https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=WIk4OJJJwJg
Welcome back to After Socrates. This is episode 16. I’m joined again by my good friend Christopher Piotr. We’re doing an exploration of the relationship between Socrates and Kierkegaard as a way of continuing after Socrates by somebody who came after Socrates almost with a vengeance. He is pursuing Socrates profoundly and passionately, but also critically in the good sense of being critical. Last time we did some things that I was really appreciative of. One of the reasons why we’re doing this is to demonstrate a dialogos. We will do a demonstration of the explicit practice of dialectic in the dialogos, but Chris and I have done this enough that we can often just get into that shared flow state. That’s what happened. We were starting out and talking about a bunch of things, and then we got into it. I very quickly found myself having insights about Socrates and irony and Kierkegaard that I’d never had before, and then making some very strong connections to Kierkegaard’s notions of sin. Whether or not those are something you ultimately agree with, that’s not the point. The point was for everyone to see not just the content of what we’re talking about, but also see the manner and the process, which was very significant. So welcome again, Chris. I propose we just take it up. We had covered some very important topics. We talked about, they’ve already got a lot about Socrates, but we did a little bit more about Kierkegaard’s background. Then we got into some very, very deep, but I think made clear points around irony, participation, paradox, finite transcendence, the relationships between Socrates and Jesus in Kierkegaard’s mind. I’d like to just get back into this with you. Yeah. We talked about Kierkegaard as being a person whose thought and action, incidentally, centers on paradox. He has a line, I think it’s in Fragments, he says, a thinker without paradox is like a lover without feeling. It’s a paltry mediocrity. That somehow acquaintance with the paradox is at the center of what it means to be a self for Kierkegaard and what it means to ultimately be religious. Would you say then that the self, and I don’t mean just reflectively, epistemically, but there’s something inherently paradoxical. Yes, because it exists because it can be drawn along the axis of different dichotomies, or drawn from opposites, right? We’re incredibly finite beings, temporally finite, and yet we have this presentiment of the eternal. Right, that’s the finite transcendence. That’s right. There’s something about us that is beholden to necessity, and yet we linger in great possibility, especially in our inward and imaginary lives, right? We float above ourselves. We’re besept by fate, but we also take responsibility for our lives. Right, so we are drawn along the lines of these apparent contradictions, these dichotomies that tear us in different directions, that present dilemmas to us whereby we might be one thing or the other, and that never the twain seem to meet. But the fact of the matter is that they meet all the time, and that irony, as we discussed last time, is the beginning of realizing the presence of the other end of the dichotomy in its opposite, right? The trace of the finite in the infinite, or the trace of the infinite within the finite, right? Being able to somehow make present the opposite of what is being lived out. And for him, being able to confront the paradoxical and being able to actually acquaint with it properly comes as the consequence of a Socratic process. Right, like we discussed, right? This idea of waking up within the dream, using irony to realize that what seems real participates in what’s real, but is not unto itself sufficiently real, right? It could be a path. Right, that we have that it, if we look at it in just the right way, it can refer itself back to something that seems, that seems closer. That seems- So there’s, you know, like a connection between intimation and intimacy here. That’s right. That’s right. And that the thing that sensitizes us to be able to, to be able to accommodate paradox is how we deal with absurdity, how we deal with absurdity. So one of the things that the Socratic tutoring does is because it brings ignorance into consciousness and allows us to appreciate ignorance, right? Appreciation in both senses, right? Appreciating in the sense of becoming properly aware of it, but also developing it, right? Developing ignorance. And what that allows us to do is is develop a relationship with what defies the outer and upper limits of the reason within the model of the world that we hold at any given time, right? And so the shift into the religious mode of life, for instance, right? When Kierkegaard talks about the stages of life, which is one of the things I think most people probably know best about him, at least at face value, is the idea of there being an aesthetic and ethical and a religious stage of life. And the step from the ethical into the, so the aesthetic into the ethical rather is marked by a commitment to necessity, right? A kind of the resignation of oneself to what is by necessity in defiance of the myriad of possibilities of what one could be and what one feels in the imagination. This is the step from the aesthetic to the ethical. And to commit to the ethical is to commit to a cultural good fundamentally. So let’s do the stages first a little bit more clearly and unpack it for people. So we talked a bit about the aesthetic stage when we were talking about the seducer, the diarrhea of the seducer. Which dwells in the imaginary, right? It dwells in the artistic and the imaginary, the poetic, right? Being able to exert impressions from the world and cultivate them with imagination in order to create spaces of possibility to explore oneself. But in that mode, in the mode of possibility. So in the mode of possibility, so that’s what I wanted to get. Is that the defining feature of the aesthetic stage? Sort of living such as to keep open the possibilities as much as possible. Yes, but still within time. So I want to bring a psychological example in and you’ll know of it because of the Jungian, right? The eternal boy, the Peter Pan, right? Pan meaning all the possibilities, right? So the person, and I remember this stage of my life and I’ve seen it in my son, where you realize that like you’ve been living within the wonder of the glory of all of these possibilities. And then you realize, but I have to kill so many of them and there’s like, I don’t want to do that. So is the aesthetic person trapped in that place where they’re Peter Pan that can’t, lost its shadow, the Jungians are clapping right now. But right, 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. 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. And so although this typifies like a youthful stage, people can be stuck in this for their whole life. