Ep. 365: Scheler on Love (Part One)

0:07 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some guys who at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 365 is something like what is the relation between love and ethics? We're continuing from episode 364 and reading Max Scheler's the Nature of Sympathy. The second and expanded edition was published in 1922. You read the last two chapters of part one and all of part two. More information about the text and the podcast, please see partiallyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer, only able to love what is at the same time appropriate to my specific instincts and of importance to them.

0:46 Seth: In Madison, Wisconsin, this is Seth Paskin, self loving but not egoistic. In Austin, Texas, this is Wes Alwan,

0:53 Wes: a co partner in Common Love. In Cambridge, Massachusetts, this is Dylan Casey,

0:59 Dylan: demonstrating what I value by what I love in Madison, Wisconsin.

1:03 Mark: All right, so this was supposed to give us more the picture of Scheler's take on ethics and its relations to emotions. We talked about fellow feeling last time. These last very short chapters of part one opened up the idea that fellow feeling can be shallow or deeper. Surprisingly, this did not come up before that. If you just like identify with somebody's circumstances, I feel for, oh, you're in that situation, then that's a, you know, that's fellow feeling fellowship. But it's not as deep as if you actually, your fellow feeling takes as its intentional object their personality, the center of their being, their innermost self.

And for that to happen, you really have to have love for them. You have to have this connection. So love is going to be something absolutely primitive. So it's actually, you can't really define it in terms of other things. You can just exhibit it, he says, and we can say a lot about how it interacts with values. But it's not like we got from Brentano, where you are recognizing the value of something and having a love that is an appropriate love. Love is not an apprehension of value, as he says. So we're going to see emotional responses as phenomenologically basic in a way that we haven't seen in Kant.

Certainly most of our prior figures we've read.

2:25 Dylan: Yeah. In fact, what you just said about Brentano, which I wasn't on the Brentano episode, makes me think that Scheler is. Love is outward, is not reacting to value, it is ascribing value. It's an act out of individuals that demonstrates value.

2:44 Wes: Well, it Seems to be occasioned by value because there's this movement, what he calls a movement from lower to higher value. Yeah, but it is. Right, yeah. We should try to give an example of this very quickly, very soon. So I think unconditional love seems to be a big theme here because it could lose all of its qualities and we would still love it on Scheler's account. And also this movement from lower to higher value is quite strange. It comes with a lot of restrictions. So it's not the case, for instance, that because we love someone, we want to change them and make them better.

That's not what a movement from lower to higher value means. It's not that we wish they were better. Maybe it's something like seeing the potential in them. But I don't think it's even that. You know, that might be a first stab at getting at what he's trying to say. He does give the example, right. Of Jesus saying to Mary, he expresses his love and then he says, go, you know, you don't have to sin anymore. So it's not a way of saying, well, I love you so you ought not to sin. Or here's a trade off, why don't you do better? It's just that there's some sort of recognition that his love is going to make it possible for her not to sin.

So he sees some higher possibility for her. Maybe it's just about personhood ultimately.

4:07 Dylan: Yep.

4:07 Wes: Yeah.

4:08 Dylan: And personality.

4:09 Wes: Well, yeah, I'm just translating personality as personhood because it's. He's speaking abstractly. Right. In this case it's not about Westness or Dylan Ness, it's just about being a person.

4:19 Dylan: Well, yeah. And so particularly accentuating the individual, he has that whole section about how the love of mankind as a whole or as a group ends up being a great evil because it actually obliterates the individual.

4:36 Wes: Unless you can conceive of humanity as

4:38 Dylan: an individual, which only God can.

4:40 Wes: Right.

4:40 Dylan: So yeah, yeah. Not just humanity as an individual, humanity as individuals. Right. I mean, somehow God manages to maintain the conception of each individual. But to me, that when you were talking about personality, that was the piece from Scheler that was ringing through was getting rid of the generic abstraction of us as individuals participating as species being, some whole species being. Yeah. But we are to be valued. And the value that we demonstrate in our love is for individuals, particular instances.

