https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=42MvlOYYgZU
Learned ignorance has to be the culmination of dialectic interdiologos. This is the greatest of aporias, and it is aporia that you must accept if you’re going to actually be one, although you can never know it. Welcome back to After Socrates. This is episode 12. Last time we discussed stoicism and how it developed the vertical axis of dialectic through a process of internalizing Socrates into inner speech, and thereby transforming that inner speech into inner dialectic interdiologos. We talked about how that vertical axis involved awakening to existential moding and awakening from modal confusion. We then related that to apter’s work in reversal theory and the metamotivational framing of arousal. We talked about the two modes, the paratelic play mode and the telic work mode, and that what we’re looking for in order to get into the being mode and engage in development is to get into the paratelic mode, and that requires safety framing. Then I proposed to you that what stoicism is, is a way of trying to create a powerful, universal safety framing for an individual by getting them to notice the distinction between the framing and the event, etc. That led to the discussion of reciprocal opening, and especially the notion of the logos of your being to the logos of being, and the falling in love with being as you flow with the flow of nature, and that experience, that realization that one is one with nature flowing with it because one is in love with it brings with it joy as something distinct from pleasure. Now I want to move to neoplatonism, and neoplatonism is kind of like the grand unified field theory of all of the Socratic lineage here. It’s the synoptic integration. It takes Plato, especially his ideas of a rational Socratic spirituality, and adds to it Aristotelian science, especially Aristotle’s psychology and ontology, and then adds to it from stoicism this idea of the logos to the logos, the vertical axis, and from cynicism, the horizontal dimension, and the moving beyond of the conventional. So neoplatonism is going to integrate these all together, and it is therefore going to take dialectic into the logos into, I would posit, its ultimate form. So the grand integrator, not the grand inquisitor, the grand integrator is Plotinus, and he’s living around the year 270 of the common era, so a very long time after Socrates. And if you want more on his general approach, take a look at episode 18 of Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. I want to concentrate on what he does with dialectic. So first of all, Plotinus wrote a treatise on dialectic, called On Dialectic, and as you might expect from what I’ve said, it’s not an instruction manual. You go, oh finally somebody has written on dialectic, that will be the instruction manual. Nope, nope. Instead, what he proposes, and here I’m making use of what’s considered authoritative work right now, translation and commentary, Paul Caligas’s, the Aeneids of Plotinus. So Plotinus wrote a bunch of treatises, and then they’re grouped into nine treatises per Aeneid, that means the nine, and this is excellent because it’s not only a sort of a crisp up-to-date translation, there’s also extensive notes and commentary. This is only of the first three Aeneids, but it has a lot of the individual treatises in it. So as he points out, Caligas, for Plotinus, dialectic is an intellectual journey. We must listen to the language, theoria, intellectual journey, right, is an intellectual journey, and it’s a journey that’s not just journey, we must pursue in order to ascend to the first principle, the good, and we already have a sense of what the good is. The word intellectual is technically right, but it’s misleading. It’s not as misleading, I presume, in the German. When we think of intellectual, we think of somebody who’s stirred a lot of propositional theory and can do that sort of academic work with it. When you hear intellectual, that’s actually a translation of noesis and noetic, and you remember that that has to do with that perspectival knowing and our salient landscaping and grasping things in a moment of insight all at once. So I would say the noetic journey we must pursue in order to ascend to the first principle, the good. So notice this is not about logic, this is about the anagotic journey. So dialectic is not a matter of logic, it’s a matter of noesis and noesis. Remember, noesis is that perspectival, and then noesis is that liberating participatory knowing. Dialectic is a matter of the noesis, noesis of the logos, following the logos within anagogy, within that reciprocal opening, within the ascent. Another way of putting it is that dialectic is the study, and one of the translations of logos is study. Dialectic is the study of the dialectic is the study of the nature and interconnection of real being, the eidos, plural, such that one comes to an understanding of the intelligible world. That’s also from Caligas, from the same book. I want you to note that point. It’s the nature and interconnection of real being, eidos, so that one understanding, one comes to have an understanding of the intelligible world, the intelligibility of reality, one comes to really realize the intelligibility of reality, the really real. So Plotinus thinks of Aristotelian logic, which is also called syllogistic logic, which eventually became propositional logic and symbolic logic and etc. It’s the whole beginning of logic. Plotinus argues that Aristotelian logic is preliminary and subservient to this journey, and this is how Plotinus corrects, responds to the Stoics characterization of dialectic. If you remember, they had followed Aristotle and they used the word dialectic basically as a synonym for logic. Plotinus says, no, no, you’ve got it all wrong. You’re leaving out all this platonic stuff around anagagae, etc. that you’ve got to make central again. Now, I’m going to read an excellent quote from Caligas again on page 