https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=bWYmPjX5m90
So we’ve got a lot of evidence that we are self-referential, meaning the arrow of relevance goes this way. And we even experience it phenomenologically, right? How things are relevant to me, how they are important to me, right? But the fact that we’re mammalian primates that are capable of culture means we also have to learn to tell, and this is agape for me, agape is turning the arrow of relevance the other way, which is not how is it relevant to me, it’s how am I relevant to that. I’m joined in this episode with people you’ve already met, my good friends Christopher Master Pietro and Guy Sandstock, and we are going to reflect upon a philosopher, theologian, he’s hard to pin down, who epitomizes making dialogue, or what we would in fact probably call theologos, central to his whole intellectual philosophical framework. And that of course is Martin Buber. Some of you may have seen Guy and I with Zevi Slavin in a series we did together on Martin Buber, but we wanted to bring in the more dialogical aspects here, and I can’t think of any two people with whom it would be better to undertake such a task than these two gentlemen. So Chris is going to lead us off by reading, I think, a very pertinent and provocative quote by Buber about the dialogical way and Socrates. And it brings up a lot of the themes that we’ve already addressed in the series, and we’ve already seen enacted in some of the practices, but it will allow us to dive much more deeply into the connections between Buber and being after Socrates. So take it away, please, Chris. Okay. So this is an excerpt from I and Thou, which I think is probably going to be at the center of a lot of our discussion. Here we go. How much of a person a man is depends on how strong the I of the basic word I-thou is in the human duality of his I. The way he says I, what he means when he says I, decides where a man belongs and where he goes. The word I is the true shibboleth of humanity. Listen to it. How dissonant the I of the ego sounds. When it issues from tragic lips, tense with some self-contradiction that they try to hold back, it can move us to great pity. When it issues from chaotic lips that savagely, heedlessly, unconsciously represent contradiction, it can make us shudder. When the lips are vain and smooth, it sounds embarrassing or disgusting. Those who pronounce the severed I, wallowing in the capital letter, uncover the shame of the world spirit that has been debased to mere spirituality. But how beautiful and legitimate the vivid and emphatic I of Socrates sounds. It is the I of infinite conversation, and the air of conversation is present on all its ways, even before his judges, even in the final hour in prison. This I lived in that relation to man which is embodied in conversation, believed in the actuality of men, and went out toward them. Thus it stood together with them in actuality and is never severed from it. Even solitude cannot spell forsakenness, and when the human world falls silent for him, he hears his daemonium say, Thou. Excellent. So this brings up many of the themes that we’ve been talking about, I’ve been talking about in this series. Maybe it would be good to clarify for the viewers some key movements in this passage, some of them maybe just clarifications. Some people might not be familiar with whether Shibboleth is a biblical reference. The contrast he’s making, there’s an important contrast in there that just goes by between world spirit and mere spirituality, which I think is really important, especially for certain dimensions of Deologos. And so perhaps what we should start with is an understanding of this notion of the I, Thou, that is not just the combination of I and Thou, but the relationship is actually the primordial unity from which the I and Thou emerge and in which they are constantly bound up. And I think we should contrast it, because he doesn’t do it in this particular quote, with the I yet. So first of all, how would you, each of you, how would you explain what Boobur is doing with I, Thou and I yet? Want to go ahead, Dan? Well, I don’t know if this is an explanation, but it’s a demonstration. I have, as you both know, I have a 17-month-old at home, and we’re currently living with his grandparents. So basically his life is probably spending somewhere between three to nine hours a day sitting on someone’s lap, facing them, doing these back and forth gestures. And it’s so interesting because that’s just what he’s doing, right? That’s what he feels compelled to do. That’s what he finds himself doing. That’s what everyone around him has moved to do. This thing where we’re facing each other in this back and forth, and you can feel the primordialness of that relation. And I think it’s, you know, Boobur, in some sense, in my view, really, I think at that time was sensing the meaning crisis or nihilism, and specifically the isolation and atomization of the I, and the loss of relation and the numbness that comes through nihilism. And I think when he talks about this kind of ontology of what’s most primary is relation, right? And what comes out of the relation are the individuals, if you will. But that primordial sense in returning to that is, I think, really basically what I, thou, is really, really getting at, right? And I think it’s easy to see that, you know, we all as human beings are born so vulnerable, right? We’re probably the most vulnerable creatures that we know about in the whole universe. We’re completely dependent on others in every single way. However, that vulnerability can transform into everything that human beings are. I mean, we’re the ones going to Mars, we’re the ones thinking about the origin of existence. There seems to be this deep connection between vulnerability and our ability, and it seems like relation is the difference that makes that difference. Oh, that’s interesting. Relation is the thing that makes that difference. We become in and through relation, and we see that most obviously when we’re young with the family, and how those relations go determines so much of what that person becomes and how they conceive themselves and how they relate to the world and what they do, everything. However, I think what Boober is really onto is that that is always happening and continues to happen through our whole life, or at least it can. I don’t think it does in our culture, but it really, really can because he’s talking about these I-Thou encounters that you can’t create, but you can find yourself having them emerge can be completely transforming of both people, right? Cultivating an openness to that, a fertility to that, I think is what he’s really expounding on what he’s after. Chris, could I amplify the bit? So two things I think came to mind when you said that, and this is meant as amplification. One is to challenge the Cartesian model, which is you start as a reflective cogito egrosan, you start as a self-reflective, interiorized ego, and then you work your way out to the world, but that’s not actually what happens in development, like with your son. So if you ask even a three-year-old what’s going on in their head, they’ll say blood. They don’t have a capacity for introspection, but if you ask them, how’s daddy feeling, they’ll say daddy’s angry. So what they do is they come, we’ve got evidence of like 18 months being able to pick up on the mental states of others, and then only by gradually internalizing that do they get that ability to turn it on themselves. So we start dialogical, and