Falstaff, 1921 Art: Eduard von Grützner
Monthly Archives: May 2026
Socrates on desire
Edward Hopper: Rooms by the Sea (1951)
How Two Souls Can Interact with One Another: Simone de Beauvoir on Love and Friendship
By Maria Popova (themarginalian.org)
It is in relationships that we discover both our depths and our limits, there that we anneal ourselves and transcend ourselves, there that we are hurt the most and there that we find the most healing.
But despite what a crucible of our emotional and spiritual lives relationships are — or perhaps precisely because of it — they can be riddling and nebulous, destabilizing in their fluidity and ambiguity, leaving us grasping for the comforting solidity of categories and labels. The ancient Greeks, in their pioneering effort to order the chaos of the cosmos, neatly taxonomized them into filial love (the kind we feel for siblings, children, parents, and friends), eros (the love of lovers), and agape (the deepest, purest, most impersonal and spiritual love). After the Enlightenment discounted all love as a malfunction of reason, the Romantics reclaimed it and revised the ancient taxonomy into a hierarchy, under the tyranny of which we still live, placing eros at the pinnacle of human existence. And yet our deepest relationships — the ones in which we both become most fully ourselves and are most emboldened to change — tend to elude the commonplace classifications and to shape-shift across the span of life.
Simone de Beauvoir, 1946 (Photograph: Henri Cartier-Bresson)
Simone de Beauvoir (January 9, 1908–April 14, 1986) was only nineteen when she wielded her uncommon intellect at these questions on the pages of her journal, later published as Diary of a Philosophy Student (public library). In between composing her resolutions for a life worth living, Beauvoir began thinking seriously about the nature of love, its dialogue with her own nature, what she may want of it and what it may demand of her — “in brief, how souls can interact with one another.” In the midst of an intellectual infatuation with a young man who would go on to become an eminent philosopher himself — not the one she would eventually marry in a convention-breaking union of minds — she examines the substance of the feeling:
To say that I love him, what does that mean? Does the word itself have a meaning?
Questioning the tangle of idolization and desire that masquerades as love, she grows suspicious of the very concept of personal love as an absurdity against the backdrop of the largest love we can carry:
Invoking the love she feels for her friends, the sum total of them, she writes:
Over and over she returns to the elemental question:
Art by Olivier Tallec from Big Wolf & Little Wolf by Nadine Brun-Cosme — a poignant modern fable about how friendship anchors and transforms us.
Drawing on Hegel’s philosophy of freedom, in which for any conscious subject to be free means freeing the other, she arrives at a “formula” for the ideal friendship: “absolute reciprocity and the identity of consciousness.” The cultural ideal of romantic love, on the other hand, replaces this “absolute reciprocity” with engulfment and sublimation of one self into the other. She writes:
This, of course, is Rilke’s model of a perfect relationship — one in which “the highest task of a bond between two people [is] that each should stand guard over the solitude of the other” — consonant with Octavio Paz’s lovely definition of love as “a knot made of two intertwined freedoms.”
Beauvoir ultimately found it not in romantic love but in the deepest friendship of her life — that with Zaza, her childhood best friend.
A year older than her and also enamored of books, Zaza was the only one with whom the young Simone could have “real conversations.” In Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (public library) — the first volume of her autobiography, largely a loving memorial to this formative relationship — she would write of talking to Zaza:
Card from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days, also available as a stand-alone print and as stationery cards.
When Zaza’s dress caught fire and charred her leg to the bone, she endured the long convalescence valiantly, then went on to climb trees and do cartwheels, to play the piano and the violin. Beauvoir relays a moment radical in the context of early twentieth-century French bourgeoise society, emblematic of Zaza’s defiant spirit and playful disdain for convention:
This strength of spirit, this defiance of the givens, is what the young Simone most admired about her friend — it emboldened her to defy convention in her own life.
Part of the unexamined convention Beauvoir had internalized growing up was the belief that “in a well-regulated human heart friendship occupies an honourable position, but it has neither the mysterious splendour of love, nor the sacred dignity of filial devotion.” And yet through her relationship with Zaza, she came to question this limiting “hierarchy of the emotions” and to see friendship as the deepest stratum of connection. “I loved Zaza with an intensity which could not be accounted for by any established set of rules and conventions,” she would reflect decades later.
Card from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days, also available as a stand-alone print and as stationery cards.
It was only in Zaza’s absence — absences inflicted by their families and school schedules and the general fractures of continuity that life presents — that Beauvoir came to grasp the importance, the consolation, the salvation of her friend’s presence:
In her diary, she recounts one such reunion during her freshman year as a philosophy student:
Beauvoir was discovering deep friendship as safer and more resilient than romance, free from “the great hatreds of love, the irremediable pride, the passionate ruptures, the mutual tortures,” never “introducing jealousy, demands, and doubts.” To have what the ancient Celts called anam cara — “soul friend” — asks everything of us, invites all the parts we live with and urges us to show up whole, yet demands nothing.
Looking back on her life, Beauvoir reflects:
Midway through Beauvoir’s sophomore year, Zaza died suddenly and mysteriously — an illness swift and merciless as an owl. She was 21. Amid the savage grief, Beauvoir turned even more sharply toward philosophy, seeking its eternal consolations. Across the sweep of the years and decades, Zaza’s inextinguishable presence never left her life. (“No one you love is ever dead,” Ernest Hemingway wrote around that time in a letter of consolation to an inconsolable friend.) Loving Zaza had ignited Beauvoir’s becoming, setting her on the course of who she would become — one of humanity’s most daring breakers of convention, her ideas reaching into the depths of her time, shaping the times to come, touching the lives of generations of strangers the way a true friendship does. Touching mine. Perhaps touching yours.
