07/28/2023
Amor Mundi: Robert Harrison on World Love
A monologue in which our host, Professor Robert Harrison, reflects on different kinds of human love, and above all, love of the world.
07/28/2023
Amor Mundi: Robert Harrison on World Love
A monologue in which our host, Professor Robert Harrison, reflects on different kinds of human love, and above all, love of the world.
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[Music]
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In title opinions coming to you after another long hiatus,
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coming to you from the scorched earth of a Luciferian summer,
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coming to you with the fresh air of free thinking,
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that means coming to you from KZSU on the Stanford campus,
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and we're coming to you today with an equal admixture of sadness and gladness.
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Sadness because our beloved producer, Vithori Amollo,
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whose dedication and devotion to entitled opinions has been unconditional over the past seven years,
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has decided to move on.
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Gladness because Vithoriya has accepted a really attractive offer to teach at SMU.
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She's on her way to Dallas as we speak, and on behalf of the entire brigade,
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I would like to wish her the very best in her Vithanwoba.
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Vithoriya, you will be sorely missed. You have been a blessing for this weird and wandering show we
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call in title opinions. Thank you for all you've done over the years to help it thrive.
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The person who's taking over from Vithoriya and who's now sitting in her chair next to me is
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Thai Devidian, such are the ways of apostolic succession. Thai is a graduate student in our Italian
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studies program. He's about to begin his third year, and we're delighted that he will become
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the new managing producer of this radio show and podcast. Welcome aboard, Thai.
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[Music]
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Since we're dedicating today's show to Vithoriya, I would like to share a few thoughts about some of
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the sentiments that fall under the rubric of that big and sprawling word in English love.
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An all-encompassing word that encvers many kinds of bonds and emotions.
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Unlike English, ancient Greek had some eight different terms for love.
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Vithi Liya, or the affection one feels for friends, relatives, and fellow citizens.
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Eros, passionate desire that covets its object. Agape, the self-sacrificing,
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unconditional love of a mother for her child, for instance, or of God's love for man,
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regardless of merit. Then their storga, familiar love, mania, obsessive love,
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ludus, playful love, zinnia, guest, or hospitality love, and finally, feel outia, self-love.
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Eight is better than one to be sure, yet we would need even more than that to cover the many
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different kinds of human love, some of which go unacknowledged precisely because we don't have proper names for them.
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Now some years ago, I coined the term chlorophilia. I believe I used it for the very first time in an
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entitled opinions show on Epicurus with my colleague Andrea Nightingale back in 2005.
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Chlorophilia belongs under the more general rubric of bio-philia, which is a term that the biologist
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Edward O. Wilson introduced in 1984 to designate our innate sense of kinship with other life forms
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above all mammals. Chlorophilia is more specific. It refers to our basic human need for the presence
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of plant life in our surrounding environments. With a few exceptions here and there,
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a lack of greenery is one of the curses of most modern metropoluses,
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and it comes with psychological consequences. Most of us succumb to a corrosive existential
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mallets when we find ourselves for long periods of time in habitats deprived of vegetation.
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A mallet is that often goes undiagnosed or attributed to other causes. Without central park in its midst,
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New York City would probably go insane. The same holds true for many other big cities with major parks
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or gardens to save them from utter urban despair. Is Chlorophilia a human universal? Probably not.
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I'm sure there are fifty people on any given block of Wall Street who can do without plant life
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around them. Yet even they, if they make enough money, tend to return to homes in well-wooded
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suburbs or neighborhoods, if only because their spouses and peers are not exceptions to the rule.
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Why are most of us chlorophylls? It may have to do with the fact that plants are, like us,
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eukirotic organisms, in other words, they have cells with a nucleus, as opposed to pro-chirotic
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organisms who cells don't have a nucleus. Of the three main domains of life, eukirota,
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bacteria, and archaea, animals and plants belong to the first. So when we humans enter a meadow,
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a forest or a garden, there's a homecoming aspect about it, a reunion with our biotic kin, as it were.
