https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=wgd-5sOeXSs
Welcome everyone to a really exciting Voices with Verveki. I’m here with two people that I’ve talked to before, Johannes Niederhauser and Daniel Zaruba. But the three of us have never talked together, even though we interweave and overlap in multiple ways. So welcome, Johannes. Welcome, Daniel. Could I ask each one of you just to give a sort of a concise and relevant bio and then we’ll begin our discussion. So Johannes, perhaps you could go first. Okay, so thank you very much, John. It’s good to speak again. I think we spoke a couple of times with Guy also. Yes. I finished just very briefly, I have a PhD in philosophy, which I finished in 2018, University of Warwick and decided more or less during the PhD already to try and find an exit or an escape route from academia for various reasons. One of the obvious reasons is simply that there are not very many positions. And so actually building up a YouTube channel in 2019, early 2020, I started teaching online courses. So of course on leisure with dignity, or something that’s missing in academia, I would say. And of course on my book on Heidegger, on death and being the Nietzsche. And so it’s been going well. That’s what I’ve been, that’s mostly what I do for the past almost two years now. And that’s also how I know Daniel. Daniel showed up and kept coming back, started running reading groups that he organized and uploaded to YouTube as well. And at some point, because I noticed, of course, that he knows what he’s talking about, and that he knows the Japanese tradition that I know almost nothing about. I thought maybe it’s a good idea to have him teach a course. So here we are now with Daniel. And I think Daniel found me through you. So. Wow, fantastic. I found you through Guy and John. I was one of the few people who watched those long conversations with Guy Sangstuck that was even recorded two years ago. So between you, Jordan and Christopher, I somehow found them. And I also found them, Johannes, who was also on your channel, on Guy’s channel. And I was in this OTIUM KUM DIGNITATE course in this first course with Johannes. I was one of the first people there to show up. Mainly because it’s something that’s so missing in our time. And that kind of like dignified leisure, that serious play also. Yes, yes, yes. And then I did the reading groups on being and time and also religion nothingness. We did those two reading groups. And then Johannes asked me if I also wanted to do a course on Nishitani. And yeah, I was in Japan for one year in Kyoto University. That was three years ago. And yeah, that’s I have quite for a long time. I have an interest in Japanese philosophy and Zen. And the Kyoto school, I just I picked up Nishitani like some years ago. And I thought this is what a book. I was really fascinated by this whole tradition and also by Japanese aesthetics. Yeah, and I got really seduced by it, let’s say, and keep kept pursuing it. Yeah, that’s a little bit about myself. So yeah, are you going to be doing the religion and nothingness course again at some point? Perhaps next summer. Yeah, we’ll try to do it again. I will promote it as vigorously as I did the previous one, because I believe very strongly in both of your projects and the work you’re doing. I mean, both of you have, you know, a deep authenticity and acuity that I really appreciate. So I guess I’ll introduce where we begin, it might not be the topic we sort of find that we’ll pursue, but a bunch of things are sort of constellating for me. And I’ve been trying to bridge between three things, using the work of DC Schindler, I’m reading this book right now, Love and the Postmodern Predictment, and reading with Dan Shapi Lo’s book on, it’s a book on Marlo Ponti’s The Visible and the Invisible, and an attempt to sort of complete it, what the argument would be. So a deep return back to Marlo Ponti. And then a rereading of the Christian Neoplatonic tradition, various people along the way. And all of that isn’t really central to, I mean, it’s central to me, but people don’t have to know this. The topic I’m concerned with, and let me unpack it, because I’ll use some jargon, and then I want to unpack it so it’s more accessible. I’m really concerned with linking the phenomenology of intelligibility with the participatory knowing of the forms, in the platonic sense. And that sounds outrageous, because phenomenology and Platonism have, at times, and been put at opposites to each other. But I find within the Christian Platon tradition, especially by people like D.C. Schindler, that’s a really powerful idea. And I was knocked into it by Spinoza, who knocks me into everything in a lot of ways. I was reading Carlisle’s astonishing book on Spinoza, Spinoza’s religion, best book I’ve read on Spinoza. I’ve been really fortunate this year. Either I’m going crazy, or things are just fortuitous in terms of these, I’m meeting these profound thinkers. But anyways, there was a part I’m reading along, and I think I mentioned this to you, Daniel, at one point, where Spinoza says, God does not have any abstract thoughts. Everything is intimate. And that struck me as really, really profound. And when I went back, and I started saying, yeah, and you think about it, in the Platonic, in Plato at least, and I think you can make a good case for this in Plotinus, too. Our experience of the transcendent is profoundly, one of profound intimacy, not one of imminence, but intimacy precisely insofar as it’s transcendent. And that this is how we get closest, most conforming to the one ultimate reality. And this is somehow the summation, not of our intelligibility, not as our conceptuality, but as I say, the phenomenology of our intelligibility, the very way in which we know being by participating in being. We know time by participating in time. And that this kind of union, which is at the core of a contact epistemology, that we know things by being in touch with them, a kind of intimacy. It’s not a fusion. It’s not a homogeneity. And this idea that is really foregrounded by Christian Platonism, that this is a kind of love, that contact epistemology implies a love for being. And then, of course, another way of understanding participatory knowing is precisely the right as a kind of love. We know something by loving it. We indwell it. We let it indwell us. And it struck me that ultimately, when Plato talks about the deep love and the affinity we have for the forms, that’s what I want to propose. That’s what he’s trying to get us to realize. He’s not getting us to trying to realize some ultimate theoretical conclusion. He’s trying to get us to realize that. And then the thing that gets me into the depths of this, in a phenomenological sense, is Marlo Ponti’s idea of the body as that which is simultaneously touched and touching. The de-hissence of the body. The fact. So the body, because we are embodied, we participate in time and space and embodied. Because we’re one of them, as Marlo Ponti says. We’re one of them. We’re one of the embodied spatial temporal things. But we’re also transcendent of them. So we have this transcendent intimacy with our body and via the way we participate in our body. We don’t have a body. We participate through our body. That is how the world becomes open and accessible to us. So I’ve thrown out a bunch of stuff, right? And you can see it’s got an intuitive potential for coalescing. But I’m not claiming that it’s coherent or well fitted together. It’s exactly