirituality, the silent takeover of religion, and there's a tenth anniversary edition due to appear next year. 2009-2013, he led an AHRC ESRC large grant project with Professor Hugh Mile on religious NGOs and the United Nations in New York and Geneva, which resulted in the jointly edited work, religion, NGOs, and the United Nations visible and invisible actors in power, Bloomsbury, 2017, and also a special study of Quaker international activity at the UN. Professor Cort's present research includes articles on Archbishop William Temple and Land ethics, a review of Anglicans and the environment, as well as working towards his next monograph on William James's pragmatic theory of love, which I think we hear more about this afternoon. With the Late Professor Robert Morris and the Late Timothy Sprigg of the University of Edinburgh Schools of Psychology and Philosophy. Professor Corett organised the centenary Conference of William James' 1902 Gifford lectures, the varieties of religious experience, which took place in old College in 2002. He also gave the prestigious Harvard Divinity School, William James Lecture in 2013 and has presented the keynote addresses to the Brazilian National Conference on Religion and Psychology in both 2012 and 2017. He is also co founder and co director with Professor Kenneth Fincham of the Centre for Anglican History and Theology. 2020-2023, and from this led a series of conferences and publications on radical Theology, examining the work of William Temple, John Robinson, and Don C Kupe. So there's an overview of Professor Curet's amazing academic and career achievements. But I also want to note that in his spare time, it's a sort of euphemism, I suppose as being head of school. He's also a keen runner, a very good runner, I think, as well. He also supports Newcastle United Football Club and has a love of Brittany lighthouses, as well as enjoying with his French wife and children the South Coast of France. I'd now like to welcome you all and introduce Oppressor Cort, who is going to deliver his inaugural lecture, which is entitled a Philosophy of Love, Nietzsche, Lualme, and William James. I'm going to sit at the front so I can see the slides. Thank you so much, Sarah. And thank you for all of those words of which the core is that all that I am is built on relation. And the tributes to all of the academics that I've worked with are, in many ways echoing through everything that I do. And on the note of relation, I just want to say a thank you to all of you who have taken time out of your busy schedules to be here this afternoon. And I understand that as part of this academic year, we're also opening this to new students. And so to all of the new students, I want to particularly say, welcome to the University of Edinburgh, and I hope that a lecture on the Philosophy of Love is a good beginning to your academic careers. I also would like to take a particular thanks to all of the colleagues and friends who are here, some from previous universities, some who've travelled far and wide. It's great to share this moment. And also, particularly to friends who've come from France, and I want to particular thank you to Joe and Fred for coming who sustained our childcare through our time in Paris. It's great to see you here. Our daughters are not here, but they did promise to watch the video, so. Thank you, Lauri, for recording. I also would like to thank Fiona Smith, the Principal Clark of the Church of Scotland for this use of this beautiful space today. Really appreciate that, and it's good that you're here. But above all, on a talk of love, I would wish to thank my wife for being here. And I think that when all the words of love that I put forward in academic phrases, I think only you know what they mean in the lived reality. Thank you. Love. Love is an issue in philosophy. But first, I want to begin with the words of love in every day. The Scottish psychiatrist, an existential thinker, ARD Lang, following a very successful, diological, and poetic book called Knotts in 1970, which looked at the entanglements of human interactions. Also published a very little text called Do you Love me in 1976. Later republished as Do you really Love me? With the words really scribbled in red above the original title. The words, do you really love me were the final parts of a dialogue between lovers doubting whether they were physically and emotionally loved by each other. More to the point, they were words about whether different parts of their body were loved and liked by the lover. To the point of questioning whether which eyebrow was more preferred, the left or the right, to which the skillful lover responds. But if I say one, the other will be jealous. A. This set of reflections by this psychiatrist was trying to understand the level of insecurity and doubts that we have about our body image and our intimacy and the fundamental question of whether we feel worthy of being loved, the physical anxiety, and all of this in the face of love's fragility. It shows how the words, I love you have a powerful force rooted in our everyday communications. Likewise, the French structuralist Roland Bart explored the fears of anxieties of everyday love, in his work in 1977, a lover's discourse. Examining a range of positions in love from being overwhelmed and terrified by love to those ascetic and guilt ridden denial