https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=KcvsipxzjXw
Humor is inherently multi-perspectival, multi-espectual, and dialogical. Same thing with tragedy. So now here again, like I did last time, I want to do this sort of semi-provocative thing with you because I can deeply trust you. Kierkegaard to me is great evidence of the capacity to bring humor and tragedy into a disclosure of how one can see the world the way Christ, the way Jesus did. I’ll use my language if that’s okay. And we see humor clearly in Socrates. We see it clearly in Kierkegaard. We see it clearly in many great sages, like Shuangzi from the Taoist traditions, just humor after humor after. I don’t see it in the Bible. Welcome back to After Socrates, episode 18. And we are continuing the series within the series where I am being joined and helped by my dear friend and collaborator Christopher Mastro Petro, in which we are trying to exemplify dialectic into dialogos, well, especially dialogos and the Socratic orientation. And we are also trying to bring this discussion about the logos within dialogos from both the Socratic-Platonic perspective and the Christian perspective by putting Socrates and Kierkegaard into deep dialog. And last time we had, I thought, well, I think it really caught fire. And for me, of the three we’ve done so far, that one was the most dialogical. And the logos was there. It was in the other two, but almost completely last time. And you’re nodding in agreement. And it was around, I think, a very important reflection about irony and paradox and following the logos. And so Chris is back. And he is going to take us into something that follows on that, that he’s something he really wants to bring into this conversation. And I think it’s really opportune. So Chris, welcome. All right. Thanks, John. So we’ve talked a lot about irony. And we’ve made sidelong gestures back and forth to humor quite a lot when we’ve been talking about Socrates and Kierkegaard. Both of them are very funny. Yes. Whatever else they are, they’re very, very funny. The role of humor in Phileas Sophia, I think, is very underappreciated. Yes. It’s not an accessory. It’s not an affectation. There’s some necessity about it. There’s something actually important. There’s something we need in it. This is a point that Anderson Todd has made to me previously as well. So please make it. Right. Right. And so I have with me, this is a really great book. My dear friend Patrick Kelly put me onto this. The Humor of Kierkegaard. It’s an anthology. It’s edited by Thomas Odin. It’s basically like a compendium, a compilation. Let me show the audience. The Humor of Kierkegaard. And it’s basically a compilation of excerpts from Kierkegaard’s body of work that, at least in the estimation of Thomas Odin, are funny. Either are about humor. Most of them aren’t about humor. Most of them are just funny because he’s very funny. And in his irony, he’s very funny because he’s often indirect. He makes very clever, veiled references. He’s very… One of the reasons that he was such a fine polemicist. Is polemicist the term? Polemicist. One of the reasons he was such a fine polemicist is that he was… In fact, some people have remarked about him that his writing actually reached its absolute pinnacle when he was immersed in a polemic. And when he was trying to undress his opponent. He was really quite… He had a wicked sense of humor and an ironical one at that. And anyway, so I wanted to read something I think is quite apropos. It’s more, I think, insightful than it is funny. But you see the traces of the humor too. And it has… We’ve been talking about this idea of following the logos. How Kierkegaard takes up the task. He takes it up with a slightly different focus in his crosshairs. But fundamentally, he takes up the task of following the logos from Socrates. Right road, wrong direction. That’s the title given to this excerpt. And the question given to it by the editor is, does it represent a bold advance in the spirit to master arguments for the existence of God? It’s like, oh God, God’s existence. All right, what are we talking about? Any qualification that claims to render the God directly knowable is undoubtedly a milestone. But a milestone on the way of approximation, registering retrogression rather than progress. It marks a movement away from the paradox, not toward it, missing the point of Socrates and Socratic ignorance. Close attention should be paid to this, lest the same thing happen in the spiritual world that happened to the traveler who asked an Englishman if the road led to London and was told, yes, it does. But he never did arrive in London because the Englishman had omitted to mention that he needed to turn about inasmuch as he was going away from London. The metanoia, the right, right, the turning around, the reorientation. The reorientation. I want to share a parable, and I think it’s the right word, because it’s a story that undermines itself as a narrative by Kierkegaard. And I think it’s telling that there’s very few people, Plato’s clearly one, Jesus of Nazareth is the maestro of the parable, but Kierkegaard is capable of the parable. He tells this story about a bunch of geese that file into a beautiful building and sing and sing about flying, but they’ve walked in, they sing and sing about flying, and then they walk out and go home. That’s vintage. That’s vintage Kierkegaard, and it’s geese, and of course there’s all kinds of stuff about geese. You get this amazing, the irony is coming through, and the humour is coming through. You can see how that’s part of his critique of Christendom. The birds singing about flight who never ever take flight. Yes, and you laughed, which is the proper response. So I think it’s very important that we explore this. First of all, there is a deep connection, there’s a continuum even I would propose, and Nagel says the same in his seminal essay, The Absurd, between humour and the absurd. Of course, Monty Python was excellent at really walking the place where they overlap. I just watched the scene again about the trial of the witch. Who are you, why is it the ways of science, and all that wonderful stuff. And so it’s important because there’s a sense in which a refusal to incorporate humour into the following of the logos as a spiritual orientation actually innervates us with an ability to have a human transcendence with respect to the absurd. That’s a proposal I’m offering. So first of all, and I talked about this in Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, but Nagel’s beautiful article, at least the first half of it, where he’s talking about absurdity, and he says we give all of these arguments that are supposed to both justify and generate our sense of absurdity. He takes each one of the arguments and he demolishes them. What you’re doing won’t matter a million years from now, but that’s symmetrical. What people are thinking a million years from now doesn’t matter to you. Exactly. I’m so small, well if I made you really, really big, would you somehow find a life more meaningful? No. He says, okay, so the arguments are after the fact. He gives