https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=nKZRElug2KE
Welcome back to After Socrates. This is episode 13. Last time we took a look at Platinus and the advent of Neoplatonism and we looked at his argument for a non-logical, non-propositional understanding of dialectic. We went through that very carefully and we came to the bold, but I think ultimately plausible proposal that reality itself is dialectic into dialogos. This is a deep realization that is also a profound learned ignorance. We see in this the possibility of deep resonance with Christianity. Christian Neoplatonism is going to be created out of the integration of this Neoplatonic tradition and the Christian tradition. I think it is no coincidence that just like Stoicism is going through a huge revival and we have all of the mindfulness revolution, that Neoplatonic Christianity is going through a huge revival right now. The Neoplatonic tradition inspired by Buddhism, the stuff around flow ultimately influenced by Taoism, the revival of Stoicism itself and now this resurgence of Neoplatonic Christianity. Pay attention please. See all of that. See how it’s relevant to what we’re talking about. But before we pass into two figures who exemplify that Christian Neoplatonism, Aragina, or also I’ve heard it pronounced as A-ru-gan-ah and I don’t know which one is the right pronunciation, who takes the proposal of Platonus that reality is itself dialectic into dialogos and just expands it within Christian Neoplatonism. I think he brings it to a kind of culmination. And then we’ll take a look at the work of Nicholas of Cusa who does the same thing with learned ignorance. But before we pass to those two figures, we have to go through a linchpin that is between Platonus and the way Neoplatonism enters into Christianity and that’s Proclus. Proclus is deeply influenced by the whole Neoplatonic tradition and he will have a profound influence on St. Augustine who is the pivotal figure of Christian spirituality and philosophy in the West and he will have a profound maybe even more profound influence on Dionysius the Areopagite who is the sort of, you might call it the one of the founding figures of Eastern Christianity. Now Proclus is much later than Platonus. He’s right near the end of things, 412, 485, the Western Roman Empire is collapsing, the Byzantine Empire is under strain, all of that is going through a huge transition. So he’s at the very end and in that sense he is summative of the whole pagan tradition and although he himself is critical of Christianity, he nevertheless affords it. There’s pretty good evidence that Dionysius, for example, just takes huge pieces of Proclus into his work on mystical theology and the divine names and also that Proclus is taken up by Ambrose who influences Augustine and also directly influences Augustine when he reads the book of the Platonus. So Dionysius, Proclus was one of the most prominent of those. Okay. So we can see where we’re heading. We’re heading to two figures who bring dialectic into dialogos and learned ignorance to sort of a culmination. And we’ll look at them together because they belong together. But before we can get there, we must pay attention to Proclus, the last flowering of pagan Neoplatonism. So what did Proclus add? He’s not, and many people would say, he’s not the genius that Platonus is. I would say that too. Is he a good philosopher? Yes, he’s a good thinker. I think that’s pretty clear. So what Proclus does is he takes Platonus and he takes a figure that’s between Platonus and Proclus, somebody who in his time was regarded as equivalent in stature to Platonus. And this is a philosopher by the name of Iamblichus. He was often called the Divine Iamblichus because of the stature that was given to him. I want to recommend a book to you, and it’s going to bring in the scary term that I foreshadowed, which is all about Iamblichus. This is Theurgia, or Theurgie, sorry, and the Soul by Gregory Shaw, The Neoplatonism of Iamblichus. This is one of the best books on Theurgia, its philosophical significance, the philosophical significance of Iamblichus. It is brilliant. And Gregory Shaw does so much, so much, so much brilliant work. He, for example, gives a very good argument for how you can see Neoplatonism, especially Proclus, being taken into Dionysius, etc. But this is an excellent book. So when we look at Proclus, he feels weird to us. Well, he feels weird to me and to other people when I read other scholars commenting on him, because on one hand, he writes the most logical argument for Neoplatonism, the Neoplatonic worldview that has ever been produced. It’s called The Elements of Theology, and it is patterned exactly on Euclid’s Elements of Geometry. There are axioms, theories, propositions, proofs, and he builds it exactly like Euclid. And you’re going through it and it’s just like, you know, you won’t see anything like that until Spinoza writes the Ethics, to my mind. Nothing as sort of logically like tight and as trying to get language to carve as close as it can to something like geometry, math. And yet, on the other hand, he practices theurgia, which many people, if they’ve even heard of the word, for them, it’s theurgy. And I get it. I get it. You walk into, you know, you know, new age bookstores and there’s sections on theurgy and it’s modern magic and how you can make people fall in love with you and other stuff like this. And it’s it’s and there’s. Yeah, I get it. I get it. I get it. And so people think theurgy. How could somebody so logical give into something so silly? Irrational. The occult. And all of that’s right. But you’ve seen in both this series and especially in Awakening in the Meaning Crisis, things can start out one way and become something very different by the time they reach our modern hands. One clear example from this series. Compare the way we use the word cynical to what ancient cynicism was or the way we use the word stoic to what