https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=hIAfVKB66fY
people are gonna look at the idea of ecologies of practice and they’re gonna think of it as a system, right? Like a circuit that they have to walk through and a formula or an algorithmic way. It’s like if you do X, Y and Z, and if I have this practice and this practice and this practice and I add them all up, they amount to enlightenment. And that kind of systematicity is exactly the kind of Hegelian thinking that he was so vehement against. Because for him, it’s like, if this does not take in the soil of your subjective life, if it does not catch, if it does not light, if it cannot be true for you, it will fail. [“Pomp and Circumstance”] We are continuing the series within the series, Christopher Mastu-Pietro and I, putting Socrates and Kierkegaard and via Kierkegaard, Socrates and Christ or Christianity into a profound, we hope, aspire to profound conversation, dialogue. And this, of course, for a couple central reasons. One is there is much about the figure of Socrates and Christ that bears comparison, not identification, of course, but comparison. They both died for a cause. They both died to try and bring a more abundant life to human beings. They both understand themselves as midwives, trying to help people go through a second birth. There’s important overlaps, I should say, and interweavings between the Socratic love of wisdom and the Christian sense of love. There’s a lot about Socrates’ relation to the spiritual. And of course, there’s a lot in the Christian tradition about the cultivation of wisdom. And so there’s a deeper discussion, and it’s typified by really important books. We’ve mentioned this already before, and I’m going to be talking to Jacob at some point. I’m looking forward to Jacob Howland’s amazing book, Kierkegaard and Socrates, a Study in Philosophy and Faith. And what is the relationship between philosophy as a way of life and the love of wisdom and faith, not as the assertion of belief without evidence, but as a particular kind of religio, connectedness that calls one in a profession. Into a profound aspirational transformation. And so Chris has already led us through two of these. And so welcome, Chris. Let’s go into our third discussion about. It’s our fifth discussion. Our fifth discussion about Socrates and Kierkegaard. I’m sorry, my mistake. How they fly by. Yes. It’s funny, as, it’s, after the last discussion we had, it’s been a little while since we had our last one. And I’ve been thinking a lot about. It’s very different from us, for us than for the people watching this video. This is coming, I think, a week after the last one, but it’s actually been quite a bit longer for the two of us in reality. And I’ve been thinking a lot about it, not just about the discussions and the content, but about what we’re doing. What we’re doing when we’re talking about them. We’re doing this in this very public way. And there’s a real tension in doing something that refers itself to such a private responsibility, such a private domain, right? And to do that before a crowd, in some sense. Kierkegaard has a lot of thoughts about his relationship to the crowd. And both Socrates and Christ marked themselves out from the crowd. And in so doing, made life difficult for people. And in so doing, suffered and died. Socrates famously described himself as a gadfly. Right, right. And Kierkegaard was too. We’ve talked about that already. He was quite a gadfly himself, and he made himself very difficult for a crowd. And he was, I think he was very insistent that whatever it meant to take responsibility, whatever it meant to become oneself authentically had everything to do with standing before a criterion that exceeded any evaluation that a crowd could offer. And that that was a private affair. That it was before the good, before the absolute. That one stood in clear resolution and gathered together. And I think we’re gonna talk about that as we go along, because we’re gonna talk about confession and what that means. But I think his relationship to the crowd and Socrates’ relationship to the crowd and what it means to be ethical, I think is something I’d like to talk about. First though, so as I’ve been thinking about our conversations about Kierkegaard, I’ve been wandering around Kierkegaard for a long time now. And you know how when we do philosophical fellowship, we find that as we go through the exercise, we did a demonstration of it in one of the earlier episodes. And as we go through that exercise, there’s the shift that happens, or at least when it’s clicking. And the shift is that you go from trying to talk about someone and you start to realize at some point that you’re not talking about them. They’re actually talking about you. You’re not trying to get an objective purchase on what they meant, because you can’t. Something about them is gonna remain incomprehensible to you, what they meant, what they intended, what decisions they made inwardly. You don’t have access to that. But what happens is that as you confront them, you go from trying to get an objective purchase on their ideas and their thinking, and you realize that what you’re actually confronting is your own thinking. What you’re bringing to them, they’re reflecting back at you. And they’re opening a space, a subjective space, in which you’re coming into confrontation with whatever you’ve brought to them in the first place. And you go from thinking about them to using them to think about yourself and what you’re doing. The responsibility reverses, and so does the attention. Same thing happens in Dialogos, right? Dialectic in the Dialogos, right? We’re talking about the virtue. We’re trying to get this purchase on the virtue. We’re proposing at it. And then at some point, the orientation reverses, and we’re being seen by it, right? I think we’ll talk about what that means a little bit more later in a forthcoming discussion. So the whole purpose of the exercise changes in the throws of the exercise itself. And I had this moment in reflecting back on our discussions about Kierkegaard, especially after having spent so much time thinking about him and trying to think like him. And I just realized that I don’t understand him at all. At all. And every time I think I get a purchase on his ideas, he bucks it. And he bucks it again, and he bucks it again, and he bucks it again, and I get a hold on it, and then he slips through, and I get another hold on it, and he slips through. Well, he exacerbates that, right? He does, because he withdraws. Right, the pseudonymity, he withdraws as you’re trying to get to know him, much like Socrates does. And I think that’s part of what’s going on with the pseudonyms is the withdrawal, so that what happens is you find yourself in something, and suddenly he’s not there, and you’re going, at the end of one of his dialogues, the concluding unscientific postscript, Johannes Klimakis, does almost like a revocation, he basically says, like, everything that you just read, don’t appeal to it as an authority. You can ignore it, I know you will. They all do. Just ignore it, it’s fine. It’s okay. And he just withdraws, right, he’s a humorist. And part of being a humorist, we were talking about humor in our last discussion, and part of being a humorist is to say something like, whatever it is that you’re objectively trying to get a purchase on, you as a subject will vanish before it if you make that objective ostention the goal of your exercise. This is not an objective exercise. And what I found is that, as I realized that I didn’t understand him, that no matter how many times I went back to him, he would elude me, the more that happened, the closer I felt to him. The more incomprehensible he was, the more I related to him. The more eros there was, in the proper sense. Okay, slow that down, because you’re making an implicit distinction that I want you to explicate. There’s a way in which he would be incomprehensible that would be a failure, clearly, or I don’t understand this. And you’re not saying that, you’re not pointing to that kind of incomprehensibility. You’re pointing to, you get it, and then the frame is broken, and you have to move to the frame, et cetera. And