https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=Abaxmkvk3Fc
making a relationship ironic doesn’t deprive it of its meaning, it doesn’t instrumentalize a person. It also makes it iconic. Yes, exactly. You have to always keep those two in mind when he’s talking. The irony is that you realize the way in which what is not ultimate participates in what is ultimate. Yes, exactly. Welcome back to After Socrates. This is episode 15. And as promised, I’m joined by my good friend, dear friend, and collaborator Christopher Master Pietro. And we are going to do two things at once. We’re going to exemplify a more Socratic dialogical approach. And we are going to discuss the relationship specifically between Socrates and Kierkegaard, and then more generally the relationship between what you might call Socratic faith, the leap of reason, and the Kierkegaardian, classical Kierkegaardian leap of faith, and Christianity. And so welcome, Chris. It’s a great pleasure to have you here. Thank you, my friend. The pleasure is mine. It’s a privilege. I’ve been looking forward to this quite a bit. I always do. So for most of this, Chris is going to take the lead. And it probably won’t be perfectly this, but Chris will tend to speak a little bit more on behalf of Kierkegaard. I’ll speak a little bit more on behalf of Socrates. We’ve been influenced by some books. I want to give a bit of credit. I have been deeply influenced by this book by Howland, Kierkegaard and Socrates, A Study in Philosophy and Faith. I know that, Chris, you’ve been influenced by the Evans book as well. Stephen Evans, yep, who wrote, he’s written a few books on Kierkegaard, but that one, Kierkegaard and Spirituality, I think, is a particularly excellent summary. There’s also a biography that I’ve gleaned a lot from, which is Josiah Thompson. And that biography I really like because it weaves in, well, we’ll be talking about why character is so essential to understanding the project of Phileas Sophia that Kierkegaard has. But I think a really good book on Kierkegaard does not ignore the character. And it also doesn’t ignore his thought. And it fuses the two together and understands the continuity between those two things. So Claire Carlisle’s book does that really well. And Josiah Thompson’s book does that really well. And Walter Lowry is a classic name in Kierkegaard scholarship. And I’ve read some of his and Odin as well. I don’t think we’ll be talking about this one today, but Thomas Odin. This is a book specifically on the humor of Kierkegaard. And that’s going to play in as well. So there’s a lot, you know, there’s quite a bit. And the debt that’s owed to all of these folks is just going to have to remain implicit as we go along. Yes. So we’ve tried to give credit where credit is due. The Evans book also talks about Socrates a lot. And I believe you said it’s from Evans that you got a line that I want to start provocatively this discussion with, that Kierkegaard was a follower of Jesus, but Socrates was his teacher. That’s right. And I don’t know that there’s a single place in Kierkegaard’s corpus where he says that explicitly in so many words. But Evans finds quite a lot of textual support. You really don’t have to look very far in Kierkegaard’s work for textual support for that, because Socrates is everywhere. He did his master’s thesis on the concept of irony with continual reference to Socrates. That was the title of the thesis. And then throughout his corpus after that, he makes continual reference to Socrates. Holland talks a lot about the philosophical fragments with Climacus and the constant reference to Socrates and toggling back and forth between Socrates and Jesus. So where would you like to start? So let’s start with Kierkegaard. And let’s start with him and his context. The thing about Kierkegaard is that the beautiful thing about him is that you can’t know Kierkegaard’s thought without knowing his person. And you can’t really know his person without knowing his thought. The two are fused together. They’re continuous with one another. So what I’d like to argue for, and I don’t really need to argue for it because the folks that we’ve just mentioned have done this work already. This work has already been done. We’re just going to refer to it. But that Kierkegaard’s work, your way of relating to Kierkegaard is as much as a character as it is a thinker. And they’re not separable, those two things. So this puts him immediately into resonance with Socrates because, of course, we’ve been talking a lot in this series about how the character of Socrates and his knowledge of himself and his self-portrayal are bound up with his philosophical practice and his way of life. And like Socrates, and this is both, I think, a consequence of his natural temperament and also what he cultivated, this is Kierkegaard now, is that he arouses very strong feelings in people. And it’s impossible, I think, to read him, to come to know him and to be neutral about him. You can’t read him without entering into a relationship with him, in spite of yourself even. Right, right, right. Right? Because he’s very provocative, but he’s not only provocative with his, in your language, his propositional content, but also in his form. So what I’d like to do is start talking about him formally. I’d like to talk about his mode of presentation, the way in which he writes, the way in which he presents. Right, right. And, you know, the most relevant thing I can say about him is that I really love Kierkegaard. That’s not incidental. Right? My love for Kierkegaard, I think, is, exemplifies the particular property of his work that sets him apart from a lot of other people and that puts him firmly into the Socratic tradition. Namely that to read Kierkegaard is to enter into an I-Thou relation, implicitly and often in spite of yourself. Right? That’s what I mean when I say there is no neutrality possible when it comes to Kierkegaard. Because he is, he makes of his own life a kind of symbolic stage to play out the content of his thought. Right? He’s staging. There’s something very dramaturgical about his work. Right, I was going to say, so it sounds like in addition to what he’s saying, and I mean this is of course the way his discourses are written, there’s a lot of drama and character development like in a story that’s unfolding. Right, he’s a poet. I mean I think one of the ways he referred to himself most frequently is as a poet. And I think in his mind that wasn’t the compliment that it might seem. I think he was a poet for lack of, in his own estimation, for lack of being able to be anything else. Not because it was necessarily the highest vocation, but because it was the vocation that his temperament consigned him to. He was a person of great melancholy. So let’s talk a bit about him biographically, because again it’s significant. So Kierkegaard, one of the things that’s remarked about him quite a lot is that he’s lived on one hand quite an uneventful life insofar as most of it was within the confines of Copenhagen. Which at the time, so Kierkegaard lived in the first half of the 19th century, died in 1855 at the age of 42 incidentally. His output, given how relatively brief his life was, is astonishing. And that’s because in some ways he lived out his life through his writing. However uneventful his life may seem in its sort of material, when it’s denuded to its material facts, that’s not really where his life was lived. His life was lived in his authorship. He played himself out in his authorship. And he actually quite enjoyed the irony. We’ll talk about irony properly as we go along. But he really enjoyed the irony of seeming very, of hiding his industry. This is a man who wrote all day, every day, copiously. But he would go out into the streets at lunchtime and make a real show of being gregarious and getting to know people and being very chatty. And he would grab somebody’s arm and take them for a stroll down the street. And for all the reputation he has of being, you know, anti-social and withdrawn, there’s some validity to that. But he had a whole other side to him that was flushed with a kind of show of extroversion that was ironic because what it concealed was that the life he lived was lived fundamentally inwardly. And the characters that he plays out through his writing is him unspooling multitudes of perspective and playing them off against one another. Right. Staging, in other words, staging dialogue, using himself as the kind of