we only develop into a capacity for monologue, right? So that point resonates. And then going with that process is the agapic element, which you’re also alluding to, which is these dialogical relationships are person constituted. So I want to get that there’s the primordiality that Buber is pointing to, and you can see that concretely in development, and yet we still pretend that the Cartesian picture is how we naturally are. We are primordially dialogical, and the monological emerges out of and is continually dependent on the dialogical, so a complete inversion there. And then the other point is that there are dialogical relations that are person constituting, and I think that is also a proper part of what is going on in the notion of I thou. So the relation precedes the poles, the I and the thou, contrary to a Cartesian model. And that primordiality is also one that produces, protects, and promotes personhood. So it’s that kind. If we think of conversation just, well, I don’t like conversation as a translation, but anyways, if we think of dialog even as just, here, if we think of the dialogical, that’s what I want to say. So that just as communication, we lose the constitutive communing in which person making is happening. And then what I think Buber takes that to mean, as you said, is that is not something that happens, it’s original not in just being the beginning, but the archaic, right? We are constantly that by which we become more persons, cultivate character, etc. So I just wanted to amplify it. Does that land well? Totally lands. Totally lands. Absolutely. So there’s another dimension of this which is interesting that I like the idea that the primordiality of the dialogical relationship is such that we think of it in the context of speech and conversation. But there’s absolutely no necessity in that. It doesn’t start that way. No, right. It doesn’t start that way. In fact, we’ve got people like Tomasello arguing that the dialogical relationship gets very fine in order to afford the learning of language. Right. So it comes, it’s prior, it comes before. Yes. Right. Comes before, it comes before, it comes before. And so a lot of dialogical relationships, I think, that are implicitly dialogical are often disguised as subject-object relationships. And I think that actually becomes most obvious in solitude. So I think examples of interpersonal relationships are far more ready to hand when we talk about I that or I it. But actually, I think that those, the examples that to me, the examples which to me are even more lucid are the examples that actually come when you realize that you’re in a relationship with your environment such that it extends itself to inanimate features of your environment that recur on you as features of your relationship to yourself and by extension all of the other relationships that you have around you. So what I mean is like, I was thinking about this this week, like, you know, I live alone. I come home sometimes, right. And I come home to an empty apartment and I put my things down. And you know, I go into the kitchen and I prepare something and I go into the living room area and I sit and maybe I read or I go to my desk and I’m on my laptop for a little while. Each of those features of my living space, I have a relationship with each of them. And what happens when I encounter them is they stimulate in me a whole host of of associations and concerns and fears and anxieties because each of them fold. Calls to action or avoid or avoidance thereof. Each of them require something of me. Each of them invite me to do something with them. Each of them are both inviting and repellent, depending on how I frame them. Right. It could be that when I sit down and I look at my the prospect of sitting in front of my laptop, there’s a whole host of things that are demanded of me by that feature of my apartment that maybe I really don’t want to confront. Or maybe when I look at a bookshelf and I think of all of the things I have yet to do. You can relate to that one. Right. Which somehow foists my responsibility back on me because it has come to my relationship to that object has come to stand in place of my relationship to a whole sum of actions and invitations that by accepting or rejecting them, I’m recreating my relationship with the way that I’m living and the relationships I have with other people. So why am I saying this? I think that this idea that even when it comes to the features of our environment that aren’t persons in any technical sense, we give them, I don’t want to say we give them, but they come with personhood. They come with a kind of… Personality or personality. …or personality maybe. But there’s a sense in which I’m already in a relationship with the space around me and I have subtly characterized it. There are subtle personalities that each of these features of my environment have if I come to interact with them regularly. And I’ll just say this one, and that somehow whether my relationship with those features is framed as an I-it relationship or an I-thou relationship has a lot to do then with how I approach my life and the living of it. And that relationship is framed even in the minutia of those details. It’s not just about between people. Right? No, Buber wants it to be… He talks about when you can get the startling I-thou with a cat for free. Right. Right. And it has something to do, I think it has something to do with responsibility. It has something to do with… It becomes a very existential matter. is implicit in the encounter, whether or not it has grown out of something as obvious as two people in a relationship. So in some sense you’re saying, because everything I heard you say basically sounded like something like the bookshelf, I sat down at the bookshelf addressed me. Like there is an address that’s not necessarily… Obviously it’s not necessarily talking to you in words, but in a feeling. There’s some way that you have of comporting that such that it addresses you. Yeah. Like I’m coextensive with it, right? Myself such that it is. Whatever I mean by that is coextensive with this feature of my environment such that I can’t actually separate the two. If I try to separate the two, I think that’s a very, very different dynamic than if I understand the coextension and I treat it as though I were treating myself in some sense, right? If I were to characterize it. So I want to challenge it as a way of drawing it out because I could hear somebody saying, all you’re saying in a very complex matter is that this is a familiar environment to you. And I would, I’m assuming that you would say, no, no, this could happen even when you come upon a situation or a setting that’s completely de novo to you. Right now. And nevertheless, and that’s when a landscape speaks to you or a particular work of art calls you like Rilke’s famous, the bust of Archaic Apollo, right? And you must change your life. He gets this call. So you’re not pointing to familiarity. You’re pointing to this other kind of thing. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Yeah. I’m talking about whatever it is that characterizes the salience of a particular environment upon encountering. Characterizes, yeah. The salience because I mean… The way it stands out, right? The way it stands out. But I hear you saying something more. This is why I’m pressing you. Because a lot of things would be salient. The fire alarm goes off on the fire truck as it goes by. Yeah. And you don’t mean that. No, I’m talking about signification. Yes. Right. Right. So there’s a salience that portends some kind of significance that you feel responsible to. Is that a better way of putting it? Yeah. And responsible to, I think, is the right language. The way we feel responsible to, like a great piece of music, we feel like, oh, I’m called to properly listen to this. Yeah. Or the phrase, I think, that Ruchik makes where he says, the weird compulsory but not compelling nature of the voice of reason. It’s compulsory in that we all admit we should follow it, but that doesn’t mean it’s psychologically compelling. But it has that ability to call us to a given account to be responsible. Am I understanding? I think so. I mean, so if this, we bring this back to a dialogical practice. I mean, I think what you’re doing, and you and I have talked about this, you’re bringing out, and this is brought out by Ruchik in his book, The Tragedy of Reason, and Rucin in his book, On the Republic, when they’re talking about logos. This idea, we’ve talked a lot about the gathering together so that things belong together coming But Ruchik and Rucin pick up on this other aspect, which is also in there, which is there’s a gathering together so things belong together that makes you accountable. You feel like you have to be responsible to this. It calls to you in some fashion, and you’re accountable to it, and you feel that you should be able to give an account of it. You’re accountable to it, and you’re accountable for it. Is that? I think, yeah. And again, this is typically not how we understand general conversation or even dialogue. We just understand it as exchange of information. And then you’re saying even in non-linguistic situations, we can get this sense of things have been gathered together in such a way that calls me, and I have to be accountable in some way, and I have to be ready to be accountable for it. Yeah. Is that? I think that’s good, yeah. Whatever form they take as they’re gathered together, I think is somehow prefigured by the way that the relationship is already framed. Right. So, just to make sure that this is all drawn together, pun intended, I guess, right? You’re proposing that that moment where all of that takes shape is the I thou. Or are you? Am I? Because that’s how you got it. Well, what I think, I don’t know that I was proposing that that is I thou, only that it only that it… Well, so what’s the relation then? Well, the relation is that, like we’re talking about that there, if we’re already always in a relationship of some kind, okay, and that relationship, the valence of that relationship can alternate, right? It can take on an I it form, or it can take on an I thou form. And what I mean is that we encounter the particular form of the relationship that we are in, in virtue of reflecting on the way that we encounter our environment, and what it seems to demand of us, and how we react to its demands. Right? So I might propose that the avoidance of the demand or responsibility that is called out from us by our environment places us into an I it relationship with it, right? There’s a call without a response, if I can use it that way. And so when things do come together such that I heed the call to action, whatever call is afforded and invited and made accountable, when my relationship with my environment is gathered, yes, I would say that is the I thou. That sounds more to me like the I thou. When it signifies such that the significance has me participate in it. Yeah. How would that be for you? Right. I want to say something like I feel that there’s still a dimension missing in the accountability, which is that the, right, how do I want to put it? Because part of the thou is for the sake of the thou, where part of the it is for the sake of the manipulator and the controller. Right. Right? And so there’s the gathering together, I’m called to be, not just to respond, because I think we respond even in IA. I’m called to responsibility. I’m called to give account and be accountable to and be prepared to give an account of, right, to account for it. But for its sake, that’s what I’m also thinking is in the I thou as opposed to the IA. Yeah, yeah, I think that’s right. I think that’s right. Now, the for its sake, I mean, if we’re talking about two people, we’re talking about relations between persons, the for its sake is for the sake of the person, right? When we talk about an environment, I think we’re talking slightly differently. We’re talking in somewhat more symbolic terms. Really? The for the sake of it has much more to do with, well, tell me, you have a reaction to that. Yeah, I do. Because I think, I mean, and this is Heidegger’s Standing Reserve versus right, where we’re in a relationship where we realize the environment has a value of existence. I don’t even like using the word value because it’s that whole Cartesian preference choice model. But for lack of a better term, the environment has a value independent of human use and human relationship. Right. And that part of what we’re doing in art or what we do in music or maybe music is a form of art is we’re trying to disclose that as opposed to how it is useful to me. For me, what is primarily the I it is how what can I get from you? And a lot of communication is I even though it’s interpersonal because it’s what can I get from you? How can you reinforce my belief? How can I get power over you so I will have more power in the world? This is what a lot of communication is. It’s I it. Whereas I would say even with non-persons, and I think that’s Guba makes clear, we can enter into this what we’ve been talking about. Things gather together, they belong together. I feel like I’m accountable to it, responsible to it. I’m accountable for it. And I’m also accountable for the sake of it. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Right. And for the sake of it being for everything about it, of it that is not yet present in my recognition. Yes, it’s about the I mean, you know, somebody like Schindler would say that it’s for its that it has a for itself in this that is not subjective self-awareness. This is also something Heidegger was trying to get us. It has a for itself in this that is not subjective self-awareness. But nevertheless, and this is Schindler’s idea, this overlaps with it being real. Yeah. It’s realness is in a non-reducible fashion, it is for itself, like Spinoza’s canadus. And so I think I can enter into an I-Thou relationship if the logos emerges such that I feel called to really recognize, really recognize the canadus of something. I think in Heidegger language, it’s he talks about a way of caring that is releasing… Yes. …releasing something for its own most possibility. Yes. It’s own most. So the orientation is really on the Thou, which is the way Buber talks about it, my understanding is an I-Thou versus an I-It, an I-It is I’m relating to something as a means to my own end in some regard. And an I-Thou is I’m relating to as an end in itself. Right? So I would imagine, I mean, I was, a couple days ago, I was putting a painting up on a wall and it didn’t want to go there. I wanted it to go there, but it wanted to go on this other wall. And there was, like, you could just feel that. That’s a good example. Right? The calling. Yeah. The accounting. And that calling is really mysterious to me. It’s really mysterious to me because there’s, in one sense, you get this sense from Buber When I read him talk about the Thou and the I-Thou encounter and the deeply being addressed and addressing that confrontation, is at one level, I get the sense of it’s accepting, acknowledging