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And that’s a good point. It’s like these stages, there’s no automatic migration from, in fact, there’s nothing automatic about any of this. I mean, one of his points, I’m going to try not to just fire off in all directions here, but this is relevant. His critique of Christendom, which is one of the things that he’s most famous for, it was both sort of an abstract critique, but it also eventually toward the end of his life concentrates on the Church of Denmark. And he has a vicious and transient kind of polemic with the church and some of its, some of its, some of the luminaries of it that were in repute at the time that he lived. And I don’t want to imply that, you know, his critique is often painted in very strident terms, and that’s true. But he was as critical of himself. Yeah, that’s correct. He was as the same criterion that he applied to the Christendom of his day as the measure of its failure was also the measure of his own. And he knew that. And so I don’t think that there’s any hypocrisy in his critique. He’s implicated himself in it. And that begins to evolve in some different ways toward the end of his life. But fundamentally, the crux of the critique is, and we can talk about how this reminiscences of Socrates is that Christendom, his question, how can I be a Christian within Christendom, which, which is a heck of a question, right? And what he is denying is any, is that you can become a Christian by any inheritance, by growing up within an ethic of Christendom. Yeah, you don’t inherit your Christianity in any way. No, you don’t. What you do inherit is you inherit the possibility thereof. So he would find the proposal of a Christian nation, an oxymoronic proposal. Yes, because the nation, the nation or the state is not a religious entity. The state is an ethical entity, right? It is a universal entity insofar as it prescribes a criterion of truth that is less than ultimate, right? Compelling and formidable in its own way, but relegated to a domain that is not fundamentally in the category of the religious. Right. That is the ethical stage. This is a commitment to the necessity of a universal criterion of living that is recognized, but that is ultimately less than ultimate, ultimately less than ultimate. What a phrase. So the idea here being that you do not inherit your identity as a Christian, you suffer for it. I was going to say you don’t just choose it either, right? You have to be… You choose it, but you choose it, you choose it. Your will, and I mean, this is why Christ is necessary and not simply Socrates, is that yourself is something to be suffered in order to be known. And what Christ provides for Kierkegaard is the way, the passion of that suffering is the way of acquiring a relationship with yourself in both aspects. Okay, so let’s move to that. So you’ve got the aesthetic, which is the person gets like self-enclosed in that bubble of the glorious possibilities. And then there’s a sense in which the transcendent is being emphasized at the expense of the finite. They’re too heavenly minded in some sense to be too any earthly good or something like that. And meanwhile, time is having its way with them. And they think they are maintaining their freedom by maintaining the plethora of possibilities when in fact they’re losing their freedom. This is very insightful. And then so something happens, and we talked about this last time, we’ll come back about the details. Something breaks in from the outside, ironically comes into that world, but blows them out of it somehow. And they move to the ethical stage. And the ethical stages you’ve just typified it is that the ethical stage is to shift off of possibility onto necessity and to really emphasize in that sense, our finitude before the universal, our subservience in the fact that we’re dominated by the universal. Is that a good way of putting it? Yes. And so what would be sort of, I gave you an example, what would be like a psychological profile example of somebody living this way? Is this somebody who, like I think of what’s his name, Jere in Les Misérables, who is about the law and the law and the law. And that was the whole point of the novel, is that he doesn’t see that he’s lost his humanity because he is so enamored, like he remember- So deeply committed. The stars, he says like the star, like at least in the musical, the stars. And he’s so enamored of that and deeply committed that of course he loses touch with his capacity to recognize humanity. That’s right. And it’s an idolatry of sorts. And I think we’re meant to understand it as such, which is that his commitment to the law becomes an idolatrous commitment because he mistakes something that’s less than ultimate for something ultimate. He develops an attitude to something universal that is a category mistake that properly belongs to the religious. Because, but the difficulty is that, so the great either or, the great canonical example of this in Kierkegaard’s work is the question of marriage. That is marriage is a kind of either or, that the sacrament of marriage is in some sense a kind of threshold from the aesthetic way of life, where- But he has this tortured relationship with Regina, right? With Regine, yeah. So Regina- And he hurts her too. Yes, not nearly as much as he does himself though. No, no, fair enough, fair enough. But so the Regina, Regina is a very interesting thing. Oh, so that’s how you pronounce it. Okay, go ahead. I think so, yeah, I think so. I’m just going to sit through the Canadian pronunciation. So Regina is, so the- He’s clearly in love with her. Yes, and she and with him, by all accounts. And one of the things that’s, you know, it’s fitting that Kierkegaard’s thought centers on paradox because his personality by all accounts was very paradoxical. He was, and I’m going to come back to Regina, but I want to talk about him for a second. I’ve been wanting to do that. He was a very difficult person to love, but he had qualities that punctuated his melancholy and that punctuated, he had, you know, in some ways a very disagreeable personality by all accounts, prone to melancholy, very intransigent, polemical, very difficult to please. And he would maintain that nobody really understood his work. So there was an element. He was, I think many people would probably call him arrogant and pretentious. I think, I think the arrogance is completely, it’s fun. It’s tricky, right? He is many things at once. He is, he is, he is melancholic and disagreeable and prone to, and prone to fits of deep ennui. And on the other hand, by many accounts, he has, he’s remarkably sensitive, deeply romantic, very courageous, and has moments of tremendous generosity and love toward his, toward his, he had a very good relationship, for instance, with his nieces and nephews. He was very playful with kids, especially, you know, and they remembered him so fondly actually that his nephew, I think he got himself arrested, if I remember correctly, at his funeral because he protested the way that the church was treating him and the hypocrisy of the way that the church was treating him. Treating Kierkegaard. I mean, treating Kierkegaard, sorry. So he had on the one hand, this kind of a personality that was quite difficult and that would, that I think people would find very difficult to love. But at the same time, there was incredible grace and sensitivity and, and something remarkably tender about him. And he was himself tender, very sensitive, and as disagreeable as he could be, he was very prone to injury by the epithets and scolding and ridicule that he received from others around him. That to him was his particular way of suffering himself. He was endowed with a personality that had a very natural melancholy to him. His father believed, for instance, that all of his children, Kierkegaard included, would be dead by their mid thirties as a consequence of some, some, some reprisal for his sins. And Kierkegaard inherited this belief that he would die very young. He, he was convinced of it. And in fact, he spent his money accordingly. He really didn’t, he didn’t plan to live very long and he didn’t, he didn’t a little longer than he expected, but ultimately a very short life. And he ran out of money just in time to die, which is also interesting. And he literally, in some sense, worked himself to death. We still don’t know exactly what he died of, maybe tuberculosis, but, but he just, he, he, he was born and raised and lived under the aspect of a particular kind of grief. He recognized in himself that life came with, that his existence came with a burden of suffering that could not be ignored, that could not be shied away from, that couldn’t be slept through, but that had to be brought into consciousness and recognized. So he had a calling in his suffering. Yes, that’s right. And his suffering isn’t, I don’t think an ascetic indulgence. I don’t see it that way. I think for