symbolic ground for those dialogues. So I digress. Biography. Biography. So this is at a time when Copenhagen, Denmark is sort of coming into its industrial, industrialization. So it’s kind of gone from more of a feudal context to a more commercial context, sort of becoming more of a market town. There’s a little bit more civil liberty to play with. There’s more recreation available to play with. Right. Things are loosening up in that respect. And so the idea of the individual being able to pursue independent opportunity and exercise a little bit of agency in the world is something that’s kind of coming more into its own. In Copenhagen at the time, and you also have this great literary and intellectual movement. So on the literary side, right, this is all part of the building movement that’s happening. So on the literary side, you have him associated with people like Hans Christian Andersen, who is a contemporary of his. And of course, in the philosophical arena, this is the time of Schelling and it’s the time of Hegel. It’s really the time of Hegel. And so his main context, the philosophical context or the intellectual context in which he’s growing is very much Hegelian context. Yeah. I mean, we’ll get into it. But one of the things I think is happening with Kierkegaard, I mean, he’s deeply he’s deeply critical of Hegel, but he’s also influenced by Hegel’s notion of the dialectic. But it’s like he sort of backs out of the Hegelian dialectic into the Socratic dialectic. He parodies the Hegelian dialectic. Yeah. And he parodies. He makes use of it. And like I said, he sort of he Socrates it, as you say. But he does so with a great deal of irony. Yes. Yes. Yes. And, you know, his form, much there’s a lot that we can say about his critique of Hegel on its sort of philosophical grounds. But when you look at his form, the form of his authorship, the critique is implicit in the form itself. Right. So when I say that you can’t get to know Kierkegaard’s thought without getting to know Kierkegaard, what I mean is that Kierkegaard in sort of he enfolds you into the subjective character of his conscious experience. But he does it in this intriguing way. He does it by writing under various pseudonyms, which is really intriguing. He’s like Plato. He’s mostly absent from his writings. He’s not even the author. He writes under this various pseudonyms. So the philosophical fragments. Sometimes. Yeah, not always, but sometimes. But a lot of the ones that we’re going to talk about are written that way. Like the Philosophical Fragments is authored by Johannes Klimakis. Yeah. Yeah. And so why I mean, why does he absent himself and why is he writing under pseudonyms? And because it feels like there’s an important similarity to how Plato is never actually present and Socrates himself doesn’t write anything. And so we have this weird literature that sits between being the voice of Socrates and the voice of Plato. It’s both and neither in this really interesting way. And Kierkegaard seems to be doing something by writing under pseudonyms. What do you think he’s like? Why do that? Why not just say this is what I think? Well, the idea of the self being an absentia, I think has everything to do with it. The irony of those pseudonyms. And even if even when he’s not writing under a pseudonym, he still is not he’s not assuming any kind of authoritative role in his writings. Right. He eschews that he makes that very clear. Right. Even when he’s writing what they call the edifying dialogues or the building discourses, which do bear his name, he’s still standing beside the writing as much as he’s standing in it. And I think there are a lot of ways to think about this a lot. And none of them are exhaustive because he’s a very, very difficult person to pin down. But part of the nature of what he’s talking about, which is the self, is precisely that that it’s known often by indirection. Right. That to step into it, to assume it, to reunite with it, I can put it in those words, is something is a movement that is articulated out over many painstaking stages. And that the first ways in which we seek ourselves out is precisely by indirection, by exactly where we where it isn’t, where we aren’t. Right. So the aesthetic kind of character of his writing is such that he’s he becomes it’s sort of a coming into consciousness of the fact that you live mired in ideas and images and reflections of yourself. That are ironic because of their unreality, because they’re not real. Right. The idea that that’s where he starts interacting, I think, very meaningfully for Socrates. That’s where the irony comes into play, which is that whatever it is about you, about your purported projects and about what you profess and about the role and the identity that you take in the world. That it’s not real. But that doesn’t terminate in some kind of nihilism. It terminates in the Socratic project of waking up to the fact that at any given time, the particular form of self and form of life that you’re living out is fundamentally not necessary. That it indexes away from itself and that it is something to wake up from. Okay, well, let’s let’s put that because I mean, we’ve been talking in this series about the dialogical self, the new model that’s emerging and that the self is in a very real sense of a multiplicity of voices. And part of what we’re doing is getting them into into dialog with each other. That the self is an internal dialog and an external dialog. And those two things are in dialog in a profound way. So, I mean, when he’s writing as, for example, Climacus, I have a sense that that’s actually a voice in Socrates. So that voice in Kierkegaard that’s interacting with Socrates, because I feel that I mean, the choice of the name is even symbolic. And there’s irony in there because Climacus is actually like this very harsh, ascetic and not sort of the classical kind of philosopher. So that he’s playing with things. But I’m wondering, like, is there a sense in which Kierkegaard’s use of the pseudonyms is also putting us like, is he letting us into this internal dialog within, you know, I think what I mean is I think he I think he takes up these perspectives with genuine empathy. I don’t think he’s writing from them with disdain. Right. I think he he he he takes them. He both he takes them seriously and with empathy. I feel him inhabiting them. But of course, he’s also he’s doing that thing, the irony. He’s inhabiting them, but also stepping back from them. They are him and they aren’t. Yes, that’s exactly. They are him and they aren’t. And that’s probably the pure, the purest, most distilled expression of irony that we could probably manage. Right. Right. Right. You are and are not. You are and are not yourself. You are insofar as you have a natural endowment, right, an endowment of your humanness, an endowment of your humanness as spirit, he would say. But you are not yourself insofar as it is something you have to become. You must become what you are already. Yeah. Yeah. Right. By art as well as by nature, as it were, as a matter of intent, as a matter of the application and tutoring of your will. And that paradox that what you are, you are in fact not yet, but must become is something that undergirds all of his work. So the dialogical self and the aspirational self are interwoven together in a profound way, given what you just said. You’re in dialogue with what you are between what you are and what you are not. But that dialogue isn’t sort of well, it can be. It can degenerate into conflict and it can make you stuck. But it can unfold in a way in which you are aspiring to become who you are. Yes. Yes. It’s a kind of protracted exercise in aspiration in some sense, right? He’s searching himself. And because he is multitudinous in his perspectives and those perspectives aren’t just perspectives in the sense that they’re vantages or views to take. They’re much more like what he calls a life view, which is an entire system of belief and not belief just in the propositional sense, but a belief as being a form of life. Well, that’s like when I step into his characters, I feel like I’m seeing a whole world in both ways. I’m seeing the whole world this way and I’m seeing a whole world this way. Right. Right. And he’s placing me right there at that perspectival participatory nexus. Exactly. Exactly. And so for him to know his thought, you must descend into it. You must be absorbed into it. You must assume the perspective. You must assume