https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=srYgkX3Rdig
If I’m sitting with Guy, like, let’s say we’re in a circling exercise. Sure. And Guy is asking me questions, and he’s imagining himself as me, and he’s venturing… He’s venturing a guess at what I might be feeling or thinking. Oh. It’s not the astuteness of his imagination that draws me to him. It is the interest that he has in the question itself. Mm-hmm. That is what galvanizes me. I’m joined again by my good friends Guy Sendstock and Christopher Mas de Pietro, and we’re going to pick up on what we were doing in the previous episode. We were taking a look at a, I guess I’ll call him as neutrally as possible, a thinker who made Dio Logos the center of his thoughts and his framework. This is the work of Martin Buber. And I was very grateful for that discussion. A lot was drawn out and a lot was articulated. It was a lot of insight. I’m very grateful for that, so first of all, thank you. And then what we’re going to try to do is we’ll keep doing that, but now we’re going to turn the focus of that project onto how could that inform or transform a lot of the practices that have been discussed and demonstrated in this series. So I’m going to turn it over to Chris and Guy to get it started about some of the insights that caught your eye or your ear and how they might help us to, first of all, see more deeply what’s already happening in the practices or perhaps, and that’s what I mean by inform, or how it might give us some advice of some maybe possible innovations or modifications we want to bring to the practices that reflect what we’ve learned from the engagement with Buber’s work. So who would like to go first? One of the things that we talked about when we were in, when we actually did the practices episode and explained the dialectic and the dialogos and did a demonstration of it, and one of the things that I think, and as we do the workshops where we have people come and we all try it out together, and we just did one two weeks ago, our fifth one. And every time, what’s fascinating to me is that every time we do it, I feel as though I understand what we’re doing better. The practice itself becomes more and more of a vow, in other words, right? Its particular abundance becomes far more open-ended, even as it becomes tighter and more well-defined, its possibility also becomes more open-ended, which is, I think, an interesting way of understanding the paradox of it. We double down on it on the one hand, we clarify on the one hand, and as we clarify and proscribe it in one sense, it also becomes a little bit more open-ended in another sense. One of the things that is very tempting, even right now what we’re doing, it’s very tempting to become attached to the letter of what we say, the proposition of what we say, what we pitch and what we propose. And think of the insight itself, the semantic content of the insight, as the fruit of the process. And I think as we do it over and over and over again, it becomes very, very clear it’s not the fruit of the process, right? That’s an instrument in the process. And that, and we were talking about how what is said part of the irony, I mean that in the technical sort of the Kierkegaardian sense that you and I were discussing, that part of the irony of the practice is that it’s not an exercise to gain objective insight. That’s not what it’s for. The exercise is to develop a subjective relationship to a virtue. And that the act of proposing in the direction of a virtue is to deepen and unfold that relationship and to become progressively more intimate with it, right? To make it more and more and more and more of a vow. And that’s something about the practice and that’s something about the structure of the process and the repetition of the process, repetition in the recollection forward sense, right? Not in the stalled sense, but in the progressive sense of repetition, of vertical repetition, you could say, is that the repetitiousness of the exercise helps to renew the commitment to treat the virtue as a vow. And that commitment has to be renewed every time we propose, we err in the proposal, we know we err in the proposal, and that we have to propose again. And so there’s something about that repetitious structure that I think is meant to, when we’re doing it properly, renew the commitment to regard the virtue collectively as a vow. And there seems to be something about regarding one another as thou that helps to triangulate that move. And I don’t know exactly how that works, but it strikes me that one another, being thou to one another, and that being bidirectional, right? Because there’s a certain vulnerability in being a vow, right? So it’s having to treat another as a vow, disposing yourself to receive the kind of attention and virtue of which you would become a vow. And then to use that reciprocal opening to understand the virtue on those terms. And that’s not as easy as it sounds because it requires, there’s a sacrificial element to it. You have to be willing to err and err again and err again, knowing everything you say is in some sense wrong, wrong in the sense that it doesn’t capture the virtue, right? It’s not equal to it. And so in some sense, being an