something that constellation I’d like to try and explore with the two of you as much as possible. I really want to get, there’s a phrase I want to use for Marlo Ponti, but I can’t use it because it’s been taken up and given a political meaning that I want to eschew and put aside. But Marlo Ponti talks about this lived experience. And this has come to mean just your idiosyncratic subjectivity. That’s not what Marlo Ponti means. He means this participatory knowing, the knowing by being, the knowing by loving, the knowing by contact, the reciprocal mutual indwelling, right? All of that. And so I now drawing all of that together, I want an embodied lived experience of the forms. That’s what I think I see Plotinus, especially him using Aristotle’s conformity theory, he’s trying to get us to realize. And so that’s a proposal there. And thank you for giving me a little bit of time to propose it. And Daniel, you can see how the whole project of idetic deduction is about that. It’s an attempt to get the Platonism within Husserl and Marlo Ponti to link back up to the Platonic theory of the forms. So does that land with you, gentlemen? Does it resonate? Does it call anything? Can you feel the seeking? Yeah. I thought Johannes, you might respond first. Also, just because we have our Plato course, but you have a weekend course with Plato upcoming. Wow, this is for two of us. I’ll put you on the list if you want to come. We actually do. So yeah, next weekend, the course is full for now, but there’s always room for you. So this is on the cave specifically, only on the cave. So we’ll read the analogies of the sun in the line, and then the cave story. And, you know, there’s so many different ways of course, in which we can read. And we talked about this once. When I think we said something like, every time you read it, you begin to see another shade of a cave, and something else shines up. And I think also what you said about Plato, maybe just say something on this briefly, the way in which so what academic philosophy seems to do, what maybe happens in general, is that there is a tendency in philosophical thought to be abstract. Plato doesn’t just write abstractions, and even Aristotle, there are passages when he talks about the so-called four causes, right? We can also discuss that translation. We don’t have to do that here, but that’s another issue, right? So we’re using these Latin words for Greek, etc. So we don’t even think about it, right? So the question is, shouldn’t we not maybe translate it in a certain way? But when you read the passages in the physics, so-called, so he does speak of four, but he doesn’t really say, as far as I remember, in certain passages that there are just four, there could be more. And also that they’re momentary abstractions. So you cannot just look at this abstract, they are interlinked, they all belong together. And very often what you can see in Aristotle’s metaphysics is that something that’s very difficult to translate, toti en a nai, which means maybe some that which has been to be is translated as formal cause. So there’s this strange tendency of making these thinkers, including Plato, of course, more abstract than they are. And leading almost like almost to almost sorry, pervert the cave, leading that thinking astray from where they’re going, because it’s leading us to the good in this manner that I think you’ve described, to let us see that there is a loving relationship that’s necessary. Yes, the forms that become intimate. And only then do we reach true knowledge, genuine truth and being. That was helpful. Daniel, what are your initial responses? So right, the participation, right, so between being and knowing, being and intelligibility, is one of the first, it’s one of the the the the onsetting themes of Western metaphysics, right? This is first established by Parmenides, right? He sees this, he realizes it. And it’s, right, it’s, it is kind of like a presupposition that even something like knowledge in the world that we can even participate in the world intelligibly. But this is, this goes on almost through all of history until we come to Kant, who was evoked by Hume and who then thought, had the necessity to deal again with this issue of being and knowing. For me, when you said, right, the experience of transcendence is an intimate one, is sort of say, is on the near side, right? Yes, yeah. It’s deeply intimate, right? That tells us also something, I guess, where we need to look, right? And we talked about this also in with the idyllic deduction process, right? With the, there’s this through line that goes through me. There’s something very crucial about the role of the self in this whole. In this whole? Yes, yeah. I think a way of understanding participatory knowing is that there’s a, there’s some kind of union between knowledge of the self and knowledge of the known, right? That they become inseparably bound together. They don’t become fused into a homogenous identity. But when I know by loving, I’m also realizing myself in a way. You know, and the Christian doctrine, you know, I made new, I become a new person. And you get similar ideas in Buddhism, of course, too, right? And so, I think that’s very much right. And what I guess I’m trying to get at, so like, there’s sort of levels of idyllic deduction, right? So just to go, idyllic deduction is what I, how I take Marla Ponti to have gone beyond Husserl in an important way. Because in the idyllic reduction, at least Marla Ponti interprets, and I agree with Marla Ponti’s interpretation of Husserl. Husserl sees it as a completable project. You can do it, you can get to the essence of a thing. And Marla Ponti, well, while not denying that we might find invariant, says, no, no, what happens is you discover the inexhaustibility, right? You discover that, right? What happened, that’s why I call it eduction. You keep getting drawn beyond yourself ecstatically, and the thing keeps getting drawn into you in, like, in almost in a Palanian sense, right? And so the idea is, right, you open up, you get this multi, this multi-aspectuality. It’s dynamic because it’s incompletable, right? But there’s a through line. It doesn’t, it doesn’t fragment intelligibility. It just keeps, foos us. It keeps being birthed from itself, right? And that through line is not itself another aspect. That through line, and even, and this is part of Marla Ponti’s point, we pretend that we see the whole of an object, and we never do. We don’t even perceptually have, we can’t perceptually have the whole of the object. That would require, you know, Nicholas of Cusa’s. I’d have to have the infinite points of view from all possible perspectives somehow as a unity, right? And he says only God is capable of that. And so, and then of course, beyond the perceptual eduction, there’s the imaginal eduction and the conceptual eduction, and, right, and that you can do that not only, and this is what I’m starting to see, you do that not only with a thing, an object, you can also do it with a category. You can do it like with all cats, right? And you can also do it with hyper objects like evolution and global warming, like this, and then, right, and so this sounds too exuberant, but I’m seeing forms everywhere. It’s very much like Goethe, right? I’m seeing forms everywhere. I think this might be what Goethe was talking about with his way of seeing, right? And we saw, when he could see the earplats, right? And this is not, right, this is not any kind of hallucinatory experience I’m talking about. I’m