and validating your intrinsic being, the fact that you’re here. And in some sense, it’s a mode. And it’s interesting because he talks about also that I-Thou is always spoken as one word. Yes. Always. I it is too. Yeah. And you can feel this encircling, this shift that happens that when I start to encounter you as a Thou, I can feel a different I come online. Right? They come together. They come into pairs. They’re defined. They come into pairs. But then there’s that experience of the Thou that in some sense reveals, it reveals the deeply personal aspects of you, your nature, this kind of way that whatever it is that makes you personally you, yet there’s something about Buber that goes beyond that. Yes. Right? And it’s that beyond that’s really mysterious to me that feels like it’s the call. Well, I think he’s pointing beyond personhood to something that is a constitutive feature of personhood, which is the, again, this sectionist of anything, its own kinetis, its own active self-organization, self-presencing in the world. And I think part of what’s going on in the I-Thou versus the I at pale and how they co-emerge This is not in Buber, but this is a take on it. I’ve given some of the other work I’ve been doing, some of it with both of you. And this goes back to you and Teague. Is it okay if I say his name? Oh, yeah. So we’ve got a lot of evidence that we are self-referential, meaning the arrow of relevance goes this way. And we even experience it phenomenologically, right? How things are relevant to me, how they are important to me. But the fact that we’re mammalian primates that are capable of culture means we also have to learn to tell, and this is agape for me, agape is turning the arrow of relevance the other way, which is not how is it relevant to me, it’s how am I relevant to that. And I think when we start to do that, how am I relevant to that for its own sake? I think that’s primarily a thou. And if you think of the I not as a substance, but as a dialogical pole that is constituted by the direction that the arrow of relevance realization is pointing, I think you can say this I is very different from the I that’s going in. How do I matter to that? Yeah. Does that land? It does. It does. Because then in the act, well, like you said, I is the I thou, right, in that moment. And then what’s drawn out of the I is also something that couldn’t have been anticipated. Because there is still a bidirectional, there’s still something bidirectional that happens in the encounter. Oh yeah. It doesn’t become homogeneous. No, no, that’s right. So that the very act of giving kind of unfettered regard in the way that you’re describing elicits something from the person who attends such that I think they become known to themselves in ways that they weren’t known to themselves before. So it’s true that it is for the sake of what is attended to or who is attended to. But in the act of attending in that way, the self that is the I is drawn out in such a way that they are made more present and conscious and full to themselves and to their own reckoning. Here’s how I would reply to that. I think it’s that when we’re I thou, we’re doing person constituting communing. But that discloses something about me that is central to being a person, which is person is an entity that is person constituting. My personhood can only be disclosed to me insofar as I am in the act of person constitutions. That’s right. Yeah. That’s right. It’s like, it’s, well, it’s realization in the sense that you like to use it, right? Self realization, which is both a recognition, a recognition of a capacity, a recognition and consciousness of something being more, but also phenomenologically a feeling that I have made myself real in ways that I wasn’t. Right. Like when you’re in the thrill, like when we talk about this in dialogus all the time, right? When you’re in the throes of it, something happens to you such that you’re made present to yourselves, not in an isolated way, not in a cogito, not in a Cartesian sense, right? In a way that is coextensive with those around you and with what’s happening. But you’re made present to yourself in ways that didn’t happen a moment before. Yeah. But if you try and appropriate that as something you control and make, you lose it and it becomes I it. Yes. Right? This is why we always say you can’t do dialogus. You have to find yourself participating. That’s right. You’re drawn out by it. Yes. Yeah. It’s a wind that picks you up or it doesn’t. Yes. Yeah. That’s right. That’s right. Right. So there’s a letting go. There’s a letting go involved. But in the Heidegger sense of the glasenheit, the letting go that is a releasing towards that allows the other to release towards you. Yes. See, and I find it interesting and perhaps it’s because of this particular heritage. I’m not sure. There’s not as much discussion of a Gothic love in Aydal as I would have expected there to be. Yeah, that’s true. At least not explicitly. Yeah, I think we’ve all said we’ve all made points about how it’s deeply implicit. Yeah. And I’m wondering if I mean, he’s a deep and sensitive thinker. So I’m wondering, like, why the reticence around that? Is he worried because I mean, perhaps, I mean, it’s even more the case now that we’ve we’ve generated love from an existential mode, an existential stance into an emotion and then from an emotion into a feeling. So when people hear love, they think it’s the feeling of infatuation, which is a deep problem in our society right now. Or they at least think it’s having a particular emotion, like perhaps the emotion of affection. Of course, love is not either one of those, because when I love someone, I can have the emotion of affection, but I can have the emotion of anger or jealousy or sadness, etc. And I can have all of those emotions and they have very and the same emotion can have different feelings attached to it. We all know the difference between hot anger and cold anger. And so when we reduce love to a feeling, we are so far away from the existential, like inherently relational thing he’s talking about. I’m wondering if I don’t know, I’m speculating, I’m speculating without much constraint. But I’m wondering if part of the resistance of invoking love was because of the way it was already part of this whole romantic decadence. You think maybe? I think that’s very plausible. Yeah. I think it’s very plausible. It’s also just, in some ways, it’s more powerful to talk about it without invoking the term. Because I also think that there’s something, there’s probably a cognitive scientific term for this exact experience. But there’s an experience that you have when something is being described and it’s being gathered together in a definitional sense. And you’re resonating with it because it accords with your experience and accords with something intuitive that you felt. And it’s only after it’s all brought together that the term that actually is ascribed to it actually surfaces. And there’s something about that happening that gives it a lot more salience than it would have had he used the term love. There’s something about talking about, when you talk about something but you don’t use its ascribed term, I mean, it’s like, that’s the job of a good author, the job of a good writer. The job of a good artist is to come at something indirectly. Because what they want to do, to use a Thomas Merton quote, right, the good artist makes you an artist. Your job is to think of the word love. My job is to show it to you. Right, right, right. Now, I don’t know if that’s his