https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=erxLwlk6RCQ
reducing, going through the labor pains of giving birth to yourself. That is to be on the horizon of wonder. It is to be in a place in which you are calling yourself and your world into question so a new self in a new world can deeply be born. Welcome back to episode 2 of After Socrates. Last time we looked at four ways we are after the way of Socrates and we also reviewed the basic format of the series. Now let’s continue being after Socrates. Right now at the beginning as we orient ourselves to find our way let’s follow Socrates and in order to follow Socrates we have to understand how he understood himself and this is going to be perplexing. Socrates self-knowledge. He found himself and frequently described himself as atypos, not belonging to any particular category, like our word atypical but deeper, more powerful. He explicitly refers to himself sometimes and Plato has other characters refer to him in terms of monsters as monstrous. He’s like a satyr, he’s like a stingray. He compares himself to a titan, many different kinds of monsters. This is a recurring thing across many of the dialogues. Famously he describes himself as metaxu as fundamentally in between in between the human and the divine. I’m going to come back to that because Socrates never thinks that he becomes anything other than a human being. So he says we, like him, at least he’s challenging us to realize that we, like him, are somehow in between human finitude and the transcendence of the divine. Drew Hyland, excellent book and we’ll come back to it, talks about finitude and transcendence in the Platonic dialogues. Socrates does something really interesting when he says that he’s metaxu. He says so is Eros. Eros isn’t a human but it’s a transhuman force. It’s not a god. Eros is a daemon, D-A-E-M-O-N, not a demon but a daemon, a being that is between and therefore mediates and unites the human and the divine. Just think about it. Isn’t there something really insightful in that about love? So Socrates, he understands himself as fundamentally liminal. He’s within and without. He sort of fits our categories but he doesn’t. He’s monstrous. The monster takes the normal categories and distorts them in a way that is startling and challenging and disruptive. Somehow Socrates transcends our normal framing in a way that is challenging and even at times threatening. How is Socrates within and without? How is he liminal? How is he monstrous in a way that’s constantly challenging and threatening to us but nevertheless beneficial to us? And how does he do this while never claiming to be anything other than a mortal? A mortal, doomed to die human being. So Socrates enters into these intensive, in terms of how he’s involved with people, but extensive in terms of how much scope they take in, how much they zoom in and zoom out. Probative conversations with people. And in these conversations, questioning, not just questions, questioning. It’s even better perhaps to hear a related word to questioning. Questing. Questioning plays a central part rather than concluding. These exploratory dialogues are often centered on what is virtue? What is wisdom? Related things? What is knowledge? What is goodness? What is real? And these are questions and this is the importance. These are questions we cannot ignore. This is why we cannot ignore Socrates. We can’t ignore these questions. We can pretend to ignore them, but then we’re just giving answers to these questions given to us implicitly, unconsciously, automatically and we reactively acting them out rather than acting on principle. Yet these dialogues frequently and frustratingly end profoundly inconclusively. Everybody including, really hear that, including Socrates. They’ve been talking about courage. At the end of it, everybody says, I don’t know what courage is, including Socrates. Socrates claims to have achieved human wisdom in that he, by practicing this kind of dialogue, has come to know that he does not know. And we go, what? That’s it? We’re all ignorant. I know. There’s tons I don’t know. Well, how is this? What’s going on? Well, Socrates doesn’t mean that generic belief. He means an existentially in the situation specific realization in both senses of the word. It’s a palpable reality and one is coming to a deep understanding awareness of how one is ignorant in this situation in a way that matters because one has been pretending deeply, unconsciously, automatically reactive to know, know both the situation and know oneself relevant to and relative to that situation. This is a profound kind of realization. It requires disciplined mindfulness. He has cultivated, and this is going to become an important phrase, he has learned, learned ignorance. In fact, when I say learned ignorance, I want you to hear both pronunciations, learned and learned. He has learned ignorance. He has become aware of his ignorance in a way that makes a huge difference to specific actual concrete situations. So let’s explore the dynamics of this a little bit better. So we have on one pole, we have conversation. Socrates is engaging in a conversation. I want you to start to get a feel for this. I want you to think of those conversations you’ve been in where you’re asking each other questions and you’re not giving sort of pat answers. You’re really opening up. The person’s opening up and you’re opening up. You’re reciprocally opening and the conversation starts to take on a life of its own. And it’s not wandering aimlessly, it’s wandering fruitfully. And you both find you’re getting to places and having insights, realizations that you couldn’t have had on your own. When the conversation comes to an end, you say, that was one of the greatest moments of my life. Socrates is like that. He talks about it. You may not get that sense when you’re reading the dialogues because it seems like there’s a lot of conflict and argumentation. But Socrates says, in more than one place, but in one space specifically, he says, I’m willing to follow the logos, dia logos. And we’re going to come back to what is this logos he’s talking about. But he’s willing to follow the logos wherever it goes, like the wind. Isn’t that amazing? The wind. Because it seems to have a life of its own, but the wind, spiritus, wind, inspiration, aspiration, spirituality. When Jesus is talking to Nicodemus and