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Alain de Botton
Plato, for example, views love as a classroom. The ancient Greeks saw love as a classroom in which two people under a benevolent and generous spirit are trying to induct one another to become the best versions of themselves. This sounds hugely odd. I mean, if you said to your partner, look, I've read some Plato loves a classroom. And that's why I'm going to point out certain things that you're doing when it sort of immediately, you know, it's a fine line between an insult and of course, because of this, we don't learn a very subtle art, which is a pre modern art, which is diplomacy. Diplomacy. It's not just what Peter Mandelson used to do. It's something that everyone is called to do in order to have a good life, which is to try and get difficult information across to another person.
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Podcast Host
Hello and welcome to Philosophy for Our Times, bringing you the world's leading thinkers on today's biggest ideas. It's Daniel here covering for Amari. And today I am bringing you a talk by Alain de Botton on the philosophy of love. Alain is a philosopher and author who first rose to fame with his 1993 book Essays in Love and is now better known as the co founder of the School of Life media company. In this talk recorded at our how the Light Gets in London festival in September last year, de Breton explores how the Greeks viewed love, why voyeurs are not interested in intimacy, and why we seem to punish ourselves with our choice of partner. So without further ado, let's hand over to Alanda Baton with Love is more than Magic. Thank you.
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Alain de Botton
Thank you very much. In saying that love is more than magic, what we're really hinting at is the idea that it's a subject which enters philosophy. It is a subject on which we can reflect logically. But a little caveat here. We might think, well, what is the person? What is the nature of the person who has reflected logically on love? What is their life likely to be like? And I'm going to put up my hand here And I argue for a certain way of living. I think the expert on love should have what other people think of as a bad love life, a difficult love life, a complicated love life. There's a lovely bit in Marcel Proust where he says that if a sick man is looking for a doctor, he should always look for a doctor who's very well acquainted with illness. Only illness itself will force the doctor to explore the nature of unwellness at the level of depth which it deserves. And something similar applies to love. So if you're looking for an expert on love, you found him not because he understands and has led a flawless life, but because he's pretty much made every single error in the book. And this has therefore incentivized him to look more deeply. So the place in which we find ourselves now in relation to love has a history. Love has a history. And we need to become historians of love if we are to try and understand it. It's a subject that shifts in time. We have not always loved as we love now. And so it's really important to situate ourselves a little bit. And, of course, we are still broadly living in the Romantic era. I know we don't think of that in necessarily in those terms in all areas, but broadly speaking, the Romantic age kicks off Germany, France, the UK in the late 18th century, and really the 19th century is the heyday of it, and it's connected up with a decline in religion. In many ways. Love is a redirection of emotional energy. We can discuss this redirection of emotional energy from up here to down there, with huge pressures. Of course, by the time you're calling the person you're sharing a space with, angel, there could be some tensions. The great thing about the Christian era is it understood the fervor, the longing for an ideal being, but it very handily situated them up there and they do not mingle with us here. But Romanticism firmly, you know, reverses the levitation, puts the divine in the middle of everybody and says, tells everybody that there is such a thing as a soulmate.