5:16 Seth: Right. That's a really important point, that whatever love is, it functions directly on individual to individual to just go back to the round out characterization, a kind of simple way to think about this is this is that Scheler thinks that you never love because there's not a because of love. Like, oh, this person's really sweet, so I love them. He's like, that's always an. A post hoc rationalization of why that love is actually. It's an action, it's a movement. It's not kind of like an emotion or a state of being. It's almost like a dynamic relation between an individual and something else.

And, you know, as Dylan kind of pointed out, it's a relationship between an individual. You know, we're talking specifically about the paradigmatic case between human beings, but an individual and another specific individual. And what love does, really, is love makes it possible for the beloved to achieve their highest potential. In other words, the act of being loved, as opposed to loving. The act of being loved makes it possible for you, if you're the beloved, to achieve your highest realization or your highest value. Because love is the act of somebody else sort of seeing that potential as it were, in you or seeing that value in you.

It's a really interesting perspective.

6:48 Mark: Well. And poetic and paradoxical that I feel like. Well, as we were saying, it's not that I want you to change. It's not that I'm pushing you higher. It's not that I'm deluded. It's not that I'm just seeing. I just see the best. And even though you don't act like that because there's no chance of being disappointed later, not like, you know, I see in my child the great person that he's to become. And then when he doesn't turn out that way, I'm like, oh, well, I guess I was loving my idea of you rather than you yourself. But yet it is shot through with values.

So. And he really wants to say both that the deepest kind of love involves this individual personality. This was a technical term for him, but that you can also love art and love God and love the personality of Jesus. Even though you never have met Jesus, you don't actually know anything about his material circumstances. For real. Yeah. So it just ends up being a bunch of paradoxes.

7:45 Wes: Jesus was a sweet guy, but this is why it's.

7:49 Dylan: I mean, to me it's so clear that love is an act outwards from us. And this aligned to me with the whole bit about from last time about fellow feeling as being part of our powers. Love is a power, from Scheler's point of view, that comes out of us. That got underlined for me. And I know that we didn't have the SEP article in here, but they were summarizing Scheler as being a kind of dualist in this respect, that love is associated with spirit activity and then joined up with mind. So that act of loving or love is our power that we act out on the world. So it makes sense that you can love Jesus because love is not Jesus pulling it out of you. It's an act outward from you.

8:36 Wes: Yeah. You know, I would make just getting at what Mark is calling the paradoxical nature of some of this. We could qualify that in various ways because it is true that we love valuable objects. We don't love value per se, he says, but it's not the case that we go around loving objects that are not valuable. Now perhaps it's the case that by virtue of personhood, everyone is valuable. I think he would probably say that. But there's got to be something valuable about the objects. Which is not to say that every valuable object is going to arouse.

Tells love. He makes that point. He wants to write and exactly. So he'll say love and hate aren't right. They're not feelings, they're not preferences. They're not even an apprehension of something. It's almost like one point. He calls it a unique attitude and says it is an emotional response, though it's just at this kind of procedural, pre discursive, non discursive level. It's not a judgment, but it is a response to value content. So he says a lot of things that. And maybe we can tease this out as we go forward, that at various points you get to a point in the reading and you're like, is he contradicting himself here or is this just a subtle qualification?

Didn't he say it wasn't about value? Now it is about value. It's not a feeling, but it is an emotional response. Right. That kind of thing.

9:55 Mark: It's always spontaneous. Even when in response to something else, it can make itself felt as an attractive feeling, force coming from the object. But you're not just being attracted to. It's not just passive. It is still. Even if somebody reaches out in love to you, you are still spontaneously reaching out in love to them. This has to be seen in the context of phenomenology, that he's just saying, yes, we can see that value is involved, but in the phenomenological act, when we analyze what is love, we don't feel like, I am evaluating this thing. So that's why he can say that, yes, there's evaluation involved, but I'M not doing any evaluating.

10:36 Wes: The other aspect here is the epistemological component, right? Because persons are, as we saw previously, they're kind of like black boxes. We can't ever really fully know them except through love in the way that love familiarizes with them. But again, it's non discursive, right? So it's the only way of actually making contact with a person. This is a way of getting contact with the thing in itself. It doesn't involve knowledge in the typical sense. It's non empirical and it starts out as something non conscious even. And then judgments follow on that and feelings follow on that.