telling him he has to be born again, he talks about the wind is like the spirit is like the wind. It comes and goes as it would. And you don’t know where it’s coming from. And you don’t know where it’s going to. But you can get caught up in it and follow it and breathe it and been inspired to aspire by it. That’s one pole. It’s important to realize that Socrates is being just as surprised by the way the conversation, the dialogue is going. He’s just as much surprised by the dia, by way of, by means of logos, the dia logos as anyone else participating. And you’ll see how much he comes to deeply value this. He’s not experiencing this just as a rough, you know, back and forth adversarial thing. There’s a deeper thing going on. And you’ll see this in what he says about this practice. Now this is one pole. The other pole is this learned ignorance. You say, what’s like, why is that valuable? Well, think about it. What the dia logos is doing is it’s taking you to the horizon of wonder. So curiosity is when I don’t know something, I need that information, there’s a gap in my knowledge. Hey, look, this fills it. And now I’m done. I have what I need. It’s very much as Fromm would say, in the having mode. Wonder, at least the way Fuller and others argue about it, wonder is the being mode. You come to the horizon. Now think about the horizon. You can actually never reach it, but there’s a horizon. And when you look at the horizon, you have a sense of what is within your understanding, but how it is on the cusp of what is beyond your understanding. The horizon of wonder. Socrates famously said that wisdom begins in wonder. Why? What’s going on? In wonder, you’re not filling the hole. You’re opening it up to the horizon. You are calling yourself and the way you have framed the world into question. But in a way you feel called to in a way that is somehow beautiful to you, that is drawing from you. This is the word for to draw forth is educe. This is where we get the word education from. But think of it, it’s a different kind of education. This isn’t here’s the knowledge you need. And so you can service the workplace and the market until you die and otherwise meaningless death. They don’t mean education like that. You mean educing, going through the labor pains of giving birth to yourself. That is to be on the horizon of wonder. It is to be in a place in which you are calling yourself and your world into question, so a new self in a new world can deeply be born. That is what’s going on in this process. So notice there’s a discipline. What does the word discipline mean? It means to follow. It means to track. It means to follow and track so that you are transformed by that following. There is a discipline to following the logos, dia logos. Letting it call you into question, letting it call your world into question so that you and the person you’re in dialogue with are giving birth to yourselves. Mutual midwiving. Socrates was clear that he was not only examining others and helping them give birth to themselves. He repeatedly emphasized it was reciprocal. He was also examining himself and giving birth to himself. They were mutually interwoven. This is a discipline of following the logos that allows us this mutual midwifing, allows the logos to take on a life of its own and thereby transform the way we are living. Socrates and it’s often talked about using this practice called unlink us, this questioning and answering and probative. As we’ll see the unlink us slowly in the hands of Plato becomes dialectic. This disciplined following of the logos, this mutual midwifing and affording of the logos to take on a life transforming life of its own. So we’ve got a discipline. So there are a set of practices. Let’s call those with Plato dialectic. This is not Hegel’s dialectic. This is a way of structuring dialogue in a disciplined manner so that it will take on the features of the logos. There’s a practice, there’s something we can do dialectic. It’s doing this mutual midwifing and affording the presencing of the living logos. That practice can result in a process that we do not make. It’s a process between us and between us and the world, the texu. And it’s like eros, it’s like love, especially in the platonic sense. You don’t make love. Well, we do say you make love. But what I mean by that, let’s think of it as analogous. Well, it’s a kind of love itself too. In fact, it’s a kind of platonic eros. We call it platonic love. Friendship, profound friendship. You can’t just make somebody your friend. You can’t say, you’re my friend now. That’s it. I’ve decided it. I make it so. That’s in fact, that’s going to go nowhere. In fact, it’s probably going to have the opposite result. You can’t just sort of passively wait around. Someday a friend will come. Somebody will come up to me and say, I’m your friend. Probably not. That’s why we use metaphors of like falling in love, growing in love. We participate in it. So there’s a practice we can do. We can discipline ourselves to follow the logos, to mutually midwife, to afford the logos taking on a life of its own. That’s dialectic. But the process of the logos is not something we do. It is something we participate in profoundly, the way we participate in love, friendship. It is between us and between the world. The practice of dialectic, the process of dialogos. That’s why Fowler put in both dialogos and dialectic in the classical tradition. But there’s also a state. Here’s the dialogos and learned ignorance. And they’re mutually affording each other. The dialogos gets us to the horizon of wonder. And that opens us up and makes it possible for us to reciprocally open with each other and reciprocally open with the world. And then that affords the dialogos. And the dialogos affords learned ignorance and we cycle the practice of dialectic, the process of dialogos, and the paradoxical state of learned ignorance. But is not all of this problematic, you should say to me, you should say, this looks like a lot of knowledge, a lot of learning, and Socrates is claiming that all he knows is that he does not know. That’s actually not accurate. Many people put that. All that Socrates ever said is that he knows that he knows. No, no, Socrates doesn’t say that. He said that’s what his wisdom consists in. Socrates actually claims to know a bunch of things. So first of all, we have to modify it. But then we’ll come back