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