ancient stoicism was. So I’m going to ask you to try and bracket that initial response. I’m going to I think it’s a legitimate thing, but I’m going to try and give you a more reasoned argument about what’s going on in Proclus in a way that can make sense to us. And I’m going to ask you, therefore, to treat theurgy like I asked you to treat the word divination. Try to put aside the modern and crazy and, you know, blah, blah, and let’s try to get back at what was going on. Let’s give these profound thinkers the benefit of the doubt. We gave it to Socrates. Let’s give it to Proclus. Now, when we go and when we turn to the ancient world, we see that there were two distinctions made about this theurgy. One was theurgy was clearly and very explicitly distinguished from sorcery and other kinds of magic. In addition, there was a distinction made between external and internal theurgia, which was very similar to the distinction made between technical and natural divination. The external was sort of techniques. The internal was much more the natural theurgia. They’re not totally separable, but the internal theurgia was considered far superior. All right, so let’s go to that first distinction. Sorcery and magic. Here is literally the book on Proclus. Like you want to understand Proclus. This is the book. There’s so much in here about the Neoplatonism. The section on Proclus and theurgy is fantastic. So this is Radic Chlup, Proclus and Introduction. Don’t be misled by the title introduction. This is not a book you read at the beach. You got to read this carefully and slowly. It’s good idea that you’ve got you’ve read some other books about Neoplatonism before you pick this up. Sorcery was considered to be the kind of magic that works in terms of what we would call using our language horizontal sympathy. Things belong on the same level, even in the same broad categories. They co-participate in some principle, and that’s how we can manipulate things through that sympathy. By the way, the Stoics believed in this as well. And before you go silly people with notions of sympathetic magic. Remember, there’s lots of things where we agree that that happens. You can think of the way music can induce a trance or a particular state in somebody. Right. And because there’s the patterns in the environment and the patterns in consciousness start to participate and they start to co-shape and they start to fall into a kind of alignment with each other. I’m not saying that magic, sympathetic magic works and or anything like that. I’m trying to get you to understand what was meant by this horizontal dimension. The other important feature about sorcery is that its purpose is egocentric and therefore often immoral and theurgia is not egocentric. And it is directed towards the cultivation of virtue. So theurgia is not horizontal. It’s vertical. It’s not egocentric. It’s ontocentric, reality centric. Or if you want to put a religious spin on it, it’s theocentric. And it’s oriented not towards personal power. It’s oriented towards the cultivation of virtue and wisdom. You may say, oh, that’s all good and fine, but that doesn’t mean it’s true. I get it. Give me more time, please, to try and make a case. So theurgia made use of what are called synthamata. It’s S-Y or S-U because we don’t have quite the right sound in English. S-Y or S-U N-T-H-E-M-A-T-A. Synthamata, having the same theme, we would say. But for the theurgist, these are symbols. And remember how we’re using that notion. These are symbols of the vertical process of emanation and emergence. Or what they called procession, emanation, and return, emergence. The idea here is something at one level that points to, and in that sense, is significant of, a higher level. And therefore, it aids us in moving from one level to another. You’re saying, what do you mean by that? Remember the neoplatonic idea that you have levels of the self, levels of consciousness and cognition, self-awareness, and that they are bound up with levels of reality. They co-define and co-shape each other. The Synthamata are symbols that transform consciousness, cognition, and character, and thereby disclose new levels, new arenas for cognition and awareness. So the Synthamata in that sense are catalysts for propelling the agent arena relationship up a level of co-realization. So you’re moving from one of those levels to another level. And of course, that is a transformative experience. In fact, it’s an example of what we’ve been calling trans-framing. Both sides of the relation, the self-awareness, and the co-shape, are the same. And the point about transforming being a transformative experience is you cannot reason yourself through it. You cannot reason yourself through it. You cannot reason yourself through it. You cannot reason yourself through it. You cannot reason yourself through it. You cannot reason yourself through it. You cannot reason yourself through it. So the point about being a transformative experience is you cannot reason yourself through it. We’ve already talked about that. You cannot reason yourself from one level to another in the way that is required to cultivate wisdom. Of course, you can move up levels of abstraction in a taxonomy. But remember, we’ve put that notion away. And we’re talking more about this process of trans-framing in the vertical dimension of dialectic. And you can’t reason your way through that kind of transformative experience. So this is, of course, putting an emphasis on the non-propositional, the perspectival, and the participatory. And it’s putting an emphasis on the need for serious play within a safety framing that will afford you doing this. Now think about some analogies that may have happened in your life. And think about how they could closely elide into modal confusion. But you’re trying to become an adult. And so you sometimes will take on the props, the accoutrement of an adult, in order to get into the serious play of what it would be