THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING Podcast
Christoph Quarch on Aliveness & Cosmos
Beschreibung
Christoph Quarch [https://christophquarch.de/en/autor/shop/] is a philosopher and author in Germany. He co-founded the New Platonic Academy, teaches ethics and business philosophy at universities including Danube Private University in Krems. He has written or edited more than 50 books. A handful are available in English, including Plato’s Metaphysics of Soul, The Donkey School for Leadership, and Awaken the Spirit of Europe; his German works include Lebenselixier Schönheit (”Beauty Will Save the World”) and Wahre Wirtschaft (on rethinking economics). We met in Athens, and I’m really looking forward to this conversation. You may know this or you may not, but I start all of these conversations with the same question, which I imagine you’re going to enjoy. I borrowed it from a friend of mine. She helps people tell their story, and it’s a big, beautiful question, which is why I use it. But because it’s big, I kind of over-explain it the way that I’m doing right now. So before I ask it, I want you to know that you’re in absolute control, and you can answer or not answer any way that you want to. And the question is, where do you come from? And again, you’re in absolute control. This is an excellent question. So, where do I come from? This is a profound question, mostly for the philosopher, for philosophers for centuries posed this question. I would say I come from the universe. I am part of the universe, some kind of distillation of the universal spirit in an individual form, which will dwell on planet earth for a couple of years before probably my individual form will dissolve again, and I will become part of a greater whole again — without a personal identity, without subjectivity, but nevertheless being part of the cosmic consciousness. When do you feel like you discovered you were part of the universe, that you came from the universe? Well, to be honest, this is based on two columns. On the one column, it is philosophical reflection, mostly in conversation with ancient Greek philosophy, because this is a topic that I studied all my life. Mostly Plato, who inspired me very much indeed. But there’s also a kind of personal experience, which resonates with this philosophical reflection. This comes right from my childhood days, from a period when I was still adolescent. I remember very well the first spiritual experience, even though I don’t like these big concepts. As a young man, I was pretty much influenced and inspired by a kind of Christian congregation, which is called Taizé. It is a congregation located in Burgundy in France, and they practice a very contemplative kind of Christian faith. As a young man, at the age of 16 or 17, I went to their place very often. And I remember sitting on the ground floor of an old Romanesque church from the 12th century, contemplating, and suddenly it felt like my whole body opened up and a stream of warm energy — I would call it love — flowed straight through my body. This experience really had a huge impact on me. I could feel it for a decade at least, and it was my sincere intention to understand what happened to me in this moment and what it was all about. So first I studied theology, because I thought it must have something to do with Christian faith. But to be honest, I didn’t find answers in Christian theology, and therefore I proceeded to philosophy, which always attracted me, mostly ancient Greek philosophy. And there I found a concept and a mental explanation for this amazing experience of being fully alive. And when you were young, what did Christoph want to be when he grew up? Do you have a recollection, maybe before this experience — what was the imagination of Christoph of what he would be when he grew up? There was no very precise idea of what I was supposed to do in later days. It was about the same period when my spirit started to grow, to unfold itself, to evolve somehow. And in this period, I remember very well standing in front of the bookshelf of my father and finding a book called Plato’s Master Dialogues. I took that book and read a bit in it. I didn’t understand very much, to be honest, but there was something I did understand — namely that this had something to do with me. I became somehow attracted by this mind, this spirit that spoke to me through the lines I read in this book. And so it was the idea to do something that had to do with spirit, but also with beauty. I had the imagination that one day I could become a kind of poet and photographer who writes books, takes pictures, and through this makes a living. To be honest, this was very optimistic. I think in the 21st century, due to technological revolutions, this project would have failed anyway. So I became a philosopher. And when talking about this, there comes a line to my mind from the German poet Friedrich Hölderlin, who once said that philosophy is a kind of asylum for those who felt attracted by poetry but didn’t dare to become a full-time poet. That’s quite beautiful. And that resonates with you and your experience. It does. And to be honest, sometimes it still feels to me that I should give up this philosophy, with these mental operations and dialectics and conversations, and