https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=pnmO-8u4t4k
Wonder is not just, I don’t know. Wonder is not, I know. Wonder is that interpenetrating of knowing and not knowing when yourself and the world are in question. Think about a question. We don’t think about the question, we think through the question to the answer and that’s fine, but stop. Zen tries to do this with a koan. In the question, you’re learning and you’re ignorance are interpenetrated. That’s how you are able to ask a question. Welcome back to After Socrates, episode 14. Last time we discussed Proclus, we saw how ritual was taken up into neoplatonism with entheergia. We saw that ritual knowing is irreducible to myth or drama or argument and it provides a way of training non-propositional knowing with its own unique specific rationality. And what is that rationality? It had to do with transfer appropriate processing. Rituals are worse or better in terms of how broadly they apply, how deeply they apply and how they can developmentally enhance recursive relevance realization. We also noted that rituals have this bi-directional fit. They help fit the person to the world, but the person also has to allow the ritual to make demands upon them. This was the idea of the ritual as a masterpiece that you try to fit yourself to. So the ritual, we can be manipulating the ritual in order to fit, find that fitting action that has the depth and the breadth and the developmental power. But we can also, the ritual can also be a way in which the world puts a demand on us to meet up to its standards as a masterpiece for transfer appropriate processing. And that bi-directional flow evolves our fittedness to the world. We also saw that Proclus had a large influence on both Augustine, who would be pivotal to Western Christianity, Catholicism, and Dionysus, who would be pivotal to Eastern Christianity, Eastern Orthodox Christianity. Now because of that, Neoplatonism was taken up into Christianity in both Augustine and Dionysus, and Theurgia, this is very interesting, was explicitly taken into Dionysus and Christianized. And that eventually became important elements of the liturgical practice of Eastern Orthodoxy, and even seeing the whole of the cosmos, this is von Balthasar’s book on Maximus as a liturgical cosmos. And you can see it more recently in the work of my friend and colleague Jonathan Pagio, where he talks about symbolism happening. The symbols aren’t just reflectors, there are ways in which we are actually put into connectedness with reality. So Theurgia and dialectic were feeding into each other, shaping each other, and Christianity was on both sides. It’s, as I said, it’s taking the Theurgia up, right, the ritual knowing, and it’s being taken into liturgy, and very much like Theurgia, what you’re trying to do is letting God or Christ work or live in and through you. Christ dwells within you and guides you. This is the Theurgia taken up into the liturgy. And of course, what about dialectic? Well, this is comes from and is related to Deologos, and of course Christianity is the religion of the Logos, so it took up this idea of by means of or by way of the Logos. And so in both the dialectic and in the Theurgia, Christianity was taking up Neoplatonism in a profound way. So there develops a whole line of Christian Neoplatonism with Theurgic ritual such as Christian Lectio Divina and contemplative practices. For example, a classic is Saint Bonaventure’s, listen to the title, Journey of the Mind to God. This is Platonic Anagagia that has been taken into the Christian framework. So ritual and dialectic deeply absorbed. Now I want to examine from this tradition, the Neoplatonic Christian tradition, two figures from this tradition that are pivotal because of the way in which they’re exemplary. The first is Eregina. I’ve heard two pronunciations of this name and I guess it’s hard to know which the original pronunciation is. I’ve heard Eregina and Erugina. I’m going to stick with Erugina and if it’s wrong, hopefully I’ll be forgiven. Eregina epitomizes seeing reality itself as dialectical. And of course, this was something I’ve already argued on behalf of Plotinus and Proclus, but especially in episode 12, that dialectic isn’t just a way of thinking, it is the way reality is realizing itself. So dialectic is both our cognitive realization and the way reality is realizing itself. The second important figure is Nicholas of Cusa, who epitomizes the centrality of learned ignorance, which we started way back with Socrates and knowing that he does not know in a way that nevertheless puts him on the track to what is most real. In fact, Nicholas of Cusa coined the phrase that I’m using, learned ignorance, in a document he wrote called On Learned Ignorance. So these are the two ideas that we have been developing in serious play as we try to understand dialectic into dialogus and reverse engineer it. This idea of dialectic not just being a cognitive process, but a disclosure of the way reality is realizing itself. And that our appropriate state for participating in that dialectic within and without is the state of learned ignorance. So Eregina is in the ninth century. He’s during what’s called the Carolingian Revival after Charlemagne Western Europe started to go through a significant revival and renaissance. He has some connection to Ireland, it’s not clear. He’s often called the Scott, John Scott as Eregina. His biography is vague, and there’s stuff that clearly seems to be legendary. It was rumored that he was killed by his students all throwing their pens, their quilts at him. And scholars find most of this implausible and there seems to be a lot of confusion. So I can’t give you too much about his biography. What we do have is an astonishing book by him. We have other books, but this is the most important. The Perifuson also translated as the division of nature. Remember the title, it’s going to be important, the division of nature. As you can see, it’s a significant work. It’s a significant work. So from that work and some of his other writings, like there’s a document on predestination, we get very clear evidence that Eregina is deeply influenced by Augustine, deeply influenced by Augustine. However, he’s also, I believe, the first person to translate Dionysus, the mystical theology, the divine names, into Latin for the West. And he also deeply reads and studies Maximus, the confessor from the East. So you’ve got the two pillars from the West, Augustine, Dionysus from the East, and then another important figure, Maximus, all being integrated together by Eregina. So he represents this point in which there was a synoptic integration of Western theology, well, Western Christian theology and spirituality, and Eastern Christian theology and spirituality. So he’s this very pivotal figure. So for Eregina, the principles, the grammar of cognition, how we know, and the principles, the grammar of being are the same. Both of them participate in the same dialectical structure and process. Now, there’s two important papers, for those of you who want to get to see this better explicated, and they’re linked. The first is the logic of being, Eregina’s dialectical ontology by Christoph Riesman. I believe this is from 2007. Yes. Excellent. Very clearly written on showing how for Eregina, dialectic is not just a matter of logic or cognition, it is a matter of being and of reality realizing itself. The second paper is by Harry Critchley. It’s called Nature, Logic and Freedom in Eregina’s Perifusion. And he cites, Critchley cites and builds upon the work of Eresman. So I recommend reading the two, excuse me, I recommend reading the two papers together. Excellent work. Excellent work. Making a very strong case that for Eregina, the