to your point because you are making a good point in posing that problem. What does Socrates claim to know? Well, he famously claims to know ta erotica. He knew he knows about the erotic things. That doesn’t mean he’s really good in bed or he just knows about sex. He’s talking about eros in a much more comprehensive sense, about how we seek to bind ourselves to things. And this seems inherent to us. We seem by nature to be looking for things other than ourselves to complete us. And notice how that gets us into self-transcendence. I’m looking for something that’s other than me to become me so that I am more than me but completed as me. And so when you think about this, you start to go, oh, how does that make sense? Hold on to that vertigo. We’re going to come back to it. Socrates knows how to track eros. Do you? Well, I know what it’s like. Yeah, I know you know what it’s like to feel eros. I do too. But can you feel eros in a way so that you don’t do all the self-deceptive, self-destructive things you’ve done because of that feeling? Because when you track, you’re following, but you’re also able to know and see where something is going to go. When you’re tracking a storm and following it, you’re trying to predict where it’s going to go so you can avoid being overwhelmed by it. Socrates knows how to track eros. He knows how to follow the trail of signs. He knows how to properly apprehend and appreciate the significance of eros. He knows what to care about. He would do this provocatively. As I already said, he would go into people and say, why are you spending so much time on your hair and your clothing and how you smell? It’s a little time on your psyche. It’s a little time on your mind and your soul and your character. You go, yeah, why am I? Socrates would walk into the marketplace and say, look at all the things I don’t need. You go, oh, right. Why don’t I do that? That’s the Socratic question. It’s a question about Socrates that reverberates back and becomes a question, a wondering about yourself and the world that you live in. So Socrates knows ta erotica. How can we know this? How can we do this in practice? How can we realize it in practice? We will come back to this. Socrates also, and he states it very confidently, he knows the difference between belief or opinion and knowledge. He knows it. Now, how can he know this when he claims to know that he doesn’t know anything? He actually claims to know a lot of things. He knows how to do geometry, read the mino. He’ll often say he knows how this practice works, how this art, or actually more specifically, more technically, how this techne, how this particular kind of expertise works. So what Socrates means is he knows how to track, he knows how to follow, he knows how to quest after knowledge in a way that’s not just haphazard. That doesn’t mean he’s got there. He’s got it. He’s got it. He’s got it. He’s got it. He’s got it. He’s got it. He’s got it. So he’s sort of haphazard. That doesn’t mean he’s got there, that he knows what virtue is in the sense the way you know by being. He certainly doesn’t claim to have wisdom. to be completely ignorant of it. He claims to be a lover of wisdom. There’s the connection to love, except this time it’s not eros and this is important, it’s phylia. It’s the kind of love between friends or even more importantly fellowship, people working in concert together. He knows how to work with people in order to be properly oriented towards wisdom. When you really love your friend, when you really love your romantic partner, have you got them? I figured you out. We’re done. I don’t need to learn it. I got it. We’re finished. I’ve got the perfect framing for you that holds you perfectly in place, reveals everything that there is possibly to know about. I’ve got you. Yep. I say to you, in fact, if you say that, that’s a strong predictor that your relationship is actually over. What do you actually… You have a faithfulness to this person. You know how to follow them, to track them. They’re going to change and you know how to adapt. You don’t know where they’re going. You don’t know what kind of changes you’re going to go through, how you’re going to dance with them. But you keep teaching each other how to follow each other. The person, although you have a continuity of contact and you’re loving them and they’re opening up to you and you’re opening up to them, reciprocal opening, there’s always that which exceeds. It’s funny, you can meet people. We’ve been together for a very long time and this has probably happened to you. A friend’s come up to you and said, you know, I’ve been with her for like 10 years and then wow, I just like, she did it and wow, totally caught me by surprise. I just… because you have to remember learned ignorance. How much you really don’t know because of how really dynamically complex another person is. And wisdom and virtue are excellences of persons and you can never fully know a person. How could you possibly fully know the excellence of personhood? But you can love it the way you love a particular person. Think of the connection between able to really wonder, not in the sense we sometimes overlap with anxiety, but wonder about your friend or your partner, to be amazed by them. I’m very fortunate to have a romantic relationship with to have a romantic partner that she’s one of the best people I’ve met in my life and she constantly exceeds and this is something I have to keep remembering, relearning. Sati, mindfulness, means to remember, not in the sense of just recalling, but reminding yourself, bringing that memory into action. Mindfulness, I have to constantly remember, remind myself that she exceeds all of my personal experience, all of my professional expertise and she does this so regularly and yes, so beautifully. I have profound friends, you’re going to meet one of them, Christopher Mastropietro, same thing within friendship. Wonder, love, the cultivation of wisdom, deep continuity of growing contact, they’re all bound together in learned ignorance. Socrates also claims to know two really deep and fundamental things. He famously, in his defense at his trial, knows that the unexamined life is not worth living. He knows this with such confidence that he is willing to die for it. No propositional argument could convince you of that, but somebody with such powerful presence as Socrates was willing to die for