11:15 Dylan: So what's a little bit confusing? I agree with what you're saying, and maybe this is just confusion. And Scheler is the way in which love seems is sort of explicit, the act of valuing, from Scheler's point of view, that we are demonstrating and exercising our power of love and connection. And that is a valuing activity. And in that way it also seems to be something that gets refined with qualification. I would agree with the notion of that there being a kind of ladder involved, though Scheler has a very different conception of the ladder of love than what Diotima has in the symposium.

So it seems that you can refine your loving activity, which seems confusing to me given the characterization that you just had Wes, which sounds also like it comes right out of Scheler, like the idea that you can actually refine and learn how to love better or to value things that are appropriate to value more. And when I say that sentence, things that are learning to value things that are of higher value better seems to be like I'm tuning my value detector better. That seems to be consistent with Scheler, except for the fact that it's. Well, here I.

Here I trip up because it seems to be that the value of things in the world seem to come from them, but the valuing of things in the world is an activity of ours.

12:43 Mark: So just to comment on what you were just saying on how we can tune his section near the end on eugenics, I thought was pretty funny that he's criticizing eugenics, but actually says what would make the best possible pairings is not. Let's have some central committee look at people's genetic makeup and try to pair them and get the best possible type, but that we are naturally attracted to the best possible type unless we have learned wrongly, right? Unless we have had bad values imposed on us, which might be like find the richest person or find someone who has this particular physical makeup, you know, Whatever the fashion of the day is that these are the attractive people. If we can just unlearn all that and be spontaneous, then we are naturally attracted toward the highest specimens of the type. That is what improving, making our love more appropriate to worthy of love.

13:37 Wes: That's sexual love in particular, which is

13:39 Mark: something I wanted to talk about because Dylan was just saying that it was very different from what's in the symposium. He should have a section in this on the symposium where he actually says, how am I different from Plato, from Ficino, from whatever other takes on this? Because definitely he's dismissive of pure sexual attraction. That is sort of like any person of the opposite sex will do. Like, he's not. He doesn't have tolerance for that. That's not very spiritual, but real. Like, sex definitely is not something like in Ficino where it is just pushed down and degraded and like, oh, it's the ladder is just about getting beyond sex. Like, it's actually inherently, it's really important. And if you lose your libido, if you lose your primary sexual urges, you actually become weaker in spirit overall. So he has learned the lessons of Nietzsche.

14:32 Wes: So, yeah, with sexual love, sexual attraction sets restrictions.

14:38 Dylan: Basically.

14:38 Wes: This is what he says. We're not going to just have a romantic love or sexual love for anyone. If I'm a heterosexual male, it's going to be for a woman. So there's that kind of generic qualification, but it's also going to be a particular type of person that does it for me. So you get. It's not like certain types of love can't be restricted in that way. But I think the more generic form of love is something like a replacement for concept of respect or seeing a person as an end in themself. Scheler doesn't like that idea, that cold Kantian approach which excludes love.

But I think his form of love really is a replacement for that. Going back to my whole black box comment, what he says, it's a. There's kind of an individual core value in people that is not itself susceptible to judgment. And that is what we're latching onto with love. And it goes even for sexual love, right? So it's almost like saying, well, I got to be attracted first. But ultimately if I do love this person, then it's not for that. It sets a condition on who I'm going to get with. But ultimately, if I love them, my love is focused towards their individual core.

So if it's Susan that I really, you know, I really like her in particular, and she's got all these great qualities and we get married. That's great, but that's preference. And then beyond preference. Love is another leap for her individual core. And she says, can't you just love me for who I am? And I'll say, do you mean for your beauty or do you for your individual core? I love your individual core so much.

16:18 Dylan: You're such a romantic.

16:22 Wes: I would never reduce you to your intelligence and other fine qualities. Love you for your personality. And by which, I mean personhood.

16:31 Seth: I don't know. I appreciate the fact that. I think he's trying to capture something in words and description that in some sense we do feel like the idea that love is not contingent in some respect on a person's characteristics, maybe in the aggregate. I mean, he says that. Here we go. This is on page 167. Persons cannot be objectified in love or in any other genuine act, not even in cognition. Personality is that unity of substance, baffling observation and eluding analysis, which the individual experiences as inherent in all the acts he performs.