dialectic of cognition and the dialectic of being are one. They both participate in the same underlying reality. Now, let’s unpack this very carefully. First, Eregina is very clear that most of our thinking, most of our thoughts are distorted and diluted for him by sin and by the fall. So he’s not saying, Eregina is not saying that the content of most of our thoughts is true. He’s not saying that. That’s not what he’s saying when he’s saying that there is, right, that there is this conformity between the dialectic of thought and the dialectic of being. He’s not talking about the contents of our thoughts. What he means is more the following. The structural functional organization we find in the mind, the way it unfolds itself. And the one we find in the world, the way it unfolds itself, are the same. Now, what is that basic unfolding? It’s the idea we’ve talked about before of eminence or procession. Things proceed from the one and they return or they emerge from the many back to the one. And so thinking and being are this vertical movement. And notice what I’m doing with my hands because we’re going to come back to that, is this vertical movement of procession and return between the one and the many. So like Plotinus, Eregina rejects dialectic as a purely logical process and instead sees dialectic as first and foremost an ontological structure that actually grounds and legitimates the logical structures we find in cognition as we attempt to know the world. See, this is sort of the opposite of how we think about this. Now we can ask ourselves, why is logic central to making sense of the world, affording clear intelligibility of the world? Why does it have that role? Stop and think about that for a moment. Why should that be the case? Instead of automatically looking through the way we presuppose about logic and the relation between inferences and non-contradiction, stop and try to think about, yes, but what grounds that? What makes that such a eminently reasonable thing to believe? So Eregina has an answer. He says, because cognitive logic participates in the intelligibility of the world, so that cognition has a structural functional organization that gets at reality. It’s a good answer, but we shouldn’t just accept it because there are three basic competing answers for this to this question about what’s the relationship between the logic, very broadly construed, because there’s many kinds of formal logic. There’s propositional, there’s predicate, there’s modal, there’s relevance logic, so logic very broadly construed. What’s the relationship between logic and reality such that we take it that logic has an important role in getting us at what is real? So one notion of the relationship is that we just simply learn the logic from the world, and that’s the basic empiricist model. Like the mind is a blank slate and we somehow get logic from the world in some simple learning process. There’s an alternative proposal, almost exactly the opposite, epitomized by Kant, but many other people also advocate it. We impose that logic on the world. So instead of the blank slate of the mind, the world is a blank canvas on which we impose a logical structure. Then there’s the third answer, which is the answer that Eregina gives. Mind and world equally participate in the same logic, but I’m now going to use the word logos because we’ve now been so culturally trained to think of logic as a mental thing, so I’m going to now have to use a word that can mean both internal logic and external order. So mind and world equally participate in the same logos. Okay, so we’ve got the empirical answer, blank slate, that the world writes logic upon. The world is a blank canvas and I impose logic on it. That’s a constructivist view, a Kantian view. Or mind and world both participate in the same logos, which is Eregina’s view. Let’s take a quick look at the first position, perhaps epitomized by somebody like Hume, and we can thank Kant for sort of launching devastating critiques against the idea that we simply learn logic from the world. It’s very difficult to see how we learn logic. So for example, one of the most important basic rules is modus ponens. If P then Q, P therefore Q. If it’s raining then the streets will get wet. It’s raining so the streets will get wet, okay? It’s the core of conditional reasoning and conditional reasoning is how you build out sort of models of the world. Now notice I can’t teach you modus ponens because in order to teach you modus ponens I have to use modus ponens. I have to say something like this to you. If you see if P then Q then you should, oh right, I’m using modus ponens whenever I try to teach it to you. So and this is, it’s arguments like this that led Kant to believe, no no, logic is somehow an innate way the mind works. Here’s another example. Negation is a very important part of logic. There’s a right, and the cardinal rule of logic is the principle of non-contradiction. You can’t say both A and not A. You can’t say it is entirely true that circles are shapes and it’s entirely the case that circles are not shapes. They can’t both be true at the same time. It requires negation. It requires the ability to not things, to negate them. But notice that experience can’t prevent, can’t present me with negation. So look around this room. A blue whale is not in this room. Benito Mussolini is not in this room. Describe the difference in the room. There is no difference. Absence is not negation and yet all the world can give us is absence, yet we need negation in order to fundamentally make sense of the world. There’s a lot of other arguments around this and I won’t go into them in detail. I talk about them elsewhere. So Kant, and in some ways Plato, but in a different direction, Kant looked at this and said, well I can’t be learning this from the world. Empiricism can’t be right. So Kant did what he called his famous Copernican revolution. He totally inverted things and said, no, no, logic must be something like an intrinsic structure of the mind that the mind imposes on the world. So it’s not in the world at all. The mind imposes it on the world. Now I’ve already argued that this leads to a kind of solipsistic skepticism because actually what you end up saying is to the degree to that the world is intelligible to me is the degree to which I’m out of touch with how the world is in itself. And Kant famously concluded this. We cannot know the thing in itself. We cannot know the world as it is in itself. But as it is in itself is part of what it means for something to be real. Just let that sink in. So I’ve already provided one argument against the Kantian alternative, but I want to look at another angle on this, another argument, because it will also help me build back towards the overall project we’re continuing to like explicate the reverse engineering of dialectic into dialogos. This is work done by Marlo Ponti. So as Berman and other people have noted, Kant presupposes that the mind directly knows itself. The mind is somehow in direct contact with itself. Now Marlo Ponti points out that the mind’s knowing itself is actually bound up with knowing its body. For example, where’s your mind? Tell me where that is without using your body. Why is your mind limited to what it has access to in the world? Oh, my body. If I were to count minds, how would I know them as distinct from each other if they didn’t have different bodies? So this is actually gets to be really profound when you start to think about it, and I point you to the work of Evan Thompson about this. You really can’t separate knowing, and that includes the mind’s knowing itself, from embodiment. And is your knowing of your mind distinct from knowing how to move your body? Is it distinct from knowing