you must. You must come into the atmosphere, the mood of that form of life in order to know it from within, to know its particular encounter with inwardness, its particular character, its complexion, its mood. Right. So what he does is he, you know, he uses his work to not just depict or explain, but to create moods, states of being, beliefs that are lived out to understand what the subjective character of that state and mood is. Right. Right. I often think of that great term that I love so much, the pathologos, right, which is, which I mean, is a very, very obviously it’s a very old term in the Socratic tradition. And it was kind of brought back into application by Pierre Grimes and the pathologos. I like, I love that. By the way, his book is entitled Philosophical Midwifery. Part of the, one of the, one of the progenitors of the sort of philosophical counseling. Yeah. It’s very appropriate that it should, that Grimes work should be philosophical midwifery because in a sense what Kierkegaard is undertaking is a kind of self-midwifery in all of these various works. So the idea of the pathologos being it’s the sick belief, it’s the belief that is lived out sick, not in the sense that every last detail of it is pathological, but because it’s ultimately illusory. It’s not necessary, right. It’s not sort of ontologically necessary. So slow down. What does that mean? So first of all, yeah, I want to challenge it’s, it’s, it’s logos, not belief. It’s more of that agent arena relationship. The relationship is exactly right. Right. Okay. So it’s not real. I mean, it’s real in the sense that the person is assuming like a certain role, taking on various skills. Parts of the world are responding to it. In what sense is it not? I mean, because that’s a really loaded term. In what sense is it not real? That’s true. I just sort of threw that out there. Well, it’s, it’s real. Okay. So let’s refer back to the sort of the more explicitly Socratic model for a second. It’s real in so far as the cave itself is real. Okay. Right. The illusion. I don’t. It’s like. It’s like Kierkegaard pseudonyms and the characters that they in turn produce, because the pseudonyms aren’t necessarily the characters that some of his dialogues, some of his works are epistolary dialogues between characters that aren’t even the pseudonyms. Right. There yet another set of layers upon layers. And I think what he’s doing in part, at least is he is depicting and having us live inside the body of a world whose long whose particular desires, whose particular forms of longing, whose objects of attention, whose dilemmas and problems as framed are somehow not necessary. Not necessary to what? Not necessary in so far as they have somehow miss framed or mistaken the identity of their longing. Right. So they have chosen to vest their interest and attention in objects of pursuit in time that are giving a kind of repetition to a pattern of their longing. But not satisfying it. So, so not saying that all versions are this, but with something like, as we’ve talked about this in the series, something like froms modal confusion being an example of this, you’re trying to pursue the being needs within the having mode. You’re fundamentally modally confused and therefore you’re not capable of satisfying the needs. And so you’re frustrated and you keep repeating it with more intensity. Is that right? Is that a good example? Within time? Yeah, that is a good example. That is a good example. So one of the fundamental dilemmas that was a dilemma of his own life that he plays out in his writing is the dilemma of marriage. Either or, that’s just the title of one of his books, one of his earlier books, which is just a dazzling literary work, whatever else it is, dazzling literary work. And it’s a direct challenge to Hegel even in the title. Right. Right. And so marriage is subject to a kind of either or, which is to say, What is the right? How do we arrange it to use a line from Auden? How do we arrange our loves? What is the proper order of our loves? The ratio, the proper proportioning. Yes. Right. So one of the great conflicts, one of the great dramas of Kierkegaard’s life, and this is, it’s very difficult to write and think about Kierkegaard without thinking of this. And I don’t think it’s unfair to him because he brings it into many of his works. Incidentally, Kierkegaard was also someone who even in his private journals, I mean, he arranged those private journals in such a way that they would be publishable. Yeah. This was a person who staged the conversation with himself out loud and did so deliberately. It’s funny that made him an object of ridicule later in his life. He had this long polemic with a Danish publication called The Corsair and its editor was ridiculed him at one point for using his authorship as a way of working through himself. And I find that amusing because I think that the accusation is just, but I think that the moral appraisal is exactly inverted. Right. There’s something to me that’s deeply enthralling and admirable about the particular kind of nakedness, the kind of what’s fascinating about him is that he bears himself, but he never takes off the mask. Right. It’s almost like imagine the image. I know it’s an odd image. It’s a very carnival-esque image of someone denuding himself, but keeping a mask on. Right. And I think that image is helpful when it comes to Kierkegaard because he is engaging you to live inside the exposure that is drawn to that particular form of nakedness, when a form of life, when a particular mode of living, like the mode of the seducer in either or who is constantly drawing, who is using his art of seduction, not as just a way to satisfy his base libido. That’s not what he’s talking about. He’s using the encounter with his libido in time to extract impressions and poeticize his idea of himself so that he can try and compass his own imagination, so that he can try and live a life that is adorned and that is able to give a fuller expression to his longing. And that his worldly engagements and worldly interactions are simply used as a kind of raw material for the exercise of the imaginary and the exercise of the imaginary, the playing with the material of life, the abstracting of it. And it’s the imaginary, not the imaginal. Right. Is one way in which we pursue ourselves, we chase ourselves, we seek ourselves out, right? That we’re tracking ourselves, right? So these perspectives, these perspectival worlds, these pathologoi, as I would call them, that he entreats us into, are ways of understanding the various forms of life that we live in and live out in pursuit of what is real. But they are ironic. They are ironic in that the mode of pursuit, the particular set of vestments, the way that they’re costumed is a mistaken identity. It’s a mistaken object of longing, but it’s present. It’s present in absentia, right? It’s present precisely because it’s not there. Okay, so he’s getting us into this. And then we’re seeing, because you were answering the question of how it’s ultimately not real. And so there’s a sense in which we see people bound to a task or they bind themselves to a task of trying to track themselves, almost like a hunter. Right. And then what I’m getting from you is what makes it wrong is they’re oriented in such a way that they can’t actually find their quarry. That’s right. Right. That’s right. It’s elusive. So I mean, this is kind of like the misformulating of a problem where we’re finding the wrong things relevant and we’re making the wrong things salient. So we’re actually thwarting ourselves from solving the problem, like my perennial favorite, the nine dot problem and things like, is it like that? So it’s that this person’s their their entire mode is a fundamental framing in which they are trying to find the trail to themselves. But their orientation is actually thwarting them from doing so. So how would one know? So Kierkegaard is proposing again, obviously not as an argument or a theory, but by dramatizing. And we should come back to that. But he’s proposing to show us, at least from the outside, because that’s part of the irony. There’s dramatic irony when you’re reading these things. There is dramatic irony. There’s dramatic irony. You’re going, wow, I can see you’re really messing up. And that’s so apt, right? Because we know this, right? And even from the research, when you’re in the midst of one of those things, you can’t see it and your friends can and they can