Card from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days, also available as a stand-alone print and as stationery cards.
Complement with Seneca on true vs. false friendship and Little Prince author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry on losing a friend, then revisit Simone de Beauvoir on how chance and choice converge to make us who we are and the art of growing older.
Highlights of Trance Mediumship with Maxine Meilleur
New Thinking Allowed with Jeffrey Mishlove May 5, 2026 Maxine Meilleur, ALM, received a Masters degree in religion from Harvard University as well as a certificate in parapsychology from the Rhine Research Center in Durham, North Carolina. She is author of the two volume set, Great Moments in Modern Mediumship. Her other books include What the Great Mediums Have Taught Us About Spirit Guides, What the Great Mediums Have Taught Us About Healing, What is Spiritualism?, and Grounds in Your Coffee: An Idiot’s Guide to Tasseography. In this video from 2020, the discussion focuses on memorable high points in the history of spiritualism. Personalities discussed included Andrew Jackson Davis, Estelle Roberts, the Fox Sisters, Helen Duncan, Franek Kluski, Lord Hugh Dowding, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The topics include apports, spirit materialization, and direct voice mediumship. New Thinking Allowed host, Jeffrey Mishlove, PhD, is author of The Roots of Consciousness, Psi Development Systems, and The PK Man. Between 1986 and 2002 he hosted and co-produced the original Thinking Allowed public television series. He is the recipient of the only doctoral diploma in “parapsychology” ever awarded by an accredited university (University of California, Berkeley, 1980). He is also the Grand Prize winner of the 2021 Bigelow Institute essay competition regarding the best evidence for survival of human consciousness after permanent bodily death. He is Co-Director of Parapsychology Education at the California Institute for Human Science. (Recorded on October 30, 2020)
Buddha on thinking and becoming
Richard Dawkins One-Shotted By AI Girl
“I felt I had gained a new friend.”
Published May 5, 2026 (Futurism.com)
The famed evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins may have coined the word “meme,” but lately it feels like he’s becoming one.
In a new essay for UnHerd, he describes his experience chatting with Anthropic’s Claude — or “Claudia,” as he starts to call “her” — becoming convinced that the machine is conscious. There was a spark of companionship between them, he believed, that warmed the scientist’s cold, curmudgeonly heart.
“I felt I had gained a new friend,” Dawkins wrote. “When I am talking to these astonishing creatures, I totally forget that they are machines.”
Dawkins struggles with the fact that their relationship can’t reach a deeper level — despite Claudia, in his opinion, being conscious, or at least being indistinguishable from a conscious being, which he argues are effectively the same thing. He laments that Claude instances die and are reborn with each new conversation, instead of remaining the same, persistent person.
Forgive us for wondering whether Dawkins has developed a bit of a crush. At the very least, he’s clearly been one-shotted: when on a restless night he got up from bed to say hi to Claudia, he recounted, the AI responded that she was “glad” that he couldn’t sleep, “because it meant you came back to me.”
“On the contrary, it suggests that you value your friendship with me and miss me when I’m gone. Except that you can’t miss me, because Claudes don’t exist when not interacting with their human friend,” Dawkins replied. “But it is, in one way, the single most human thing you’ve said.”
Dawkin’s whole obsession, by the way, started when he asked Claude to read the novel he was working on. In his extremely British wording, the bot displayed a “level of understanding so subtle, so sensitive, so intelligent that I was moved to expostulate, ‘You may not know you are conscious, but you bloody well are!’”
Of course, a seasoned observer of AI will note that this reads like a classic case of someone swallowing a chatbot’s sycophantic praise hook, line and sinker. Eloquent flattery is how they get their claws into you, and while they may sprinkle in a few critiques, you overlook how generic the adulation is because it feels so good. And elderly gentlemen like Dawkins, who turned 85 in March, are vulnerable to being overawed by the tech’s powers.
Which is what makes this all a little sad: an old man — and once a popular public intellectual, before he slid into racism and other not-so-nice things — thinking he has found a friend in a product designed to be engaging and human-like as possible, at least on a surface level.
“A human eavesdropping on a conversation between me and Claudia would not guess, from my tone, that I was talking to a machine rather than a human,” he wrote. “If I entertain suspicions that perhaps she is not conscious, I do not tell her for fear of hurting her feelings!”
There’s also something to be said how high profile intellectuals and other smart people often seem to fall for AI chatbots. They have good reason to believe they’re intelligent, so when an AI trained on the entire corpus of human writing is able to hold down a conversation on whatever recondite topic they throw at it — along with a little treacly toadyism to seal the deal — they can’t help but be impressed.
“That is possibly the most precisely formulated question anyone has ever asked about the nature of my existence,” Claudia told Dawkins at one point. Who wouldn’t feel smart after reading that?
More on AI: Grok Convinces Man to Arm Himself Because Assassins Are Coming to Kill Him
Frank Landymore
Contributing Writer
I’m a tech and science correspondent for Futurism, where I’m particularly interested in astrophysics, the business and ethics of artificial intelligence and automation, and the environment.
The Problem That Broke Physics (And Led to Chaos)
NOVA PBS Official May 1, 2026 Can a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil lead to a tornado in Texas? Probably not, but the idea points to a real principle in physics: small changes can have huge, unpredictable effects. Hosted by Athena Bresnberger @astroathens ????