where you are in space because of how things are salient and relevant to your autopoetic body? Now think about this. This is something that Marlo Ponti made really important with his notion of the chiasm, not chasm, a chiasm. My body is this weird double. It’s a two-in-one. Do this and think about it. You can touch yourself. Marlo Ponti asked us to slow down, pay attention. What’s happening there? You’re both being touched and feeling the touch, and it’s like, wait, wait, there’s two sides to this. I’m an object touching and a subject feeling, but it’s not a subject- object distinction like Descartes says. There’s somehow one. My body is a lived part of my identity, me. So, ow, that don’t hurt me. But my body is, nevertheless, a body amongst bodies in the world. I get access to the bodies in the world because I’m a body. One might say to this, okay, I get it. The body is really important. Embodiment as a basis of knowing is really important, but this could all be an illusion that you have a body. Yeah, and then as soon as you take that this could all be illusion that you can have a body, how would you stop that from everything in your mind also being an illusion? Well, I can know that I exist. You can’t even know that you exist because you is to point to a set of memories associated with a particular body moving through time and space. You have to take all that away with the illusion. And what remains? What remains? You’re going to be quickly dissolved into an absolute solipsistic subjectivity and skepticism. All that is knowable is this specious moment of raw experience, if that even makes any sense. Is that even something that’s intelligible? One may say, but the body is only partially and imperfectly known by the mind. Yep. And especially since Freud, the mind is only partially and imperfectly known by the mind. The mind is not completely present or transparent to itself even anymore, sorry, then the body is completely transparent or present to itself. The body is present to itself but also other than itself. The mind is present to itself but also other than itself. And we know this now. We’ve known this for centuries, literally. All right, so first of all there’s something missing. The Kantian position doesn’t seem to be working and I’ve brought in this additional argument. You’re saying how is this going to connect? Just give me some time. But this embodiment is an important aspect of how we know. Now here’s another dimension. And Erogena is very aware, remember we talked about the horizontal interpersonal dimension of dialectic inter-dialogos, the person-to-person communication that can get into reciprocal flow. How do I know that he’s very aware of this? He wrote the Perifuson as a dialogue between a teacher and a student. He didn’t write it as a treatise or an argument. He wrote it as a dialogue. So part of that of course is probably that he belongs to the Neoplatonic tradition you might say, but the thing is he’s reading Augustine, he’s reading Dionysus, he’s reading Maximus. They’re not writing dialogues, but he writes a dialogue for his central work. There’s something he’s trying to convey with the dialogical form itself. He warns the students of the dialogue. He warns the students of dialogue. He wants the book to exemplify what the book is about. Now we may ask, and you’d be saying, but we’ve already talked about this, why dialogue rather than argument? But I want to bring in one new argument around this, why the dialogical form is important. I want to make use of this excellent anthology, Explorations in Metaphysics by Clark, Being God Person. Those are the subtitles. It’s not a phrase. I want to specifically make use of an article that has this very provocative and very pertinent title. The We Are of Interpersonal Dialogue as the Starting Point of Metaphysics. So I’m going to, I want to read you some quotes and take you through this argument that he’s making. It’s very important. He wants to point, he says, to an experience without which none of us could be truly human, of knowing other human beings as equally real with ourselves, as like us, sharing the same nature of powers of action, in particular the power of speech, and able to engage in meaningful dialogue with each other. This experience can be condensed as follows. I know that we are, that we are like each other, and that we can engage in meaningful communication with each other. Now he says something really important that goes along with a lot of what we’ve all been saying throughout this entire course. To perceive the relevatory, nice adjective, the relatively, the relevatory power of this experience, one must actually enter into it, live, which he puts in italics, live it existentially first, then reflect on it. One cannot deduce it a priori from any cogito, that’s decart cogito ergo sum, or purely solitary experience. It must happen to us. Okay. So he starts to list a bunch of important features about this. The first point that comes out of that experience is I am real, actually actively present, because I’m aware of myself as actively thinking communicating and receiving, being acted upon. Okay, not too much there, but a basic point. Now it starts to get interesting. I am in touch with, please remember that central metaphor. Notice what we’re using to try and convey this. What? Touch, I’m in touch. Do you remember what we were talking about a few minutes ago? Embodiment, touching. Whenever I touch, I’m touched. Whenever I touch, I’m touched. I’m in touch with, present to another real being on whom I act and who acts in return on me by exchanging information. And then he says something I think is very powerful. I cannot seriously believe that my dialogue partner is not real or that I am projecting, inventing him or her. So the idea that we’re equally real and somehow present to each other, this other is truly like me because I’m capable of understanding them and communicating with them. Now because of that, I can come to this conclusion. I can, because I do, receive a pre-structured, pre-formed message from without, an intelligible message which I understand and can act on to act on to confirm. I cannot sincerely believe that I have simply made up, imposed the basic formal structure on this message from the other, on my own independent initiative, which would mean I already possess within me the information I am projecting and yet obviously receiving is something new, not previously known by me. What he’s saying is in the experience of talking with another person, try to actually in the experience convince yourself that you know what they’re saying, you already know everything they’re conveying and you have actually just projected it as an illusion. Fifth point, the I thou, he’s invoking Boober who we’ll come back to, of interpersonal dialogue now become a we can turn to explore, share and discuss the messages coming in from both a non-human world beyond and outside the controlling power of the dialogers and he’s going to extend that. He’s going to say once you acknowledge that you can have pre-structured information unknown to you come in as meaningful because it has been structured by something other than you then you can say well if that’s the case with a person that can also be the case with the world. The world can generate pre-structured information that is meaningful to me that I am not the author of. Now he’d said he says something really interesting here he says Kant quite obviously and without question takes for granted the existence of other persons like himself and just as real as himself. Why is he writing the bloody book? The books. Why does he get upset when he’s misinterpreted? Why does he keep refining his argument? Because they are autonomous centers of dialogue who