return to poetry. As a young man I wrote a lot of poetry. Sometimes I think, in the time of AI, even philosophy seems to be substituted by automatically generated texts and books. But when it comes to poetry, there always remains something mysterious about it, something that I’m pretty convinced will never be substituted by artificial intelligence, even though it can pretend to write poetry. Real poetry, in my understanding, has to do with that early adolescent experience I was talking about. It has to do with the universal spirit, which sometimes grasps you, inspires you, fills you with inspiration and enthusiasm. And without that, I’m pretty convinced no real poetry will ever come into existence. So catch us up. What does it mean? Tell us a little bit about your work. What does it mean to be a philosopher? And what do you do? What’s the work that you do? I’m sitting here thinking all day long. No, I’m just kidding. It’s not that easy to explain, because when I decided to become a full-time philosopher, it was really a challenge. And if I had known at that time what it meant to do this, I’m not quite sure whether I would have decided to take that road. But anyway, what I’m actually doing is a kind of multi-task work. On the one hand — not that surprising for a philosopher — is teaching. I’m a lecturer at several universities, both in Germany and in Austria. But this is only part-time work. I’m not a professor at university; it’s freelance philosophy, and I’m invited to give some seminars. On the one hand, in a business school, in order to discuss with future entrepreneurs what it takes to reflect on what they are doing, what it takes to reflect on the spiritual dimension of economy, which actually exists. On the other hand, in Austria, I’m a lecturer at a medical school, and it’s about doing the same thing with future doctors. It’s quite inspiring for me to converse with young people and to understand how they look into the world, what kind of ideas they have for their future. Another thing is that I work a lot in collaboration with a German broadcasting corporation. I have a weekly format in which I reflect in a philosophical way on political topics that are important these days. Another thing is consulting work with corporations, mostly with leadership, when it comes to the question of corporate culture development — what needs to be reflected beyond figures and numbers and the hardcore economy stuff, but is important in order to have a good relationship with employees, all these things we call corporate culture in German. And the last thing — and this is the fun part of the whole thing — is the philosophical journeys I do in collaboration with a weekly German newspaper called Die Zeit, which is very widespread in Germany. These are philosophical journeys where we stay together with a group of interested, open-minded people to discuss week-long central issues. For instance, I go with them to Athens, where we met, to discuss the origin of democracy and political thought. Or last week, I just returned from Norway, where I had a seminar on the philosophy of nature. It’s really fun to go to places in which you can easily combine the experience of people with the topics that we are talking about. We met in Athens. I was there for the House of Beautiful Business. You were there, and you led a tour — the birthplace of democracy, of the Pnyx. And without question, it was the most powerful part of that journey for me. I was there in large part because I live in a very small town. I have concerns about the way that community conversations have struggled in the social media age, and democracy and all that good stuff. So I was excited to be in Athens, and that tour was really powerful. And I guess my question to you is this: it seems like your attraction from the beginning was to the ancient Greeks. So what do the ancient Greeks have to tell us now? And in particular, Athens and the Pnyx — the role that it plays — what do you think is significant about the Pnyx and the Athenians that we should be listening to? Well, they have so much that’s really important for us in our modern epoch. Let me try to put it like this. Ancient Greece is somehow the birthplace of Western civilization. That’s where our roots come from. Of course, there are other influences as well, from Jerusalem and Rome. But when we talk about politics and about democracy, it’s obviously Athens, or Greece, from which the whole story began. And what attracts me so much about these ancient Greeks is that they thought in a very inspiring way, differently than we do today. If you accept a metaphor from modern information technology, I would say the ancient Greeks operated with a different operating system, a different mental operating system than we do. And this is quite fascinating, because they were discussing similar topics to the ones we discuss nowadays, but they did it in a different manner. And this different manner is mostly influenced by their basic intuition, which is expressed in ancient Greek mythology and philosophy. What amazes me so much is that these people were very optimistic. They had a very positive attitude toward life. Their language expresses this inner mentality by the word cosmos. Cosmos is a word that we usually translate