No object, therefore, let alone a thing. And thing is in quotes. And that put me in mind of. So this thing you're. This core essence or this core value that you're describing. Wes, you remember when we were reading a hundred years ago, Sartre, and we talked about, you know, the ego as a horizon, and we've, you know, this concept of consciousness or being somehow just unity. And I feel like Scheler is kind of tapping into that somewhat, that this personality, this sort of ephemeral thing, which I don't want to say is unchangeable, that's not right.

But is somehow not a specific characteristic or not something that you could prefer or choose or opt to recognize value in. But instead it's the unity of the individual. It's kind of like the entirety that constitutes the whole. So it's not a core substance. It's not like Aristotelian substance, that there's a core of the individual. It's more like. It's the unity of the individual as a whole. It's their entirety as a being. In ironically, right. In their particularity, that is the thing that you love.

18:27 Mark: It's emergent. He uses this a couple times, that this is.

18:31 Seth: Does he use the word emergent?

18:33 Mark: Well, maybe I was just reading into it that.

18:35 Wes: Yeah, I don't think he does.

18:36 Mark: But, you know, the whole last couple of chapters that we read have to do with how naturalistic theories of like, well, love is just sublimation of libido. Love is Just the instinct of propagating the species that gets re channeled and spiritualized. And he just. He doesn't think that this, that that version, a naturalistic version of the latter works that phenomenologically we just recognize these spiritual, these core inner. You know, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts that you have all these qualities. And that might be what initially attracts me to you, but.

But once I get to the personality, then I'm seeing something that is just really basic that we could not reduce to some more just strictly materialist elements. You know, Wes, you keep talking about the individual's personality is sort of a black box. The tragedy of this text and our choosing this text is that his concept of the personality is a little bit of a black box. I think Seth pointed out some good. Like he says a lot of good hints about what he means by the personality. But apparently it's like half of his previous book on non formalism and ethics that is talking about what this.

So is he just. Is it a soul? It's a little hard to see exactly how necessarily religious he's being. As opposed to something that we could all agree on no matter what our religious beliefs.

19:55 Wes: Yeah. And I think it's worth repeating here, especially in light of the section that Seth focused on here, that personality is more like personhood. Because usually we think of personality as the particular. As the character of the person, the particular qualities they have. And when we think of love, we think of, you know, oh, I just. I love their personality. But he's not thinking of personality in that specific way again, you know, in terms of Westness or Sethness or something like that. Because a person for him isn't. He says in this section can't be manufactured from those qualities, including qualities of character.

And love just is love for the value of persons. He says in this section. It sounds a little bit contradictory to what he said before, but since we shouldn't be loving value, but it's value in this most abstract of senses. The other point in this section is when I mentioned before is this is the way we become acquainted with the individual personality. But the individual personality, again, the reason why I call it a black box is, well, it's individual, but it's kind of generic because it's just like this little monad that before. It has inequalities.

Right. We all in a sense have the same individual personality. It's numerically different, but it's not differentiated qualitatively.

21:18 Mark: Right. The word personality is not good, but the word personhood is not good either, because that sounds like species being. It sounds like I only care about you because you're a member of the species, humanity, and we all have these things in common. But that would still be referring to qualities. So is there some way that we can refer to the individual?

21:36 Wes: Individuality? Well, even that is not great. I say individual personhood.

21:40 Dylan: Your instance.

21:42 Wes: I love that.

21:43 Mark: Your person trope.

21:44 Dylan: Well, yeah, yeah, here.

21:46 Wes: I love this instance. Yeah, that's great.

21:49 Dylan: Yeah. My use of that comes loaded with a whole category of programming ontology, right? So that personhood would be like the class of entity that people are. But I myself am an instance of that. This part that Seth quoted on page 167, I have a bunch of question marks here because I found myself confused about what we're doing phenomenology about if we don't have things. And is it this? Because he's using object and thing in a very particular, like, technical way when he says. I'm just going to repeat the sentences that Seth said and read a little bit more.