an example that’s humorous, I think you remember it. Is it the call? From the dark before times, before we had smartphones. We actually had physical phones and we had these archaic devices called voice recorders, so people could leave you a message. A what? Yeah, that’s right. It goes like this, there’s this fellow, he’s summoned up his courage to call this woman he loves, let’s say Susan, and it’s almost like a Bob Newhart routine. And he’s like, Susan, hello, don’t say anything. I have to tell you, I love you, I love you, I love you. And then he hears, Susan is not here right now. And you laugh, right? And then, Naila says, why is that funny? And it’s because we’ve got two, and this is the thing you were saying that was like, stepping into the traffic and I do stop going into the- Getting running over by the carriage. Right, right. And because what you have is from that guy’s perspective, right? Everything he’s doing is so rich with meaning and he’s in the first person perspective and he’s trying to set up an eye-thou relationship. And then the machine suddenly introduces the impersonal third person perspective that takes all of that away. And we’re reminded that we have these two perspectives and they can be, they can be juxtaposed in a way in which one undermines the other. Now, what’s interesting is, of course, he uses that example, and it’s humorous. When I use that example in class, I first just tell it like that and everybody laughs. But then sometimes what I’ll do is I’ll go back and I’ll get in. Yeah, but really think, I’ll say, but then I’ll say, it’s John, right? John went home and really reflected on that. That all of these moments that are so first person perspective, meaningful to him, are in this third person perspective. And then you can see their faces change into, oh my gosh, I’ve woken up at 3 a.m. and wondered, does this all mean anything? And then they feel the family resemblance proximity between humor and absurdity. Because both of them, and this is really important, both of them involve perspectival clash. But here’s a proposal I have for you. And this is why we should talk about the two in relation. I think humor involves perspectival clash that we resolve with a kind of insight. I think absurdity involves a perspectival clash that drops us into participatory paradox, where our existence is fundamentally called into question. And then I think the response there is something that, again, can overlap with humor, but it’s different. I think the response there, the proper response is wonder. The proper response is to call both your world and yourself into deep question. Right? And so I put it to you that I think that humor bears the same relationship to the absurd that irony does to the paradox, in the sense not of being one-to-one maps, but one is on the same continuum and affords us and prepares us. So if we do not develop the capacity of humor, of bringing perspectives, notice how I’m emphasizing perspectival and participatory, if we can’t bring them into this and then look for an insight in humor, then we are not properly educated, adduced to when we confront the absurdity, not having a propositional, not even having a fully perspectival insight, but something that requires a fundamental restructuring of our being, a metanoia. So the humor prepares us within perspectival transformation for a perspectival participatory transformation. To restructure our fundamental relationship. Exactly. That’s my proposal. Yes. Okay. I think that the proposal, at least I think I’m in total agreement, at least with the gist of it, I think that we can talk about exactly what the relationship is between irony and humor. Yeah. I think that the idea that irony, I think what you said is humor is to the absurd, what irony is to paradox. Right, but I wasn’t trying to draw an equivalence between irony and humor. Right. I was only, the proportional, the developmental relationship was all I’m drawing into the analogy. Yeah, yeah. So I think that the crux of the move you’re making is exactly right, and very Kikogardian, that humor is the kind of intercategorical response that changes and reorders our fundamental stance in relation to the absurdity of existence. Right, right. And I think that’s what you said in so many words. Yes, yes, yes. Well, not all humor does that. No. But the humor that takes us towards wonder. The humor that begins in irony. Yes. Not all humor begins in irony. Right, right, okay. But some humor begins in irony. The irony that begins with the vis-a-vis of those two perspectives, when they see one another and are aghast at one another. Right, right. That irony, that particular kind that turns into humor is the kind that we’re talking about. Right. Which is the preparation, which is the receptivity to paradox, and the assumption of the paradox happens through humor. We’re going to have to do a little bit of qualification about what humor, what we actually mean by this. Yes, yeah, yeah. Because you’re right. There are different kinds of humor. Yes. And also people kind of think of humor as, just like when we talk about irony, we’re not talking about a kind of social affectation. We’re not talking about a temperamental accessory. Right, we’re not talking about a reaction spontaneously to a situation. Although cultivated irony can produce ironic reactions, just as cultivated humor can produce moments of humor. But we’re talking about a fundamental attitude. Right, we’re talking about a cultivated way of being, a life view, a way of understanding and making sense of the world, a way of ordering, right, a kind of meta-meaningful way. Yeah, yes. Of putting things into right arrangement. And we’re not talking about that on a propositional level, right. We’re talking about a posture in response to the absurdity of life. So when we’re talking about humor, we don’t just mean I laugh at something that’s funny. We’re talking about an attitude that we carry into a situation, not simply something that we’re foist with as a spontaneous moment of reacting. So is this like, because Hyland talks about this infinitude and transcendence, the ancient sense of comedy and tragedy, where comedy is a particular way. They’re not opposites, maybe opponent processing. Aspectualizations. Yeah, aspectualizations of the absurd. Yes. Where what comedy does is it makes you laugh at the absurd so we don’t take ourselves too seriously, whereas tragedy makes you wonder at the absurd so we realize that we should take ourselves seriously. Right, right. Right, and you’ve got the playoff between those two. Right, right, exactly. So the comedy is a way of being, almost to elasticize your relationship by being able to multi-aspectualize. Yes, yes, yeah, yeah. It’s like a cognitive flexibility. Totally, totally. That’s totally what it is. Those aspect shifts are at the core of insight. Right, right, and of course humor, when it’s cultivated well, is productive of insight. Right, right. You hear good humor, but you don’t hear it when it’s not. Right, right. So it’s like, you’re not just talking about a positive thing, you hear good humor, sorry, the humor we’re talking about, I