as universe, and the ancient Greek concept means much more. A literal translation would be beautiful order. So they thought they were living in a beautiful world, being part of a beautiful order. And the beauty of this order was the harmony. In ancient Greek philosophy and mythology, we always find people who are obsessed by the idea that they live in a harmonious universe, like a beautiful symphony, wonderful music, and that the responsibility of humans is to be in tune with this music, with this melody — to write, by one’s own life, a beautiful variation of the big symphony of life. And this is so different from the world we are living in, because from the 16th or 17th century onwards, Western civilization is somehow obsessed by the idea that the world, or nature, is something we need to dominate. René Descartes, a very important philosopher of the 17th century, said the dignity of humans consists in being capable of being maître et possesseur de la nature — master and owner of nature. This is completely different from the ancient Greek idea that human responsibility, or human dignity, consists in being part of this wonderful music, this wonderful harmonious universe they called cosmos. So there’s a completely different mindset. And in a world in which it sometimes seems to me that the mental operating system of modernity is becoming dysfunctional, it’s quite inspiring and also encouraging to understand that by no means is the way that we think nowadays the only way, that it is engraved in marble. No — there are different ways of thinking, and these different ways are not coming from another planet, but are to be found in the very basement floor of our own civilization, in ancient Greece. And as we were talking about democracy and the Pnyx, this is for me very important, in a period in which democracy seems to be under attack. Unfortunately, in one of the countries that for two centuries had been the lighthouse of democracy — I’m talking about your country, the United States of America — nowadays we as Europeans see with great sorrow and concern what is happening. And in a period like this — and to be honest, in Europe similar things are happening as well — it makes sense to me to reflect on the very origin of democracy and political thought in general. And that brings us back to essence, mostly to the place where we met, the Pnyx, which used to be the assembly field of the ancient Athenian general people’s assembly — the very center, the very heart of ancient Athenian democracy. When we reflect on ancient Greece, the amazing thing is that we can understand what has been the basic idea of democracy, and this is pretty different from the way we discuss democracy nowadays. Because the ancient Greeks didn’t understand democracy as a method of how to organize power. That’s the way we do it. We think democracy is a method to organize and operate with the power of the people. And a good democracy, in the modern mindset, is one in which the amount of power generated by the people is strong enough to become a powerful, wealthy, and prosperous country. The ancient Athenians thought differently. They asked themselves: how do we need to organize a society — they called it a polis, citizenship — how do we need to organize the citizenship in a way that suits the basic principles of life? A completely different approach. What do we need to do so that people will have the chance to live a good life as citizens of our polis? And to lead a good life, in the ancient understanding, meant to organize the city, the polis, as a kind of microcosmos. They had this image of the beautiful harmonious cosmos, and they asked themselves: how can we use this as a kind of measure within our own citizenship? How can we live together in a harmonious way? And a harmonious way means each citizen has the capacity, the ability, and the preconditions he or she needs in order to unfold their own individuality in a way that suits the whole polis, so that it can prosper. And the answer that a guy like Solon, one of the pioneers of Athenian democracy, gave was: let’s do it like this. Let’s take the citizens in charge, in responsibility for the polis. Through this it is pretty likely that the equilibrium, the balance of the whole citizenship, will be established and established again, even though the times are changing and we are in a constant flux of things. This is the original idea through which democracy was generated, on the basis of a different mental operating system. And to bring this to our minds and consciousness could be inspiring, in order to reactivate the core idea of democracy and to understand why democracy indeed is the way we need to organize ourselves — if it’s not merely about power, but about human aliveness. And this is the whole thing we are talking about. Philosophy, as I understand it, should always reflect on the question: how can we live a good life, allowing humans to unfold their potentials, to be fully alive? I just have so much appreciation — I love listening to you. And I said this when we met: it’s clear that you know that this is what you’re doing, breathing new life into these concepts and ideas. In my experience, my therapist was a little bit of a philosopher, and we would get into intellectual conversations, and