Personality is that unity of substance, baffling observation and eluding analysis, which the individual experiences as inherent in all the acts he performs. No object, therefore, let alone a thing, that part of others which does present itself objectively to me is never more than one, the physical body, two, its corporeal unity, three, the self and the vital soul belonging to it. The same applies to everyone. In respect of himself. The person of another can only be disclosed to me by joining in the performance of his acts, either cognitively or by understanding and vicariously reliving, or morally, by following in his footsteps?

Okay, when we're doing phenomenology, I always understood we were engaged in interacting with the phenomena that present themselves, that we interact with through our powers and through the things that are presented by those entities. So how is it that those aren't things? Or are we using thing in a very particular kind of technical way, such that I can point to a personality, but for golly's sake, it's not a thing?

23:46 Mark: I think the thingness. I think you're right. It's in our way of relating to it that even just pointing to it is making it an object. Whereas if I somehow vibe with it, if I somehow feel this is 168, we must love what he loves and love it with him, that elicits the moral value in the individual personality. We associate ourselves with the act of love of that personality.

24:12 Dylan: Okay, I guess I'm fine if I say that I am vibing and I am interacting, but I'm not interacting with anything. I guess I'm okay.

24:24 Mark: Right.

24:24 Wes: So we want to say the individual is an entity. Right. I think this is the problem. Maybe you're having. Yeah, I'm just rephrasing your problem. Right. And so you have to wonder, well, what is the ontology then? Because he's saying it's not a thing. He does call it a unity of substance. Is he saying it's not a substance, but it's the formal structure of the substance? Or is this a process ontology, or is there something else going on? I just don't think we get enough detail. Is interesting to see him distinguish it. Right. From the vital soul, which sounds like more of it, like an Aristotelian conception of soul, a quasi biological conception. Right. That doesn't rise to his level of spirit.

25:05 Dylan: That's right.

25:06 Wes: As Dylan, as Seth, I think, mentioned, you know, we see some of this dualism as well in the last reading where he's into vitalistic monism. But there's a dualism in the sense that spirituality and personhood are not reducible to that. So, you know, this is another point where we get a glimpse at his dualism. But, yeah, I mean, it's a good point. It's unclear. If we can't call a person a thing in the broadest ontological sense, then what is the ontology?

25:37 Mark: I think we have to add the puzzle here of the yearning that is present in love, that part of the reason that love is not pointed necessarily at an object. And there are different kinds of love. He makes this clear. Maybe this is complicating matters, but that it is. Someone said, right, when I'm looking at the ultimate, the highest version of you, when I love you, well, it's actually because I could sort of do that even if you weren't there. Which seems really weird because it's supposed to be my only way of actually connecting with you an actual other person.

But the way he puts it is like motherly love you could have even before you have kids, or even if you don't have biological kids that, you know, then can stumble across a kid and take them into you because, and he claims actually men don't have this. It is unique to women. And romantic love, right, is like the sexual urge or the urge for love. So even though he said earlier, love is not something that is purpose driven. It's not like beneficence, where once you help the person, well, you've achieved your goal. It's not like sex, where once you have the sex, you've achieved your goal.

Love will just get ever more engrossed in its object. It has no satisfaction conditions, but at the same time, it at least starts. And its overall place in us as people is as a yearning that then, you know, it's like the. We're ready to have an individual slot in so we can connect with them spiritually.

27:02 Wes: Well, I think he could say with maternal love, it's dispositional, so that. Right. And for people who think there's such a thing as femininity out of fashion or that it's not just socially constructed, the maternal is a big component of that. So you could say someone exhibits that in the feminine before they've ever had children. And it doesn't even have to be a yearning for children. It's just a habitual manner of comportment to the world. So I don't. Yeah, I find that point of view appealing, actually.

27:34 Seth: That actually raises an interesting point. Is Scheler's model here of love? Is the paradigm maternal or parental? We've talked about other philosophers in the past who've used, for example, family relations or familial relations as the basis for determining, for example, social relations, broader social relations. But is the way I'm trying to ask this question is something like the way he describes love writ large, broadly? Is he actually thinking of something like maternal love and then generalizing to these other kinds of love that he describes?

