https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=JEuw6Jyee98
So this is once again bringing us back to learn at ignorance. Yes, but this is how love and beauty are interrelated together. And then why there’s a leap, because the leap is again, you have all of the confirmation drawing you in, as you said, but you have all of the exposure to what you do not yet know. Yeah, that’s right. That’s right. This is the final episode of the series within the series that I’m doing with Christopher Master Pietro, my beloved friend, and we’ve been doing this ongoing process of putting Socrates and Kierkegaard into deep reflective resonance with each other and then also philosophy and faith and Socratic Platonism with Christianity. For those of you who wanted a clear resolution by which you could then wave a particular flag, you have probably been sorely disappointed. For those of you who wanted to open up deeply to the love of wisdom, I hope that you, because I think I have and Chris has, I hope you have found it very, very helpful. I want to close this in our final discussion about things that won’t be as specific to Kierkegaard and Socrates, but will nevertheless, they will still figure within it. I’m calling it the issue of the three leaps. So Kierkegaard is famous for the leap of faith, or as I’ve mentioned, better translated the leap into faith. Then there is something that comes out of the work of L.A. Paul and Agnes Callard and particularly D.C. Schindler that could be called and he calls it the leap of reason, but I think it should also be the leap into reason. What is reason such that you have to leap into it? Then another one, and this is where Schindler and Plato are particularly resonant with each other, which is the leap into love and the leap of love. I see that these three have a deep but problematic relationship with each other, problematic in the sense of how do we properly make sense of it because I think they remind me and perhaps, and I’ve toyed with this idea, that they align with the three transcendentals, the true, the good, and the beautiful, not the ontological good, but the true, the good, and the beautiful, in that they’re not identical to each other, but they completely interpenetrate each other. The distinctions between them are only distinctions of reason, but they are nevertheless proper distinctions. The idea is that these three leaps seem to interpenetrate each other, simply trying to reduce any of the other two to one of them strikes me as deeply mistaken because it will deeply be missing something of importance. And yet, how is it, how are we to understand their relationship to each other such that they are not detachable from each other, but not completely identifiable with each other? What does that mean about our understandings of ratio, reason? I tend to use the Latin word because part of what Schindler, myself, the work I do with Dan Schiappi, the work I do with you, is the notion of reason is precisely what is in philosophical question right now. And so I want to use a word that is trying to get us off our familiar understanding that immediately arises when we say reason. I’m picking up on a word that goes into the notion of rationality, but when you see a ratio, you hear ratio and you hear putting things into proportion and there’s all this perspectival and other things. So that’s why I’ll try and use that word more frequently. So what does it mean about love and ratio and faith that they have this weird interpenetrative relationship? And how should we best try to articulate it? Like I said, I proposed, can we articulate it by thinking of them as the cognitive response to the dynamic of the three transcendentals, the true, the good and the beautiful? Is that a good move? And I pose that as an open question. I don’t have a preconceived, I think, right? Maybe. No. Yes. I don’t know. Is it Tuesday? What day is it? Right? And so I want to just bring that out as something that’s really, really essential because, and this is part of Habermas’s critique of Kant, Kant, because Kant elevated to his soul sacred autonomy, we got the autonomy of the three transcendentals from each other. And you see that in the three critique. I think in an analogous way, we get a separation of reason, love and faith or ratio, love and faith from each other in a way that Habermas, I think, has rightly pointed out, has been deeply, deeply problematic and probably for that reason mistaken in some way. And so we need to rethink these three or perhaps these six, I don’t know, but we need to rethink them together. And I put it to you that in some really good ways, without being self-contradictory, we have been trying to do that when we’ve been doing Socrates and Kierkegaard because those three leaps have always been present, almost like a Greek chorus. They’ve been present and prodding us in certain ways. And I think at certain times we’ve been exemplifying them and their dynamic. And so that’s what I want to propose to you that we try and engage in a discussion. Good. I like it. It’s ambitious. A man’s reach should exceed his grasp or what is it heaven for? What indeed. Yeah. Properly ambitious. Properly ambitious. Well, we can sit comfortably or uncomfortably and learn in ignorance, hopefully. And I think that has to do with all of this too, doesn’t it? I think of, as you’re giving that introduction, I was thinking about the way when we do the dialectic and the dialogos, one of the things that comes up a lot, came up in the most recent workshop, is that as dialectic around a virtue begins to evolve and gather together, one of the things that, and people bring this up independently of one another in each session that we do it, they bring up the interdependence and interrelation between the virtues, almost as though the different virtues were various aspectualizations of what it means to be in relation to the good. And that the way that we aspectualize the relationship to that virtue and the meaning of that virtue and our meaning in relation to the virtue has everything to do with the way it shows up bound by a set of circumstances. What conditions its appearance when it appears? What aspectualizes the appearance as being of a certain kind? And I think of the way Schindler talks about the restoration of appearances. Yeah, yeah. Right? And that it’s not as though we’re trying to do away with appearance, right? Or dispel it, as if we could. It’s that we’re trying to, if I’m remembering correctly, you’ll remember his argument probably better than I will, but it has something to do with it’s more of a symbolic relationship to the appearances. Yeah. One way, and I think I presented this in our conversation to David and he liked it, I invoked Rucker’s distinction between the hermeneutics of suspicion. Hermeneutics of beauty. Beauty. Where the idea that in the hermeneutics of suspicion, appearances distort us and distract us, but in the hermeneutics of beauty, appearances afford us coming into a deeper