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Chlorophilia may also have something to do with the fact that photosynthesis is as essential to life
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as air and water. All living things with the exception of those in hot vents on the ocean
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floor depend in one way or another on a molecule with a magnesium atom in a porphyrin ring that
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enabled plants to turn sunlight into sugar. This chlorophyll molecule absorbs energy from the blue and
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red parts of the solar spectrum, but not from the green middle. If the molecule were more efficient,
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if plants were able to devour all of the solar spectrum, their leaves would be a non-reflective
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black instead of green, and we would probably be mavrophiles instead of chlorophylls.
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So yes, maybe what we love in plants has a direct connection to the sun and the entropic
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processes deep within its core that fuse hydrogen into helium, letting tiny amounts of energy
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escape in the form of sunlight. There's another kind of love I would like to put into play here.
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I'll refer to it as amor Mundi or Love of the World. That phrase is found in St. Augustine
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who urged Love of God over Love of the World, and it was first put into modern circulation
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by one of the trustees of this radio program. I mean our friend Hannah Addent.
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Amor Mundi. Mundus is the world we share in common with our fellow citizens.
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It's the world we step into when we leave our homes and enter the town square.
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It's the world we fret about when we read a newspaper or hear about what's happening in our community.
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A world brings people together through its social, cultural, and political institutions,
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we love it in a fundamentally different manner than we love people, plants, pets, or our pocketbooks.
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We love it for the way its structures, our collective lives, and connects us to past and future generations.
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Amundus is built by humans, for humans, so that we may have a place to live in, to learn in, to act in,
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to die in, and to be remembered. Without a world to house us, we are not fully human.
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I'll have more to say about Amor Mundi in a moment, but first let me mention another kind of love
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that does not have a proper name in English. I will call it "lamplite love".
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I borrow the image of lamplite from a poem of WB Yates called "Leaders of the Crowd"
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where Yates declares truth flourishes where the students lamp has shown and they're alone.
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Truth flourishes where the students lamp has shown and they're alone.
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"The student's lamp is not a computer screen that shines into the reader's eyes.
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It's the subtle light of mental concentration which the student brings to the written word on the
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page, illuminating the truth that hides in the silent converse between reader and book."
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The American poet Wallace Stevens evokes the effects of that mental glow
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in a poem of his that I've cited before here on entitled opinions,
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at poem begins, "The house was quiet and the world was calm. The reader became the book
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and summer night was like the conscious being of the book."
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This kind of studio's reading, where the reader becomes the conscious being of the book
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is the essence of lamplite love. And here's something to consider, to study,
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originally meant to desire, to strive toward, to show zealful.
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It derives from the Latin studio with its archaic connotations of order,
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keenness and eagerness. Our friend Dante knew what it meant to study in this keen,
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Amorous Manor. In the last chapter of his Vithanwova, a short book he wrote about his love
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for a young woman named Beatrice, composed a year after Beatrice died at the age of 24.
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Dante was the same age, more or less. In that Vithanwova, Dante tells his reader that he has decided
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to stop writing until I quote him, "I may speak of Beatrice in a more worthy manner
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and say of her what has not been said of any woman."
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He adds that in the meantime, he has decided to study as much as I can.
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He will stewed your quantipos.
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Desire, study and love come together in that visionary last chapter of the Vithanwova.
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I say visionary because in the divine comedy, which he began writing 10 years later,
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Dante will meet Beatrice at the top of Mount Purgatory, and she or her character will actually guide
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him through the nine spheres of heaven into the Imperium, where he'll have a face-to-face
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vision of God. Dante's celestial journey in Paredizo is in many ways a journey of the mind,
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of what he called La Mente en Amorana, the mind and love.
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The enamored mind takes the student's lamp up to the stars, where it seeks to consider the cosmic
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order to which all things, including its own fervent desire for knowledge, be long.
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The enamored mind is in love with the divine mind that created space, time, matter, spirit,
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and the whole cosmic spectacle above our heads with its great crystalline spheres embedded
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one within the other, all nine of which in Dante's medieval cosmology, turned in perfect intersecting
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circles around the Godhead. Since the universe is the visible manifestation of the mind that
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engendered it, one has only to open one's eyes and consider the stars to become enamored with it.
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In the famous last line of the divine comedy, Dante refers to the love that moves the sun and the
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other stars, enamored the love that binds creation to creator, creator to creation,
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and the student's mind to the divine mind. Thus we can introduce one more term here,
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Cosmophilia. Cosmophilia in our time takes a different form than it did in Dante's.