Or, you know, is there a broader category that the maternal loves is subsumed under? Because it does seem like his description of love. I don't want to say it's. It is unconditional. I don't. Yeah, I do want to say it's conditional, because it is. But it's unconditional in a way that a parent loves a child, as opposed to unconditional in the way that Seth loves. Cy Twombly paintings.

28:40 Wes: Maybe this is a good segue. And just to go into chapter four and talking about the forms, modes and kinds of love. Right. Because we're jumping around between these different. What he calls forms. And this is on page 169. I think we've focused a lot on. On the spiritual, what he calls here, spiritual love of the person. But we can also love an individual self. He calls this mental love. We can have passionate or vital love, which I take to be romantic, synonymous with romantic or sexual love. Right. Sexual love is another phrase he uses frequently.

And then he makes associations between those and certain types of qualities. So, for instance, it's really interesting to find out that vital love is actually associated with nobility versus meanness or baseness. Mental acts associated with cultural values. And perhaps that could even be loving someone for their virtues might fall into that category. It's a little unclear to me. And then we get. The spiritual act of love has something to do with the holy and the profane. So, yeah, I don't know. I'm not answering your question, Seth, about how this relates to maternal love.

I think when we get into maternal love, he's going to. Is he calling that a kind or a mode? I think it's a kind, yeah. So by the time we get to 171 and 172, we're getting into these kinds of love. And that's a distinction between not the objects of love, even though it sounds like that, right. If I'm saying maternal love or filial love or love. He mentions love of home and all these different kinds of love that seem to be distinguished by their objects, then he said they're not. It's really about the quality of the emotion itself. And that's why he makes the point about I can have maternal love without having a child.

I could have nostalgia, right. Without even explicitly thinking about home. Nostalgia, in a way, is defined as a homesickness. But that homesickness really can be a quality of the act without any specific home that I'm yearning for or thinking about. But, yeah, I don't see him thinking of generalizing this maternal disposition. How would that work? Is it elsewhere in the text he

31:02 Mark: says explicitly later that it seems like he thinks these kinds are irreducible to each other, that if you try, as he thinks Freud does, to say, well, it all boils down to a particular kind of love that gets transferred to a bunch of other objects in a bunch of other ways through sublimation. That doesn't work. So again, he's going to just be phenomenological. And there's still. I think we want to point at commonalities between these different kinds. And this is why I was trying to get at, like, is it necessarily have. Well, not an object, but, you know, something in particular.

I don't even know how to say this. Is it always directed toward, you know, an individual or something? Or can. It is. It seems like it is fundamentally this disposition that thus could be aimed at God or something, that doesn't necessarily. And even when I love another person, right, Because I never actually. They're a black box. I never actually. The only. Only God has that insight into them. So this is just calling Back to the thing that we talked about at the end of the last episode. I'm always loving them through God in a way. So is something irreducibly spiritual even when you're talking about sexual and vital love?

I don't know. It's getting complicated.

32:19 Wes: Yeah. How is. Right, how is sexual love related to spiritual love? They seem to be related. It seems to be that spiritual love is ideally a component of sexual love. Right. I mean, these are things that are just not clear in his text.

32:33 Dylan: Well, you guys were earlier really aligning his descriptions with a kind of progressive ladder of love a la the symposium in which you start with physical attraction and get all the way up to the love of the good. And I found that he actually went to great pains to really distance himself from this notion of love being on a spectrum of different qualities of the same activity, the same disposition, the same characteristic that gets refined so that you move from being. And that would be aligned with saying that our attraction to bodies is a one manifestation and sort of the root manifestation to our attraction to the good, to our love of the good.

That's the ladder of love. He, on like 169 and 170, seems to make them different in kind. Even though he would say that they're forms of love. They seem to be different species. They're not things that can be transformed one to another. It's not like a bunch of pigeons that you can get different kinds of pigeons. Right. It's not that. It's not even like an evolutionary model where, well, you know, maybe it's the lizard and back in our. You know, we have a common ancestor with lizards, but it's really far back. It's not even that they're like completely different in kind.