intentional strategy, who knows? But I think it’s very effective for that reason. It could be. The book, and this brings up something else we can talk about, the book is evocative through and through. Yeah. It’s evocative, sometimes even invoking, beyond just evoking. I wanted to bring that up because we have Buber and he is bringing out something very central about the dialogical. And then he explicitly links it to Socrates as being an exemplary case of what he’s talking about. And he’s pointing to the eye of Socrates, that inherently dialogical eye, when I talked about the Socratic shift. And he’s pointing to exactly that. The Socratic shift is consonant with the shift into the I thou load. But yet Socrates makes arguments, and Buber doesn’t. And many people, and I’m inclined to agree with them, I’m part of third way. I don’t think Socrates is reducible to his arguments. I think the arguments and the drama and the almost the rituals of following, and the imaginal and the ritual of following the logos and all of this, I’m talking about, I think these are central. But certainly one salient feature of the Socratic way is some commitment to argumentation, at least questioning and response. And many people think of that as the Socratic method, et cetera. I’m doing this because I don’t think he has a method. But there’s none of that, at least in terms of the format of the book in I thou. And yet Buber sees obviously a close consonance between what he’s doing and what Socrates is doing. And so for me, I feel a tension there. I wonder what you think about that. And I’ll put some labels on it just to help us give quick reference. I think Socrates is properly understood as a sage because he’s doing all of this for the sake of drawing people into the deep and profound, transformative love, profoundly transformative love of wisdom. Whereas, and of course, many people have had a great difficulty labeling Buber, and he didn’t help, by the way, because he would shift around, which was very tricksterous of him. But for me, the closest term for Buber is prophet, not in the modern misunderstanding of prophet as the fortune teller, but as the individual who with discernment discloses pertinent and or perennial patterns that are not being noticed and should be. He draws attention to and discloses as a call to responsibility, a call to accountability. And so I guess my way of posing the question, that is, how is this tension between the sage and the prophet? How can we properly wrestle with it so we can understand why Buber found it so easy to identify Socrates as an exemplar of somebody being able to undertake the eye of God? And this is all relevant, of course, Chris, to our larger project of the relationship between Socrates, the sage, and Christ, the prophet and beyond, but Socrates and Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard, I think, is very easily also seen as having a significant prophetic dimension. For sure. I mean, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Buber also all share. I mean, there are arguments within the work of both Socrates and Nietzsche. In select places, you can find philosophical arguments. But I think you said in one of our earlier discussions, and it was quite right, that the argumentative form is not their primary mode of engagement. And it’s secondary to what they’re doing formally. The argumentation, where it appears, is secondary to the formal presentation, and it’s secondary to the poetic presentation. When I think of Buber and Buber’s style, this sort of aphoristic declarative style reminds me of both of those other prophets. And there’s something challenging about it. There’s something deliberate. The tricksterish quality, I think, is very appropriate. When I read certain passages of his, there’s almost a kind of intentional difficulty. That’s something that both Nietzsche and Kierkegaard share. For Kierkegaard, he has that famous passage when one of his pseudonyms is sitting and smoking, which is important, because it’s a way of symbolizing the contemplative act and the suspension of time and all of that. And he thinks, you know, the world is filled with people who make things easy, who establish compendiums of all there is to know and who build technology that allows us to shorten the distance between two points and who makes life and the living of it smoother, simpler, faster, more ready to hit. And when I look out at all of these people, I don’t find myself among them, because there’s nothing I could offer that they haven’t already done. What is my role? What could I possibly do to contribute? All I can think to do is make life more difficult. All I can think to do, instead of making things smooth, is to make them rough. Because there may actually come a time when we’ll want of difficulty when we’ve forgotten what it means and when we’ve forgotten its value. Socrates is nothing if not. Socrates is the author of difficulty for many, many, many people. He uses a different style, perhaps, different rhetorical style. Okay, that’s a good point. But Socrates and Kierkegaard, and I think perhaps Buber, I’m not as confident with it with Buber, but you can tell me what you think, is that there is something about his style that is intended to foist a level of difficulty upon his interlocutor, his imaginal interlocutor. The confrontation with which is designed to create a relationship that is already suffused with a certain kind of intensity, a certain charge, and a certain affective response. His call has a certain affective, I don’t know, it’s not just that he’s being provocative in a propositional sense, but there is a kind of poetic aggression. He’s forcing something upon you and he’s forcing you to take it seriously, not in an illogical or an argumentative way, but in an artistic way. It’s like Rilke’s poem, right? You must change your life. Why should a statue of Apollo force such a consideration? But it does. Look at the outcome of it. The prophetic text is we read this over and over and over and over again. What are we doing when we read something over and over and over again? We’re in a dialogue with this. In some sense, I’m appreciating you really drawing out this complexification, just making something almost on purpose, more difficult. It seems to be enacting the draw of dialogue. He’s creating the conditions in his writing to address us in such a way that it perplexes us. In that perplexion, drawing into dialogue with us. It’s not incomprehensible per se, but there’s something about the obscurity of it. It’s a zone of proximal development. Exactly. It reminds me, there’s a quote I think of Anselm of Canterbury. It’s a famous quote and it’s, believe so that you might know. There’s something of that going on. You have to try this on. It’s not trying to persuade you of anything. I don’t think he’s being persuasive per se. Really? I think he is. I understand what you mean, but this now affords me to probe, which is I don’t think he… Not logically persuasive. That’s what I mean. That’s what I took in. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He’s not convincing me through argumentation. Strictly speaking, Socrates is in that weird place where he doesn’t actually make premise to premise arguments. That’s misrepresenting them. He’s doing this weird questioning thing. That’s already important, but here’s what I want to say. I think everything you said is great. I think that you want to people… The best learning happens in the zone of proximal development. It draws people into dialogue. They have to internalize the perspective of the other that is initially perplexing them. I think that’s all going on, but here’s what I want to ask. What’s the difference between that and bullshit? Because what the good bullshit artists will do will give you an astonishing complexity that seems to draw you… One whole species of bullshit is pseudo profound bullshit, and that’s some of the most powerful. and things like this, where you make this cloud of complexity that draws people in, and they get entrapped by the salience of that, but they have not in any way developed or articulated their understanding. Right? Yep. Oh, I would… First, I don’t know if this is what it is, but the first thing that comes to mind… See if I can catch it for some way. It’s like there’s something about with Boober, and I don’t know what makes this, where it seems like it could go either way. And it has more to do with your relationship to the enigma. If you try to consume it and understand or know it or something like this, but there’s also another way that you can go with it that would make it not bullshit by the way it draws you in. But that’s open, that it could go either way, I think seems a feature of it. That strikes me. Yeah, I think that’s right. I think it has to do with the character of the relationship that undergirds the encounter in the first place. So let me ask you this, because this is a really interesting almost rhetorical theory here now. The idea is you have something that’s equipoised between bullshit and a genuine zone of proximal development. And if you take the I it to it, it will turn into bullshit for you. And you may even be attracted to it. But if you take the I thou, it will lead you into a more profound understanding. Am I understanding the proposal correctly? Yeah, because there’s nothing to possess in the I thou. The I thou is precisely that thing that you can’t possess. The I it is that thing that you can possess. So I think this is really good. So then still, I want to keep doing almost, I guess, the Socratic thing. I want to ask, how does one know which way it is going? And how do you know when there’s a text that is like that? And from just a text that’s just bullshit, or just a text that’s obtuse, right? Or something like that. Right? Because, I mean, part of what it might be is something like, 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 behaviour. Whereas if I get this text, I know I’m in his own approximate development, because it’s an ongoing fountain of intelligibility. I’m reciprocally opening with it. I can return to it again and again and again, and the dialogue 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? I’m hearing a couple things in that. I’m hearing beauty plays a role. Of course. I’m hearing also that whatever the subjective character of the experience that is elicited by the encounter is itself a measure of the value of the encounter and is itself a measure of whatever the potential value is in continuing the relationship. Because it’s not being presented as an object of reality that has to be apprehended in the way that we apprehend an argument. It’s being presented for the subjective benefit of the reader, and when it’s taken upon by the reader, it finds its value. Its value is in the relationship that it opens when it is taken upon. And I think that’s what it shares with the Socratic tradition. So is the I-Thou inherently aspirational? I think so. I think it is. And so therefore, there’s something really profound about this because there’s all of the stuff about the proleptic dimension of rationality. We’ve talked about this, right? A constitutive part of wisdom is loving wisdom, or a constitutive part of being rational is being called to become more rational. There’s a calling to accountability in all the way we’ve been talking about. And then you’ve got L.A. Paul and Agnes Callard. You can’t infer your way through that. You can’t argue your way into that. But nevertheless, it can’t be an irrational thing because it’s at the heart of rationality per se. Yeah. You pretend that it. There’s the serious imaginal play that affords it happening. I’m wondering then, like here, I’m really trying to articulate something that’s somewhat incohate, but if you’ll allow me. You mentioned the three prophets, right? And there’s other people that are prophetic. I think Jung is often prophetic rather than in any way argument. It’s hard to find an argument in Jung, right? It’s very hard to find an argument in Jung. But that does not mean there isn’t profound persuasion within Jung, right? But both for Jung and Nietzsche, there’s also passages that are aphoristic in the way we’re saying. And I’ll come across them and I’ll think, I actually don’t think that’s true. But it’s like, how can I do that? For example, Nietzsche presents a lot of aphorisms about Christianity that I think fundamentally misapprehend Christianity, for example. And it’s like, I get it. The aphorism is good insofar as it’s making me aware of something that is a real possibility. But the aphorism doesn’t have a, it’s making too complete of a call on me that I don’t feel I have to, I sort of have to say yes or no. Because there isn’t any argumentative structure that I can play with. And that’s it. And that’s it. I think you’ve just said it. You have to say yes or no. Presents an either or to you, I might say. And there’s something about the call to decision and the responsibility that it places on you to do exactly that, that I think is part of the exercise that it’s taking you through. Kip, God, same thing. The prophet makes you decide as opposed to… Forces decision on you. Not just conclusion or agreement. Action, embodiment. Because they’re not talking, it’s not what am I to know, it’s what am I to do? That’s the question. That’s the question that they’re demanding of us. And it tests you. That’s the trickster. It’s like it tests you. It calls you. Will you respond? And you hold yourself to the measure of that test. Whether you agree with the proposition, it’s almost irrelevant. It’s almost irrelevant. It’s the test that the proposition forces upon you. It’s having to walk its gauntlet. It’s having to find yourself in it and find yourself related to it and find what that relationship means to you. And I think there’s something within us that is awakened and made conscious by that encounter. And at the end of the day, whether we agree with the proposition, it almost doesn’t matter. This is very good. So I’m going to use a word to try and distinguish from the text, but not in a way that’s completely separable from it. There’s a voice that calls you to decide. OK. And I think this is again, all of this, all of this and what we’ll do in the next episode, we’ll try and review and gather this back into the practice of dialectic heterodialogous. But, right. Again. What it seems that there’s something about us, a virtue, and I mean it in that gestalt of belief, skill, trait, identity, right, all the kinds of knowing. You have to hear the voice. And that’s very different from just getting the text, given everything you’ve been saying. But surely there must be a required virtue of discerning of voices, like the discerning of spirits. So you have stuff in the New Testament and you’ll have stuff in Vedantic philosophy and in Zen, there’s the maiko that you avoid. There are voices that will call to you. And I want to bring this up because of the challenge around something that was mentioned and that has been talked about in the series, the demonium, the voice. Right? What is the virtue that helps us