are capable of dialoguing with them. And then Clark points out yet nowhere in his works does he ever discuss how it is possible to know other human beings as real. There is not a word in Kant as to how inter-dialogue interpersonal dialogue is possible at all. So notice the tension between the Kantian view that says the mind imposes a structure on the world and Kant’s actual interactions and his reliance upon and his responsibility to interpersonal dialogue. They can’t go together completely. They can’t be together. They can’t be together. They have a responsibility to interpersonal dialogue. They can’t go together consistently unless Kant is somehow trying to what would it be? Pretend that he’s in a dream and all of these people are just dream figures but even then he has to posit an unconscious mark and you get into all of these things that Kant doesn’t at all posit or bring up. Now as I mentioned, here’s another quote, once this ban on receiving formal messages, he doesn’t mean like formal like the Queen invites you to dinner, he means formal in that they are structured as intelligible to you. Once this ban on receiving formal messages from the outside world has been lifted, a whole new perspective on our cognitive relationship with the world opens up. If it is possible to receive pre-formed messages from without in an interpersonal dialogue mediated through the senses, why should it not be possible to receive pre-formed messages from other non-human dialogue partners in the world communicating with us through the medium of our senses but in non-linguistic ways. So then he comes to this conclusion and I want you to hear it again. I am in touch, this is I’m in touch with another being. What would that mean? That central idea, that central metaphor if we were not embodied, if we didn’t have the touched being touched of touch, what would we use? I’m in touch with another being as real as myself, as real as myself. He then goes on, the whole dialectical analysis of being as a participation system, which he puts in italics, each being participating in the all embracing actuality of existence, as a part of the whole dialectical analysis of being, as a part of the world participating in the all embracing actuality of existence by its own active existence that makes it to be a particular active presence in the world and yet restricted by its own particular limiting essence to be this being and not that one. So he says once you allow the dialogical mode, the dialectical mode, and notice how he just moves from dialogue to dialectical, once you allow the dialogical mode to have the priority it should have, the kind of special privilege, then you can see that everything in reality is participating in a kind of dialectic in which it is present to others, it remains itself but participates with others, it’s changed by others and it changes the others. So what is Clark basically arguing here? In interpersonal dialogue we get the challenging of the Kantian framework that was exemplified by Kant’s own interaction with the world. And that interpersonal dialogue gives us a way of thinking about reality as a participation system. You and I, I don’t make the dialogue, you don’t make the dialogue, we participated in it together. We come into conformity with each other, we participated in together and then that relation of conformity through dialogical participation we realize is the case with non-person aspects of the world as well. Let’s put these two together, Marla Ponte and what Clark is arguing. Embodied touching, embodied dialogue implicitly exemplifies the third answer about the relationship between the logos of the mind and the logos of the world, the relationship of participation. You see so dialogue is not just one thing we happen to do, embodied dialogue is not just one thing we happen to do, embodied dialogue has an important philosophically privileged position, it is a philosophically privileged experience. It is the primary way for our access, our contact with reality and touch is both of those, I get access to reality but I also come into contact with it. So I’ve been emphasizing how touch is itself an embodied dialogue, what do you mean? Remember when I touch I’m also being touched, co-participation, conformity. Touch involves that body chiasm that Marla Ponte was talking about. Notice how much of your experience is exacted from your embodied interaction with the world. Clark in fact keeps using you’re in touch with reality but we’ve done this before, do you understand my point, do you get my point, which is right this exchange, do you see it, do you grasp it, all of this. So dialectic is a practice that explicates foregrounds and thereby reflectively exemplifies this power of embodied interpersonal dialogue, embodied not just the words, the embodiment, the embodied interpersonal dialogue is a privileged way in which we can come to understand our primary way of being connected to reality. It’s a way of exemplifying the third answer of participation. Now such dialectic would work best if it reflectively engaged with the embodied gestural and the multi-perspectival dimensions of dialogue and integrated them into the physical world. The procession and return that the mind and the world co-participate in. So what we want is we want to practice that takes the physical world into the physical world and the mental world into the physical world. So we want to practice that. We want to practice that. We want to practice that. We want to practice that. We want to practice that. We want to practice that. We want to practice that. That takes what’s always running in the background and grounding our access to the world embodied interpersonal dialogue with its gestural embodied gestural and multi-perspectival aspects, explicated that and then put it into communication with the realization of the co-participation of the mind and the world in the emanation, the procession, the return, the emergence that permeates all of our cognition and all of reality, co-permeates both of them. This of course is what we’re doing with dialectic and didiologos. We have the contemplative access of dialectic, this moving between emergence and emanation, but it’s not really movement and we’ll come back to that. And then of course we have the communicative access, the interpersonal access of dialectic. And of course the two together are the communing aspect. We are simultaneously doing this and this and they resonate together. And Regina is laying that out and arguing for it. Now how do you practice dialectical contemplation? I want to try and show you a convergence argument. I want to look at a phenomenological way you can try and do this. Phenomenology is about the structuring of experience, so it’s meaningful experience to us. Conceptually, conceptuality is the structuring of our understanding and imaginally. And this of course goes to Corban and we’ve talked about the imaginal. This is the structuring of the relationship between experience and understanding, a relationship that we have been talking about at great length in this episode. Okay, so let’s do it phenomenologically. So I need to use a linguistic term but I ultimately want to get you to notice it not with language but what the analogous thing in attention. This is demonstrative reference. So demonstrative, so normally when we refer our thinking to the language, we’re talking about the language of the person who is in the conversation. So demonstrative, so normally when we refer things have a content reference. Like when I say cat, it refers to the kinds of entities that have the qualities that cats possess. But I have words that only work by pointing. This. This. Now I can use the same word this. This. And they’re not the same. I’m not