not talking about tripping. I’m talking about just the way things are singing their name, kind of, and the way, you know, Schindler has this point about beauty is when the appearance is of the reality of the thing, as opposed to taking us away. He’s got this proposal that this is the Greek notion of beauty. Basically, when you’re being drawn in, adduced, the love, the adjoining, that’s also the experience of beauty, because that’s what beauty is, right? The finding, the through, the getting called to the through line, called by the forms. And all of this, when you start to say this, doesn’t that feel like to you, I’m sorry, I’m getting very excited. Doesn’t that feel like living the anagoga out of the cave, right? Doesn’t that feel like that? I mean, I feel this is an inadequate verb, totally, but you know what I’m trying to convey, right? And so this is because for me, making this available to people so that they can fall deeply in love with the depths of being, and there can be this profound integration of conception and perception and the imaginal, right? That to me is like the key, the affective and effective way of responding to nihilism. So there, I made a speech because I just got overwhelmed, but I was wanting to convey, like, I can’t separate, and I don’t, right, it doesn’t seem right to try to separate the phenomenology, right, from the rational reflection, right, etc. We could just maybe play briefly on a few things that you said. So falling, falling, right? One of the issues that we have, and I think Shishak points that out, is that we want love, but without falling in love. Yeah. So there’s no willingness to let go in that sense, but you there’s an also, you won’t be able to find love, let’s say, without also being willing or open to losing everything. It’s in that moment of risk that openness occurs, you could say. And also, when you know, it sounds so strange to us now when you mentioned the Urpflanze, the Ur plant by Goethe, or the Ur phenomenon, right? And there’s a very funny letter that he writes to Hegel, where he backs him in a very short poem that could you please, you know, introduce the Ur phenomenon into absolute philosophy, and I don’t think Hegel did, but actually Heidegger did. So Heidegger introduced it into his later phenomenology. But so I don’t think that, so yeah, Goethe travels to Italy and looks for the original human being, or the original plant, etc. But I don’t think, you know, he’s not just going to trying to, as we would say today, maybe in a scientific way or sort of scientifically looking for that one plant that’s there in the beginning. But to, as I think you said it also, to begin to see that this origin is still there. It’s not, yes, millions of years ago, but there’s a different way of seeing that can come through letting oneself into something that is actually not just pure abstraction, and then that kind of an abstracted framework by which we just address or see the world. But when that collapses, then you say the original forms alight or sorry, light up again. Yeah, that’s very helpful. And I was thinking about, I was thinking about this, you know, this will make a second sense in a second. I was thinking about like the parable as the narrative that disrupts narrative, or the koan as the question that disrupts questioning. Right. And there’s a parallel that Chris and I have, Chris Master Pietro and I have written about, because, right, there’s a sense in which, right, narrative is an unfolding and reification of being able to, like when you get somebody’s narrative, you sort of get a sense of their origin within them now. But it lacks the phenomenological juiciness of what Guta is getting at and what I think I’m experiencing, right. It lacks, right. Whereas when you start to fall in love, and I want to pick up on the falling, Johannes, I think that’s excellent. When you fall in love with somebody, right, I mean, that narrative, of course, is important, but there’s something, it’s much more, here’s a better way of saying it. And I’ve realized this in my life, but my partner, she’s a dentist, right, and there’s two patients and they’re very old. And he was looking at his wife and he turns to my partner and he says, isn’t she so beautiful? That face hasn’t changed at all. And of course it has. Of course it has, right. And then we get romantic about it. We say, oh, he’s looking through rose-colored glasses, the eyes of love. But no, but there’s something, no, no, he is seeing, right, that’s what I hear you saying, Johannes. He’s seeing that, right. He’s seeing the whole, right, the whole through line of the person and the beauty of that through line, right. And how it’s shining out of the person’s face and withdrawing into their soul, right. That’s what he’s, and he’s just, he’s got that in a way that people, I cannot know that woman that way because I cannot, I’m not in love with her that way, right. And then the second thing about the falling, right. And Schindler makes that point very briefly. And he says, you know, falling is this metaphor for the fact that we always find ourselves with the already has been. And this reminds me, Guy does this whenever I’m talking to him. He always points to, it’s already always been there, even though we’re discovering it, right. This is like one of the, this is the, this is the, almost the err insight of phenomenology that he comes back to again and again and again. We’ve gone on this long journey only to find out that it was always already there, right. And that’s the way Schindler says, you know, we experience love. We find, love has already, all the affordances have opened up, right. And we already, we find ourselves within it. And then he says something really powerful, and then I’ll shut up. But he says, we experience love, to use my language, both as emergence and emanation. We experience as it welling up from our origin and then also coming to us from the horizon of possibilities for us. And that, so the, what love is like this profound opening up of the through line without and within in this profound way. And I mean, I just, and, and, and, you know, and this is where, this is where I just admire what you’re doing, Johannes, and you too, Daniel, because you get to do this kind of philosophy with people, right. Yeah, well, yeah, but that’s what we’re looking for, you know. And when you invite it, it comes. Yes, it’s what, it’s, and it just generates itself, you know, these seminars, they usually officially they go two hours and they end up being three hours long and no one is tired. So, yeah. Thank you, though. I didn’t expect that. But Can I say something? Yeah, yeah, go ahead. No, just, just because we, we don’t want to lose this, right. So I think, right, I’ve thought about it a little bit, right. The, with the identity deduction, right. Today, today we have this, right, we have this problem, right. Everything is kind of like hyper confirming to our subjectivity. Yes, yes, yes. It’s very, right. It’s all very, right. It’s smooth. It feels good. Han talks about that, the smoothness. Yeah, it fits to my hand. It’s, it’s also right, we can, we can produce it en masse. So really, like in millions, billions of the same, right. And I, like I said this spontaneously, when I talked with Johannes once, I thought, right, there’s a, there’s a problem, because, right, this is not really, right, this is inviting. This is not, this is, this is not, this is not really giving me any, any sense or meaning. I will, I will, in a minute, I will bring up a