this is not happening incoherently. There’s a kind of trajectory to it. There’s a sense of moving closer to him. Am I understanding you correctly? Yeah, I would say it’s something like, the more his sort of poetic style withdraws and coaxes me forward, the less I relate to him as an object of study, and the more I relate to him as a subject, intersubjectively. From your own capacity, right? Right, right. So what I’m talking about when I’m talking about him is not him. What I’m talking about is what occurs to me, what happens to me when I encounter him. That’s actually what I’m talking about. That’s actually what we’re talking about. That comes as a relief when I think about it, because I think like, I don’t understand him, and God knows I have no authority to talk about him, and he eschews the authority himself. So what are we doing then, right? What are we doing if not trying to understand him and trying to explain his thought? Whatever it is that we’re doing, that’s not what it is. So then what are we doing? What is he doing in his pseudonymous writings if not trying to provide an authority that is the measure of good thinking? That’s not what he’s doing. So what is he doing then? And I feel as though what he’s doing becomes clearer to me when I find myself in the thicket of his writing, completely lost, and in being so lost, I find that I incur all of the responsibility that I’m trying to foist on him as an authority about what is ethical. But it doesn’t put you in a position of arbitrary choice of preference. No, no, it’s not. It’s not. It confronts me with… Like you’re called. Yeah. In some way. Yeah, it is, right? It’s like a call. I just wanted to say this is really resonating with me because I started with the series by saying I’m after Socrates. And I was gonna create this masterpiece and I realized I’m not gonna do that. Right. Right, exactly. So, and there’s something about the performance of it, right, like I think about what we’re doing right now. And it’s such a curious thing. And we started doing it and it was exciting and interesting and fun, right? Because it’s like play. It’s like dramatic improvisation with this deeply Socratic element. And I don’t exactly know what it is. And as we go through it, I’m starting to wonder what it is because something about what we’re doing causes me to reflect on what he might have been doing with his pseudonymous writings. He’s doing something very, very private in a very public way. Right. Which is that he’s trying to, I think, or what occurs to me when I read him is that he’s taking this remarkably public forum that is, in his case, it’s publishing, in our case, it’s something very different. But I think we can think of them analogously. He’s putting on this performance. He’s, like we talked about this, right? There’s something very performative, very theatrical about it. He’s taking on characters, right? Or at least so, yeah. Right, okay. And so we’re confronting these characters in these writings, and at first we’re confronting them as though they’re sort of objective philosophical reflections. But then the further we wade into them and the further we wade into this, I think this stops being about objective philosophical reflections. This is an intersubjective exercise. And whatever it’s meant to do, whatever rings in the wake of that speech, when inevitably you and I have to go back into silence and wake up alone the next morning and wonder what the heck we are and who the heck we are. What good will this have been? What good will this have been? That’s the question to me. And I think the question has something to do with this relationship that he has between the objective role of philosophy, and he’s talking about it in a particular way, right? There’s Hegel in the back there. The system. There’s a contrast between Hegel and Socrates. There is, there is, which is why he’s a student of Socrates. Because he understands his relationship to Socrates, not as a subject to an objectively philosophical system or scientific enterprise. He understands his relationship to Socrates as an intersubjective relationship. He also understands his relationship to God that way. I think. And so to use a phrase that you use a lot, he is trying to disabuse people of the propositional tyranny that they bring to philosophy. That’s right. Because for him, the propositions he makes are completely incidental at the end of the day. What he’s trying to do is he’s trying to spatialize your subjective relationship to yourself, force you back on it, and lead you to the necessity of decision. Decision. Decision not as a choice of something in the world over something else in the world. It’s not conviction about a proposition. No. Decision is an inward movement that you make that has to do with realization, making yourself real. We’ll talk, we’ll get into that. I just threw that out. So he has this idea of truth as subjectivity. Right. Which is extremely dangerous because people very typically, and I have been guilty of this myself, especially when I first encountered Kierkegaard in a galaxy a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away when I was an undergrad. Inferno. And the truth is subjectivity, and I thought that’s- That’s unscientific. Well, and that’s ridiculous. That makes no sense. Yeah. It would be unshareable, and the most important feature of the truth is it has to be shareable. Yeah. Right? And so you’re gonna have to really carefully unpack both of those, subjectivity and truth, and always in relationship to also what, because Socrates has also a very different relationship, a very different understanding of truth. And I wouldn’t say for Socrates, there’s something, I would hesitate to apply subjectivity to it, but maybe the Kierkegaardian sense, but it’s more the call to aspirational, authentic selfhood or something like that. Yeah. Right. And I think that’s much warmer. Yeah, because we think of, you’re right, we think of subjectivity, and we think of relativism immediately. We think of relativism, and we think of the completely internal, completely private, completely inaccessible, completely idiosyncratic aspect of my consciousness. Yeah. And that, and if you have that kind of Cartesian understanding of subjectivity, and you bring it to the notion of truth, especially a Cartesian notion of truth, you just get this oxymoronic statement. Yeah, yeah, that’s right. That’s right. So, okay, so what does, what does subjectivity mean in this sense, right? And we have to keep, I think this all hinges, like even beginning to understand this, like I’m not even sure I do, because it’s hard, because it defies the way we think about these things traditionally. Yes. It’s really difficult, and that’s the point. It’s hard. But it has something to do with minding that distance between propositional certitude and something more processual or procedural, or to use your terms, participatory and perspectival. It has something to do with being in a relationship with being, being in a relationship with the conditions of your existence itself. And for him, I think- And it’s not self-enclosed either. There’s a notion I take, well, I’ll ask you. When I’ve been reading Kierkegaard, the notion of subjectivity has, so the notion, our notion, our normal notion of subjectivity is something that is monadically self-enclosed, like a Leibnizian monad, whereas his notion of subjectivity has a kind of proper receptivity in it that seems to be also different than how we normally hear the words subject, to throw under myself, right? It’s not a throwing under myself, it’s an opening of myself in a certain way. That’s right, yeah, yeah, exactly. I think that’s right. I think it’s like, it’s something like the position, like the position you take as being a self relative to the good itself. Right. Right. It’s before the good. And the reason that it’s in defiance of the crowd, the reason that it’s in defiance of a social norm is because it takes as its measure of realness a measure that is not reducible to anything objective that you can pursue outside of yourself. It’s a truth that can’t be accessed without you directly undergoing transformation? Yeah, I think that’s right. But a transformation, a kind of, a