https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=FjSFbgtsvDU
Okay, well, we’re here as friends to reinvent your friendship or philia, to use the Greek word. Yeah. Which is a deeper word. I think it means sacred friendship in some sense. Yep. And I wrote an article a while, a long time ago about this subject and I rewrote it. I sent it to you guys. But I think the thesis is really that friendship is not a commodity, that it’s sacred, that it’s a vulnerable thing, that it’s risky. It’s not something cheap that can be bought and sold on social media. So I tried to write down my article in 10 sentences, but the first sentence was, friendship is how we steal the culture. Because that sort of makes sense to me. Would you agree with that, John, because you’re the originator of that phrase? I think so. So for me, philia captures two terms that we should maybe try to bring into discussion together. It obviously captures friendship, like you said, but the invocation of the stealing of the culture also invokes the model I was using, which was Christianity in the period of late antiquity. And then the notion I want to bring in is the Christian notion of fellowship, where fellowship is not the same. It’s not to be identified with friendship, but nor can you keep it distinct. And philia covers both. I think philia is the love that emerges out of and is the care for things that are self-organizing, that are living. And so the Christian notion of fellowship was the philia that emerged out of and sustained the body of Christ. The church is the body of Christ. And of course, bodies are self-organizing. They’re autopoetic. They’re self-making, living things. And so philia, and insofar as it was associated also with wisdom, is that there’s the sense of the community, like the school. Because Pythagoras coins the term, and he simultaneously founds a community, a school. So there’s fellowship. Out of the school emerges a kind of love that emerges out of the community, but it also sustains the community as its organizing principle, as its logos. And then it is, but it’s not just self-organizing. It’s like a living thing. It is directed towards something. It is the philia for Sophia, the love of wisdom. And so I think that if we could bring that notion of fellowship, the Pythagorean Christian notion, if you’ll allow me that, into Aristotle’s notion of friendship as the idea of a suke in two bodies, so that the bodies get a self-organizing principle, a shared life between them, like the bodies of the people in the church. Oh, that’s wonderful. I think there’s a profound discourse that we could open up there between that Aristotelian idea and the Pythagorean Christian idea of sort of friendship-fellowship. And fellowship is about a quest, too, which that’s what Kate and my mother meant. Yes, the fellowship of the ring. Exactly. I’m thinking the fellowship of the ring, and it’s a quest. So that’s another dimension of friendship which I hadn’t considered. And that’s very much within the Pythagorean tradition, because for Pythagoras, you were on a quest for wisdom, literally a soul flight towards wisdom. And that’s where he really gave mythological teeth to the notion of wisdom as a profound kind of self-transcendence. So the questing, thank you for bringing that out, Andrew, that’s exactly also intended in things like the fellowship of the ring. And so I’ve been thinking a lot about, you know, Eros as the love that comes out of and nurtures emergence, Vilea as the love that emerges out of and nurtures self-organization, and Agape as the love that comes from and helps sustain the way things emanate. So I’ve been really playing with sort of the metaphysical correlations of the three kinds of love as well. And so that’s the final thing I want to say, and then I’ll let you guys respond. So I’m trying to bring the Pythagorean Christian, the Aristotelian, and then this final notion, you might call it the Neoplatonic or dialectic, of seeing Vilea as the important mediation between Eros and Agape as well. Okay, great. Yeah, I was sort of thinking that this conversation, we could focus on Vilea, maybe, but if we bring in all three, that’s okay as well, of course, because everything is very interconnected. Well, I do want to focus on Vilea. But what I’m saying is I think there’s these three aspects to it, and I think they’re all related. The Aristotelian aspect, the Pythagorean Christian aspect, and what we might call the dialectic or Neoplatonic aspect of it. Okay. I’m glad you brought in the Aristotelian notion of the shared tsuke, because that’s something that then is developed, I think, further developed in Christianity. Augustine, I think, uses some of the same language. What does tsuke mean? Can you tell us what tsuke means? Sol, in the sense. Sol, I see, okay. Yeah. It also, it sort of covers soul and mind. It’s in the word psychology. Psyche, yeah. It also means that about you, which is self-moving. So it’s part of this self-moving, self-organizing. So it’s sort of soul and psyche mixed together as a dynamic principle of some kind. Yeah, basically. And that maybe too opens the door to add one more dimension to what you’ve just said, John, which is that to understand friendship, authentic friendship, and maybe later on we can also talk about maybe make some distinctions between authentic and inauthentic friendship, because I think that would be probably a very fruitful territory for us to venture into because our landscape is rife with inauthentic friendship. And I think it’s very important for us to qualify what we mean by that. But I think that there’s a dimension of Socratic self-knowledge and the pursuit of genuine and reciprocal authentic friendship, because friendship, authentic friendship, I think, makes manifest the realization that one cannot know without being known in return. The project of knowing and being known are conjoined projects. And the conjunctive nature of those projects is something that is only realized in deep friendship in phylia. So couldn’t you put the two together then? I mean, what I’m thinking of is, sorry to interject, but maybe you can riff on this then, right? The idea that, you know, the friend, friends are each other’s divine double, because that you get the sense of the shared suke, because the divine double is, right, the same suke in two bodies or two locations, and there’s an aspirational relationship to them. Yes. But you also get the Pythagorean quest, right? The aspirational quest between two people. Yes, yes, exactly. The friend becomes a symbolic vow by whom you pursue your authentic self, right? And to whom you pursue your authentic self, too, right? Because you’re also affording them the same thing. That’s right. That’s right. Because if I can use the, you know, that we often use, especially when we’re talking about dialogue, we often use the fire metaphors, the metaphors of the campfire. And so maybe to reintroduce that a little bit, the light that is kindled in the virtue of friendship is the light by which you uncover yourself, right? And without which you cannot uncover yourself. And so I think that so understanding the project of self-knowledge, almost in a meiudic way of uncovering recollectively that of yourself, which is not yet known to you, there seems to be a deep necessity of friendship in the cultivation of that project. And then the other thing I might throw in, too, you know, I remember you said something actually to me, John, a long time ago. And then I read something similar, I think, in Seneca. Seneca has an epistle on friendship. And he says something quite beautiful. It’s very similar to something you once said to me and then proceeded to live out, incidentally, which is that a friend is one against whose death you stake your life. And now we could think of that literally, of course, but we could also think of death as the soul’s despair. And to me, that’s a little bit more of a helpful way of thinking about it. So I might say something like a friend is a soul against whose despair we stake our life. And there is a sense in which a real, the cultivation of a real friendship, when you’re a real friend, a real friend is someone in whose fate you implicate yourself. A soul in whose fate you become implicated, voluntarily implicated. And who brings you, who lifts you up from