like to be an adult. Many people do this sort of thing. And some of it, of course, the props can be deleterious. They might start smoking or drinking. Some of the props are much less deleterious. People might start dressing a different way. You’ll see young men growing facial hair. Now, like I said, that can slide into modal confusion. But what if you had something that helped keep you clear of modal confusion and instead was helping you to do the serious play so that you could move to another level of self-awareness and facing reality, as we say. Of course, to face reality, it has to disclose itself. It has to face you in an appropriate way. So I just want to point out a book here. The Experience of Meaning by Zwicky. I believe it’s she. This is all about Gestalt psychology and moving from the features to the Gestalt going up the level and how really important that is and how the relationship to it is not one of linear inference or anything like that. And of course, she has a wonderful section on Plato’s theories of the forms. She calls it that. But the point she makes is actually there can be no theory of the forms. Very consonant with an argument that we’ve already explored. So I want to recommend that book. And then I want to recommend again this notion of Jonathan Paget, which I find very provocative where he thinks about faith in the Christian sense as exactly that something induces. There’s something that’s a symptomata. He wouldn’t use that language. Maybe he would. But there is something that’s symbolic that induces, that draws us, makes us make that leap to a higher level. And I think there’s something right, insightfully right about that. So a transformative experience that’s emphasizing the vertical dimension. Anyways, this movement is a leap to invoke Kierkegaard, who you will see very soon in upcoming episodes where I’m in dialogue with Christopher Mastapietro about Socrates and Kierkegaard. This is a leap of insight, intuition. And we’ve talked already a lot about this. It’s a leap of noesis and gnosis. Remember that. We’ve already seen the deep intertwining of rationality, the imaginal aspiration, the dialogical. They’re all interconnected, deeply interconnected with each other. Rationality, the imaginal, the dialogical aspiration. We have seen the need to cultivate proper receptivity, ratio religio, for insight flow. And I remind you again of the excellent book by Crystal Addy, Divination and Theology in Neoplatonism. So here’s, start drawing that in. Instead of thinking of magic, 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 and are thereby received guidance, sacred guidance, guidance by the gods if they have a mythological way of framing it. The interesting thing about the Neoplatonists, like Proclus, is they make an independent argument, which I’m not going to make, right? That the mythological gods are actually symbolic of the Eidos. They give a complete platonic reinterpretation of the gods. And Proclus is, he is just prolific in doing that. And I want to put it to you that every liturgy does exactly what I just said. A set of rituals that make use of symptomata to help people leap to a higher level of self-consciousness, reality disclosure, aletheia, in a way so that they experience antinormativity, they get closer to the really real and that guides them, it challenges them, it demands from them transformation. Every liturgy, and I don’t mean specific to Christianity. This is happening. As I said, Dionysus imports Proclus’ theurgy into his understanding of liturgy. Both Chalup and Gregory Shaw make a good case for that. And then that notion of liturgy, you have to remember, it’s not something that happens in this place. That liturgy participates in a liturgical cosmos. There’s an excellent book on Maximus by von Balthasar called The Liturgical Cosmos that makes exactly that case. Maximus is part of the Christian neoplatonic tradition through and through. You may say, fine, but what does all of this have to do with following Socrates to the good through learned ignorance? And I don’t participate in liturgy. Why should I? OK, so let’s make an argument. And it builds on an argument I made at Cambridge when I gave a talk on rationality and ritual. If you haven’t seen that, I invite you to take a look at it again. Let’s remember a bunch of things. I’m going to lay some things out and I want you to logos. I want you to gather them together and find what runs through them. We’ll deduce from them. First, remember what I’ve already said, the deep interconnection between rationality, aspiration, the imaginal and the dialogical. That’s A. B, the huge emphasis on non propositional knowing throughout this whole course. C, the importance of trans framing and the importance of the symbol as something from a more encompassing frame that can come into a smaller frame and draw one beyond one’s current frame into a more encompassing, more truth revealing frame. That was C. D, divination. Remember we talked about divination is puts noise to induce self organizing criticality and prevent overfitting. Plus the way it gets an insight, the way it taps into intuition and insight, often an insight flow. The way it de centers us and therefore provides for the Solomon effect. E, the importance of transjectivity throughout everything we’ve been talking about the agent arena relationship bound together by Alethea, the most primordial sense of the truth. Now let’s add to all of this recent cognitive anthropology that has been doing since the 1980s this ongoing work on ritual knowing. Knowing as a sorry, ritual as a way of knowing. Now first of all, this literature does not presume to propose that ritual is only doing like is only affording knowing. Ritual is doing all kinds of social things, economic things. It’s doing all kinds of things about, you know, the society’s relationship to its environment. None of that is denied. But this is cognitive anthropology with the emphasis is