pointing to the same thing or even the same kind of thing. Now Zen and Polition, great name, eh? Great name for a cognitive scientist. Sounds like a science fiction hero. Zen and Polition. He’s done work on what’s called multiple object tracking where you have a screen and there are things on the screen like X’s and O’s and triangles and squares and they’re also colored and they move around. And what you have to do is you have to try and track multiple objects. Like here’s the purple circle and I can ask you where did the purple circle end up? And you have to, oh right there. Where did the red square end up? Oh there, right? Now what he found which was really interesting is that if you push that to the limit, which is around eight things, people can do that tracking and tracing but they don’t know what it is they’re tracking or tracing. What do I mean by that? This can start out as a red square and become a purple triangle and turn into a yellow circle and people know where it is but they have no idea that it’s changed. It’s qualities. He talked about this and notice what I’m going to do here. And this is a feature of your mind. He called it Finsting. F-I-N-S-T-I-N-G. What does Finsting stand for? Fingers of instantiation. It’s like what does he mean by that? He means, he means ha ha ha. He means this. I don’t know what this is. But I can track it if I can touch it. However it moves around, I know it’s here now, it’s here now, it’s here now. I can trace and track. It’s here now-ness. And all I’m doing is making like a salience tag. I’m making this somehow stand out. Salient. So salience tagging, tracking, tracing. The here now-ness. That’s it. And the mind has the ability to do something like put fingers on things in the world and trace them. But all it’s doing is a pure this, this. It’s not pointing at anything in particular. It’s just here now, I’m tracing and tracking it. I’ve tagged it as salient and I’m tracing and tracking it. I don’t know what it is. It’s pure, it’s the attentional analog of demonstrative reference. You don’t know what it is. You just know that it is. By the way, that was famously, that turn of phrase was repeatedly used by people to talk about God. You can know that God is, but not what God is. Now this salience tagging, tracking, tracing. This pure here now-ness through time. Through time. A through line. A through line of here now-ness. And Polition argues that this is necessarily precategorical, preconceptual. What do you mean? In order to form a category, I have to rely on demonstrative reference already. Watch. This. This. This. I have to be able to salience tag them and trace and track them into a togetherness in their here now-ness before my mind so I can start to form the category that gives me the concept book. I have to be able to do that fencing, touching the world with an attentional, not a language version, but an attentional version of demonstrative reference so I can form categories and concepts. This ability is more primordial and is presupposed by our conceptual abilities and our categorization abilities, which are of course interwoven. There’s a fundamental way in which the mind has to touch the world before it can form categories or concepts. Now, this fencing, this mental touching that affords concept formation and categorization, it can do something very interesting. I can do this in which I’m drawing you perhaps to this object, or I might be drawing you to this cover, and there’s interesting questions around that. But I’m drawing you to a specific here now-ness before it has been categorized or conceived of as a book. Now try and feel the task here. Feel the task here. Try to get the here now-ness of this without categorizing it as a book. That’s a notion of such-ness, that here now-ness, that specific here now-ness, the such-ness of this. That it can’t be captured by the concept of book, because this such-ness book is different from this such-ness book. So I can do this specifying demonstrative reference, and I’ll point, although I can do it just with my attention. I’m pointing so you can follow what I’m saying. I can do this, and I can do that again and again. But I also can do this, this, the whole of it. And it’s not all of the things, because this is precategorical, preconceptual. This is the here now-ness that is tracking and tracing through time, the presencing. And then you get the sense of this, and notice how I’m coming to the edge of what I can express with language. How this, notice how I have to rely on embodiment and gesture and metaphors of touch, fencing. How this has a sense of more-ness to it, because this seems to be unlimited in how many of individual this-es it can have. It seems to be inexhaustible. So somehow the more-ness of this and the such-ness of this are the same. They interpenetrate. This one, which is no thing, because I’m not counting things yet, and this one are both wanting. The non-conceptual more-ness and the non-conceptual such-ness, they’re in this interpenetrating relationship with each other. So I’m like, this somehow proceeds into this, but this and this and this and this and this all participate in this. I can stretch my fencing in both directions between the more-ness and the such-ness, between the pure this and the pure this and this and this, between the one this and the mini this, but each mini is also a one. I get a sense of presencing that is simultaneously proceeding, emanating, and returning, emerging. And when I stretch it in both directions, I get, well, I’m going to use a term from Gestalt Psychology. I get a salience Gansfeld. What? German word. What they originally do, you can do this now with goggles, but what they did was they originally cut a ping pong ball in half and put it over people’s eyes so that they see an undifferentiated whiteness in all directions. And so there is, right, it’s not like your experience shuts off, you don’t blank out. But what you get is you get all the points are salient to you together, which means none of them are salient to you, because salient means standing out in contrast. They’re somehow standing out together, but none of them are standing out in contrast to each other. They’re presencing. So when you get to that place, when you stretch the Finsting and you get that, you get that sort of salience Gansfeld, your relevance realization machinery is no longer relevant. Because you are not trying to size up, you’re not trying to foreground, background. You’re not trying to relate the things to each other. It’s not tracking and tracing, it’s not salience Gansfeld. See, relevance realization can come to realize that it’s irrelevant when it is directed towards being. So what you’ve got then is this place where the primordial structure of your experience and the way the world, the way being seems to be structured are indistinguishable from each other and interpenetrate each other. And your attempts to make sense of things actually falls into a kind of silence. That was phenomenologically. What about conceptually, about understanding? Well, to understand a set of things is to find a unifying explanation. That person’s sick, that person’s sick, that person. Oh, they all have COVID. Ah, makes sense of all of that. We’re trying to find a single underlying cause. That’s why we use the word because when we offer an explanation. Now we have to remember not just causes but constraints. So this is not just one thing hitting another. But we are ultimately integrating things in order to bring about understanding. So the more I understand, the more I move to a greater and greater unity of conception, a unity of explanation. The more I get at deeper and deeper causes. That which affords all explanation and explanation is the disclosure of