him, suffering is a significant part of the nature of our existence and it must be known in order for existence to be known. And what he saw is that the Christians of his day had no relationship with suffering, certainly no voluntary relationship with suffering. They would never have opted for it. They would never have elected suffering as a, as a way of coming into consciousness, as a way of realizing that they had relationships dispersed throughout their lives that were somehow substituting for something, for an appetite that really had no place in them. And for him, it is the experience of suffering oneself that allows us to know, to differentiate those mistaken identities. Right? That’s the Socratic part of the story, which is that the suffering is necessary to induce the aporia that is required to disillusion oneself from all of those attachments that are, that are modally confused and that are mistaken for something that they’re fundamentally not. And he knew of Christians in his day that, that they missed the imitatio, right? That by eponymous definition, they were fraudulent. There was a certain fraudulence of spirit because they took the name of Christ without following in the way of his suffering, the very way that would make them conscious of the conditions of their own existence such that they could turn in the direction of them and be naked before them and know themselves in their wake. And he looked out at the world and the Christendom of his day and said, I don’t know what you all are doing, but whatever it is, it’s not Christianity, right? You can’t be a Christian except to follow in the wake of the suffering of Christ, not because we’re fetishizing pain. I think that’s often the impression that people have. It’s like, no, no, no, that’s not it. Is that suffering is a necessary way through to oneself without which we cannot be made awake inside of that dream, right? And so his critique of Christianity, of at least of Christendom, really came from that where he saw, he looked around and he said, no, no, this belongs to the category of the ethical. The Christianity of my day, speaking as Kierkegaard, belongs to the category of the ethical, of the universal, a worldly commitment made on worldly terms, not something that is angling its attention to what is beyond the boundaries of that universal frame, right? And that Christ as the paradox, straddling the finite and infinite, straddling the finite and infinite, straddling the necessary and the possible, is something that can only be assumed, assumed in the sense of taken upon, taken upon, not, yeah. If we have confronted, if we have exhausted the bound, the outermost boundaries of the ethical and still found it wanting and beyond those boundaries is something unreasonable, unreasonable in the lower sense of reason, right? Illogical. This goes back to his critique of Hegel as well, right? It’s not simply that you take these opposites and synthesize them, right? You have to suffer them. You have to suffer them. And there is an absurdity in the contradiction of the suffering that they conduce. And it is only when that absurdity is lived that the paradox can be found and that the irony in the face of that suffering is key to that whole undertaking. That was excellent. So if we can, that wasn’t a digression, but if we can bring it back around. So you proposed, maybe a bit of a pun intended, that for Kierkegaard, marriage was one of the things that indicates that you’re moving from the aesthetic into the ethical and that, and Regina, and he takes up this, he genuinely loves her. She seems to somehow get him through all of this. Because she sees that spark, the spark of Eros. Exactly, exactly. They form a relationship. He proposes marriage. They get engaged. And then he unexpectedly, at least from her perspective, breaks it off and ends it and just shuts off all of that. Why does he do this? Well, because he, and the story of his breakup with Regina is, like it haunts him. It’s fear and trembling. Fear and trembling is written as a not particularly well disguised account of his dilemma. Because… So this is something I want to explore to you. I just want to put a pin on it. What’s the difference between the dilemma and the paradox? Well, the dilemma, the dilemma frames the paradox as the either or. Right. As one or the other. Right. The paradox… Doesn’t synthesize them either. No, it’s not a Hegelian synthesis. You’re suffering and you’re doing this almost like opponent processing. Yes. Right. Yes. And suffering, suffering the dilemma of the either or is what conditions the relationship with the absurdity. And the absurdity prevails above the dilemma. Right. It’s like you’re trying to access something beyond the outermost boundary of the frame, because you framed a problem as an either or. And that’s bedeviling you. That’s bedeviling you. But the paradox is, the paradox belongs to the category of the religious. Right. Which is neither the aesthetic, nor is it the ethical, nor is it a straightforward synthesis between the two. No, no. Right. Right. So he breaks off, it would seem, I hate to be so straightforward about it, as though the truth is clear and unambiguous. But I think it’s I think it’s true enough to say that he breaks his relationship with Regina because he cannot consign himself to the ethical form of life that would inhibit what is ultimately for him a religious vocation. He will not be able to find himself in that form of life. He will not be able to commit to it and if he does, he will have circumscribed his own vocation. He will have circumscribed his relationship to his self so severely that it will bring that it will bring contempt and resentment and conflict to their relationship in the first place. So he’s afraid he’ll become a chevere in a way. Or that he will strain so much so violently against the boundaries of that phase of life that he’ll wreck the marriage and her and himself in the process. Right. Right. Right. He does this in my estimation. He does this as much for her as for himself. He knows that he can’t. He knows that he can’t do it. He can’t commit to that life because that lot because the he’s not really rejecting her. No, he’s rejecting. He’s rejecting. She should have been really bounded to the moral state, the ethical stage. I should say that’s right. And she remains for him. She remains a symbol of she. It’s like Kierkegaard spends much of his life, especially toward the end of his life, in a kind of earthly like a kenosis. Like he just empties everything out. And he retains a few close confidants, a few close relationships. But you know, he’s very polemical and he’s very disagreeable. And he arouses the ire of most people and he becomes a little bit of an outcast. And some of that is something he deliberately cultivates. And some of it it’s not. But he really does own it. He takes it on. He says, OK, that’s fine. You know what? I can’t follow perfectly and properly in the way of Christ. But what I can do is I can remain a top boss like Socrates. I can dwell on the outer edges of this world. And I can be liminal. And my the deprivation, I will suffer as a consequence of being socially rejected in the way that he is. He’s socially rejected in part because of his, the way he breaks off the engagement, because that’s an ethical faux pas. Right. It’s like, how could he do that? Right. He commits a kind of an it’s an ethical trespass. But also because his critique of the Church of Denmark has become, like I said, very polemical. And and he’s also been a bit of a he’s become a bit of a pariah on that basis, too. And of course, his published like he’s become he’s he’s a very well known person. And he’s a very big fish in a small pond in Copenhagen at the time. But it’s not like Berlin. This is like Copenhagen is a much smaller place. Denmark itself is a much smaller place. And the way that he is received partly as just a natural property of his