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Alain de Botton
You know, it's a fascinating concept, but it really gathers speed at the end of the 18th and early 19th century. The idea that there's one person there who can understand you at unusual depth, all sorts of things go with this. The soulmate will understand you without needing to speak. Speak. This is a real romantic prejudice that language gets in the way of emotion. A classic Romantic division, by the way. Romanticism is a slightly dirty word for me, as you'll see. I mean, Every time the word is mentioned, every time people say something is not romantic, that's generally a really good idea. People say a couple went out on a date and they discussed their finances. Not very romantic. And you think, yeah, it is. I mean, in terms of if we use romantic as conducive actually to the success of a relationship or, you know, if you pour water on the idea that someone met after two weeks and married in Vegas and you go, sure, that's such a good idea. Oh, that's not very romantic of you. Well, it's a good thing anyway, so don't oversold it. They understand you without words, music, of course, the great romantic medium of communication. And so it's this whole idea that, you know, you will say of a lover, they understood me without me needing to speak. And then you know that it's the right person. You're drawn by mysterious force. You just knew it had to be them. That force is beyond analysis. You can't probe it, et cetera, other romantic tropes and ideas. No one has a job. Generally in romantic culture, love just subsumes everything. So no one's really working. There's no money. Money is totally off the stage. There's no, you know, think of Jane Austen, the last great English pre romantic writer. She's obsessed by money. I mean everybody. She's literally sort of tabulating who earns what, when, how. And it's really important to her definition of love. Like you come with your accountant book to Jane Austen after that completely deserves. I mean, Keatsu, God knows what's happening with the money. It's just whatever. It's also, of course, forever. Love has no other end other than death. And then the Romantics, obsessed by the idea of an early death. So it is forever, but it's going to be short. So kind of interesting. And you know, quite soon someone develops a cough, tuberculosis, you know the story. So then sex, very particular take and ranticism on sex. Adultery had always been a problem. Madea, etc. You know, there's always some heat around that, but it really becomes a true tragedy in a way that it's not been for a very long time. So sex, the idea of sex outside of love is completely prescribed and is seen as really the end of the world. And that is the romantic idea. Now. Many consequences from. You know, we've been wandering around with these romantic ideals for a long time. One of them comes the words thing, you know, as we're in a philosophical setting, language, very important. It's led to a Massive outbreak of sulking. What is sulking? Sulking is really a consequence of romanticism. I'm telescoping, but it's a consequence of romanticism in a sense that it's something that arises if you believe that your partner must understand you should understand you. If the proof of true love is wordless understanding, you can have a lot of sulking on your hands because you're going to get a lot of situations where there's something that you're feeling like, I'm really annoyed at the partner, but you won't explain it to them. And so it's a quintessential romantic moment. You said that with you. I. Arms crossed. Your partner goes, is anything wrong? You go. And they go, must be something wrong. Like this. And it goes on and on. You lock yourself in the bathroom, they're begging you, et cetera. And you don't want to come out and you don't want to say it. And if they say, why? Why? And really, the real answer is, because I was brought up as a romantic child, and I believe that true love means that you should be able to see through the outer skin into my soul and read my soul, as Keats suggested. And if not, then, you know, anyway, so on and on it goes. Also a belief in no secrets. Romantics very obsessed by the idea that there cannot be a secret. If you have something that you know, truth in you, it belongs also to the other. And a beautiful idea until, you know, you're having breakfast a Saturday morning, it's great, you're eating your eggs, avocado, and you say, oh, the waiter's quite fine. And then massive argument, because you don't want to hear that side from your part. The true complexity of a human being. It's. It's hard to fully be yourself with another person. We can discuss whether, I mean, again, a great romantic idea, this person allowed me to be fully myself. Really? Is that a good idea? I mean, all areas. Also a terrible view of criticism. Again, people will break up and they'll go. Some will go, why did you break up? No, my partner was too critical. They just didn't allow me to go to, you know, fully be myself. And you want to say, okay. I mean, so Plato, for example, views love as a classroom. The ancient Greeks saw love as a classroom in which two people under a benevolent and generous spirit are trying to induct one another to become the best versions of themselves. This sounds hugely odd. I mean, if you said to your partner, look, I've read some. Plato