Living Wisdom with Patrick Lee Miller

Plato and Bumble, Lucretius and OK Cupid. Cait Lamberton, a professor of marketing, discusses how we "sell" ourselves on the dating "market." Should we be ourselves, or must we trade in appearances? What counts as success in love anyway?

Sex and love are meaningful: done well, they orient our soul towards eternal Beauty. So says Plato. This episode of the podcast aims to explain his theory and then show how it incorporates what is best in the others already discussed (Aristophanes, Lucretius, and Freud).

Recommended Readings: Plato, Symposium 201d - 212c

https://www.amazon.com/Plato-Symposium-Hackett-Classics/dp/0872200760

"A man who will kiss a girl's lips passionately," wrote Freud, "may perhaps be disgusted at the idea of using her toothbrush." This episode explains why.

Recommended Readings: Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality

https://amzn.to/31C4lAL

Are sex and love meaningful? For Aristophanes, finding and joining with your soul-mate is the key to happiness. Lucretius disagrees. Sexual desire is simply an agitation of the body's elements; love is the dangerous fantasy that there is any greater meaning to it than that.

Recommended Readings:

Aristophanes: Plato's Symposium (189d - 194e)

https://amzn.to/2Yx3mjw

Lucretius: On the Nature of Things 4.10301287

https://amzn.to/3810jDy

Be Right Back is a story of love,  grief … and artificial intelligence. After Martha loses her husband, Ash, she begins the difficult process of mourning. That is, until she is interrupted by the arrival of an artificial "Ash". Martha's love is renewed, but she soon grows disenchanted, even angry. Why? Is it because the robot is an imperfect imitation of her husband (culled from his electronic traces)? Is it because the robot is too submissive? Or is it, finally, because it's a robot -- determined rather than free? Simon DeDeo and Patrick Lee Miller discuss and debate the possibilities, ranging widely, but touching especially on the paradoxes of love and self-reflection.

Guest: Simon DeDeo (@SimonDeDeo) https://www.cmu.edu/dietrich/sds/people/faculty/simon-dedeo.html

Sartre argues that love is paradoxical: the lover craves love that is given freely, but because such love can be revoked, and this possibility makes him anxious, the lover also wishes to control the beloved. He wants love that is free yet determined. This episode shows how this paradox stems from Hegel's Master-Slave dialectic, then concludes by synthesizing it with the theories of preceding episodes (on Ovid, Solomon, and Freud) in order to argue that loving wisdom requires liberating the slave within. 

Recommended Readings:

Sartre, Being and Nothingness (3.3.1: "First Attitude Toward Others: Love, Language, Masochism")

Nowadays we call it depression, but Freud was right to notice its similarities to mourning. The mourner grieves someone or something she recognizes she's lost. The melancholic lives as if what she's lost is in some ways still present. The depressed are haunted.

Recommended Readings: Freud, "Mourning and Melancholia"

https://www.amazon.com/Freud-Reader-Sigmund/dp/0393314030

The Roman poet Ovid tells the story of Pygmalion, a misogynist who made a statue of his ideal woman and loved it rather than anyone with flesh and blood. But was this love or grief? Robert Solomon, an American Existentialist, gives us one theory to answer that question. 

Recommended Readings: 

Solomon, The Passions 

https://amzn.to/2MaXhSJ

Ovid, Metamorphoses

https://amzn.to/3gqASix

The Arkangel device permits parents to filter and monitor the experiences of their children, to the point that they neither see nor hear anything that might cause emotional distress. But who is being protected? Whose interests does this device really serve: vulnerable children, or anxious parents? In this wide-ranging conversation, two philosopher-dads discuss the difficulties of parenting -- some of them perennial, others particular to a society so preoccupied with safety that it threatens to inhibit children's growth

"Trauma" is Greek for "wound." The world can wound our souls as well as our bodies, and some victims of psychological trauma never recover their equilibrium. Freud recognizes that we are vulnerable in this way ("vulnus" is Latin for "wound"), and has a theory of what happens. The Stoic Marcus Aurelius, by contrast, thinks we preserve an "inner citadel," a part of our soul that is invulnerable. The founder of CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy) drew from Stoicism to develop a clinical method that promised to help people recover control of their minds. Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff adapt this Stoic approach to address recent movements in American higher-ed that would reformulate education for traumatized students.