relationship with an underlying reality. And then you have a point in Plato and then picked up again by Marleau-Ponty, illusions are completely parasitic on reality. You can only say real and illusion are inherently comparative terms. To say this is an illusion is to say this is, it is to say it in comparison to something that you’re holding to be real. Right. Okay. Okay. So this is interesting then, because that makes me think that in some sense, so this idea about the hermeneutics of beauty, that my encounter with one aspect, right? I mean, you’ve done this, right? You’ve done this a few times. You never see the whole thing. You never see the whole book. And yet my encounter with one aspect of the book, if it’s conceived in the right disposition- Perhaps apprehended. Yeah. What did I say? Conceived. Conceived. Okay. Maybe I’m picking up on this sense of poesis, right? Oh, okay. Sure. Sure. Okay. Right? The anamnesis as being both an act of creation and an act of recollection at the same time that I’m making real by my remembrance. Fair enough. Okay. Do that. That’s fair enough. But that my apprehending of the aspect can actually be my relationship with the whole. Oh, but this is the thing. Schindler’s argument is the same relationship between appearance and reality that he’s talking about is also the relationship between the relative and the- And the absolute. And the absolute. Yes. There’s the relative that can distract us away right from the call to the whole, but there’s going to be the relative that properly ushers us into a relationship. Exactly. But never always as an affinity, never as a totality. Never as a totality. And so in virtue of being as a part, I can participate in the whole. Excellent. Right? And this again reminds me of this Kierkegaardian idea that I cannot be all things, I cannot be a totality, I cannot be God, but in virtue of being myself exactly as I am, I can participate in him. Right? This idea that assuming the part that I am allows me to participate in the whole, which is a symbolic move, right? When the part- I just want to remind everybody, when you use the word symbolic, you mean it in a very deep sense. You don’t mean it in the usual sense in which a symbolism is merely an ornamental sign of one thing for another. Exactly. Or representational. Yes. Not just representation. That’s right. Right? But an instance of the very thing to which it moves us. The difference between the word L-O-V-E and a kiss. Yeah, that’s right. That’s one of the great canonical examples that we’ve used. That the kiss participates in love. It is an instance of love, right? It’s a container for the very thing. It’s a fractal, as Jonathan might say, right? Jonathan Paget might say, right? It’s basically a fractal of the same pattern in virtue of which it becomes itself. Okay. So let me make sure. I think there’s something here. Don’t lose your thought. But I think this is right. And this is part of the platonic thing, right? That if we look within faith, love, and reason, we will find this participatory relationship, right? Reason is I grasp some part, but I grasp it insofar as I’m aspiring to the whole. Without ever trying to claim I’ve escaped finitude, right? And so there’s always the aspirational leap that goes beyond. And that’s why you can’t just get it. You can’t reduce reason to inference, right? Because there’s the aspirational participation in the transformation of the part as an isolated thing into a part that is participating towards the whole. Right. Love is, and this is classic platonic argument, I know and I don’t know, right, what I’m lacking. And so I have a partiality, but what happens when I love is the part I come in contact to ushers me into something deeper and deeper and deeper. First there’s the love of the beautiful bodies, and then there’s the love of the virtues. And the love is a lack. Right, right, the love is a lack, but it’s a negative determination. It’s a lack that is gathering you together and orienting you. That’s right. And not just gathering me together, but gathering me together and gathering me to itself. Right. Both. Right. Vertical and horizontal. Yes, and then just to give him, I think, appropriate credit, this is something Jonathan Peugeot and I were talking about. And we both, I was doing it in terms of insight, but he was doing it in terms of faith, and then we were really resonating. His idea of faith as, and this is like your idea of symbolism, faith is when you participate in a whole because you have an intimation. You participate in something as a part, sorry, I made a mistake. You participate in something as a part because you have an intimation of how it will usher you into the gestalt. Yeah. Right, and that faith is that sense of being drawn, and then retrospectively, and you see how this is like rationality, right? Retrospectively, you can understand the part in terms of the whole. Yes. And this is like Spinoza’s. Right, and it’s a paradox. It’s scanty intuitiva. Yeah. And this is Kierkegaard’s, you live forward and understand backwards. That’s right, it’s what he calls a repetition forwards, right? Or a repetition being a recollection forwards, right? Which is the faithful kind of repetition, which is like this, describes it as faith as this bi-directional movement, which is something like what you’re describing. It’s an infinitizing movement, right? It’s going towards the inexhaustible, and it’s also a finitizing movement, right? Of being a kind of a confirmation of the particularity that I am. And it’s the simultaneity of that bi-directional movement, which is, I guess I would say, sort of the inward assumption of the paradox that we were talking about in the previous discussion that is that movement. So that’s excellent. So there’s three proposals. There’s two that have been sort of explicated. One is the leap of love is like the participation of the appearances in reality of beauty. And the leap of reason, the leap of ratio is the participation of the heart in the whole in terms of the relative and the absolute. And then faith is something like the participation of part insofar as it intimates the gestalt that you are going to come into greater contact with. Like we’ve got, I’m seeing this, I’m trying, this is completely de novo, I’m just trying this one. No, no, I know, but you’re trying to pick up on the identity and non-identity between these three, right? Well, I’m trying to pick them up on sharing the same grammar. They’re all this kind of, I’ll call it crooked guardian and platonic participation, right? And they’re all doing this thing, right? In this way, but I’m trying to get the poles. Like one is appearance and reality, another is relative and absolute, and another is something like part and whole, right? And I’m trying and I’m taking other people’s definitions of love and ratio and faith, and also of beauty, truth and goodness as trying to make this all work, right? Okay, so if we were to, okay, so to take those three. Sorry, that’s a lot, but I’m just. Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, okay, let’s try this on, right? Like, let’s see, so you have these three different formulations, so the part and the whole, and the part to the whole is, that strikes me as the good. That strikes me as the bonocentric movement. That’s right, and that’s the leap into faith. Yeah, okay, so that tracks for me, and then the relative and the absolute as being of reason. Yes, and that’s for truth. And that’s for truth, and what was the third? The third is appearance and reality, which is beauty. And that’s love. Pretty good, yeah. Well, we’re done. Finished. Instead of doing this whole series, we could have just done that. That’s very elegant. That’s very elegant, now what do we do with it? Well, I mean, first of all, I mean, if it’s at least prima facie plausible, that means it gives us a way of understanding the equa, like the interdependence of the true, the good, and the beautiful, the interdependence of faith, ratio, and love, and then also the interdependence of them. So we’ve got a proper complexification of it that presumably gives us a much better base of intelligibility. So that is kind of the initial epistemic reward. Right. And I know you, your question is, but what existential import does it have? That’s always my question. Well, yeah, that’s why I mentioned it on your behalf. So, okay, so I’m tempted now, let’s like, let’s visit these- I don’t want this to be Hegel, right? In the disparaging sense. You’re snarling right now. Right, right. I mean, I think there’s another reading of Hegel, but I’ll say, I don’t want it to be Kierkegaard’s reading of Hegel. I don’t want to say, look, this is the absolute system when we’re now done, right? That’s what I meant about, like, I think there’s an epistemic reward, but what’s the existential import of? What could it be? Yeah, or- And how does that relate to dialectically to be a locus? And what are the phenomenological differences? Maybe let’s, I’m at it that way. Oh, excellent proposal. What’s the existential import? That’s just sort of a broad wash of a question, but let’s think, let’s talk about it this way. Oh, no, no, no, excellent, excellent. What are the phenomenological differences between these- Oh, no, but this is always a good recommendation. If you’re going to move from the epistemic to the existential, going through the phenomenological is always- Shortest distance between two parts. Well, sometimes it’s wrong, but it’s always a good practice. Okay, so very good, very good. Okay, so I think Kierkegaard would have a lot to say, probably about all of them, especially about the, especially about the movement of faith from the part to the whole, but let’s start over maybe with, let me throw it back to you. Let’s start with, let’s start with reason. Yeah, with ratio? Yeah, sure. Yeah, with ratio, I’m sorry. No, it’s okay. We would call it ratio. Okay, so ratio being the movement, the movement between and the relation between the relative and the absolute. Absolute, right. Okay. So, and this is, and why the, first of all, why is a movement needed? I mean, this is the core argument that Schindler makes, it’s the core argument Schindler makes about Plato’s argument in the Republic. In other places, he makes the other arguments about love, but this argument is what Plato is trying to get us to see is the absolute that does not include the relative is not actually the absolute, and the relative that does not lead to the absolute cannot possibly exist, right? And you can see how this is the finite transcendence at work, right? The finite binding us down towards the relative and the transcendence calling us towards the absolute. And the idea is you can’t, and if you try to, not only, if you try to resolve it, you not only do an ontological mistake of separating the relative and the absolute, you also do an existential mistake of deforming our humanity by separating the finitude from the transcendence, right? Good, yeah. And so ratio is the idea, it’s a way you get out, it’s a way in which you see, right, what is needed about Mino’s paradox in some ways like that if I was completely ignorant, learning is impossible, and if I had the answer, learning is not needed, yet if I don’t have the complete thing, I’m inevitably in error, right? And so the idea is reason has to always be recognizing its relativity to its finite place, right? That it can’t, there’s no place it can jump out to and say this is the eternal grounding for itself, right? We tried this with Descartes, let’s just say that project has failed, okay? Foundationalism, it’s generally regarded as failed, okay? So it can’t do that, right? And then you can say, well, I know the absolute, you can make pretentious claims, and then that’s what will guide me, that has failed for various reasons. So the thing you get into is you have to always be moving towards the absolute, well, always acknowledge you’re coming from the relative, but always, I’m trying to use a neutral term here, always sensing that the relative is, the relationship between them has properly oriented you. And so this comes in, this comes in, it comes in specifically with the proleptic dimension. Right now I’m not very rational. But part of being rational is to know that I should be more rational. And if I don’t have that, then I’ll never, there’s nothing you can do to me that will persuade me to become more rational. So somehow I must have rationality within me in order for you to call me to a greater rationality that I possess. How the hell is that possible? Plato tries enemies, he says, blah, blah, blah. But the idea is, well, no, what’s happening is the aspiration to being more rational is actually somehow a proper part of how the absolute calls me, but it’s not something that I can inferentially build from here to there. Okay. Okay. Did that work? That worked. So then here’s the question. How, again, using, we’re in a phenomenological mode of engagement right now. So phenomenological- I have an answer. So phenomenological- Of course- I have a response, sorry. I’m shocked. That was, no, no, no, wait. That was arrogant on my part. I have a response. Okay. So what is the phenomenological texture of that call from the absolute to the relative? How does it sound? How does it, so in reasoning, which is not always inference, because being reasonable is a way of reasoning, which is not necessarily being inferential, right? Somebody can ask you, be reasonable, and they mean put it into proper proportion. They don’t mean make an argument. Yeah. Right? And you all, given a much broader notion- You can just refer to it. Right, right. What you find is the interpenetration of insight and inference. Okay. That’s, no, I’m not making, you’re not asking for justification. You’re asking me for a phenomenology. I find, right, and what’s really, if you do a careful reading of Descartes, you see this, and it’s like, oh my gosh, because he said, you think Descartes is