loves a classroom. And that's why I'm going to point out certain things that you're doing when it sort of immediately, you know, it's a fine line between an insult and of course, because of this we don't learn a very subtle art, which is a pre modern art, which is diplomacy. Diplomacy. It's not just what Peter Mandelson used to do. It's something that, it's something that everyone is called to do in order to have a good life, which is to try and get difficult information across to another person. And again, the Romantics are not thinking too much about this because the truth is always supposed to be its own reward. Well, and this psychotherapy is very aware of this. If you tell people things about themselves, they may be very well, very true, but you will come up against what they call defense mechanisms. And defense mechanisms are there to protect you against the full glare of uncomfortable truths, which may nevertheless be really necessary. So part of being a successful lover is not just having the truth and spitting it out, but also finding the right moment, finding the time, finding the best possible way in which the truth can make its way from one mind into another. This is something, I mean, it's also something that philosophy has wrestled with. I mean, when I started my career in philosophy, I remember being utterly struck by the differences in which philosophers would write some papers, very charming, incredibly easy to read, etc. Other papers impenetrable, etc. And I remember saying to teachers, professors, there's a real difference between these two. And they'll go, yes, well, one's more intelligent or less intelligent. But it had nothing to do with the presentational manner because at least in those days, philosophy was not understood to be a. A medium which should be interested in the seduction of the reader. That was, you know, that's almost close to rhetoric. What matters is the truth. And if the truth is there, it doesn't matter how you write, it's just how you, you know, it's just the points you're making, not how you're making them. Transpose that to love. Again, you know, how do we want to live that issue? In love. And I'm a firm, I've become a firm believer that you may have all sorts of insights into your lover, all sorts of things you need to share, et cetera. Unless you're doing it in the diplomatic way, forget it. And that means at the right time, you know, there's no point broaching an enormous topic at one in the morning when someone's had a Dr. No one's ever learned anything under conditions of humiliation? By the time you told someone a threat or told them that they're not as good as their mother or something, you've lost them. So how you get it across is really, really important. I mean, the other thing, of course, that we've learned and a major insight. So the age of romanticism starts to bleed, of course, into the age of therapy. So 1900 interpretation of dreams. We are still, I believe, living in an age which has blended the romantic and the therapeutic. I'm firmly on the side of therapeutic. I but very keenly aware of the romantic. You see this issue in its sharpest form when it comes to how people are when they go on a date. So you set people up on a date and you wait to hear what's happened and they go off and meet and then you call them up after date and you go, how did you get on with this person that I helped you to meet who seemed really good on paper? And often the person says, yeah, yeah, on paper. Yeah, no, great, nice. Thank you. Thank you so much. They were really, really nice person, really nice evening. You go, what was really going on? I don't know. Yeah, something. I don't know. And you're thinking, what is it that's not right? And then you get this, you know, difference between the paper and the psychology on paper. This should work. Psychologically, it doesn't. Why does it not work psychologically? Well, this is an enormous topic that psychotherapy has lifted the lid on. And essentially psychotherapy gives us a fascinating story, which is it tells us that the way in which we love as adults is following in grooves defined in childhood. And love is always a question of refinding love. But there's a real but in it. The priority in adult love is to seek familiarity, not fulfillment. So we will prioritize familiarity. So if your father has been an alcoholic and your mother has been depressed, these are not great things when you're a child, but they feel really familiar. Really kind of, yeah, you're there. So when you go out on the dating scene, you meet lots of people who might be really great on paper. There are lots of people who don't drink, lots of people who are not depressed. But yeah, yeah, kind of get a head off to things that feel a little bit familiar. I mean, we're laughing. It's absolutely tragic. And it happens. I mean, I am a qualified therapist. I did a therapy training, and I now see clients and this theory, which was a theory floating on high, you see it every day and it's galling and it's humbling and we can only fall on our knees and pray to the God of philosophy at how stricken we are as human beings. We're really stricken this error. So your friend who you set up on a date, really, if they were being honest, saying, why didn't you want to get together with this person, really want to say something like, look, thank you for setting up with this