it. That’s at least challenging. He claims a life without dialectic into diologos, affording learned ignorance is not worth living. Is Socrates as ignorant as we thought? When we just thought, oh he just doesn’t know that he knows, he’s just, I know that I don’t know, I’m skeptical of a lot of things, I’m cynical, I live in modernity, blah blah blah, post-modernity. No, no, no, this is a not knowing that at the same time gives him the confidence to die as he’s telling you and I, because I’m feeling it too. The unexamined life is not worth living. And what do you do with that? Think about it. You’re just sort of like, because I’m sure my life is pretty unexamined, I don’t have that self-knowledge, my life’s not worth living. Seems, yeah, sometimes I wake up at 3 a.m. and he’s sort of right. I don’t want to think about that. He’s saying that. And then relatedly, he’s saying that doing this dialectic into diologos and cultivating this learned ignorance, this wonderful, wonder-filled learned ignorance, is the best activity that human beings can engage in. It’s the best kind of life. But how? How could a practice that is so frequently frustrating, it does not produce conclusions, it does not produce clear answers, it does not give us resolution in the sense of completion and finality. How could that be worth dying for? It sounds like an utter waste of time at best and endlessly annoying and frustrating and undermining of all of our projects. How could that be? How could that be? Savor that question, because I’ve actually returned to the question you asked a few minutes ago, and I’ve made it deeper on your behalf. By the way, that’s me exemplifying Socrates, taking your question and making it deeper on your behalf. Take that question in, savor it, let it roll around in your mind. Try to feel into its monstrous challenge. Think about how it challenges all of our assumptions, how it crashes into so many of our presuppositions about success and purpose and achieving your goals and completion, consummation, conclusion, and how all of these are so central to a good life. That question about Socrates just smashes into all of that, monstrously. How could this Socratic proposal possibly be true in any way? In fact, in any way that we could actually realize in regular practice. But the problematic around Socrates, the way he’s liminal, atypos, monstrous, is even deeper. Socrates clearly and repeatedly argues for three things. Number one, the best life is a life of virtue. First of all, really how? It’s a provocative statement, and therefore claiming to know this is, again, really important. Socrates claims to know that the life of virtue is the best kind of life. He claims to know that virtue depends on knowledge. Sometimes some people have rendered that as an identity claim. I won’t do that because that’s controversial. But at least virtue depends on knowledge. But what kind of knowledge does virtue depend on? Okay, good question. We’ll come back to it. But first of all, how does virtue depend on knowledge? We’ll come back to it. But first of all, life of virtue is the best life. Virtue depends on knowledge, at least a particular kind of knowledge. And then Socrates repeatedly, and we’ve already seen it, claims that he does not have the knowledge needed for virtue. How do those hang together? How can that be the case? And you can say, well, maybe Socrates, if you put those three together, you can put them together and say, well, Socrates is just realizing he’s just kind of a buffoon. And of course, there were people that thought that. Aristophanes failed miserably and his play The Clouds. But Socrates claims to know what a good life is such that he is willing to die for it. How does that fit in with that? Right? That doesn’t fit in with being a buffoon. And Plato clearly and repeatedly presents Socrates as the most virtuous person living the most worthwhile and virtuous life. At the end of the Phaedo, this is the dialogue in which Socrates actually dies. After Socrates is dead. These last words are spoken. Very last words, super salient. The culmination point of the dialogue, not really, but yes, here, salient at the end, where we’re supposed to reflect upon everything else. Such was the end, echicrates, of our friend. Socrates, who’s just died. Of our friend, whom I may truly love, whom I may truly love, whom I may truly love. Of my friend, whom I may truly call the wisest and justice, most just, and best of all men, best of all men, whom I have ever known. How is this the case? How could this be the case? How could that learned ignorance give Socrates the knowledge of the good life, the confidence in it for which he’s willing to die? How could that, that thing that challenges all of our assumptions about the good life, how could that make him the wisest, the most virtuous, living the most worthwhile life? How? How could we possibly realize this, understand it, and such that we could put it into practice? When you roll this around in your mind, it feels like a profound paradox. He seems to be not knowing, and yet he seems to have all of the results of the knowing that he says he does not have and does not know. This feels monstrous. Doesn’t fit in any of our categories. He’s not a buffoon, but he’s not the typical successful person. He doesn’t seem to have knowledge, but he seems to be wise. Like, what’s going on? Now in response to this, and many people have done this, they even do it in the dialogues, Plato repeatedly shows that. You can just reject Socrates. You can say, he’s just confused. He’s just all messed up. You can just turn away. You can reorient yourself away from the Socratic path. It’s easy to do, but that ease is only superficial because if you stop and reflect at a deeper level, it’s actually harder to turn away, to disorient yourself from the Socratic way. When you read these dialogues and when you start to practice what Socrates does, you see Socrates disclosing so much self-deceptive, pretense, bullshit, mis-framing, failure to appreciate properly, failure to understand appropriately, failure to love wisely. Socrates is powerful. And you go, I need all of that. And I put it to you. Is this not needed now more so than ever? Yes, it seems to be. Socrates affords trans-framing. What do I mean by that? Well, it’s a combination of transcendence, transformation, and reframing. You know when you have an insight