of love, to the rejections and embarrassments, to its mystical fusions, and, and I quote, the thunderstruck gaze across the cafe. No doubt Bart knew the best Parisian left bank cafes for such exchanges. But what he makes clear in all of these examples is that love reaches a point where language is both too much and too little. And it's on this sense of too much and too little that it is to remember on this day, which is September 11, the poignancy, that, as many people have now recorded, that some of the final things that were text by the victims in their final moments were in a general sense, Remember, I love you. Such a force of final words led the musician Marc Koffler of the group Dia Straits to write in 2006 and perform with Emma Lou Harris, the song, if this is goodbye. With the words, if I love you, that is all that matters with equally powerful music in tribute to those who lost their lives and those who remained. But what those words do is to echo the fundamental understanding of the too much and too little of the words of love. These powerful examples are ones that challenge us in philosophy, to question whether it is actually possible to think philosophically about love when it's detached from its existential and lived realities in those very painful and sharp moments. We might ask whether philosophers, particularly male philosophers, particularly with weird moustaches and beards, of the male type that dominate 19th century philosophy are adequate for us and whether they fully understand the specificness of the field of use and the gendered specificity of expressions of love. Indeed, Mark Shaffer, and sorry Andrew Shafer, amusing collection, great philosophers who failed at love shows that really, philosophers may not be the best people to ask. As he said, a lover of wisdom and a wise lover are, it turns out, two different things. Of course, not all philosophers fail at love, and there are great accounts of love and the love letters of philosophers. I put here just two examples. John Stewart Mills love for miss Harriet Taylor, though she was married, and he had a friendship with her for 21 years. He did eventually marry her and wrote lovingly in his autobiography of what he called the most valuable friendship of my life. There are also incredible love letters between the French feminist Simon De Bouvoi and the American writer Nelson Algrn, a Transatlantic love affair of some 17 years, which, if you read it has all of that deep passion and tenderness of those who are clearly in love. No doubt, the philosopher and also lover of Simon De Bavi, Jean Pul Sart, was forgotten during these moments of writing. But then Jean Pul Sart did say in his 1944 play, no exit. Hell is other people. Yeah. Despite the challenges and complexity and the philosopher's vulnerability in writing about love. Love is too big an issue for a philosopher to ignore. And it has, as an issue, been erratically explored across Western philosophy. Indeed, from Plato, it has been a core issue. In many ways, Whitehead's statement that philosophy is a footnote to Plato stands out very strongly when we reflect on the question of love, because in Plato's symposium and Phaedrus, there are, of course, key parts of an issue about love, which Ivan Singer in his three volume study of Love has demonstrated. And more recently, Adriane Martin's collection has also acknowledged that significant place of Plato. But despite Plato, love remains an elusive term, though not sufficient, analytical philosophy has attempted to demarcate it. As we see, Robert Brown, in his book, analysing Love, said, there is no public criteria for what love is, but rather a spectrum of words across caring, loving, respecting, attracting, and affection. The spectrum of words returns, of course, to that big question in Greek philosophy, which has taught us many, many things, but it has shown us that love is diverse across Eros, Agape, amplia, desire, care, and friendship. It has also been widened in the Greek tradition to refer to Storge and Pragma, family love and enduring love. Indeed, this diversity of loves in the Greek tradition was picked up by the Canadian psychologist John Lee, in his book, Colours of Love, and exploration of ways of loving to show that diversity of forms and interconnections of different forms of loving. Indeed, the Florist website blog, FTD, also took the idea and said, after demarcating the types of love, why not show it by sending some flowers? One should not underestimate sending flowers, of course. Words for love are diverse and translating love from other cultural and religious traditions can often be distorting. Across a diversity of uses in a variety of different religious traditions. There is a devotional notion of love. There are notions of love related to compassion, states of consciousness, and a wide set of moral consciousness. But my focus here is on the Western philosophical account of love. But even in the Western philosophical account, we have to understand the plurality of positions and also build a critical context for thinking about love. Indeed, modern philosophers have provided a critique of the dominant forms of love and a critique of the imagination of love. Hannah Arnt, for example, in her doctral work, opened up an in depth study of Augustine's theory of love across the dynamics of the love of God and the love of