person, but I just didn't sense that they would make me suffer in the way that I feel I need to suffer in order to feel I'm in love because of my childhood. I mean, that's the long answer which you tend not to say. So you just go, I didn't fancy them. But that's often what's really going on. I mean, you know, again, back to psychotherapy. Most of the crazy, distorted things that people are doing as adults has its root, obviously in patterns learned in childhood. And the poignant thing this is, again, what you learn is that in order to survive childhoods, we learn all sorts of quite clever tricks, like, for example, disassociating. Fantastic. If there's violence in the house and, you know, and you're five years old, you learn to disassociate, you learn to split your mind from your circumstances. Fantastic. You go off into another world. That's really useful. Age 5. Fantastic. If you've got a very depressed parent and you're seven, what might you do? Really focus on the upside and become a joker. Constant jokes, levity. You just stay on the surface because you're going to need to carry somebody. If somebody's very judgmental in your. In your family, you might be extremely keen to just please, please everybody. Yes, absolutely. Great idea. Fantastic. I'll do that. Absolutely. Just trying to keep the peace. And on and on it goes. These things which children work out intuitively, it's unbelievable genius how they work it out. And it's. Their survival strategy. Becomes, of course, age 30, 40, 50, an unbelievable liability. What worked brilliantly and had an absolute logic to it. Age 5, no longer works. And this is when people are so unsympathetic to the craziness that we're all up to, people go, why is that person dis. Why is that person invulnerable? Why can't they open up in love? You want to go, do you know the childhood that this person came through? Of course, it made no sense to open up in love. They would have been annihilated. So no wonder that they've gone through three marriages and no One knows what they're feeling inside because that's how they learned to be. That was their survival strategy. Or why is that person so superficial and slick and you can't raise any melancholic topic with them? Well, that's how they survived. You know, sometimes some of us have to become comics in order to, you know, survive our show. Some of us have to get on stages and make a lot of fuss and like, whatever. This is not normal. This is very strange. Very, very strange. I mean, if your definition of good parenting, your child has no inclination to be famous, you've done well. Otherwise, something's gone wrong. So, by the way, I mean, look, in love, no one needs a completely sane person. And if you look for a sane person, you'll never find them. The best thing you can do in love is to find somebody who has some kind of grasp on the map of their distortions and insanity. That's the best we can do. And, you know, standard question on an early dinner date should just be, how are you crazy? And if the person gets offended and runs away, it's a bad sign because, you know, they should be relatively relaxed and have something to say. So if they don't speak, leave immediately. So, and by the way, I mean, all mental illness. I want to say we could have debates about this. All mental illness ultimately has to do with the shortfall of love. Everybody's an institution and everybody who's struggling with their mental health, et cetera. It can all be traced very crudely with a marker pen to incidents in childhood when there was a deficiency of love. Love literally helps to heal the mind. All those maneuvers of mind that we associate with health are essentially the gifts of love. So, for example, a lack of paranoia. Paranoia is a standard part of mental unwellness. The sense where you can't. You can't really separate what's coming at you and targeting you from what is a more random accident in the world. You can't. That distinction slips constantly. And therefore you just don't. You think something is against you that isn't. This is, you know, to be protected from. This is again, a gift of love. Because you start through a loving education, through a loving early journey, you can. You're protected from a sense that you may be the center of everything that goes wrong. I mean, by the way, this is extremely depressing news. I mean, the idea I'm really harking to this standard psychotherapeutic view, which is it's all in your childhood and it's so boring. I mean, we have a YouTube channel at the School of Life, which I help to run. And we're always. Every film is about your childhood and there's someone who every week takes upon themselves. We launched film at 2 o' clock and at 2:15 they're there and they go, another film about childhood from the School of Life. And they have lots of exclamation marks and it's always the same person and they're just having fun doing this. And I always go in and I go, yes, you're right, sadly it is. And we just have this back and forth every week. And sadly, it's true. I mean, I share the person's frustration. It's maddening. You're 40 or 50 or 60 and it really is supposed to be between 0 and 10. How is it even logical? I sometimes help people to understand it by talking about language. You know, when we're 2, 3, 4, we're acquiring a language, a grammatical language. Hundreds of words, thousands of constructions, declensions, etc