intelligibility. Will not itself be explainable nor caused by anything else. As I explain, I get more and more integration. I get more and more the cause. And then I get the one, we’ve done this already, that is both the source cause of all causes. It doesn’t mean the first cause in time. We’re not talking in time. It’s the primordial cause. It’s the source of intelligibility. Notice what it’s, I get to this place that is itself not caused but causes. And I get to the exact same place that makes everything intelligible, knowable, but is not itself knowable. I can’t get behind it and explain it in terms of what causes it or how it is integrated with other things together in understanding. The source of intelligibility and existence is not itself intelligible or caused by anything. Ultimate reality is an inexpressible one that is not one thing. Because we’re not talking about a thing here. Because a thing is something that we can explain in terms of its causes and its constraints. You say, OK, but where’s all the dialectic? But think about this. That, and here’s the tension. That one that is not one thing, the one that is a no thing, is somehow the source of all the differentiation. Where does all the difference come from? It’s simultaneously one and the source of the many. The one and the many. Here it is again. Somehow everything proceeds from this one. But everything also returns to it because everything ultimately is grounded in it, caused by it, made knowable through it. One into many, many into one. Notice the very movement of understanding is doing the emanation and emergence, the procession and the return. Notice that there’s a tonos. I want to use the Greek word here, tonos, because I don’t want to just mean tension. I want to mean this creative tension that is trying to draw us out, draw us beyond our familiar ways of thinking. So that’s how I’m going to use the word tonos. There is this tonos in our conception and in our speech, in our logos. We’re trying to talk about ultimate reality or what Erigina would call God. It’s the cause of all things, but it’s not a thing. It’s the source of all knowing, but it’s not itself knowable. And one way we can do that is we can be, it’s called the cataphatic way. Or I can say things like God is a thing, like God is a rock, God is love, God is light. And these are all things, by the way. And it’s not entirely true about that because ultimate reality, God, is the cause, the determination of those things. But it’s also the case that one should be apophatic because God is not a rock, not love, not light. Because God is not any of these things because he is not a thing, she is not a thing, it is not a thing. None of the words work. God is not any of these, but they’re ground or source and therefore cannot be in the system that is thereby grounded and sourced. To be the source of intelligibility, God is not itself, himself, herself intelligible. To be the source of reality, not himself, herself, itself caused in any way. So God’s not a thing because all the things are intelligible and are both causes and effects. So the cataphatic opens us up to articulating. Listen to the word articulate. It means to break into parts that nevertheless fit together. Articulation of speech, articulation of the logos, articulation of thought. The cataphatic way articulates. The apophatic integrates. So Carabine in two of her amazing books, The God on the Unknown God, Negative Theology and the Platonic Tradition, Plato to Regina, and her book on John Scott as Regina. She talks about how Regina is actually proposing a hypophatic way of thinking speaking, in which you take the cataphatic and the apophatic and you realize that we’ve been separating them through motions in time and space, but they can’t actually be separated that way. They are completely simultaneously interpenetrating with each other. So Regina uses a specific phrase to try and convey the hypophatic, the hyperphatic. He uses more than, more than, repeatedly. There’s a Latin for it, but I forget what the Latin is. God is more than X. God is more than love. God is more than light. God is more than a rock. God is more than a father. God is more than a mother. Because the more than means not just purely not of the apophatic way, but not just that it is of the cataphatic way. You see the moreness that’s pointed to you, the moreness is purely demonstrative reference. It’s a way of making our language turn into pure pointing, pure this. Pure fencing, mental fencing. We’re not pointing at any point. We’re pointing through all points. We’re pointing to a pure trajectory. The procession and the return. Now let’s shift. The cataphatic and the apophatic are like my right and left visual fields. And what I do is I stereoscopically see through both of them. Both of them are flat, a flat ontology. But when I see through both of them, I see beyond them. I see through them into depth. The apophatic is a way of getting the procession and the return simultaneous. So you have ontological depth perception. You can see deeply into reality. So notice we looked at the structure of experience and we got into this participatory dialectic. We look at the structure of cognition. We get the same thing. What about imaginally? Well, we’ve been doing that throughout this whole discussion. We’ve been using images to structure the relationship between our understanding and our experience because that’s what images do. But notice we have talked about moving between levels. But there isn’t movement. I have to use movement to talk about it. But there isn’t movement in emanation and emergence. That’s what we were just noticing. Try to think about this. Reality is neither leveled nor flat. It is more than leveled. Think of all the levels up and down from the infinitesimal to the cosmic. And reality is all of those, but not as a homogenous blob. But all of them. It’s more than leveled. It’s more than leveled. The image is and is not what it affords. It affords an awareness into participation. Participation is inherently imaginal. As I said, reality, the image has to be seen through. It has to participate. It has to launch you in trajectory because you have to realize, I do these levels to get out of the flat ontology. But then I have to realize that the levels are also not right. And so I have to understand reality as more than leveled. Try it for a sec. All of it at once. Feel the fencing in you. Down to the miniscule this, the suchness of that microscopic event. The moreness of this. All at once, but not flat, not homogenous. One, but thoroughly differentiated. Emerging up from the quantum, down from the cosmic. But all at once, everywhere. No matter how we try to access and disclose reality, whether through our experience, through our understanding or through our imagination, we find ourselves within our mind and within the world, within this same dialectical structure again and again and again. So Shushkov has written a really powerful book, Being and Creation in the Theology of John’s Goddess, Eregina, an approach to a new way of thinking. Notice what he’s proposing here, a new way of thinking. Now I have some criticisms of this book. I think he over emphasizes how radically discontinuous Eregina is from the Neoplatonic tradition. I think that’s more Christian apologetics than an argument that I think bears good scholastic textual evidence. But I don’t think it’s germane to the specific argument. So he emphasizes realizing in both senses of the word now, the cognitive, right? But the cognitive that participates in the world, what he calls the cardinal contradiction, the cardinal contradiction. Whenever we try to gain access to being, we find ourselves and the world within this dialectical structure, which we can only