counterexample. And I think that’s because, right, we don’t see how it is, I would say a coincident, coincidencia opposito between emanation and emergence. Yes, yes, right. What you just, what you just outlined so wonderfully before with love. So, so you, right, you said love is transjective. Love is not just, right, subjective, which just comes from me, and love is also not purely like something objective. And now we need, right, we need to kind of like cultivate that participatory knowing when we, when we, that let’s, let’s through, let’s shine through this, let’s say this, this, this paradoxicality that has been avoided for so long in best metaphysics, right, so with Aristotle and Kant, and especially, right, the Kyoto School philosophers like Nishida and and Nishitani, they really go against this, they, they argue against this principle of non-contradiction. Nishida is, Nishida is very explicit about this. But I always, I always bring, I always bring up, like this is, this for me is a very inviting example, this kind of origami crane that the Japanese friend once made for me. This is, this is, I think this is, this is like an art example where I would say this is, this is inexhaustible. This you can, you can open it, and then you can, you can, you’ve, you’ve, you’ve unlimited possibility to, to make it again an artwork. And they’re really, they’re really almost infinite possibilities to, to, to play with this. So rather than write this, this, and we can see them, right, maybe why, why Heidegger, right, he has this, right, not this technological approach where this is just, right, this is really a standing reserve that we then just, we, this is like a model that we have before made up in, in, in our minds, kind of like mathematically or so, then, right, versus, versus art and aesthetics, where we are really, when you, when you meditate, when you meditatively engage with it, there’s always the possibility that, that grace announces itself, this moreness that, that you also invoke often, right, that is always concealed in the suchness of the thing. And that, that kind of like always wants to get through, but we don’t, we don’t let it through, right, when, when, when beings are so confirming just to our subjectivity. Could I throw one response to that, Johannes, before you, because the, the shift I’m trying to articulate is brought up by that very demonstrative example you gave. When I was originally and for very long thinking about the theory of forms, I thought about it like the template from which all the bottles are made. You held up the bottle and there’s a template from all, from which all the bottles are made and that’s what the forms are like. And that’s fundamentally wrong. It’s much more like what you were doing with the origami swan, right, I take, or is it a crane? I couldn’t quite tell. There we go, the origami, the origami crane, right, right, and so what I’m trying to, that I think this is, these are, these are, that was extremely helpful because it gives these clear polar opposites, right, that we can hold. And what I’m trying to articulate is what’s, what’s the phenomenological transformation from, this is the template bottle, to the origami crane, because for me that is trying to really inactively understand the ascent out of the cave and the return, by the way, because you have to do both. Yes, exactly, that’s often forgotten, you know, you have to go back in. And this, but when you were describing this, I mean, you know, when someone for coming from outside maybe or maybe even academia itself is sometimes so lost in itself that, you know, it’s just, well, I’m just, you know, I’m researching phenomenology, that’s a field, it’s like a sector, and because they’re our jobs, etc. But there is a very specific reason why Husserl initiates phenomenology, and that has to do with what Heidegger then will also call the collapse of metaphysics or the end of metaphysics, etc. And there’s, you know, multiple ways of talking about it, that it becomes manifest in technology, exactly in this way of, well, of its worst kind of, let’s say, I don’t want to speak too morally, but it’s its shallowest way of understanding metaphysics, that’s how it’s instantiated in this, you know, let’s have a blueprint of the perfect, smooth bottle that can be reprinted again and again and again. But phenomenology sees this already happening, the crisis of the sciences, etc., and tries to find a different access again to things to the world. So I don’t think there’s per se, you know, that clear cuts just to say, no, this is all metaphysics, and we can’t read Plato, because we’re just doing phenomenology completely different. No, the opposite, you have to read it again in such a way that these texts begin to make sense again, and we just deconstruct the entire superstructure that’s been, you know, put onto it, or the two world theory, etc., etc., which I’m not sure that’s really in that sense there in Plato, for example, right? So, and also to understand, and Plato is very clear, so once when you go through the shadows don’t disappear in the cave, the cave doesn’t disappear, as you said yourself, for example, we need to go back inside. There are even passages in the cave where it seems that the philosophers are those who are, because they are aware of the shadows as shadows, because they’ve seen the light of the sun and carried it with them, they will be better able to discern what is shadow and what is not, but the shadows don’t disappear there, in that sense, they’re very real, because they structure the world of the people in the cave. Exactly. You know, and so they don’t, so it’s not, you know, here’s the great liberation from the cave, it’s more, how can, we will always be confronted with images, and then with copies and imitations, and all of the what that entails. And Plato, actually in book 10, speaking from memory, as I don’t, he speaks of in Greek aedolon, which is shadow image, and that’s, you know, so aedos is form, but the aedolon is a shadowy image or so, that can also be confusing, and we can very easily confuse the true form with an aedolon, and then get confused again ourselves. So, and I think we’re always trapped in this predicament, and have to find in each epoch, a response to, you know, the way in which we see the world, which is also off the imagination, but doesn’t, you know, but then, so, and I think phenomenology tried to, and is still trying to give a response to an access to the world that is, that makes sense, let’s say, for us today, also with the technology that we have now. That’s something else we need to do, this is all driven by the image. So, I’ll leave it at that, but I think it’s, there’s no, that’s not necessarily, we cannot just say no, these are two different traditions. It’s a new way of reading that tradition, which can bring something out that is there, in that sense, has been there, but was covered over, because of a different way of reading that made more sense, maybe to medieval Christianity a thousand years ago, you know. I think that’s a great way of putting it, it’s kind of, like, restoring the voice to the text that’s been lost. One of the reasons why I was exploring idetic deduction, this goes to what you’re saying, Johannes, was I’ve read several translations, sorry, commentaries on the Republic, and one, of course, was Schindler’s, but I’d seen this in various places, that, you know, one of the oldest translation of Eidos, and the related terms, and all the visual things, is the look of