are entering our minds as we're doing other stuff. You know, we're doing handstands in the garden, drawing buttercups in the kitchen, and yet it's all going in. And so that by five we have a language bedded in. And that language will remain with us throughout our lives. And if you try and learn another language in middle age, I mean, boy, boy, even with Duolingo, you've got your work cut out. It's very, very hard. You will never really reach fluency. Very, very easily. Something similar. You're learning an emotional language. Of course you are. You're learning a grammar not of words, but you're learning a grammar around value. What are you? What are you worth? What is your worth as a human being? That's something, you know, one of the great distinctions between humans. We talk a lot about inequality, political inequality, financial inequality. One of the great inequalities of life is very broadly how you feel about yourself. What is your baseline assessment of who you are? Philosophers talk a lot about, you know, reality and perception and subjectivity, etc. One of the great issues that sits on this is what is my worth as a human being? Am I fundamentally a good person who may sometimes make mistakes? Am I basically broadly on a good path, or am I broadly worthless and hopeless and damned and there's something wrong with me and I can. We have a show of hands for people in the room who broadly feel. Broadly feel they're okay. I mean, not that they've done anything great or last, but broadly they kind of like themselves. They kind of like themselves. Okay. And who broadly, broadly thinks they're kind of wretched and kind of, like, awful. Yeah, okay. You're all immediately my friends. I love those guys. I mean, we cry together, we'll meet afterwards, we'll head off. Because these are the. You know, it's hard living like that. Why am I talking about this? Yes. Grammatical language. So we're imbibing a grammatical language about our worth and our value. And it's so hard to shift. You know, we learn about what a man is, what a woman is, what happens when a man and a woman are together, what happens in two men. All of these things we're learning as children. And to try and change this, psychotherapy offers us, you know, 50 minutes a week. It's hard. Imagine if you were learning Finnish for 50 minutes a week. You know, try and get fluid is really hard. Psychoanalysts, of course, want us on the couch once a day. I mean, in a way, yeah, maybe. Maybe. Maybe that's, you know, that's a better option. Okay, minutes left. Let me. Let me just throw out some. Some things. Should we talk about sex? Let's talk about sex. Because sex is all part of love and is really intriguing, I think. Let's talk about sexual perversion.
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Podcast Host
So
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Alain de Botton
one theory which I think is very interesting is that all sexual perversion is a flight from intimacy and mutuality. Take the voyeur. No, take the flasher. The guy who's in a raincoat. Often a guy. Usually a guy who's in a raincoat flashes in front of everybody, right? If you go up to that person, go, you're really lovely. Do you mind if we go off to a hotel? We'd love to get to know you hear about your charity. Lovely. Me and my parents, they would run for the hills. They're absolutely not interested in this. They would absolutely, you know, run. Why? Because they're not trying to get to know you. They don't want. They want to frighten you. Why do they want to frighten you? Because they're very, very, very frightened themselves of intimacy. Why are they frightened of intimacy? Because someone frightened them. I mean, this is the terrible thing about meanness. Meanness is the thing. We're just so great at handing down the generations. We just. It flows down the generations. You know, someone took my eye out. Okay, great, I'll take your eye out and then I'll shoot your foot, and then I'll grab your toenail and blah. And it just goes on and on. We are we are massively, you know, the word sadism and masochism should be written on the sky. Sadly, we're doing this all the time. We're setting ourselves up for suffering. Why? Because we were primed for suffering in our own early years. And constantly we are redirecting a sadistic impulse which again, I mean, we're constantly handing people parcels of love and hate that don't really belong to them. And someone gave. It's a constant, constant game of pass the parcel. And being a self aware individual from a therapeutic point of view is knowing a little bit about what the impulse is. What parcel are you trying to pass to who and why? It's a huge topic. Right, back to perversion. Voyeur. Think of the voyeur with a telescope, right? They have to be a mile away from somebody because again, they don't want to be too in the room. This is going to get a little dark here. Bestiality, sex with animals. What on earth earth's going on there? Why? Why? The reason why it's something that people go for is because the animal doesn't know who you are. It doesn't know what's going on. It has no. It can't look you in the eye and go, we're equal. I know what you're doing, I know who you are. It's totally puzzled. And that gives insulation from the mutuality which again, the very, very ill person is into. Most tragic of all, sex. Murder. Why