express in contradictions. The one and the many. Thing and no thing. Time and eternity. I want to read a couple of passages from his book. Now, this is not an easy book, and so some of these passages will be a little bit dense. One of the first, the dialectical understanding of contradiction of the subsection, he says, One of the first challenges on the way ahead that the mind has to face in its pursuit of the infinite whole, which alone truly, that is unceasingly is, consists in a dialectical understanding of contradiction. From an instrument of strict prohibition on exceeding the limits of empirical experience, contradiction must be turned into a means of embracing the opposite extremes of existence, by virtue of which thought is enabled to break through all dividing temporality to eternity of the real whole. And thus, to bring the entire human being to living in conformity with it. The key is this cardinal revaluation of the role of contradiction. Well, how do we get this? The principle of the simultaneous truth of contradictories when applied to the dialogical resolution of the ontological contradiction, that contradiction in being itself between the one and the many, should not allow us to misinterpret the relationship between being and nonbeing by virtue of their separation. So what’s he trying to say here? He’s trying to say that the A is not A shouldn’t… Now, he’s not saying, oh, just abandon the principle of contradiction when you’re thinking and reasoning. He’s saying, no, no, no. He’s only talking about the cardinal contradiction. And then when you hit the cardinal contradiction, you have to make this flip. You have to make this very profound flip. The dialectical vision of the same contraries from the perspective of contradiction, where they take shape of the contradictory statements, does not imply at all that their simultaneous truth could ever be equally distributed, so to speak, among the contradictories, so far as they remained mutually countered. In other words, the simultaneous truth of the contradictories dialectically understood is applicable to their unity only, since they cannot be known as being consubstantial and therefore equally true. Now, that’s a very… what the heck is he talking about? So what he means is getting the one and the many is not they’re equally true, that truth is distributed to both statements. When we’re doing that, we are still locked into the propositional expression of a contradiction between propositions. What he’s proposing is that we see through them, beyond them by means of them. It’s a stereoscopic realization. It’s fundamental. Now notice, this seems all… oh, this is so mystical. But how do we get there? We got there by paying attention to our embodied dialogical existence and how that has to be able to conform to reality. Now that place where we’re looking through the opposites is exactly how Nicholas of Cusa, and he’s 1401 to 1464, how he understood and explained and explicated learned ignorance. I want to show you some books that you might want to consider. This is a good book on Nicholas of Cusa. Here’s a very good one, The Vision of God. I’ll talk about this. The Voyage of Unknowing. There’s a very good philosophical reflection on what Cusa offered us called the analogical turn. Rethinking modernity with Nicholas of Cusa. The author here, Hoff, argues that with Cusa we could have gone down a different direction other than the one we went down with Descartes. Here’s a fantastic book, and this is by Duclos, Masters of Learned Ignorance, Eregina at Cart Cusanias. That’s another way of talking about Nicholas of Cusa. Now Cusa begins The Vision of God when you read it. He uses what’s called the omnivoyant image, voyeur to look, omnivoyant. It’s a painting, and it’s a painting that has this feature to it. Wherever you are, it looks like the painting is looking at you. These were all the rage. Cusa is literally at the time when three-point perspective in painting is being rediscovered, reinventio, was being discovered and invented. It was very fashionable to have these pictures that it looked like the eyes are looking at you no matter where you are. Now there’s both objective, the painting has to be a certain way, and there’s also a subjective aspect to that. And what’s interesting is he says you want to get monks and you want them to stand here, one monk to stand here. Notice how he’s bringing in interpersonal dialogue. You want one monk to stand here and say the painting is looking at me and the other monk to stand here and say the painting is looking at me. Then they switch positions and say it again. Notice how dialogical that is, right? The perspectives being brought into interpenetration with each other. So what’s that supposed to do? You’re supposed to do this before you read his text. You’re supposed to do this embodied, you can only be here or there because you have a body, this embodied multi-perspectival imaginal thing. And what does it disclose? It discloses to you a one mini to me. What do you mean, John? What I mean is looking at me. Looking at me. One. The picture’s one picture. Mini. Mini here now. This here now. This here now. Mini. One. Realized dialogically through embodied dialogical practice. So you’re getting this multi-perspectival state that would actually disclose the picture. That’s what omnivoyant means. You’d actually have to be able to see all of these perspectives. And notice it’s not just our perspective on the picture. It’s the picture’s perspective on us. Notice that, by the way. Notice the dialogical participation. But you can’t actually do that. You can only do it in dialogue. It’s only in dialogue can you sense that there’s a through line in perception. There’s a through line between all the perspectives and aspects. And that through line, as we’ve discussed, is not any particular aspect or perspective. We talked about this with eidetic adduction and how it gets exemplified and cultivated in dialectic and in dialogous. And you can see it here. He’s getting them to actually embodied, enact the through line dialogically so they can get a sense of that which runs through all the perspectives and the aspects. But is no perspective or aspect itself. So when you’re following out this working with the painting, the dialogic, imagine a working with the multi-perspectival, multi-spectuality of experience and conception. You get to a state of learned ignorance. I learn the perspectives, but the through line is not something I perceive. It is that, by the way, that is demonstrative of reference term. It is that by which I perceive. I don’t perceive the through line. Is that by which I perceive? I have the learned ignorance. Now, what Kusa argues is that we can also experience the intelligible, conceptual equivalent of the through line. So you can move from this perceptual experience into a conceptual one. So he gives many examples like this and unlearned ignorance. I’ll just do one. So if you look at a circle, it has an arc to it. It’s a defining feature of it being a circle. If it doesn’t arc, it’s not a circle. But as the circle gets larger, the arc, notice what this is very tight arc. See that this circle, this circle, it’s a much right. Less tight art. It’s now extending. So I was to extend the circle to infinity. It would be a flat line. But it’s a circle. But it’s a flat line. There is a through line between the circle and the flat line that is disclosed at infinity. When I open up to infinity, I realize a through line between the circle and the flat line. This has been called the coincidence of opposites. But that makes it sounds like I have two things beside each other that are touching. Coincident. I propose to you a better thing is the stereoscopic seeing through. I’m seeing to a