neighbour and argued that there was a fundamental question around the political force and lack of it in Augustine's work. Of course, Foucau has also underlined the historical conditions of love, desire, and pleasure in his new economy for sex, same sex, love. And Bel Hook's inclusive trilogy of work on Love has underlined a whole series of new questions that have been incredibly insightful. From her book all about love, she offered a personal exploration of how we needed to define love and its vitality. In the next volume, Communion, the female Search for Love, she showed the social positioning of women in discourses of love. In her book, salvation, Black People and Love, she called for a renewal of thinking about love, lost as an answer for Black communities and social justice, reviving Martin Luther King's 1963 work speeches on Love. As Bel Hooks rightly indicates, without justice, there can be no love. The correlation between love and justice is, of course, a one oh one complex question in the study of philosophy and religion. It's one to which I will return because the demands by which we think about love require us to understand its ethical implications. Finally, there's also the work of the French feminist Los riga in her construction of the third space for love, a love that transforms our rationality to overcome the patriarchal ego. Instead of love being I love you, she wants a shift to I love to you as an act as a becoming as an acknowledgment of the space between and not a possessiveness of the male ego. These pluralities and complexities lead us to a challenge to the notion of romantic love, and there have been creative explorations of romantic love. Quite recently, Carrie Jenkins, in her work, what is Love, which builds on the work of Bertrand Russell's 1929 study marriage and morals, sought to provide an analytical metaphysics of Polyandry queer and interracial loving. She believes that romantic love can be reshaped and involved to be inclusive. And while I welcome the inclusivity, I think with Lauren Balant in her book, Desire love, that we need to suspend the logic of romantic love and understand the ideology on which it is built, stylized as it is, according to a structure of yearning, conflict resolution, longing for union, a sense of lack, and, as Balant indicates, feeling as a form of destiny. But there are other forms of intimate love and forms of love that are not based upon fusion or a sense of lack. We can explore these models. But I think we need to also suspend the notion of romantic in itself. I think this comes forward in terms of Carrie Jenkins other work, sad love, romance and the search for meaning, of which she tries to explore and overcome the over inflated hopes about love of the happy ever after and to show the problems of the palsity of thinking about intimate connections. Though, I think her work is important in reshaping some of those questions. And of course, we shouldn't underestimate the market driven desire for romantic love in many films and other outlets. I can confirm from a recent visit this summer to Verona, that the Casa Du Julieta, the House of Juliet, which is built on the imaginings of the story of Romeo and Juliet, is an intriguing place. As the tourist guide indicates, although most everything about this house is fiction, the emotions that draw people here are very real. The balcony was added in the 1930s for effect. And later commercial outlets, and, of course, the tourist cues are also being added, though I have to confess with my wife, that we did buy a wonderful pair of heart coloured oven gloves. But what I like about that is that it's a blend of the imaginary and the practical in love. However, in this broad set of issues of the philosophy of love, there is one underlying tension that I wish to explore, and that is love in a Post Darwinian 19th century world, which is rarely considered, but which I would like to open up in a number of ways. I want to call this the problem of the Plato Darwin philosophical problem of love, which in its extremes ranges from indeed Plato's symposium, Around 37380 BCE, two, of course, in its other extreme form, which will be well known, Desmond Morris' 1967 text, the naked ape, which is a text reducing all forms of love to a form of coupling and survival instinct. But in order to do this, I want to take you on a little journey. In order to grasp the full weight of my philosophical problem. And I want to take you to Italy. I want to take you to this particular place of the Italian Lakes and Lake Oto. Because this is an intriguing place of the Sacraonte, the sacred Mount, which is a world heritage site from 2003, and you can ascend from the lake up the hill past 20 chapels dotted at various stages, where you will see a life sized terra cotta statues depicting the life of St. Francis. From birth to canonization. Began in 15 83 and finished in 17 88. As the Italian Ministry of Culture website states, the beauty of the landscape, the silence and harmonious balance between art, architecture and nature, mirror the essence of Franciscan spirituality. Such an artistic legacy holds the life of the St., a theological community, and many strands of love. The love of the monastic community, the love of the monks, the love of creation, the love of God, all captured in this beautiful walk. The site is undoubtedly significant as