on the mind making sense. So fairly recent, I believe it’s 2014. Let me check. No, sorry, not not that recent 2004. But there’s been more work since. That’s what I was thinking of in response. This is an excellent anthology thinking through ritual philosophical perspectives. Now it’s a philosophical perspective on anthropological work. This is excellent, excellent anthology. Of course, there’s they’re playing on words here like I have often played on the word through there. We’re thinking through it, trying to figure out what’s going on. But we’re also thinking by means of ritual. Now, this anthology comes from, like I said, from a significant amount of work and both empirical in the sense of ethnographic and theoretical that starts primarily in 1982 with this seminal, very influential, deservedly so, article by Theodore Jennings called On Ritual Knowledge. So Jennings first goes in and he says he wants to challenge the mentality of the Reformation, the Protestant Reformation, the primacy of word over sacrament. And let’s remember that word is a the way I really want to be careful here. There’s a lot of words that are used in the Reformation. And let’s remember that word is a the way I really want to be careful here. There are many Protestants that I’m in really good relationship with fellowship. I don’t want to disrupt that. But there’s the idea that the Reformation was to some significant degree with its rejection of tradition was a simplification of certain ideas. So the notion of word logos, that’s the original meaning of the word in Protestantism tended to become identified with scripture, the Bible and sola scriptura that the only authority for any Protestant was the Bible. So the rich heritage that we’ve been talking about in dialectic into the logos is lost because word is identified either sometimes with Jesus, but often, especially in this context with scripture, with the Bible. And the idea was the Bible should have absolute authority over sacrament. Luther gets rid of all but two sacraments and then the other reformers get rid of the remaining sacraments. And of course, sacrament is another word for a ritual. It’s a ritual use of synthamata. Notice I’m trying to use that term because I’m trying to give you a new term so you can think because the word symbol is so contentious and it’s not just a sign. It’s this thing that has the power to afford the leap. Sacrament is the ritual use. That’s maybe not the right word. The ritual serious play with synthamata. So what’s his main argument for this? He wants to reverse that. He wants to challenge us. He has says he wants us to basically step out of that Protestant reformation mentality. And you can see how that has drifted into the secular world. Think about how Freud takes the notion of ritual and makes it repetitive behavior that is that is exemplifying neurosis. Or we think of a ritual just as anything we do for routine brushing your teeth is not a ritual. Repeatedly closing the door because you have OCD is not a ritual. That is a misuse of that term. His main argument is that, quote, ritual may be understood as performing noetic function in ways peculiar to itself. Now, two things to note about that quote. One of the reasons that why this article is so impactful, it has such a huge influence, is because Jennings is so careful with his language. I really admire that in people. You have to balance that care. One of the ways you care for language is not always just being like precise and pedantic. You also care for language by seriously playing with it and reviving and breathing the spirit back into the letter. But notice he says he uses noetic. He could have used epistemic. He could have used cognitive. He could have used epistemological. But he is noetic because he wants to point us towards noesis. Remember what noesis is. It’s that insight intuition that grasps the whole. It’s exactly the kind of cognition when you’re leaping from the features to the whole, when you’re moving from one level to the other. And he also has this other point. And he also has this other point. Peculiar to itself. His main argument is going to be there’s an irreducibility to ritual. There is a way of knowing in ritual that you cannot get through other means. There’s another quote from that same article. Ritual is a means by which its participants, excellent word, discover who they are in the world and how it is with the world. And he puts that right. He puts that in quotes because he doesn’t want you to read it literally. He wants you to rumble it around in your head how it is with the world. What I think he’s pointing to is who you are, what’s your agency, and how is the world an arena for your agency, and how do they fit together? Now, he emphasizes something, and I think it’s important to emphasize this, although we will see a counterpoint to this. But he emphasizes something because he wants to distance what he’s talking about from sort of the Freudian appropriation, or I would call it the misappropriation of the idea of ritual. He emphasizes that we have clear ethnographic evidence that rituals evolve over time. They are not sort of the province of individual neurosis. They actually are intergenerational projects within the collective intelligence of distributed cognition. And in that way, they are like myths. And that’s why myth and ritual are properly always and always should be thought together. I put it to you that if you claim to understand myth and you do not have a deep understanding of ritual, you are misleading yourself and vice versa. If you can’t if you’re thinking about ritual without its relationship to myth, then you’re also confused. But the relationship is not identity. Ritual is not just a demonstration of myth. Myth is not just stories about ritual. They have a much more complex relationship. So he emphasizes that rituals actually evolve over time. And he struggles. And he’s trying to say rituals are sort of their discovery