https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=n8cdOLlxAb0
Kierkegaard has a very humorous example in the Diep Samadhi in either or he’s talking about, you know, this busy, busy, busy, busy man who’s wandering the streets so flushed with his affairs, so determined, so full of activity and itinerary and whatnot. And he gets run over by a carriage and he dies. That’s something similar to what I understand. I know, you talk about being hit by the bus, right? Kierkegaard got there first, John. Well, I bow. No, no, but it’s a telling convergence of thinking, right? And that’s, and of course the aphorism ends with him laughing and laughing and laughing and laughing because it’s very funny, right? Because the irony of putting those perspectives into tension reveals something implicit about the absurdity that we encounter when we try and rationally make sense of the world and ourselves within it. Welcome back to After Socrates, episode 17. We’re doing the series within the series with my dear friend and collaborator Christopher Mastopietro on the relationship between Socrates and Kierkegaard. This is an especially important relationship. It’s about the Socratic philosophical project and the religious project, reason and faith. And it’s about the relationship between the Socratic and the Kierkegaard. It’s an especially important relationship. It’s about the Socratic philosophical project and the religious project, reason and faith between existentialism and spirituality. There’s a lot of important dimensions of dialectic and didiologos that we are unpacking by doing this. And I cannot think of anybody better to do this explication and exploration with than Chris. So welcome again, Chris. Thanks, John. We’ve already come pretty far. We’ve already talked about quite a lot. And so maybe it might be helpful at this point to kind of try and summarize a little bit of where this has taken us so far. And its relevance. And its relevance. We’ve taken a lot of twists and turns because there’s so much volume with both of these figures, with both Socrates and Kierkegaard. We began kind of in all different directions and slowly we started to gather things together. And I think that what we’re trying to sniff out is what it is that properly unites these two together, where their projects overlap, but also where their projects differentiate and diverge a little bit. And both seem somehow quite critical. I just wanted to say that that, I think of that process as the breathing of the logos. The respiration. That’s right. And it’s not for nothing that the respiratory metaphor features very prominently in Kierkegaard and his discussion of despair, right? And the possibility it is though a person cannot draw breath, right? That the expiration and aspiration is really how he understands the movement of the self and its relationship to being itself, right? To the divine, to the ground of itself. And I think of so many things that are doing that. Like attention is also doing that. Right. Respiration, etc. That’s right. And we were talking about that opponent process, right? Between the dichotomous aspects, between possibility and necessity. Between the finite, the expansion and the contraction. And that something in the dialectic between the expansion and contraction prepares us as we suffer it for a confrontation with the absurd of our existence. Right. Right? And in behind that absurdity is something like what he calls faith. And so we talked a little bit about that. Well, I think we’ll get maybe a bit closer to it today if we can. Well, I really do want to explore the faithfulness to the logos in connection to the faith that’s spoken of. At least in Kyrgyzstan Christianity. That’s right. That’s right. And faithfulness being the operative term because it’s the expression of a relationship. Right. Yes. And that’s something we kept coming back to last time, right? Which binds these two together again. Which is that somehow we’re not talking, to use your language, we’re not talking about propositional knowing exclusively. No. We’re talking about the procedural, the perspectival and the participatory. And one of the things that we’re talking about is the expression of a relationship. And I think that’s something that we’ve been talking about a lot in the past. And that’s something that we’ve been talking about a lot in the past. And that’s something that we’ve been talking about a lot in the past. And that’s something that we’ve been talking about a lot in the past. And that’s something that we’ve been talking about a lot in the past. And that’s something that we’ve been talking about a lot in the past. And that’s something that we’ve been talking about a lot in the past. And that’s something that we’ve been talking about a lot in the past. And that’s something that we’ve been talking about a lot in the past. 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And that’s something that we’ve been talking about a lot in the past. And that’s something that we’ve been talking about a lot in the past. And what does it mean to not be yourself? For Kierkegaard, of course, that means that yourself, properly known as spirit, he would say, under the aspect of the eternal, has something to do with your relationship to the ground. has something to do with your relationship to the ground. has something to do with your relationship to the ground. Where are you ground out? What you are based in, what you emerge from? What you are based in, what you emerge from? That you’re not a cause-a-sue, you’re not self-made. That you’re not a cause-a-sue, you’re not self-made. And one of the most acute conditions and symptoms of being in despair, And one of the most acute conditions and symptoms of being in despair, is to be under the illusion, or determined to be under the illusion, is to be under the illusion, that you are in fact a cause-a-sue, that you are somehow a world unto yourself, autonomous, independent. And there’s more than a little bit of irony in the fact that this figure, And there’s more than a little bit of irony in the fact that this figure, who is the purported father of existentialism, who is the purported father of existentialism, which is often known for… Self-determination, self-interpretation, right? Right, exactly. Right, exactly. That’s a question of acceptability, and, in a sense, an expectation, right? Exactly, exactly. Is in fact arguing very paradoxically that the espousal of one’s will Is in fact arguing very paradoxically that the espousal of one’s will and agency and autonomy and agency and autonomy is only properly freedom is only properly freedom when it opts for and elects what is already endowed. What is already preordained. He says, insofar as we are ourselves where necessary, But insofar as we have to become ourselves, And so paradoxically, we are endowed with the task of becoming that which we are already, which means rediscovering the relationship that binds us continuously with the ground of our being itself. And that’s why, as I said last time, the self for him is the I-thou relationship with that ground, with God in his terms. Right. So I just want to zero in here. A connection that keeps coming up for me is this overlaps with recent work around the paradox of self-transcendence. We see that human beings are capable of qualitative development. They self-transcend, and then Galen Strassen famously said, but this is inherently paradoxical. Right. Because if I just extend myself, that is not self-transcendence. That is just extrapolation. And then if there’s genuine novelty, something other than me that introduces that genuine novelty, then it’s not self-creation, it’s other creation. And yet what we seem to be claiming is both. Right. And we go through self-transcendence. We are somehow being other than ourselves in order to become ourselves. That’s right. Right. All due paradox applied. Yes, right. And then the point that I’ve made use helpfully and hopefully of the work of L.A. Paul and Agnes Callard is, but nevertheless human beings do this because that is a fundamental presupposition of rationality itself. Rationality is something that can be, is supposed to be comprehensively self-corrected, actually requires that self-transcendence and therefore is grounded in the paradox of the self. Exactly. Well said. And so somehow both then for Socrates and for Kierkegaard, the rationality of knowing thyself has something to do with finding the measure or the criterion by which one becomes known and defined and where to look for that criterion, where to look for them, what is the measure of me? And so you were talking about this idea of simply extending yourself, right, which is inhibiting to self-transformation, right? And that’s something that more or less falls into what he would have called the aesthetic stage of life. Right. You are simply extending yourself across time into ideality. And the opposite, where I’m just being created by the other is to capitulate to fate. To the ethical. To the ethical. Oh, that’s a great mapping. That’s right. And then what you need, oh, this is beautiful. You need to in order to actually realize the fundamental ecstatic nature of the human self, it’s a fundamentally aspirational nature. So it can be genuinely rational is you have to transcend those two. You must. You have to posit a non-logical identity that says the paradox is actually misleading me. That’s right. And the non-logical, the confrontation at first with that non-logical identity appears in the aspect of the absurd. Right. The absurd. Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful. And so irony, as we were talking about last time, is the beginning of realizing that the measure… Because you’re saying A and not A at the same time. A and not A. That the measure is not me. The measure is not present. The measure is somehow outside of the frame that I’m living. And the realization, we use that, I think, really opposite analogy of waking up inside of a dream. The measure of this dream that actually seeds its significance is not to be found squarely within the boundaries of this arena. But I have to actually wake up to the fact that this is in fact an arena with finite boundaries first. And so irony is the realization that what seems, Allah, the dream, is not what is, but that by virtue of waking up inside of it, I can actually use what is less real, what is not, strictly speaking, true or final, as a way of, ironically, developing a relationship with what is. Right. Indirectly. You give up propositional truth in order to be true to the through line of what we’ve been talking about. So I think this is a… I want to zero in on this irony because it’s pivotal. And I get that it’s not final. You pass through irony to something else. But nevertheless, it is central. Right? Yeah, it’s critical. For both Socrates and for Kyrgyz. So we need to care… First of all, I think we need to distinguish it, contrast class, right? We need to distinguish it from three things with which it might be confused. One is the current notion that irony is a kind of cynical, a kind of cynicism, and that the only form of irony is sarcasm. And that, of course, is… That is to make a category mistake. It is to confuse a species with the genus in an important way. Yeah, yes. So that’s the first. The second is, how do we distinguish irony from people who are just sloppy in their thinking and equivocate and state A and not B in a self-contradictory fashion? Bullshit, you mean? Yeah, bullshit, sloppiness, laziness, misology. Misology. As D.C. Schindler puts it, right? And then, Velman’s point, which is… I’ve put it sort of to you as the slogan, how does Socrates not become Hamlet? So Velman’s concern is you can keep stepping back. And Hamlet, of course, is dripping with irony. He keeps stepping back and calling into question what he has just asserted and then stepping back. And then Velman’s point is you get… He calls it the reflectiveness gap. You get so far removed that you are unplugged from the machinery of agency in the arena, in which you find yourself. And so you become this… Well, you become this figure like Hamlet. You become infinitely resigned. Right, right. And what you’re doing is, I think, in Kierkegaardian language, you see Hamlet constantly toggling in a vacillating way between the infinite possibilities, right, and then trying to determine himself to the specific necessity of what needs to be done. But you get the tragedy of the reflectiveness gap, which is he does nothing and people are dying and going insane around him. So there’s three contrasts. So I’ve put it out there. I’ll review them quickly and then ask you, how would you respond? Let’s take them one at a time. So the first one is, why is irony not just cynicism and sarcasm? So I’m thinking, for example, of a show that I don’t particularly like, but was famous in the 90s, Seinfeld. Seinfeld was dripping with irony, but it was to no purpose. It was nihilistic through and through. The greatest irony was that it was a show about nothing. It was funny, though. Here’s a question I often ask people when they say I like their show. Do you want any of those people as your friend? No, no, no, no, no. Right. Exactly. Exactly. But I would love to have Socrates or Kierkegaard as my friend. Would you? Well, at least for a time. Well, I would like to put it this way, which I can say very honestly, I would like my friends to aspire socratically and if they’re Christians to aspire the way Kierkegaard does. Yes, absolutely. OK, so that’s what I’m trying to get at. There is irony in the service of nihilism, and that can be mistaken for the totality of irony. Right. Right. And that’s clearly not what either Socrates or Kierkegaard. They’re not trying to bring us into a nihilistic orientation. Yeah. So first, how would you? OK, so for one thing that does. I’m glad you’ve brought this in because, you know, I’m so saturated in Kierkegaard that I use irony now very univocally to mean his meaning. And I often forget or ignore the fact that it’s used so colloquially to mean so many other things. I think one of the things both of us can 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. OK, 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. OK, at some point we need to connect this to the hermeneutics of suspicion of the beauty. But please keep going. OK. So for one thing, actually, irony. Well, it’s like it’s like what you often say. You often you talk about this in your lectures about the difference between the liar and the bullshitter. Yes. Right. Let’s think about that for a second. Right. The liar has a relationship with the truth. Right. They have to in order to subvert it, but they subvert it very knowingly. That’s why I think there is such a thing as a virtuous lie. Yeah. Right. And irony sometimes takes the form of a virtuous lie. I might say something that is in its bare facticity untrue, but I might be saying it actually in a deeper faithfulness to the truth. Right. Right. Right. If my idea of the truth is much more participatory and perspectival and not merely just a proposition. Right. Right. Right. Right. That can be confirmed or disconfirmed. Right. That’s a very, very, very superficial definition. Yes. What is true. Right. Could you also would you sorry, this is just a minor thing. Would you also include in irony the kind of Zen thing, not where you’re saying something false, but where you’re saying something that’s like a poem. Yeah. Something that’s self undermining or Jesus’s parables, which strike us like stories. Right. So that’s they’re also ironic in that sense. They are. And that’s why irony is contiguous with the humorous. And that’s why irony evolves into the humorous. Right. Because it involves the juxtaposition of two perspectives that are at quits with one another. Right. And that are drawn into tension by the context and the circumstance. Right. Right. Right. Kierkegaard has a very humorous example in the Diepzammar and either or he’s talking about, this busy, busy, busy, busy man who’s wandering the streets so flushed with his affairs, so determined, so full of of activity and itinerary and whatnot. And he gets run over by a carriage and he dies. That’s something similar to what I know. You talk about being hit by the bus. Right. Kierkegaard got there first, John. Well, I know. No, no. But it’s a it’s a telling convergence of thinking. Right. And that’s and of course, the the aphorism ends with him laughing and laughing and laughing and laughing because it’s very funny. Right. Because the irony of putting those perspectives into tension reveals something implicit about the absurdity that we encounter when we try and rationally make sense of the world and ourselves within it. Right. OK. So the ironist has to mind the distinction between appearance and reality because irony presupposes that there is such a thing. Contra the bullshitter. Right. The bullshitter