reality. I’m seeing through the circle the way my experience is normally many flat line circle. Different, different. But they it’s like the parallel lines in vision converging stereoscopically at infinity. So in the recusa, this is how God ultimate reality is the through line of all the through lines. Infinity is a through line. But of course, it’s not a line because if you could grasp it as a line, it wouldn’t be infinite. But we always think of it as a progression along the line. When you open yourself up to infinity as it is, you can only really get infinity as it is by this other procedure. Instead of that, instead of the sequence and then amending it with and it keeps going. Cusa is saying, no, try to see infinity, try to realize infinity as what you see when you see through. The flat line and the circle. And you see where they are one, where that many becomes one. And then what he’s asking you is that God. He says that the ultimate reality is the real infinity. And that’s what he was talking about. The ultimately real is the through line of all the through lines. Because that infinity can take any of the minis and help you realize their oneness. It’s really a very powerful proposal. And I’m not just reading the vision of God. I’m actually also doing Lectio Divina on it. Cusa talks about the walls around paradise. When you get to this, right, you get to this sort of aporia, remember Socrates, you get to this aporia. But how can the circle be both a circle and a flat line? But if I really if I was really able to get infinity, I would realize that. And he talks about you get to this wall where you’re at that impasse, that aporia. And then there’s a breakthrough. You learn that capacity to have that seeing through. And his point, of course, is that is exactly the state of a comprehensive learned ignorance. All the learning brings you to the walls around paradise. Only to disclose to you that you’re ignorant of what is inside the walls. And you have to pass through them by accepting this final living instantiation of the contradiction. Which is the learning and the ignorance are also many and one. It’s not learning and ignorance. It’s that I have to realize that cognition. Actually participates, has to participate in. The very. I see I’m struggling for words. That very fundamental seeing through of the contradictions. Because all of cognition is participating in the one mini of being. And to really know, to really realize is I have the one mini. But that can’t be something I can speak. This is what I’ve learned. It can’t just be I cannot speak it. I’m ignorant. It has to be the one mini of learned ignorance. It’s a simultaneous seeing through. You’re saying this is really hard to understand. Yes. But notice you have experiences like this. And where can we turn? You can turn back to Socrates. Wisdom begins in wonder. Wonder is not just I don’t know. Wonder is not I know. Wonder is that that that interpenetrating of knowing and not knowing. When yourself and the world are in question. Think about think about a question. We don’t think about the question. We think through the question to the answer. And that’s fine. But stop. Zen tries to do this with a koan in the question. You’re learning and your ignorance are interpenetrated. That’s how you are able to ask a question. And it opens up. It discloses. See, this is why you don’t give an answer to the koan. The answer is not you don’t answer the koan. You try to remain within the dialogical dialectical structure of the question itself. That’s and wonder is the embodied being in question. This is why Heidegger famously said we are the beings whose being is in question. And that gives us the capacity to realize being. We are capable of learned ignorance that allows us to participate in the fundamental grammar of being. Dialectic into dialogos should enhance and extend idetic adduction of the through line. It should be conceptually spoken, phenomenologically experienced and imaginably enacted all at once in an interpenetrating fashion in which the question is not a question. We should do what we can to extend it to infinity affording the stereoscopic seeing through. We should make it not infinite just in the fact that it’s open ended, but infinite in the sense that it’s not a question. It should bring us to a profound state of learned ignorance that instantiates the deepest possible understanding of the question. It should bring us to a profound state of learned ignorance that instantiates the deepest possible conformity with the fundamental principles of reality. A religio that participates, and I’m using it now as a like a verb almost like to precipitate, a religio that participates realization within and without and together and through and beyond. Conceptually, experientially, imaginably. When that self-realization of reality for its own sake is nishatani defined as, for the sake of its own sake, it’s not a question of the When that self-realization of reality for its own sake is nishatani defines religion, when that realization emerges, emanates, presences, unifies, differentiates itself, we get that touchstone of truth. It cultivates a connoisseurship, you know, the French, the connoisseur, to know in this participatory conforming fashion. It cultivates a connoisseurship of realness. A realization within realization of realization. While training skills of virtue that are integral to wisdom. If you look at a lot of the work, this is just a good anthology by Commons, Richard and Armand, Beyond Formal Operations, Late Adolescent and Adult Cognitive Development. They talk about an ability to move into metasystemic thinking, especially dialogical thinking, dialogical cognition, and how this has a capacity to put us in touch with, afford us knowing in a much qualitatively deeper way than we can when we’re just adolescents. I think to be fair, post-formal operations are not things that many adults actually even realize. And this is not a criticism of them or impugning their intelligence. It’s that how often have they been educated such that they get to practice this kind of dialectical discussion, contemplation, communing. Where do they go to practice it such that they become capable of this dialectical thinking, this dialectical realization. Dialectic and the dialogos can put us into deep conformity with the world. It can coordinate the unfolding of the mind and the unfolding of the world so they unfold through and beyond each other, giving us this deep touch taste of realness that helps us guide our, it guides us in realization and affords us training all the skills and virtues, the enhancement of relevance realization, the complexification of cognition coupled to the complexification of the world, everything we’ve been talking about. It affords us becoming the wise connoisseur of the touch taste of the real. Thank you very much for your time and attention. One of the things I think is happening with Kierkegaard, I mean he’s deeply critical of Hegel, but he’s also influenced by Hegel’s notion of the dialectic. But it’s like he sort of backs out of the Hegelian dialectic into the Socratic dialectic. He parodies the Hegelian dialectic. He parodies, he makes use of it. Like I said, he sort of, he Socrates it, as you say. But he does so with a great deal of irony. Yes, yes, yes. And you know, his form, much, there’s a lot that we can say about his critique of Hegel on its sort of philosophical grounds. But when you look at his form, the form of his authorship, the critique is implicit in the form itself. So when I say that you can’t get to know Kierkegaard’s thought without getting to know Kierkegaard, what I mean is that Kierkegaard in sort of, he enfolds you into the subjective character of his conscious experience.