all, rules for the, right, discourse for the rules of method, you’ve got to make your mind into a computer, and each step, but what he says is, because many people don’t understand that Descartes understood that animals have a kind of unconscious intelligence, and I won’t get into the details, but for Descartes, you had to be able to hold the argument together in a flash of insight in order for it to be ratio, so the inference ultimately was dependent on this kind of, right? So there was something, there’s something supervening then. There’s something supervening, but, and you get, and then it comes, I think, into proper articulation in Spinoza, when Spinoza talks about how discursive reasoning has always been drawn to and is ultimately filled in Schianzia Intuitiva, right, where you get that interpenetration of the relative and the absolute, right? Right, thinking of something like abduction or impulsive learning. Peirce is trying to do that, too, right, and even when people get into the nuts and bolts of it, if you understand abduction as something like inference to the best explanation, the non-inferential criteria of competition between the preselected, for plausibility, things is all stuff that’s non-inferential and it’s a crucial part of that. We don’t have to get into the nitty-gritty cogsight details, but what I’m trying to show is how it shows up phenomenologically for me is, like, these two experiences, when I’m doing, when I have good reason from other people to believe I’m philosophizing at my best, I find no clean distinction in the flow of the logos between the inferences and the insights. There’s inferential stuff and insights, and I can’t, I can’t, I can analytically and cognitively, scientifically pull them apart, but phenomenologically, they are completely interwoven. Okay, okay. Is that, do you find that as a plausible? Yeah, and you know, when you talk about their interweaving, I hope this isn’t trespassing on beauty, which is forthcoming, but it seems to me, like, when I think of the interpenetration of those two, it sounds something like creativity. The problem with the word creativity is, I mean, if you mean it the way Erogyne meant it, as something that’s between making and receiving. And receiving, yeah. Right, right, and it’s something that is the deeper third that binds emanation and emergence together, then yes, creativity in that sense. If you mean it in the self-help sense, about we need to be more creative, you mean it in that sense. Of course I don’t mean it in that sense. Right, right? Because that’s factuous. No, and I don’t mean, I don’t, I mean, that’s why I used the word poesis before, right? I mean, like the Platinian metaphor of uncovering the sculpture from within the stone. Right, right, right. It’s something much more like that, right? I’m thinking of anamnesis when I say that. Yes, it is. It’s, there’s a sense of… That you’re coming into, the ratio religio, so as you’re coming into right relation, and when you come into right relation, the axis of that relation is what produces the insight. And it seems to supervene because it’s not a natural consequence of any of the inferential reasoning. But the insight is not running independent of how the inferences have put constraints. No, that’s right. Right, right, right. The way that you talk about propositions as negative… Determination. Negative determinations. Yeah, yeah. Okay, so that’s similar to what you’re describing now. Yes, yes, yes, very much. Okay, right, that makes sense, that makes sense. Okay, so you’re creating the affordances and the conditions to make yourself receptive to the insight. And you also have, the insight has to be accountable to the logical structure, but the logical structure has to be accountable to the affords of insight, and the two of those together. So you have an opponent process between… That’s logos. Yeah. That’s logos, as opposed to just logic or insight. Right, and so that’s not a closed system. That’s right, that’s right. Okay, okay, okay. And so then it seems to me that one of the things that puts a welcome, a provocative strain on any particular line of inferential reasoning is when it’s forced into aporia by the collision of two perspectives that seem irreconcilable from within the system of reasoning. Yeah. So you have Nagel’s absurd. Yeah, yes. Right, for instance, right? So then it shifts you out of the propositional mode into a perspectival clash that induces an aporia, and the only thing that allows you to basically gather together again around the aporia is that very process of sensitizing yourself to the insight. Right, exactly, and I think the insight is the perspectival participatory side, and the inferential is the propositional, and some of the procedural in the sense of the technical aspects of logical inference. Right, okay. Okay, let’s shift over now. Yeah, yeah. Anything more you wanna say about that? No, that’s my initial reflective response to your question. Okay, so let’s shift over to beauty, and beauty we’re talking, oh, you’re gonna have to refresh me now. Appearance and reality. Appearance and reality, okay. So, and okay, so this is interesting. So then this is a version of the same question then, right? How is it that reality heralds itself through appearance in a phenomenological encounter with an apparent? And the mistake is again, it’s either I either have the appearance or I have the reality. And beauty is no, you have the appearance insofar as it is orienting you towards the reality. And so, right, part of. And what, and sort of unpack the orientation. Like what happens phenomenologically in that reorientation? So this is where I’ve been deeply influenced by Skari. So she says, the book is on beauty and how it prepares us for, it’s just one of these thin gold injectable. How it prepares us for justice and truth. So this comes from Ellen Skari, right? You see the beautiful tree and it somehow, and I don’t mean enumeratively, but it reminds you of all the trees you’ve seen before, right? It is precisely because of that, the contrast comes out because the beautiful tree is, but I didn’t know trees could be like this. So possibilities now open up. So you get the huge, this is a fundamental, this is the, I would argue, the fundamental grammar of plausibility and understanding. You get massive convergence. You don’t go, what the hell is that? You go, that’s a tree. All this. And it must be. It must be a tree. But you also get the elegance of, I didn’t know trees could be like this. There’s all these possibilities for me before. And therefore, what you get, right, is you get a profound kind of understanding in the beauty. And that’s how the appearances are taking you into the reality. And so what that does is that, that, that, that, that, the gathering together so they belong together so that you can now be accountable to the newness and give an account of it, right? That opens you up to the possibility of reciprocal opening because everything in you has