for the bullshitter. The measure of what is true is contained within the speech and expression itself. Right. He is his own measure. Man is the measure of all things. Right. That’s, I think, very much the ethos of the bullshitter, the ethos of the ironist. No, no, no. There is a truth. OK. And it’s not it’s not relative or subjective based on my whim or will. It is prior in the sense that we meant before ontologically prior to where I am now, to where I stand. And I am aware that where I am is not somehow where that measure is. Right. The ironist knows that there’s something outside of the arena, even though he stands inside of it. So irony is a position that we take in relation to reality. It is not an attitude. It’s not just a personality trait. Now, having said that, I think it is true that temperamentally some people I think can be a little bit more presupposed predisposed, I should say, to be ironic. And I think Kierkegaard was such a person and people who perhaps find themselves a little bit at quits with their environment or at odds with their environment, who don’t conform particularly easily to social norms and social roles may use irony, especially in the working world. I think this is particularly apt is that when people have to occupy positions and stations in society. In order to do so, I think without those positions becoming pathological, you need to understand that your identity is not reducible to those positions, that it always remains properly outside of those bounds, even if practically you have to keep working within them. Okay. So there’s a couple things here. You don’t mind if I just… No, no, please. I went on long enough. No, no, no, no, no. That’s good. So a couple things come up. One is it seems that in the way you’re presenting irony, it’s inseparable. And I see this in both Kierkegaard and Zockerdies. It’s inseparable from a particular character trait, which is kind of epistemic and even perhaps normative humility. Absolutely. And that, for example, is what was to my mind missing in Seinfeld. None of the characters have humility. They are constantly humiliated until there’s dramatic irony for us. But in the end, it undermines itself, because in what does our superior knowledge consist? Right? So we won’t make it about that. But I’m just saying. So that’s one thing. The other thing is it sounds to me like there’s a deep relationship then between irony and the ability to expose oneself to radical aporia. So here’s an example. So reason, think of Kant, reason needs to be autonomous to be reason. And so reason seeks to ground itself, but reason can’t be circular. And yet it doesn’t seem that it can ground itself without being circular. So it needs to ground itself on something other than itself while maintaining its autonomy, which is, oh, no. And then Kant even does the antinomies of reason. And that’s an aporia. And then it’s like your relationship to your own reasoning capacity. You can’t say, oh, well, I won’t be rational. Because then it’s like, but the aporia only works because you deeply care about rationality. So you’re being dishonest if you throw it. But then you can’t say, but I can totalize rationality. So I have to have this relationship where I commit myself to it, but I also withdraw from it. I shine into it. I withdraw from it, the very fabric of phenomenology. I shine in and withdraw because of that aporia. So is that right? So there’s a close connection between irony and the way you’re talking about it, we’re talking about it, and epistemic humility, and then the, I don’t know, the the the apperception and the affordance of the apperception of a port. Absolutely. I think that’s exactly right. And not only is there a connection, but I think irony is irony is precursory to the confrontation with a poria. Okay, excellent. Let’s maybe put it that way. So people who, because you see this in Socrates, you know, the people that sort of react to him confrontationally, they actually lack capacity for irony. And they do. And they get pissed off at his irony. Or they do. Because they want cognitive closure and completion. That’s, and let me just stop you there. And irony is the denial of that. It is the denial of the fact that this, where we stand, is complete. But it also accepts that we always are standing somewhere. Yes. We cannot stand above it all. That’s right. But we should, but we must stand where we stand. But we must stand with the awareness that it is not exhaustive. So this again ties irony then. And this is not something people would normally hear in it into Socratic wonder. Oh, yeah. Absolutely. That’s right. No, that’s a good point. Because people think about the ironist as someone who’s just disinterested. Yes. It’s like, no, no, it’s the opposite. The ironist is far more interested. The problem is that the ironist is, the ironist might appear, the ironist, there’s a playfulness to irony. A serious play. A serious play. That’s right. So the thing, let’s go back to our analogy of the dream. You wake up in the dream. Irony is the lucidity that one acquires when one realizes that one is in a dream. Well, then what does one do in the dream? You begin to play. Now, irony is not the end of the story, because the playfulness that you acquire within a dream when it becomes lucid is then susceptible to forms of indulgence that we would associate, I think rightly, with the aesthetic stage of life, which is to say, like we said, our last talk, the tendency to infinitize oneself, the tendency to float away in ideality. And then when that ideality meets actual concrete circumstance, it produces a kind of repetition within time whereby one is trying to extend oneself temporally and can’t quite get a grip on whatever it is that the irony is referring to. So you can be endlessly ironic to your own detriment when you’re constantly deferring your participation forward, hoping to somehow, hoping to strike your target within time, hoping to strike your target by meeting that repetition. So would it be, is this a fair phrase? The ironist passionately participates in paradox. I think so. I think so. But I think- And I’m trying to play on both the ancient and the modern term of passion. Passion meaning intense, like immersion and involvement, but also the ancient sense of you’re also undergoing it. You’re not just, right? You’re not standing outside in a godlike manner. You are always, as you said last time, you’re always suffering the paradox. You’re always suffering, yes. And the ironist suffers. The ironist suffers the paradox, but the ironist hasn’t resolved it. That’s why irony prefigures the religious, but does not. I get that. Because the ironist does not resolve the paradox, but they do live stranded and exiled between these dichotomous elements of existence. And they suffer the dichotomy because they are correspondingly more aware of being riven by them. That’s why irony wakes us up to the presence of our despair, to the non-identity between ourselves, floating in our ideality, using ourselves, our subjective consciousness as the measure of what is true and real, and somehow knowing that that’s inadequate, but not being able to commit ourselves to anything that will bind time together and place us into, let’s say, the ethical stage. Right. So the aesthetic stage would be typified by people who use a phrase that’s, I find, oxymoronic. Well, it’s true for me or real for me, which to me, we are trying to use terms that expressly denote that which is shareable and is prior to me or to you. And then we’re exactly reversing it and saying that which follows from me. Which is like, no, no, that’s not…we should have terms for that, but we should also have terms for the other, where no, no, I follow from that. So I think we’ve really, really clarified the first thing, how irony is not cynical sarcasm or anything like that, the way we’re using it. The second is, how is it different from somebody who’s just intellectually lazy and sloppy? So you’re at a party and you’re talking to somebody, and you point out, like Socrates would do, that they’re in a contradiction. And they just go, oh, well, I don’t care. You know what I mean? People who do not strive to get consistency in their thought, that are lazy, sloppy. Are we in the habit of calling those kind of people ironic? No, but I can…no, we’re not. But what I’m saying is, they superficially seem similar in that they seem to embrace propositional contradiction. Oh, I see. And