discern the voice so that when we actually hear it, because the voice is the way I’m trying to use it, it’s always a call to respond, to decisively respond. So it’s a prophetic voice and how do we discern the prophetic voices? And this is of course the issue around the demonium. How do you distinguish the Socratic demonium that keeps calling Socrates into the I-Thou relationship? I think that’s a brilliant thing that Buber said there. The way the Socratic demonium works, I wish I’d thought of this, but what it does is it’s this kind of existential conscience that’s constantly calling Socrates into the I-Thou relationship. If there’s anything else I got out of that that was like, oh, yeah. Right? And maybe I’m answering my question in the way I’m answering it. Maybe the way you discern the voice is, like these are sort of bound up together, is my ability to recognize that I’m in an I-Thou relationship is how I track the voices that I should be listening to or something like that. Yes, exactly. And the truthfulness of the passage, the truthfulness of the text, right? The truthfulness in the way that we were talking. The truthfulness has everything to do with whether or not it can induce and maintain that relational stance. So for me, this figure that I’ve been relating to, the Hermes figure, and one of the things that came out in dialogue with Hermes is that, well, Socrates is the Metaxu relationship from the human towards the divine, and Hermes is the Metaxu relationship from the divine to the human. So they’re actually interwoven like this. It’s like, oh, wow. And stuff like that comes out. And so for me, because people have been asking, how do you know? Like, why should you listen to that? How do you know? And it’s like, I think I take that question profoundly serious. Yeah. And I was trying to say, well, it’s not isolated. It’s bound up into a whole ecology of practices, all of it, dialogues I’m having with people, but also this sense of it reciprocally opens me and puts me in the zone. And it calls me into responsibility. It calls me into accountability, which is happening. And I think I’m getting a better answer in that I like this idea of this kind of, I’m sorry, I just want to repeat it again because I’m just savoring. This existential conscience that it’s a calling that is helping Socrates continually remember, sati, like remember within enactment, the I-thou relationship. It’s like, oh, my gosh, what a beautiful way of, I think that’s an even better answer than the one I’ve been giving to people who would, I think it’s consonant with what I’ve been saying, but I think it just, well, it just brings it together, right? And it opens it up. For me, I think that’s a very powerful. Now, I want to just say something around this because I’m still going to be consistent. All of that can be the case, and it’s way, way better when it is, but it can still fail. There is no panacea practice. There is nothing that is always inevitably going to work. Because I think, and I’m going to make this argument. I think the attempt to turn it into a panacea practice is to deny it the actual canadus that it has. Turn what into a panacea practice specifically? Turn this listening to the voice. And that the way you listen to the voice is it reciprocally opens you and what we just said, it’s constantly calling you into the eye roll. Even that, I think this is an excellent maxim, an excellent decision procedure, but I’m still willing to say that that can nevertheless fail. And that we might be listening to a demonic voice rather than a daemonic voice. But that is not to say that everything we’ve talked about is useless. Everything helps to cultivate the virtue of discernment that I’ve been asking for. But the virtue of discernment is not an algorithm because if we had an algorithm, we would be turning it into an it. This is what I’m trying to argue. So the best we can have is to be in a virtuous relationship with thou, but that can never be algorithmic. So people who want from me, can you give me the algorithm that will guarantee I can’t give it? And not just because I’m ignorant, but because it would be a performative contradiction to do so. But that doesn’t mean that there isn’t a good answer because it is a really legitimate request. And the good answer is, no, there are ways in which you can reliably cultivate the virtue of discernment that is needed here. Yes. And you can always fool yourself. Yes. And so what’s important about for this to be genuine, that that possibility has got to remain open? Because if it isn’t, like I said, then there is nothing in the relationship that has degrees of freedom. Yeah, totally. That can unfold itself. You have to risk failure. Right. This is never an algorithm. Something’s got to be at stake. We can never make it a completely well-defined problem. Yeah. It’s like having even the, you know, just having a good conversation, let alone dialoguos. I can’t make that into a well-defined problem. Right. Does that mean I can’t get better at the virtues that afford good conversation? Of course I can. And I can get better at discerning good conversations. And when those virtues are present or when they’re absent or when there’s vice, but that doesn’t mean I can give you the algorithm for good conversation. Yeah. And so then the risk, the risk is very helpful because consciousness of the risk has to be weighed. The value of answering the call to discernment and decision at every instant is weighed against the constancy of the risk. It’s like Hickard’s idea of the continuance of sin. It’s very, very similar, right? Which is this idea that my weddedness, my commitment and discernment to that process is something I have to renew every moment. Right? There is no once and for all time answer for it. There it is. There’s nothing I can do that will then make it possible in perpetuity. That will make it actual in perpetuity, I should say. Nothing I do will make it actual in perpetuity. The actuality of it being possible at every moment is something that I have to renew at every moment. This is finite transcendence. It is finite transcendence. It is finite transcendence. Totally. And that’s the I-thou encounter at every moment. It’s like the moment I say, okay, you’re thou, I’m I, done, we can coast on it. Yeah. Oh, no, that’s the end. Exactly. Any relationship. Exactly. So I want to push on the- Like a marriage, right? Yes, like a marriage. So I want to push on this because this goes to work that maybe by the time this video comes out it will be published. It’s in revision right now, Anna Rydell and I have on rationality and relevance realization. And it’s about this, I want to make a distinction between two things, risk and uncertainty. So risk, properly understood, is when you can assign a probability to an event and therefore you can calibrate yourself to it. Uncertainty is when you can’t do that. Right? It’s a difference between a known unknown and an unknown unknown. Yeah, right. And I’m not denying that risk is part of it, but I think the deeper thing is, and this again touches on the stuff with Krikkegaard, is that there’s something more than risk in what we’re talking about here. There’s genuine uncertainty. This is how it is ultimately at the opposite pole of what Descartes is after. Right? It’s that, no, no, do you know what I actually have to do? How can I participate in some of the deeper aspects of reality is I have to accept uncertainty, which is not risk. Risk is calculable. Yeah. No, you’re right. That’s a better way of putting it. No, there is