been drawn into this. And then it has been, and I’ll use our good friend’s word, Guy Sendstock, it has been exposed to the otherness of a tree in its beauty. I didn’t know trees could be like that. And then reciprocal opening, and reciprocal opening is love. And then that’s- So we’re once again, okay, so there’s a pattern here, that’s for sure. So there’s this, again, there’s this bi-directional movement, right? Which is this confirmation of everything that must be about a tree. And all of these things that must be about a tree are all basically condensed into the one, this one instance of it. That is absolute, that it’s sort of like, when, that it is both, it is both a tree in the sense that it, that it has all of the features of a tree and absolutely must be that in virtue of having all of these features. But when you actually, when all of those features are gathered into the specificity of this tree, what that sort of, what that specificity reveals is an infinite sense of possibility about what being a tree actually is and means. Yeah, you see the- And that’s what makes it a proper, that’s what makes it a paradox, right? Is that being, I’m even struggling to get my words around this. Here’s your paradox. It’s a tree that is showing you how it’s more than a tree. Good. Without stopping being a tree. Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay. So it appears to you in a way that is disclosing a reality beyond its appearance. Right. Which means that what a tree is in the first instance is not what you conceived it to be. But it’s not not it either. Right, right, right, okay. So this is once again bringing us back to learn at ignorance. Yes, but this is how love and beauty are interrelated together. And then why there’s a leap. Because the leap is again, you have all of the confirmation drawing you in, as you said, but you have all of the exposure to what you do not yet know. Yeah, that’s right, that’s right, okay. And so it seems to me that something very, very similar is happening in faith. Which is? Which is that ascending to be and being gathered together to be consciously the very thing that I am and cannot avoid being is the very thing that opens me to the possibility that what I am is a great deal, in fact, infinitely more than what I could have ever imagined myself to be. Right, and so what do you think that Kierkegaardian proposal with Pajot’s proposal that the phenomenology now, that was a great description of it existentially, but phenomenology, is it this intimation that the part that, almost like the Jamesian me, is always, right, the part is always, you have to relate to it as participating in the open possibility, the infinitude of it. And so you can never capture the I, but you can never capture the I as any particular me, right? Yeah. There’s that gestalt. I would say instead of me, well, I would make a different turn, though. I would say instead of my experience of myself as me before an infinite I that could behold me, I would say I become thou. I become thou, right? Because I think that what Kierkegaard talks about in the movement of faith is really the process but isn’t thou a part that has been taken up into a greater whole? Yes. And that’s Pajot’s proposal of what faith is, is the phenomenological intimation of that part. Yeah, I think that’s right. Okay. I think that’s right. Yeah, I’m agreeing, I guess. I just wanted to make that that’s a terminological change because I think that actually captures what you’re saying better, right? Rather than becoming me before an infinitely comprehending I, that infinitely comprehending I, makes me thou in virtue of its gaze. Okay. And I think that’s kind of what it means to accept the solicitude of the one or of God, which is to say to be willing to be made into a thou by one who beholds you a great deal more comprehensively than you could behold yourself. And by presenting yourself before that silent observer, you are becoming in the likeness of its gaze in some sense, right? You are being drawn together by, we talked about this already in a previous dialogue about this topic, right? But it’s like by presenting yourself and giving account of yourself and being accountable to the very necessary, to all the necessary features or indeed errors or sins that compose your being in the world, you are made accountable to the possibility of being beheld as more than the sum of all of those errors, which is why you need to be gathered together in error in order to become receptive to the possibility of forgiveness in the Kierkegaardian term, right? Or in the more overtly Christian term. Right. But I think it’s very much the pattern that that takes and the bi-directional movement, the affinitizing and infinitizing movement, right? The gathering together and confirmation and the opening up of the possibility, that’s the same move that you’re describing. Right. I think it takes the traces, the same contours. The language and the relationality might be different though. And maybe we can talk about that. We can. I just wanna finish the explication before we move into the critical reflection. Sure. Because we haven’t completed the schema. No, you’re right, I rushed ahead. No, no, no, because okay, and faith is like what’s its relationship to the good, right? And then the idea here is, right, that what you’ve got is you’ve got an apprehension of a fullness of being. Yeah. That you, right, it is the proper, again, relationship of the finite and the transcendence. So you, that what you just described, that intimation of the part being taken up into the whole, the way you’ve been describing, that the good orients us so that we have an intimation of a fuller life. I give you the abundant life and that you may live it abundant, right? That, and then I take that that’s sort of the good in the ethical, aesthetic. But now I wanna say, why does that, how does that trace to the ontological? The good as the through line, the true line between all of the aspects, all of the parts that point towards the through line that is itself not an aspect. Yeah, yeah. And that is. It’s the unity, I might say. Right, right. But not the unity as a part whole or a logical unity. No, no. Right, it’s, we’re doing the phenomenology. It’s being true to the through line, the true line, right? And the realization that it is not any and can never be any one of the aspects, but that doesn’t mean the aspects aren’t conducing you in. And that what makes it good is the fundamental promise, right, that intelligibility will not fail. Yes. That the through line will not be broken. Yes. As we open, reality will open to us. This is the fundamental goodness, the fullness of being, which we, the fullness of being Big B, if you want. And then we can, we can apprehend that species of that or participate in it and when we get ethical goodness, which points us towards a kind of fullness of being. And so that’s the proposal of the phenomenology of faith and relationship to the