despair at the same time, right? Yes. With whom you despair and with whom you recover. And who you also despair with. So there’s, yeah, that’s so beautiful. So you’re picking up on the, one of the essential features of the sukké is the self-knowing, the self-caring, and then that gets extended through another person. That’s right. They become conjunctive. They become conjunctive. And then I think that also serves maybe to connect up to the insight that in a way that friendship has that mediatory function between, you know, the knowing and the being of oneself and the knowing and being of the world writ large, right? The countenance of one and the countenance of the world are reconciled or resolved in the relation of friendship. Yeah. Because the, so you’re saying something like the friendship is where we get the second person perspective that mediates between the first and the third person perspectives. That’s right. And thereby forms the religio, the binding. The vow, yeah. And it’s an interesting thing because it’s always perplexed me phenomenologically. Because obviously linguistically, conceptually, we have the first, second, and third person forms. That’s indisputable. And we’re picking up on something that has some sort of phenomenological functional basis. I get that. As a phenomenological exercise, it’s very easy. Like if you’re sitting in meditation, for example, you can adopt the first person perspective, sort of this here now, or you can adopt the third person’s perspective. No one, nowhere, no when. But what is it you’re doing when you move into the second perspective? It’s this weird stereoscopic thing where you’re looking out through your eyes, but you’re also looking back through the beloved other, right? And yet those are somehow fused into a unified perspective. The second person perspective is a very odd, like I’m trying to get us to remember before we were in D’Antio, the strangeness and the oddness. In comparison to the first person perspective and the third person perspective, the second person perspective is very, very odd indeed. Very very odd indeed. And I want to see how that, the weirdness of the second person perspective, the way it binds the two others together. So there’s a way in which it binds the first and the third person perspective, as you said, Chris. And then I want to bring back what I was saying. There’s something about friendship fellowship, the way it binds us into something that takes on a life of its own. So a friendship, a friendship isn’t, there’s a sense in which both people, that’s the analogy to dialogos, a friendship draws people, a friendship takes on a life of its own and it leads both of its members or more than two people, right? There’s more, you know, friendships larger than that, right? But it leads them places, like it takes on a life of its own and it takes, that’s what happens. I mean, that’s the myth of the fellowship of the ring. And like the Holy Spirit. It’s the third, the divine double, the Holy Spirit. All of these things, it brings this third element in, doesn’t it? Why do you say it’s weird, John? What’s the weirdness? Is it just because, because if you’re, if you, you’re reflecting on yourself, you’re this isolated, let’s say, atomistic, like if you’re meditating and you don’t have that sense, perhaps it becomes a sterile exercise. It could. And if you, and if you don’t have, and you’re just, there has to be this, this, this devotional in some sense to, to another, another principle, higher principle, it could be a person or not otherwise. I think you’re stuck in the I it relationship and you don’t get into the vow. I acknowledge all of that. What I meant, what I meant weird is let me try and articulate it in terms of the grammar of our assumed metaphysics. Okay. First person perspective max onto subjectivity. Third person perspective max onto objectivity. That is a second person perspective map onto. Yeah. Neither and both. Yeah. You know? Yeah. Well, that’s what I’ve been trying to get with this notion of friends. Objectivity, the transjectivity. Yeah. Yeah. And so friendship, friendship is one of our most powerful ways of inhabiting and disclosing the trend, the transjectivity as something of equal standing. And I think even more primordial standing because of the way it mediates and grounds subjectivity and objectivity. And I think because our culture, and this is one of the things I’ve been arguing for quite a while, right? Because our culture doesn’t speak about transjectivity at all very much. I think it is largely at its metaphysical depths incapable of speaking about the grounding of friendship. Okay. So we have the sacred notion of friendship, which we’ve been exploring. And then we have the profane aspect of friendship, which is, you know, everywhere today. It’s been reduced to a commodity. It’s been reduced to a kind of casual notion where everybody you associate with is your friend on some level. And it’s become something that people, you know, Facebook makes billions of dollars, on this notion of friend. So can you explore those? Can you guys explore those two aspects and the difference between them? And I think it follows on what I was just saying. I think because we don’t, because we’ve lost the connections between friendship and fellowship and because we’ve lost the metaphysical home in transjectivity for friendship, I think it’s very difficult for us to get to the depths of friendship. Friendship becomes just a casual relationship where you kind of get your rocks off with your, you’re not building towards this something or you’re not creating a symphony together or something like that, you know? Yeah. I mean, when you don’t have a grammar that takes you into ontological depth perception, you’re going to degrade and default to the lowest common denominator. And what is the lowest common denominator? Well, it’s human association we associate. And we used to have more fine grained distinctions. So I mean, I understand what Chris meant by inauthentic, but what I mean is we used to have authentic categories that were non-friendship categories. There were literally your associates. Acquaintances. Yeah. There were your acquaintances and there were your associates and there were your colleagues. And these were not understood to be friends, nor should they be friends. And then we got the weird sitcom thing that happened where now everybody is your family and everybody is your friend. And it’s like, well, no, I don’t want that because that removes the distinctness of friendship. I want people that are good colleagues and I will appreciate them as good colleagues, but I don’t want them to be my friend. And I want people who are my acquaintances. And we even invented a new term in modernity recently that I thought captured another category that you had the buddy. And the buddy isn’t a friend. And that’s one of our biggest mistakes. The buddy is somebody that you do fun things with. They’re your buddy. Like, hey, there’s my rollerblading buddy. And that’s fine. Because again, we’re not trying to legislate the relationships. But what we’ve done, again, because we lack the ontological depth perception, is all those distinctions have collapsed. And that is adulterated, adulterated and confused our understanding so that we have this, well, as you said, this profane notion of friendship, because it is a notion that is muddied and equivocal and has lost the important intelligibility that all those distinctions gave us. If I can bring this down to something like, for men, for example, friendship is beer and football. And whereas it used to be church. Yes. In a sense, I don’t go to church. And I don’t want to become a Christian. But I prefer the church thing to the beer and football, the alcohol and sports thing. Just almost, that’s like the masculine aspect of friendship. Because it’s interesting because like philia, it means brotherhood, doesn’t it? Yeah. Of course, we should include sisterhood in the notion of not to respect us. But brotherhood, you know, this notion of brotherhood is quite, has been reduced to that or? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I, you know, there’s people that I can sit, like I, before COVID, I used to do role-playing games and, you know, you have your role-playing buddies. Yeah. Like you go in there and you have this fun thing, you do it together and it’s great. Right? But that’s it. It’s organized around the pleasure of a shared activity. And of course, you know, drinking beer with somebody at a football game is an instance of that. But that’s not the same thing as like fellowship. Like you’re saying, when you go to church and what happens, I mean, it’s an archaic term now. But when I was growing up and in church, we used to use the term edification, like edifice, like building a building. We were engaged in the project of building each other up in the Christian life. Yeah. Yeah. So one of the things, so taking what both of you have said and maybe just viewing it from then from a slightly different vantage, one thing then, one property that we can use to distinguish one kind from the other. First, as you said, John, that one is what we might call a real or authentic friendship. Again, not a definition, just a property is that it is not contingent on a shared context that is then repeated and reproduced. It is it rather than being reproduced by a shared context, it is it in and of itself reproductive of then the context in which you can share the time. And so to me, that gives the feeling that what we when we say real or authentic friendships, they do not rely on the context of a predetermined world to find relevance and significance. Rather, they create and unfold between themselves that shared context and world that then becomes enveloping of all other things. That’s why that’s why when you’re in the presence of a real deep friend, it truly does not matter what you’re doing. Yeah. You sit with them on a log in the woods and that’s enough. That’s enough. It to me, that’s the difference. So that’s that’s one thing. And then the other is that on that. That’s of course, I find that’s brilliant. I won’t talk a lot. I won’t say very much. I think that’s brilliant. I think you’ve articulated and extrapolated what I was trying to convey with this idea of the love that emerges and cares for something that has a life of its own that’s self-organizing. I think what you just said there was brilliant and articulated it perfectly. Yeah, right. Also, we can bring that to the level of what I said, the beginning of culture, you know, as well as just individual is like that’s how that’s how that’s how we create a culture that is living rather than a culture that is just based on in these dead institutional forms. That’s right. That’s right. Exactly. Yeah, I think that’s exactly right. And then the second thing is that and they’re obviously they’re they’re interrelated is that they’re the the I’m going to put this in scare quotes, but the real friendship is is infinitely dissimilar from all other friendships. It is incomparable to any other. It is it is a car. It is a kind and not an instance, right? It is not comparable to any other fright. So you know, Andrew, you were talking about, you know, you have your people that you go to the pub with and drink beer and watch football. There is a degree to which all of those friendships are similar because of their shared context. And it is the dissimilarity of that singular friendship that marks it. And you know, if it is if it is a kind unto itself rather than an instance of a kind of friendship, I think that also is one way of telling the difference. Like you said, that follows perfectly from the from the previous point, because if it is a thing that is autonomous, literally, it creates that it creates the known was for itself, it creates the laws and the standards for itself because it is a auto it is a self making thing, a self organizing thing with a life of its own. It’s going to have that uniqueness to it. Right. That’s exactly it has to be the case. I would argue. I think I think it’s I think it’s not just a related sequence. I think there’s an implication, maybe even an entailment from the first point into the second point. That’s a good point. Yeah. Yeah, I think you’re right. I think you’re exactly right. Yeah, they’re not they’re not just they’re not just two independent properties, but they are they are one one is implicated by the other. Yeah. Implied by the other. I mean to say. Yeah. And that would then mean right why it’s so. Yeah. I mean, think about how that then goes back to your previous point. Maybe these the points are there’s a consolation for me because insofar I mean, I’m doing this whole course now on the nature and function of the self. And one of the functions of the self is it’s supposed to pick out uniqueness. Right. So insofar as I share properties with other people, those aren’t the properties that pick out myself. And there’s problems there with that. I’m not like it’s some idea that in some way yourself is that about you, which individuates you and which picks you out from other persons, gives you what we call a personal identity, a biographical identity, etc, etc. And we sometimes transfer that to objects like works of art have that kind of self because any painting other than the original Night Watch by Rembrandt is a fraud. Right. And so. Right. Because it’s a language. Right. I mean, if you have a deep, real friend, you generate a unique language together. That’s a great point, Andrew. It’s nobody else’s language. Right. Right. You know. And what I’m saying is that unique language feeds back into the point Chris was making about Socratic self-knowledge. It literally gives you the language by which you bespeak yourself, by which you can carve out and individuate yourself, right. In which you can write. So it’s a unique language, but it’s also the language that allows you to communicate outside of that bubble or outside. That’s right. That’s why you speak. That’s why you speak more fully and more truly when you speak into the ear of your friendship. Yes. Right. Because the ear of your friendship, right, which we might call that third entity, the spirit or the geist, as you and I have called it, John, when you speak into the ear, because its ear is more resonantly comprehending, the tenor of your speech is the breadth and the compass of your speech suddenly grows. It’s the totality of its reference grows more encompassing because its capacity for comprehension is that much more. You’re speaking into an entire world when you speak into an authentic friendship. And so therefore, your voice, your vocality takes on a resonance, the logos takes on a resonance and is able to self-multiply in that Heraclitian way that it is not otherwise able to do. That’s the fecundity of the world that’s created between two authentic friends. Right. And so what I’m saying about that is, like, I’m trying to get sort of the resonance there. And I like, in speaking to the depths, I have to speak from my depths. And in speaking from my depths, I actually make myself into a new kind of self. And this is the way in which I think the self, the suke is shared between two people, right? That process of self-definition is being shared in some resonant fashion between two individuals. And it’s to realize, and you’ll like this, Chris, because this, I’ve been reading a lot of, what’s his name, the guy who wrote the book on, is it Fowler? On D. Logos as midwifery, talking about Socrates and Jesus. Yeah, Stephen Fowler, right? Yeah, Stephen Fowler. And he’s done a section on Socratic irony as seen by Kierkegaard. And so there’s this Kierkegaardian point about friendship is a place in which we can deeply realize, and I’m loading lots of connotation into the word realize, that the self is inherently dialogical. Yeah. Yes, yes, yes, exactly. And then to riff on that and put it even just in another pithy way, John, the speaking between friends is how we learn to speak with ourselves. Yes, exactly. And that’s, I was just teaching a lesson at the Saturday Sangha. We’ve gone through Epicurus who’d sought that the greatest virtue, of course, is friendship. And then we’ve moved into the Stoics and Antisthenes coming out of Socrates. What did you learn from Socrates? Well, I learned how to converse with myself. But he doesn’t mean that we, he means we replace that stupid babble we do on our head all day long with something like Socratic dialogue in the affordance and the aspiration to wisdom. And yet, and that only in friendship is that possible. That speaking to the depths from the depths is like, there’s something