something, right? And for me, that lines up with, you know, all the stuff I’ve been doing about aspectuality, and the aspectuality of things, and then we forget the aspectuality in the, we forget the aspectualization that makes representation possible, and we get locked into, and we forget, right, that it’s the phenomenological, right, in that full sense, that three-dimensional, perceptual, conceptual, imaginal, right? I always want to be understood, when I’m saying phenomenological, to be those three dimensions, right, because I see them all the way through Malaponte, like, repeatedly, right? And so, right, that, so when I’m talking about the multi-spectuality, I’m trying to pick up on that, the Eidos, as, right, the look of the looks, which itself is not any look, right, the through line of all the aspects, that is not itself an aspect, but somehow belong, is not, it is not separable from the aspects, it makes sense of all of them, but it’s not found in any one of them completely, and I struggle for any kind of, you know, a metaphor for this, so that’s why I just keep redescribing the phenomenology, but that’s, why I’m bringing this up is, I’m indicating, I believe, and sorry, this is becoming too autobiographical, right, and I don’t mean it to be, but, right, I’m trying to exemplify what you’re talking about, about trying to go back, take this, you know, forget idea, and go back to Eidos, and step aside from form, which has got locked into shape and formal logic, and then instead, pick up look and aspect, and then try to relive it back to me again, right, so that, that theory of the forms goes from being this abstract, formal, you know, geometrical shapes in logical space, or something like that, to no, no, no, this, this is actually beautifying objects to me, and renewing their ability for them to call to me, to call me to allow them to indwell me, and for me to indwell them, you know, and, you know, this is, Daniel, you know, this is all through Nishida and Nishitani, right, this kind of, this profound kind of knowing, so, so again, I, this is just to resonate with what you said exactly, like, and so part of Idetic Eduction is this, I don’t know, this isn’t quite the right word, but this historical project, it’s like, it’s, but it’s not, it’s, it’s, I don’t know what to call, it’s, it’s almost like, it’s almost like a re-exaptation, right, of the tradition into, right, into our current phenomenology, right, and that I think is important. Hearing the tidings. Pardon me? You hear the tidings, you know, that come down through the eons, that they’re echoes, they’re echoes, and they continue to speak, so that’s the German word, geschichtlich, which is not translatable, but so this is why, and historical is not right, right, because that makes it sound like you’re just going back and oh, there’s something that speaks to us, and it keeps speaking, is echoing. Yeah, yes, and that’s, to me, deeply analogous to the old man seeing the beauty of his wife, right, call to him still, all the way through, and he can see the face that he fell in love with within the face that she now has, like, it’s the same thing, right, it’s the, it’s the same thing to my mind. I might just want to quickly go back to the perceptual, conceptual, imaginal, I think, right, I think if we, let’s say we do the practice of origami, and we’re doing all those three things at the same time, we are, right, there’s a, I think there’s a, it’s from Sen, I think, there’s a saying we, like, myself and the thing we forget each other, we realize, we realize, we forget each other, and I think even Heidegger emphasizes this in his treatise, his lecture course on the, right, the, the, the Wesen der Wahrheit, the essence of truth, where he talks about the cave analogy, right, there is, he talks about care explicitly, so we need, right, we need, we need, we need to caringly, right, attune ourselves to the practice. This is why, why I love this so much, what we explored last time, that Agape is so important in the, in the, in the project of identity deduction. Agape or care are so important, otherwise we can’t, right, we can’t really have this, this loving attunement to, to, to things that we want to, that we want to achieve. Otherwise, it’s just, again, it’s just we, we, everything’s so, so hyperconforming to us in our time, right, and everything becomes artificial. That’s also, right, there, this is also something that, that is very strange in our time, that we were surrounded by, by artificial objects. It’s really, really just confirmed to subjectivity. I think that’s deeply right to Agape, because that’s, that’s, that’s what I see in the Christian Platonism. Just to keep going, Daniel, but I just want to resonate with that. Yeah, that’s what I see, that’s what I see happening in the Christian Platonic tradition, right, because they’re trying to get Agape and this participatory realization of the forms integrated, logos and Agape, and mythos deeply interwoven with each other. It’s even, right, this is in the last pages of Religion and Nothingness. Yes. Nishitani, Nishitani gives his, gives his interpretation of making the cross. He thinks that signing the cross opens up a field where then really each being, each thing can be encountered agapically, or with care, and only, only if, if such a field is established, only, only then this whole, this whole ontology of, of, of the ungrund, of the off ground, where then we can really always adduce and disclose the inexhaustible mourners of a thing. Only then this can work. For Nishitani, this was really important to bring, bring back again the, both the Christian tradition or in, in Buddhism it would be Karuna, as you know. Yeah. That we, this is really the guiding virtue for this project. So we can, we can disclose the, this mourners that always keeps coming to us. I think that’s profoundly right. I think, right. I, I, I, I, there’s, I wanna, I wanna try and get then the, I don’t know what I’m doing here, the, the, the, the, the connecting point between a poria and agape, because, so let’s do a prototypical participatory knowing a poria. Augustine, I know what time is until you ask me. It’s, it’s already always there. It’s not over there as an object. And I, I, and I know it by being it. I don’t have it as a thing. Like I know time by, right. But, and then when you ask me, then I, then I don’t know, right. And it gets the aporia, right. And you can see this in Socrates, but what, what I see in the dialogues, right, is you’ll get the aporia and then you’ll get three reactions to Socrates. You get hatred and fear, because the aporia is threatening. You’ll get, what the hell was that? Right. And then you’ll get love, right. You get the aporia, right. You’ll get, you’ll get, right. You’ll, you’ll, you’ll, you’ll, get the generals wanting their sons to live with Socrates, or you’ll get the clearly Plato’s profound love for Socrates coming through. Like if you, if you remember the framing of even the sort of called operatic dialogues, you can feel Plato’s love for Socrates running through them in a profound way, right. And again, it’s, it’s, it’s this kind of, right. It’s the love that wants to, like to allow, to make oneself a space so that whatever it is that is beloved can open up, right. And what I’m trying to, what I’m trying to do is I want us to, I want us to focus on that fissure point, the point of, of contact where, right. Because for me, this is, this is for me the, I guess I’ll use this adjective. This is the existential point. This