so, right. So I agree with you that, but I don’t want to leave the distinction implicit because at the surface level, I want to get, okay, superficially, they look the same, but in deep structure, they’re different. That’s what I’m trying to get you to. Okay. So maybe one way of differentiating those is the lack of inwardness in one case and the volume of inwardness in the other case. The ironist becomes ironic precisely because of the introspective nature of their subjective life. The character of their conscious life turned inward understands that there’s a depth of possibility that somehow is not strictly in keeping with the bare facts as presented by the world in any given situation. Right. Like the possibility of interpretation, for instance, becomes open to them. They realize that by retrieving impressions as presented by the world, as presented by a social situation or a piece of art or whatever, that those can be…that when they’re taken into a poetic hand, they can be used to remake the world artfully in so many different kinds of gradations and so many different variations that the inward esthete, for instance, can become so overwhelmed by the way in which a single situation can be fanned out and unspooled into variety that they realize that this, this as presented, is not the only possibility. Right. But they’re aware, they’re aware. It’s their awareness of that distinction that makes them properly ironic as opposed to someone who is, like what it sounds like you’re talking about someone who’s just…who’s equivocation, because the ironist will equivocate knowing that she equivocates, but the person that you’re describing equivocates simply because they’re not paying attention. Yes. It’s the lack of attention that makes the difference. I’m not sure how else to say it. No, no, no, that’s good. Let me try and refine it, hopefully, and give it back to you. The ironist cares about propositional consistency, but recognizes that there is the perspectival and the participatory beyond the propositional, where the intellectually lazy person does not have that recognition and is remaining within the propositional, but is just not playing the game of the propositional properly. Yeah. Is that fair? No, I think that’s a good way of putting it. I think that’s a good way of putting it, because the knowing of the ironist is unfolded consciously into the dimensions of perspective and participation. So let me give you something that might strike therefore as probably not ironical, but paradoxical. I want to see how this lands for you, because when I was at Respondent, I was working with Zachary Stein and Steve March. Something emerged for me dialogically that I had never quite, two things not put together, and I’ve already put it into this series. So when you’re on the level of beings, relevance realization is indispensable, and you face combinatorial explosion, but there’s a relationship you can enter into in which relevance realization can realize that it itself is irrelevant, and that is the relationship to being per se. And I think that what’s often happening is people, when they talk about non-duality, they can sound like they’re omniscient over all the beings, and they get misinterpreted that way. But instead, what I propose, and I’ve proposed it to some of these people, oh, this lands better, is no, no, what’s happening is when I’m moving towards my relationship to being, the relevance realization that is so essential for dealing with beings has to realize its own irrelevance. Because if I try to apply the fundamental framing that I use for beings to being, that is a fundamental mistake. But we don’t want to say that only the non-duality is true. So we are in this paradoxical thing of, do you see what I’m trying to say? I do see what you’re, yes. Right? That you get this moment where relevance realization, as its ultimate act of relevance realization, because relevance realization has to be inherently interested in itself, because it’s inherently autoproetic, it’s inherently self-correcting, etc., etc., it can realize its own irrelevance with respect to being. Is that? Yes. And I think what you’ve just described is a movement of irony. Yes. That’s what I wanted to know. That’s what I wanted to see. This is true, and yet it’s irrelevant. Yeah. Yes. That is irony. And the other, this is true, but I can’t articulate it in any consistent set of propositions, because I’m in the, I mean- Because I’m framed with a set of, within the gameplay as provided, it has no place. It is unspeakable. It’s inenerable within the story that’s being undertaken, which is why its only appearance has to be indirect and quite playful. I was actually interacting with one of the monks at the monastery around this, because, well, I’ve been taught in Zen that we get to this place, and I said, well, there’s two things you could be saying here. You could be saying, I’m within the domain of framing, and I stop framing, and I think that’s not enlightenment, that’s combinatorial explosion, or I can realize that I’m now outside of the domain in which relevance realization applies, which is itself and the ultimate sort of act of relevance realization. That’s good, John. I like that. I like that. I think that’s a very good use of your machinery. I think that’s a very good use of your machinery, because the relevance realization framework enfolds the various kinds of knowing, and because it has to do with the way that the arena is cordoned at any given time, the way the rules are prefigured, and the way that the agent arena relationship is actually fashioned and fastened together, that effectively means that the ironist knows that whatever might be true in the context of this agent arena relation is true only in that particular modality of relation, and that because that mode of relating isn’t necessary, I mean ontologically necessary, it’s also for the purposes of an ultimate measure, it’s ultimately relative. Good, because I’m glad what you said is beautiful, because I’m trying to extend what we’re talking about here into where we can make a distinction in kind between the kind of concern we can have and ultimate concern. Or a relationship with the absolute. Tilliken-Kirkegaard. Right, so the ironist is striving, it’s the beginning of the striving, but the ironist is striving for the relationship with the absolute. One thing I’d like to do, maybe we’ll drop it in now and we’ll work our way back around to it, is to talk about, you already mentioned it, DC Schindler’s Misology, which I take to mean there are a lot of ways of phrasing it. What a great, what a brilliant book. Isn’t that book astonishing? It’s so good. I recommend everybody, if you get a chance to watch the series I did with Robert Breedlove, he and I on his channel go through DC Schindler’s Plato’s Critique of Impure Reason in depth. It is quite something, and this idea of Misology I think is very helpful, and I think that actually, ultimately, this is a way of binding Socrates and Kierkegaard together, because they both are, they’re both Platonists, Kierkegaard’s a Christian Platonist, but they share a project to undercut Misology, and to deny its claim on the truth. The hatred of the Logos. The hatred of the Logos, Misology, the hatred of the Logos, right, and both of them are following the Logos. We were talking about this last time after we actually filmed our session, we were talking about the fact that they’re both following the Logos, and even though for Kierkegaard, the pattern of the Logos is made incarnate in Christ, in the symbol of Christ, fundamentally it’s an extension of the same project, right, and that what we’re not doing in accepting Socrates as our teacher is we’re not holding Socrates up as the measure. We’re using his attention to train our attention. We’re trying to look where he looks. We’re trying to see as he sees. We’re trying to see as Socrates saw. We’re not trying to hold him up as something we look at. Exactly, and so Kierkegaard, I think, uses the eyes of Socrates to look for Christ. Oh my gosh! Right? Wait, wait, let me just, I gotta savor that. That’s really profound what you just said. That’s really, really good. That’s really, really good. Okay, thank you. That’s, that, and you can see the, like, that just knits them together in a way that makes so much sense of what’s going on, and that actually even can provide a way of thinking about the Socratic faith, the Socratic faithfulness, and the