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We love the universe not for its harmonies, but for its wild,
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wayward, overwhelming energies, its bottomless chaos, and nuclear rage. We love it as a sublime monster.
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What has changed? Only the way we understand it. With our physical eyes, we see the same night sky
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as Dante did, yet our vision of it is completely different, because human vision is not the same thing
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as animal eyesight. That's a proposition that comes to you from yours truly,
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and if you need a reference to it, or to the term chlorophilia, I refer you to my book Gardens
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and essay on the human condition published in 2008.
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So human vision is not the same thing as animal eyesight. Why? Because vision is cognitive,
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synthetic, and historical, in addition to being ocular and organic.
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When Dante joins us to open our eyes to see the glory of the heavenly constellations,
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he meant above all our mental eyes, through which the order of the cosmos becomes apparent to
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the informed, knowledgeable viewer. The circular motion of the heavens was visible only to a
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mind that understood its geocentric mechanics. What this tells us, and here is another proposition I offer
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up to the brigade, what this tells us is that human vision sees with the pale,
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extra-missive light of intelligence. We emit a light when we look,
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the same light that shines in the student's lamp, or in the student's mind,
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when he or she turns on that lamp. That's why we could say that lamp light love,
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when it turns toward the night sky, in fact illuminates the stars and helps them shine.
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I cannot stress enough here the cognitive aspect of human vision, or the degree to which
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our historically evolving frameworks alter and reorganize our perception. Pre-determining what
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we see, as well as what we don't see when we open our eyes. To say it again, vision is linked to
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understanding, and understanding is linked to the age into which we're born. We no longer belong to
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the age of gods, hence we no longer see Zeus in the lightning, or Dionysus in the vine, or
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an nipius in the river, or nymphs in our ponds. Today we see biomass, not Artemis in the earth's woodlands,
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and Poseidon for us is H2O with 35 parts per thousand of sodium chloride.
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In some, our historical worlds are the lens through which the phenomenon appears.
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And what this means is that all the types of love I've discussed so far. Biophilia, chlorophilia,
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bibliophilia, and cosmophilia have amormundia or world love as their foundation and center of gravity.
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How so?
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Without a world to house us, a person is what King Lear called unaccommodated man,
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a poor bear-forked animal. Without a world to live in, we could not love the plant life around us,
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since chlorophilia needs a human place to take root and flourishing. Without a world to draw away from,
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we could not withdraw into the intimacy of a book in lamplight. Our books, after all,
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our edited, published, distributed to bookstores, housed in libraries, and handed down from generation
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to generation. All books presuppose a world. The same holds true for cosmophilia. Without a world,
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we cannot relate to the larger universe within which our history unfolds in time.
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I could phrase this thought differently and say, for a universe to exist, we have to have an idea of it
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because there is no universe independent of its idea. Matter may exist independently of ideas,
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but not the unified totality of all that is. That totality is first and foremost a human concept.
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A human concept in turn requires a mind and the human mind in its turn requires a world to learn in
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and to think in. And finally, our worlds require amor Mundi
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because it is human love and human love alone that builds our worlds and assumes responsibility
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for their perpetuation. Stay tuned friends, more about world love in a moment.
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[Music]
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We all practice world love in one form or another in our daily lives. It's why we vote,
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why we follow the news, why we take up causes, and why we send children to school.
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If you were to know with certainty that the human world was going to come to an end the day you died,
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the rest of your life would become meaningless. The ultimate bastion of meaning is the endurance
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of the world after our death. Only a bare, forked animal can survive the termination of the world.
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Philosophers have thought and theorized about the world.
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Shopenhauer's main work is called the world as will and representation.
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Martin Heidegger speaks about the worldhood of the world.
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Wittgenstein begins his tractatus with the proposition that the world is all that is the case.
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Yet when it comes to love of the world, which keeps worlds and being, there is hardly a philosopher
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or thinker we can turn to for insight. Apart from Hannah Adent, who put the term "amor moondian"
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desurculation, the only thinker known to me who offers a minimal philosophy of world love is
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Jumbatista Vico, the 18th century Neapolitan thinker, and author of the new science.