and you realize you’ve been mis-framing, not properly proportioning and directing your attention. I thought she was being aggressive, but she’s actually afraid. Oh, I’ve just been mishandling this whole thing. I was mistaken. Oh. It’s insight. You can also get what John Wright, following Iris Murdoch, and I talk a lot about this in Awakening from the Meeting Crisis, called sensibility to transcendence. I can get simultaneously an insight into that person and a reflective insight into me. The way I have habitually been framing or thinking about things or being with people also needs to be reframed. And I can be reframing that person and reframing my sense of who I am and how I look at the world. And that means I start to reciprocally open. I start to transcend myself. I start to afford that person to transcend my conception of them. I start to be transformed. They start to be transformed in how they are and can be to me. Transframing. Socrates affords that. And here’s the thing. That transframing ability seems to be central to becoming wiser. It seems central to a lot of spirituality. And if we want wise spirituality, and don’t we, can we afford to turn away from Socrates? Socrates deeply inspires, affords aspiration of the Platonic tradition, the Stoic tradition, and the Neoplatonic tradition. And all of these are going through significant revivals right now. And for good reason. They are needed in our times. And if they are needed, so is Socrates because Socrates is at the heart of them. You can’t pull apart Plato and Socrates. Stoicism is the religious philosophy or the philosophical religion, I don’t know which, what to call it, of internalizing Socrates. At least central aspects of everything I’ve been talking about. Neoplatonism is, and you will see this, the profound pathway into the deepest possible learned ignorance. We can’t turn away from Socrates. Socrates is like all the other sages who are paradoxical, atypos, and strange. If we turn away from Socrates, we turn away from Siddhartha Gautama, we turn away from Jesus of Nazareth, we turn away from Swangsa, we turn away from Lao Tse, we turn away from etc., etc. Can you afford to turn away from all those sages? Are you so confident that you can reorient away from all of them and find the path to wisdom, virtue, meaning in life? Think about it. Be honest. I propose, and this is an honest proposal in the sense that this isn’t my life, this is how I try to live. I propose trying to move deeply into this problematic of Socrates. I want to allow it the real possibility of challenging me, of transforming me, of calling me into transframing. I want to move through, like the through of my lenses, I want to move through this Socratic problematic. I aspire to this. I have tried to dedicate my life to it. To do this deeply, we need to confront further dimensions of this problematic. Socrates does not have a method. So how do we move forward in a practice? How do we move forward into the problematic? Is Socrates just Plato’s mouthpiece? Are the words of Socrates equivalent to what Plato wants us to get from the dialogue? That’s problematic too. The third wave, people like Gonzales and Hyland, Sarah Rape, just so many people, so many of those books all argue, no. Plato wrote in a dialogue form in which he is only in one, I think in the Apology, in just very minor way actually present. He’s absent, he never puts himself in the dialogue, and the dialogue is not there as sort of literary ornamentation around Socrates. In fact, and this will be central to following Socrates, the collective intelligence in the distributed cognition of all of the characters in the dialogue is actually central to us following the Socratic path. Socrates is central, he’s important in the dialogue, but he’s also in service to the logos, the way other people are drawn out, the way other people represent alternative perspectives, alternative ways of being that Socrates takes into account, which is one translation of the word logos by the way, taking into account, giving an account. One way in which we can understand this is can we get into a flow state, logos with a life of its own, of the collective intelligence of distributed cognition that has the capacity to cultivate both individual and collective wisdom? Can we be Socrates to each other? Because if we need Socrates to do this, and all of the traditions say in one sense we do, but in another sense we don’t, then of course we couldn’t do it. We need to know how to internalize Socrates, both within us individually and between us collectively. One function of the dialogues, I think, and how they’re not replaceable by just capturing this is an argument made by Socrates and this represents Plato’s theory, right? One function of the dialogic format is it affords internalization. What’s internalization? This is a notion drawn from Bogotsky. This is the notion that, let’s say a child is learning, and for some of you, you’ve heard this before, but for some of you maybe not. A child is learning. They’re taking a particular perspective on a problem. The adult comes in to try and teach them. I’ve raised children. The adult has a more encompassing and penetrating perspective that includes but transcends. Hear that? It includes but transcends the child’s perspective. What the child does, they imitate the adult. As they imitate the adult, they start to enact the perspective that the adult has. As they presence the adult in imitation, they start to fill in the perspective that the adult had on their perspective. Eventually, they do this to such a degree that they do not need the adult present. They can do it for themselves and then they get metacognition. They can step back and reflect on their own cognition. They could perhaps come to know that they do not know. See that? See, when you’re in a perspective, remember when we compared the first-person perspective to the third-person perspective, when you’re asking your friend about the problem that they’re having? When you’re in a perspective, that framing, it blinds you to what’s outside the perspective. You can’t see the biases of your perspective and you can’t take on new interests beyond your perspective. But when you internalize other people, you transcend and you get the capacity to self-transcend. You get the capacity to self-correct, to overcome bias and to orient more properly and appropriately