mean good in that sense, is there’s not only an insight in the joke, there’s an insight beyond the joke. Because the joke stands outside of itself. Exactly. It is ironic, it stands in relation to what, the really good joke is actually not found in the propositional content of the joke, though that too can be funny. The joke, the really, the master ironist who is also a humorist, finds the source of his humor, or her humor, as the case may be, in the way they stand in relation to the joke that they have made. It is a characterological move that they’re making. Right. Their position relative to what is uttered is actually where the humor is. It’s not simply within the semantic content of the joke. That’s why I did the story of the geese, because they’re doing something absurd, and there’s a, you have to, you get the juxtaposition, and it’s like the two perspectives in the story of the person with the voice recorder, and it’s funny there, but you realize, but the joke’s actually on us, because we often are the geese that sing about flying and never fly. Exactly. Exactly. So in Kierkegaard, or Odin, I think makes a, and I can’t do it justice right now, but I highly, highly recommend it, this book, The Humor of Kierkegaard. He makes an argument that goes something like this, that basically, just as irony, waking up inside the dream, right? Waking up within the mirage of ideality that has us extend our self infinitely, but somehow within time, right? That just as irony wakes us up within the aesthetic stage of life and prepares us for transition to the ethical, for commitment, for commitment to an either or instead of the impasse of either or, because irony prepares us to live within the bounds of commitment, still somehow under the aspect of the eternal. Humor, for Odin, he makes the argument that in Kierkegaard, humor does something similar in the transition from the ethical to the religious. That’s the move he makes. So that irony is to the aesthetic what humor is to the ethical. A way of waking up inside of it and realizing that it is not ultimate. And of course, a lot of Socratic humor is that way too. You’re corrupting the youth. Actually, Socrates says, I think that you should be paying me for it. Yes, exactly. Paying the apology, right? I can’t remember exactly. It’s something like that. What do you think your just punishment should be? You should give me state sponsorship for the rest of my life. That’s right. Right. Exactly. No, I like this proposal. I think this is really, I just want to make sure I’m understanding it. So irony sort of gives you the requisite cognitive flexibility to get an insight out of the aesthetic into the ethical. And then humor, at least the kind of humor we’re talking about here, gives you an insight out of the ethical into the religious. That’s right. Could tragedy also do that? Because of what I just said, that pairing between comedy, right? I don’t think you have one without the other. No, no, of course. And Jonathan Miller made it famous that when you’re putting on a Shakespearean tragedy, you emphasize- You lean into the humor. You lean into the humor. And we do the same. The thing you write because they’re yin yang with each other. That’s right. And good drama, good dramatists know that in general. Because what I’m proposing is like we’ve got the humor telling us don’t, they’re saying to the ethical person, don’t take your ethical framework so seriously. Seriously. That’s right. But the tragic figure is saying, you know what? You need to take your life and your aspiration to virtue seriously. That’s right. Right. And you need- That’s right. And there is no algorithm for resolving that. It’s opponent processing. That’s right. And so we were talking about this earlier, and I just want to bring it out because I think it’s solely also appropriate to both Kierkegaard and Socrates because I see them both as taking on this role. So you’ve got somebody that’s doing humor, right? And what you just said about challenging the frameworks, that’s the gesture before the king. Yeah, that’s right. You have all this authority and all the laws, but here I am reminding you don’t take yourself too seriously. Because you are not what is ultimate. Right, but you also have the prophet. Now, I don’t mean prophet in the person who tells the future, the fortune teller. I mean the biblical prophet, the person that’s not foretelling. They’re telling forth. They’re trying to get people to see more deeply into what’s happening. And you have Nathan coming before the greatest king of the Old Testament, David. And he’s a prophet, and he tells them this story. He tells them the story about this guy who has one sheep, and there’s this other guy who has all these sheep, and he comes in. And David’s outraged, and then he says, that’s what you did with Bathsheba. And David goes, ugh. Right, right. And that’s, he makes David see the tragedy of what he has done. Right. And that’s also something that takes you out of the ethical into. So they’re both. There’s the prophet and the gesture. And then here’s my proposal. Both Socrates and Kierkegaard are both. Yes, 100%. 100%. Absolutely. I couldn’t agree more. So, okay, so. Okay, so let’s take that proposal. Let’s presuppose it for a moment. And then let’s talk about maybe both aspects. Totally. Discretely. And then we’ll bring them back together. Okay. Because each one, right, the tragedy reminds us of transcendence while we’re finite. And the humorous reminds us of the transcendence coming into. The finite. That’s right. That’s why humor, the good humorist, one of the things that the good humorous does is show performative contradiction. Yes. Right. The humorous actually, it’s one of the ways that the humorous alerts. Alerts. I just want to make clear what performative contradiction is for. Sure. Right. So it’s important because the performative contradiction is something that moves us outside of the propositional. Yes. So a classic example of a performative contradiction is I am sleeping. Yes. Because that statement in so far is how it’s referring objectively. Of course I sleep. But when I utter that statement, I can’t be asleep in order to utter it. So there’s a contradiction between the proposition and the perspectival and participatory. That’s right. That’s right. Good. Good. Good. And you see how that the performative contradiction. One of the things that it does is it de-idolizes the ethical of the religiosity with which it is often unduly invested. What I mean by that is this. It shows that we can be beholden to the custom of an ethic while at the same time depicting and coming into awareness of the fact that we do not in fact live in accordance with it. We do not live in a way that presupposes it as the highest good and index of what is true. So this is Jesus. The Sabbath was made for human beings, not human beings for the Sabbath. Right. Right. Right. I’ll give you my favorite, my favorite example. So my I had a great conversation a little while back with Sevilla King about this. My favorite current humorist who is also an ironist is Dave Chappelle. And I don’t think there’s anybody around that