good. Right, right, right. That, yeah, I think that’s good. Followed you. Yes. If I followed you, I think that’s good. Well, the ability to follow me is exactly the good. It is the affordance of the ability to follow. Yeah. Which is one of the common metaphors used for faith. To follow, yes. And the way, the following, et cetera. Yes. Yes, that’s right. And the giving up of oneself to the following. You have to. Yeah. Because if you try and stop yourself, then you will stop on an aspect and then you will thingify something, you will reify something that is properly not any kind of thing. Right. So goodness is how the no-thingness continually affords us determining the intelligibility of thing. Right, and there’s sort of an interesting, sort of, there’s a kenosis here at work as well, right? Because there’s an emptying of one’s, like, there’s a, so when all of the features of the tree converge on that one instance of a tree and then open themselves to the possibility of a tree being more than a tree while remaining itself, sounds very Heraclitan, actually. Yeah, it does. When I say it that way, doesn’t it? Of course. And then it should change such that it remains itself and it changes in order to remain itself. And there’s something about that in the movement of faith too, right? Because there’s an emptying of oneself in order to participate in the fullness of oneself. Exactly. Which is part of that same. But there’s an emptying in each one of them. There is, yeah, yeah. You did the emptying of beauty and love and there’s also the emptying of Ratio. Right, right, right, okay. So then what is required? So then, back to my evergreen question of existential input. So what then allows us? Because, you know. Exactly. What is the receptive thing in us for all of that? That allows us to do it. Yes. Yes, and that I think is, there’s the rub, as they say. There’s the rub. Now, and that’s what I meant earlier when I was harping about the sort of the relationality. This is where we have to talk about the relationality. This is where we have to talk about the Socratic Eros. This is where we have to talk about being related to the good and it being an intersubjective relationship. First of all, I wanna propose that we use the word soul for that receptivity rather than a ghost that inhabits our cadaver. Okay. I agree to the proposal. Soul it is. Okay. All right. So, okay, so this brings me to something that I wanted to bring up, which is that in, so for Kierkegaard, I promise I’ll bring this back to the question. In Kierkegaard, we talked about the Sore, so we don’t need to do it again, right? But there’s this movement through these spheres of consciousness or stages of life. And that implies this consecutive linear movement and that’s wrong, right? Because you can somehow, I think, they’re basically contiguous at every instance. You can even be layered within yourself about it. Absolutely, absolutely, right? So unfortunately, it’s hard to talk about these without trying to do this sequentially, but they’re not sequential. I’m very suspicious of stage models. Yeah, yeah, it’s not a stage model. It’s not a stage model. Spheres of consciousness that do interpenetrate, but that ultimately are differentiated, at least the aesthetic to the ethical by decision and the sacrament of the decision, right? The either or. And that the aesthetic stage being ultimately characterized by an attendant despair in which in weakness, I can’t bring myself to the good. I can’t muster myself to assume what I am. Or in defiance, I want to tear myself away from it, do away with myself, do away with my connection to the good prospect of being whatever it is, right? And that that operates along all of these dialectical lines, right? The despair of possibility that lacks necessity boiling off into the imaginary. It’s a nice phrase by Thompson I really like, Josiah Thompson. Or the being beholden to necessity, meaning that the denial of any kind of freedom apart from simply following the flowing crowd, right? We talked about that in the last one too. And then the sort of the inward compression of that dialectic that has been spread out across time, cast forward in terms of fantasy, cast back in terms of regret, being fussed with the unfolding of oneself across time. When that becomes compressed and made inward, then it becomes a movement toward the ethical as being a matter of decision, a consummation of oneself, right? Before an either or, before a proposal. Now, when we first talked about the ethical way back when, I was thinking of it much more in terms of, you know, the ethical as defined by worldly norms, but there’s another version of the ethical and the ethical is so tricky because it mediates between the aesthetic and the religious. And so there’s this equivocal, there’s this, maybe it’s just my understanding of it, which is wooly, but there’s this sort of, there’s this washing back and forth, there’s this teetering back into the aesthetic and teetering forward into the religious. But in some sense, the ethical unto the religious or the ethical dash religious, or however we wanna call it, has, is basically about graduating the orientation toward the good and the gathering of oneself before its witness. And what does that mean? How do we do that, right? It’s a really vexing question. How do we actually bring ourselves together to do that? And that movement also involves the gradual withdrawal of the ethical measures from the world to something far more interior and- We were discussing about that last episode. Right, okay, so I don’t have to do that again, but point is that the way in which all of that, the way in which an individual is gathered together when the ethical is looking to the religious, I think, if I understand right, is repentance. Now people hear repentance and they think, oh God, Christians again. But isn’t it- They’re always talking about repentance. But isn’t it the gathering, the confession gathers you and then, but there’s also the opening to the possibility? Yes, exactly, exactly, right? So the confession, the way I understand it, it’s a very Socratic move. Kierkegaard says something like, when people make confession, he says, people don’t understand, because people always say, why are you confessing to God if God already knows? Or they can also treat it like a magical formula. I’ll sin on Saturday and I’ll confess on Sunday. And confess on Sunday, right. And what Kierkegaard says is like, no, no, no, you don’t understand. When you’re making confession, you’re making it for your own conscience and understanding, right? Your confession brings to your, you confess such that you understand yourself. It’s in making the confession that you draw yourself together, right? You’re not trying to convey information. But you wouldn’t do that if you were also simultaneously orienting towards a possibility. That’s right, right, the possibility of… Because 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, 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? There