personality. He’s prone to fits of melancholy. Like I said, there’s part of him that’s intransigent by nature and very disagreeable. Part of it is that he chooses to cultivate the very thing that happens spontaneously, which is that he is rejected, roundly rejected. And that becomes a form of suffering in itself that he opts for. So Regina. Yeah. Regina. Regina, I think that he breaks off his engagement to Regina because he knows that he cannot live within the boundaries of that phase of life. And he and he but she remains a symbol for him that a symbol on and it’s proper meaning that connects his that connects his agapic love that connects the love that he the love and longing he has for Christ. To his worldly identity, she actually spills over the boundaries, right? She becomes I think she becomes a symbol for him in the proper sense. Yeah, I’ve thought of that as her being a symbol of, you know, the aspect shift that the I don’t know what to call it. The shift from Eras to Agape. Right. Exactly. And his relationship with her is therefore ironic. Yeah, because he he loves her very genuinely. But but for him, his love for her is also displaced from a love that is more ultimate. Right. So let’s let’s let’s pick that up. So let’s say he’s not I mean, I don’t want to be cavalier or callous towards her, but he’s not rejecting her. He’s rejecting like this, the way of life in a particular stage, because I’ll use biblical language because I think it’s appropriate. He regards it as an idolatry of the law. He regards it as the right. We promote a universality of a particular moral code and we do it mercilessly. All right. And of course, there’s there’s aspects of that that are very prevalent in our culture right now. So clearly aren’t talking about something that’s just Copenhagen and weird attitudes towards marriage. We can think about the ways in which we like as a culture, we are taking moral principles and we’re making them these universal absolutes. And and and we’re and we’re really we’re sorry, I want to speak very carefully. There are times in which we are losing touch with the humanity of the people that are involved in our moral pronouncements. So Kruger is afraid of that. And that’s the Lutheran in him, like the Martin Luther and the Saint Paul and the worrying about right that that trying to find salvation through the law, that that is ultimately doomed. You can’t do that. And so he’s picking that up. Right. So and we and like I say, we can see a movement right now. And I’m not taking a political stance here. I’m just observing that, you know, that no, no, what we can do is we can find salvation through the law. Here’s this here is the ultimate final moral stance and everything. If we just all agree to it, then that’s right. Yeah. And perfection will ensue. And you can see both left and right doing this in various ways. That’s right. And there is still a scene to be a little bit more platonic about it. I mean, that is all a matter of seeming. Right. Yes. It is all a matter of seeming. It might seem for years and years on end, but it is only a matter of seeming. And for him, and for him to equate that with to attach himself to it, to bind himself and continuity with it would be something so deeply fraudulent to his spirit that he couldn’t bring himself to do it. So this reminds me, of course, of Socrates being accused of corrupting, corrupting the youth, right. Being an atheist. And so by the by the standards of Athens, he’s, you know, an immoral being. And he is he’s ruthlessly apolitical. He he he he pisses off both the tyranny and the democracy. And it’s the democracy that in fact kills him. Right. And so. And then they immediately regret it. Right. And all that sort of stuff. But again, this so Kierkegaard is also placing himself the way at least I think he sees himself as placing himself into that that liminal, a categorical, because the thing about the ethical stage with its universal pronouncements and universal categories is it actually has no place for the liminal. And it presents itself as completely self-enclosed in another way. And complete. Yes, complete. And complete. Yes, yes. And so we see that we see the self enclosure of the aesthetic stage and then to all this possibility. Right. And now, no, it’s necessity. It’s necessity. And everybody must bow and bow down to the necessity. Right. And then he he wants to say, no, no, there is something beyond that, because that is nevertheless. Right. You’ve lost. Now you’re so into the finite that you’ve lost the taste of the infinite. You’ve lost the eternal and you’re hopeless, still hopelessly dedicated to the temporal. And and you can be just as passionate there as the people who are leading the aesthetic stage can be passionate about what they’re doing. Absolutely. And you can find very persuasive apologies for it. These phases have there’s even a kind of nobility. There is. And he would agree. He would say there is. I mean, the the conversation, one of the dialogues that takes place in either or is between an estate who is very wantonly chasing objects of his erotic desire and Judge William, who is this very stable married person who is trying to extol the virtues of marriage, the virtues of relative stability, the virtues of the finite, the virtues of steadfast worldly commitment to this aesthetic wanton young man. And he’s doing so very persuasively, like when Kierkegaard’s writing in that perspective, he’s committed to it. And Kierkegaard finds great dialectical and Socratic necessity in periodically committing to a perspective to understand its ambient quality, to understand its mood, to live inside of it, to know its particular each each each can be valorized. The problem is that you can valorize it while remaining ironically aware of the fact that it’s not enough and it’s not final. Right. And it is not where you must end. And he dies to there’s this phrase dying to himself. He continually dies to himself, which is that he forfeits, he sacrifices the self. No Kierkegaard himself, the self that belongs to any one of these stages and forms of life dies, right? Dies, dies with its attention fixed on what is paradoxically more and other to what is being lived out now. And yet through irony is continuous with it in so far as you find the traces of what is missing in the world in which you happen to find yourself. So again, in the end, Javert commits suicide because that’s the only way he can, he has to actually die. That’s the only way he can respond to the fact because he gets hit by the realization that he has lost his humanity. Yes. Right. When Kierkegaard breaks off his arrangement, his engagement, he doesn’t in a sense die. I mean, he and hit and losing Regina, I’d actually, well, I’d like to read something. I won’t make a habit of this, but this is the last letter that he writes Regina, which she never receives. She never receives it? She never receives it because he being very decorous and very proper, he sends it to her husband. She marries eventually. So he sends it to her husband. A man named Schlegel, not the Schlegel, another Schlegel. And he sends it to her husband to be very proprietary about it. And her husband does not pass it on. But this, I think, boy, this is this bear in mind. This is this comes, I think this is in 1949, not long before he dies. Sorry. Yeah. And, and, you know, it’s important to say, I mean, we know far less about her perspective and all of this than we do his, obviously. But by his account, they do begin to very subtly, very tacitly. It’s not as though he ends their engagement. And then there’s acrimony between them to the end of their lives. It’s not quite that. It seems that there is a lingering fondness. There’s a lingering connection between them. The eros that they share, there’s something about that that remains. It certainly remains for him. I think you always carry some love for somebody you’ve been in love with. Yeah. And