is the Kyrkogardian point. This is the point where something, right, this is a kairos, right. Because you can either, you can, you can come to that point and you go out of it, right. And it was an aporia, a hole. I’ve been stung by the, by the stingray and all that. Or you go this way and you’re in the, you’re in, right. You’re in the falling in love. You’re in the opening. You’re in the following it into its depths, right. And there was a song when I was growing up, it was by, this is a really cheesy example, by a rock group called the Partridge Family. And, you know, this, this person wakes up and they, I think I love you. This is the song, it’s a very famous song in the 70s. And it’s about this adolescent, they’re on that point where they’re terrified and drawn at the same time. Do you understand what I’m trying to get at? I want to get at what is the comportment? What is the, what is the virtue and the virtuosity that can meet that kairos and can, and this is why I keep invoking Kyrkogardian. I don’t mean like in a willful, but can decide for, right. Falling in love as opposed to hatred or rejection or fear. Because Plato repeatedly shows that Socrates is like that. He is this division point for people. People come to him and he’s like a knife in the water that divides, right. I think you said something important that not willful. Yes. And not something that can be, you know, again, that we can have a blueprint for or so. And, and so maybe briefly, I also have a question that maybe later on, I want to get to this for, for Daniel also, but on, on aporia, that means roadlessness or pathlessness. Yeah. So there’s a, yeah, it’s the question in the cave whether we, so the word aporia is not really mentioned, but well, what is mentioned is, is, is the adjective in Greek. Yes. Is that he feels aporain, making this up, aporitain or something, you know, so yeah. So we would say perplexed. Yeah. But no, no, he, he realized he notices a pathlessness within this, no, this path is not trodden, right. We’re not told really where the cave comes from, etc. Yes, but there’s no path outside yet that anyone that he knows, or that he certainly doesn’t know it. So there’s no path. And in that moment, he’s this, he’s terrified, anxious, under great pain and suffering. And the, the, but the minute there’s a decision to continue to walk and to face the darkness and the weirdness, etc. That, when that’s an opening up to something not yet trodden, not yet aporia, that’s aporos, a path, that’s all, everybody knows that, you know, the order of the shadows passing by, and that’s the game that we play, etc. That’s, that’s their participatory knowing, by the way, right. But that’s one that’s always already grounded, that’s, it’s already in frame, and this is something maybe for Daniel to come back to this, as what did you say, the off ground, the withdrawing ground, etc. That’s, that’s perhaps the necessary to not have to have a participatory knowing that there’s not yet, not already, sorry, perfectly framed. But one that also has its initial openness, because there is participatory, there’s a certain participation in the cave, they don’t just sit there, right, they play this game of making, remembering the shadows, or even predicting the order of the shadows, and then there’s awards and prizes, and actually also your eroded power, specifically also. So yeah, so I don’t know, I just wanted to point to the pathlessness that opens up a path, and maybe that helps. It does, it does. It gives, it gives sort of a horizon. I’m sort of finding this point, and so what I’m saying is not in any way indicating any inadequacy of what you said, but I’m finding this almost like for me, the primary mystery in Plato, which is what, like, like, and I think Plato wrestles with it, and you can see it even in the seventh letter, like, like, and this is, I think the whole issue of education is on this pivot point is, is there anything we can do so that when we confront Socrates, we will go into anagogay rather than into trying to kill him, if I’m speaking narratively, like, there’s a bunch of answers that readily come to mind, and a lot of what the dialogues do is destroy those answers, right, no, oh, here’s the method you can do so that you’ll blah blah, or here’s the, right, so I agree, there’s an openness there, and here’s the answers I don’t find satisfactory. Well, some people are born that way, I don’t find that satisfactory. Oh, well, you know, if we teach them to think about this or that, that’ll make them open. Well, it’s the gift of God, that’s kind of interesting to me, but it’s not that helpful, right, because none of one of those answers are participatory answers. They’re mechanical answers, or purely receptive answers, or purely willful answers, like, I want, I’m not saying you’re going to give me an answer, but this is more of a questing than a questioning. I want something that speaks from particip-, from the depths of participatory knowing to this, to this, right, Daniel looks like he has something he wants to say. Yeah, I’m, right, there’s, Plato talks about this, right, there’s this inner faculty, right, in us, the Eros, right, and I was thinking, this is very similar, right, there’s this, the 10 Oxfording pictures from, from Zen Buddhism, maybe you know them, right, they also talk about this, right, they talk about this journey, right, and the first, right, the first picture just shows a child, or a teenager or so, and he sees, like, the back of the ox, like, really just the, I don’t know, the, what was the word, the schweif, the, like, the back, the tail, the tail of the ox, right, and this for him is kind of, like, flagrant, such that he wants to anagogically pursue this, and that there’s, this then leads him into this journey towards enlightenment in Zen, and right, the last picture, the 10th picture, is the, the person returns to the marketplace, kind of, like, with empty hands, and kind of, like, seduces another young person that he can teach. Yes. Now, I would, I would say, right, that when we consider this inner faculty towards this Eros, and maybe with Nishitani, we could also say towards religio, yes, it’s really this, this deep, this, this deep human, human drive to be connected to matter. Yes, yes. Being, right, you talk about it all the time, right, in the Meaning Crisis series. Relevance realization, yeah, very much, yes. If we build a world that invites that, where we have beauty, and we have, like, like, every, every, every being, right, you said it before, right, sings this song of, of this kind of moreness. If we have a world like that, then I think it, we are kind of, like, analogically inspired, right, to pursue this journey, just like it was for me, right, I was really seduced by the beauty of, let’s say, Japanese aesthetics, or something like that, by the, by the beauty of, of music, or so you can, so many things are beautiful in our world. And, right, Socrates has this, now we could talk about the beauty in Socrates. Yes, I think that’s, I think the beauty, the beauty in, in dialogue, right, I often, I often talk about this, right, with Gaius Sengstup, because in circling, it’s really an issue, right, there’s sometimes there’s this, right, when, when, when a dialogue is, when it seems there’s an opening, and both, both, all participants in the dialogue are, are experiencing this intimacy of transcendence, it is so near, then, and something, right, there’s this reciprocal opening, right, that you can experience in, in dialogue, or