transformation into, it’s very tricky, because it’s like, it’s a transformation of, I think it’s a transformation of consciousness, but it has this recollective sense of being transformed back into yourself, right? Like the botanic anemesis? Yeah, I think it’s very much. You’re remembering the fundamentals of your own self, right, or something like that? Yeah, as being, as being, so we talked about despair as being the sense, like being suspended in this tension of, I can’t stand being myself. I can’t bring myself to be whatever it is that I am. It’s always ahead of me. I can’t find it. But whatever it is that I am now, I can’t stand being it, and I can’t not be it. I can’t be what I am, and I can’t not be what I am, and both are frustrating, right? And I’m caught, it’s like a double bind. I can’t do away with myself, but I also can’t assume and espouse myself. So there’s a frustrated aspiration, and there’s this desperate avoidance. Okay, so just, but there’s a pause point here again, because this is where we could also help people to not miss here, because people can also hear, and this is prevalent in our culture, subjectivity means my truth, and that means sort of ruthless self-assertion, self-affirmation, and he is not saying that. No, he’s talking about something that can’t be expressed. That’s why it’s ironic. So we talked about irony as being sort of the, one of the classic kind of formulations of irony that we gave in one of our previous discussions was, I can’t, I can say something that is sort of objectively untrue, but I can say it truthfully, right? And I think that distinction, the distinction between the letter of the proposition, object to philosophical reflection, we might say, which for him is weightless on the soul, and the manner, the form in which it is said, in which it is conducted inwardly, that that manner or form in which a thing is said, by which a thing is made, from which a decision comes, is actually the measure of its truth. Truth is not the letter of the proposition, it’s not the assertion, it is no thing that could be described or expressed, which is why all of this writing is ironic, because nothing that could be expressed in volumes and volumes and volumes, for him is truthful in a subjective manner. The subjective measure of truth is weighed against the felt gravity of existence itself. So is it, I mean, we were talking about this with Guy in the car, as we were driving to the studio, around the notion of, and I think Jordan Peterson’s talked about this too, these other senses of true, your aim is true, so you’re aiming yourself, and then true as being true to, as trotting, betrothing yourself. And that, it sounds to me like what you’re talking about with Kierkegaard’s decision, is that you aim yourself, and then you are true to it, you commit yourself to it. Yes, yes. And so it’s got a lot to do with, and Stegmeier means this in a very profound way, orientation, right? Yeah, exactly. It’s the sense of being properly oriented. Right, and the truth is the orientation itself. I think it’s something more like that. Well, it sounds to me, I wanna say this is where Kierkegaard maybe could have been helped a little bit more by Plato, because there’s a sense that you shape yourself, I’m using that as a metaphor, like Eidos, right? You shape yourself to the true line, I’m now taking true line and making it the true line, right? Such that a real affordance for navigation becomes possible for you. There’s a contact, there’s a conformity. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right? There’s a sense of being shaped by the good or by God, so that you can orient and then move in that direction properly. That’s right, I think that’s good. Yeah, I think that’s good, right? And it’s very Socratic, that is very deeply Socratic. Because if I make my decisions, if my manner of conduct, whatever it is that I happen to do is done in relation to that orientation to the good, then in some sense I can’t miss, because it’s being towed by that relation, what he calls willing one thing, right? It’s being towed by the magnetism of the good and being utterly faithful to it, that is the measure of the ethics of any decision I make. It’s not the decision I make, it’s not the consequence of the decision in the world, right? He talks about it’s like when you’re making decision, the sacrament, because it’s almost right, that’s why marriage is such a canonical symbol for it, for the either or, I must choose this or that, right? And choosing this or that requires me to make inward the tensions of that dialectic, right? Between being the kind of thing that I am and not being able to get away from it, and having this open-ended sense of possibility before the eternal, and when that dialectic is made inward and pressurized by the intense weight of existence itself and suffered thus, then decision becomes possible, decision meaning that orientation to the good. And so then in that case, I think he would say, like don’t look left or right for the consequence of the decision in the world to tell you if it’s the right decision, because we’re not omniscient, we don’t know, we can’t predict the sum of consequences. The measure of the decision and its integrity is that it is in fact decision. Okay, so this is good. So I wanna ask you about some things, because I mean, for me, this resonates very much with L.A. Paul’s work, that you can’t infer your way to a transformative experience, and Agnes Callard’s, that there’s an aspect of, and we’ll talk about that in the next episode when we talk about the three leaps, but there’s this aspirational dimension that is irremovable, and it also is not driven in an inferential or standard decision theoretic way. And then the idea of serious play, serious imaginal play, and I think there’s a deep, and I have a philosophical intuition, there’s some deep resonance that needs to be disclosed about the relationship between irony and serious play, Socratic, or the Guardian irony and serious play, and humor, those are all sort of singing together in some way. And so let’s keep that positive side, but just to also by contrast, because people said this of both Socrates and Kurt Tugger, well, that’s just, you’re just being obstinate. Yeah, you’re just being obstinate. You’re just being inflexible. You’re just not, right? Just being stubborn. And I think in both of their biographies, there’s some truth to that. Oh, yeah. But I also see in both of their biographies that there is much more than that going on. So I’m giving you sort of the positive, transformative experience, serious play, aspiration, but also not obstinacy. So what, you see what I’m trying to do? I’m trying to get us, what is it we’re getting in on? Because this is more this, like if it is this conforming, transforming orientation that tempts me towards the good. Yes, Safferson. Yeah, Safferson. Yeah. Right? And how is it distinguishable? Because this will help us to explicate it further, negative determination. How is it distinguishable from obstinacy, being stubborn, merely refusing to consider things like that? Yeah. Because I have to confess, when I read about some of the stuff with Regina, it’s like, get over it, right? You part of you just want to say to him, like, you know, like, cause if you were to have somebody that just knew, I’d want to say, okay, get over it, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. But then I, you know, then I realized, no, but there’s something else going on and I want to be responsive. But I’m trying to be honest about, right? So now I’ve given you a framing. Yeah. And I don’t know that he is the exemplar necessarily for the virtue that he is trying to illustrate. I mean, it’s tricky, right? I know is, do we take his life as the model for the religious, the religious ascent? I don’t know. I think he took Socrates and Jesus to both be exemplars, but in different ways. Yes, but he didn’t take himself to be an exemplar. That’s right. Fair enough. Right. So let’s play, let’s play with it that way. How did he take them to be exemplars, but he took them differently? I think that’s part of the tension I feel in his work. They’re exemplifying something that we’re both talking about here. And yet there’s