seem so wise. But then the reverse is the case. It’s the Solomon effect on that. So what are the features within like the seducer, for example, or there even some you can even get a sense that the tensions within Climacus, right? And the fragments. But what are the features that are showing that people and I mean, Krugergard is basically, you know, demonstrating sin as failing to love wisely in a way that takes you off the course. That’s the class trespass, right? The classic model, right? What are the like what are the signs even for us with that dramatic irony? How can he’s trying to he’s trying to do it indirectly. I take it in hopes that we might stand back and think, hey, maybe I’m trespassing in some profound way. What like what are the signs he’s showing within that that it’s going awry in some fundamental way? Well, I think it has to do with it has to do with the nature and character of suffering. Right. Yeah. So this is crucial. This is crucial. And it’s often I think it’s often misframed as being some kind of ascetic impulse or some kind of Christian self-flagellation. And I think that’s wrong. I think that for him. Being a self comes with. The endowment of a certain responsibility, as I’ve said, right? It’s the requirement to become something, not simply to be something. And that’s a paradox. Well, we’re self-making beings, ultimately, autopoetic in a profound way. That’s right. And so for him, that autopoiesis. To be brought to proper fruition needs to be something that happens as a consequence of consciousness and will. And sin is a failure of will. It’s not ignorance. Right. That’s a really, really crucial difference. Right. And that’s where that mean we’ll get into this later, but that’s where Christ and Socrates become continuous in our need for them for Kierkegaard. Because roughly speaking, one helps to bring us into consciousness and develop what I know you’re calling learned ignorance after Kusa. Right. But one of the consequences of that coming into consciousness, waking up inside the dream that is a particular form of life, lived rapaciously, lived with repetition of a pattern whereby you’re seeking something in time and not finding it. Right. The Socratic inquiry. It smashes that to some degree. Right. Right. Right. It’s a disillusionment. Right. So for Kierkegaard, the role of Socrates as a trickster is to disillusion from those modes of relation to oneself that is trying to find oneself projected in an object that is less than ultimate and that will not contain that relationship in the way that it needs to be cultivated. So the Socratic project, I would say, is one of awakening to come into consciousness. Right. The problem with that, though, and this is where Kierkegaard becomes properly Christian, is that the awakening of that consciousness, the realization of ignorance, also activates the will. It brings the will into more acute attention. Right. It amplifies our agency. You have to make a choice when you’re like, what do I do now? When a aporia wakes you up, then you have to, how do I go forward? But then the anxiety comes, right? What he calls the vertigo of freedom, right? This dizzying, this dizzying realization of one’s own will and its capacity to relate or to not relate to that fundamental grounding on which the self rests, which for him, of course, is God. That fundamental power that somehow we have to be become continuous with again in order to become what he calls spirit. So what’s happening before? So this is good. And we’ll come back to that. But we’ve got this. I can. I can. We’ve sort of got into the that moment when you realize you’ve been suffering. But like so you mentioned this a couple of times. There’s this sense I’m getting this sense of like of repetition that you find yourself doing the pathologos. You’re doing the same thing over and over again. And from talks about that too. He talked Kirk has a term repetition. You’re right. You’re right. I’m just trying to what would it be like? I get it. I get your point is while you’re in it, you can’t see that you’re in it, which is a profound thing. Right. And we’ll talk about the Socratic version of that and Kierkegaard’s notion of being in sin or untruth. Right. But but I’m trying to get it like for us, at least we can see like this. Oh, because I remember at the end and then you realize he’s got to do this whole same thing again. He’s got to start all the way over again. He’s going to do with another woman. And you’re going you’re never going to actually know anybody. Right. So you really long you’re trying to know yourself. Yeah. Right. You’re trying to know yourself and yourself is is contained in the aspects of these pursuits of these relationships. But what you’re really after is you’re after a reflexive relationship. You’re well like, you know, the in the symposium, you look at yourself through the reflection and other people’s eyes. So he’s actually but he needs somebody who’s actually other than him. Right. And that’s not what the seducer is doing. He’s wrapping somebody totally into. Right. And so the thing. So the way he’s framing the other person prevents them from being the other that he needs in order for there to be genuinely dialogical knowing of himself. So that’s that’s again like the nine dot problem. You’re miss framing. You’re you’re framing it in such a way. And so he’s going to repeat again and again and again. So there is there’s there’s that sense of. Look, it’s an illusion because the repetition and it’s an illusion because well, I’ll ask you. It seems to me like these characters are often thinking they’re exercising their agency, but they’re actually bound to this repetition that is robbing them of their agency. This is sort of I think something like his notion of sin. Right. That you think you’re doing something but you’re actually like you’re constantly being captured by this way of life, preventing you from coming to any genuine self-knowledge. I’m reaching here. I’m trying to understand. And I’m trying to get at I’m trying to get at what is it we should be seeing such that we can say, yes, this is why this is a failed or a failing way of life. So Kruger doesn’t give you a philosophical argument. He doesn’t say, you know, here’s a good life and then blah, blah, blah. He doesn’t do that. He keeps doing these dramas and you keep wondering. Well, he does do that. But he does do that. I mean, he so. OK. How so? What do you mean? So well, his his treatise on despair, which is the sickness unto death is is a very it’s a it’s a very meticulous work of sketching. The psychological profiles of the various states of sin. Right. And how the graduating knowledge of being in that state amplifies the condition itself. Yes, I think I misspoke. What I meant is he doesn’t lay out sort of a classic how to how to pull the escape hatch. Yes. No, no, it’s not nearly that easy. It’s not nearly that easy. But so go in that. So you’re making connection. So suppose I’m starting to take this seriously. You know, whoa, how maybe I am doing what Kierkegaard is criticizing. Well, again, again, I’m not asking you for an instruction because he doesn’t do that. But what’s what is he trying? How is he trying to move us around with respect to ourselves so that we might get a sense of how we’re actually suffering? If that’s the mark of a way of life that’s ultimately illusory. I think that begins with irony. So. So let’s let’s talk about bullshit for a second. Sure. OK, because I think in some ways in the in the Frankfurtian sense, in the Frankfurtian sense of bullshit. OK, so bullshit is that. And I’m going to bring this back around, but I think it’s important to start here because there’s something like the aesthetic, the aesthetic life for Kierkegaard has some when it’s unconscious. When it’s unconscious. Bear some resemblance to the Frankfurtian idea of bullshit, which is to say that you. You use your speech, you use expression. Not out of any relationship to the truth. But to. To take command of the world in which you live, right, you use it in a sense. To kind of. You use it in a fit of autonomy, meaning that you create something that is utterly independent, a world unto itself that is composed of whatever it is that’s being expressed. In which there is no continuity or association with anything that is prior or comes before. It’s entirely de novo. It’s entirely new. It’s sort of in wrapped within itself. OK. And you can say things that are true propositionally, but that don’t