Kierkegaardian faithfulness. Yes, yes, we’ll get there. So do you think, I think, I think we’ve really answered the second… Oh, that’s right, we’re still answering why irony isn’t the irony that we… So that’s good. So we’ve got, we’ve got… Thanks for bringing us back. No, no, no, no, no worries. So that, that, that, we really distinguished it. Now there, here’s the third. The third, which I take to be very serious, because I take Vellman to be a very good and careful thinker. And I’ve talked about this in Awakening for the Meeting Crisis, Vellman’s concern about, right, about agency. And there’s no point in talking about freedom if you’re not talking about agency, right? Only agents, only with respect to agents can we talk about freedom. Yes. Okay, so, and, and, and so let me just quickly do this. Vellman talks about, you know, the wanton. He gets this from, he gets this from Frankfurt. This is the person that just acts impulsively, right? And, and of course, they don’t achieve agency, they undermine their agency, because we have conflicting, right, impulses, and they undermine each other, and, and you fall apart. And this is why impulsivity, especially, you know, in young adults can be such a disaster for them. Okay, so what you need is you need some reflectiveness. You need to step, and you said you need that inwardness, that self, right, that, that metacognitive self-reflective. You need to have a sense of normative demand upon your, upon your being in order to become an agent. The ought has to be part of your is if you’re going to be an agent, right? And so he says, oh, right, so the reflectiveness gap, it pulls you out of impulsivity and gives you agency. But then, of course, we have the capacity to keep doing that once we realize it. And then he says, and he gives the example of Hamlet as somebody who’s continually stepping back and calling into question, ironically, and, and Hamlet is dripping with irony, right? He’s constantly doing this. And, and what it’s a tragedy, because although that is a very admirable trait, it makes him superior to everyone around him. He’s clearly heroic in that sense, which is, of course, why we admire him. But nevertheless, that noble trait is also a profound failing on his part, because it actually undermines his agency, and people around him are dying and literally going insane, because he’s this black hole, right? And so Valman talks about the you can go too far and get the reflectiveness gap, right? So you don’t want to be the wanton, but you don’t want to be Hamlet. And so that seems to me, like there’s a continuum within irony. And we want to somehow distinguish the ironist who’s on the path to the good, given what we’ve just been talking about, from somebody who just becomes Hamlet. So here’s my question to you. How does Socrates not become Hamlet? Ha, it’s funny, I have an easier answer for what is Kierkegaard. Well, not for nothing that they’re both Danish Kierkegaard and Hamlet. That’s not a knock on the Danes. I love the Danes. But the Danes also started Bildung, right, which is really important model for how we could respond to the meeting crisis. So there’s a lot there. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. That is, I would say, I would say that that is that is a risk of irony. That is a risk of irony. Now, why does Socrates? Why does that not happen to Socrates? That’s something to I think to do with the Eros, right? Okay, very good. And then the connection between the Eros and the Logos is something you should talk about a little bit, right? So we were talking last time, you asked about Socrates, but I’m going to veer over to Regina and back to Socrates, right? Because we were told, well, what is it that keeps what is it that keeps someone bound to the finite, even while infinitizing himself, even while withdrawing, even while being so preoccupied in, you know, there’s this great, there’s this great aphorism that Kierkegaard has that, that I think is a beautiful poetic description of this aesthetic. And I’m going to bring this back, I promise, but this beautiful description of, of, of the particular kind of imprisonment that happens within the aesthetic stage of life. He talks about himself as being bound by figments of unreality, like the Fenris Wolf from mythology, that he’s bound in place, and he can’t escape because those things that bind him are unreal. He talks about being bound by the breath of fish, by the roots of rocks, by the beards of women, right? That what is keeping him in place is ideality itself, right? An irony, I think, that when it turns in upon itself, runs that risk. Okay, but what keeps Kierkegaard’s eye, one of his eyes, trained on the earth? I like the stereoscopic vision metaphor. Yeah, that’s right. Well, what keeps his eye trained on the earth, personally, it’s Regina. It’s Regina, right? What keeps Socrates bound to the earthly, even while he abstracts endlessly away from it? It has, as you say, it has something, I mean, I think of symposium, right? I think of symposium and the implied continuity, the ontological continuity between, between the eros that is bodily and material and the eros of the eidos, right? The eros we have toward the forms. Well, that’s what I was trying to do earlier with the phenomenological version that I was giving in a previous lecture, right? The through line through all the aspects. It doesn’t take you away from the appearances. It puts the appearances constantly in relationship to the non-thing reality that is running through them. Right, right. So having some kind of symbolon of eros that becomes a kind of a way of anchoring the search for the logos is something, it’s something like that, I think, where we need to start answering that question. I want to read this quote. I want to read this quote if I can, because let me see if I can find it. Give me a moment, because I found it and this is Socrates speaking. Just give me a moment. See if I can find it. Here it is. It’s a fairly long quote, but it’s just so pertinent to what we’re talking about here. And I think it’ll bring up a bunch of ways of understanding the Socratic eros. I want to point out one thing. Mark Vernon in one of his recent excellent work, Mark does excellent work, by the way. I highly recommend his work. He did a thing on this symposium, because he’s been doing Dante and Neoplatonic love. And he says, we have to be really careful. There is no ladder of ascent in this symposium. We impose that language. Plato never, it’s just going deeper and deeper. So for me, it’s a, oh, right, it’s actually the through line. It’s not a high doesn’t. And then we got Schindler saying, no, no, no, in the Republic, it’s not just the ascent. The eros also brings them back down into the appearances. It’s the appearance in the absolute and the absolute including the appearance. Bringing us back to the paradox. Right, right. So it is in the nature of one who is really a lover of learning, notice the language here. This is from, I believe, from the Republic. Yes. To strive for what is, there’s that onto normativity, the love, the whatever else gratifies my desire, I want it to be real. Okay. And he would not linger, think of Han, he would not linger by each of the many things that are pined to be, but would go forward. But notice he doesn’t say upward, but go forward and would not lose the keenness of his passionate love or desire from it until he should touch the nature itself of each thing. See, he doesn’t, the touch is not separate from touching the thing, right? That is with the part of the soul that is suited to lay hold of such a thing. So there’s this, and we’re going to bring this back with Kierkegaard, there’s some sort of affinity, right? But it’s not the same thing as completely known. Having the affinity that affords you the touch is not the same thing as the touch, right? Okay. So it’s to lay hold of such thing and it is part akin to it that is suited. Having drawn near to it and coupled, sexual union, coupled with that which truly is, and having is, and having begotten, the translation here is intelligence, but it’s nous, it’s the Greek is nous, right? That insight that grasps the whole, right? The gestalt, and truth, having begotten intelligence and truth, and notice how those are paired together, right? He would know and truly live and would be nourished and thus cease from labor pains, see the relation to the midwifery, but not before. That’s quite a quote. So, right, again, this