and making. He would really benefit from that Latin word inventio, which means to both discover and make. And what is it? What is the inventio that’s being involved, evolved in ritual? He says it is the is a quote fitting gesture. And he’s going to make that stand for a whole arena hook. No, sorry, not a whole arena, a whole type of action. But fitting gesture, the gesture that fits. So why gesture? Because look, what’s easy want to emphasize the perspectival and the participatory, the enacted, the embedded, the transjective. And it’s fitting. It’s fitting you to the situation. Now, this takes place within the right. This takes place within the serious play found within a liminal state. We talked about that serious plays in that liminal place. He invokes, of course, one of the most important anthropologists of liminality, Victor Turner. And Turner is also a very important anthropologist. Victor Turner and Turner is also the person that talked about that brought the notion of flow into the discussion of ritual. So we’re seeing lines of convergence here. So like flow, which is an optimal experience in two senses, ritual is is a generative mode. And what it generates is appropriateness, which is such a great word because it’s things are our actions are appropriate because they fit. But there are also actions by which we appropriate the world to us. Beautiful. Throughout this, he emphasizes that this is done through embodied cognition. He explicitly talks about the embodiment of this. He goes deeply into the non propositional. I won’t go into a detailed argument, but I think it’s clear that what he is talking about is convergent with what I’ve been talking about with recursive relevance, realization and logos, et cetera. He says that a ritual involves skills. It involves states and frames of mind and involves traits of character. And those are exactly the things that you are trying to train and coordinate as you cultivate a virtue. There’s an implicit argument here. There’s there’s a kind of knowing through ritual that might be unique and needed for the cultivation of virtue. And that might be so relevant to Socrates, his whole framework, his whole approach, his whole orientation. He then goes on. He goes on to say that ritual quote, teaches one not only how to conduct the ritual, but how to conduct oneself outside the ritual. He’s bringing up the idea of transfer that what you’re doing in the ritual transfers to other domains of your life. So just as it’s percolating through your psyche and disclosing levels of reality, he’s bringing up the idea of transfer. So just as it’s percolating through your psyche and disclosing levels of reality, it is also transferring to many different domains of your life. Here’s another quote. The knowing of the ritual action provides a model for fitting action in context or situations not themselves ritualized. So my practice in the ritual tutors me so I can fit myself to other contexts. Of course, this is enhancing relevance realization. Serious play, just like music enhances relevance realization by playing with seriously playing with our salience landscaping ritual is doing exactly that. So he’s arguing for the transfer appropriateness of a ritual. Now, this is an important aspect of your cognition. Your brain is hungry for transfer appropriateness. So your brain will try and make use of all kinds of information about context to see if the way you solve the one problem can transfer to another. So let me give you a practical example of this. And this is relevant if you’re a student, right? You should try and study the information in the same way in which you’re going to be tested about it. So notice what I’m not I’m not concentrating on getting the content into my head. Of course, you have to do that. But the manner, the orientation, the way you are formulating it, framing it. So, for example, if you know that you’re going to be asked a lot of multiple choice questions, study the material by making a lot of multiple choice questions for yourself and practicing. If you know it’s going to be short answer, make a bunch of short answer questions. If you know it’s an essay, practice writing essays. That will significantly and reliably improve your performance because the brain is not only trying to transfer content, it’s trying to transfer orientation. Because orientation is primordial to finding your way. And when you’re in a new context, you know what you need first before you apply your knowledge? Orient yourself, transfer appropriate process. The brain is going to be able to do that. The brain is so sensitive to the context. Classic experiment. You bring a bunch of people into a room, you give them a bunch of material. You bring those people back in two weeks. You have them give them a test on the material. One group is in the room that in which they originally were presented the material. The other group is in another room. On average, of course there’s variation, but on average the people who are in the original room do significantly better than the people that are in the new room. Why? Because the transfer is easy. The orientation, the context, all of that perspectival participatory stuff is the same. Transfer appropriate processing is very, very important. It is a crucial part of any pedagogy of wisdom. Look, one way of thinking about this, an example that ties into this so well. You want to flow in situations that transfer to other contexts of your life. So there are for some individuals, there are some video games that don’t do that. People get into the flow state within the video game. But what it does is it actually undermines their ability to orient themselves in real world situations. This, of course, is video game addiction, which is recognized by the WHO. And I’ve had students write on this. Now compare that to something like Tai Chi Chuan set within the framework of Taoism. And you get into the flow state while you’re doing it. But that