does it better than him right now. And he has this joke that I think basically sums it all up. He says at one point in one of his specials, he goes, he’s talking to an audience that is, I would say, politically speaking, kind of generally left leaning. Yeah. As is he by all accounts by his own admission, but he’s very hard to pin down when he does a stand up because he assumes different identities and perspectives. He often leads you down a road thinking you’re being set up for one thing, but the joke comes in from the left. That’s very quickly guardian. Very. So he says at one point he’s talking about a variety of political topics and he’s talking about gun control and he just sort of shakes his head and he goes, I hate guns. I can’t stand them. And of course the audience, someone cheers, yeah, no guns. And he goes, yeah, but I have several. And that to me is one of the most well-crafted jokes imaginable because what it does is he means it when he says he doesn’t like guns. He can’t stand them. And he means it when he says he has several. Right, right, right, right. And what he’s doing is he’s so he’s making now there’s sort of there’s an obvious joke about two perspectives, right? Clashing. A very obvious performative contradiction. So that’s the first order of the joke is this is a performative contradiction. He’s woken up to it, right? He goes, he goes, I am at quits with myself because I espouse an ideological position that is in accordance with a prevailing ethical frame of framework, right? And it’s a framework that, you know, at least in our ethos, many people are aligned with, right? And on the one hand, he realizes that there is something about him, about the way that he lives, the way that he behaves, that there’s that variance with that ethic that he can’t comport himself. He can he can he can kind of he can he can to it. He can espouse it. But there’s something in him that issues it, that alludes it, that bucks it. Right. So that’s one level of the joke. But the higher order of the joke, which is really the source of the joke, is that he’s standing beside himself, looking at the performative contradiction and going, Jesus. Yeah. Yeah. And he’s pointing implicitly at his audience and going, see, see. Yes. See that. See that. Right. Do you see that? Do you see how I am quite beside myself? I am how I am quite not myself, how I am quite at variance with myself. The Guardian themes you’ve been in. He is. He is the source of the joke. He is its object. Right. Right. Right. He’s showing the performative contradiction, but he’s turning in the direction of the performative contradiction and wondering at it. OK, so let me. And finding himself in a moment of absurdity allowed before an audience. So I just want to slow this down because this is really brilliant. So he does this first move, which is, as you properly described it, how humor gets you to undermine the sort of self-righteous absolutism of a particular ethical framework. But then you can’t then defer to him as the authority that is now going to be made sacred because he’s also in the performative contradiction undermining himself. Oh, that’s very good. Right. Right. He does something very similar. He has a joke. He picks these remarkably contentious topics. He has a joke about he talks about abortion, right? And then immediately gets an audience on the edge of its seat. And they’re really. Right. Even someone who’s watching this right now is like, oh, God. What was he about to say? And he says and he goes, he stops and again, he’s talking to a relatively left-leaning audience. He looks at the audience. He goes, I got to tell you, I’m not for abortion. There’s maybe two people clapping. And he goes, I’m not for it. And I’m not against it either. It all depends on who I get pregnant. Right. The same thing is happening there. Right. The exact same dynamic is happening. Right. And then he takes it even further and he says, and he says, and he takes up this. He kind of takes up a kind of a caricature of a moralizing persona. And he says, I honestly believe and I think he means it. I honestly believe that I believe in a woman’s right to choose. And I believe that right is unequivocal and unquestionable. And she should not have to consult anybody except for a physician as to how she applies. That’s right. Gentlemen, that is fair. It’s their choice. And then he says, and ladies, to be fair to us, I also think that if you choose to have the baby, the man should not have to penny. If you can kill this kid, I can at least abandon him. Right. Right. Now, imagine, right. Imagine the blood rushing to the face at hearing something like that. But the fact of the matter is what does the audience do? Do they laugh or what do they do in that situation? Well, they’re are they laughing nervously? Yes, I think so. Right. I can’t remember exactly, but they’re definitely laughing. There’s a little bit of there’s a little bit of there’s an intake of breath. There’s a nervous laughter. There’s a mixed reaction, but it’s very uproarious. So I want to get this. First of all, he calls this up and everybody sees their commitment. And then he calls out a contradiction. Right. And then and then he’s also placed himself right that this isn’t an abstract thing. It involves me and I’ll be egocentric when it involves me. And exactly. Right. And he’s got all this going and you’re going, wow, this. So first of all, he is making us aware of all of these different perspectival clashes and how there’s a complexity there that we are in many instances trying to avoid. That’s right. And what he’s showing is that this doesn’t make sense. Like when we put these pieces together, they don’t fit. Do you see everybody? I’m putting all the pieces together. I’m fitting the perspectives. I’m putting them face to face and they don’t agree and they don’t make for a coherent life view. That means that something about the way that we’ve ethic now, I’m editorializing him a little bit and that in some ways I shouldn’t even be doing this much. But but for the sake of explanation, I think what he’s doing is something like this is like he’s trying to he’s putting all of these perspectives together and he’s gathering them into this. He’s trying to squish them into the ethical frame that we have decided to use as a way of arbitrating and it doesn’t all fit together. And he’s going, look, everyone, we are full of performative contradictions when we try to absolute ties, right? Right. This ethical frame and it doesn’t fit. So something is missing. And that removes our capacity for empathy and understanding of people who have an ethical position other than ours. If we fail to grasp the humility of our humanity that we are caught up in performative contradictions, it is very easy for us to defy our side and demonize the other side. Which of course undermines what ethics is supposed to be doing. Of course, it’s. That’s a huge performative contradiction of the entire frame. Huge. So that’s just to kind of tie that back in. Essentially, what the ironic humorist who can pit perspectival frames against one another and fit them under the same overall marquee