eros isn’t flying away. The eros is bringing these into sexual union with each other, the affining of them, the disclosure of the affordance, the alaphia, the logos that gathers them together so they belong together so that you can give birth to intelligence and truth and be nourished by that. That’s the Socratic eros. Beautiful. Beautiful. And everything that you’ve just described is made when Socrates turns over to Kierkegaard is made manifest in the Logos of Christ. So this is the part… So I trust you. Because the eros is there. Right, but I want to place myself in this. I want to be Socratic and Kierkegaardian, and I’m not calling for you to do that. You can respond as you see fit, but for me, I hear this, right? I really do. And, right. But how do you get access to it? Is that what you mean? Right. And so how… I want to say something, and it’s not meant to be dismissive or insulting. So it will come off that way, but I’m asking for charity from you and I’m asking for charity from the viewers, right? I can see that… So I often say I prefer a Christian neoplatonism over pure platonism, and then people say, well, aren’t you a Christian? And I’ll go, no, I’m not. Right. That’s where I… How ironic. Yes, exactly. How ironic. But that’s exactly the point. That’s exactly the point, Chris. When I turn to the… And this is… This lines up, I think, with Kierkegaard’s critique of Christentum. When I turn to what I might call sort of North American standard Christianity… Oh, God, yeah. Right. Right. Yeah, you want to turn on your heel. Yes. Right. Right. And so… Right. And then… But I… And also, I am wary of a nostalgic… Well, let’s get back to ancient Christianity that had all of this. For all of the respect I have for like Jonathan Pageau, I find that nostalgia is something that… I worry about… I say, put on my tombstone, neither nostalgia nor utopia. I know because both of these, I think, have an implicit presupposition of some final grasp that I worry about spills human blood in titanic amounts. Right. And so, see the… I’m setting up the problematic here. And I also set up a problematic around Socrates at the beginning of this course. So, right. So, everything you said, that about the Socratic eros towards following the Logos, and he is like following the wind, spiritus. He says that, right. And that’s so similar to Jesus with Nicodemus. You must be born again. And the wind comes. It’s like, whoa. Right. And then… And Kierkegaard sees that coming to fruition in Christ. And I can… Looking through the Socratic eyes, I can see that. But I do not find a home. What’s the phenomenology? Right. Because… And I do not… And so, I cannot find a home in Christianity. Yeah. Yeah. Because you can’t find a home in that symbol. Is that fair? Well, I want to be really careful here because, of course… In this incarnation of the Logos. I find the symbol… I find the portrayal of Jesus of Nazareth deeply provocative. But let me give you one concrete example of what I’m talking about. And again, this is not… I am not here to attack Christianity. I’m asking a question. The claim that Jesus is the Christos is the claim that Jesus is the Messiah. Yet, the people who are awaiting the Messiah reject that claim. And they reject it with good reason, by the way. We are dismissive if we do not listen to Jewish philosophers and scholars and rabbis saying, no, no, we have very good reason why we think Jesus did not fulfill the description of the Messiah that has been given to us in the sacred scriptures. Now, we have one of two choices with that. We can just say, they’re wrong. And that, to me, is just an arrogant thing to do. Or we can enter into it and really respond. And then what I end up doing is, well, that’s why I never say Jesus Christ. I always say Jesus of Nazareth. This is just one instance for me. Because of the fact that I take seriously the Jewish perspective that he’s not the Messiah. And then you get the Islamic perspective that he is the Messiah, but he is not God incarnate. That I realize, I end up taking, well, an ironic stance towards that. And I don’t think on that. And again, I am not insulting. And I do not want to push away anybody that’s coming at this with a Christian framework. We’re talking about Kierkegaard. But you see what I’m trying to get at? I do not. And this is just one example of what I’m trying to say. I’m not standing back and doing the dismissive, tittering atheist. Nobody in their right mind would confuse what you’re doing for that. Right, good. No, of course not. I mean, if anyone’s been paying attention, they know how careful you’re being. I take seriously the spirituality of the Jews, like Zevi Slavin that I’ve talked to, the Islamic people. Like, oh, what’s his name? I can’t remember his name. I’ve had a couple of comments. You came to one of them. Hamzah. No, that’s not quite right. We’re both misremembering. But you came to… Sorry. Yeah, yeah, I apologize. We’ll put up a link to it. I was there, yeah, for one of them. Yeah, yeah. And that was a wonderful… It was a great talk. It was a great dialogue. Right. And so I do not want to lose faith with that. You see? Sure, sure. So this is what I’m saying. Yeah, I mean… Oh, how to respond to this. I mean, so for one thing, when I… As we’re talking and I’m speaking and I’m referring casually and offhandedly, which is, you know, still something I find very humorous, and I should find it humorous, Jesus Christ is very comic, okay? Yeah. Part of Kierkegaard’s understanding of the paradox, the paradox, as you’ve just described beautifully, that binds what is inmost and what is deepest and what is most what it is about the Eidos to what is most imminent and immediate and material. What binds those into continuity, what telescopes their identity together is the paradox, right? And that the paradox of Christ for Kierkegaard. When I refer to that offhandedly, I’m referring to it from the When I refer to that offhandedly, I’m referring to it from within Kierkegaard’s or from within my understanding of his, of his, not his phenomenology. I think that’s a bit presumptuous, but I’m trying to use his language and his way of seeing things. You want to see, you want to see in a Kierkegaardian fashion. Yeah, I’m trying to dress up as him a little bit. That’s what he asks of you. What a sight that would be, yes. But that’s what he asks of you. So what does that, so what does that mean in this broader, like this broader critique? I am, I wouldn’t style myself as a Christian apologist, and I would be a very poor one. But you ask, so his status as Messiah, I don’t even have, I don’t have a response to that. And the historical Christ is not something, the historical Jesus, I should say, is not something I’ve taken a great deal of interest in. I’m much, much more concerned and much more interested in, in the mythic. Yeah, in the mythic, properly understood. But that doesn’t mean unreal. You understand that, but that doesn’t mean unreal. And when I say symbol, you know, when I say symbol, I don’t mean something that is of a lesser order of reality. I mean the opposite. You mean the imaginal, the use of an image in order to enhance and augment our capacity to perceive or conceive of a reality. Yeah. If you take that, if you separate, this is a position I now take, if you separate the symbol from the understanding of the imaginal, the symbol just becomes a linguistic, ornamental thing. Yeah, yeah. And it becomes, it becomes semiotic in the classic sense, it becomes a sign rather than a symbol. It becomes a form of reference. The symbol of Jesus Christ is not a form of reference. It is a relationship, participation in which avails something to you ontologically, phenomenologically, all of those words, right? It avails something to you and your consciousness and your apprehension of reality that was inaccessible without the carriage of that symbol and your relationship with it, through it, in it, right? Yes. Through him, within, in him. It’s in the language of the liturgy, right? So I’m not particularly concerned with the historical Jesus. I’m concerned with the relationship we have to a symbol that seems to embody a paradox that collapses and telescopes together the dichotomous elements of existence that when they are not fitted together in a symbol, are become the absolute suffering of existence itself, right? Being hopelessly finite and confined to the temporal and having some percent of the eternal, but not being