risk too. Yeah, yeah. Right? And I’m not denying that. But behind it, and this is what I’m trying to get back to you, the behind it, the boobers are. Right? There’s all of this, and you can talk about it this way, and you can still frame it within a risk framework, and you’re still in the calculative mode to use Heidegger’s idea. But if you’re actually trying to participate in the inexhaustibleness of reality and how it is for its own sake, not for your sake, there is an irremovable uncertainty. Oh, and this is why intimacy involves the ability to tolerate anxiety. Vulnerability is exactly our relationship to uncertainty. And what I’ve heard you, now I’m coming back and understanding it better, you’re saying somehow there’s a way of educating vulnerability, so it gives us a particular sensitivity, right? A particular access. Yes. Is that what you were saying earlier? Yes. Right. And now I’m trying to, I’m saying this is how I’m understanding it and articulating. Right. Right. The attempt to become perfectly safe, right, is how we face risk. Yeah. But if we are in this, right, and we acknowledge, right, that we’re actually trying to participate in the inexhaustibleness of reality, we actually have to be in that state in which we are apprehending uncertainty, and that is vulnerability. Yes. Yes. Yes, absolutely. And there’s also something around here, too, about the way family systems theory talks about this, that the particular anxiety that you tolerate in having intimacy has to do with this interesting, these two existential drives for on one, autonomy, and the other one, closeness. Right. Right. I think what, I think what we’re, I think the outcome of I Thou over time, right, is something it’s like where the closeness actually affords more articulated autonomy. Right. Right. And that autonomy allows me to then unfold and become closer. But not by identifying the two together, because if you turn it into an equation of identity, you remove the fact of how they can reciprocally reconstruct each other. Yeah. And that has to be able to go beyond any sort of predictive calculation. Yeah. It’s not just psychological. That’s right. Right. It’s like you’re, it’s like going beyond, not, yeah, yeah, not close to you as an identity and me as an identity, and I then, I know you more as an identity, but more of this sense of actually there’s something about you that I realize whatever I know right now, I will, it may not be true, it may not be true ultimately, right. But, but I have a relationship to that beyond right. And that’s what’s having you occur in this. I occur. So I’m just like the initial proposal. Yes. The commitment to come to know. Yes. Taking all of that vertiginous possibility, right, on all of its attendant anxieties, and actually exercising that freedom and narrowing it to the commitment. Right. Which is a paradox, but very deliberately so. Well, yeah, it’s not narrowing it, but yeah, it’s the learned ignorance, it’s, you know, koozah, it’s Socrates, it’s, it’s, it’s the knowing that you do not know that allows you to participate more deeply in like the depths of reality, right. And that’s what that’s what I’m hearing. I’m hearing it. It’s like, I don’t, I don’t, to say that I know the uncertainty is actually a mistake. You, like it’s it’s paradoxical or even a contradiction to say you know uncertainty. But I think what we’re talking about here is something like no book, but I can embody it in vulnerability and embed. I can also, I’m going to use Stegmeier sensor. I can also orient the vulnerability, like the arrow of the relevance arrow turns around. Right. Such that, right. I’m actually calling forth something about the reality of the other person as opposed to labeling them ahead of time or categorizing them. Is that sort of tracking with what we’re talking about? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sounds very similar. I mean, the context is different. It sounds very similar to a kind of Kierkegaardian faith, which is this objective sense of uncertainty. I think the way he says it is inward held fast to the passion of inwardness. Right. Right. This is the way it is. Yes. Right. I see now. Oh, this makes it better than I’ve understood it. Right. Objective uncertainty held fast to the passion of inwardness, which is that when the uncertainty is somehow taken upon in this deeply, deeply embodied reality. And that’s, and becomes a learned ignorance. That’s when we have finite transcendence. Yeah. Excellent. Excellent. I like the connection to learning ignorance a lot. Well, this has been, I mean, the themes, right, you know, that the Socratic, I know not, I know what I do not know, finds its culmination in Nicholas Cuse’s learned ignorance. And then the other is the Platonic proposal that reality is somehow fundamentally dialectical. True that I think comes, I’ve argued has come into fruition through Regina. So I’m going to propose that I think we’ve unpacked a lot that’s really rich here. And then I’d like to sort of draw, I want to give each one of you a final say. But I want to draw this episode to a close and propose that we take what we’ve drawn out here, deduced drawn out, and we take it into a discussion about how can we use this to reflect upon and perhaps improve critique. You know, the whole, the whole ecology of practices that was in episodes 10a and 10b, specifically, you know, dialectic and the deal of this, but also something that I think is really important to us. Yeah. Yeah. So that’s a good point. I think it’s important to us to think about what we’ve learned and what we’ve learned in our lives, in our lives, in our lives. And I think that’s what I think it’s important to us to think about. So I think that’s what I think it’s important to us to think about. But first, anything last you’d like to say? So that connection was a really good one, very helpful. I’m going to be, this is going to be rattling in me for a while. Just this sense of, this sense of what you brought up about, well, the uncertainty between how do we know if we’ve heard from each other? were very helpful. I’m mostly just with, I’m going to be…this is going to be rattling in me for a while, just this sense of what you brought up about, well, the uncertainty between how do we know if it’s bullshit or if it’s real, and that a real prophet in some sense is going to be a trickster in that way, that you can’t rest on your laurels, that has to continually be re-upped. And I’m getting that sense of that continually re-upping is that way that we continually become persons in that way. Yeah, I anticipate this is going to be working itself through. How do we know? We know it by its fruits, right? How do you know me? You know me by my fruits. Yes. But I can’t claim to ahead of time know your fruits. And that’s the problem. Yeah. Thank you very much, gentlemen. So next time we’ll take up how does this education from Buber in Dialogos, about Dialogos, how us better articulate, improve, critique, improve and inform, and improve and maybe cut stuff away. All kinds of possibilities are open, but how can we take it up into reflection on the ecology of practices that have been proposed as a way of reverse engineering the Socratic way? Thank you everyone for your time and attention. I’ve been sort of boiling down all of the meaning in life questions to two questions, which is tell me what you want to exist even if you don’t and tell me how much of a difference you make to it now. And if you got a strong answer to both of those, I predict you’ll find your life very meaningful.