he would always talk about how far we’ve fallen, in a way, away from some of these ideas. And in particular the way you talk about harmony, the cosmos — and then I feel like you also talked about virtue, and what virtue meant to the Athenian imagination. It awakened in me a whole new understanding, or appreciation, or maybe just aspiration, honestly, about what’s possible — that is really hard to come by. So where does virtue fit in? That was a word I remember you talking about and being inspired by. What’s the difference between how they imagined what virtue was and our sense of it now? Virtue now feels like a very shallow idea, a very Puritan idea. But you talked about it very differently. Another very profound question, which fits in very well in this part of our conversation. Because indeed, in the ancient Greek mental operating system, virtue was the central concept in the field of ethics or morality. And again, they thought in different ways than we do today, because our modern ethics is mostly shaped by the concept of value, and not that much by virtue. What makes the difference? In the Greek understanding, virtue is something to be understood when we understand the very essence of something. Let me give you an example, probably a strange one. I have a glass in my hand, and for an ancient Athenian it would not have sounded as weird as it does to our ears if I were to say: this is a virtuous glass. In our understanding, this is a bit weird, because we think virtue is a quality of human beings, but not of artifacts or things like a glass we can use. But in the ancient understanding, virtue is a quality of whatsoever, given that something is 100% what it might be, what it could be, and what it is meant to be. The meaning of the glass is something we can easily understand by using it. I can see what it is, and then I can drink without getting wet all over my shirt. So this is a definition of a glass, but it is something we need to understand by doing. It is not so much a kind of know-what, but a kind of know-how, which allows us to understand the virtue of something like a glass. The glass is a virtuous glass — it is a good glass — when it manifests, when it executes its significance, its meaning. In German we say seinen Sinn, when it is what it is meant to be. So you can apply the same strain of thought to the question of what might be the virtue of a human being. In order to understand the virtue of humans, we need to understand who we actually are. Therefore the major imperative of ancient Greek ethics is a word that was engraved on the temple walls at Delphi, the temple of Apollo, which says gnothi seauton — know who you are, realize who you are, understand what it takes to be human. This is not a psychological thing; it is about understanding the essence of humanness. Is it possible to say humanness in English? I think so. What is the very essence of a human being? Of course this question is far more profound than understanding the very essence of a glass, and it can’t easily be described by the utility of something. The essence of a human being is not to be understood through utility — no, it’s about something different. It is more about what we were talking about with the cosmos. It is about being in tune with oneself, being resonant with oneself, being in a harmonious state of existence — being in tune both with your inner self, your emotions, your feelings, your aspirations, and with your surroundings, your society, your family, probably your company, and also with nature. And this is the basic idea of human virtue. Human virtue is a kind of status — in the ancient Greek understanding, mostly in Plato, it is a kind of state in which you are in resonance, in harmony, in accordance with yourself, so that there’s a certain kind of inner integrity. This is not about values. It is not about some values being declared by either a god or a moral authority or a politician or whoever. A good life, in the ancient Greek understanding, is not a life which is in tune with values declared by a moral authority. A good life is measured by being itself, by the very essence of something. This is a very different approach, which again might be inspiring for modern times, because, as we all know, we live in a world in which you have several moral authorities. There are different moral authorities in China, in Iran, in Egypt, in Israel, in Russia, in Brussels, in Washington, in Rome. And who has the capacity to counterbalance these values? Who has the authority to say this value is true and the other one not? So when we talk about values, we always have a problem, because values are always based on authority, and authority is mostly based on power, and power is relative. We do not have any norms from which we can expect that they will be generally appreciated. It is different with the concept of virtue. It is at least theoretically possible that in a global dialogue we can agree on what it really means to be a full human being, what it takes to unfold the potentiality of humanity 100%. And given that this were possible, it could be an option that we could find some kind of norms through which we could be guided to come to terms with the incredible, unprecedented challenges of the 21st century. Of course, it is a