149, because when I was reading it, I was thinking about I was going to put it in my own words, and yet he says it in a way that I don’t want it change in any way. I’ll read it to you and then I’ll explain it to you. But, and he’s already done the contrast with Aristotelian logic, but in order to comprehend Plotinus’s viewpoint, we must come to appreciate that for him, dialectic and syllogistic logic did not represent competing methods sharing a common object, but distinct rational approaches operating at separate ontological levels. So it’s not like there’s Aristotelian logic and Neoplatonic dialectic, and they’re both talking about the same thing. They are different, distinct, rational processes, and they’re operating at different levels of reality, ontological levels. For Plotinus, the Eidos, plural sense, of intelligibility is more primordial than reasoning. It is the ground of reasoning. It is, there is a logos that is the ground of logic. Now this is a quote from Plotinus, for it, the intelligible world order, is not the result of following out a train of logical consequences or purpose of thought. It is before, it is before consequential and purpose of thinking. Before. Ground makes it possible. There’s a logos before logic. We’re familiar with this, especially with my proposal of understanding logos in terms of recursive relevance realization. Reasoning and representation depend on fundamental framing, the relevance realization that’s going on within meta-orientation and meta-optimal gripping. We’ve already done that argument, and there’s a lot, and I’ve made the argument elsewhere, and there’s publications, that’s a core move. So there’s a logos deeper than logic. This co-emerges with the intelligibility of the world. Relevance, recursive relevance realization, and the intelligibility of the world are bound together. Remember they are a co-emerging, co-evolving real relation. That’s about the idea of cognition being inherently embodied, enacted, extended, and embedded. So using that language we built together, we can say Plotinus is proposing that dialectic is about the realization of this primordial relevance realization, and its alithea relationship to primordial intelligibility, and how they’re bound up together. Dialectic helps us to realize this in both senses of the word. Become aware of and actualize. And as we’ll see, Plotinus is going to do that while also integrating the horizontal and the vertical dimensions of dialectic. He’s ambitious, but not without merit because he’s titanically brilliant. When you’re reading Plotinus, it’s, I’ve got words from Plotinus tattooed on one of my legs because I was, like when you’re reading Plotinus, you’re reading something that’s simultaneously an argument and a spiritual exercise, a contemplative practice, but also a conceptual articulation. It’s like the words and the music of a song just interwoven together, and you find yourself capable of understanding it in more than a propositional way. It really aligns all the kinds of knowing, and therefore gives you a much more profound understanding. I want to unpack this very slowly. This is sort of a core move that’s going to come here, because I say Plotinus is going to come to a very ambitious conclusion, and one that I’m going to advocate for. So let’s go through an argument that articulates Plotinus’s central argument, his sort of argument behind all of his arguments, but I’m going to supplement it with some recent cog sci, cognitive science, and a lot of the work we’ve already done together. Okay, so the idea here is we can talk about cognition as being simultaneously top down and bottom up. So take a look at this. I’m going to write out this, the cat. You see this, and you look at this, and you see the first one of these as an H, and you see the second one of these as an A. Now if you think of this in sort of a linear inferential model, you get this weird almost pseudo paradox. Well, why do you read one as an H and another as an A? Because I read the whole word. But then I would say to you, but in order to read the whole word, don’t you have to first read the letters? So I have to read the letters to get the word, but I have to have the word in order to disambiguate the letters. Therefore, reading is impossible. Of course, reading is not impossible. We have to give up the framing that would make it a paradox, because I’m reading right now, and so were you a moment ago. Instead, what we have to understand is that attention and cognition in general is simultaneously going bottom up and top down. It’s going up from the features to the gestalt, the whole, and it’s at the same time going from the gestalt down to the features. At all kinds of levels of analysis, you see it within perception, bottom up, top down. If you look at comprehensive models of cognition, like recursive relevance realization, bottom up, top down, predictive processing, bottom up, top down, the bottom up of error, the top down of prediction. If you look at deep learning, same thing, bottom up variation, top down selection. You’ve got all, and as I said, we just recently published a paper integrating RRR and predictive processing. There’s deep connections. You can see them in the 2012 paper, Between Relevance Realization and Deep Learning. I’m not going to go on about this. This idea is so now pervasive in our best understanding that cognition is this dynamically self-organizing, simultaneously bottom up and top down. You go, okay. What it gives us is it gives us generative models. Do you remember what a generative model is? It’s not a picture. A generative model is capable of predicting how something would act or behave under many different circumstances. This relevance realization and predictive processing model are ultimately transjective in nature. They’re about how the meaning co-emerges from the recursive relevance realization, predictive processing, and the causal structure of the world. They’re co-creating, remember, ala theia, ala theia between the agent