that and there seems to have been some mutuality to that. You know, I think even though he was rejected from their social circles, I don’t know that he was ever fully rejected by her. I don’t know. I’m not. That’s less clear. You know, in any case, let me just read this. I think it’s it speaks volumes to Frau Regina Schlegel. There’s a parenthetical note here that reconciliation was it was first my love that is a friendship, then my friendship and then to reconciliation. So he changed that a few times. My personal, my personality has perhaps once worked too strongly upon you. It shall not happen a second time, but consider seriously for the sake of God in heaven, whether you dare entertain such a notion and if so, whether you will speak to me immediately or first exchange some letters. If your answer is no, then you must remember for the sake of a better world that I have made this attempt. In my case, as from the first, so to the last, I am honorably and entirely devoted to yours. So and kick it off. That gets me every time that letter. So what I think is clear is that he there’s a there’s a line that he repeats in the sickness unto death when he’s talking about this condition of despair, which is that it culminates in a kind of forfeiture. You have to give up yourself precisely to gain yourself right. That if you follow in in the pattern and path of Christ’s suffering, you there is in sacrifice, sacrifice is an implicit feature of that way. And but what is being sacrificed in some sense is precisely what is then being gained. Right. He brings up Job as an example of that as a scriptural example of that. Right. And there’s something like that going on with his rejection of Christ. He rejects marriage with her precisely so that their relationship can endure and belong properly to the category of spiritual life to which he aspires. He doesn’t want to banish her from his life. In fact, he knows great pains to keep her symbolically present. What that means to her is ultimately less clear, but she remains, like I say, sacred and symbolic to him right up until the end. So. He’s trying to convey to her what we’ve been doing. He’s trying to convey to her what we’ve been talking about, but he can’t. He can’t because and that’s the irony. That’s the irony. So. The person and you know, and we were bumping into the teleological suspension of the ethical right here and right and I want to bring. Do we want to explain? We do kind of did explain that just didn’t use that phrase. Do we want to explain? Yeah, this is the idea. The ethical can’t be treated in this completeness that in the end we have to be called to something beyond it. And so Kierkegaard invokes the notion of the teleological and not so much in the causal sense, but being not in the causal sense, not because being called to a higher purpose. And so it’s not a very good idea to be called to something beyond it. And he uses Abraham, the story of Abraham. And of course, this is all fraught and he uses it because I think very definitely because very many people object to the story of Abraham from within the ethical frame, which is why he chooses it. He chooses it very socratically. Very basically pisses people off. And it’s a very Socratic thing to do. But I just. So he. So again, this was at great cost to himself. He he he hears this calling. So I want to note something here first that’s really interesting, because this moving between these stages is very much like what L.A. Paul would call a transformative experience. You don’t know what you’re going to like. You don’t know what you’re going to lose, but you don’t know what you’re going to miss if you stay. Right. Right. And you know, and you can’t sort of go to the bottom of the screen. And you know, and you can’t sort of just you can’t reason your way through these kinds of aspirational changes. She gives the example of becoming married as one of the, you know, having a kid getting married are examples of these transformative experiences. And the fact that we are perspectively and participatorily ignorant as we stand within one stage or one way of life and consider the other because I don’t know what it’s going to be like to be married to X until I’m married to her. And I don’t know who I’m going to become until. Right. And so I lack the perspectival and the participatory knowing. I can have all kinds of propositional knowledge, but it’s it’s effectively useless. Right. And then the point is, well, then I shouldn’t do it. But precisely because you’re ignorant, you don’t know what you’re missing. Well, then I should do it, but you don’t know what you’re going to lose. And so you’re caught and you can get, you know, sort of trapped there in a kind of existential inertia because of the ignorance and you can get. And so one of the things that’s always intrigued me and this is very pertinent to Socrates, too, because Socrates sees the calling out of from the cave into wisdom as exactly that kind of transformative experience. So although he’s making all these arguments, Plato knows that you can’t argue somebody from one stage to another. So we’ll have to come back to this. What’s the relationship between the argument or reason and faith, this ability to move from. But what’s intriguing to me here and that this goes towards, I think something of what Kierkegaard means by faith and what we’ve been talking about with finding the through line is he has a sense. He has a sense of the inadequacy. See, what I’m trying to get at is I think this is kind of there’s something missing a little bit. I don’t want to I don’t want to criticize Lori’s work. I think it’s astonishingly brilliant. L.A. Paul and Agnes Callard. But there’s a sense in which you are ignorant as profoundly as they say. And I think Kierkegaard gets that. But you’re also called. Yes. And they both work simultaneously. Yes. That’s the thing I’m trying to get at. Yeah. That’s right. That Socrates and Christ. Yes. There we go. Yeah. Yeah. They’re paired. Yes. You’ve just done that. You’ve just paired them. Yes. Because the ignorance, the tutoring, learned ignorance, the learning ignorance, the tutoring of that ignorance into awareness, into ironic awareness. That’s the Socratic role. And that gives you kind of receptivity to the call. That’s what I mean. That’s the whole. That’s what I mean as one by Socrates as a as a preparation for Christ. And I don’t mean sequentially. I don’t mean it sequentially. I don’t mean first comes Socrates, then comes Christ. I don’t necessarily. You would always be living them together. You do. And he does clearly. And Climacus does too. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. He keeps saying, well, I’ve gone beyond Socrates, but then he wants to take all of his propositions and show them to who? To Christ? No, he wants to show them to Socrates. Right. OK, so let’s go back. That goes back to what you said. Socrates is his teacher, but he follows Christ. Right. Christ, it is only remember I said the he needs Christ because Christ is the relation. What does that mean for Kierkegaard? His self is. The self is the I thou relationship with God. OK, so is that you really understanding of the self is essentially an I thou relation to God. It is inherently relational and aspirational and aspirational, right, that we are gathered together that our dichotomy like our we are dispersed across these dichotomies, possibility and necessity, finite and infinite, et cetera, et cetera. Right. We are we are distended into contradiction across time. Right. Augustine, right. Time is the soul’s distension. That’s very much President Kierkegaard, that idea. Right. Now you must not entrust yourself to time. It will distend you. But. The reason that Christ is necessary is that that I thou relation with God is the resolution of that paradox. Right. We are gathered together. These dichotomous aspects are gathered into shared identity by being related to another