theoretical idea, but it is also an invitation to converse with each other on this very old philosophical question through which the whole of Western philosophy was initiated: understand who you are. Gnothi seauton, know who you are. And I think what we really need in global society, and in any society, is to discuss these questions again and again. And one more aspect: I think the time has come, mostly because we as humans these days are strongly challenged by the generation of artificial intelligence, which claims to substitute humans or humanity in several ways, on several fields. Therefore, we need to ask ourselves who the f**k are we? What makes us different from AI? What are the essential features of real humanness which can’t be delegated to algorithms? So I think it is a very fertile period for profound philosophical conversations, as we are leading them right now. Yeah, absolutely, and that’s been my experience. This is a good segue into the AI conversation. I had the experience as a professional who talks to people — I research, I do interviews with people — and I guess what AI did for me as a professional person is that it made me ask that question of what is it. Can it do what I do? Can I be replaced by this intelligence? Is my intelligence, which I thought was unique, no longer really all that unique? And can I be replaced by this intelligence? And that was a real panic-attack moment, because in many, many cases, just from a professional point of view, the corporation is most likely going to say: yeah, absolutely. We’d much rather pay little money and have a machine do — forgive me — answers very cheaply, than pay you a lot of money and wait a little bit longer for something that a human did. They’ve made that calculation quite a bit. So there was this existential question that ends up being pretty bad. But alongside that question is a second one — they come together, these two questions. In what way is my intelligence not unique? And in what way am I unique? What is the thing that makes me who I am? It struck me — I guess I was a little surprised — that I really did have that kind of experience of, holy s**t, there are whole pieces of what I think is valuable about me that are just no longer unique to me. And, oh my God, there’s this whole chunk of what is unique about me that maybe I don’t even really know how to talk about. Do you know what I mean? I know exactly what you mean, because the same thoughts come to my mind as well. But let me nevertheless try to share the conclusion I came to when reflecting on these things, because it is a very profound, very philosophical question. As I mentioned before, I think it’s really time for philosophers to enter the stage and to talk about this, to bring another perspective into the dialogue, because, yes, we really need to see things differently. What happens, in my understanding, when we talk about AI these days, is a very subtle process of denaturalization. What do I mean by this? I think we are about to disconnect ourselves from our body, from our physical part of existence. And of course, this is one of the major projects of these guys who call themselves transhumanists, who say it is possible, in the age of spiritual machines — to use the words of Ray Kurzweil — to disconnect from this fragile substrate we call our body, and to transport the content of our brain, of our consciousness, to far more endurable substrates like silicon, on a computer chip, on hardware. I really wonder that humans are so attracted by the idea that they could leave their body, their flesh and blood, behind, even though we all know that being creatures of flesh and blood gives us an incredible amount of joy — of course of pain as well — but of aliveness, of this huge spectrum of emotions, of feelings, of experiences. As if life could be reduced to plain data, to plain information. This is a weird idea, in my understanding. And on the other hand, let me refer to what I was talking about at the very beginning of our conversation, when I shared my experience in the old Romanesque church in Taizé, when that spirit, that stream of love, ran straight through my whole existence. This is something no AI will ever be capable of understanding, because it derives from a different dimension of human existence. To stay for a second with the term dimension — it’s a bit difficult to explain without making a sketch — but in my understanding humans are multi-dimensional beings, at least four-dimensional beings. One dimension of our existence is our body, our physical substrate. When you compare it with a cube, it’s like the line you need to construct a cube. Then a second dimension, the surface of the cube. The surface is our ego. This is the way that we consider ourselves, our self-image. But our self-image is not identical with what we actually are, our profound self, what the ancients called soul. This, in my image, is a third dimension, the whole cube, which is far more complicated, far more complex than the plain surface of our ego, our self-image. And then there’s a fourth dimension, which — to refer again to the cube — is space and time in which the cube is located. Without space and time there would be no cube at all. This, in my language, referring to traditional philosophical