and the arena so that meaning is possible. Okay, so again, pretty basic stuff now in cognitive psychology and cognitive science, especially the bottom up top down. Now we can also note something else. We can note the same principles at work in and cognition in the world. So look at recursive relevance realization. It’s basically cognitive evolution. Remember when we talked about opponent processing and attention, variation and selection, variation and selection. It’s passing through the reproductive cycle of the sensory motor loop, but that’s life. And this is the deep continuity hypothesis of my friend and colleague, Evan Thompson. The same principles that are constitutive of life, evolutionary principles, are constitutive of cognition, same principles. We talked about self-organizing criticality and insight, but we noted that self-organizing criticality is also at work in biological evolution. That’s how evolution works. It’s called punctuated equilibrium. There’s long periods of stability when evolution is basically this smooth self-organizing process and then it breaks apart because of something like an asteroid impact. It goes critical and then there’s a huge jump in speciation evolution. It’s also doing self-organizing criticality, but you can see self-organizing criticality in many levels of analysis of the world. So the principles of cognition, they’re not representing the principles. They’re instantiating them. They’re co-participating in them. Think about the no-thingness of the I and the no-thingness of being, same principles, all these levels, the same principles are at work. So the idea here is cognition is recursive relevance realization. That’s what I’m proposing to you, a way of understanding logos, and the world is recursive reality realization. What? What do you mean by that? Well, we talk about levels. We talk about the atomic, the atomic, the atomic, the atomic, the atomic, the atomic, the atomic, the atomic, the atomic, the atomic, the atomic, the atomic, the atomic, the atomic. What do you mean by that? Well, we talk about levels. We talk about the atomic, the subatomic level, and then the atomic level, and then the molecular level, and then you can get the level of living things, and then the level of cultures or communities of things, etc., all these levels. Oh, yeah. And there, they are recursively, down on the level below it and bottom up on the level. It emerges from the bottom but it influences back downward the level that it emerged from. Bottom up, top down, recursive relevance realization. Bottom up, top down, recursive reality realization. So this is a lot of sort of inductive argument that reality and cognition share the same grammar. Not the same content but the same grammar. They share the same principles of operation and Constitution. Now this leads us to Aristotle’s conformity theory and you can look at episodes 6 & 7 in Awakening from the Meeting Crisis if you want to go into Aristotle more deeply. The idea is that cognition and reality share the same form but this is in the Eidos sense. They share the same generative grammar. They share the same generative grammar. And of course that notion of Aristotle’s conformity, same Eidos, same form, is what underwrites the idea of participatory knowing that’s generating the affordances for cognition and intelligibility between the agent and the arena. This is again, remember, knowing by co-being. We are being mutually shaped by the physics, mutually shaped by the biology, mutually shaped by the culture, mutually shaped, etc. We can be mutually shaped because we share the same generative grammar. And that’s sort of an inductive argument. Here’s a deeper argument that’s more of a transcendental argument, not a transcendent, a transcendental, a Kantian style of argument. But I think there’s something very analogous to this in Plotinus and people have made that kind of comparison so I’m not the only one doing this. If the intelligibility of the world does not conform to reality then we are actually in the grips of an absolute skeptical solipsism. Because if intelligibility does not disclose reality then what are we saying? We’re saying that the mind doesn’t touch the world. The mind doesn’t touch the world which means skepticism. The mind doesn’t touch the world which means I have no reason for believing there are other minds. Solipsism. I am the only mind. There is no real world. There is no real knowledge and it’s absolute because I can’t even know that I existed two seconds ago because I’m relying on my memory and then my memory is fallible and there’s… And as many people have pointed out you can sort of get to that place propositionally but it’s actually not one that you can even think about without engaging in performative contradiction. Why? Because real, we’ve talked about this before, real is a comparative term. This is a point made by Plato and then made really well by Marleau-Ponty. When I say something is real is an illusion that’s always by comparing it to something that I take to be real. When I take this to be real, when I am not mistaken about it, that means the intelligibility and the reality are conforming. Saying everything is an illusion is like saying everything is tall. It doesn’t mean anything. So there has to be… whenever we are positing an illusion there has to be something that we are contrasting it with and when we are making that contrast we are not mistaking. We are taking things as they are. We are grasping them as they are. The intelligibility and the reality are conforming. So you may say to me but what about current ideas that most of what we see is an illusion or a simulation? For the thing about simulation, see my conversation with Yoshebach on theories of everything and what was really interesting is we went through this and I kept pressing that kind of argument on him until I got to a point where he basically was privileging math and then I said well you’re a Platonist and after a moment’s reflection he said yeah that’s