of normativity that is espoused by a particular culture does so to reveal how when you actually frame it properly, when you try and step back and see it in any kind of final way. If you try and see through that. Unironically. That’s beautiful. When you try and look at your ethical frame unironically, it results in an aporia. It becomes absurd because it does not fit together. He’s opening up exposure to the absurdity within the ethical and in so doing, gestures outside of it. Right. And so for what you’re saying is both Kierkegaard and Socrates are doing this and so I’m thinking of when Socrates is talking to Uthofro who knows what all what he knows what piety is. Yes. And he’s about to prosecute his father for being impious. Right. And then Socrates does the famous. Well, what right? First of all, he gets from Uthofro. Well, what is it? Well, it’s to do with the gods tell us. Well, do the gods tell us to do something because it’s good or is it good because the gods tell us and Uthofro wants it both ways because either way undermines his position, puts him into performative contradiction and he realizes. And so what does he do? He literally runs away from Socrates. Right. Yeah. Yeah. And you know what? That’s what people often do in face of the humorous. They turn and they run. But here’s the thing. Put all that there’s all that humor. But where Socrates going? He’s going to the courtroom to face his charges that are going to lead to his death. Yeah. Yes. Yes. There’s the humorous and the tragedy. And the tragedy. Bound out. Folded together. And you really can’t because they are simply as spectralizations of the same condition of existence that has us fraught with the contradiction of our humanness. You can’t have one without the other. Right. So this makes me think again of dialectic into dialogous and when people are doing the practice. Like you like there’s two ways in which it can go wrong. We can get so serious. That we start to choke the flow of insight. That is the life breath of a logos. But we can also fail by not taking it seriously enough. So we do not put ourselves at stake in the practice. So like we need both the prophetic and the gesture. Right. The prophet and the comedian. Yes. Right. Both have to be we have to be constantly toggling between them as we participate in the practice. Because we can fail. This is this is Aristotle’s classic idea about how you how you do the virtual engineering of a virtue. You have constraints that limit and constraints that afford. Because we’re always moving between deficit and access. We can take ourselves too seriously and we can fail to take ourselves seriously enough. And when we put the two together in the practice of dialectic we can get again. This is yet another way of how we how we can lean into. And you know start to take up the orientation of finite transcendence. That really is the place that gives birth to the logos. That’s right. Well said. Well said. And when we undertake that practice to remain sufficiently mobile. To be able to migrate our perspective properly. And also to develop the kind of the to develop the kind of to socialize the process properly. Right. That’s another function that the humor. Yes. Yes. Of course. Of course. Right. And it helps establish the relation. Right. Because you can’t tell a joke on your own. A joke is inherently humor is inherently multi-perspectival multi-aspectual and dialogical. Same thing with tragedy. Right. So now here again like I did last time I want to do this sort of semi-provocative thing with you. Because I can deeply trust you. Right. Kruegergaard to me is great evidence of the capacity to bring humor and tragedy. Like into a disclosure of how one can see the world the way Christ the way Jesus did. I’ll use my language if that’s okay. Yeah. Right. And we see humor clearly in Socrates. We see it clearly in Kruegergaard. We see it clearly right in many great sages like Zhuangzi from the Taoist traditions just humor after humor. I don’t see it in the Bible in the New Testament. We were talking about this the other day. We were. And that’s interesting. Because we have an overwhelming presentation of the Bible. An overwhelming presentation of the tragic in the sense we’ve been talking about. Yeah. Right. It’s right. And we also get presentation of human beings being foolish. But it’s not. But it’s always filled with pathos. That’s true. That might be true on its own terms. Although it makes me it puts me in mind again of some of Kruegergaard’s thoughts on the topic. Because one of the things that he takes pains to point out and that Odin does a good job of pointing out is that he understands the incarnation as being something remarkably comic. Really? Yes. You’re going to have to unpack that for me because the sort of rain shadow of my Christian sensibility is getting irked. I’m even surprised in this moment right now that I’m getting irked by that because what’s going on in me? But anyways. Well, I know. And it’s a kind of calculated Socratic heresy. For him, it’s no such heresy. Because for him, humor is in some sense the birth canal towards the serious and the religious. To use your language from yesterday. Think for a moment of in the same way that it makes me think there’s that old fable about Phales that he’s gazing up. One of the earliest philosophers, he’s looking up at the stars and he falls into the well. Something very much like that. Or Heraclitus. Did you know how he dies? Buried in a horse manure. Right. So you have the impregnation of the finite by the infinite. You have something like that. And for Kierkegaard, the fact of the Son of God being born into a stable in the lowliest of conditions and the most impoverished of settings isn’t simply paradoxical. I mean, it is. But the attitude that accompanies the paradox, the affective manner of that paradox for him is the comic. Right. So how do you get? So, okay, this is I want to really slow down on this because you’re really intriguing me with this. So I get the paradoxical and how even the tragic are such perfect vehicles for the numinous. And of course, many people, I do this, I don’t consider myself a Christian, but at Christmas time, I insist on there being a nativity scene put up because this is there’s something numinous going on. Right. And so, like I say, you know, Otto, the fascinating and the tremendous. And so the tragedy and the tremendous go well together, the fascinate. Right. How does how would the you see what I’m trying to get at? How would you how does the how did the comic and the numinous come together? Hmm. Well, one of the things that the comic does, I think, think of their like, think of this physiologically for a second, right? Like we’re talking about humor as though it’s the sort of abstract thing. Well, think of it like viscerally, think of what happens affectively. Right. Think of what happens when something strikes you as comic and you laugh and you get that sensation in your body. It is a way of it. It’s I think what it’s what it does is it disrupts your categorical thinking. Okay. By redisposing the attitude you take in the face of something that on