do people. Why is there rape followed by murder? What is this thing? What is it? And people who work in this domain will always tell you that the moment that the person murders the person they've just raped is when the victim looks at the perpetrator. It's the look, it's the eye, it's essentially the person knows that they have been seen and that is unbearable because they cannot allow themselves to be seen in a vulnerable state. So an extra extreme flight from all threat of mutuality, even more tragic, sex with children. Again, that goes on. The child doesn't know what's going on. The child is not an equal. And it's the flight from mutuality, which, this is a spectrum of unwellness. We're really at the very, very, very unwell, very tragic, very horrendous end of unwellness. But it goes right, you know, there's a sort of softer end of unwellness which is, you know, people who sleep with people and then immediately have to leave them, they can't be with them, they can't bear to be with them, you know, we think about love as something that everybody wants and is very easy to receive. And, you know, there's kind of discourse, a lot of it. Is anyone in the room who's looking for love? Anyone looking for love? Now, some people looking for love. Okay. By the way, you should meet afterwards. You should. So, but with a caveat. With a caveat. Good place to come to a philosophy festival. You might meet a real caveat. We say we want love, but a big part of many of us is also in flight from love because love is really difficult to absorb and make sense of, particularly if the early experience of love has not gone that well. So in other words, if your craving for affection was met with indifference or cruelty or sadism or intermittence or a sudden swerve or a death, etc. And this is the experience of many, many, many, many people, then receiving love as an adult will be both the most thrilling thing and the most terrifying thing. And I think we're not understanding love if we simply see it as a good thing. By love, I'm meaning here being seen, being intimate, being held, being understood, understanding, or the other way around. All of those things, all of those lovely things, we could define them at length, are both wonderful and very, very difficult to absorb. Imagine somebody who has spent a long time in prison, in a prison camp, and they've had to get used to an extremely narrow, calorie controlled diet, and suddenly somebody opens the door and says, head out to the banquet, there's lots of food, hang out, it's going to be great. And also they may die from overnourishment. The stomach simply cannot absorb, cannot metabolize the goodness that's on offer. And there's a version of this that goes on in the romantic sphere and it's particularly poignant that, as it were, the people who've been most deprived of love, who would so benefit and so flourish under the tenderness of another person, are simultaneously those who may find such a hard time in allowing love in because it is unfamiliar, because it is yearned for to such an extent that its loss is feared to a huge extent. It's a weird thing because, as we know, I would rather turn away love by my own authority than watch it die under somebody else's authority. There's a huge issue in which, you know, if I decide to be miserable, I've decided to be miserable. I've not had that misery imposed on me. And that's a very powerful impulse to be able to choose one's unhappiness rather than choose happiness and have it swept away. We know of course about attachment theory, invented not far down the road. John Bowlby and colleagues. Very fascinating, very crude, very crude Instagrams onto attachment theory. And you know, it seems like a very vulgar and crude thing, but it's pointing us to a very interesting idea, which is that unless our early experiences have been filled with real trust and good experiences, etc. We are liable to enter adult life with certain quirks around us when love presents itself. And just to pick the two classic ones, anxious attachment and avoidant attachment. The avoidantly attached person feels that if anyone gets too close to them, they feel a very strong desire to reclaim independence and reclaim authority. So they're the ones who, you know, go for long walks, don't share a bedroom, feel the need to holiday alone, et cetera. And then what's their great fear? Their great fear is really being engulfed. The fear of engulfment. And you know, it's something to take very, very seriously. Again, love, this so called positive thing threatens annihilation psychologically at the deepest level. If your, if your experience has been that the people who loved you could also destroy you, you're going to need to have an extremely vigilant system around you making sure that that never happens again. By the way, talking of things that happen again, another classic idea that we find in Freud, the idea of the repetition compulsion, right? So your parents are an alcoholic and then you head always for another alcoholic, or your mother was distant, you go for a distant partner, et cetera. And it looks perverse. What are people doing? Are we just suffering in an endless cycle? The Freudian idea is actually much more hopeful and it's good to hold it in mind. The Freudian idea is that we are trying to repeat things that we don't fully understand. Not in the name of suffering