speech, is the spirit. So we are spiritual beings, we are emotional, psychic beings, we are rational, ego beings, and we are corporal, physical beings. These are four dimensions of our existence. And to be fully alive means to be somehow at home in all four dimensions. AI, however, reduces us to the surface, to the user surface of our own individuality. It confuses the images we have of ourselves and of others with their profound depth, their soul — which of course is partly something we do not like to look at, which we try to remove from our self-image. But nevertheless it’s a part of us. I think being human is far more complex than what information technology suggests, because we are physical beings, we are fragile, we are mortal. And perhaps these are the features of human existence on which our dignity is based, and through which we are really unique and incomparable — what makes us unique and what can’t be replaced by artificial intelligence. I remember — it’s a quote I return to a bunch — I think I had gone to a brief talk, and it was by somebody who was an anthroposophist, you know, like Rudolf Steiner, Waldorf Schools. I paraphrase quite a bit, but what I heard that person say in talking about Steiner was this idea that Western man kind of wants to be a machine when it grows up. It was this way of expressing the aspiration that you’re talking about — that there’s something going on, that we’re really attracted to this technological dream, that it’s so deeply encoded that we just imagine ourselves as a machine when we grow up. It seems natural to embrace this, or at least some part of us does. And I’m wondering, how do you respond to that thought, and does that resonate with you? And then I wonder, what’s the alternative? What’s the human aspiration? If I wanted to be a human when I grew up, and to resist the aspiration to be a machine, what does that mean, and what does that look like? It’s quite fascinating, because this aspiration to become a machine, or to behave like a machine, is something that hasn’t fallen from the skies, but can be reconstructed in its genealogy, which leads us again to the 17th century, to the period that philosophers called rationalism. For instance, in the writings of René Descartes, and also in a very famous book by a French author and doctor called Julien Offray de La Mettrie, we find the idea that humans, in fact, are nothing but machines — that the body is a kind of mechanical apparatus, created in ways that are hardly comprehensible by a divine spirit. But basically, our body is a mechanism, and we can understand ourselves in a proper way by the imagery of a machine. And of course, those who try to convince us that humans are, in fact, nothing but biochemical algorithms, made to optimize their chances of good reproduction in future generations, are referring to that idea. It seems to be quite fascinating to humans, from a certain point of history onwards, to understand themselves in that way. Because what is a machine? A machine is something that multiplies human power. And in a period in which power seems to be a kind of substitute in the place where once a god or divinity used to be located, it is quite attractive to understand oneself as an optimizable machine, which can be perfected or optimized through artificial intelligence or other advanced technologies, in order to maximize power. The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche once said that the major project of humans in the 20th and 21st century would be to accumulate, to maximize power — mostly because Nietzsche said God is dead. In former times, in the Western Christian world, people for centuries adored and worshipped a God who was defined by being almighty, all-powerful. When that God died — this is Nietzsche’s idea — humans started to replace the dead God by themselves, by becoming, as Yuval Noah Harari in his world bestseller puts it, homo deus, a transhuman being which somehow combines the qualities that once used to be the monopoly of the almighty God: all-mightiness, omnipresence, omniscience, and immortality. In former periods, however — in a world based on a different mental operating system, not so much on the belief in an almighty, all-powerful God, like the ancient Greek spirituality in which the gods are not defined by their power but by their intensity of aliveness — being a machine would never have been an ideal to humans. Those humans wanted to be god-like as well, but not almighty, all-powerful, omniscient, immortal — but fully alive. The idea of an ancient Greek god is to be 100% what you are. When you are 100% what you are, there is nothing you need to change, there is nothing you could want. You are completely satisfied with what you are, because your potential is 100% unfolded. You are who you are and nothing else. You are completely in tune with yourself. This is the ancient idea of perfection. It has nothing to do with power, but a lot to do with aliveness. It’s quite amazing that you can think in such different terms, and that’s why I always return to the Greeks again. They didn’t live in a worse way than we do today. They are the founders of Western civilization, and they created an unprecedented, incomparable thriving of human culture and civilization. So a bit more of