have a relationship with the truth. Because you’re not you’re not oriented that way. Right. Where they come from is not in continuity with or in a relationship with what is real. They are used to they are used in a fit of poesis to create something, but to create something that has no origin or root or prior reference to what comes before it. OK. Irony. Is, I would say, precisely the opposite of that, which is to say, instead of the bullshitter who spins a world on the basis of making things shiny and salient and attractive and interesting. Right. But there’s no but it doesn’t refer outside of itself. It doesn’t refer beyond itself. So like one example that’s easy to understand is sort of the classic narcissist who is incapable of seeing anything that challenges their sense of themselves. And they’re sort of wrapped into that in a powerful way. It might be even appropriate because in some sense, they’re very self centered, but they have no self upon which to be centered, which is sort of the classic thing. I’m just trying to get a give people something they might be familiar with. So it’s a very self enclosed world. But that self enclosure is a bubble, as we now say, designed to prevent them from ever asking, well, who am I really that I’m focusing all this attention on me. But who am I really? And also designed to see the world manipulatively so that it can never challenge the bubble. Is that is that to optimize it? Right. Yes. Yeah, that’s right. But the ironist asks a question that something like, well, what comes prior to this? Right. What is what do you mean by prior? You don’t just mean I don’t mean temporarily. Yeah. You mean ontologically. I mean, ontologically, what does this emerge from? Is that a better way of putting? That’s a good way of putting it right. What comes before? Not in a temporal sense, but in a sense of what is more real. Right. And what is this predicated? What is what? What am I predicated? What does this presuppose? What does this depend on? Right. OK. Right. And so the ironist think that this analogy of waking up inside of a dream, which I find very helpful, right? Very Socratic. Like lucid dreaming, lucid dreaming. Right. It’s a very Socratic idea. Right. You wake up and you realize that there’s something. You’re in the cave. You’re in the cave. You’re in something that is expressing itself in ways that are just not ultimate. Right. Whose scope of reference doesn’t reach back far enough, doesn’t reach down far enough. Right. It seems foreclosed somewhere. Right. And, you know, a good example of this is simply the our mode of assuming and inhabiting identities on a day to day to day basis. Right. You know, like you and I are playing a particular role. Right. When I go to work, I play a particular kind of role. When I’m in my relationships and friendships and whatnot, I’m playing a particular kind of role. The ironist is someone who understands that that role, that context, that particular set of vestments is finite in its scope of reference, is not ultimate. And that there is always something that comes again in the way that we mean prior to it. Right. What the ironist does is use something that is not ultimate to develop a relationship with what is. So just like the bullshitter can say something that’s factually true, accidentally, but has no relationship to the truth. The ironist uses what is, if not false, then finite as a way of developing a relationship with what isn’t. So let’s use, I think I’m getting it. I think I’m getting it. So you’re in the dream and there’s a figure in the dream who points out things, uses the dream world to get you to realize that you are in a dream world. It’s that. Yes. Right. They’re not standing outside the dream. No, they’re standing in it. They’re standing in it. That’s right. And they’re using all of the salience landscape of the illusion to try and get you to wake up. That’s right. And you might still be embedded in that dream. All of the presentation. You’re still there. But the dream becomes a cultivated irony. It refers outside of itself and it is somehow, its reality has now changed its nature because it lives in reference to something that is more real than it. And yet it becomes continuous with that greater form of realness. And so somehow, even though in and of itself, it’s quite finite and quite circumscribed. But it goes from being self-enthrosed. It participates in something that is greater than it. So it becomes, in like a Perseian sense, it becomes iconic, right? It starts to lead you out. It participates in something. Okay. So these two things sound like they’re going together for me. So we’re noticing the person is bound up in repetition and that repetition is actually an enactment of the self-enclosed finiteness of this world, that it does not participate in a more encompassing reality. And that also prevents the person from properly aspiring. Good. Fair. Yes. Okay. And this is a profound way. And this is so Socratic through and through and through, right? About trying to get people to wake up, right? And become aware of the fact in which they are like, in which they are bullshitting themselves and binding themselves in to these repeating patterns. And now a little bit more prosaically, we see this in people. We see this in our friends. And we try to say it to them. We say, like, you’re doing that thing you do every time you enter into a romantic relationship. That’s right. They’re chasing themselves. Yes. You’re being subject to repetition. Yeah. And you’re doing it again. And what you’re doing is you’re locking yourself. You’re making the wrong thing salient. And you’re locking yourself into a way of relating to this person that will actually prevent you from finding the depth in them that you really ultimately are longing for. That’s right. That’s right. And the depth in them that you’re longing for is not a depth necessarily that resides in them. Yes. Yes. You may be projecting totally onto them. Right. And so to try and chase yourself out in time is to have that pattern of longing, whatever it is that is prefiguring and framing your desire to be yourself, that that is vaulting itself forward and forward and forward and forward and forward and repeating itself again and again and again in your experience of time and your experience of your, let’s say, like a quotidian identity. Yeah. And I know that, well, from experience, I know that that suffering you’re putting in your, especially in the sense of suffering as a loss of agency. But when you come to that sort of exhausted realization, I’m doing this again. Here I am again. And one example, right, is, you know, I was in this relationship. I’m going to do the exact opposite. And you’re doing the exact opposite only to realize that you are, that’s just the way in which the pattern is working itself out again. And you think that just by shifting and negating, you’re thereby escaping. You’re still bound to the very thing. And you find, I did it again. And I tried so hard not to do it again. And that’s where I get the sense of the Augustinian, when the Kierkegaardian sin, like my very attempts to get away from it, just get bound back into doing it again and again and again and again and again and again. Right, right. Because I’m looking for a kind of a kind of temporal and immediate relief from it, from the pattern. And in so doing, I recreate it. I reinstantiate it. Right. And so there’s a bit of a Kierkegaardian proposal here I’m hearing, which is, ultimately, you need something from outside that perspective to break into it if you’re going to really get out of it. And there’s something Socratic in there too. And we’ll play with that. So just to gather this together. And this has been really, really wonderful. So Kierkegaard is writing in the way he is because he’s kind of like, he’s trying to enter into, I like this metaphor, he’s entering into the dream world. And he’s going to work within the dream world to try and shake it up so that you can get the kind of lucidity and recover the fact that this world and your identity within that world actually need to participate in something greater than that, precisely because the self is inherently aspirational in nature. Is that a good way of- That’s fair, yes. Yes, exactly. Exactly. Exactly. And so Socrates, Socrates is that force that helps to disentangle his attachment, our attachments, to those objects of identification that become confused for the objects of what is actually longed for, what