that knows them as one. Right. This sounds like Nicholas of Cusa through and through. Yeah. I mean, this is it’s incredibly platonic. Right. That this that that our nature of being many is gathered into unity by a comprehending. We are one by the one. We are one by the one. There you go. And that’s it. Right. That’s it. We are we are known back together by the knowing of God that that we are drawn into absolution by having a relationship with the absolute by whose measure of knowing we are made one and Christ as the incarnation of that paradox is the way of being related back together. Right. That the assumption of his paradox, which happens through the assumption of his suffering. Right. You’re meant to be inaugurated into the perspective of the suffering of Christ. Right. To imitate the imitatio, to play on, to take on the paradox. You’re not meant to understand it. That’s the whole point. You can’t. It’s absurd. You know it. He talks about it in terms of belief, but belief is the wrong word in the sense of commitment to giving your heart to right. As you often say, right. It’s a relation. It’s like belief is fine as long as we understand belief as I believe in you, John, my dear friend. Belief is an expression. It’s an entrusting. It’s an entrusting. Exactly. And being true to. Exactly. It’s the expression of the felt quality. It is the belief is an expression given to the felt aspirational quality of being in deeply faithful relation to one whose knowing is well beyond you and in whose knowing you are gathered together again. So I like this. And I like the shift you did even did it in terms from faith, which has taken on a particular meaning to faithfulness, which retains the older understanding. That’s right. That’s right. That’s right. Which makes it part is not simply propositional. No, but part is that that’s why that’s why you can say something untrue like an irony. I can say something to you that I know to be untrue, but I can say it very truthfully. Yes. As opposed to the bullshitter who says something that’s true, but untruthfully. Yes. Yes. I’ll say something I know is untrue, but I’ll say it truthfully because I’ve established even by even by the negatives, even by the negative reference, I’ve opened up, I’ve used that proposition that is not true to open up an axis, a continuity of faithfulness to the truth attention. I’m using it to index my attention to the truth. Yes. Right. I think about this as ratio religio, having the proportioned right connectedness. So does the person in who’s on the cusp of the moral stage like they’re in it ethically, the ethical, I keep saying more for some because I’m hearing moral codes on my head. Sorry. Who’s on the cusp between the ethical and the religious? Right. I take it that in some sense, they’ve had a realization of they’ve put, they have not done the Higel and synthesis, but they have put the aesthetic and the ethical into dialogue. And they have realized that they both have a true aspect of humanity, the possible and the necessary and all the other, all the other dichotomies. And then they suffer the absurdity of that. And then in seeking to alleviate the absurdity, and absurdity, this is Nagel’s point, absurdity is a perspectival clash when you can’t get two perspectives. And so they suffer that. And then they do something where they seek something like a stereostopic vision through the two perspectives into something that gathers them in depth. Is that? Yes. So I’m trying again, I’m trying to get out. So what happens is they feel the absurdity and they, some people can get just get destroyed by the absurdity. Yes. Are you right? But some people, they, the absurdity becomes a call to see through the ethical and the aesthetic. And it’s marked by incidentally, humor. Yeah. Humor. Well, humor is playing between perspectives and then humor is the perspectival clash, but that gets resolved in something that transcends the presuppositions of both the perspectives. Exactly. Which is why it could Gonzalez describes Socrates doing that with all of the different aspects and how many of their them are in opposition. And he’s not trying to get the Hegelian synthesis. He’s trying to get the Necracube switch that takes you into the third, the third, the third. Right, right. Yeah. So think about how then all of these things interact, right? You get this perspectival clash that’s irreconcilable. You’re drawn, you’re riven by the tension that’s implied. You suffer that. You suffer it, right? But then if you’re suffering becomes a matter of cultivated suffering, not just incidental, if it doesn’t just happen to you, but you have, you actually opt for it. If you turn your will in the direction of it. And that’s the identification with Christ. That’s the identification with Christ. Right. So, so this is happening. I’m suffering to it. I’m suffering it, right? I’m suffering this perspectival clash and, and I’m being, I’m somehow like these dichotomous aspects of my existence are, are so fundamentally at variance with one another that I am at variance with myself. I am not myself. And the irony of that begins to become very destructive, right? And then that’s exactly where Christ, the symbol of Christ into, I shouldn’t say that. I mean, the symbol is my way of understanding it, but that’s where Christ intercedes because the cultivated suffering of Christ is precisely to suffer the experience of being riven by those dichotomous aspects that are so at variance. Represented by the divinity and the humanity, right? The temporal and the eternal, et cetera, et cetera. That’s right. That’s right. But they claim that they’re somehow one, but not logically. And they’re not logically identical at all, right? Which is why they are collapsed together in the symbol and by identification with the symbol, the pattern, as it were, they come to share a oneness of identity, but it is only in that symbol that they share that identity, right? The eternal that incurs upon the temporal. And that’s where the matter of offense takes in, right? Because that suffering, that fundamental, that acute, that acute amplified sense of sin, of being at variance with oneself, of not being oneself, of being somehow implicitly unidentical to one’s own existence. That, I mean, that can draw in one of two directions, right? Then being presented with a symbol of the eternal, right? And then being presented with a symbol who’s a symbol that can somehow resolve that paradox, then provokes one of two reactions, which he talks about, right? One is offense and the other is faith, which is an accepting of the relationship. And by, I mean, that’s the imitatio, right? So what does that mean? Sorry, we’re different, so you’ll take this question charitably. What does that mean for dialectic and to dialogous? Well, let’s think about it. Because we keep seeing these deep resonance between Kierkegaard and Socrates and Christ and Socrates and so much of what you’ve been saying here, I’ve already been talking about with the Socratic love of the good that you can never possess, etc., etc. So what do you think, how does this resonate back? How would this resonate back into people wanting to practice the so-called so-called so-called so-called so-called so-called practice without falling into Christendom? I’m speaking by analogy. It’s clear, and we make it clear, this is why we distinguish between dialectic and dialogous. Dialectic is something you can practice, but you can only participate in dialogous, right? And so I’m trying to get, I think there’s something really profound to learn from what we’re doing here, we’re doing here, right, for people who want to follow the through line, to the through line of the through lines, if I can put it that way. Yeah, because I mean, that is the, I mean, that is also the fundamental ontological claim about Christ, that Christ is the Logos as well. So for one thing, I think one of the things that happens in