what I am. So Plato would say yeah we’re in the cave but we can wake up from it. So let’s put aside that. Let’s take out the other one that it’s mostly an illusion. So this is an example of a kind of argument that’s popular right now. Many different people. I won’t single anyone out. Because we evolved most of our experience is an illusion because it’s adaptive and not accurate and that sounds really provocative like we might be all trapped in a dream but notice again notice the secret conformity. Ah but the theory of evolution is true because in order to give the argument explaining why and we everything might be illusion I have to accept the reality of evolution and you go okay so what ah remember that interconnection of intelligibility I flagged a few minutes ago? The theory of evolution isn’t atomic isolated unto itself. That’s not how intelligibility works. So if the theory of evolution is true not only is natural selection the case but genetics because we need Mendelian genetics to actually explain evolution and if genetics is true we need chemistry which means the knowledge of the elements is true. We also need the age of the earth to be very extensive because if it was if the earth was only a few thousand years old evolution can’t be real. It doesn’t have enough time to occur. So we need the age of the earth to be real which means we need all that stuff about geology and tectonic theory explaining earthquakes all of that stuff that has to be real. We need the atomic in the physical sense theory to be real because we use that with radio right when we used when we do radiocarbon dating and all the other kinds of radioactivity based dating. It also means that the theory of optics and electronics must be real because we use microscopes. Computation must be real and that means information processing and information must be real. History must have a reality to it because we have to be able to say well the asteroid hit at this point and that’s why the dinosaurs died and that’s why we evolved which means astronomy has to be right and telescopes have to work and language has to work because we are communicating to each other connecting all these things together and math has to be right because we’re doing all the calculations and there it’s running on the computers and so and what and why the asteroid well something banged it this many years ago and the earth was like you get you see where this goes you can’t keep the theory of evolution isolated if it’s real it’s interwoven inextricably with all these other realities. There’s a vast web of interconnected intelligibility so you end up saying things well yeah all of that’s real but sometimes I see a stick in water and it’s bent and it’s straight yeah. Some people try to dig in their heels and say maybe all of that’s false but but the math the math is real what do you mean by that? What do you mean by math? I mean Einstein famously said it’s a deep mystery why math should track reality. Kant proposed that we’d write the opposite we’re imposing math on the world. You get all kinds of problems with that especially if you believe that science is actually discovering the causal structure of things. What you’re basically saying at some level is the fundamental grammar of intelligibility is captured in math and that fundamental grammar of intelligibility making sense is unquestionably connected to reality. You’re just making the platonic argument and I think that’s what actually happened in my conversation excellent conversation he was an excellent conversation partner with Yoshebach on theories of everything. Okay so see we have to have intelligibility and reality conform and we can’t do that in just an isolated sense here or there it’s a vast web. So what we need to see is that Plotinus is actually reversing and here I’m influenced by the work of my colleague at U of T Lloyd Gerson one of the great scholars of Plotinus and Platonism. Plotinus reverses Descartes question and we’ve taken Descartes way of formulating the question as something that is unquestionable. What’s Descartes question? How does the mind work? That’s what we have to answer first epistemology how does the mind work and then once I figure that out then I can tell you what the world is like and we’ve been trying that for a very long time and we’ve been having a lot of difficulties with it so much so that everybody most of the main philosophical movements are trying to undermine the Cartesian framework pragmatism, phenomenology, postmodernism etc. So Plotinus reverses it and asks this question how must the world be such that it is intelligibly real to us? See the difference? We don’t start in the mind and then try to work out to the world. We reject the possibility of absolute skepticism and solipsism and then we ask what must the world be like such that it is intelligibly real to me or real to us? So notice you’re not going from epistemology how we know to ontology the structure of the world. You are going from ontology the structure of the world as grounding your epistemology and notice there’s no place you can stand outside of Descartes and Plotinus and say well clearly Descartes is right. Clearly Plotinus is right I could equally say it. So let’s take it that Plotinus has a very viable grounding and then what his answer to that question, the answer that we’re building together right now is well the grammar of cognition and the grammar of the world, the generative grammar of both, are fundamentally using the same principles. They’re the same. The grammar of cognition is recursively layered with top-down and bottom-up movement. It’s not really movement, it’s the flow of information but we usually represent it by arrows of motion. What’s the generative grammar of the world? It’s recursively layered with top-down and bottom-up movement. It’s not movement through space, it’s ontological causation between levels. But the grammars, the generative grammars are fundamentally the same. That’s what you need in order to answer