some important difference that he wants to put his finger on too. Is that fair? Yes. I mean, I think he thinks of them as being of a different kind, like between them. But they both exemplify something like what we’re talking about here, right? So there’s convergence, but there’s also significant difference. Okay. Can you play with that? Because I think if we play with that, we can get deeper into what is really being met by truth or subjectivity. Yeah. Is that fair? It is, it is. I’m like… So one of the tensions is that, so let’s go to this strange sort of public versus private thing, because I think that’s maybe a way in, right? Yeah, they both have a, both Socrates and Jesus are profoundly a tip-offs. And then for the Socrates, that points towards finite transcendence in a profound way. I think Hyland’s right about that. Yeah. But Socrates, sorry, my mistake. Kierkegaard sees in Christ a different way of being a tip-offs. So I see, I see Howland doing that constantly comparing. They’re both similar in being a tip-offs, but they’re both different in how they are a tip-offs. And it has to do with this difference with who. Well, let’s not forget that. I mean, for Kierkegaard, when he talks about Jesus Christ, he’s talking about the incarnation, right? They’re of completely different categories for him, right? They’re not just two exemplary teachers who happen to be a tip-offs before a crowd. Yes. They are of different orders of reality, right? Completely. Which is why he, one is, as we said, one is his teacher and he follows the other. Very much. But they both, but I think the, so both Socrates and Kierkegaard, Socrates maybe incidentally, because of the way that Plato immortalized him historically, Yep. And Kierkegaard because of the way he did it for himself, have some kind of public presence or persona that is, I think, negatively referential, meaning that the truth in Socrates and the truth in Kierkegaard insofar as their writings present them is absent. But by absent, I mean that whatever could objectively be said about either of them is ironic because what it does is it presents as error in some sense, right? So, like even right now, right? You know, you and I are talking about Socrates and Kierkegaard and I’m convinced that pretty well, I’ll speak for myself, not for you, but I’m convinced that pretty much everything I say about him is probably wrong. But helpfully so. And I don’t mind doing that. No, right, helpfully so. Okay, what does that mean for it to be helpfully so, right? What does that mean for it to be helpfully wrong? And I think that that gets back into the irony because to be helpfully wrong places the onus of accountability on the inwardness of the person who will have to take upon themselves the decision to relate to what is incomprehensible. And it is the relationship to what is incomprehensible or to the absurd that I think for Kierkegaard is the very, very turn, the reorientation that divests a person from the crowd and throws them back on their moorings. But it’s tricky because the same behavior when witnessed by a crowd can mean something very different when it’s weighed internally, right? So two people can make the same decision in terms of its worldly consequence. And those can be completely different decisions. In fact, one of them might not be a decision at all, depending on- It could just be an impulse. It could just be an impulse. It could be an exercise in social conformity. It could be an exercise in, I mean, you were talking about Kierkegaard as being someone who’s scorn for the crowd was almost self-important. Maybe it was, I don’t know. It could very well have been. I feel the scorn now. Like I feel it, it’s like I can almost feel it directed at what you and I are doing in this interesting way. Because for him, truth as subjectivity meant that when he had to account for himself and give account, that was something that could only be done in solitude before the absolute. But that being before a crowd, being before a crowd ironically helps to, I think, awaken that need for a subjective measure. And so being before a crowd and being active and playful, ironically before a crowd, had a role in opening up that sense of inward responsibility so that when you withdrew and retracted yourself from the public and found yourself once again back in the recesses of your private silence, everything that had been said and spoken or not spoken is still ringing. And it’s still preparatory for that silent confrontation. So I think there’s something about this playful, outward facing social exercise or game that is preparatory for the movement from a kind of objective focus, whereby the actual subject vanishes and evaporates because of its irrelevance and helps facilitate the movement and the reversal of responsibility back squarely into a person’s relationship before the good. And I think he understood, I think, that something about the public facing game and the theater and the drama, much like Socrates is with his interlocutors, was a preparation for a more ultimate silent confrontation with a more ultimate measure. And somehow using the crowd as a surrogate, as a playful preparatory surrogate for that more final confrontation was part of the game that facilitated that inward movement. That’s an approximation of it at least. Okay, so I wanna slow down because you’re saying a lot here that’s very provocative in a good way. So, and I almost interrupt you earlier, I apologize. It’s okay. Right? So both of them are not cynics in the philosophical sense. They’re not withdrawing from society, Socrates and Jesus, right? Although Jesus has a lot of the trappings of the cynic philosophers, yet he’s still going amongst the people kind of thing. And Socrates is the same way, right? And you’re saying that serious play is educating both of them so that they can come to a place where they can have a more direct calling, being called direct orientation, conforming, transforming orientation to the good. Okay. I think that’s right. And the contrast there is playing some important facilitary role. Is that what you’re arguing like that ability? Yeah, I think the contrast is, yeah. I think the contrast is a dialect, it’s playing a dialectical role. Okay. Yeah. Yeah, so, and then here’s again, and I see, and of course, Heidegger is deeply influenced by Kierkegaard and Heidegger’s critique of Das Maut, right? And how we, this is what everybody thinks. And because it precisely prevents us from thinking for ourselves and from ourselves and beyond ourselves, right? And that’s Heidegger’s point. And he’s a deep reader of Kierkegaard. I get that. But that only, that allows me to now deepen the question because yes, but also, and this is part of the Socratic project, we often best learn about ourselves through other people. Yep. And so there’s, I now feel a tension between I need to withdraw, right? And what I’m trying to feel is, are they both trying to get us to remember, I’ll just use this adjective, a Socratic relationship between people and displace Das Mann or the crowd relationship to people. Is that part of what’s going on? Yeah, I think it’s something, yeah, yeah. I mean, in terms of Kierkegaard biographically, there is a fair bit of withdrawal, especially toward the end. So, there is a, there is a- Yeah, permit. Yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely. But I think that there’s something, I think he has a, or I feel a very different attitude in him toward the crowd that takes on a kind of would-be objective consensus and fashions itself that way and between an intersubjective relationship with another solitary individual in whom there is also a personal relationship before the good. Is that the role Christ is taking for him? Like, is Christ the way he enters into the interpersonal relationship with the good? Yeah, I think so. I think so, I think it is. And I think for him, it is, well, I mean, because it’s the intercession of God into the historical, it has that mediating function theologically, right? And I think he understands it that way. I get the theology, I’m trying to get the phenomenology that’s going on for him. Yeah, so yeah, yeah, so I mean, we talked about this in one of our earlier