devotion to St. Francis and carries a tradition layered with discourses from the Biblical tradition. If you go to Chapel eight, You will see on the Sacred mount, this chapel to St. Francis, with paintings of the vision of Azekel, the apparition of Christ by the disciples, Alijah kidnapped on the chariot of Fire, and Solomon's parents watching an angel going to Haven. And standing in front of these is a remarkable terracotta suspended statue of St. Francis in a chariot. And there below are the friars in awe and Loving gaze seeing Francis on the chariot. Now, the chariot is significant in this artwork and carries a distinct cultural symbolism, which as Stuart Piggott has noted in his 1992 text, has always been from the very early oxen cart from around 3,000 2000 BCE, a very long and prestigious form in ancient ritual. He had the capacity to depict power and transcendence and became embedded in the Greek and Roman and Christian tradition, and the symbolism of the chariot took on a new force. Indeed, my fellow biblical scholars will be able to give more detail on that significance of the chart in the Biblical text. But what is significant here is as much the biblical illusion as the fact that it also calls out another chariot, the chariot that links to Plato's Phaedrus, perhaps captured in the loving gaze of the monks. In Plato's Phaedrus, you actually see that the soul is represented by three components, the charioteer, reason, managing the two flying horses, representing the spirit of the will, and the appetite, desire, a combination of forces that wherever we are, we have to manage within ourselves at varying levels of success throughout our lives. The chariot emerges as a fundamental symbol of love in the Phaedrus. Around that time, Plato constructed his own work, the symposium, the discussion about love, beauty, and truth. Now, St. Francis's chariot of devotional and transcendent love and Plato's associated love of mind, beauty, and truth are not the only links of chariots. That we can find in this association to the Monte Sacre. This place is also significant for modern philosophical love. Because, although it being not a chariot, but rather a cart, it is exact a symbol of the love that happened between the German philosopher Frederick Nietzsche and his love of the young Russian Lou Salame on the trip of May 18 82. When it appeared that they gathered with the writer Paul Ray and constructed, you'll see here in the bottom right corner, a particular photograph which became notorious within the philosophical circle, capturing a particular depiction of the three companions. Nietzche had met Lu Salame in Rome in April 2082. Lu Salame was 21, and Nite was 38. But they shared a curiosity, a curiosity about philosophy and became strong intellectual companions. On the walk of the Sacraone, there was a moment of intimacy. Indeed, Frederick Nietzsche proposed marriage, on three occasions to Lou, on all three occasions, she rejected it. Of course, this was of a concern to Paul Rae, who had also tried to win over Lu Salame. And also a question of dispute of Nietzsche's sister, Elizabeth, who disliked the rejections of her brother. This is an intriguing moment, not least because the chariot has become a cart. Whatever happened up on the Monte Sacre, whether they kissed is an enigma of the biographies, but what it does depict is a particular and important set of shifts. The feminist scholar Babette Babich examined this photograph of the three figures and said that rather than linking it to Plato or even to the biblical illusions, that we should rather link it to the Greek myth and the significance of the power of woman and the particular story of Cleobis and Biton in the bottom left. The two sons who took their priestess mother to the temple at Hera without the available horsepower, the two sons pulled the carriage to the temple. And as a reward, they were given the eternal sleep of death. While Babie's reading adds another layer, moving it into a domestic sphere. One thing is very clear in our shift from chariot to cart. We have here a problem of the relationship between love as transcendent, eternal, and related to death, and love as earthed, embodied, and lived. My argument here is that this shift becomes acute after Darwin, and that my three figures, Nietzsche, Salome, and James, help us provide a resolution. Love after Darwin. But what did Darwin say of love? Darwin refers to love in a very general sense. It's principally an idea of the instincts. It's touched on very briefly in 18 59 origins of the species, but it's the later work, the descent of man, and more specifically the expressions of emotion in man and animals in 18 72, where love is associated with animal behaviours. He uses the word love in a very direct sense as relating to mating and what he calls the love antics, such as dancing and plumage displays of certain birds. He also includes his attempt to explore it in a moral sense of love, and the idea of the concept of sympathy in social animals, which, of course, comes directly from some of the discussions of the Scottish philosopher, Alexander Bain, who, as philosophers might wish to know, was the founder of the journal Mind. More significantly, in the study of emotions, Darwin includes a chapter on joy, high spirits, love, tender feelings, and devotion, in which love is correlated with contact or