Plotinus’s question. How must the world be such that it is intelligibly real to us? Take a look at knowing. What is it when we come to know? Well we have a bunch of separate phenomena, many things, and we find an underlying shared principle for them all. Oh all of these things, you know lightning and that static stuff and rate, like that’s all electromagnetism. So out of the many we realize one. Knowing is a relationship between one and many. What is it for something to be for us? When is it a real entity for us? Well when it’s one. This is why we don’t think of a pile of stones as a sort of real thing, but we think of a bird as a real thing because the bird is structured so that it functions as an integrated whole. But why do you think of me and the chair as separately real things but when I sit in the chair you don’t think oh there’s a new entity, John Chair, because that unity is very fragile. It doesn’t actually point to an ongoing structural functional oneness. So knowing is a many into one or a one flowing into many. We’ll come back why you want to do it both ways in a sec. But being is also many parts, many components into one, a unity over many things. So the principles by which something is known and the principles by which it is are again the same. I’m showing it again and again and again. Reality and knowing are a one many. This is why the problem of the one and the many was the deep problem of ancient epistemology as opposed to our Cartesian problems of how do we know when we know. So I’ve given you many different ways an inductive argument and then this more transcendental argument and then another argument from Plotinus about what is it to know and what is it for something to be and we keep coming back to this shared generative grammar. So here’s a beautiful book by one of the great current neoplatonic scholars, Eric Pearl. Now what it is is it’s actually first of all it’s a really great translation of a treatise by Plotinus called On the Three Primary Levels of Reality. On the Three Primary Levels of Reality and then his excellent commentary. It’s a really good place to start and he makes this really powerful argument. He makes a powerful argument that in Plotinus when he’s talking about the levels, he’s always talking about levels of the self and levels of reality. So a level has two poles to it. A level of the self, a degree of knowing and a level of being and when you move up a level of self it corresponds to a different level of being and vice versa and so you have all of the when so when he’s talking about levels Plotinus is always talking about sort of levels of self, levels of self-consciousness and levels of reality. They are tracking together and you see what’s happening here. What Plotinus is doing is saying okay whenever you’re knowing something you’re in conformity with it but that’s the horizontal but it’s not just one level. The levels are also recursively realizing so you’ve got conformity this way and you’ve got the emergence and emanation this way. He’s completely weaving together the horizontal and the vertical and you might say you just slipped in a couple terms there emergence and emanation. Well first of all emergence is now sort of getting pretty much widely accepted achieving kind of a consensus status. This is the idea that levels of reality emerge from lower levels because of the interactions going on at the lower levels. So you have a chemical interaction between oxygen and hydrogen and it produces water and water is not a gas it’s a liquid and well at room temperature etc and it has a whole bunch of different properties that neither hydrogen nor oxygen have. We have sodium which is poisonous you have chlorine which is poisonous but when they interact they produce a molecule that has a separate kind of structure that is actually nutritious to you called salt and so the idea is right you’ve got emergence up this is the bottom up and this is now a prevalent way for people talking in science and there’s been an increasing acknowledgement that we’re going to need that vertical level in order to explain reality. We can’t just explain it in terms of the horizontal interaction. For example the particles the particles are identical all the electrons are identical all the neutrons are identical all the protons are identical and yet look around you where does all that difference come from and that difference is what makes a difference that’s what information is if it was a homogenous identity there’d be no information there’d be no life there’d be no knowledge etc and so many people yes emergence not everybody it’s still you know it’s science it’s still debate and discussion and philosophy but it’s no longer a crazy idea it’s it’s moving towards being a mainstream idea. Now here’s the problem that means we already have levels of being but we put the most real at the bottom we just have an inverted neoplatonism so remember for Plato it’s more and more real towards the good we just have an inverted one where it goes more and more real as you go down and everything and you have people who say this they’ll make reductive claims like love is nothing but a chemical process and then you say oh but chemical processes are nothing but atomic processes and atomic processes are nothing but quantum processes and quantum processes are nothing but probabilistic relations that are only described mathematically in abstract state space you know that’s the problem and when you get down there how is love different from a cat because a cat is the same thing it’s just probabilistic distributions captured by abstract math you’re not saying anything it sounds profound. Here’s the problem if you only have the bottom up that’s emergence and not the top down that’s emanation you face a problem that’s called epiphenomenalism I try not to use multi syllabic terms but this is it’s another E and it goes well what’s epiphenomenalism epiphenomenalism for example is a theory of consciousness and epiphenomena is something that is an