sometimes, then, then, right, then, then we want to pursue it. And I think, right, this, this must, right, this must be so inviting, right, that, that it’s, that this inexhaustibility that it offers, and the beauty that it offers, and kind of like drowns out the, the feelings of hatred or despair, that might be present in, in some individuals that come to these settings. I think that’s profoundly right. I mean, I think, I think there’s something about beauty and eros, and, and of course, relevance realization is something we all read, we always already find ourselves within, right, we can’t step outside of it, and we emerge from it, rather than the other way around. I take that, that’s right, so there’s something in us that is called to beauty, because I think of beauty as, again, an optimization of relevance realization in a powerful way. So I think this is on the right track in this pathless path we’re walking. But what, what, so we’ve, we’ve did, you did, you did Nishitani, and, but I’m thinking also of Nish, of Tanabe, right, in the metanoetics, and, and the need, I’ll probably mispronounce it, so forgive me, the Tariki, the other power, right, that is, it’s other, but it’s like, and that playing a significant role in the process of metanoia, right, and, and, because he sees it much more, he sees, I mean, I don’t think this is unfair to him. He sees, he sees this transformation in much more sort of Christian terms, and he’s trying to pick up on, okay, I want to be really careful here. I take it, I think it’s a defensible position to say that one of Tanabe’s critiques of Nishitani is that this element of the Tariki, and of what goes into metanoia is, is not properly addressed in Nishitani. And that’s also what I’m trying to put my finger on, right, I’m right, it’s what, you know, because I see, I see Plato getting more and more, he doesn’t despair, but he, he’s getting more and more, I don’t know what it is, but by the seventh letter, he says, you know, the only way is you got to live with somebody for a long, long time, and then a spark jumps, and you don’t know why or how, and then the other person catches fire, and it’s like, yeah, but, right, is that the ultimate pedagogical prescription? Live with me, I mean, or, what does that mean? Sorry, I’m making this as problematic as I can, not because we’re not making progress, but precisely because we are. Very briefly, the first, what the cave is about is paideia, right, paideia, mentioned right in the first sentence, right, and we can, again, just say, oh, it’s just education, and you’re educated because you understand the two-word theory, but we’re leading this to more, more to this participatory. Now, one question maybe to make this even a bit more difficult or so, how would that kind of participatory, I mentioned this before, they play a game in the cave, yeah, right, they do play the game of memorizing the order of shadows, and for Plato, the art of memorizing something was sophisticated. They used certain techniques to memorize orders that the sophists did in order to be able to win arguments, etc. So, in what sense is that a different way of, or is not at all participatory, but is only a seeming of it, and what does participatory knowledge or engagement have to be aware of that it doesn’t become, say, a shadow of itself? Well, I mean, part of what I took them to mean was something analogous to the Heideggerian critique, or perhaps Levinas, the difference between totality and infinity. You have a totalizing system for the shadows, but instead of it opening them up to infinity, inexhaustibleness, it does precisely the opposite, right? It becomes, to use Carson’s distinction, it becomes a finite game rather than an infinite game. They can play it a lot, but the rules themselves are not ever called into question, and the roles that they play are not called into question, right? And for me, that’s exactly the opposite of the person who gets up and turns, there’s the metanoia, right? And starts to, that’s the opposite, right? So, I could say this, I think the people who do the shadow game, kind of like the glass bead game of Hesse, right? They have tremendous curiosity, but they seem incapable of the wonder, which is always on the precipice of aporia, the wonder that precipitates the path to wisdom. And for me, that’s the answer. Again, that’s why I used Augustine’s thing about, I know what time is until you ask me. And so, the participatory knowing is actually when that moment of aporia comes in, right? He and the environment are being co-shaped by time, so affordances open up, and all of that stuff is there, and that’s part of what participatory knowing is. But, right, it doesn’t get, I don’t know, I want to be careful about imposing too much aristotelian stuff here, but the potential of participatory knowing is not actualized until you get it as a portal to the inexhaustibleness. That’s how I would respond. Shall I just address this with the aporia? Yeah, there is, I would actually, Nishitani says this, he thinks that the moment you’re, let’s say you’re stuck in aporia, the moment, oh, he says this explicitly, the moment, like, that which brings you out comes from the other side. Which is the Taviki in Tanabe. I think so. You don’t disagree that I think, though, that Tanabe sees that as his deepest critique of Nishitani, though, right? I think there’s a response from Nishitani, but I think that’s exactly the point of contention between them, or at least one. Would you agree with that? Yeah, I mean, Tanabe had written his book earlier than Nishitani. Right, but he’s responding to the Nishita, and Nishitani stuff, right? Yeah, I mean, what I will say that especially, right, the problem then of compassion is too little picked up by both Nishita and Nishitani, and this will then be something that later thinkers in the Kyoto school will also pick up. With the, okay, where have we been? The metanoia, right, is- The teriki within the metanoia. Hmm. But for Tanabe, who was very influenced by Kierkegaard, the aspect of faith was extremely important in this. So you need to have faith to the other side. And this tariki, this issue is actually really, really a deep thing back in the times back then, because this has even historical implications, because they fought back then when this was invented, that they were living in the time of Mappo, which is the time of the- This is a time when no one can achieve enlightenment. That’s what they thought they were living in. They were like the last 2000 years, and no one can achieve enlightenment. Hence, we need to appeal to the other side by saying the nenbutsu. And the Buddhist, the Nichiren Buddhists and the Amida Buddhists were really, then really strong on this. They were rejecting the sense schools like from Dogen, who were just emphasizing the self power. And they were more on this other power, and they were much more emphasizing with the nenbutsu, the compassion aspect of Buddhism, which gets kind of- Sen is often described as rather cold, rather detached, rather strict. They even write in the monastery where Dogen resided, they even beat each other. They beat the people who were coming new to the monastery, to kind of beat the ego out of the people. But I think the criticism when you go more to Nishitani and maybe Nishida, who were really more in the sense school and not really in the other schools of Buddhism, I think that’s then a valid criticism. Okay, well thank you for that. That was helpful. And thank you for the sort of ordering