dialogues, right? That it is his intersubjective personal relationship as a vow with Christ that facilitates the turn, right? That allows the relation to the good, right? And it’s because of the- Even empowers it. Yeah, and it’s the resonance of the suffering, right? Because you have in Christ a finger who suffers the conditions of existence as known by man, right, which is this hopelessly repressible finitude and this infinitizing sense of possibility. And the collapsing together of those into this suffering inwardness and the cry of that suffering is, I think for Kierkegaard, the way, right? It is the way of that orientation, it is the way of accounting, right? Like the way that you liked to define Logos as being accountable to and giving account of that when that suffering, once again, that suffering of existence pressurized and weighted upon the spirit in a way that cannot possibly be known by any objective measure, but is only known as the felt character of existence itself, that is most true and most facilitating of that metanoetic movement. And that’s why truth is subjectivity. Right, it brings us into who we sort of fundamentally- We are, right. And that’s the, I think that verges into the finite transcendence idea. You know that better than I do, but I think that’s probably what he’s getting at. But then this brings out both resonance and dissonance because I see the figure of Socrates, especially as presented in Plato, as calling us to always preserve the tonos of finite transcendence. If you only emphasize the transcendence, it’s hubris, because you’re not a god and you will never be a god. If you only emphasize the finitude, you are falling into the servitude or bestiality, and you’re losing, and you always have to hold them together. But for Plato, this is presented as, oh, I’m stumbling here, but this is presented as a positive and good thing. And yet, Krugogard 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. And yet in Socrates, it seems to be sitting there, harmoniously together. Yeah, yeah, I think that’s a fair contrast. Yeah, so what do we make of that? Yes. Yeah, I don’t know. I don’t know. I mean, I can tell you that personally, I can identify with the Riven suffering that is the tension that Krugogard describes a lot more than the equanimous version that Socrates exemplifies. I don’t know what to make of that. Maybe it’s just because Krugogard’s experience, to me, is a lot more legible, because I think the way most of us experience ourselves and experience the beginnings of that dialectical awareness that we are and are not ourselves, that we’re at quits with ourselves, at variance with ourselves, a kingdom divided, whatnot, then our experience of that is deeply, deeply painful. More like St. Paul and Augustine. Yeah. So, and this is giving me a way of understanding a little better Nietzsche’s critique of Socrates, because, and this goes to work, Ruchik’s book, Dan Chepi and I are reading it, The Tragedy of Reason, because tragedy is a way of suffering finite transcendence. Yes, as is comedy. Yeah, yes, yes, but, and of course, Socrates speaks a lot about tragedy in comedy. Yeah, he does. Which is really important, so he, right? So I think Nietzsche’s not being totally fair to Socrates, but the point is, I think you’re saying, for many people, this experience of enacting finite transcendence, so that we are decisively oriented towards the good, right, is experienced tragically or farcically, rather than… Equanimously? Yeah, the way Socrates presents it. I think so, I think so. I mean, maybe, you know, Kierkegaard, I think in some ways, maybe, is sort of the graduation of the Socratic consciousness, sorry, or the graduation of the Socratic consciousness, or the Socratic process through into the Christian consciousness, right? The consciousness of sin as being that sort of a fundamental suffering that life simply comes with, and without acknowledging it on its own terms, we’re not somehow acknowledging the character of our existence itself. Okay, so here’s, I think that’s right, and then here’s where this gets interesting and personal in a way that Kierkegaard would really like, right? Because I see the equanimity of Socrates about finite transcendence overlapping very significantly with Siddhartha, the Buddha. Yeah, yeah. Right, and so for me, that resonates with me very profoundly because of three decades of Buddhist practice and Taoist practice, right? And so there’s something, and I’m definitely not saying, okay, tell me which one is right, or something ridiculous like that. I’m trying to get at, like, there’s something about one’s philosophical home that you have sometimes, I might be reading into this, but you sometimes have said to me, I think ultimately the decisions people make about their metaphysical worldview are aesthetically driven. Yeah, I do think that. Right, and that’s not exact in this, but it’s close to it. It’s just this, like, depending on your ecology of practices. And your temperament. And your temperament. Your pace temperament. It might be, like, and I’m not trying to give a simplistic relativistic argument, right? It might be that the tragic Christian, or the equinemius, right, Socratic, may call to you more. See, for me. Yeah, I mean, if you have a melancholic personality, it’s gonna be different. Yeah, you know, and so for me, I mean, I was brought up and internalized a very sadistic super ego. And so I can get the Kierkegaardian thing. And I have actually found for that deep reason, and I try not to make an argument from this for other people, but I have found for myself, for that deep reason, more attractive to the Socratic ideal. Because returning to the suffering of that is often an invitation to be subjected once again to the lashings of the super ego. Right, right. And there’s elements of self-loathing. We’ve talked about this. There’s elements of self-loathing in Paul and Augustine. Right, that are. Yeah, we should stand back from and say, you shouldn’t generalize from that, right? Right, yeah, that’s interesting. Right, and so I’m trying to actually give you a Socratic or Kierkegaardian response to this problematic we’ve put up, which is- No, there’s something here, sorry. No, it’s okay, play it. So no, but there’s something that you’re getting at, which is that there’s this idiosyncratic orientation that has to be taken into account when we’re making this kind of move, right? Because each of us, right, it’s like, there is a necessity, a necessity born of temperament and personality, a necessity born of physical aptitudes, a necessity born of intelligence, a necessity born of the early experiences that we can’t do away with no matter how we wish them away. We come baked with, we come worn and weathered and disrupted, we already come disrupted, we’re already in error in the sense that we are, we don’t have, we have this access to the infinite that is fettered by all of the finitude that is composed of these many, many, many, many, many sort of these many circumscriptions, right? And it is sort of, it’s when those, all of those circumscriptions marry to that infinite sense of possibility. It’s when they are wedded together. Doth, yeah. Yeah, it’s an erotic movement. It’s an inwardly erotic movement, I think. And that’s again why marriage, weddedness, being bound to the religio. Betrothed. Betrothed, it’s like a weddedness to yourself. And I think the weddedness to yourself that happens when there’s this impregnation of these necessary finite enclosures by the sense of open-ended possibility that comes in your relation before the good, that is the movement from the aesthetic to the ethical. And it turns on an either or. It turns on the making of decision. And the making of decision is something like a sacrament of weddedness to yourself that binds you to what is finite without losing the infinitizing influences of the aesthetic. I don’t think it’s simply that the aesthetic, the poetic, the artistic, the imaginary, all of that is somehow dispelled. No, no, no, no. It’s simply subordinated and integrated. It’s something like that, right? So taking account of yourself and all of your idiosyncratic errors, and we’re going to talk about that later, I think, when we talk about