is actually aspired, right? Which is for him, which is the espousal of oneself authentically, right? Which is the kind of rejoining with the ground of one’s being. I know that, I know how abstruse that sounds, but we’ll get there. We’ll get there. I know how abstruse that sounds, right? But it ultimately, it grounds religiously for him, right? He’s trying to get back to the fundamental relational mode that grounds him most fundamentally in what is real. And for him, that is a kind of nakedness before the absolute, right? Yes, yes. There’s this phrase, I think it appears in Fear and Trembling, but it appears in a few places, this idea of having an absolute relation to the absolute. It’s like, what the heck does that mean? It reminds me of Tillich, though. It reminds me of ultimately concerned with what’s ultimate, right? That’s right. That’s right. And the problem is that that concern becomes costumed in so many different ways under so many different guises and aspects that what we have to do is somehow infiltrate the various aspectualizations of that fundamental drive so that we draw it out, so that we give it form, so that we give it a kind of, we give it, we characterize it, right? That’s why he works in character. So himself and his pseudonymous entities are characterized perspectival enclosures that show how different aspects of that fundamental project come clear, how we interact with them and by stepping back from them and trying to look at their dialogues from a kind of Socratic distance to be able to see how they are in fact aspectualizations of the same fundamental. So using some language that we’ve been developing here about the Eidos and everything, he’s trying to find the through line through the various aspects and through the various perspectives and how we follow the through line. And that’s really, really, really profound. And the idea is that through line isn’t going to show up in any one of the aspects or perspectives. No, it’s there only by suggestion. It’s there by indirection. Because it can’t be. No, exactly. It can’t be. And he’s trying to find the right aspects or perspectives. And he’s trying to by do this and by juxtaposing them in the right way with the right irony, you go into a perspective and its aspects and then you wake up and then you move and then eventually you start to realize, oh, oh, there’s a through line through all of this. OK, so I get that. And we can talk about that. And it’s a relationship to the good, capital G, right? And the platonic system. I just want to make sure that you so you Kierkegaard sees Socrates as this fundamental figure trying to wake us up and get us oriented so we can track the through line, the through line that will take us on the path to what’s more real and also draw from us the deepest realization of who we are. It’s aspirational. So you see this in Socrates because the topics are virtue and virtue is an inherently aspirational thing, right? And then what you’ve got is the realization that you can’t capture it. You have all these characters who think they can capture it. And then what happens is all those positions get sort of demolished. And you can either come away from that skeptical or you can do this. What we’re talking about, you can say, well, wait, the dialogue, the mistake is to think that Socrates is just the speaker of truth, right? All the characters together are actually the thing that is carrying the message of any particular dialogue. And so what is like, yeah, but there was a through line and Socrates was actually following it. He follows the logos. He follows the logos, how wherever it blows. Yeah, the trace, the tracking, the signs, the signals. Yes, yes, exactly. Exactly. And there’s and the thing the thing about Socrates that Kierkegaard really latches on to is this the shamanic deprivation, right? That the the aporetic inducement, right? What he does is he robs, he deprives any given form of life, any given set of priorities, any given set of identities that we clothe ourselves with in pursuit of a particular set of earthly goods. Because they’re always partial. They’re always partial. They don’t put us in the orientation of that which grounds the whole. Right, right. So Socrates relieves them of their mistaken identity with the whole of what is real and with ourselves. Yes, yes, yes. It remember it, it brings to mind the memory that I am not this, whatever this seems, even this right now, right? I have to have a dose of irony about the fact that you and I are sitting here talking about Kierkegaard. I have to remain ironic about that. I have to remember that everything. Not in the current sense of irony. No, no, no, no, but in the sense of irony that we’re talking with, that this is partial, that everything I say about him is said of my relationship with him, not of him. Okay, so we’re going to get into this, but this is a thesis I’ve been developing in the course based especially on the work of Hyland, you know, the finitude and transcendence that we are always finite transcendence. We are, right, we, if we say we’re just finite, then we just bound into our fate. If we say we’re just transcendence, then we think of ourselves as a god and we fall prey to hubris. And so what we need to do is get an orientation that keeps it right. And he argues that irony is exactly that. Because you don’t want to say the partial truth is no truth because then you’re just into Minos paradox and you’re doomed. Then you’re done. Yes, yes. But you don’t want to say it’s the truth. No. So you have to get this idea that it’s, right, it’s an icon that is participating by being on the pathway that is inexhaustible. Exactly. Exactly. The irony allows us to straddle both sides of an either or and tutor the idea of paradox. Right. Irony is a forerunner to paradox for Kierkegaard. Right. Right. Irony does not terminate in itself. It is the beginning. It is not sufficient. Irony sensitizes us and our receptivity to paradox. And that is why Socrates is a propaedutic for Christ because Christ is the paradox that incurs upon us. Right. For Kierkegaard. Right. Right. That’s why Socrates is preparatory. Socrates is preparatory for Christ because Socrates sensitizes our appetite for the paradoxical by inducing moments of absurdity in any given perspective that make us aware that its truth is finite and partial. Right. And has us… But not worthless. No, no. Not worthless. Yes. But finite and partial. Yes. But yes. But with some continuity. Right. I mean in the same way that in the Socratic dialogues Socrates is very committed to articulating out the particular arguments that his interlocutors give him. That’s right. He doesn’t dismiss them out of hand. He doesn’t treat them as worthless. He treats them with a great deal of meticulous care and detail. He’s very fastidious about them. Not because the arguments are true, but because the arguments so expressed have some relationship to the truth. And also… Even if indirectly. And that’s why the arguments are ironic when treated by Socrates because they don’t need to be expressly true to have a relationship with the truth. And their relationship to the truth is a matter of character, not a matter of proposition. That’s the… That’s what we’re getting into him being a midwife. Right. Right? So even though it looks like all he’s doing is demolishing, he’s actually trying to have them, if you’ll allow me to mix the metaphors, to find the through line that’s the birth canal. Right. Right. Right. And so the arguments are gestures to the offing. The offing is where… What is outside of the frame, right? The arguments in a Socratic dialogue, when they are taken into the hands of Socrates, become indices that refer outside of their frame. Okay. So Socrates is catching the spirit and the wind of the logos. And the through line is that logos, as you said a few minutes ago. And is it fair to say… I mean, that’s not just the logos of the discourse. This is the logos that leads to… Leads us out of the cave, leads us to the good. Does Kierkegaard see any relationship between that Socratic platonic logos and Christ as being the logos? Is there a relationship? I’m trying to get what the preparatory relation is. Socrates wakes us up to the lived challenging reality of following the logos. And then Kierkegaard is positing that that came… I don’t know what to call it. That was, well, incarnated. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I think that’s fair. I mean, one of the things he calls Christ is the pattern. Right. The pattern, right? Well, as I mentioned, the followers of Jesus are not initially called Christians. They’re called followers of the way. Right? Yeah, yeah. That’s right. That’s right. That’s right. And so… But the reason that Socrates is not… Well, one of the reasons that Socrates is not sufficient for him… For Kierkegaard. For Kierkegaard. …is that the condition of being in sin, the condition of despair, isn’t just being immersed unknowingly in a dream. It’s not just something that can be disabused with conscience. But in some way, you’re also the dream weaver. You’re the dream weaver, exactly. But the amplification of your consciousness and the awakening of your will within that dream means that suddenly that will can become very perverse. That will can be used to deny your own freedom, to deny the relationship that your… To deny your relationship and continuity with the ground of what is real. That will, when it is emboldened… And for Kierkegaard, the deeper… The more conscious the despair becomes, right? The more we realize that we are not properly in relation with ourselves, the more the will becomes defiant as a consequence of the realization of having failed to be itself. So it goes from… In his language, it goes from despairing over… To despairing over the misattribution, despairing over the illusion, despairing over the earthly, to despairing over oneself, but then to despair over the sin itself, to compound the failure by making something necessary of it. And that’s why the pattern of Christ and the redemption of Christ is necessary, because Christ is the relation, right? That being unrelated to the ground is something that can’t be resolved by consciousness. It has to be resolved by a relation. Okay, so I’m going to play with that within the metaphor that we’ve been using, which is… And Wagner talks about this. One of the things that can happen when people lucid dream is that they just fly and have lots of sex and they become… And they just become actually… They mistake their control over the dream world with having… And then he says, no, the thing you should do is you should go on a quest to find the Dreamweaver within the lucid… The lucid dream gives you the opportunity to find the Dreamweaver so you can wake up in a way that you have never woken up before. And so there’s that. And then I’ve had this experience in lucid dreaming where you’re trying to wake up and you keep waking up in the dream. And then there’s something outside of your consciousness in the dream that wakes you up. And I take it that this is also Kierkegaard’s model of… Christ is not only there, but Christ is also outside and therefore can… That’s why he’s the paradox. Yeah, he can wake you up. He’s inside the frame and outside the frame and wake you up from… I get that. That’s right. It’s interesting because you can sort of put those two together in that… You can choose to fly and have sex and just become a god unto yourself. And what Wagner says in the book is that people ultimately eventually become dissatisfied with that because it doesn’t go anywhere. It’s finite and self-enclosed. And then he says, but what you can do is you can go on this quest. And I’ve done that at least once in a lucid dream, which was really interesting because I’d done some other thing. And what I did was I said, oh, this is a lucid dream. And I just dropped the drama. And then I sort of… I want to talk to the dream weaver. And it was this sort of profound thing. And you get this different orientation because you’re starting to move towards the ground. So there’s this weird movement I’m trying to get at. I’m bending this metaphor, but there’s one sense in which you can seek the ground of the dream weaver, but that also has to be able to come into proper relationship with the world outside the dream. That’s right. That’s right. And that’s why you need… I think that’s really good. That’s really good. And that’s why you need the symbol on. Yes. You need what connects… Something that can take you to the depths of the inner world. It’s fountain origin, but that also puts you ratio religio with the reality that that is ultimately responsible to… Grounded in. Yes. Grounded in and responsible to and lives in reference to. Yes. That’s right. That’s right. And that’s why the people that are flying around and doing all the Bronze Age deity stuff ultimately become dissatisfied. Because it’s like, that doesn’t give me… It doesn’t connect… It doesn’t connect my depth to the depth. That’s right. That’s right. And instead I might be exiled. I might have exiled myself to a world unto myself where I can have dominion. But that dominion is… Then becomes founded on the realization that I’ve woken up in this world, this world that is finite, this world that is not ultimate. But instead of finding the Dreamweaver and reaching beyond the scope of that world, what I might be tempted to do is I might be tempted to simply reign in that world, create from it an island. Right. Right. Create from it something autonomous, something unrelated to what is prior, to what is supernal to it. And the failure of having… The failure to have been… The failure to escape that dream instead of producing, instead of redoubling the desire to escape it, may in fact produce a very different attitude, a defiant attitude. One that says, well, I’ve woken up inside of this, but I can’t get out. And I can’t… You’re like the Merovingian in the Matrix series. So what I’m going to do instead is that, and this is I think what it means properly to take offense. Kierkegaard has this interesting idea of the offense, that taking offense at the idea of the paradox, right? That the response to the incursion of Christ into time is to either faith, which is the absolute relation, right? Which is assenting to the relation and accepting it and accepting its solicitude, accepting its love, accepting the possibility of the paradox, accepting the possibility that all things are in fact possible. Or to despair over that sin, to essentially compound it, to redouble it, to use that sin, that realization of living in a dream as the basis for a world unto yourself that you then become, that you become a kind of, you become a kind of despot. Well, like I said, not that the second movie was particularly good, but the Merovingian character was probably the highlight of that second movie because he’s exactly that. And his motto is, everything is completely fated, right? He completely gives up transcendence and collapses into the captivity of the third person, right? Impersonal finitude. We’re all locked into this. Right, right. So that despair of offense is that you make necessity of the sin. That’s right, right. You make necessity of the sin, but it’s a false necessity, right? I get it. It’s a false necessity because in God, all things are possible for Kierkegaard, right? And so to make necessity of the sin is in some ways the deepest, he actually calls it the demoniacal form of despair, which is that your despair becomes a kind of open rebellion against the possibility of redemption. You cultivate the sin, you redouble it, you compound it, you amplify it, and you create from it a kind of cosmos unto yourself that loses its relation and continuity with everything that is beyond it. I see. So one of the great ironies of all of this is that the exercise of the greatest amount of agency, so it would seem, deprives you of your freedom. Because the freedom isn’t an expression of, you know, freedom of will, so understood as not freedom of action, right? I mean, that’s a famous insight by Frankfurt. It’s something that Rick, our mutual Rick Rappetti writes very, very knowledgably about too, although in the Buddhist context. But this idea that the exercising this kind of freedom of action to create and cultivate a world that is autonomous, independent, and entirely self-referential actually deprives you of the freedom of will, which is to say to be in right relation with yourself in such a way that you are in relation to what is prior, to what is fundamental. So this reminds me then of, right, I can see now how it’s fundamentally not being true to what we are. And this is, you know, the work we did on the elusive eye with Greg, right? At some point, the arrow of self-reference and self-relevance has to turn to not how are things relevant to me and my world, but how am I and my world relevant to something that has a reality and existence beyond me? And