towards reality. But as the child is to the adult, the adult is to the sage. Just as a child, you needed to internalize adults. As an adult, you need to internalize a sage. Why could you possibly think you’re done? Okay, but Socrates problematizes this. What? How? Well, he often speaks and presents himself ironically. In fact, this is one of the most famous aspects of Socrates. He’s ironic. Now, he’s not ironic in sort of our modern, cynical sense of irony, but he’s often saying something that’s opposite to what he actually holds to be the case, even though he asks people to always state honestly what they believe. So Socrates is often speaking and presenting himself ironically. Imagine if the parent was constantly being ironic with the small child. That’s going to destroy the internalization. Socrates’ irony seems to thwart the function of the dialogues, which is to help us deeply internalize Socrates, have his perspectival knowing, see the way he sees, realize the way he realizes, have his participatory knowing, transform our character, our identity the way he does, transform our self-knowledge. The irony seems to be undermining all of that. Is the irony just so that Socrates or Plato can avoid political censure? People have argued that, but most people, most of the people I’ve been reading, the scholars I’ve been reading saying no. Is it because Socrates can’t sort of directly challenge people? There’s truth to that, but many of the people that he’s talking with know he’s being ironic. And he does seem to really challenge them at times. Yet maybe in a deeper way, irony is actually connected to learned ignorance. And in that sense, it affords the right kind of internalization. I’m going to throw that out tantalizing, and we’re going to give a special place to that. When Chris and I enter into dialogue, and hopefully deal logos, about Socrates and Kierkegaard, I think that Kierkegaard reflects deeply on Socratic irony. And other people, especially people like Drew Hyland, Kirkland, in his work on the ontology of Socratic questioning, they all do great work around this. So what are some points to ponder, points that we want to reflect upon so that we can realize them in practice? We want to realize on one hand the dialectic and to deal logos and how it’s in this reciprocal relationship with learned ignorance on the horizon of wonder. We want to really let it roll around in our mind, banging and crashing like a loose cannon on a ship at sea. This problematic around Socrates, only by passing through this problematic, this paradoxical problematic, will we have any chance of genuinely following Socrates? And for those of you who follow other sages, Siddhartha, Jesus, Maimonides, I put it to you that following the way of this sage has the real potential to deepen your ability to be a disciple of the sage that you are most trying to internalize. Perhaps even it would be best if you had an inner symphony of sages. One of them can be preeminent. I do not want to call anybody away from a living allegiance that is breathing into them wisdom and orientation towards reality, that’s maturing them in virtue. But perhaps a symphony of sages not only will help disclose what any particular sage is, but also allow you to participate in a way of wisdom that allows you to understand, not superficial, polite, liberal tolerance, or ideological, yelling at and not really quite sure you know what it means, diversity or whatever word you’re using. These can be good, they can be bad, but I’m trying to point to something more profound. Could you understand other people’s sages such that you could enter into deal logos with them? You don’t have to agree with them, they don’t have to agree with you. You don’t have to come to a conclusion if Socrates is right. But if Socrates is right, that would still be part of the best, maybe the best kind of life we could live with each other. It is superficially easy to turn away from Socrates and not orient ourselves socratically. But it’s actually in reality hard to turn away. Before we move into learning our new practices, rooting and humble wonder, I remind you to continue always doing your dialogical reflection, your imaginal engagement and enactment, and your study. So we’re going to do two practices. The first one is going to help us build on the mindfulness practice of centering. This first practice is called finding your root. It has to do with developing the right kind of relaxation in your meditative practice. Many people come to meditation because they want to learn how to relax. The problem is our normal way of relaxing is opposite to what we want to be doing. We are making our body more insensate. We’re letting our mind slowly shrink and become clouded, somewhat confused, sort of warm and fuzzy until we lose consciousness because the point of that relaxation is to move us towards sleep. We may not go all the way, but that is its function and it often ends in us falling asleep. That’s not what we want to be doing in a meditative practice in which we are trying to learn. We’re trying to become more aware of the forms, the formations, the functions and the processes within our mind and body. Think of the kind of relaxation that a martial artist engages in. Very often you’ll see martial artists, I teach Tai Chi Chuan, and you’ll see them take a particular stance. They’ll bend their legs, they’ll sink their arms into a position, they might close their that might have open hands, but they do this thing. It’s called rooting. Why are they doing that? Well, they’re trying to do two things. They’re trying to stabilize their arms, their legs, their body. They’re trying to stabilize, but they’re also relaxing. If you tense your arm like this and you touch, you’ll feel there’s not very much sensation, but when you relax, you find that sort of stable point and you can relax into it, you’ll realize, oh wait, this is a lot, I’ve really increased my sensitivity. You see what’s happening here? The rooting is a kind of relaxation that simultaneously sensitizes the mind, makes it more alert, more acute, but also stabilizes it so it doesn’t start running off and getting scattered. So you’re trying to get this sensitization and stabilization that are interpenetrating to each other. Now think about how much that would matter in a martial arts situation. You’re coming into a situation, there’s going to be all this