there. And like I said, I think it’s unreasonable. I think it’s deeply unreasonable to expect that, to have that, those many deep and unique, to pick up on your point, Chris, deep and unique living relationships with very many people. Yeah. That’s very hard to do. You only have a few. That’s the other thought that I was saying. Like you only have a few friends in the sense we’re talking here. Yeah, maybe a handful. You don’t have a lot. It’s not, it’s a quantitative, not a quantitative thing. Exactly. It’s marked up your 5,000 friends on Facebook. Or it’s not even just like a lot of people that you know. It’s like, it’s a small amount of people. And crucially, to your point, Andrew, I think, and it’s not even speculative because I think I’ve witnessed this. I’ve witnessed a lot of people who are without any. Yeah. Like it’s not, I think, I mean, I agree that I think we can only have perhaps a handful of those kinds of friends because of how much air they take. That’s sort of suicide, isn’t it? Oh, you say they have very few. I think that’s just so tragic. That’s the suicide of being. It is. Oh, that’s a great way of putting it. That’s exactly, I think that’s true. When you abandon all friends and you’re just this ship adrift somewhere before watching your computer screen. And I think that goes back to Chris’s point about the person that you stake your life against their death, against their despair. I just finished reading with a good friend of mine, Dan Schappi, the play by Camus. And, you know, and running through it. I mean, you know, the character, he told me the character he identified me with and then he was reading ahead of me and I sort of accepted, it’s end of eyes me with Tarrou and Tarrou’s project that we talk of sort of seen that is my way of calling my project. Tarrou’s thing is he wants to learn how to be a saint without God. And that’s literally the phrase he uses. But what you see in the plague and the plague, of course, is this. I mean, it’s I think it’s the book that helped Camus win the Nobel Prize. Right. It’s a beautiful book masterpiece. In some ways, I think it’s a better book than The Stranger. But in the plague, the plague, of course, there’s a friend. It’s so apropos of right now, there’s a French town. It’s overwhelmed by plague. They lock down. They go into quarantine, etc. And, of course, it’s a metaphor for human beings confronting absurdity and mortality and that. And that. But what you see in it is exactly that. You see that you see the friendships, the friendships between like Rieu and Tarrou and some of the other. The friendship is the thing that it’s amazing because Camus writes it so beautifully. He he doesn’t write it romantically. He doesn’t. He all but what he shows, he shows that the friendships, that’s the locus, that which calls to us and calls calls to us from another’s depth and calls to us from our depth in a way that preserves our humanity against whatever. I mean, this sounds trite, but against whatever the universe can sort of throw at it. I mean, that that’s the point. Like when I want to hear about, you know, some of the friendships that were maintained in some of the deepest, darkest situations like, you know, in POW camps and things like that and how those friendships like helped people preserve their humanity when nothing else does. Heroic individualism and all that stuff that that all gets broken. That all gets broken. But the one thing that undermines it, the one thing that is not undermined is friendship. It’s telling that in 1984 Orwell gets this because what he does, the most horrific thing he does is he ultimately undermines the relationship and the friendship between Winston and Julia. And that’s when they lose their soul. That’s when they lose their soul. Yeah, that’s when he loves Big Brother. Yeah, he loves the it instead of the thou. He loses. And that’s the whole point of the party. If you read the book, you realize the whole point of the party is to absolutely destroy the possibility of friendship and fellowship so that the only thing that’s left is the devotion to Big Brother. And the market and the state are trying to do that right now. And that’s what you’re pointing to, Andrew. That’s what you’re pointing to. Yeah. Yeah, it also occurs to me that I had a couple of thoughts while you were talking. One is that that, you know, this kind of friendship is not necessarily temporal, like you can have friends from books or you can have friends that are that that are that have passed away or that you no longer talk to or, you know, you can cultivate friends in all kinds of places that you could be alone. And maybe at times, solitude is more of a place to cultivate a generous, genuine friendship than, you know, in the crowd. Yeah, I think that’s a really good point. And also that it also seems that there is a certain there’s something about those kinds of friendships that are also both voluntary and involuntary simultaneously. I think that it’s important to understand that, too. It’s Frankfurt’s voluntary necessity. Voluntary necessity. There’s always a voluntary necessity. That’s right. That’s right. But once you enter into it, you find that you couldn’t be without it. Because then suddenly, suddenly you live in a world in which it is presupposed. Yes, exactly. And once you live in a world in which that friendship is presupposed, it cannot be discarded. Right. Because it becomes like it becomes a fundament of your being as such. I use those terms deliberately. Right. Your being as such begins to depend upon it. And and it’s not something that you can hasten into. You can’t rush into it. And you also can’t contrive it. That’s the other thing. I think sometimes people think, you know, there’s something formulaic about people when they have convergent interests and perhaps personalities that would seem by else by all psychometric criteria to be compatible. And you know what? Sometimes it just does not work. And that does that’s not to romanticize it necessarily. But there is something there is and must be deep mystery within the emergence of authentic friendship. Some some of it has to remain mysterious, must always remain mysterious. I like that. And I like the fact that you’re pointing out the involuntary aspect of it. The fact that that’s why you fall in love. And this I wonder if you fall in love that that’s actually philia, not Eros, in the sense that you on some level, because because you develop a bond with the person, a creative bond with the person that that that that endures through time. And it’s not merely, you know, an erotic thing. It’s something it develops more from Eros into philia or or something like that. Are you following my. Yeah. Well, Plato, yes, yes. Plato talks about a shift within Eros itself. He talks about that there’s there’s a kind of Eros that’s the consumptive Eros. So, right. You want to you you want to be one with something and you consume it. Yeah. And then he talks about the fact that it could flip and you can get this move where Eros goes from being consumptive Eros to being generative Eros. And he says when we and he gives a prototypical example of encountering beauty and wanting to make more beauty. You don’t want to consume the beauty. So it disappears into you. That’s not the direction. The direction is the other way. You want to make more beauty in response to the beauty you’ve seen. And then he indicates that that is preparing you for the philia in the Socratic relationship. Yeah. And that’s why you could be married for a long time. Right. Because it’s because you keep going with that creation of beauty. You don’t it doesn’t end somewhere along the way. I’m sorry. I just I was just thinking that, you know, that the the the essence of the husband wife relationship, right, is really is really about that. As you know, we’re talking about friendship, but it’s also the essence of the husband wife relationship. I think you say your wife is your best friend or that. And the reason you don’t leave this person because there’s so many other options is because you’ve you’ve you’ve gone beyond that state where you can continue to to create this beauty that you’re talking about or which isn’t necessarily something so tangible or and it’s also a unique language as we’ve been talking about. Right. I think I think so. I think disposal