dialectic and to dialogous is that you, let’s talk about these dichotomous aspects of ourselves, right? Yes, I think that’s where to start, exactly. So I have this experience, I know, when I’m in dialogous, which is that I am reminded, I come in with all of these infinitized ideas about, you know, what ought to be said, what I’m going to say, what I’m going to propose. And then there comes a moment, and then like I did today, I was like, I’m going to talk about this and that, and then this and that, and it all just went right over my shoulder. And that’s why I started sort of sputtering around. And so then what very quickly happens is you come with all of these infinitized ideas, I might say, both of myself and of what I’m going to be presenting, because they are the same, right? And then at some point, and it happens very quickly, depending on the dialogous, is that I am, let’s say, I become hopelessly finite again, right? I realized that whatever grip I had on the proposal or the topic or the virtue under discussion was, is very abbreviated very quickly, right? I reach the back wall fast, much faster than I anticipate it. And then I’m thrown into the other side of the dichotomy, right? I’m kicked over into this experience of being remarkably circumscribed, remarkably limited, remarkably remarkably constrained. And the only way, the only way to dislodge myself from being stuck, one of the analogies Kierkegaard uses for this is to think of once, you know, he says at one point, he says, I am as one of those chess pieces of whom it is said, you shall not move that. That’s what it is to be in that ethical sphere, right? Which is that you have a place and you’re, you know, the number of movements that are made available to you operate within a finite set of rules. There is a finite gameplay to the ethical, right? So then I enter into the dialogue and I go from all of these infinite ideas that are somehow going to compass the virtue itself. And all of a sudden I find myself hopelessly, hopelessly limited and at a loss very quickly. And what happens by necessity, as you and I both know, in the dialogus is that it reaches at some point an aporia. And that aporia is my opportunity to shift the center of my identification. I no longer am identifying egoically with myself, if all goes well. I’m now identifying my, the center of my attention is now the center of the dialogue, right? It’s not my egoic center. It’s the center of the process that is taking place, that is unfolding. In other words, you know, it is, I’m going to, this is going to be a bit of heresy for a moment. It is not I who lives, it is the dialogus that lives within me, right? And that’s a way of understanding something like what’s going on here, which is that if you get to a point where the, where this, this contradiction in terms that is the human being becomes so untenably contradictory that it is completely stuck and immovable and has absolutely no agency, reaches an absolute aporia. It has no choice at that point, but to shift its mode of identification to something other than itself. So you, there’s the faithfulness to the logos becomes more important. And it happens because there is no other way unless I choose to make a- You can be imperious and just impose. I could. And that’s- You can just withdraw and be reticent. And that is the despair of defiance, right? The despair of weakness, he calls it, which is, you know, my will not to be myself, right? Which is a kind of, a kind of, a kind of demurring, a kind of walking back from the responsibility that is presented to me because I can’t bring myself to confront it. But then there’s that of defiance, which is to say, fine, I’m stuck. You have no idea just how stuck I can be. Yeah, yeah, I can dig my- I’ll drag everybody into my stuckness. I find it very helpful, you know, sin is a very tricky thing to talk about because it brings all kinds of associations. People think of it, I think, in- people can’t help but to draw back to this sort of parental metaphor of, you know, the naughty child main chest. You’ve been marked. It’s the, you know, the mark of Cain kind of thing. Yes. Right. It is very helpful though, when you’re- we’re thinking of these various stages of despair and how a person reacts to be the product of an irreconcilable contradiction. Think of what happens when a, you know- let’s think of how a child reacts sometimes when a child is caught. But when a child is made conscious of being in error, right, of doing wrong, of making mistakes, think of the various- that the sequence of behavior that often follows that, right? There’s a denial, there’s an outright denial, a kind of willful obliviousness, or maybe a more overt denial, a more confrontational one. Then there’s sort of a bit of a tantrum, right? Maybe there’s just a kind of more overt despair at the realization of being in error. I’m no longer trying to deny it. I’m now so overcome with its undeniable truth that I am quite beside myself, right? And then there’s another reaction that’s not- it doesn’t happen every time, not to every person, not to every child, but there is also another step to that realization, which is to say, well, if I’m so bad, I’m just going to be right. Yeah, yeah. I’m going to make that the basis of who I am, maybe just periodically for a kid, you know? It’s not like a decision they make for their- the rest of their lives, but for that moment- Because there is a kind of ease that comes from doing that. And a kind of- It releases- Yes. And there’s a catharsis to it. And there’s a kind of a way of- there’s a real intelligence to it as well, right? It’s like, I’ve found that I have a facility for this. And I’m going to, rather than deny it- It’s like Megamind, that’s what in the- Right. Well, I’m then going to be the supervillain. This is now what I am. I’m going to make- I didn’t think that this was a possibility, and now clearly it is. And I’m going to make a necessity out of it, right? I’m going to make an absolute- I’m going to be determined, right? There’s a kind of fatalism. One of Kierkegaard’s critique of the Stoics, incidentally, was that they had a necessity that lacked for possibility, right? That everything was fatalistic, everything was so overdetermined that- I mean, however we respond to that critique, but this idea that we can make a necessity that is not, in fact, necessary. And so, the adult, as the child is to the adult, right? The adult is to the sage. So now imagine that same sequence of reactions, this time in an adult, as opposed to just a child, right? That when an adult awakens to find himself living in error, the prospect of being resolved by something, by having to become something so outside of himself, is a great offence. It is a great offence to the determined autonomy of will that he has now established. Right, which is taken to be a prototypical definition of being an adult. Right, so I want to bring this back around, because I think one of the things you can see, and we’ve been doing these- we’ve done like three workshops, and we’ve been doing examples all over the place, and you can see people- and this is not a criticism, but I’m doing this mapping because it’s helpful- you can see people get aware of all the possibilities of the virtue. They get aware of the multi-spectrality, and they’re like, and that’s amazing, right? And they can get just caught up in the wonder of that, and we shouldn’t foreclose on that on people, especially when- right? But then you can also get- you can see other people who- well, yeah, but we need to come up with a rule. We need to come up with a definition. We need to lock this down, right? And that’s very much like moving into the- An opponent process. Right, and there’s the- so the first is like the aesthetic, and the second is like the ethical, right? Possibility, no, necessity, and then what we try to do, especially because we have a sequence of like four people, is