effect but is in no way a cause so many people want to say consciousness emerges out of the brain’s activity but it doesn’t have any causal powers so it’s an epiphenomena it is an effect in no kind of cause now that is very problematic it’s very problematic because what that means is you’re saying that something exists and is real and it has no cause or power it has no ability to make effects you’re saying it is real but it is not actual because actual means capable of acting causally interacting making effects and that is a bizarre claim it’s a very bizarre claim epiphenomenalism is such a disaster of a conclusion that you should take it that the chain of reasoning that led to it is somehow going fundamentally awry if epiphenomenalism were true of intelligibility and cognition notice the performative cognitive the performative contradiction we get in for science we’d say the only the only real level is the quantum level well how do you know that well I know that because I’ve got right I’ve got these gauges here and I’m right and I’m looking at them and I’m noting things down and I’m putting it into computer and then you know I’m talking with Angela and we’re arguing about it and then we could so all of that is an illusion not real epiphenomenal has no causal power and yet that is the basis for you claiming the quantum realm exists how do you get from all of this non-real to the real you have an ontology in which science itself cannot exist and relatedly you have an ontology in which we have scientific explanations for everything except of course for our capacity to generate scientific explanations so science and us don’t actually really exist that’s gonna really mess people up with the meeting crisis and it’s right you get a performative contradiction this is also related to the measurement problem in quantum mechanics which is basically this problem the the thing by which I measure a quantum event can’t be at the same ontological level as the quantum thing because it has to have a kind of stability and independence or I can’t use it to measure the gas chamber that’s doing the the the tracing right of the particle decay has to itself be at a different level from the particles in order to measure them making measure them making measurement of them possible I can’t measure one quantum thing with another quantum thing these are all variations of the same point the upper level has to be as real as the lower levels the way this is talked about by people like Alicia Urraro in dynamics in action and people are making use of complexity theory and dynamical systems theory is you have bottom-up causation and you have top-down constraint so causes are events that make things happen constraints are conditions not events that shape the possibility of things and before you go oh you’re introducing weird things into science no no what’s a law equals MC squared it’s not an event doesn’t happen somewhere it’s not in a place it’s a constraint on what is possible it is a real shaping of real possibility well possibility isn’t real oh so do you believe in the conservation laws that are fundamental to science the conservation of energy here’s kinetic energy it stops oh I just destroyed energy oh no no the kinetic energy became oh right potential energy and what do you mean by potential you mean the real shaping of possibility so think about a tree all the chemical events cause bottom-up the structure of the tree but why that structure that structure changes the probability that a photon will hit a chlorophyll molecule and empower the tree bottom-up causation top-down constraint emergence emanation do you see what’s happening here reality is dialectical it’s the horizontal and vertical flow of logos it’s the bottom-up and top-down it’s dialectical but it’s happening in a reality that is combinatorially explosive inexhaustible so reality is dialectic into inexhaustibility what am I proposing what is Plotinus proposing he’s proposing the reality is dialectic into dialogos that’s what it is that’s his proposal and I’ve given you a whole argument for it and I can even point you to other people’s work like Scott Berman Platonism and the objects of science arguing that science actually radically presupposes Platonism think about that reality is constantly shining into intelligibility that gives us the conformity sense of realness and withdrawing into mystery that gives us the surprise sense so we’re I’m trying to see these taking these generative grammars to their depths to the primordial level and they converge they conform to each other conformity is to improve the generative grammar of cognition so as to better track the through line generated by the grammar of being that’s what dialectic is for Plotinus the logos of your being to the logos of being that’s what dialectic helps you to realize dialectic into so notice how this is now giving a richer depth to the stoic idea about logos to logos dia logos so on one hand we have the self-realization of your cognition your self-consciousness your rationality got all of that that self-realization and that is bound and intermeshed with the real self-realization of reality and where did I get that phrase from from Nishatani in his book religion and nothingness and that’s his definition by the way of religion where self-realization and the real self-realization of reality are conformed are at one with each other now he means religion in the sense of religio ratio religio I wanted to add one thing to his phrase the real self-realization of reality and this comes from DC Schindler for its own sake reality is doing that for its own sake that is the gift of realness that things have an independence from us they are for themselves in a way that is deeply analogous to how we are for ourselves we are conscious of it in relevance realization they exemplify it in reality realization but that’s the gift of realness if things didn’t have that for for itself Ness we would be we would have nothing to crack open our egocentrism