the Greek mindset would do us well, I suppose. We’re coming near the end of our time, and I’ve got so many things that I’m curious to ask you about. Yeah, we can do a follow-up one day or another. Oh yeah, definitely. I would love to do this again. I’ve got two competing ideas in my head. One is, because we met at the Pnyx, I think there’s something in everything you’re talking about — about conversation, about this need to engage with each other — that is also under threat, as much as AI is exacerbating this difficulty we have in coming together and engaging each other in conversation and dialogue, and what philosophy does. I’m curious about that, just how you feel about the state of conversation and the importance of conversation. And maybe that’s what you’re saying — that’s why we have philosophy to begin with, to inspire that kind of conversation. And then I have a second curiosity, just about the word beauty. You’ve been talking about power, and I’m wondering what role beauty plays in the Athenian imagination, in that operating system, to use that analogy. So I’m just going to lay those in front of you and see what you might do with them. Perhaps let me start with the topic of beauty, because it’s a beautiful one. The last book I’ve published, unfortunately so far only in German, is called Beauty Will Save the World, which is a quote from Fyodor Dostoevsky, the famous Russian novelist. I like it very much, because I actually think it is true. Why? Because beauty, again, in my understanding — I try to understand beauty on the basis of what I call the ancient Greek mental operating system, which, as for the topic of beauty, is quite different from the aesthetic approach to beauty that is common in modern Western philosophy. In the understanding of the Greeks, something is beautiful when it is harmonious, and again, to be harmonious means to be in tune with itself, to be completely what it is. This is true, for instance, for a piece of art like an ancient Greek temple. We stood in front of the Parthenon, on the Acropolis in Athens, which is a ruin, but nevertheless you can still sense the incredible beauty of this masterpiece of ancient Greek architecture, because everything is proportional, everything is arranged in a way that it suits each other and creates an impression of wholeness, of completeness. This is the ancient idea of beauty — but with one aspect that was forgotten in later epochs, for instance in the Renaissance. In the Renaissance, philosophers talked about beauty, and they also talked about harmony. But the ancient Greek concept of harmony comprises one feature that is very important: namely that beauty is always created at the edge between order on the one hand and chaos on the other. It is always on that very edge, always in danger of falling either into a kind of fixation, of petrification, by order, or into complete chaos on the other side. So beauty is when you are walking on a very narrow rope. That’s what beauty is in the understanding of the ancients. Order was combined with the god Apollo, chaos with the god Dionysus, and the combination of the two of them is the very secret of what beauty is all about. Beauty is not sterile. And therefore the idea of a beautiful society, that the ancient Athenians tried to operationalize through democracy, always comprises the possibility of change, of transformation, sometimes even of what we call disruption. And this brings me to the second topic you were talking about, the importance of conversation. I think from the very beginning, from Socrates onwards, conversation and dialogue had always been the vehicle through which philosophy was executed, performed. And I think this is important, because profound conversation always has a capacity to change our opinions, to destroy patterns of thought which maybe once have been fertile and inspiring, but whose time has come. So the time has come to walk on different ways, to try other ways. And this is what Socrates did with his interlocutors when he talked in the marketplace in Athens. He asked, what do you think, what is the good life? And then they gave a conventional answer that most probably is not born on the soil of their own experience, but is a kind of food taken from someone else’s tree, repeated again and again without ever being reflected upon. So the beauty of philosophy — to refer to this term again — maybe is due to the fact that it has the capacity to destroy what has become an obstacle to becoming fully alive, in order to open new spaces, new perspectives, new horizons, which might help us to improve, to grow, to evolve our potentials, and through that to become fully alive. Christoph, I want to thank you so much. I would love to do this again with you sometime. It was a treat. The experience of the Pnyx in Athens was really moving and powerful, and I’m so glad you accepted the invitation here. It was a pleasure. Thank you very much. And thank you very much for your inspiring and sometimes challenging questions. In my understanding, what we actually did in these last 50 minutes was philosophy at its best. And therefore it was really a pleasure for me. Thank you so much for having invited me to that wonderful conversation. Thank you. 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