transfers to the other side of the world. You get into the flow state while you’re doing it. But that transfers all over the place. It percolates to areas of my psyche I wouldn’t have foreseen. And I find myself making use of its meta-optimal grip and meta-orientation all over the place. Transfer appropriateness is an important demand on the power of our learning. And therefore, it is a relevant normative criteria by which we can judge how well we’re learning. And he’s saying one of the things that rituals do is train you in a transfer appropriate way. And what they’re training is your ability to get properly oriented and fit to whatever context you might find yourself in. Now he’s not claiming, nobody would, I think, that maybe some forms of certain ideas about Buddhist enlightenment. But we’ll put that aside. He doesn’t mean it will transfer to every context, but it will transfer to many contexts. So he talks about you want rituals. Notice he’s giving you a way of evaluating rituals, which means we’re onto something here. He says, and this is exactly what you would want. You want, you know, some rituals transfer broadly, but not deeply. Some transfer deeply. But what you’re trying to do, oh, wait for it. You’re trying to get the optimal grip between breadth and depth. And when you get a ritual that does that, then you have a juicy ritual. You have a juicy ritual. So this means that the, quote, ritual serves to focus paradigmatic gestures. Oh, my gosh. Which pattern he’s just patterning as a verb here, which pattern world engaging activity generally. That’s what I was just saying. Then he makes it very clear. There’s another quote. Fittingness is a relational notion. He reminds us that he’s talking about transjectivity to use our language. Here’s another quote. That to which the ritual action corresponds is not some discrete and immutable state of affairs, but world in act. He puts right. The ritual does not simply mirror, but intends to transform this world in action. He’s talking about the agent arena relationship. That’s the world in act, the arena. And he’s talking about that agent aletheia arena relationship. He’s talking about the embodied transformation of transjectivity, ratio religio. A ratio religio that is transforming that embodied transjectivity to afford optimally gripping transfer appropriate processing. This then leads to one of his main points. This then leads to one of his main conclusions, which are foreshadowed. The non reductive noetic function of ritual. It cannot be reduced to something else or replaced by something else. And if this thesis is right or even plausible and your life is empty of ritual, that means there are ways of knowing yourself and the world that you are cut off from. Another quote. The ritual action seems to have the ontological dimension, ontological dimension of exhibiting the action or rhythm of reality. So right. He’s picking up here on the musicality of intelligibility, like the rhythm of process and the melody of patterning and the harmony of principle, all that stuff that the Neoplatonists were talking about. The musicality of intelligibility that conforms us to reality. The non reducible noetic function that transforms transjectivity so that we have ratio religio and flow with the music of intelligible reality. Stoics and the Neoplatonists through and through. OK. So I just double check, double check the date. I believe it’s 1993. So this is an amazing book. I’ll put it sideways. So I don’t know like that. So you can see. Can you see that? Yeah. There we are. This is an excellent book by Williams and Boyd, Ritual, Art and Knowledge. That is a very careful ethnography. They did all of Zoroastrian ritual. They did participant observation, belong to the community. And then they have as they have a philosophically deep response to Jennings. It was also a treat for me to sort of dip a bit into Zoroastrian ritual because it’s Persian through and my partner is Persian. So first of all, they agreed with Jennings that ritual can have that invential quality to it. But they pointed out another dimension in their ethnography of the Zoroastrian rituals. They go through two very carefully in the book. And then they point you to the more they’re more extensive ethnography. Now, Jennings emphasizes the generation of the ritual knowing and the transformation of the arena. Williams and Boyd contrast this with the perspective of ritual as a non propositional masterpiece, like a work of music. Think of, you know, the Ode to Joy by Beethoven. One of the things you don’t go in if you’re a musician and say, you know what we should do? We should change that. We should change this, change that, no, do that. You’re allowed to do arrangements and interpretations of the music. You’re allowed to do arrangements and interpretations. But what you’re what you’re doing is you’re not trying to change that the masterpiece. You’re trying to better conform to it so that your performance will bring out what’s there. The point is not to create, but to transform oneself to fit the masterpiece. The agent is conforming to a demanding arena. It’s a masterpiece. The agent has to cultivate a receptivity to excellent transjectivity that motivates and affords profound self examination. Like, am I up to this and what do I need to learn and how do I need to practice and what can I bring to this to bring it out? So it’s provoking significant self transformation. And they point out, yes, Jennings is right. And he was right to point it out. There was good rhetorical reasons for it. Rituals do evolve, but they also have long periods of strict repetition. You don’t go in and mess around with rituals on a daily basis. Now, think about this. This is like evolution with pretty strict reproduction that is punctuated by periods of innovation. Remember punctuated equilibrium. Long periods of very gradual change, short bursts in geological time. And then, of course, human development, same