sensation, the quality of touch, habits of nurture, pleasured contact, as seen in cats and dogs, My cat, our cat, will affectionally follow us around the garden, and rub herself along our feet, sit on our lap, purr with contentment, and carry out a great sense of engagement in contact and caress. My dog, as a child, would enjoy its tummy being rubbed for hours and jump up in excitement, lick my face as I entered the door, which for any human display of emotion would be rather excessive. For Darwin, these gestures of my cats and my dogs are love. They are fundamentally the base of physical affirmative contact. If love is classified in these terms according to Darwin, then connection and contact at its primary level is key, and transcendence is marginalised. However, Darwin does also recognise that sympathy is a core part of our species, and that there is a quality of a theory of mind that we also have, which is a sense of understanding the other as another agent with feeling. He also recognises that it's an emotional quality, a bit like the vibrations that are created on music on the body. There is a behavioural and emotional code. He even goes further, but rejects those commentators of his day who suggest that the devotion of looking upwards is, in fact, a correlation between the emotion of love and religion. But he doesn't feel that there's enough empirical evidence at this point. Darwin presents us with a very different kind of love to that that we've seen in St. Francis's community in Lacata, to that of Plato, and we now have to understand the problem of how it was resolved by philosophers. Firstly, to Frederick Nietzsche. Nitzsche is known as a nihilistic philosopher. He is misogynist and takes stereotypical assumptions about women, and above all, is overly sceptical about many things. Why on Earth would we approach him for a question on love? And in many senses, you're right to ask that question. But Nitzsche is a complex and difficult thinker, but he does take us one step along the way for understanding this problem. Even if I think it's not a fully adequate one. First of all, he has a force of thinking related to a dnsian understanding of life, and embracing of life against all odds. He sees Greek philosophy, that of Socrates and Plato, as fundamentally as he says, symptoms of decay. What he wants to do is to rescue what he calls a judgement of life in Greek philosophy, to rescue it what he says as being perceived as worthless, a bit like Cleobis and Bytan, in the analogy earlier. In this way, what Niche seeks to do is to have a Darwinian inspired logic about the body and life. As John Richardson's Nises new Darwinism has indicated in 2004, what he wants to do is to fuse with Darwin at the same time as rejecting Darwin. He ejects all forms of system. In rescuing life, Nietzsche questions idealism and transcendence, as he states. If one shifts the centre of gravity out of life into a beyond into nothingness, one has deprived life of its own centre of gravity. Nate is doing is moving that external reference into the biological force as a way of counteracting the neglect of life. One of the difficulties of course with Nise is that his thinking about love is scattered and fragmented, and indeed, some writers like Ulric Beer in 2020, have tried to bring these together in a book of aphorisms. But in my view, these decontextualized Niche and we lose the project of NTC's thinking across time. A project which began from his inspiration from Wagner and Schopenhauer, and that birth of tragedy where Apollo and Dionysius were reunited into a form of romanticism. Where he says, and I quote, the deepest insights are gained only out of love. But such positivity is soon removed. In his enlightenment, scientific understandings in Human A to Human in 18 78, a work, which Lou Salame had grounded as his positivist work. Love loses its value and becomes empty. It is broken in familiarity and what he calls the wicked game of change. Here we see that he recognises that there's a problem in the idealisation of love, though, somewhat problematically he says that women created this, but also are trapped by it. He then shifts into an aphoristic style in the joyful science of 18 82 and equates love entirely with greed. Greed and possessiveness. He sees love as undistinguishable from these biological forces. But by the time we get to thus spoke Zarathustra, the text here, in 18 83, love is partly rescued as an act of of overcoming a kind w to power, trying to live beyond oneself. Finally, in the Twilight of the idols of 18 89, he comes back to the Greeks and says powerfully, the spiritualizing of sensuality is called love. This is to bring love down to earth. It's against the Greek tradition. It's instinctual, it's Darwinian inspired. But it's highly problematic in so far that he cannot move beyond instinct, and he cannot move beyond masculine forms of possessiveness, and even friendship he says is not compatible with erotic love. Such is the sadness of Nitzsche. If love is limited, as Nietzsche would say, he just about rescues that in thus spoke Zarathustra. And Strikingly, that is the text that he acknowledges was influenced in part by Lou Salame, the moment when he saw the possibility of love. Indeed, love is registered in some positive way there. But in order to understand Niche, I think we have to go to the first commentary