able to access it. That tension is an absolute torment. That is despair. That is Kierkegaard’s despair. And without their reunification and reconciliation in the symbolic carriage of one who is both and they leave us destitute, right? This feature of our existence leaves us destitute. Now, that’s why we are inaugurated into the phenomenology of Christ by his suffering. That is our ingress. That is our point of access. Okay, so let’s bring that back to the question. How do we, like, and this problem I’ve had, we’ve devoted many hours, you and I, talking about this. Yes. Right? Those have always been fruitful hours. Yeah, yeah, of course. Which is that I’ve always had a very, very hard time finding a relationship with that symbol, right? I grew up as a Catholic and in a very innocuous kind of Catholicism, perfectly solicitous. There was nothing pathological about it. Very different from my experience. Very different from your experience. And I’m glad. I’m glad of it, you know? And we’ve talked about this before. We were talking about this yesterday that, you know, I realized, long since realized, that I can’t do, like, that’s my symbolic grammar. I can’t do away with it even if I wanted to, right? I take a very Jungian perspective on that, right? It’s like, you know, I can’t detach that from myself. And yet I’ve had a very, very hard time meeting it on its own grounds and knowing it and being known by it, which is just as important. Because one thing that Christ does symbolically is that it’s being known by Christ. It’s being loved and known. And I’m using those synonymously because platonically they are the same. Having intercourse. Having intercourse. Yeah. No, and ah. Yeah, yeah. He entered the tent and knew her, right? It’s right there in the language of the scripture. So I’m talking about knowing and being known and being loved as being synonymous. And what happens in the carriage of the symbol of Christ is that you are known and loved back together, right? You are related to yourself by being related together another by whose measure of knowing exceeds yours because the measure is outside of you. And yet in virtue of the measure that is outside of you, you are made yourself. Property symbolic. And that is faith. Yes, yes. That is faith, right? You, you, you reacquaint with the axis of your I, thou relationship with the ground of your being that is God that happens in the symbol of Christ because Christ reacquaints, draws the like unto the like, as Socrates says, and makes them acquainted. Right. Yes. Okay. Okay. But why is this so hard? Right? Why is it so hard? This is a good question, right? So, so let me say something like, first of all, that was profoundly beautiful. And this is, this is Chris, like, this is what he does, which is like, like, so what I’m now going to say is not trying to undermine that in any way. I want to, I want you to bring that to bear. So let’s go back to the, the specific, not because this is the whole issue. I just, like something concrete. So the fact that you can see the gospels wrestling with the fact that the Jews do not accept Jesus as the Messiah. And I think if we are honest and careful, we see the seeds of a profound kind of anti-Semitism being born there, especially in the most profound gospels, John, where the Jews are constantly being referred to. And Jesus even says, like, Jesus says they’re the sons of the devil. Right. It’s right. Now Jesus probably doesn’t mean the Nazis or anything like that. I’m not saying anything stupid like that, but when I watched, I told you about this, when I watched a reenactment created by Christians of the gospel of John, which was quite moving, by the way, they prefigured it with a statement about, please put this in context, because a lot of this, what seems as anti-Semitism should be understood as a thing going on within Christianity between the Gentile Christians and the Jewish Christians and all this stuff. And it’s like, it says, because I take it as evidence that they’re aware of my concern, not of my particular, the kind of concern I’m broaching here. Right. And so for me, and what I’m like, I deeply resonate with what you say, but I don’t, I don’t want to dismiss the history of the Messiah. Right. Because that problem of the Jews don’t recognize him as a Messiah isn’t just a philosophical religious problem. It turned into a historical problem that laid the seeds for the deep associate, I get, you know, where I write the programs of the killing of the Jews in the ghettos during the middle ages, during Easter and all kinds of sure stuff that needs to be taken into account. That’s so for me, see, I’m really everything. Yes, yes, yes, deep yes to you. But, and again, this isn’t the only issue I’m just picking on. Yeah. It’s like, but yeah, but I can’t turn away. I can’t really totally turn away from the history of the history because that history, right, is bound up with tremendous evil. I’m not saying Christianity is evil. I am not saying no, no, I know, I know. I, yeah. But I think, I think that’s because you’re like, your attention is fanned out in ways that I think Kierkegaard isn’t for one thing. Kierkegaard cares about having a personal relationship with Christ. Yes. I don’t think he’s particularly preoccupied with the, with the, with like everything you’ve said, I’m not, I’m not saying it’s irrelevant on its own grounds. It’s obviously deeply relevant for you and for many people for him. I mean, not that he’s historically illiterate or scripturally illiterate. No, he’s not highly, highly literate. He’s both well educated. Well, well, well beyond my capacity. That’s for sure. But I think for him, you know, he does come as platonic as he is. He does come out of the Lutheran, the Protestant tradition for him, a personal relationship with Christ through scripture. Yes. But through contemplation, through inwardness, through all of the things that we’ve just been discussing is paramount. I don’t think that there is any historical argument, no amount of historical circumstance, no amount of, no amount of acrimony, no amount of, of, of societal anomie. None of that would touch that for him. None of that would intervene. None of that would intercede because he would say, I think that much of that conflict is, is an ethical matter. I see. Oh no, no, no, no, wait, that’s good. That’s good. And what he’s focused on is an absolute relate. Like I say, I keep coming back to this being repetitious, but he’s talking about an absolute relationship to the absolute, not to the relative, right? This is a religious matter for him. His eye is fixed somewhere beyond the point at which these conflicts are relevant. And so it is that yeah. And that’s like the move I made earlier. That’s the move you made with the relevance realization, right? Right, right, right, right. I see that. And I think, wow, this is a beautiful response. So for you, like you’re speaking of a path of crooked, but I also want to hear from you because of what you said a few minutes ago. Yeah. Right. There’s a sense in which the, and I’m going to, I’m going to use some almost biblical sounding literature, the living icon that’s in the New Testament. The living icon of Jesus is the only way in which you can orient your ultimate concern to that, which is ultimate. Is that fair? I think that’s fair. Yeah. I think that’s fair. I think he would say so. And there’s a sense in which that’s at a different ontological level than the level I’m working at. And then we have the proper problem of, of how do one encounter that? Like, how does that happen? This is a question I’ve been preoccupied with for a really long time because, you know, these ideas, there’s such a beauty and elegance to this. And, you know, I’ve been, I’ve, I, I, my understanding comes to a point and then it leaves off because propositionally, I think I can cohere this together in mind pretty well. And yet for me, for a very long time, to some degree still, there is a point at which all of that propositional elegance and coherence ends beyond which there is only the relationship and the relationship is participatory. Right. And no amount of propositional acumen or insight can get us there. Right. So we can talk endlessly about how beautiful and elegant this all seems. But if you don’t actually have that relationship, it’s, if it’s not available to you, then it’s kind of all for not. So then the question for me becomes, how do I access it? And I think that the