indefinitely, but in order to resolve them. The fantasy, the reason why we head some of us from one difficult relationship to another is not a desire for perpetual grief, but it's a desire to unpick something that we don't yet know. And so it's really the idea that knowledge, and this is a classic philosophical idea, knowledge will stop the repeated behavior. The repeated behavior is a vain attempt to unlock a puzzle. And the puzzle might be something like, well, what did happen with your alcoholic parents, etc. And the fantasy, the wish is that an unfulfilling, the parent who you could never change will be re met in an adult form, in an adult that you can change. How can you change them through philosophy and psychotherapy, by dialogue, through words, by being able to talk about what previously you didn't have a vocabulary for. So this is a place where a vocabulary, not a romantic vocabulary, but a philosophical, therapeutic vocabulary becomes absolutely essential. We will be able to talk about things that, as a child, I only suffered through. That's the fantasy. And it's a deep fantasy. And I think explains why, say, the children of alcoholics so often find themselves alcoholics. They don't want to find themselves with people who are going to be forever alcoholics. They want to help them to heal themselves. And this is a very, very deep impulse. Let's head. So we've been discussing veered off. We've been discussing avoidant attachment, also anxious attachment. The other classic way of attaching. It's slightly misnamed, really. Its most observable feature is angry attachment. People who are essentially furious all the time that the quality of the love that they're receiving from a partner is not quite up to scratch. Another show of hands, who here basically feels always, always, you put it on their gravestone that they've not been loved enough with a partner, just are not loved enough. Not loved enough. Yeah. Great. Well, we'll meet afterwards. You guys are anxiously attached. I'm anxiously attached. It's this sort of pattern that we know that love is possible, but it's always under threat of disappearance. And I mean, again, we have to kind of apologize to ourselves in the universe for. I don't mean mystically, just way of speaking. It's just the way in which we're constitutional. We emerge from the morass of childhood with these patterns. And it's deeply. It invites, as I say, poignant compassion. Okay, what's the future of love? We've got about a minute to discuss the future of love. I'm looking forward. I'm looking forward. You know what comes after romanticism? I think we are looking for therapeutic relationships. And what is a therapeutic relationship as opposed to a romantic relationship? A therapeutic relationship starts from the idea that two people will only be very partially aware of who they are. That on an initial dinner date, it's not like I'm this and you're that. It's like, I don't know who I am, you don't know who you are. But together we acknowledge the mystery of being human. And we're like, with our tiny flashlights, we're looking around the chasms of the self, and we can pick out only a few words and the giant volumes with which we're surrounded with most of which are sunk in darkness. And tyre. We don't know who most of us are. And that's a very good starting point. A humility around our epistemological claims. I don't quite know who I am, you don't quite know who you are. But we're going to try and maneuver through the darkness. And also a keen awareness of how many of the things that we do owe their origins to dynamics from the distant past whose details will escape us, but around which we only can only really apologize ultimately. And a deep willingness to explore these in a non defensive way. So to be able to say, well, I'm not sure why I did that or why I lost my temper, but I'm curious. Curiosity is the most. I mean, why are we all here? We are curious people. It is the bellwether of a healthy relationship is a healthy amount of curiosity. Why did that happen? Who am I? Who are you? And the awareness that just because you've been together 34 years, you don't know the person at all. At all. One of the great mistakes is people think they know each other. Absolutely don't know each other. However long you've been together with, you have no idea who your partner is. You have no idea who you are. And that's exciting. You know anyone who goes off my ratio? A bit familiar? No, it's not. You just haven't. You haven't opened the hatch. You don't know and. Okay, so on that basis we're now going to have to come to an end. But we've got some questions. So if you want to have questions, we can start. But thank you. Thank you so much.
- [35:06]
Podcast Host
Thank you for listening to Philosophy for Our times. Do you agree with Alain or do you have a better philosophy of love? You can get in touch through the email address in the show notes or by leaving a comment on the platform of your choice. And if you'd like to hear more, please like and subscribe and take a look at our upcoming festival this September in London where you can watch talks like these live and even meet the speakers. If you're busy, you can always head over to our website IAI TV for thousands more recorded debates, talks and interviews from the world's leading thinkers. Bye.
- [35:41]
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