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By the way, keep an eye out for an entitled opinions show on Vico. I'm hoping we can bring you one
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soon. I can't believe I've never done a show on Vico over these past many years since he's the thinker
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who has had the biggest impact on my own work. But maybe that's why I haven't done a show on him
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yet because he's too important to me. In any case, there is one passage and only one passage in
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Vico's new science that is directly pertinent to Amor moondian, yet it's a golden one.
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It's a passage in which Vico describes the way love and world co-evolve as human societies move
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in stages from savagery to enlightened. In section 341, Vico, using the Italian verb "amare" writes,
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"Man in the bestial state loves his own welfare, having taken wife and begotten children,
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he loves his own welfare, along with that of his family, having entered upon civil life,
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he loves his own welfare along with that of his city." When its rule is extended over several
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peoples, he loves his own welfare along with that of the nation. When the nations are united by
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wars, treaties of peace, alliances, and commerce, he loves his own welfare along with that of the
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entire human race. In all these circumstances, man loves principally his own utility.
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We find here that self-love becomes Amor moondian without ever surrendering its self-directed utility,
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self-directed impulse. In Vico's scheme, love of the world actually arises only after self-love
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extends its circle beyond family to include members of a polity, that is to say in the third,
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fourth, and fifth stages described by Vico, namely city, nation, and empire.
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Love is a binding power and world's come into being when an individual or a family's interest
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combined with other individuals and families' interests to create institutional forms of togetherness
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out of self-centredness. This process of expansion extends the egoic core of love from the private
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into the public realm. In so doing, it gives rise to the sentiment of a shared world,
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a common world. Cities and nations become possible only when self-love sublates into a commitment
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to the common good. Without such sublation, there would be no world love, and without world love,
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there would be no world at all. People would not die for their country or city state if the roots
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of Amor Mundi do not run deep in human communities. Yet history reminds us time and again
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that Amor Mundi can collapse back into private or tribal self-love at any moment along the way.
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The great insight of the Vico passage I cited is that the larger the spheres of inclusion
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get the more diffuse becomes the love that holds them together. Thus the bonds of tribe tend to
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be stronger than those of city while civic bonds tend to be stronger than those of nation.
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The good news is that as societies become more complex and law-governed,
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institutions do most of the binding work that love had done previously.
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Empires do not depend on love as much as principalities and city states do.
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Yet we must never assume that any polity, however institutionally sound or organize,
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can do without a considerable quotient of Amor Mundi on the part of its citizens.
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To love the human race as a whole is a tall order, yet any cosmopolitan or international
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world order depends upon a majority of its citizens committing themselves to that ideal,
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to that form of expansive, Catholic love of the human. In fact,
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the major question facing us today is whether love of the human world as a whole.
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In all this diverse social, cultural, and political instantiations can possibly hold its own
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against the reactive counter pressures of nation love, not to mention the more adivistic forms of
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tribal. Another major question facing us today is whether it's possible to love a world that,
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despite itself, is destroying the earth we dwell on.
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The destructive forces of our contemporary global world, with all their technopolitical
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machinery and will to power, these forces are threatening our future survival,
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as biological as well as worldly beings, which means that they are thoroughly at odds with the
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inner core of self-love from which all world love springs.
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It's this disjunction, this out of jointness between self-love and Amor Mundi that threatens to
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transform world love into a form of world-loathing.
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There is a great deal of world-loathing in the world today and often for good reason,
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yet nothing is more dangerous than to give into it.
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World-loathing only hastens the unworlding of the world that creates such revulsion in us these days.
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I suspect that the main unabout impulse behind a lot of environmental activism these days
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is not only to save the planet, but to save the world that is threatening the planet.
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In other words, to save the world from itself so that we might be able to love it once again.
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So I will leave you with one more proposition.
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Only Amor Mundi has the power to render the world we live in today worthy of love again.
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If we withdraw our love from the world, the world is lost and with it the only home we have here on earth.
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One need not love the people of the world. One need not love the world's laws or reality.
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One need not love the direction the world is heading. Yet you must still love the world itself
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if only because it's your world and it needs you now or the never.
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So much depends upon a red wheelbarrow, said William Carlos Williams.
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Yet a lot more depends upon our resolve to keep the world in being,
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to resist the temptation to load it and to find a way to regenerate the saving power of Amor Mundi.
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| 00:27:50.880 |
I'm Robert Harrison for Entitled Opinions. Thanks for listening.
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