of Niche and that first book on Niche was written by Louis Salame, a long and forgotten text from 18 94, where she understands fundamentally that life and philosophy are linked, and she actually recognises that his inability to grasp something of life is that his philosophy is built on suffering and loneliness, and his own maxim, that what does not destroy me makes me stronger. Importantly, she understood that beneath all of that, rejection was a religious quest. Indeed, the attempt to find meaning in suffering and through suffering was his own religious quest. But for the complete picture, we cannot stay in the commentaries of Nitzsche. We have to move to Lus Salme's own voice on love. Indeed, one of the intriguing things about scholarship around love is that trying to get to the heart of Lou Salame, thinking about love is always layered by having to get through Nitzsche because everybody puts Nietzche before Lou Salame. Indeed, it's striking that some of the biographies of Lou Salame indeed always fall back into the men that she's been associated with. Indeed, Julia Vicker's study in her biography looks at a text which she says is inspired by Freud Nets and Rilke, the poet, all who had differing friendships and associations with her. And Angela Livingston's in her own biography is a refusal to prioritise Nitzsche in her own study, preferring a whole different set of relationships, which she regarded as more important. This negativity around Lu Salame in the biographical literature and in academic texts is quite remarkable. Indeed, in the Sea of Faith series and by the philosopher Don Cupid, in an otherwise brilliant series of reflections of which I recently had a conference, introduces Lucame in a very complex way, and actually says that this was the person who seriously disturbed the Bachelor life of Nisa. And that she was framed, and I quote as volatile and difficult. But we may ask, to whom? Was she volatile and difficult and is not rather the problem of Nietzche and a better description of Nitza. Biographers have also referred to her as a wayward disciple of Nitzsche. Indeed, as has been pointed out by NASA and Yesdal, in their were women philosophers of the long 19th century, Salame was more than a, a mentor, and a collector of male genuses. She was a philosopher in her own right. Lu was supported by the German educational feminist Malvea Von Mismburg, who introduced her to the Intellectual Word of Europe and introduced her, indeed to Nitzsche and Paul Ree, the writer in the picture. Following leaving her German speaking home in St. Petersburg in Russia, she went to study in Zurich, one of the only institutions available for women to study at that time. She was of German Baltic and Huguenot descent and established life of intellectual enrichment. She resisted marriage for many years, but though would marry eventually the linguist Frederick Carl Andreas in 18 87, only because of his emotional threats. She refused relationships with him and remained independent to travel and study and to explore the world. Indeed, she did eventually have lovers, including the Poet Rilke in 18 97, and became a major friend of Freud, trained as a psychoanalyst, and the greatest honour that Freud could pay her was to allow her after his own analysis of his daughter Anna to allow Luclem to become the analyst of Anna. These are all recontextualizing and rescuing the voice of Lou love. Lou, in many ways, is ahead of her time, to a large extent, as Matthew Del Navva has argued, she was anticipating many of the French feminists and the post structuralist in her theories of sexual difference. She pushed against Freudian theory and resisted the reduction to see motherhood as the defining feature of the physiology of woman. While largely ignored in Juliet Mitchell's F feminism of 1974, she was, as Gary Winship has indicated, a founding figure in the Post Freudian object relations theory movement. Her studies on Love appear principally in two articles, the Love problem of 1,900, and in her book, the Erotic commissioned for a series published by the Jewish Dological philosopher, Martin Buber. While her own thinking on love holds many Darwinian aspects and anticipates a later Freudian structure, she resists what she calls the one sided approach to love. What she seeks to do is to widen love to a broad set of ideas. What she wants to get behind is the total grasp and the purpose of love, the totality of its phenomena, as she says. She wants to hold onto the sublime and the basis elements in that study of the erotic. Indeed, what she does is to develop three dimensions of love, the physological, the psychical, and the social. She says, inch is not the relevant point. The point is their interaction of these different levels in the emergence of love. Rather than see love reduced to the erotic, what she wants to do is to say that the psychological state determines that space. Lou Slam believed that love was governed by two forces, the law of the diminishment of excitement and the desire for change. Interestingly, the thing that destroyed Nietzsche. For Lou, she saw that there was in love an ascension to something much more powerful, much more vital. And what she wants to do is to integrate the notions of consciousness and mind when we think about love. The full meaning requires what she says is to understand that which propels