that for itself Ness the through line and the promise that the through line that intelligibility will never fail that’s the good that’s the good and now you can bring these two big strains together we’ve had a extensive argument about the one it’s actually the one wanting the one wanting and the wanting that it becomes one the one wanting the one short form for that which we’ve been talking about here and the good which we talked about when we talked about the Socratic Platonic model what Plotinus is now saying is now taking those and saying by the way their one and then I propose to you that what he’s saying is the identity the non-logical identity of the one it’s it’s right is the good between the one and the good that’s the sense of the good remember as the through line between the true the good and the beautiful the non-logical identity between the one and the good that is the basis of onto normativity why we find the really real good in this way that transcends our quest for the true the good and the beautiful and binds them together of course when we get to that place this is not something we can know propositionally you say why what what what Plotinus says look the one can’t be something you know because knowing requires a distinction between a knower and the known or as we would say following Descartes between subjectivity and objectivity the very structure of knowing is a structure that is based on a capacity for things being integrated connected unified the so the knower and the known the subject and the object to use our language but that means that the one cannot be known by us because we are always in a frame when we engage that any kind of knowing that puts us out of conformity to the one saying it from another angle the one is the ground of intelligibility the ground of realization in both senses and therefore it is not something that can be known or made intelligible because it is the ground of intelligibility and knowing so if you remember the when people are in that state of experiencing on on to normativity it’s often ineffable to them they can’t put it into words so we can understand the psychology now but even more so what we see is at the very apex of this whole journey we get to something that we cannot know we can only participate in we get to a place of learned ignorance in the most profound sense because you cannot know the ground of knowing the ground of being the ground that grounds the relationship between them etc learned ignorance has to be the culmination of dialectic into this is the greatest of a porias and it is a poria that you must accept if you’re going to actually be one although you can never know it now of course you can see deep connections here between neoplatonism neoplatonic dialectic and the and the whole relation of logos to logos and the wanting and the wanting one and the emanation and emergency like think about the incarnation and the ascension you can think of the logos and our logos becomes at one with the logos of being all of this probably reminds many of you of Christianity and that’s not a coincidence because Christianity basically merged with neoplatonism so we’re going to take that up but we can’t move immediately to Christian neoplatonism and its development of dialectic into the logos because it really develops it and learned ignorance because we have to go from we have to go to a lynchpin figure here’s Plotinus and here’s Proclus and Proclus is deeply influential over Dionysus, Pseudo-Dionysus, Dionysius the Areopagite who is the pivotal figure of Eastern theology and spirituality but Proclus is also a huge influence over st. Augustine who is the pivotal figure of Western theology and spirituality so we have to first go through Proclus and what did Proclus add to Plotinus well there’s a lot but he’s going to add something and initially it’s going to be again weird he adds what I’m going to call theurgia it’s often the modern translation is theurgy and when people hear that they hear magic and the occult and weirdness and oh no step back I’m going to ask you instead instead of thinking of magic with all of its weird connotations and its fantastical and illusory connotations I want you to think instead of ritual think of ritual and what Proclus does is bring out the ritual dimension of dialectic into dialogos in a way that is going to be taken up into neoplatonic Christianity and before you go what what are you talking about? Liturgy is such ritual. So we’re poised here at sort of the end of we’re moving towards the end of the pagan development of dialectic into dialogos and we’re poised on the pivotal figure literally the pivotal figure of Proclus it’s going to take us into Christian neoplatonism and how it’s going to develop the ritual liturgical aspects of dialectic into dialogos but that’s our next lecture instead what I want to do now is give you some points to ponder and I want to say these ones slowly and I want you to really you’ve probably been doing it with all of them but really savor let this really roll around in your head dialectic into dialogos is not just a practice it is a way of participating in a principle in process of reality you’re doing this practice but this practice doesn’t just represent reality it instantiates it it participates in it it conforms to it it makes you at one with reality you get the grammar the generative grammar of cognition and the generative grammar of reality the principle and process of reality to be fundamentally at one with each other this is offering you that this practice not only cultivates wisdom and virtue and everything we’ve been talking about but this next move that platinus gives us and proclus is going to open up this practice offers you deep at one mint dia logos is a way by way of the logos you participate in deep at one mint when we do dialectic into dia logos we are participating in this principle in process our individual and collective relevance realization bottom up from individuals top down from collective