error, being an error in the letter of what we say, serves the building and development of the relationship. And it’s at the level of the relationship that we come to know the virtue, right? So anyway, maybe I’ll start there. Yeah, and that thing we were highlighting in the last conversation about an eye vow, it’s not the question of how you’re relevant to me, but how I’m relevant to you, right? And I would say I really saw this clearly in the last one. I think, and looking back, I saw, you know, in every single one, but it was just really prominent. The last workshop. Yeah, the last workshop. Is this people sharing about their experience, but from that place of being relevant to the virtue, right? There was this kind of, like almost a, there was almost a ecstatic, there was an ecstatic place people were talking about, right? That it’s as if they realized that they were significant to the degree that they were able to participate in something glimpsing, or it would start to glimpse the universal thing when it would catch. There’s a sense of being significant in that sense. So it was really thou, right? And the ecstaticness coming from them was, it was really interesting, because if that was towards themselves, they’d be so inflated, right? But it was this, it wasn’t an inflation, it was an ecstaticness, right? So this is this virtuous vulnerability. And because one of the things we warn people about in these practices is try to resist sort of the attractive pull of autobiography, right? Because autobiography is about trying to better because autobiography is about trying to bend everything towards the self, right? Even though the first autobiography is Augustine actually trying to invert that arrow the other way around. People don’t read the confession of the first great autobiography, or if they do, they don’t read it deeply enough to see that that’s the point. So the thing I want to ask about that then is, first of all, I want to make one modification. I would want to say that it’s not, that the I thou isn’t subjective objective, I would say the I thou is transjective from which the subjective and objective poles can be posited. And that what people are realizing with this intimacy that they have not understood, they’ve not encountered before, but they’ve always longed. The only way I can make sense of that kind of platonic anamnesis, that’s Plato’s word for remember. That’s Plato’s word for remembering or recollecting is that they’ve always been operating, if I can put it that way, from transjectivity, but they’ve never realized in a phenomenological sense transjectivity. And I think the I thou relationship is a profound transjective. We talked about it, it’s primordial, it’s underneath. And it’s also generative. It’s not just reflective, it’s not just representative, it’s generative. It’s creating persons. So what I wanted to say then is I want to try and bring the question I brought in when we got into the discussion of, there’s this interrelationship between discerning the voice and realizing the I thou relationship and being in an aspirational zone of proximal development. Is there, I mean, it seems to me that what we have to be doing all of that to some degree to get what you’re putting your finger on, that people are willing to make the turning the arrow around. But I’m wondering again, part of it is the fact that we choose virtue as a thing. Because typically if you’re trying to make a decision because typically if you ask people, would you want virtues to continue to exist even if you didn’t, they say yes. So the two, 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. Right? And so we choose a virtue because people generally answer strongly to the first. They would want it to exist in a world even if they didn’t exist in that world because they see sort of the inherent value of virtue or something like that. But we’re trying to get them to come into right relationship. And I want to, I know I’m not trying to challenge what you said, Chris, I’m trying to balance it. How do we balance off them? Or how could we better do it? Because perhaps I think we’re doing it. We might be doing it. We must be doing it in some way. How do we balance off them feeling that they matter and make a difference to, they’re connected, they’re relevant to the virtue? And you’ll see this is kind of like D’Amino’s paradox. While also kind of doing what you said, that they are not coming into a semantic grasp of it. So how, I mean, this is also the paradox of love, right? So how is it that they can feel that they’re in right relationship to it, ratio religio, that they are being relevant to it, while at the same time reminding them that they’re probably mistaken about it? And the it being? The virtue. The virtue, yeah. Right? So this is, you want to say you’re probably erring around this, yet that doesn’t mean you’re not relevantly connected to it. Yeah. You see the problem? Sorry, I had to lay out a bit of a preamble to get that. Right. So how does, in other words, if I can make sure I understand your question, how does error, how does the knowledge of being in error in relation to your apprehension of a virtue incentivize your participation? Or even not even undermine the sense