34:00 Wes: He doesn't like reduction, and he's going to argue later against Freud. Right. Spiritual love is not just a sublimation of vital, passionate sexual love. It's not reducible to that. So, yeah, I think you're right. A difference in form is a difference of kind. Not according to his technical vocabulary, but yeah, there's an irreducibility.

34:23 Dylan: Yeah, I mean, example is like he won't allow for love to be on a spectrum with pleasantness at all objects. Who values. Whose value is simply that of being pleasant engender neither love nor hatred. There is just a feeling of pleasantness together with an interest in all these are in scare quotes, things that are pleasant or indirectly pleasing or so useful, but there is no love for them. For although we may speak colloquially of loving A food, the expression is quite unsuited to the phenomena described. Merely pleasant things cannot be suitable for love, seeing that they are incapable of an enhancement of value in the sense implicit to the nature of love.

Okay, So, I mean, that's a pretty categorical difference that any notion of conventional phenomenal. I would use the word phenomenological notion of being attracted to or being drawn to or something. You know, using Tomasello's language, activating my agency would not be on a spectrum with it. It's not for him.

35:22 Wes: This reminds me a little bit of the aesthetic distinction. So it's there in Kant's Critique of Judgment, for instance, between the pleasant or. What is it?

35:33 Mark: The pleasing.

35:35 Wes: Right. So aesthetic objects don't induce appetite in us. We have a disinterested disinterest. Yeah, I always want to say indifference, but that's not the right word, disinterest. So we are plugged in to some formal element of the object when we're plugged in aesthetically. And as we know, there's interesting overlap between the aesthetic and the moral. Yeah, but I'm not related to pleasantness of someone's qualities. That's more like food. If I'm loving the person as a person, it's not like this is a delicious person.

36:10 Mark: Let me read a quote from 170, because why are sex and food different? Why can I not love food when clearly I can love things like art that don't have to love me back? So that's not because the food can't love me back. It's that. But yet I can love and have sex be a component of it. That he's not saying, well, if you have sexual attraction, then you don't really love them. Like, which is, if I'm hungry for the grapes in the picture of the grapes, then I'm not really appreciated artistically. Like there is a connection between sexual desire and love.

It's just that it can't be only sexual desire. That's a different thing. So page 170. There is no such thing as sensual love so far as the word sensual in this expression is taken to note a particular kind of love and not just a way of saying that love in this instance is accompanied and interspersed with sensual feeling and emotion. A purely sensual attitude toward a person, for example, is at the same time an absolutely cold and loveless attitude. It necessarily treats the other as merely subservient to one's own sensual feelings, needs, and at best, enjoyment.

So that's. I'm not appreciating the art, you know, the person for being a person. I just want the pleasing ness from their sexual.

37:22 Wes: Yeah, yeah. So you have a one night stand, you're focused almost purely on the body. Or maybe you're even focused on the charming personality as well. But there's no higher love there, you know. But it does raise questions, right? Because if you are in an ideally loving relationship with someone, there is still that objectifying component in sex. And also. Right. Objectification of their finding their personality pleasant, finding them charming in various ways. So those things have to be combined somehow. So in other words, it's not love. There can't be sensual love. But I can have sensual feelings towards someone in conjunction with love. Just not always easy, but easier said than done.

38:11 Mark: Right after that, he has a comment about onanism of using yourself in the same way. And this sort of goes. He's made a few comments about the difference between selfishness is not loving yourself. That actually that's taking my narrow interests, my financial bottom line. Or I could in this case use myself sexually for my own pleasure. That those are different than loving yourself. Okay, so we can have a deeper relationship to ourself as a human being, even though, you know, it's not that. Am I a black box to myself in the same way that other people are? Maybe.

38:49 Wes: Yeah, I don't think so. Because I think what he's talking about in terms of individuality has a lot to do with the. I think. Right. It has a lot to do with. In a way, it's the thing that's only accessible to us. It's personal identity in that sense. Right. In the Cartesian sense where I have access to my own subjectivity and I don't have a direct access to anyone else's.