oh there it is again participates in the emergence emanation that is at the heart of reality we not only get intimate with each other horizontal we not only get intimate with the logos of the we space all of that becomes intimate with the ground of the common ground of intelligibility and being being at one with the deepest of realities while we one collectively and individually this is a profound sense of being connected in from our depths to the depths of mattering being connected to something that has a reality and an intelligibility and a goodness beyond our egocentric concerns this at one mint is a deeply deeply meeting at one mint is a deeply deeply meaningful thing now i’m using that pronunciation at one mint because i’ve not yet used the christian pronunciation which is atonement because christianity put a spin on the notion of at one mint that’s not present in neoplatonism but what does that one what’s the at one mint supposed to be well you’re supposed to be reconciled with god the ultimate reality and that is supposed to bring us a profound kind of abundant life joy again all these consonances you can see how these how neoplatonism and christianity are starting already in your i hope in your mind to dance i’m not trying to make you a christian that’s not my prerogative it’s not something i want to do i just want to set up the next step we’re going to take but i’m using that foreshadowing that step to get you to realize the depth of religio ratio religio the depth of it that is possible in the practice participation of dialectic into dialogus remember all of this is not to say that the content of our minds and the content of the world are the same that’s to think in a thingy way but if you move to non-thingy and you get the principles of degenerative grammar then you can realize the deep conformity the deep at one mint you can be you can participate in the co-realization of the world and of your self and your cognition you yourself and the world are our siblings co-participating in that shared generative grammar so i’m going to show you some books on neoplatonism neoplatonism one that you might want to take a look at is the neoplatonic socrates excellent crystal addy has an article in here about how proclus took the socratic demonian and modified it and brought it into theurgia i would love to do work on that but i can’t but i will point you to excellent excellent anthology i pointed out already this excellent book by pearl i recommend that there’s a whole series of these books i recommend this also by andrew smith the particular anead 1.6 the treatise by by patanus on beauty is one of the most accessible of his works i recommend starting there and if you can read it and read a good commentary on it here’s one there’s another one of course in this really good book too for those of you who want something a little bit more originally accessible but nevertheless valuable i recommend these three books by arthur verse lewis who i’ve got to talk to and if you only read one of the three read this one the perennial philosophy this is not aldous huxley arthur verse lewis is arguing there there is a perennial there’s a through line to western spirituality the perennial philosophy and that through line is neoplatonism and that’s one of the three books by neoplatonism and that’s what this basic argument is here a very good book to go with it these three books form an excellent trilogy is the mystical state politics gnosis and emergent cultures also highly recommended highly recommended the third book is platonic mysticism contemplative science philosophy literature and art if you want to follow up this excellent book commentary the translation and commentary by eric pearl to my mind eric pearl is the single best expository teacher explainer of neoplatonism he’s got two other books i recommend i’ve got so many books on neoplatonism but platinus this is this is like a tenth but i’m trying to give right different levels so this these the pearl stuff is the people who want to really or maybe after you’ve read the other stuff you can go into this but this is the single best book on neoplatonism it’s actually on christian neoplatonism the neoplatonism of dianesis the eriopagite and pearl is not a christian but nevertheless this is an astonishing book the neoplatonic philosophy of dianesis the eriopagite it’s called theophany excellent again not too thick and finally thinking being introduction to metaphysics in the classical tradition by eric de pearl and this book basically lays it goes through all the history from parmenides plato platinus all the way through and it basically is a development of the argument that i gave you about who the the conformity between the generative grammar of cognition and the generative grammar of reality okay i’m not going to give you a new practice what i’m going to do is ask you to reflect pro-sash and pro-chiron sati try to remember and remind when you’re doing the walking contemplative practice i gave you what you do those three levels right you’re doing the the level of the rhythm of process the melody of pattern the harmony of principle when you’re doing the seated practice that i taught you in episode 10 the the neoplatonic contemplative practice where we go through fusis into suke into noesis into hennosis into kenosis and theosis which takes the walking practice and develops it try to now realize that in that practice you are implementing and instantiating everything that i’ve been talking about in both those practices the walking and the seated version try to do them in the light of all of this try to impregnate and enrich those practices with this philosophical framework that’s your task thank you so very much as always for your time attention and commitment i want to propose to you that theurgia is a set of rituals that make use of symptomata to help people leap to a higher level of self-consciousness and reality disclosure more profound aletheia in a way so that they experience antinormativity