grammar, same principles. Human development goes through that same punctuated equilibrium. So notice what we put Jennings and Williams and Boyd together. We get this model of oscillation. Sometimes you’re changing the arena to fit the agent and sometimes you’re changing the agent to fit the arena. And, of course, that’s culture. And we’re constantly doing that to try and get this optimal co-shaping between the world and the organism to generate as many affordances for them. And remember, the affordances are meta-meaning. The affordances set up the real possibility for meaningful interactions and other meaning systems. You can look at Geertz’s proposal of religion as a meta-meaning system that is doing exactly this. I would say, in fact, it’s actually opponent processing. It’s a kind of intergenerational evolution, relevance realization, recursive relevance realization, where the recursion is also intergenerational. So Jennings is emphasizing variation of fittedness, variation of fittedness. And Williams and Boyd are emphasizing selection for survival of excellent ritual patterns. And that’s how you get something to evolve, variation and selection that survives. So Sheldrick, he edits this anthology and then he writes an amazing article in it, brings Jennings and Williams and Boyd in. And his, I mean, I think also extremely well written, well argued chapter, Ritual Metaphysics. Ritual Metaphysics. It’s like, whoa, metaphysics, isn’t that also a scary term and something we reject? Well, let’s go through this. This is a quote from him. Ritual knowledge of the nature of things typically serves to put the ritualist back into accord with that necessary truth to train their emotions and appetites and comportment, training virtue, according to its patterns so that they become a microcosm of the cosmic order. Ratio religio, right, sharing the same grammar. What does he mean by necessary truth? Is he talking about the necessary truths of logic, a priori, transcendental things from Kant? No. What he means by the necessary truths are those ways of rendering the world cosmic, cosmos, beautiful order, the way in which, how we fit ourselves to the world so we are at home in it. Those necessary truths, the truths that are necessary for our cognitive agency. As I said, he uses both Jennings and Williams and Boyd to argue that. I’m going to read you a lot of quotes from this paper because it’s really well done. He wants to argue for quote, the possibility of seeing ritual specifically as a form of metaphysical inquiry. And now we can see why philosophers would be interested in ritual. The possibility of seeing a ritual specifically as a form of metaphysical inquiry, that is, as a source of knowledge about the most general context of human existence. The possibility of metaphysical knowledge is needlessly confused, in my opinion, when metaphysics is identified solely with an investigation of claims of numeral or supernatural realities. This paper focuses on metaphysics not as an inquiry into a world beyond human experience, but rather as an inquiry into the character of experienced things in general. Can a ritual lead to this kind of knowledge? What’s he getting at, making use of what we’ve been talking about? Rituals that are massively transfer appropriate disclose the non propositional intelligibility of the world in a non reductive, unique way. So they’re doing something phenomenologically, prospectively and participatorily that’s analogous to what science does. Science tries to find patterns that are context invariant, that you can find across in the world different contexts. Ritual metaphysics is trying to find the transfer appropriate orientations that can be applied across many different contexts and therefore disclose something about the world as an arena for our agency. This is ritual metaphysics. So he goes on. Ritual activity produces the ritualized body. We shape, it’s not just a mental, this is a whole, we shape our bodies. As the participants come to engage with the structured and structuring environment of the ritual through the deployment of certain oppositional strategies, such as the opposition between what is divine and what is human, what is masculine and what is feminine, what is above and what is below. The ritual shapes the understanding in the experience of the participants as the participants come to master the ritual and internalize these schemes. I would say orientations, their bodies come to appropriate the ritual world in their habits, dispositions and gestures. Prone of processing through and through. It’s in prone of processing within orientation. So it’s doing meta orientation. Another quote. That’s two points in it. From the fact that metaphysical knowledge involves imaginative projection, it does not follow that no metaphysical understanding of reality are possibly true. A totalizing claim if ever there was one. He’s invoking the imaginal sense of imagination. And he’s resisting the totalizing claim that all imagination is imaginary and therefore illusory or fictional. One solution open to those interested in the possible truths, but they’re not propositional truths of embodied metaphysics is to join with those who see human involvement with the natural environment as fundamentally circular. And human agency and cognition as always a form of interaction with one’s perceived situation. On such an approach, ritualizing is a practice embedded in and emerging from interaction between people and their environment. This is for eCogSci through and through. Transjectivity, embodiment, the non propositional through and through. Here’s two conclusions. The argument, the place he’s come to the conclusion, opposes those who deny that rituals can be world embedded and truth pursuing activities. We can follow the through line. Doesn’t mean we’re making a theory. It opposes, in other words, those approaches to the study of ritual that treat rituals as necessarily confused. Think