relationship is different from friendship, not because of absence, but because of excess. I think disposal relationship should have all three loves, at least the generative form of Eros. Definitely Philia. There’s a sense in which you’re helping you’re helping to midwife. You’re helping to give birth to that person’s aspirational self. There’s a sense in which you’re you’re taking you’re you’re you’re engaged in the love of creativity. And of course, the problem with that with an adult, right, is to not do that in any way that’s patronizing or condescending. So it’s precisely I think the Eros and the Eros is the most important thing. And I think that’s the most important thing. So it’s precisely I think the Eros and the Philia that counterbalance that, you know, that pretentious patronizing aspect, the danger, at least of agape. But I think it’s also agape that makes sure that the Eros doesn’t become consumptive. And I think what is mediating between all of them and keeping them going, like you said, Andrew, is Philia. And so if you look at sort of the measures of long term relationship, yeah, the Philia team tends to be central. But especially for long term relationships, there’s an agape element into it. Like Chris said, you you the agape element is you help like you’re a world through which the other you give birth to a world through which the other person can come into who and what they are. Or to use another way, Andrew, you there’s an agape in creation of creating a unique language by which that other person can come into articulation. So I think I think all of them, I hesitate to speak like I have any authority about this, because I mean, I’m in such a relationship now, but trying to get relationships to last a lifetime is not something that I’ve succeeded in. So I have to bow to your expertise on this. But from what I’ve seen and from what I’ve observed and from what I have good reason to believe, I’m now participating in and from the research I’ve looked at this, I think if you have all three and they shift around in what is prominent at any one stage in the relationship, right, you know, you know, there’s periods where the erotic aspect can come to the fore or the friendship aspect or the agape aspect. Sure. Yeah. I think again, again, the degree to which if that argument is right and they’re interpenetrating, the degree to which we have denuded right and diminished friendship is the degree to which the other two are also denuded and diminished and the way they all relate to each other is also denuded and diminished. I think it’s no coincidence that the people that only have, you know, Facebook friends have a tremendous difficulty having committed romantic relationships. That’s not a coincidence. That’s not a coincidence at all. Mm hmm. Yeah. Yeah. There’s also something kind of interesting in the incidentally, before I say this, you know, all of all of this serves to. Serves to depict what is at stake in the loss of friendship. Mm hmm. You know, I know for myself, the. The. The quaking of that foundation, the prospect of the loss of a friendship of that nature and of that intensity, I can’t I can’t speak to the spousal relationship, but if I can return it momentarily to the philia of friendship. The loss of which to me is such a it brings a kind of existential stress that in my experience, very, very few things can compare. Because when you’re, you know, when you’re when you’re. When your life begins to presuppose that foundation and begins to presuppose that reproduction from the worlds that are opened by those friendships, the risk of the loss of those worlds is tantamount to the risk of the loss of soul. To bring it back to despair for a moment. It’s funny. And that’s why it is such a seismic threat, at least in my mind and experience when, you know, even if there’s no real imminent threat of the loss thereof, if there’s even a sort of a real disruption to the foundation of those worlds, the I think the consequences, the existential consequences of that and the follow up from that can be incredibly pernicious and deleterious to the living of to the lived life. And and understanding and understanding those stakes, I think, is very, very important to the treatment of those friendships, you know, because it helps to make sure that in treating those friendships, you are not treating them as mere, you know, we’re treating them duly as the worlds they are. And and and and often, you know, sometimes to friendships to take your point about the consumptive eros, John, and how, you know, the the difference between the consumptive eros and the generative eros, that very difference often is is is is the difference that makes for a barren world or a fruitful world in the soil of that friendship. You know, I’ve I’ve hit moments in my life where I’ve realized. That a friend whom I cherished very deeply was, in fact, my what was what was driving my the need I had that drove my pursuit of that friendship was of a consumptive, erotic nature. And of course, I mean, erotic in the broader sense, not in the sexual sense. Right. But there was a there was a consumptive eros that was actually an unconscious determinant of the relevance of that friendship to me. Yeah, I’m sure. Yeah, we I know we many of us that experience is not interesting. Like everybody goes through that. It’s like we have to I’m sure that you have to go through. And yes, I discovered this poem I wrote a long time ago for a woman. And it was just this barrage of sex and death and, you know, every kind of drama you can even imagine. It was just it was just like pouring out of my unconsciousness. And, you know, we all go through that. Right. And then and then it’s like the romantic has to die or something. I don’t know. That’s right. That’s right. It’s like that need, you know, whatever it is, that that consumptive erotic need that can sometimes move friendships with a force that goes unseen to you has to be made opaque. It has to write. It’s the transparency, opacity shift that has to happen. You have to become conscious and aware. That’s why it’s me you to can sometimes you have to become conscious of the nature of your need and how rapacious it is. And then and then sometimes in so doing, it’s almost like a sacramental process. And so doing a friendship and the and the potential of a friendship can be renewed in that process. It doesn’t necessarily mean the death of a friendship. It can actually mean the renewal of a friendship and the reopening of the friendship back into the mode of I thou. And when that happens, I find, especially if it’s required, it is such a profound experience. And I was thinking that friendship is also in stages like like when you were talking, I thought of like the period when you when when things become translucent or transparent is when you become an adult on some level. So it’s like it’s like becoming a mature friend. It there there’s there’s there’s a there’s a there’s an evolution to friendship. It’s not it’s not a. Yeah, yes. Uh huh. I was thinking, Chris, as you were talking. I was thinking about because we often we’ve talked about the mythos around these perennial patterns. I was thinking about the vampire myth as opposed to the like the zombie myth is the myth of, you know, what we’ve argued with with Philip, the myth of the meaning crisis. But the vampire myth strikes me as a really appropriate myth of especially because of all the perversions of Christian fellowship that are within the vampire, because the vampire is someone who sucks the life out of you. Right. And the and the consumptive hunger is insatiable, not in the same way, not in the mindless way of the zombie, but in the way in which it is. I mean, vampires are sort of the quintessential narcissists, right, that everything is drawn. And that’s why they literally have the power of drawing attention. Right. You know, you know, the Bella Lugosi example is famous for that. And then I wonder if that’s the case, that the vampire represents how we can deeply betray by Leah. The fact that we have gone through this cultural movement of making the vampire sexy and fun, isn’t that maybe a way in which our culture is unconsciously indicating what we’ve been talking about here, that it has lost the understanding of friendship because it’s lost the horror of the vampire. Being a vampire is cool. You get to live for a long time and all that. Right. And it’s like, no, you don’t understand it. Yeah. The vampires are all 20 somethings now, which is sort of the age of narcissism. Right. When you’re 20s, you’re kind of like you’re self-obsessed. You haven’t learned to, you know, develop. You know, you haven’t you haven’t had enough relationships to know what it means to, I don’t know, develop. I mean, not always. That’s a good point. That’s a very good point, Andrew. I hadn’t thought about that. That’s even in one of those horrible books by Anne Rice. But the idea of the perpetual, the immortality is also a perpetual immaturity. The vampires. Yeah. Sorry. What did you say, Chris? Forever Young. The Forever Young. Yeah. The vampire. So maybe the little prince or the Peter Pan myth and the vampire myth, they’re coming together. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the And the Forever Young, the pairing of Forever Young with the living death is a very, it’s an interesting pairing, John. Yeah, yeah. It’s definitely sells a lot of, you know, TV shows. So and so the youth obsession of our culture and the trivialization that Han talks about so much in the agony of Eros and the scent of time and saving beauty. I mean, right. All of that, the perpetual immaturity of our culture. That then that would also feed into your point, Andrew, and also help another loop explaining why friendship is so radically like trivialized in our culture. Because the 20 something is supposed to be where you’re moving from buddies to the real possibility of friendship. But if you’re always in that liminal place and if you’re always what you’re trying to do is get whatever you can from it, the vampire, then then then, of course, you’re going to be perpetually incapable of friendship. And that’s that’s a really horrific thought. What would it be like? What would it be like to be psychologically set? Your character is so malformed that real friendship, the friendship that creates these, we said this unique language where we’re not just communicating, where we’re communing with each other. What would it be like to not be capable of that? What would that be like? I mean, I don’t I don’t know what that kind of. I think it’s a kind of perennial starvation. Like, that’s how I think about it. Yeah, sorry, I didn’t know I said it’s a living death. It’s it’s it’s it’s you’re one of the undead. You know, really, because there’s just nothing. It’s your whole movie. Your life is a friend’s sitcom. It’s like it’s horror, you know. Yeah, because it’s your your. I think of the image of I think of the image of. I think of the satanic image at the at the bottom of Dante’s Inferno. Right. Right. The flapping of the wings, right? The the the the the the striving, but the modally confused striving is precisely what recreates the conditions of incarceration, right? As he flaps his wings, he cools the world and keeps himself encased in ice. And I think that that state is something akin to that. It’s like the very the kind of the kind of the kind of the kind of the kind of the kind of the consumptive and rapacious form of Eros that drives people to want to collect and consume one another is the very thing that keeps them perennially fixed and and motionless really. And so far as they just they can’t incapable of the kind of self transcendence that would have them again know and be known prop in proper reciprocity with another person. So that knowing and being no, I mean, that’s the deep relationship then between Philea, Diologos and the cultivation of wisdom. Right. If you can’t enter into Philea, if you can’t commune, then you’re not going to have Diologos. You’re not going to have these conversations that take on a life of their own and give birth to new ways of seeing and being. And without that, then the possibility of knowing yourself virtually, because when you know yourself to know yourself virtually. I think you even made this pun in one of the things you wrote. To know yourself virtuously is to know yourself in virtue of others. Right. There’s there’s there’s there’s there’s there’s an inherent binding there together. And so without so without Philea, there is no Diologos and there is no capacity for that kind of knowledge, the self-knowledge that makes us wise. So instead, so what so what you do then? Yes. Right. You gather, you gather the likes, you gather the connections and you don’t have any aspirational self-knowledge. You don’t have any Socratic self-knowledge. You fill it up with narcissistic autobiography because that hole there is also missing. And so what you do is you’re posting all the pictures, right. And you’re doing all the things on Instagram and you’re constantly it’s sort of attention economy. Yes, exactly. And all you’re doing is constantly running the autobiography. Yes, yes, yes, yes. Except the autobiography remains literal autobiography, because one of the things and as opposed to, you know, you know what that so you know how when you have it, when you have a friendship, an authentic friendship that you’ve had for a very long time, shared autobiography becomes a way or shared memory, if I can put it that way, using it in the Augustinian sense of memory. Yeah, yeah. Memory, the memory becomes a world in which to play through. The shared memory, the commons of the shared memory becomes a world in which to to to make yourselves more mutually known rather than simply to trace over journeys undertaken. The tracing over journeys undertaken actually becomes a way of co-mapping your your sort of expanding reference for one another. Yeah. Do you know what I mean? I’m struggling to get this one out a little bit, but that the and I guess what I’m trying to say is that the the reliving of shared memory has to be a symbolic exercise rather than a literal exercise. Totally. It’s it’s the memory of Sati. It’s not the memory of of chronology. It’s it’s the memory that brings mindfulness of the deep remembering of who and what we can be. It’s an ontological. It’s an ontological memory. Yeah. Other than historical remembering. That’s right. It’s the it’s it’s the vertical. It’s yeah, exactly. It’s vertical. That’s what that’s what Proust’s whole, you know, opus was was all about, really, wasn’t it? It was it was it was, you know, writing down in minute detail the the beingness that he had experienced in his life and transforming that. Yeah. Trying transforming that into meaning instead of triviality or or, you know. Yeah. You’re talking about the remembrance of the remembrance of things past. Yeah. I post. Yeah. Yeah. I think that’s exactly right, Andrew. I think that’s exactly right. I think which is why it’s such a profound novel, right? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. It it it it it what it it’s almost like a parable. Parables are things that look like narratives, but actually undermine narrative from within. Right. Because what they do is they they they they they they they they dislodge you from that horizontal autobiography and they set you into the ontology. So like the parable of the prodigal son is like I said this before, that there’s that there’s the tension between justice and compassion and between the father, the role of the father and the role of the elder son and the role of the younger son. And if you try to resolve it in terms of any one of these things in favor of any one of them, you lose your humanity. While justice should always plan. No. Compassion should always plan. No. The father should always teach. No. The elder son should know the point. And that’s what Jesus is doing. And he said and then he says, though, he does a typical Jesus thing. And the kingdom of God is like this. And you go, oh, my. Oh, right. So you get this right. But Proust is like that, too, because what happens is you you you know, swans win all this. You’re reading what sounds like an autobiography. But but but you realize, like you said, Andrew, you realize, no, no, wait. The bottom drops out. And I’m not really moving this way. I’m moving this way. I’m like, like he’s exploring the depths of humanity. I had a similar experience when I read The Great Gatsby, right? I’m reading The Great Gatsby and I’m reading this book. I’m kind of frustrated with it. I’m going along. What is it? Why is this book famous? Yeah, you