us towards another person. And she argues that love holds in that propulsion a social significance, a social significance about community, and the sanctioning of a relationship, and the validation of a relationship by the social conditions, which shape the social conditions of woman. In the interaction of the different dimensions of love, Lucaname argues fundamentally that it's a creative act, not unlike the psychoanalyst Eric F in his 1956, the art of loving. There is imagination in love, and the physiology is brought into a higher level. She also believes intriguingly, that there's an instinct for idealisation within us based on the act of human consciousness, that it's an act of exhaltation of life, that within the meeting, there is a creation and adoration and a joy in the experience of another person before us. It's this quality, which she sees as the giving of oneself to something outside of ourselves that creates a form of transcendence, an act of becoming, which was there a little bit. I poke Zathustra. In this sense, she wants to argue that love holds a realm of the religious. But for her, this is not something beyond life, but is actually part of life. And what she wants to guard against is the very sense that there is a potential for an illusion about the nature of the amorous instinct, because linked always to the fantasy is the reality. And it's the play of these two forces that she wants to explore. As she says, If our dreams of love take us to such heights, then the more powerful those dreams have been in us, the better able they are to make that leap as if from a diving board which leads from the sky to the Earth. Localms transcendent is always back to earth, but in life, in the rapture of love and in the lifelong union, and as a distinct part of the every day. This is a totality of love, and she concludes in that shift and paradox of love, and I quote, for all life exists only as a miracle that constantly renounces its miraculousness. The miracle is always a miracle brought back to earth, a bit like Adi Lang's reflections at the beginning in, Do you really love me? They're about every day, and there are life falls. But in this bringing together of these different dimensions, there's still something missing in our philosophical resolution. And this is where we need to turn to William James. William James, like Lucaname, holds love at multiple levels, but he adds one other distinctive element, the element of ethical critique, a critique of the claim to love Bave as he argues, has many distortions. To fully understand this journey of William James into the question of love, you first have to ground his thinking in physiology. He's a physological philosopher. And in his work, the Principles of Psychology in 18 90, he built a Darwinian model of the Theory of emotions, of which the most famous of from 18 84 is the emotion built around the theory of the Bar. Which I have to ask ping at the camera is that my daughter doing GCSE questioned William James' theory of love from 18 84, based on the fact that she also thought the mind was part of it, not just the body. I then had to point out, of course, that William James had later explanations of love, which included the mind, such as my justification for William James. However, what James does is to create a multi dimensional form of love, physical, cognitive and social like Lu Salame, and that he is driven by a post Darwinian reflexar of the construction of our reality based on sensation perception, attention, and conception, and volition and action. The running figure is running from the Bar, by the way. The physological response. Not running from love. This is our claims to Love, therefore, have to be built across the instinctive arc and built onto a pragmatic framework. Because it ends in action. Volition. And that is because William James is a pragmatist and builds his thinking upon the basis that it's the fruits and not the roots that are of value. You can hear the echo to Matthew 720. We see here that what William James does is hold Darwinian instinct against conscious and ethical action and reflection. Love is no longer an ideal to be reached, but something created in action. Body and perception form emotion, but it is also checked by the conscious state of mind. It's always the agent that is reflecting on the body in a social space. Love, therefore, is both emotional and rational, which is a point also made by Troy Jolly More in her book Love's vision. But the point that William James wants to make, that even if love and emotion are joined in the will is that not all love is good for you. Rather, in his pragmatic evaluation, what William James wants to do is to recognise that we have to morally reflect on love, pragmatically reflect on love and ask whether it holds insight, philosophical reasonableness, and moral helpfulness. We have to ask, does it enhance life? That is trained as a doctor, the physician's logic. One example in a literary sense, for my colleagues working on literature and religion is that the problem of love is best articulated in this context of James to the 1981 story by the American writer Raymond Carver. When we talk what we talk about, when we talk about love, a short story in a collection of the same name, where two couples are discussing the nature of love and drinking gin at a table, reflecting on as the afternoon