has to be some supervening belief in the possibility of renewal. Maybe intimation is a better word. Intimation’s good because it has that relationship with intimacy, which has that related, intersubjective encounter to it, right? Which is how that sacrament takes place. It’s a deeply intersubjective, penetrating form of relation. Very, very intimate, that nothing could be more intimate. So there is something about that sacrament that draws a person together and draws their finitude into resolution, right? Because what you’re doing is you’re taking account of your error. You’re taking account of all of those things that makes you you such that you couldn’t be otherwise. Your absolute finitude is drawn into distinction. But the drawing together of your finitude into distinction is paradoxically the very thing that makes you receptive to the possibility that you could be more than the sum of all of those errors. The transcendence. The transcendence. And it can stalt beyond the feature. Right. Yes. Right? And so, you know, basically I think for him, the movement to faith really kind of, like I don’t want to be too reductive about it, but it really comes down to the seeking of forgiveness, right? The seeking of the possibility that the measure of your own realness isn’t simply the sum of all of this error. Because there’s a defiant form of despair, I think, that attends to the consciousness of sin. One of the things that I, sorry, go ahead. I just want to say, so that sounds like the proposal I’ve made before of sort of rewording forgiveness into foregiveness, F-O-R-E, forgiveness. Right. Right, right. And I also think forgiveness and gratitude in some sense are different aspects of the same thing, right? Because gratitude for the gift of my being in one aspect is also my receptivity to forgiveness in another aspect. Right? So there’s this interesting co-identification between gratitude. There’s this beautiful line it brings to mind. There’s this beautiful line by James Baldwin in one of his novels where he says, you know, he’s talking about it in the context of erotic love, but we know, for Kierkegaard, there’s, and for Socrates, there is a continuum, right? And he says, you know, people cannot invent their mooring posts. No. Their lovers and their friends. They can’t invent any more than they can invent their parents. Life gives these and also takes them away. And the great difficulty is to say yes to life. Well, the Lord giveth, the Lord taketh away. Blessed be the name of the Lord. Right. That kind of thing. Right. So I want to understand you. Are you proposing that you’re seeing, I think you’re saying you’re seeing the same movement that I was talking about in the leap of Ratio into truth, the leap of love into beauty, and the leap of faith. Into the part properly participating in the whole. Yes. You’re seeing this exemplified existentially in repentance as the gathering that is also the exposing. Yes. Yes, exactly. Exactly. I am seeing that pattern. And what I’m trying to get my, what I’m trying to get a handle on or understand better is the affective and relational disposition that attends to that move, right? Because it’s one thing to kind of trace the pattern and go, oh, okay, this is the kind of thing that’s happening very well. But what I’m trying to get a sense of is what is it that allows us to make that move? Because, so one of the things that happens, this happened in a couple of the workshops we did with D’Alogos. And it was really interesting is that, you know, I think someone said this at the end of a session and I felt it myself, which is, I talked a little bit about this with Jonathan Pageau. Like, I become aware of my errors, right? I become aware of all of the ways in which I have been, I have been not attentive to the things I should be and I’ve missed this and I’ve acted rashly or selfishly, right, you know, I’ve sinned, let’s just say. And part of this dialogical process makes me aware of all of the ways in which I’m finite and partial and inadequate and hopeless. And- But in that, you are also simultaneously aware of how you could really be something other than that. Yeah. Because if that wasn’t there, you couldn’t make that judgment. You know what though, yes, I think that’s true. But I would say that knowing, knowing that I could be more does not relieve that guilt. No. In fact, it intensifies it. Yes, yes, I’m not denying that. Right, so you’re right in the sense that it’s like, I think you’re right in that, in that the gathering together of the error and taking account of it does open a view to the possibility of being different, acting differently. And it’s something beyond you is calling you that is somehow still part of you. It’s no different from how Rekur talks about this, how we are somehow against ourselves when we’re tempted. But who is tempting us other than ourselves? Right. But it’s not ourselves, right? Ah, good. And that makes me think like what the act of confession does is it creates temptation for the good. Sofferson. Sofferson, right? I think confession is a preparation for Sofferson in some sense, or is conducive of it. But I guess what I mean is that there is something, and this is where the contrition and the repentance and the forgiveness in that tradition and for Kierkegaard is essential, is that when I gather, when I become conscious of my sin and I have a view to the possibility of being more than that, what does it take for me to consummate that belief without succumbing to this debt of regret that I inherit as a consequence of waking up? You sound like St. Paul. Yeah, I guess so. I should be so lucky, I suppose. And I think that’s the real problem because I don’t think, like being able to, well, I can do, well, now I know. I can do better from here. That doesn’t solve the problem. I really don’t think it does. I really don’t think it does. What- But reifying the guilt into Augustine’s gravitas of original sin in order to explain why he is drawn to depravity also seems to me to be fundamentally wrong because it carries up into a kind of pathological self-loathing that is also not the proper response to what you’re talking about because that is to deny the definition and make the finitude absolute as a prison in which you are encased. And then you cannot possibly know you’re in a prison unless you have some real sense of what is outside the wall. Yes, I think that’s true. I’m not sure about the, yeah, I’m not, yeah, I’m gonna, yeah, wading into the, well, because you were mentioning- Like a combinatorial explosion problem right now. I mentioned it because, I mean, Augustine’s conclusion in the confession is, I think, and now the Catholics are gonna get angry at me, but I think it’s a conclusion other than his later conclusion of original sin. I think he has this sentiment of some downward pull, but he has a sense of something in him that’s also the upper pull because he has the Neil Platonic mystical experience before his Christian