unexpectedness. If you start flailing around because of the unexpectedness, you’re easily uprooted. If you just sort of lock in, your ability to sense what’s going on and respond is lost. You want to find this optimal relationship between sensitivity and stability. Now you may be saying, well, I’m not going to get into any fights. I hope that’s right, by the way, because when you fight, even if you win, you lose. You lose a little piece of your soul. So what’s the point? Well the point is transfer. Think about entering into a situation in which you want to enter into a deep dialogue with another human being the way Socrates does. Socrates is all just sort of scattered, right? And he’s just, uh. Then his capacity for entering into the deep conversation is lost. But if he’s just rigid and closed in upon himself and holding onto his position no matter what, you can’t move me, I am so stable. It’s true, I can’t. But then what’s the point of the conversation? How will the dialogue take? How will it lead both people? You want to be sensitive yet stable, stable yet sensitive so that you can optimally flow within any situation, especially situations of dialogical encounter. Being able to root, really important. So often when I’m doing these discussions that I have with people and engaging in these Socratic practices in a way that they might not know, I’m doing Tai Chi Chuan. They don’t know it. Sometimes they do. I’ve had people look at one of my videos, especially when the other person was sort of very interruptive or hyperactive and they’ll say, you were like doing really good Tai Chi there. Yes, exactly. I take that as a very encouraging compliment for which I’m grateful because I aspire to that. I aspire to be able to have that rootedness so that I’m not easily overwhelmed but I can also flow into the situation. I’m aware of what’s going on. In the meditative tradition, this is called sitting as still as a mountain but as alert as a warrior. This is a phrase used, by the way, within Buddhist traditions that are often committed to nonviolence. So how do we do it? How do we do it? How do we get that? How do we learn it in a way that can transfer to most of our life? Well, if you think about Taoism, you can think about the very famous yang yin symbol with the black and the white and the black dot and the white dot and the white dot and the black area showing that they’re flowing. They have this flowing balance and they interpenetrate each other. We’re trying to get a mind that is open yet centered and stabilized. It can flow out into yang but it can also return to yin and it has these so that they interpenetrate each other. How would you do this practice? First of all, you go through your centering practice. You do all three centers. I won’t repeat that now but you make sure you center mind and body, you center your attention, you center your attitude. Get centered. Now I’m going to describe the practice to you and what it looks like, what it feels like. Let’s say you’re centered, your eyes are closed. I want you to imagine a space just slightly above your head and then as you inhale, you’re expanding in all directions almost like you were inflating a balloon, a perfectly spherical balloon in all directions. You inhale. You opening up. This is you expanding your awareness, expanding your connection to the world. As you inhale, don’t hyperventilate but you inhale and you expand. Then as you exhale, you let everything gather back together. This is the yin. You come in. You come in. So inhale, exhale and then you find that spot. Oh, right there. That’s about right. Where it is for you is where it is for you. Don’t imitate what I’m doing. Imitate the way I’m doing something. Inhale, exhale. The last little bit of the exhale and that little space in between the breaths, it’s like I’m opening and melting and draining and I’m coming to what’s called the third eye traditionally. And from there, but even from the center of my head on that axis, I inhale out, I exhale in. Opening, melting, draining to the throat. Inhale. Inhale, opening, exhale, gathering, opening, melting, draining to the heart. Inhale, opening, exhale, gathering, opening and melting and draining to the solar plexus. Inhale, opening, exhale, gathering in, falling back towards the center. Yang into yin, yin into yang. Do you see? Opening, melting, draining to this area called the dantian. This is eventually where you want your breathing to be when you’re meditating. Don’t force it there. Let it naturally fall there over time. But here you center around there. The tradition says one finger below your navel, three fingers in. I don’t know if that’s precise, but something like that. Inhale, exhale, and then opening and melting, draining to where that center axis is touching what you’re sitting on. Feel that point. Everything is drained there like a pool of liquid. And now you let it sink into the earth. Imaginally, imagination for the sake of enhancing perception, you let it sink like the root of a tree rooting. It’s sinking into the earth, connecting you, stabilizing you downward, but also nourishing you, energizing you, sensitizing you upward so that you’re then sitting as still as a mountain, but as alert as a warrior. So you center, find your three centers. Go through that rooting practice. You may want to replay that sequence so I can talk you through it while you’re doing it. Once you feel that sweet spot, that optimal grip between yin and yang, you feel rooted into the earth, then begin your meditation following your breath, labeling your distractions, befriending yourself. That is the rooting practice. The other practice is specifically oriented towards the learned ignorance that we’ve been talking about in this episode. This is a practice that I call the humble wonder practice. Humility and wonder were both central and integral to the Socratic practices, especially the practice of learned ignorance. How does this practice work? I recommend first centering and rooting and doing two or three minutes of basic meditation. Then bring your awareness to your heart area. You can put your hands on your heart. I won’t put them right there because I don’t want to screw up my mic. And then I say as mindfully, and you’ve been cultivating mindfulness now, I say as mindfully as I can, there is so much I do not know about myself because of all of the facts. There is so much