its face, one taken literally doesn’t add up. But one thing that humor does is I think it softens our attention. Right. It’s a certain form of sensitization. And I think in the case of this biblical example, I think what it does is it helps to inoculate the literalism that would that that would accompany the self-seriousness taken towards. Oh, okay. Okay. I want to savor this. I want to savor this. This is good. So the idea is if we if we only look at it one way, there’s a tremendous temptation to literalism and kind of fundamentalism, which which of course is anathema to all of this stuff we’ve been talking about everything. Yeah. Okay. And so what you’re doing is to remember the comic means you don’t take the literal presentation so seriously. So it’s like the way the parables undermine the narrative framework, right? Right. So that they don’t calcify the perspective. Okay. So excellent. Excellent. And then while you were saying that something else came to mind and I want to see if they go together, I was I was realizing, oh, but John, you have been so uncultured to regard laughter as always ridicule. But there are the moments in which I have really laughed have not been moments of ridicule. They have been moments of joy. So I grew up in Dundas and I was going to a school high school and I had a really close friend and one day after school, we were in a room and I said, what’s that on your on your shelf there? And he said, well, there’s a game we can play. And so I said, well, let’s play it. He said, okay. And we get it out and there were there were colored spheres and he and he’s was blue and my regreen. He says, okay, so count your spheres. And I he and he said, I have 13 and I said, I have 14. Do I win? And we laughed for 10 minutes after that. Because it’s all this setup in the game is just to count, which, of course, it wasn’t. Beautiful. Right. And it was and I’m not ridiculing him. I’m not. There’s no ridicule at all. The laughter is about, again, a capacity to suddenly see through. And again, to write to to to to to really properly move between taking things seriously and not taking them seriously. Beautiful. And there’s a joy there. Beautiful. So I want to put these two together. Right. If we can think of 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 and 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. So another moment that comes to mind about this. So now this is really singing for me is that scene in C.S. Lewis where the kids haven’t met Aslan yet and they say, is he a tame lion? And all the animals go, oh, of course, they’re laughing. But he’s good. Yes. So there’s a punch line and there’s humor and there’s right. But nevertheless, the humor is in service of how numinous and it is ironic. I’m getting it. So ironic about that is what the kids are saying. What the kids are asking is, can we trust him? Yes. That’s the question. And the irony is, yes, but you have no idea just how much. Right. And you also don’t pull it. It’s the sensibility transcendence. Not only do you need to have an insight into him, you need to have a reflective insight in that you really don’t understand trust yet. Right. You don’t you think of trust. Can I predict? Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Does what you’re saying, what you’re saying participates in what is real unknowingly and yet beautifully and continuously and to such a degree that you can’t begin to imagine how it participates. Yes, exactly. Exactly. Your story inspires me to tell one too, which is I think similar friend of mine, Leslie Guiley, who’s one of the funniest people I know. And and who’s and incidentally, whose Catholicism I think is quite beautiful and quite inspiring, quite sophisticated. So I think of him at a moment like this. And this was many years ago. We were gathered together, a few of us friends were watching the Olympics and the and Olympic hockey, you know, which is a big deal in our house. Well, Canada. Big deal. The official religion of Canada. The official religion of Canada. Yes. The ethical religion, but sometimes it borders on the religious. Yeah, right. Well said. We can teleologically suspend the ethical for hockey. And and and it was the the Olympics that was actually held in Canada where Team Canada won the gold medal for hockey. And so it was it was quite an uproarious occasion. Right. It was about as sacred as it could be without being in the proper category of the religious. And like we said, it’s pretty close. Right. And and so we go out for a walk afterwards and just really flush identifying very personally, very closely with this victory, which is interesting to me now. I don’t think I would necessarily have the same reaction, but at the time it was very important. And we’re walking down the street and there’s a man who’s, is it one or two, and he walking in our direction and they’re clearly evangelizing. And I don’t know what denomination they are, but they’re evangelizing and they look at us and they sort of they take on this sort of kind of solicitous manner, like, oh, we’re going to engage you in conversation and we walk closer together. And then my friend Leslie says, have you heard the good news? Now, this is coming from a person who’s properly religious. Right. Yeah. And yet the irony of the way that something that is by all comparison, relatively profane participates in what is sacred. Right. If only by indirection. Right. Is something that is present in the humor and present in the joke. That’s really good. That’s really good. Anyway, so I think so this connection, the other thing that the humorist does, and this is again present in what is comical about Christ and comical about the incarnation. Again, not ridicule. No, comical. Right. The comic is not. So you’ve taken pains to say this and we should take more. Yeah. The comic comedy is often associated with cruelty. Yes. And it needn’t be right. It really needn’t be. So when I say, and when he says that the incarnation is comic, he is not debasing it. Or ridiculing. He’s not dispraising it. He’s not ridiculing it. He’s not trying to remove its sacredness. The profanity of the absurdity of the incarnation taking place in the lowliest setting imaginable indexes to the sacred. And he dies, the death of a criminal and a terrorist. Right. Yes. You were talking earlier about in one of our previous sessions about the Socratic Eros and how it transmutes from the lowly and sexual, the lowly and sexual, you know what I mean. Yes. To the… The anagogic. To the anagogic. And we have to think of this in the same way. Yeah. Right? Yes. There’s a sense in which returning to the cave, of course, makes you susceptible to tragedy, and that’s in Plato’s mind. But it also has… Plato puts a comedy in there because when there’s a joke there because when he comes back, he’s stumbling around because his eyes aren’t used to the dark and he’s saying things that nobody believes. There’s a Zen story like that about two frogs and one is at a pond and another one goes away. And it comes back. And the first frog says to the second, what happened? And he said, well, I saw the ocean. And the first frog