do. It’s like I thought it was kind of boring. It’s like, here’s the story. Oh, yeah. This love story. This is like this is this autobiography. It’s just this biography is unfolding about these indulgent people. And then you get to the last five pages of the book and it goes. And you go, oh, my gosh, he hasn’t been talking about these people at all. He’s been talking about the American dream. And he’s been talking about the collapse of the American dream and the corrupting us. And and you get that you get that drop into the vertical I’ll drop into the vertical. Yeah. Yeah. And so here’s another pithy way of putting it. Friends are ways they share and they afford the dropping into the vertical for each other. Yeah. Yes. Yes. Which is why there I was going to say one of the things I wrote down was there’s a risk involved in friendship because you can you can lose a friend. Like it’s and also a friendship. A friend is not something that it’s not a smooth operation to use on language. It’s something that challenges you. Yeah, it’s a labor. It’s a labor to go back to the midwifery metaphor. It’s a labor. And so so so I guess that’s why it’s sacred again. But I guess that’s why it’s also a journey. And I guess that’s why it’s also hard. You know, it’s it’s a it can be a trial sometimes. Well, every relationship, every relationship ends in loss. Like every I mean, you know, every relationship ends in loss. And this is where, you know, if you take a look at because I’ve been teaching all of them recently, you know, epicurean, the epic. We are understanding that the curing is this totally off epicurism. It’s about, you know, philosophical contemplative companionship. That’s what that’s at the heart of the curing is. And then, of course, you know, and then, of course, within stoicism as well. And they both they’re both they both generate friendship profoundly and deeply. But they always do it in the recognition. That’s what I meant about that’s why I was invoking camus the plague, because every relationship ends in loss. Either the relationship is betrayed or damaged irreparably or the person dies. Right. And so the stoics, the stoics, actually the premeditatio, you’re always supposed to remind yourself, Sati, that every friendship, every friendship is is is subject to fatality in that way. Everything, even your even relationship, even relationship to objects. But the point is not to stop because of it. Right. The point the point is not to say, well, I’m not. The point is not, you know, I’m going to pack up my toy, my emotional toys and go home. The point is not it’s the is precisely the opposite is to see. Go ahead. Oh, I’m just thinking that the opposite is also true. Is this the friend remains with you always until you die, you know, if it’s a deep friendship, it never leaves. So it’s both those things are true. Yes, they are. They are. And that’s the point. And even if you have an antagonistic relationship with this person and you break up or they’re still working inside of you on some level and they’re still having their effect on you, you can’t you can’t get it. You can’t escape from from from a real friend. I don’t think I think there’s no you can’t you can’t. Yeah, actually, that’s almost very crucial. It’s almost very crucial to the real friendship. It’s a responsibility is there whether you decide to take it up or not. Right. I think it’s been my experience that once you love somebody and love not lost or acquaintance or care, once you love somebody, you always love them to some degree. Yeah. I mean, so I mean, and even in grief, whether it’s the grief of rejection or the grief of loss, right, you still love the person. But it’s interesting. You the the whole if you didn’t love them, it wouldn’t hurt. Right. That’s the point. And also you you you might even hate them as well. And some people might have hate for them, you know, and how they how what happened. You might have that. But that doesn’t take that away either. I mean, hate is so the interesting thing about it is. So what I what I was going to say, nothing. You interrupted me, Andrews is. Hey, guys, you dropped out for a second. I had I had a bit of a latency problem. The last thing I heard you say was Jordan Peterson. OK, so let me make the point. I said invoking Jordan Peterson is like invoking Voldemort. What he made a point and it’s not his insight, but he made it famous. That meaning what I would call meaning in life is what sustains you when you’re not happy, when you’re not cheerful, when you’re not content. And what I was what I was suggesting was that friendship is the tutorial for that. Friendship is where we get the lived sense of it being worth it, even though there is going to be loss, even though there is going to be conflict. We get a deep. And so in the Epicureans and the Stoics, you get the sense of friendship as where you get. And I want to break this word up to emphasize it, where you get in encouragement, where because courage isn’t just fortitude. Courage is a sense of the meaning of life that sustains you, even when things are going horribly. And friendship is the place where the Stoics and especially the Epicureans thought we practiced that we thought. Well, and you have something similar in Buddhism, Andrew. You have the Buddha and the Dharma need the Sangha. You have the Buddha and the Dharma need the Sangha. And so I think that the degree also which and you have the spiritual friend, I think it’s called, which who is who you can’t really go very far without that. You can’t. And that’s what you see also again in the plague. And so, again, I think and we don’t talk enough about this virtue. I mean, we fall we fall into a maniacal monologue about justice, not even internal justice, just social justice. Social justice is important. It really is. But justice and softness and have to be talked about. And so does courage and the degree to which people are not capable. I’m going to make a prediction here. It’s something I think we could actually test. I think the degree to which people are incapable of friendship, of a communing relationship that we’ve the time we’ve been talking about here is the degree to which they are not going to get practice in existential encouragement, the courage to be the defense against despair. And therefore, they’re the existential cowards. That’s a prediction I’m going to make. Or the degree to which they are merciful on some level. Right. I mean, but those go together. Cowardice and cruelty, cowardice and cruelty are deeply interwoven and bound together. Yeah. They’re deep. You cruelty always comes out of tremendous insecurity. That’s why you see the cruelty of people like Trump, because he is such a fundamental coward. Right. That’s why he that’s also why he’s incapable of real friendship. Right. That’s why you see the cruelty that he sort of espouses without giving it a second thought, because those are bound together. Insecurity and cowardice and cruelty are always bound together. Yeah. Well, it just occurred to me that justice, right. This idea of justice without the sense of without that sense of understanding what philia and friendship is about would lead you to be unmerciful and cruel and shallow and, you know. So it’s you know, there was a song by Three Dog Night, which which really dates me. Chris doesn’t even know who I’m talking about, but you do, Andrew. I don’t know if I know the songs, but. Well, there was a song called, you know, it’s you know, it’s easy to be hard. And then there’s actually a line in here about, you know, people who care about justice, but but in the line is that they care about justice. But as you said, they’re incapable of actual friendship with each other. And I think I think the severing the the attempt to sever justice from fellowship and even a sense of commonwealth. And ideology becomes the substitute, doesn’t it? Like, yes, the having of shared belief basically become we become propositional buddies. Yeah. That song. And there’s a venomous behind it and, you know, which which arises with it. That is, you know, it’s where it gets that where the where the scapegoat thing mechanism kind of comes into being where you want to. I don’t know. You want to join together with somebody and destroy something rather than join together with somebody and create that. Yeah. Well, it’s just it’s just group vampires. Right. It’s like it’s it’s it’s group vampires. Yeah. The mob mentality kind of thing. And we can mob together with our words as much as we can mob together with our actions. And that’s problematic. That’s why, again, I think the myths. And there’s a reason why there’s a reason why I think I mean, there’s many mythic elements in things like token. But the fellowship of the ring is a myth that’s running all the way through. And I think the profound attraction for that is for many people, it awakens and helps them sati to remember how much they need friendship. How much they need it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Because friendship in and of itself is like. It’s like it’s like. Within within the suffering of life. Wow, that’s beautiful. Say that again. Friendship cocoons the memory of the eternal within the intrinsic suffering of life. That’s that. Yeah, that’s it. So that he just Sam and Frodo on the mountain with all this, you know, that is collapsing around them. That’s see. Yeah. But that’s very beautiful. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. That was beautifully said, Chris. Well, it was just just taking all that you two just said and just trying to synthesize it in a sense. Yeah. Yeah. And that’s why that’s why expressions of the Sam and Frodo example is so canonical for a good reason. It’s incredibly moving. I’ve never ceased to be moved by it for precisely that reason, because it’s like a pure art. It’s like a pure distillation of that insight. And maybe that expression, maybe the Harry Potter books are sort of the opposite. You know, in a sense, the friendships there are all about rebelling against the adult world or something like that. Or maybe I’m wrong. I’m not an expert. No, I think there’s I think there is authentic friendship in that story. But I don’t think that the I don’t think that the friendship is as is as central to the story as it is in Lord of the Rings, because it’s because the Harry Potter is a messianic story. It’s a messianic. It’s the death and resurrection of Christ, basically. That’s that’s essentially what Harry Potter is. And that’s why it’s so it’s so beloved, because it’s a very, very thinly disguised story of Christ. But I still wonder if it’s beloved for the wrong reasons at times, you know, in the way that the you know, just the like what we’re talking about is these little groups of people playing Quidditch with each other. And they’re sort of like that. It reflects the superficial aspect, right? It’s not doesn’t have this sacred quality. The Lord of the Rings does. Yeah, I think there there’s it. I think Chris’s point is the friendships aren’t as pivotal because it’s the stories about Harry Potter and how he’s a messianic figure. So it’s basically Jesus and his disciples. Whereas in whereas in the Lord of the Rings, the superpower of the hobbits is friendship. That’s what people don’t get. Everybody else has fantastic abilities. But the superpower of the hobbits is friendship. It’s friendship that time and time, time and time again, preserves them against the temptation to evil. Again, it’s their friendship. And it’s the and the Shire. Right. It’s that it’s that and the Shire isn’t a nationalism. It’s again, that sense of fellowship. Right. And the Shire village, it’s a village. And it’s yes, exactly what the kind of communities I think that we’re sort of, you know, trying to create in the wake of the collapse of civilization. Yes. Yes. The smart village book is about right. Yeah. The smart villages of future thinkers, the Sybium of Jordan Hall. It’s all about trying to get the that back. But right. The idea is right. What makes the hobbits, the beings that have the ultimate courage, there’s other heroic figures. There’s Gandalf, there’s Aragorn. But the only ones that have the courage to the end. For me, the scene is when Sam lifts Frodo up because he can’t walk anymore and he carries Frodo to right. Yeah. Into the heart. It’s the defining. It’s the define. It’s the fulcrum moment of the entire story, I think. Yeah. For good reason. Yeah. Very much. Very much. And again, it comes back to your point, Chris. He he lived, he literally bears Frodo up against despair. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. I should head out, guys. I think that’s a good place to bring it to an end. I think that’s a very good image to circle around to. But my time is pretty much up. Yeah. Well, thanks for taking the time. I see you’re incredibly active and busy with talking to a lot of people. And so I appreciate you taking the time. But I want but I want to do this again, Andrew. I find all of these reinventio session. Yeah. And I’m going to rename it like I put them out as reinventing because I thought reinventio would just kind of sound weird and people wouldn’t get it. But then people have been writing and saying, what do you mean reinvent? You can’t reinvent these things. It’s not right. So it should be reinventio. So I’m going to I’m going to rebrand our discussion as reinventio. And I thought that maybe like because I really love the subject of friendship, that the next thing we could, if we if we dared to talk about, you know, the erotic or the aspect of of friendship and love another time or the next time. I’d be happy to take that. Yeah, let’s do that. There’s so much more to say about this. Yeah, there’s there’s an endless amount of things to say, I think. I would like to explore also the proposal, which has fallen off our cultural table. But it goes back to perhaps use of Nazareth. It’s definitely in Paul’s, definitely in Augustine and in Aquinas of love as a virtue. I want to I would like to really explore that because the idea we we we we have. I was talking about this in the sign of this morning. Right. How much we have lost, how much we perverted the sense of the word passion. Right. Well, we we do things with passion and we use this word, not realizing that the word passion is related to passive. And the Greek word is pathway from which we get pathetic. Passion is the opposite of action. And we think somehow that the intensity of feeling is what keeps people committed. We look because what we’re actually valuing is people’s ability to commit to an arduous or longstanding task. You can’t do anything without passion. What you’re saying is you need commitment. But the ancient idea is what feelings are ephemeral, no matter how intense they are. Right. What what keeps people committed is a power for committing to the good, which is exactly what virtue is. Virtue is the power of committing to the good. And so to my mind, I was comparing the intensity of a factuation. I use this as an example with what you were talking about earlier, the virtue that empowers you and encourages you to stay in a long term relationship. And that’s not an intense feeling. It’s a virtue. So I would like next time, if possible, to talk about love as a virtue. Love is a virtue. Sure. Sounds great. And that’s another thing to reinvent, right? Passion. Yeah. Wow. Love is a virtue because because because it means like so many of these things, we’re living in a time of inversion where the thing we think it means is actually almost its opposite. Right. Exactly. Exactly. And you’re right to note that we and this is Jonathan Pajos pointed, but we live in that we live in the topsy turvy world. We live in clown world. We live in the upside down world. The upside down world is always predictive of the end of an epoch and of a civilized end of a civilization. It speaks of of an imminent death on large scale when all these things all these things have gone through some major inversion. Yeah. I think talking about love is a virtue and talking about the inverting of of it’s almost like Frodo and Sam, like the end of all things, the inversion of all things. Let’s talk about both of those. Let’s talk about love is a virtue and the inversion of all things and the inversion of all things. OK, I’ll write it down here. OK. Very good. Sounds like a plan. Thank you. Thank you so much. I love these conversations just to death. It just. Yeah. Yes. Exactly. I love them too. I think they’re I think they’re life giving. Exactly. They certainly are. Thank you, Andrew. John, of course. And both of you. Yeah. Thank you guys. Good night. Then take care. Bye. Bye.