I make a mistake if I attribute that to any individual in the world, to any one relationship that cannot possibly bear it, that can’t bear it. It can participate in it because it becomes, if it’s ironized properly, if the relationship, and that doesn’t mean that he doesn’t, making a relationship ironic doesn’t deprive it of its meaning, it doesn’t instrumentalize a person. It also makes it iconic. Yes, exactly. Always keep those two in mind when he’s talking. The irony is that you realize the way in which what is not ultimate participates in what is ultimate. Yes, exactly. Right? And that is the paradox that it is and is not ultimate. It participates in it. It partakes of it. Yeah, so we’ll talk about this more about the through line that leads us to the through line of all the through lines of the good. But I think this is enough for this particular episode, Chris. We really, it started, I could feel it starting to take on a life of its own and go places. It does. It’s difficult with, you know, it’s, I knew it would take, it would take a minute to get into it because the problem, the problem is also the beauty is that there’s so, it’s difficult to know where to begin. Yeah. It’s difficult for me to know where to begin with Kierkegaard because there’s so much and it’s all wreathed together. But it’s so difficult to talk about any one aspect without talking about them all. And that of course is what we’ve been talking about. So any points to ponder? Like what would be things that people could take away from this that we’ve said that you’d like them to sort of reflect on and, you know, turn over their mind. This is what I try to do at the end of every episode. So instead of a lecture is done, now go home, right? It’s like, no, no, take this into your home. What would be the bridge? That’s what these points to ponder are. What are some key things you think we’ve disclosed here that they should reflect on? Well, I think that thinking about one’s personal relationship with irony is a good place to start. And that means that, you know, we are in the custom of inhabiting. I just want to intervene here because the problem for many people is the current understanding of irony is almost the exact opposite of what we’re talking about here. Irony is often being confused with a kind of cynicism or sarcasm or sarcasm. And it’s not cynicism in the ancient sense either. It’s in the modern sense. So I just wanted to put that pin and I just wanted to emphasize that. It’s a very difficult thing. It’s a there’s a reason he devotes all thesis to it. It’s a very difficult concept in some ways to to to wrap our arms around. But one way of beginning to think about it is we inhabit a variety of identities. We are more than any one of those identities. There are times, though, when we forget that. Yes. Right. There are times when we over identify. This is one way in which Kierkegaard comes into very powerful dialogue with Jung. I think there are times when we. We lose the memory of ourselves in the platonic sense of an amnesis. Yes, sense for a Kierkegaard sin is what blocks an amnesis, interestingly enough. But we inhabit a variety of identities on a day to day basis, and those identities require a certain amount of focus and commitment even and commitment. But because of that, we are prone to dissolve ourselves into those identities, to forget, get absorbed in them. Yeah. And to over identify them to the point where we live in them as dreams and we forget that that’s what they are. We forget that they are provisional, that they’re partial, and that somehow their nature refers outside of them, gestures outside of them. Right. It would be easy for the professor to forget that he’s anything but. Believe me, I know that. It’s difficult for the bureaucrat often to forget, to remember. And people also, I’m thinking of Eichmann and Arendt, they compartmentalize. They compartmentalize, which is exactly the opposite of trying to find the true line. That’s right. That’s right. And in so doing, they lose their will becomes dormant. Their consciousness of self becomes dormant. They lose a dimension of their humanity. They lose spirit. Right. So that loss of sense of self doesn’t mean that they can’t be incredibly self-centered or selfish. Oh, yeah. In fact, more so. Right. Exactly. Exactly. In fact, more so. So what I would leave people watching with is, you know, consider the ways in which you dissolve. Usually, usually imperceptibly, usually without notice. I mean, it has to be without noticing because that’s how it begins. It begins unconsciously. And those identities aren’t just identities, they’re not things you put on and take off. They are perspective. They’re perspectives in the proper sense. They are worlds unto themselves that have their own ethics, their own sense of rules, their own cast of characters, their own objectives. They are entirely. They seem like islands unto themselves of personality, and we dissolve into them and forget ourselves in the process. And irony is. Irony is the beginning of waking up inside of those dreams and remembering that whatever it is that we are is not reducible to any of those identities, though through irony, they may participate in it. Right. That’s the part I wanted to get. And irony is what allows for that participation. Irony wakes us up to the fact that the particular identity we have is actually participating, that world is actually participating in something other than itself. It participates as a consequence of the irony. That’s right. Irony wakes us up to that. Therefore, whatever it is, whatever the features of that world are, become sort of are vested with a kind of. They are able to symbolize our relationship inside and outside what is outside of them. Right. So this to me means in this sense of irony, if as the argument I’ve been building here is dialectic into dialogos is a way of finding that through line and being able to track it. There is a deep. Like, so how do like how to within the multi aspectuality to find the through line and then within the multi perspectival nature to find the through line. If that’s dialectic into dialogos, and I think that’s a proper part of understanding it, that’s what it is to follow the logos. There’s a deep connection between irony in the Kruka guardian sense and perhaps in the Socratic sense and dialectic into dialogos. Yes, absolutely. Because in dialectic into dialogos, the irony is actually baked into the method. It’s baked into the tissue of the method because you know at any given moment that what you are professing or proposing is a more accurate way of putting it. The proposals that you make that strike toward the definition of a virtue are not that virtue. But if we if that if the consciousness of that non identity is baked into the process that that which is not virtue can still bespeak it. Yes, can still speak. So that the virtue is made negatively negatively is not a value judgment. Right. I mean it in the more technical sense is made negatively present because of our it’s a circumambulatory process. And we get that sort of horizon sense of the virtue. Yes. Again, it’s. Yes. And so and so irony puts us into relation with something by making it negatively present within a dream within something that is fundamentally not of the same order. And that’s going to get us at some point into talking about love because love does exactly. Ah, yeah, especially the love of within relationships, which is going to bring us back to Kruka. Right. Thank you very much. Thank you, everyone, as always for your time and attention. We’re not going to do a practice after every dialogue between Chris and I. But Chris and I will do some dialogical practices to help give you further things to add to your growing ecology of practices. Take good care of everyone. Thank you, Chris. So is the aesthetic person trapped in that in that place where they’re there, they’re there, they’re Peter Pan that can’t lost its shadow. The unions are clapping right now. But right that that you’re locked in. So paradoxically, you think you have all these possibilities. You’ve infinitized yourself. Right. And you’ve lost the fact that you’re a finite being your exactly. Exactly. Exactly. So you’ve in a sense, you’ve mistaken the nature of time. You’ve entrusted yourself to time, hoping, thinking that it will bear you out, that it will bear you out to the sum of all of these possibilities. That simply by living it out, that you’ll arrive at yourself.