confession. Because I think confession and repentance for him. Well, that’s the direct connection to Augustine. Exactly, exactly, right? Because confession and repentance for him is, I think, exactly the process of the gathering oneself together to make oneself receptive to be known by the measure that exceeds you, which is receptive to the forgiveness and love of God. That’s the, yes, I think this is right. And there is joy to it. It’s not all. Right, right, right. It is that particular set of moves and experiencing the call within that moves of orientation of agape that is the particularly Christian dimension. Yes, totally. And the transmutation, I mean, you’ve been making for years this beautiful argument about the transmutation of eros into agape. And I think that’s very much what he’s talking about. Because Kierkegaard talks about the lover that the disposition of the lover is essential to all of this. But he also says, but when that love finds its object, or indeed its subject, in any other love that is not the good, it is double-minded, and it is despairing and not singular. Now, maybe we don’t like him saying that. But I think for him, that brings us back to Regina, right? Yeah. And perhaps why, or at least when he retroactively took account of his decision, I think that’s kind of how he framed it to himself, that the intersubjective love, the eros that he felt to her had been displaced from its proper subject before the good. And you know. Well, I have a proposal then. Go. If we want to create a way that is then therefore shareable, it would be something like an integration of the neoplatonic, the Christian, and perhaps Zen, because it integrates Zen, and Taoism, and Buddhism. It would be something like Zen neoplatonism. Because that would not, and deliberately not, any kind of reductive amalgamation. But no, let’s have them in this dynamic tension, so that many people can find home. But we all recognize that what is needed is this multidimensional opponent processing between all of these, because of the fact that we are resonating with two things simultaneously that can’t be resolved, which is this truth and subjectivity, but that we also are intersubjectively sharing it. As Stephen Batcha really put it very well, we are alone with others. Alone with others. I think that, yeah. And that you face this problem that if you just do the aloneness, you become terrifically parochial. And then if you just try to be objective, you become disengaged from the transformative call. And he was trying to get at, he uses a Heideggerian interpretation of Buddhism, which is to my point, he’s using this Heideggerian interpretation of Buddhism to try and get us how we can reasonably undertake, how we can be called. It accounts for our throneness. Right. It accounts for, you could appreciate Socrates, but you are called to Christ. And I can appreciate Christ, but I’m called to Socrates, because I’m also called by the Buddha. But you’re also called by, right. And we’re trying to find how can we make it such that we’re neither doing, neither pronouncing and ignoring the truth of subjectivity, nor are we ignoring the fact that we are dialogically true and by each other. Yeah. Right? Yeah. Yeah. And so try to create a dialogical ecology of practices, something like I’m just, I’m playful. I’m being playful. Zen neoplatonism, where you’ve got like. Yeah, yeah. As long as it can be taken upon, like, yeah. I think that’s true. I mean, I don’t know if he would agree. But when I hear that, I experience both, like you, I experience the need for both of those dimensions. I do think, though, like the part of his voice at the back of my head that is sort of looking warily at this says, like, the ecology of practices, the minute it threatens to become a systematic enterprise. That’s exactly not what I’m talking about. I know you’re not. I know you’re not. But I also want to make it clear for people who are starting to digest these ideas. And because it’s going to happen. People are going to look at the idea of ecologies of practice and they’re going to think of it as a system, right? Like a circuit that they have to walk through and a formula or an algorithmic way. It’s like if you do x, y, and z, and if I have this practice and this practice and this practice and I add them all up, they amount to enlightenment. And that kind of systematicity is exactly the kind of Hegelian thinking that he was so vehement against. Because for him, it’s like if this does not take in the soil of your subjective life, if it does not catch, if it does not light, if it cannot be true for you, it will fail. It will mean nothing to you, right? It will mean absolutely nothing. But here’s the thing I’m saying. Subjectivity is not static and it is not singular. We are multiple within and we are constant. Like there are moments, and I don’t mean this in some sort of wanton impulsive sense, but there’s moments when the tragedy of the logos calls me. But there’s moments when the equanimity of the logos also properly call me. And I feel, and I think this is the right word for Kierkegaard, I feel a loyalty, a deep loyalty. I feel a loyalty to Spinoza, Socrates, and Siddhartha. And I cannot be disloyal to any of them. And that’s what I’m trying to articulate. And I think for many people, I mean, you’re my dear friend, so I have the great privilege of getting some insight into the splendor of your soul. And there is, you, I know this, I think I know this. You are like that too. You are multitudinous within. Oh, totally. And therefore, you also, there are moments when the tragedy of the logos, yes, and the equanimity. And it’s like, sometimes I feel at variance with myself. I think that’s part of the tension. It’s part of the tension I feel when trying to collage together, not haphazardly collage. But when I like, when collaging together these different aspectualizations of what it means to be in relation to the good and what that relationship means and what populates it, what fertilizes it, because I agree with you. Like I have this experience when we’re doing this where the intersubjective penetration, where I discover things in the throes of this process because of the contact with others that there’s not in my wildest dreams what I have been able to produce in solitude. Exactly. And yet I also find that the reverse is true. Absolutely. That can only be realized in solitude. Right, and the dialectic between those for me is where the value is. And I think the understanding that ironically is helpful because you know that so much of what we do together only comes into relief when I take it back into the recesses of that solitude and suddenly it- And vice versa though too. And vice versa too, right? Like I’ll have, there will be nascent ideas or things that have been unrealized that will become realized in the throes of these processes because it’s an intersubjective process. It’s not appealing to objective authority. It is the awakening of the subjectivity and its accountability and its responsibility in real time between us as two subjects, right? That is what happens. And I can’t in my heart find that to be a contradiction with a Kierkegaardian spirit. He might think, he might tell me it is. I don’t know. It’s like at some point it doesn’t matter. What matters is the experience I have when I encounter this and when we encounter it together. It’s far more real to me than when I encounter the propositions. And yet I think that’s the point anyway. Am I faithful to the spirit or to the letter, right? From whence does the decision come? Not what the decision is. Right now, like I worry about us because I think that we are so caught up in what you’ve called quite aptly, the propositional tyranny. Who’s the us? The us meaning, I don’t know, us, our culture. Every, I mean, this moment. I don’t know. I don’t know how to. I wondered if you meant you and I. No, no, no, I don’t mean you and I. I don’t mean you and I, although I suppose you and I can’t exempt ourselves from it either despite our best intentions. But the thing about Kierkegaard that I feel, I can’t be loyal to every letter of what he says. That would be impossible anyway because he’s so multi-vocal. And despite the sort of spiritual