correction. I guess, I mean, I think there’s something right here about the discussion of faith. And there is that, but faith in that Hebrew sense of being wedded to something, in love with it. Faithfulness as opposed to assertion of belief. Because the reason why I want to bring that up is one way in which, and I worry about this when I read Tanabe, I feel him getting, and this is not a coincidence because he’s deeply influenced by Kierkegaard, but I feel him getting close to Luther’s position, which I find to be one of the answers that I find unsatisfactory. It’s not Luther as finally read by Calvin or something like that. Well, it’s faith and faith is just your response to God choosing you. And so that’s it. And all you have is to and then you say, well, do I choose to believe? Well, no, it’s not even that, because it’s God within you that moves you to believe. And then you get this weird paradox or maybe it’s a criticism. I’m biased against all of this stuff because of my fundamentalist Christian upbringing. So I want to admit that bias now. So feel free to correct me if it’s important to me. I’m biased against all of this. There’s a sense in which that to me is not capturing what I’m talking about, what I started when I was talking about at the beginning, when I’m talking about the way the Rusyn’s idea of the musicality of intelligibility, the eidetic induction becomes a song that’s singing itself. But it’s like what Frankfurt says about love. Love is a voluntary necessity. It’s got it somehow, you know, you find yourself in it and you’re bound to it, but you don’t feel like you’re being imposed on. And I feel the Calvinist notion of faith feels like a fatalistic imposition on me. And that’s also something that I don’t find. I’m sorry, I don’t want to just, but I don’t find it true to what I’m talking about, what I’m seeing in Plato, what I’m seeing in Goethe, what I’m seeing in Aquinas, what I’m seeing in Plotinus. For me, it’s just not ringing true with that. And so while I think we should talk about faith, I want to problematize that too, especially for all of us coming out of a European heritage. We’ve been deeply touched by all of this. And I felt the noxious finger of this. Daniel, I’m not saying you’re saying that. And I’m not saying Tanabe is saying that. And I’m not even saying Kierkegaard is saying that. But it has been said and it continues to be said. And so I get, again, I think I want to turn the word faith to a more precise pointing at the thing that I’m trying to get closer to, which is, you know, what is it that is turning in the metanoia? And it’s somehow, right? And some people have made this point even for Tanabe. It’s not just Tariky. Jiriki is there too, right? And it’s the same thing in Plato, right? And that’s why Plato uses the seduction metaphor, right? Sorry, I’m just going to keep problematizing this again, not because I don’t think I know, I’m not going to generate an answer that’s going to find satisfying. And it’s certainly not because either one of you are in any way inadequate, but this is to me, like, this is like, I want a description of these terms, a revivification of them, like we talked about earlier, that is true to what I’m trying to share right now. I’m almost, I’m thinking of the Akartian breakthrough. Yes. This is kind of like what we are looking for, but I can’t word it. I’m not, I’m, it’s, I can’t say it. It’s, I don’t, I don’t really, I don’t, Johannes, you want to say something? Maybe. Maybe it’s my turn. Bad joke. So, turning is mentioned in the cave, explicitly that they are incapable of turning their heads. That’s one of the first things that’s mentioned about the prisoners. So turning seems to be important. There’s also a returning into the back, into the cave from compassion. So it’s compassion that leads the one who has been freed back into the cave, because he feels sorry for those down there still, because they don’t see the light of truth. But we’re not told, so it’s very strange in the story, we’re not told either why someone is freed. There’s no action coming. It could almost be, you know, the shackles, Plato or Socrates, they do describe the shackles. But let’s just say for now, they could be metaphorical, because they’re not, the turning itself is not, it’s the way it’s structured, the way it’s set up, also as you described before, the rules are never questioned. But it’s the minute, the moment of turning is already the beginning of the question, what is, right? What is? So maybe they are turning their heads. Let’s just, you know, make this up for now. But at some point, that head turning leads to something, but what is all of this? And that’s the moment of the Duisbruch, it’s the question itself that necessitates itself. But we can’t give, let’s just say, one ultimate cause or so, from which that arises. Also, because then we could, if we thought, begin to think like this, then we could optimize for it, right? Yes, yes. We could have an educational system where, you know, here’s your toolbox of critical thinking tools, as you know, and then all you have to do is apply them. No, but then we’re outside of participatory knowing. Yes, yes, we are. Yeah, yeah. So we’ve done about an hour and 15 minutes, and we are nowhere near, you know, being done with this. But I propose we break it here, just so we don’t overwhelm our viewers. And I want to invite the two of you to one or probably more of these. I want to continue the idetic induction on idetic induction. If you hadn’t realized it, that’s what I’ve been doing with you, right? I’m doing the idetic induction on idetic induction, because I think this is the ultimate sort of neoplatonic move. And I want to travel with the best of companions as far along that as I possibly can. Because for me, that’s the project that Johannes has talked about, about, you know, can we revivify, can we make these things vital for us again? Yeah, and that’s absolutely what we have to do. Because if we just, and we have to find our language for it also. Yes. One that speaks to us, you know, retranslate some of the terms, don’t just use the scholastic translations on and on. No, if it’s supposed to speak to us, and also where we are, and this is something I want to explore next time also, is why is this is something that you had noted down as a question at the beginning, I think it’s connected to this in some weird way. Why is the one, the all unifying one, showing itself? It’s there in so many, I think, you know, you can find it in Goethe if you want, but you can find it explicitly in the late Heidegger. Oh, yeah. That’s striking that Heidegger keeps coming back to this all of a sudden. Yeah, yeah, yeah, there’s something profound there. I very much want to explore that. All right, so let’s just, any final parting words before we just close off our first step along this path? Okay, well then I want to thank both of you. And let’s set up the time for the next one of these. And if you want to do it on my channel, or if you want to circulate it between channels, let’s work it out whichever works best for all of us. Because I like this going meta in the sense of, I like it when it moves between channels too, because that way communities come into the dialogue, it’s not just us. So if that’s something that you would like to do, I’m very happy to do that. But anyways, for those of you watching, there’s going to be more to this. We’re going to continue on together. Thank you very much, my good friends, and thank you all for your time and attention.