you do not know about your mind, your psyche, your body. The amount of information available to you is combinatorially explosive. But instead of keeping it as a safe propositional thing you store over here, you’re realizing it. There is so much I do not know about myself because of all of the facts. You want to add all the facts about myself, feel fine. Feel free to do so. There is so much I shall never know about myself because of all of the fate. Fate, what do you mean by fate, John? I don’t mean your cosmic destiny or something written down. I mean fate in the sense that it’s in the word fatal. You’re born at a particular time, in a particular place. You’re exposed to particular people, to particular events, none of which you have control over. And they deeply shape you. If you do not acknowledge your fate in that sense, your inherent finitude, then your capacity for really realizing your self-knowledge is truncated and hamstrung. There is so much I shall never know about myself because of all of the fate. Next, and they’re all F’s to help you remember. There’s so much I refuse to see about myself because of all of my foolishness. All the processes that make us adaptively intelligent, make us perennially and sometimes pervasively beset by self-deception. How often, be honest, really honest, please, how often do you really, not in thought or in belief, but actually in perspective and in how you participate in your identity, how often do you actually challenge your egocentrism and the way it might be biasing you? Igor Grossman found, he asked people to describe a really hard problem they’re involved in. They inevitably describe it from the first-person perspective without thinking, automatic framing. And then if you say to them, and think about Socrates here, questioning people, if you say to them, well, can you re-describe that problem from a third-person perspective, how your friend might see it and describe it? And will people do this? They inevitably have an insight. They realize, oh, I didn’t see this. I didn’t realize that. You know that what I’m saying is true. Think about how wise you are about other people’s problems. Don’t you realize it, Jim? You’re doing that same self-destructive pattern in your romantic life. I can see it so clearly. And Jim is like, I don’t really see it. And you think, ha ha ha ha. But then the roles are reversed. And Jim is saying to you, hey, you’re doing that thing you do with relationship to your career. You’re doing it again. Don’t you see? And you go, I don’t really see it. You know that. Part of what we’re going to learn in these Socratic practices is how to be Socrates for yourself. And that’s inexorably bound up with how can we be Socrates to each other. OK. So back. First, let’s review. There is so much I do not know about myself because of all of the facts. Realize it. Don’t just state it. Live it. There is so much I shall never know about myself because of all of the fate. Realize it. Become into deep awareness. Make it real. There is so much I refuse to see because of all of my foolishness. Realize it. And then there is so much I’m unable to see about myself because of all of my faults. You’re probably saying, oh, this is a real downer. Stick with it. Stay with me. It doesn’t end that way. And you can turn your hands outward like this. We go through the same procedure. There is so much I don’t know about the world because of all of the facts. There is so much I shall never know about the world because of all of the fate. There is so much I refuse to see about the world because of all of my foolishness. There is so much I am unable to see about the world because of all of my faults. Then relax your hands back down to your meditation. And here is now where it flips. You did the humility. And if it was just humility, it could be humiliating. But it’s not just the humility. Now as I inhale, both inwardly and outwardly, I experience wonder. Not curiosity, where I’m trying to find missing information. And we’ll talk more about this. But wonder, where I’m able to call the world and myself into question. And in a way that is positive, that is enriching, that is growing me. As I inhale, I wander into the center of my mind, outward to the circumference of the world. Inhaling, wandering, and then exhaling, receiving, receiving, being open to receiving from the world and receiving from the depths of my psyche. The depths of the world and the depths of the psyche, receiving, inhaling, wonder, wandering inward, wandering outward. Exhale, receiving, receiving from the depths of the psyche, receiving from the depths of the world. Do that practice with the breath. At least four times. You may want to do it longer, until you get the sense of the wonder and the receptivity actually interpenetrating, mutually affording and enriching each other, so that you have wonder-filled receptivity, wonderful, wonderful receptivity. You have a profound humility, but a transcendent wonder. That is the humble wonder practice. I recommend still doing your basic meditation practice, centering and rooting, and then do this practice, both sides of it, the humility practice and the wonder side. That usually only takes about five to ten minutes. You can shave a little bit off the meditation if you really want to limit yourself to staying under 25 minutes in total, but try it. See if it goes the full length, and it doesn’t bother you if it takes maybe 25 minutes. You may be saying, John, you’re going to add all these practices and I’m not going to have time for them. I bet you do. Take out your phone. How much screen time have you put in today? How much did it actually make you wiser? How much did it actually make you more virtuous, connect you to yourself, to other people, to the world? How much? I bet a significant portion of it, maybe even most of it, was wasted time. How about fasting a little bit from your phone so that you can feed more from the fount of wisdom? As always, thank you very much for your time and attention. What is dialectic in Tadea Logos and how does one practice it? The related question is, what is this logos that I’ve sort of been only referring to intuitively that’s so central to Tadea Logos? We’re going to start with the first question and as we answer it, it will give us what we need to answer the second question. What is dialectic in Tadea Logos? Everything is coming down to this.