consistency, it’s so interesting. But if there’s one thing that I feel is most exigent and needful that places him as, that puts him in the position of being able to be a proper successor to the Socratic tradition is the idea that, that sacramental turn, the process of making decision authentically is infinitely more real and interested in the good than whatever its worldly consequence would look like visibly upon the face of a person whom you did not know and whose soul you could not read. And we presume upon each other based on the decisions that we make. We just went through something like this collectively with COVID. It’s like talking about this is like trying to step around landmines, but I feel it’s important. Can I read something quickly? Sure. It’s one of his, it’s another one of his- What book are you reading from? Sorry, this is concluding on scientific postscript. Johannes Klimakis, who describes himself as a humorist. He’s also in the fragments. He’s also in the fragments. Where there’s this terrific wrestling about the relationship between Socrates and Christ. That’s right. He might be Kierkegaard’s most sort of prolific and important pseudonym. Yeah. And it’s weird because the actual Klimakis was this neoplatonic aesthetic, fierce, fierce aesthetic. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s right. The ladder of paradise, right? Just, I think- Johannes Klimakis? The ladder of ascent. The ladder of ascent, I’m sorry. Um, this comes right at the end of the book. It is said to have chanced in England, oh, why it’s always England, that a man was attacked on the highway by a robber who had made himself unrecognizable by wearing a big wig. He falls upon the traveler, seizes him by the throat and shouts, your purse. He gets the purse and keeps it, but the wig he throws away. A poor man comes along the same road, puts it on, and arrives at the next town where the traveler had already denounced the crime. He is arrested, this poor man who picked up the wig. He is arrested, recognized by the traveler who takes his oath that he is the man. By chance, the robber, the real robber, is present in the courtroom, sees the misunderstanding, turns to the judge and says, it seems to me that the traveler has regard rather to the wig than to the man. And he asks permission to make a trial. He puts on the wig, seizes the traveler by the throat, crying, your purse. And the traveler recognizes the robber, the robber and offers to swear to it. The only trouble is that already he has taken an oath. So it is in one way or another, with every man who has a what and is not attentive to the how. He swears, he takes an oath, he runs errands, he ventures life and blood, he is executed, all on account of the wig. Right. We become very preoccupied, I think. I mean, when we talk about the ethical, the ethical I think is a really hard concept to understand when talking about Kierkegaard. Like last time we were talking about this, I think I sort of characterized it as being the measure, the normativity as determined by sort of worldly and universal norms and standards. And I think that is one way he talks about it. And it’s supplanted eventually by the religious. And I think that is one way of talking about it. But he has these different ways of talking about the ethical because that version of the ethical I think verges much more on the aesthetic, which is sort of conformity to the crowd, that feeling of the necessity that lacks possibility, right? What would later be called bad faith in the existential tradition. Right. And then there’s this other kind of the ethical he talks about, which is that inward movement of the dialectic, which is the taking upon oneself in decision that recognizes one’s finitude and chooses it paradoxically as though you could will what already shall be, love your fate. Yeah. And that turns on a decision, an either or, whereby you might be this or that. And aesthetic and ethical is such an either or. And that either or seems to be, as far as I can tell, determined by a decision that becomes a kind of symbolic host to that sacrament. One either or in the world kind of becomes a symbolic proxy for the either or between the aesthetic and the ethical. And that the movement from one to the other is a movement made in the process of decision. And decisions are weighted differently inside of us, between us, right? One decision means nothing to you, but means the world to me. Relevance realization, right? Deeply relevant to you, it’s irrelevant to me. For you, everything turns on this decision. For me, it doesn’t present itself that way. It doesn’t seem full-cruel at all. It seems incidental. We just went through something together in which there was a decision that people had to make, that for some people was a completely incidental decision and that had no existential bearing. And for other people, that decision, that either or, seemed to carry the weight of either or that determined whether they would live aesthetically, that is to say, give up and deny their freedom to the crowd or to the imaginary, or whether they would espouse their capacity to be accountable and take upon themselves the responsibility for decision-making itself. That decision was vaccination, right? I’ve never seen something that just severed relationships that way, it was incredible. Like it would have been- And the point you’re making is this is independent of the sort of scientific fact- Completely, this is concluding unscientific postscript. Right, right. I’m not talking, and I’m not talking about whether consequentially one decision was good or bad. My point is that that’s not- The how. The how of decision for Kierkegaard. And this is the part of his thinking that I think is most important right now and most Socratic. The how of decision, how we come to it, what it means inwardly to us, what it means in relation to the good that can be known in the recesses of our solitude. It is the how of the decision that determines its integrity and its goodness, not the letter of the decision as presentable to before the crowd and not the consequence that arises from it. We don’t know the consequence that arises from one decision or another, but we do know how it is weighted upon oneself and whether it is made in responsibility. Well, I wanna put the two together. Even if we know the consequences, we may weight the consequences differently. So I’m thinking here that some people, when they made this decision, it was just a decision about their health and that is a subservient goal to other things in their life. And for other people, and this is Hans critique, health has been elevated to the status of a religious icon or a sacredness. And for many people, they found that, religious people, they found that idolatry intolerable. And they weren’t saying that people shouldn’t be saved from disease. Who would wanna pronounce that? Indeed. And I also wanna say, there were lots of people that were rejecting the vaccine for insane, irrational, conspirituality. Complete experience. Yeah, complete, and that’s irrational. Totally, totally. And that’s not negligible. There was a significant part. Conspirituality exploded, right? Yeah. But I’m trying to zero in on it. Every kind of person made every kind of decision. Exactly. Let’s put it that way, right? Yes, yes, but what I’m trying to get at is, right, the person who takes it, decides to take the vaccine because health is an instrumental good, because it helps them undertake the other things that point them towards their ultimate concern. And the person who takes the vaccine because health is their ultimate concern. And in Tillich’s sense, an idol, and in Hans’ sense, it is actually severing us. Yeah. The how of that. They’re doing exactly the same thing. With exactly, if I can put it this way, the same scientific consequences. Same way. Yes, right, but the how is fundamentally different. One person is taking the vaccine as the way you eat food, and another person is taking the vaccine the way they were, I’m not religious, but I’m going to the gym every day for two hours because I’ve got to have this body because only then will I realize what a god is, and that is the only god that can possibly be. And we laugh, and yet