for the whole group, because you constantly shift, not only are you shifting between people taking the role, right? You’re also- people are constantly trying to expand beyond, and you can get to a place with some people where they can see like, wait, somehow, and you can like- even when we have the larger reflections afterwards, some people are trying to- they’re trying to articulate how it can be both, right? They’re trying to articulate how it can be both, and usually they’re- that’s often the majority of people, but there’s some minority of- like they just- no, they- yeah, they want the resolution, and then the point, of course, is- and this is exemplified in the platonic dialogues, right? Is, right, the resolution is not going to be found by picking either one of those, right? But like you said, you don’t want an adversarial, you want an opponent processing that gives you something like stereoscopic vision, right? That makes you realize that you will always participate in the virtue, but you can never complete it. You are always a lover of wisdom, never wise, and- but nevertheless, that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t be- because this is part of the Socratic problematic, right? That Socrates doesn’t produce the knowledge that he claims is necessary for virtue, and yet he turns out to be, as Plato says at the end of the Phaedo- well, he’s not saying it, but he’s one of the characters- this is- Socrates was the wisest and just best person of all time kind of thing, and so part of it is to see exactly that, that in the process we have dialectic and divya logos, we have to like the eponymous, like the pseudonyms, the pseudonyms he used it, like you talked about how Kri-Kri-Kri goes in, so no, really live that, really, like, be that. You have to really get the wonder, right? But you also, right, you have to really appreciate the search for clarity and for decision, but you don’t want to stay on either place. So when you’re doing that, like, so when you’re doing it on the particular virtue, right, people often get a sense of this, and which is, oh, I don’t, there’s so much I don’t know in a really positive sense, and then there’s, oh, there’s so much I don’t know in a negative sense, and then you get the people who are saying, no, somehow, somehow I have to be doing both, I have to do the learned ignorance in order to enter into properly loving this virtue, honesty, or faithfulness, etc. Right. And that only happens not because those two opponent processes naturally synthesize. No, it’s the logos in the dia logos that makes it possible. So the people who not, so there’s people who just see, right, but like the perspective, all the possibilities, and then there’s others, but we need to come to some conclusion, right, but there’s, right, but the people who step out and see, I need both, they’re enabled to do that because they’re not only listening to themselves and each other, they’re listening to the logos. Right, right, which comes clear only from within, only when you become embedded at the center of that tension. Because it’s simultaneously shining into whatever frame you’re building, but also, and really hear this word withdrawing, drawing us with it beyond into the mystery, always. And so because it is that paradoxical presence, it has the possibility of calling to us when we are actually inhabiting the paradox between these two demands for exploration and wonder and clarity and conclusion. Right, so when we straddle the boundaries that are drawn between those two, only then do we become sensitized properly to develop a relationship with the absurdity of the logos that is neither and both. That’s right, and then the point about that is, is that ultimately puts us into right relationship, ratio religio, with the fact that our sense of realness is itself inherently paradoxical. The real is that which confirms and the real is that which surprises. This has been wonderful. What do you think are some final points we can give people to reflect on and take away and think about on their own or perhaps with another person? That’s a good question. Well, these stages, one thing that’s very interesting, I hadn’t ever thought to map these stages onto the process that happens within a dia logos, because for Kierkegaard, it’s a very intra-psychic process. But there is a way in which each of these stages is somehow simulated, I grant, or at least I’m willing to consider that there’s a way in which this dialogical process there’s a way in which this dialogical process stages these in a kind of that it somehow recreates them or simulates them in miniature, whereas usually they’re processes that unfold over a person’s life. Look for the pattern. Look for the pattern. That’s what I would leave off with. Look for the pattern. Here’s what I would say to you. The reason why it can do that, I don’t think it’s simulation. I think it’s co-participation in the very way in which intelligibility has to unfold, whether over a lifetime or within a living conversation. Or within a living conversation. A living conversation. So to simply try and notice them in action, to try and notice each, especially the first two, especially the interplay between the aesthetic and the ethical. And I would have done a disservice if I had depicted them as being somehow perfectly sequential, because they’re not. You cycle. They’re not. We cycle. And they coexist simultaneously with one another. And so they often are entire relationships can be defined by the particular stage that characterizes them and that characterizes their mode of engagement. So a reflective question I might offer is consider the particular relationships. And I mean with other people, but I also mean relationships to persona of yours that are relegated to certain arenas. And consider what particular character is being lived out by those relationships and where it tends, whether to the aesthetic or to the ethical. And if both, how exactly they’re interacting? Well, that’s part of why in D’Alogos, you also, the mindfulness is directed both inward and outward. Because one of the things you should be paying attention to is the microcosm of that within the practice. Because as you move between, like there’s this relationship and then there’s that relationship and then you’re watching that relationship, you’re actually, I find different aspects of myself and identities and roles being called up depending on both who I’m interacting with or listening to and where we are in the conversation. So I’m just saying, pay attention to the patterns both within the dialogue, but also within yourself. Oh, yeah, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And how they’re communicating. Yeah, we caution people to take note of the fact when they too easily identify or too easily disidentify with the other person who is speaking. That’s usually a mark that you should slow down and pay more careful attention. Because you haven’t exactly heard. Yes. Right. That’s right. Right. So we haven’t really concluded this. As you can see, this is going to be open ended. We will, Chris and I will do some practices. But this is all we’re going to do for this particular episode. So thank you very much. Thank you very much, all of you, for your time and attention. Take good care. I think one of the things both of us can teach, both of them can teach us is a much more philosophically astute and refined sense of irony. Right. Which is needed. Right. So for one thing, irony is not a temperament. No. Irony is not an attitude. Irony is not a behavior. Irony is a relationship with reality. Okay, let’s maybe start there. Let’s think of it in properly platonic terms. Like this term I’ve been using of orientation. Yes. Irony presupposes that there is a discrepancy between appearance and reality, which also means that it presupposes that there is, in fact, a reality that grounds appearance and that is concealed behind it.