conversion that convinces him that there is something like that, but he needs something more in order to counterbalance the negative pull of licking the open sore of lust, right? Right. To me, and I think he tries to resolve this in the document. You’re talking about Ostia, right? His experience at Ostia? Yeah, exactly, where he steals the pairs, right? Or whatever they were. Well, no, those are different experiences. Are you talking about with Monica at Ostia? No, there’s experience before- Oh, because I think that’s post-conversion. No, the experience, the mystical experience with her is after. There’s an experience before his conversion. He has a Neil Platonic mystical experience of the one, but he can’t remain there, and he feels pulled back by some center of his depravity. And then he claims he realizes the need for the intercession of Christ as something that is powerful enough to fulfill that within him to counteract the depravity. Right, right, okay, yep, I’m with you, I’m with you. Right, right. But what was the critical point? My point was there’s a way in which you can pose that problem of sensing the transcendence is insufficient with dealing with the guilt that can easily become the absolutizing of the finitude into a self-contradictory prison. Yeah, okay, good, that’s what I think happens. I guess you just sort of got ahead of me, but yes, I think you’re anticipating the move that I was trying to make, which is to say that one of the particular kinds of, perhaps the deepest, I think for Kierkegaard, the deepest form of despair, the deepest form of sin for him is for that largesse of guilt to become the thing about you and therefore about reality that is most real above all, right? It becomes the measure, it becomes an ontological measure, right? Sin itself becomes the thing that is most real. But it’s an entosse, it’s a real without any onto normativity. I had to come in therapy to the, and I have to come to it again and again and again, to the realization that if I don’t properly challenge either the Cartesian demon of doubt or the sadistic super ego to say, by what standard are you judging me? Because you have set a standard that is impossible for any, because you continually move the goalpost. And what, I have to get to the point by- Who has continually moved the goalpost? The sadistic super ego. Right, okay. I’ll say, what standard are you judging me against? If I can’t possibly speak the truth, if the truth is impossible to me, then I can’t hear you either. Right. You don’t make any sense. You’re making a claim on truth while you are simultaneously telling me I’ve been capable of hearing the truth. It’s rather demoniacal, isn’t it? Right, right. And you have to realize the oxymoron. Whitehead was right. The quintessential defining feature of evil is its self-destructiveness. And you have to not know this as a fact. You have to realize it in the way I use the word realized, because that’s the only thing that breaks the grip of that demon on you. And that’s the pathological way in which the guilt can be absolutized. Yes, yes. Okay. Yes, yes, that’s good, that’s good. And the absolutization of that guilt is something demoniacal. Yes. Right, it’s something that, it’s funny, demoniacal. There’s this scene, there’s this great, there’s this scene in, I know you don’t like it as much as I do, there’s this great scene in The Exorcist when they’re trying to ex, trying to exorcise a demon. And the priests come out and they’re conferring and they’re both rattled. That’s, you know, there’s a demon. And one priest turns to the other and says like, why is it a little girl? Why does he choose a little? And the other priest says, well, I think it’s, the point is to make us despair, to reject the possibility that God could love us. And I think the reason that that’s the most demoniacal form of despair is that it rejects possibility that lies beyond the sum of those errors. And I think that the sacrament of confession is a way of drawing together the error in order to train and socratically tutor the receptivity to the ontological reality that there is more simply than the sum of all of that error. That that error does not in itself constitute the marker and measure of realness. So it’s a distal beyond the- And so it is a self-realizing act to draw together oneself in error because it is an act of self-realization that brings to present all that I am by necessity and all that I could be in possibility. And that that is known together as a unity when it is known by the measure of a unity, which is the good itself, right? And so that’s why that act of drawing oneself together by that particular form is, at least as far as I can understand it, it is a response to the dangers that you’ve just expressed. It is a response to the dangers of the absolutizing of guilt and sin as being of a fundamental reality that is insurpassable. And the opposite is the absolutizing of transcendence into hubristic inflation. Right, totally, absolutely, absolutely. Right, so I’m given all that. I’m reformulating- I thought there was a sort of a critique or attention here. I’m actually not sure there is. No, what I’ve done is I’ve tried to reformulate this to give an answer back to your question, which is what in us is the receptivity that somehow gets us into all of this? Oh. And I’m trying to point out to you that it isn’t something, it is the inner dialogos between our finitude and our transcendence. Right, yes, and I think that’s right. I think that’s absolutely right. It’s the dialectical interpenetration in the form of the paradox. And of course for him, as we’ve talked about already, that becomes incarnated. And its incarnation has to do with it being available to an intersubjective relation, which is what consummates it and gathers it together. And that’s why Socrates can say the unexamined life is not worth living. And the practice of dialectic inter dialogos is the best way to live, because it is a profound realization of our finite transcendence in a way that makes it receptive to the true, the good, and the beautiful. And the beautiful. Very nice. Well, I think that was excellent. Thank you very much. Thank you, this was fun. Thank you everyone for your time and attention. If I relate to it as bullshit, I’ll get something like a reciprocal narrowing in my relationship with the world, because I’m not actually understanding, and I’m diminishing my agency, and the world’s possibilities are being, because that’s exactly what you’re trying to do with bullshit. You’re trying to get people reciprocally narrowed so you can compel their behavior. Whereas if I get this text, I know I’m in his own approximate development, because it’s an ongoing fountain of intelligibility, and I’m reciprocally opening with it. I can return to it again and again and again, and the dialog keeps unfolding. But I can only be in the reciprocal opening if I have an eye that relationship with something. Is that all making? Is that all working?