it is, Hans is right, it is a religion in our culture. And I remember Jonathan trying to say, well, maybe I’m willing to sacrifice some of my health in order so because. In order to preserve my religiosity. And we now even have doctors saying, the sort of single mindedness of survival, we weren’t paying attention to all the praying problem, we weren’t paying attention to all the side effects. Like I said, we’re going to get huge spirituality, we’re going to have a tsunami, a tsunami mental health crisis, which we’re now having. People weren’t getting, like there was all, and they’re now, and these are even, and I mean this seriously, these are doctors saying, next time we do this, let’s put all of these things on the table and do a much more sophisticated computation about our policy. Am I, am I? I think this resonates a lot. It’s a really good point. I appreciate you bringing the Han in a lot because I think, I think, you know, and you make a good point, like it’s important to say, to me it’s like, I might put it this way, and this is just sort of taking everything you’ve said and just putting it back into the Kierkegaardian language, which is to say that, how ethical the decision was on the part of each individual who made it, I think depended not on the decision made, but whether or not it was actually made from within an ethical sphere of consciousness. Yes, I agree. And I think a lot of people who made both, who fell on both sides of that either or, did it from within an aesthetic sphere of consciousness. I totally agree, both sides, both sides. And in those cases, those, I think, for Kierkegaard or for my understanding of him, weren’t decisions at all. No, no they weren’t. So in other words, what made a decision the right decision is whether or not it was a decision, right? That’s the point. That’s why it’s a formal good. That’s why truth is subjectivity. That’s what it means, is the how is more important, right? So people made, so tons of people got vaccinated because it would make life smoother, smooth, easier. I can, I won’t have things deprived, I won’t be deprived of things. I’ll get to go out in the world, I’ll get to go to a bar and have a drink. God, thank goodness, right? Mia culpa, by the way, you know? I’ll, you know, I won’t have to, I’ll have minimal interference and minimal suffering in my life. A lot of people made it for that reason. Conversely, a lot of people decided, right, to, I want to make it so that I preserve possibility, preserve possibility. And a lot of people made the decision not to get vaccinated, I think, out of a lot of self-importance. There was, I think, a fair bit of narcissism for some people. I’m opting out. I’m not a part of this. I don’t participate. I’m too important for this, right? I don’t participate in what the crowd does. Whatever it does, I do the opposite, which is the same bloody thing. Right. It’s still in reference to the crowd. So some went along to get along and abdicated their sense of personal responsibility and so doing, and some people did exactly the opposite, but equally, I think, surrendered their freedom to the impulse to stand apart, not to participate, simply because participation itself would disrupt this imaginary sense of exceptionalism that they held so dear to their identity. And I think both sides, both verge, I think those are the same, or lack thereof, the same indecision on both, in both cases. The thing that made the ethical person different is that that either or was weighted differently upon her soul. So, and what you just said about Han, I think had a lot to do with it. There are some people, and I know some of these people, they’re very dear to me, and it was astonishing. It was so hard to see them be so uncomprehended by people who could only see the letter of the decision and not the how of it. But I think some people watched this religious fervor unfolding, whereby the crowd was charged with this sense, this purity code, and looked at that and said, I don’t know whether getting vaccinated is right or wrong, but the decision over whether or not to get vaccinated has now become a decision over where the locus of accountability lies in my religious orientation to the good itself. And by choosing not to, what I’m asserting to my own self and my own soul is that the seat of my responsibility, the seat of what is ethical is directed to a measure that has to exceed the evaluation of the crowd. And I will not do it simply for the sake of conforming to a good that isn’t an ultimate good, whether or not the decision happens to be right consequentially. That is a very hard thing to understand. And a lot of people found it very hard to explain it. Even people, I think, and I’m not saying everyone. I’m not saying- There was mixed vocabulary around it. Yeah, because we don’t have the vocabulary to be able to describe the shape of a decision inside of a person and what it means symbolically. And so people couldn’t account for it. We got a lot of name calling going on from both sides. From both sides. And so people couldn’t account for what a decision meant to them. And because of that, and also, you know, when someone, I think, there was an implicit challenge, normative challenge, even a challenge to someone’s ontology, because I think some people became so offended or so disrupted by the suggestion that their own decision hadn’t been. I mean, some people, I think, were actually wary of contagion. But I think some people were wary of a more philosophical kind of contagion or a more ethical kind of contagion. I think a lot of people were so deeply disrupted by the presence of someone who had taken upon himself a confrontational sense of responsibility that they couldn’t bear the thought that their decision hadn’t been a decision at all. Right, there was a response to the difficulty that they were causing. Yeah, they caused, as Kierkegaard does, and as Socrates did- They were asking us to rethink. They were asking us to make things, they were making things difficult for us. They were making things difficult. And so they were met with ridicule, with ostracization, and with rejection, just like these guys were. They were also classically met with horror because they were properly intercategorical between these two extremes that were claiming to be the full and accurate and complete truth. Totality. Yeah, the totality as opposed to the infinity to use Levinas. That’s right. That’s a really good point. The totality versus the movement, versus the bonocentric movement, as Schindler said, right? The movement from the part to the whole, which is not totalizing. That’s right, which brings up the leaps we’re gonna talk about in the next episode. But just to also foreshadow that. So, Svanovic, I can’t remember right now where it’s in some of my other lectures. He talks about the fundamental movement that drives irrationality is to, and then Schindler picks up on this with mythology, is to only care about the products of your cognition and have no concern for the process of your cognition. And that is the fundamental shift that makes one irrational. And so there’s something also about paying attention to the inwardness of reason that is essential to reason, that has been being missed by the mythologist, the haters of the logos, who want to get to the bottom line and get everybody in line and get X accomplished because we know what the good is. And there’s something terrifically anti-socratic about somebody who is so easily and in a totalizing fashion pronounces what the good is. So convinced. So convinced, right? And then that brings us to again, what is the relationship between this leap, and I’m gonna retranslate it because it is the leap into faith, the leap into reason and the leap into love. And that’s what we’ll pick up on the next episode. So thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you everyone for your time and attention. Repentance also is the realized promise of renewal. Exactly, exactly. And for that to be true, there has to be belief in renewal, even if it’s just a proleptic belief. Yes, yes. Right? Has to be some, right? Like the reason that precedes reason, right? The insight that can’t be captured by the inferential thinking, right? Exactly.