of Freud, illusory or out of touch with reality. Why do I need to engage in a ritual? That’s all silly. It aims in particular to rehabilitate the cosmic dimension of ritual. And remember, he doesn’t mean otherworldly. He has specifically pointed that out. Second conclusion. Those who study religious philosophy or religious metaphysics, this is going to be parallel to something I said earlier, should also appreciate the truth that religion, whatever else it is, is a set of embodied practices. Specifically, they should include rituals as legitimate objects of philosophical study. On the one hand, therefore, this approach can be seen as anti reductionist. And on the other hand, it is anti Cartesian, which has been the way we have been throughout this entire course. Theurgia is a ritual or a set of rituals that affords participatory exploration in the dialectic, dialogos of reality. Within it, we shape, but we are also shaped to better fit the flow of that reality in a way that is non replaceable by other cognitive behavior. That is what Proclus brings to the metaphysics and ontology of Neoplatonism with its proposal that reality is itself dialectic into dialogos. Now, there are so many bad books about this out there about Theurgia and Theurgie. Drek everywhere. Takes a lot of work paying attention to bona fide scholars to find the silver and all that dross. I want to point out some books to you. First of all, again, take a look. If you’re reading about Proclus, take a look on the section, especially about Theurgia. You’ve already seen me recommend this book, Divination and Theurgie. Now you see how they go together in Neoplatonism. Careful scholastic work. Once again, Theurgia and the Soul. This is a brilliant book. I’m in the middle of reading this book by Elinka Tannisio-Dubler. Theurgie in Late Antiquity. The invention of a ritual tradition. Now a couple books on practice that although there’s parts of them that I would maybe disagree with, the books are carefully written, they’re thoughtful, and they try to keep very clear connections to the Neoplatonic framework. This is Living Theurgie, a course in Iamblichus’s Philosophy, Theology, and Theurgie by Jeffrey S. Cuperman. I can recommend this book. It’s a good book. There’s parts I disagree with, but that’s the case in any good book. And then I’ve already recommended the stellar book, The Wisdom of Hypatia, and there’s a whole section on Theurgie, and they give, and McClellan gives you different frameworks by which you can try and understand that are very convergent with the argument that I’ve made here. Be very discerning, reflective, and dialogical with other people who are cultivating virtue and wisdom with you when you pursue this dimension. That’s the one hand, but on the other hand, don’t dismiss it. Don’t make yourself willfully ignorant of it. Points to ponder. Can we realize our practices, especially dialectic into dialogos and other, and the related practices that we did in episode 10, not just as training, not just as practice, but as rituals? Because people are experiencing them that way. They’re experiencing that they’re coming to know things about themselves and the world and reality in the practice. It’s a ritual for them. We are hungry for ritual. I was at Return to the Source, Rafe Kelly’s astonishing. You can’t call it a retreat because it’s not a retreat, but where he takes you through an entire ecology of practices. There’s movement and there’s mindfulness and there’s tons of serious play and there’s martial arts. It’s a masterpiece. And I won’t spoil it by revealing some of the secrets, so I’ll have to talk generically. But there’s a thing people do at the very end of this course. And the framing and the experience and what it does, it’s a ritual. And I was there and I’m doing the participant observation and they come at this and then I’m talking to them later. And I said, do you realize that none of you sort of self-identify as belonging to any organized religion, but the very best description of what you just went through was a ritual in the way we’ve been talking about here? And they said, yeah, yeah, it is. How can we orient ourselves properly so we can stereoscopically see our practices as rituals and as training? And how can we incorporate living symptomata into our practices? I don’t know this. I’m trying to figure it out without getting into woo. One thing I’ve been doing and I actually learned this from Christians practicing Lent. Some Christians who practice Lent will put a nail in one of their pockets. So whenever they’re reaching into their pocket, the nail reminds them of the crucifixion. And it’s not just a memory of that. They’re supposed to go right into the make the crucifixion prospectively present in a way that is demanding on them. So they can properly be in the orientation of Lent. So I carry a frog around in my pocket. A frog is a symptomata symbol, if that’s better for you, of neoplatonism, because a frog starts in one world as one type of creature and then transcends to another world. It can live on land in the air, but it can also return to the water. And what you try to do is, what I try to do is remember in the sense of Sati, Proshash and Prochiron, that fundamental framing of neoplatonism. So this is something of a talisman for me in a way that does not invoke any magical forces, any pseudoscientific bullshit, any of that. But nevertheless, I’m trying to get what it would be like to have symptomata in my life. We’re coming to the end. And I don’t want to give you any sort of theurgic practices. I recommend you carefully, first of all, investigate neoplatonism, then make sure you’ve been doing all of these practices that you have people that are you practicing with, then carefully read the scholastic work and then approach some of these books on theurgy. As always, thank you very much for your time and attention and commitment. 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.