goes on about the nature of love. One of the characters, Terry talks about her previous abusive relationship and suggests that even though these actions that she experienced were evident, her partner still really loved her. Another character in the story, Mel argues that such behaviour cannot be love, and so the conversation evolves as to what is right love. Does the narcissistic state of somebody saying, I love you, but act in a different way? Is that a justified form of loving? This story explores the perversity of love. William James also explored the perversity of love in looking at the religious lifes of various saints. He looked at the way that inflatations, and punishments, and cruelties and sufferings were inflicted in the name of love, and wanted to differentiate these from those actions within the religious traditions which were life affirming and embracing a value to the community and enriching. Ultimately, James says, Love has to be critically evaluated. To conclude. What I wanted to show is that in a Post Darwinian world, philosophy has to respond in a variety of different ways. In this sense, we can recall the radical challenge that Darwin presents to philosophy. John Dewey, another pragmatist, in 1910 wrote an essay called the influence of Darwinism on philosophy. Darwinian science, he said, change is the logic of philosophy. First, it is a shift from essence to change, the problem of time. Second, it's a movement from external reference to specific conditions of meaning, the problem of the individual and history. And third, he says, it's a shift from impotency to responsibility, the problem of choice, critique, and action. I'd like to suggest that Jewes radical reading of the philosophy post Darwin is seen as one that is highly relevant to the same shifts we see in the idea of love. Love moves in the 19th century, from essence to evolution, Naze's instinct, from external form to historical and individual behaviour, Lu Salam's psychological and social forms to one of choice and action as James's theory of the emotion and action and will. They are shifts to what I see as a potential pragmatic form of love. We might note that Cornell West, in an often forgotten text of 1989, the American evasion of Philosophy, outlined a genealogy of American pragmatism by saying that there were three distinct features. One, the disenchantment with the transcendent, two, a relation of knowledge to society, and three, a focus on history as a futuristic evaluative space. It is evident from this that we see that that shift of love happens within those pragmatic conditions. And what I haven't done in my discussion of Darwin and deliberately, so is that I haven't focused on the concept of evolution itself. But there was a pragmatist, Charles Sanders Puss, who did examine this very question in his 18 92 essay evolutionary love, and an extraordinary little piece which showed that there could be a progressive and positive love of agapism evolving through history, and rather than seeing evolution as some negative survival mechanism, of course, Pers was already anticipating Tila de Chardin. Finally, what Nitzsche Luc Aime and Nietzche provide is new ways to think of love after Darwin. But before we throw away Plato, we must consider its form, as well as its content. The symposium of Plato is dological. There are seven guests debating love, offering different models of love. And though privileged, Socrates is just one voice speaking on love, including the absent voice of Diatma, the priestess, who offered Socrates his insight on love. She, of course, was part of the uninvited, as Carrie Jenkins and Karla Nappe have argued. Equally, love after Darwin is dological, multilayered, plural, it evolves. It retains what Iriga in her French feminist essay has pointed out as horizontal transcendent, a relational space of intimate connection, a contested ethical space. Where the question at heart in this ethical reflection on love is the quality of relation, the quality of attention, the quality of life's own interrogation about the quality of loving, which takes us precisely back to where I began. The opening words from Ardi Lang's, do you really love me? And that interrogation? It takes us back to Bart's opening words in the cafe and the everyday context of which we use the word love. Love, in this sense, is not an arrival point, it's not and happy ever after. It's not an ideal, but it's something that gives us the capacity to frame what it is to relate to another human being to constantly relate across the registers of our existence, the physical, the psychological, and the social conditions that define who we are and shape our lives. As Lu Salame has said, Love is a creative act, a co creative act of life that will always require our contestation and ultimately our celebration. Thank you. Oct 30 2024 17.00 - 19.00 Professor Jeremy Carrette Inaugural Lecture Professor Jeremy Carrette (Head of the School of Divinity & Professor of Philosophy, Religion & Culture) delivers his Inaugural Lecture 'A Philosophy of Love: Nietzsche, Lou Salomé and William James'.
Oct 30 2024 17.00 - 19.00 Professor Jeremy Carrette Inaugural Lecture Professor Jeremy Carrette (Head of the School of Divinity & Professor of Philosophy, Religion & Culture) delivers his Inaugural Lecture 'A Philosophy of Love: Nietzsche, Lou Salomé and William James'.