says, is it half as big as my pond? And the first frog goes, no, it’s bigger. He said, three quarters the size of my pond? And the second frog goes, no, no. And then he goes, well, it says, is it as big as my pond? And then the second frog says, no, it’s way bigger, bigger than you can… And then it says, and then the first frog’s head explodes. Right? But it’s the same kind of thing. Like you realize that when the person comes back, in some sense, and there’s something really, you have to be really careful about here. The person that comes back after the person, the enlightened person that comes back, right? Can see him at buffoon. Can see him at buffoon. Absolutely. And that’s why the irony in order to be transmuted into a religious attitude needs to become humorous because… Oh, wait, I see it. That way the person takes up. Oh, this is almost like Girard about like the sacrifice undermining the scapegoating. What the person, the sage, takes up allows the projection of potential buffoonery and ridicule and that but plays with the humor in there in order to turn it properly back on the person. So this reminds me of Woodruff’s discussion in his book, Reference to Lost Virtue. He says, he said, we now think of irreverence and we take it as a compliment, but he said the job, satire is not ultimately about irreverence. It’s about getting you to find irreverence for the idol so you get into proper reverence for the reality. Exactly. Exactly. Irreverence toward the king means reverence to God. Exactly. Render unto, right? Yes. That’s exactly right. That’s exactly right. And that’s why, that’s why the, that’s why great humorists, that’s why the irreverence of a great humorist conceals a deep reverence. But only so much. It’s like Alethea. It’s concealed, but it’s also revealed. Yes. For those who have the eyes to see and the ears to hear, right? Yes. Because they stand outside of the arena, right on its, right at its outer perimeter. Out on the horizon. That’s right. The horizon of wonder. That’s right. They stand on the horizon of wonder and their irreverence refers attention to that horizon. If it is understood properly, and often it isn’t, that’s why we kill them. We kill them literally or figuratively. We are in the business right now of killing good humorists as much as we possibly can. Yes, in service of. Now think of the idea of offense, right? Kierkegaard’s idea of offense as the denial, the refusal of the beholding gaze of Agape that reforms your relationship to yourself and the ground of your being. To take offense at that. The idea of taking offense at that, right? Think of the offense we have at the comedian that has us know ourselves by some measure that is well beyond our capacity to self-determine, to autopoeticize, and to manage for ourselves. We take offense at the idea that we could be so known and so naked by some measure that we have not. We take control. We take offense at the idea that we do not know ourselves. Yes, exactly. Which is the. And we refuse to be known. You shall not know me. I shall not know myself through you. No, I shall not. I refuse that love. Remember, knowing and love. We’ve made this identity claim before. I refuse that love. I refuse your knowing. I refuse the knowing of myself on your terms because they are not mine. Our offense at the comedian is in some sense a version of our offense. At the Christ. So it’s the opposite of the Socratic know thyself as the aspirational. And it’s mythology going back to that term again. Right, right, right. Okay, so again, this is deepening the point about this sort of primary orientation, the fundamental framing, the meta-optimal grip, the meta-orientation, the orientation to our orientation, right, that we’re bringing into the practice is like we’re adding all of this nuance. We’re building the mythos around, right, we’re building a mythos scaffolding to help people take up the orientation that is needed for practicing dialectic into theologos. That’s right. That’s right. So what do we like? What am I trying to say? We’ve hit something. Yeah, no, no. Well, there’s an aporia here. Hold it for a second. Yeah. But there’s a connection too. Because I can think of like this stance of being able to challenge the ethical in service of religio. Yeah. The connectedness, the relatedness. The ratio religio, right. And I’m thinking not only of like we there are I think the proper practice of this within a spiritual community dialectic into theologos. I’m thinking of work that people like David Fuller and others are doing of having the conversations that we’re not allowed to have, not because we want to espouse a racism or a sexism or any kind of unethical behavior, but because we want to seek beyond these ethical frameworks, a way of regrounding the ethical in something that it is in the service of, right. And that we can’t have these conversations. And so what I’m thinking of is another dimension of the scaffolding, which is and this is, of course, requires tremendous care in both the sense of caution and taking care of that. In addition to what we just said, you know, getting this finesse between taking ourselves too seriously and not taking ourselves seriously enough. Dialectic and dialogos also requires an ability to talk about things that we’re not supposed to talk about, to have the difficult conversations. And to understand that those conversations are, they’re not the end and object. No, right. Because the conversations are not driven towards coming to a conclusion. No, they’re trying to get us both to a kind of giving birth to ourselves that we’re not capable on our own. And so, like, just as an example, and I’m not going to get into it, because YouTube is not the place to do this. But I think that’s a good point. I think YouTube is not the place to do this. But there is so much invocation of justice right now and so little dialogos about justice, which Socrates and Plato and the Republic would find so abhorrent, so deeply, deeply disgusting. And that’s what I mean about standing back and saying, why are we invoking this so much? It’s pretentious as if we completely get what justice is, and we know it, and we have it, and we’ve got it, and there’s no question. And it’s like, to me, that is also an example of people stuck in the ethical. The reduction of justice to law, whether it be formally or informally, however we define it. But that non-identity is precisely that. I want to have deep discussions like this. I want to get into dialogos like Socrates does in the Republic about justice. And I feel like we can’t do it right now, because anything that we say that calls particular slogans about justice into proper question for reflection will brand us immediately as unethical individuals. Right. But this goes to back then. This is, as you know, a congester to dozens of hours of lectures to this effect. This is one of the consequences of the meaning crisis. Yes. Right. Is that the loss of the religious category of thought and action has resulted in the idolatry of the ethical. Right. And that’s why we have pseudo-religious meta-meaning systems, systems that were meaningful but not meta-meaningful, that had no capacity to govern intercategorically the way that we arrange meaning, like political ideologies that have no business being religious, but are elevated and deified to that category because they are… They’re trying to fill the vacuum. They’re trying to fill the vacuum, and it is a deeply, deeply dangerous case of mistaken identity. Yes. Yes. Right. And we can just… The examples are so voluminous. They’re so obvious. We don’t even need to enumerate them, but they’re rife right now. And it’s because when we lose that category of orientation, we drop a tier down. It’s a pretty significant tier. It’s a difference of kind, fundamentally. But it’s exactly parallel, proportionally parallel, to the person living the aesthetic life who tries to… The puer eternis. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Who’s trying to find a spiritual… He’s even trying to… There’s a vacuum of ethical orientation. Totally. Yeah. Well, as you pointed out, I think very wisely yesterday, when we talk about the aesthetic, and it’s a rough mapping, but I think it’s very apt. It’s the aesthetic and the ethical and the religious, as the child is the adult, the adult is the sage. Right. The child is the aesthetic, the adult is the ethical, and the sage is the religious. And incidentally, I think we’ve made this clear, but just in case, there is necessary and independent value in each of these stages. Of course. We don’t want to lose the ideality of playfulness that belongs to the province of the child. There’s a reason that Kierkegaard really got along with kids, right? And nor can we lose the ethical. You have to be like children to enter the kingdom. That’s right. That’s right. Our development comes through serious play, right? Which children, of course, exemplify. And of course, there is tremendous value to the ethical. And you see the great figures like Socrates criticizing the laws of Athens, but refusing to leave when they have pronounced his death. Jesus saying, I haven’t come to throw away the law, but to fulfill it. Right. And you get these constant, you’re in St. Paul. Once again, the paradox. Right. Wrestling between, right? Wrestling between law and love, right? Or the parable of the prodigal son, where if you, like the prodigal son for me is, I come back to it again and again, because if you land on any one of the identities and absolutize it, you don’t get the parable. And that’s the classic. And that is that by definition, I think by Schindler’s definition is what mythology is, is that the denial of the logos, the hate of the logos is mistaking the part for the whole, mistaking the part of any one of these perspectives, the part of any one of these stages as being absolute in itself, rather than being something that participates. Right. In what is. And let’s add the two things to it. They go exactly with it. The mythology is also that the logos is always instrumental and in service of something else. Yes. But what is all of this for? What is it? It’s for what it is, right? It’s about the abundant life. Right. Right. Right. The life worth living. That’s right. And then the other is, well, let’s get to a conclusion. Let’s get to the bottom line. Yes. And it’s like. Give me something final. Like what’s the bottom line in the parable of the prodigal son? You tell me. What’s the bottom line in the crucifixion? What’s the bottom line Socrates’ trial? Yes. Like you’re not understanding. Yes, exactly. Exactly. And so myth. Missology is also that which has us take offense at the possibility of a gap, which is a form of knowing and being known that is inexhaustible and is not brought to anything so final as what is so desired. Right. And therefore it is also, and this is one of the great to my mind, one of the reasons why I think Christianity hasn’t profunded it yet, which is the deep co-identification of Agape and the logos. Yes. Because the mythology is not only the foreclosure on Agape, it is the foreclosure, therefore also. And we have to understand them. And I think in this paradox that he talks about, in this paradox, they are co-identified. So there’s a way in which, right, and I’m not, I don’t propose we resolve it right now, but what I’m seeing, again, to help get people oriented is I’m seeing this interplay between comedy and tragedy, not taking ourselves too seriously. In order to take ourselves seriously. Right. And then there’s also this interplay between logos and Agape. I see them as these opponent things and then there’s the nexus between them. And that’s the place we want to be in when we are exercising the practice. Yes. And it is not a place that we can articulate. No. It is ineffable. No, no, but what we can do. We can live in it. Yeah, we can live it and we can triangulate ways in which, like Tillich, in which we can find the tonos. Yes. We can find the tonos and then we can find the tonos within, between the different, right, and where they touch on each other and bear on each other. That’s right. Yeah. I think this was wonderful. I think this was fantastic. So thank you so, so much. This was excellent. Can I maybe just finish us off with one more? Oh, please. Because this one is, this one is a little less obvious, but I think all the better for it. So bear with me. Okay. Bear with me. Bear with me. Instantly transforming oneself. How to become a jellyfish. And the question is, how does the self acquire its own selfhood if it is merely a receptacle for absorbing external values? There is a creature about which I fall into reverie rather often. It is the jellyfish. Have you noticed how this gelatinous mass can flatten itself into a plate and then slowly sink, then rise so still and firm that one would think one could step on it? Now notice, now it notices its prey approaching, then it funnels into itself, becomes a pouch and sinks with prodigious speed deeper and deeper with its speed snatching in its prey. Not into its pouch, for it does not have a pouch, but into itself, for it is itself a pouch and nothing else. It is so able to contract itself that one cannot imagine how it could possibly extend itself. It is just about the same with you. And you must forgive me that I have not had a more beautiful creature with which to compare you. And also that you perhaps can hardly keep from seeing it. And also that you perhaps can hardly keep from smiling at the thought of yourself as nothing but a pouch. That is so consonant with everything. Like we’ve been talking about and also, you know, tracking Socrates and trying to follow the logos. And it also reminds me of L.A. Paul’s stuff about people offering to turn you into a vampire. And you can’t possibly know what that is like. But the humor gets you into the serious play between the perspectives. That was perfect for ending it. Thank you so much. Thank you everyone for your time and attention. Take good care. Kierkegaard seems to be also presenting it as a positive and good thing, but he’s suffering it in this profound way. This is what I’m hearing you saying. This is almost ripping him to pieces. Yeah. And yet in Socrates, it seems to be sitting there harmoniously together. Yeah.