39:15 Mark: But if it also is a matter of when you love, you are identifying the best in the person and your love enables them to excel in that way. Well, you can definitely have that same thing about yourself. Like all this ethic that we have here of, oh, you got to love yourself, you got to believe in yourself like that. Actually, that fits with Scheler's view. I think that there is a part of. It's not that these things are entirely hidden in you. It's just you might have to do some work in seeing, you know, if you have a bad self image, for instance, or you just. Right, you see yourself, you become alienated from yourself because you see yourself as only your job and your financial goals and you know, whatever that is junked up your natural relation to yourself. I Guess. Yeah. Anything else on this chapter four to finish off our first part here? There's a number of other kinds mentioned here.

40:07 Wes: Oh, did you want to continue with kinds?

40:09 Mark: Just we don't start in another topic.

40:11 Wes: Well, yeah, I think the last part of the chapter we haven't really gone into is modes. Right. Which he takes to be. Modes are like molecules. They're conjunctions of love with fellow feeling or with other social dispositions. So things like kindness and goodwill, affection, friendliness, these turn out to be states that are actually reducible for him to subcomponents. And the sub components include love and something like fellow feeling or some sort of social feeling. Some are basic to human nature and some are cultural. So kindness is like a universal thing. You could see it in any culture. But he doesn't think courtesy works in the same way. It's more relative to some period of historical development in humanity, for instance, when we reach a certain level of civilization. So, yeah.

41:09 Mark: Is there any way to. Do we know why he uses the word mode?

41:14 Dylan: Well, he has forms, kinds and modes.

41:18 Wes: He's run out of words. He got forms and kind of.

41:23 Dylan: And this might be just repeating my confusion earlier, but he seems to be both explicitly make a big deal about the differences in the kinds and the forms while also saying that they're mixed up together at the same time that we can. He'll say, 70. There's profound differences between these three forms of love. And then he'll go on to say such that we can love a person deeply, for instance, without his inspiring a passionate attachment in us, indeed, while finding his whole bodily aspect extremely repellent. And so you can, you know, be in fact, that they're different shows up in the fact that you can have these different forms be activated, but at different extremes within a person. But they all get mixed up with one another, so they're not different forms of each other. So.

42:16 Wes: So, for example, I might feel kind towards my child, and that kindness would involve fellow feeling, but it would also involve perhaps paternal love. But on the other hand, and you know that my child would be pleasant to me, but ultimately paternal love might include or expand to pure. This pure spiritual love of the individual. So, yeah, it's complicated because I think we can be in multiple forms of love at once. That's what we've just been talking about, right? We can be in sexual love and spiritual love and mental love. I should be in the wedding vows, right? I love you spiritually, mentally and vitally. Promise to love you in all three forms.

43:01 Mark: And what kind of weird relation did he have with his father? And I thought I saw in the biographical stuff that with his kids, like one of his kids sponged off him. And I don't remember the details, but he definitely doesn't believe that there's a paternal love that's comparable to. To the maternal love that it is. The fatherly love is sort of conditional and it doesn't really kick in. It doesn't kick in as soon as you see your new baby. According to Scheler, it only kicks in when they sort of develop into the person, you know, an individual, until they gain something of their kid personality and

43:33 Wes: then they can hold a baseball glove. That's when it kicks.

43:38 Mark: The appearance and the character of the child. Yes. And is derived from how much do I love his mother? Which is exactly, you know, the opposite.

43:48 Wes: I thought he was arguing against that. That's the Feuerbachian.

43:51 Mark: Later he argues in the Freudian thing that the mother's love for the kids does not have anything to do with how much they love the father and they could detest the father. But here in page 173, yes, it is. You know, at least to start, I'm seeing sort of the baby as an extension of the mother.

44:09 Wes: And.

44:10 Mark: And insofar as I love the mother, I will love the baby and I will protect them. It just. Yeah, he did not have good untainted phenomenology, I'm going to just say, of fatherhood.

44:20 Wes: Yeah.

44:21 Mark: Well, let's wrap up part one here. We will come back for part two. You can get it either if you're a Partially Examined Life supporter, it'll be the next thing in your feed or if you support us through Apple or don't support us at all, then you will just see in your feed next week. Thanks.

44:39 Dylan: Thanks.

44:39 Wes: Thank you.

44:40 Seth: Thank you.