answer is it comes back again to suffering. Kierkegaard, I think shares a lot with John of the Cross. Yeah. John of the Cross, who talks about, you know, dark night of the soul, famously, this purgative aridity that the soul must undertake in order to exhaust the outermost and most boundaries of its capacity to be the measure of its own salvation. Beyond which, in the face of absolute destitution, having exhausted all rational limits of itself, it is finally ready for its metanoia because there is nowhere to look but outside itself. There is nowhere to look except to a relationship that can know its suffering, become it, and whose suffering he can become. So think about it in this way. Okay. I had an experience like this recently. It was very meaningful and I never thought it would ever come. And it was only a, it was only a, it was only a moment, but it was enough. I thought, oh, that’s what everyone’s talking about. Right? That’s what they mean, right? Years and years of growing up in the Catholic Church never happened. But then one day it’s like you, and I think this purgative aridity that John of the Cross talks about, Kierkegaard has a line in one of his journals, it’s very beautiful. He says, he goes, a worship only receives its orders when it’s out in the deep sea. You need to get out there first. I think of Moby Dick too, and the leashore. Right. Yeah. Think about the desert, the motif of the desert. Right. It’s only when you’re exhausted through your, you’re parched, you’re absolutely, you know, you’re at the end, you’re at the end, you’re dying. That’s why the symbol of Christ, that relationship is something to die to, right? Because it involves, it is a death, right? And it is only when you’re at, when you’re at the absolute limit of your capacity to suffer, and you encounter the symbol of his suffering, that your suffering becomes his. Is this being crucified with Christ? Yes. Okay. His becomes yours. And the co-identification that takes place produces a relationship that is where you take on, it is not I who live, but Christ who lives in me. Right. You take on the identity of Christ. And it is only when you are, you are beyond the point of your tolerance and your suffering. And I don’t just mean physical suffering. I mean, in the Kierkegaardian sense, the existential suffering of being a riven apart by these dichotomous contradictions. That is the absurdity of existence itself. When you’re really true to yourself. When you’re really true to that contradiction, when you are aware of yourself so acutely as a contradiction in terms that you’ve realized that you cannot be the measure of yourself, that you cannot be the measure of what is real. And that realization becomes so pointed, so acute, and you’re caught at the end of its blade. At that point in time, does the suffering of Christ avail itself to you as a way and not simply as someone hung on two sticks of wood? Okay, that like, again, profound and deeply moving. It’s not logical. It’s not. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. It’s something that happens in very much, I think, in spite of yourself. Right. And so my response isn’t going to be a conceptual counter-argument. It’s going to be, I have, first of all, and we’ll talk about this at some point, the relationship between Nishitani and Tanabe. And Tanabe wrote the book Philosophy as Metanoetics. And he talks about the distinction between Jiriki and Tariki, between self-power and other power. And that metanoia, and this is the paradox again of self-transcendence, ultimately requires other power. And so what I’m saying is, within the Buddhist context, I find something very similar being said. And then secondly, and that way of talking about it plugs into what I’m now going to talk about. I experience the logos very profoundly, obviously in contemplative practices, the logos of my being to the logos of being in contemplative practices from the neoplatonic tradition, but also here in dialectic and didiologos. So my logos and then our logos, and my logos to your logos, to our logos, to logos. And we’ve talked about this and we’ve written about it. That’s where I have a profound phenomenological experience of it. Yeah. And I know you do too. As do I. Right. And for me, part of that is getting the finesse, I’m thinking of Pascal here, the spirit of finesse versus the spirit of geometry, is getting the finesse between self-power and other power. Yeah. And finding that sweet spot. And that maps so clearly onto flow, where you have to be giving it your very best, but the situation has to exceed you. Yeah. Yes. Right. Yes. That proximal development. See, I can, that to me, and I don’t mean like easily, like, oh, after like decades of work and endeavor and that is where I have found a way to enter into seeing the logos by means of the logos. Yeah. And you know what? I know, I know that and you exemplify it, that it’s like, it’s so evident that it’s undeniable to me. When said of you. And I think maybe here is where I would depart from a lot of Christians, where I would say, I don’t, I find it difficult to, to assert an exclusiveness to the Christian symbolic grammar, which is a Christian heresy, strictly speaking, but to be quite honest, I’m not convinced of its exclusivity. I think that there’s a particular excellence in its mythic, in the way that it mythically depicts and induces a form of relatedness to being the excellence. I think of the Trinity has something to do with understanding its relatedness to itself. And there’s something about the paradox of Christ in being able to relate us back together that maps on to so much of our implicit social grammar. Right. It’s just a particular, there is an excellence to it that I don’t fully understand and don’t, don’t think I ever will. Having said all of that, none of that excludes the authenticity, the philosophical authenticity of what you’ve just described. And I’m enough of a Platonist too, to, to appreciate that deeply and to know it. And I feel when we’re in dialogous, like right now, by the way, I feel it. I feel it sacredness and I don’t need convincing of it. I know it, right? How these things all fit together is, is so elusive, beautiful and elusive. Well, let’s draw this one to a close. I mean, because what you just said was resonant. I mean, there’s a couple things here, a theme that’s come out that’s been implicit, but we’re trying to explicate it is the situating of dialectic into dialogous into a mythos. Yeah. A set of living symbols. And we remember young until like both talking about the real possibility of symbols dying because of their living, they have to be really capable of dying and they have to keep evolving. Yes. Right. And so dialectic into dialogous needs to be set into a mythos of living symbols. And they, and, and living symbols don’t live unless the mythos is bound up with ritual ecologies of practices. So that, and then there’s, there’s, there’s something, and we can explore a little bit more at some point about, with about following the logos that’s followed, that the finesse of the self power and other power and the, and the living of the paradox, not just the, the cognitive statement of it, but the, the passionate participation in the paradox. Right. Without which it is not any kind of paradox. And one connection that, that how that overlaps with flow as a phenomenon, what we just acknowledged, and that Bellman actually proposes flow as the solution to not being either the wanton or Hamlet. Or the reflective. Yeah, exactly. Because you have the flexibility of Hamlet and flow, the innovation, the creativity, think of the jazz artist, right? But you also have the deep connectedness and coupledness. Flow is the state in which you feel coupled to the environment at one. So I think we’re making some very good connections to what we need to be, how we need to be practicing and in framing dialectic into deal logos. Well said. So thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you everyone for your time and attention. If we can broaden our sense of the comic to that, which induces or conduces laughter. And then if we can remember that a lot of our laughter is not the laughter of ridicule, but the laughter of celebration of our ability to open up to reality. And then if we can put that with laughter as ed comedy, as reminding us not to get entrapped in an idolatry of the literal, I’m getting a sense now of how the comic can be part of the numinous.