that you are relevant to it? Because if the project is not how does it matter to me, but how do I matter to it? Typically when I’m in error about something, I’m in error about mattering to it. Yeah. Does that make sense as a problematic? And I’m not here proposing how we change a practice. I’m trying to say if we could get a little bit clear about this, we could provide people with better, right? Because you often express a concern about, don’t worry if you’re frustrated. And I’m not saying we shouldn’t do that. But are we fully engaging with their concern? Their concern might be, but if I’m not actually connecting with it, how could I possibly know if I’m relevantly connected to it or having the right relationship with it? Mm-hmm. Now does that make sense now as a problem? Yeah, yeah. And the first thing that I’m kind of coming to is, I don’t think on any of the people who came out and shared about the dialectic and the dialogos that they were just in that were, I don’t think any of them said, I was clearly, we clearly got it right. Right. I don’t think any of them said that actually. Yes, I agree, totally. In fact, I’d say that it was precisely in that they didn’t, they hit an aporia, yet they were in relationship with it while not being able to put it into words. And I think that’s a good point. I think that’s a good point. That somehow not being able to put it into words while not being able to put it into words, into right words, that somehow not being able to put it into right words but still being in contact with it actually had its mean more somehow. Right, because I think the non-propositional connectedness, the religio is more important, right? So I agree that that’s happening. Yeah. Yeah, so using that exact point, I think it has something to do with interest. So let’s imagine for a second, because what’s happening in philosophical fellowship, right? We did it with Buber, for instance, right? Whereas we’re circumambulating Buber. Or encircling the way that you’re doing it with an individual who’s present. Or in dialectic and in the elogos, the way that we’re doing it with a virtue. What is being expressed and conjured again and again and again is the interest that we have in the coming to know of whether it be the virtue or the person. The kind of wonder. Wonder. So let’s maybe take the analogy of the I vow between two people, right? Okay. So let’s do that for a moment and see if we can maybe carry it over to the virtue. If I’m sitting with Guy, like let’s say we’re in a circling exercise. Sure. And Guy is asking me questions, and he’s imagining himself as me, and he’s venturing, he’s venturing a guess at what I might be feeling or thinking. Oh. It’s not the astuteness of his imagination that draws me to him. It is the interest that he has in the question itself. Mm-hmm. Yeah. That is what galvanizes me. That’s what makes me commit to the interaction with him. He might say, you know, I’m imagining something about you, and he might be completely off. Usually it doesn’t happen, incidentally. Usually pretty good. Devastatingly so at times. Yeah. But he might be completely off, but that actually doesn’t deter me. What attracts me to the conversation and the interaction to him, what magnetizes me to him, is the interest he casts to me in the proposal that he makes. It is the gesture of the proposal, far more than the exactitude of its content that actually opens up the relationship. And in fact, depending on the kind of error he makes, he may make errors in such an interesting way. He might be wrong in ways that are so insightful in and of themselves that they might actually open possibilities in how I imagine myself that isn’t what I imagined at all. Mm-hmm. It’s not him according with me or to me. It has everything to do. It’s far more related to attitude than it is related to precision. Mm-hmm. Now, I don’t know how much that carries over to when we’re talking about the virtue, but I do think that there is something about the nature of being in error in an exercise like that that is a demonstration of interest, interest as in commitment. Mm-hmm. Right? In that sense, we compare this a lot to very dramatic exercises like improvisation. There’s a hell of a lot of improvisation in this kind of exercise. Yes, that’s right. It’s an artistic exercise in as much as it is anything else. And because of that, making creative errors isn’t, to use that terrible, tired expression, it’s not a bug, it’s a feature. It’s actually what opens up the possibility. So error is necessary, right? Mm-hmm. It’s necessary because part of this is actually a creative enterprise. So I think this isn’t exactly what you’re saying, but it’s what is sparking in me, which is an instance of exactly what I’m going to talk about. So it’s not the content of the error. It is like when you’re on an errand and the two words are related in that the errors are actually helping evolve you towards the thing. There’s a, it’s something like the affordance of reciprocal change and the reciprocal change of reciprocal change and the rate at which you feel the person is homing in on you. If, for example, we don’t like interest that is not doing that, that’s the stalker, and we don’t regard that as something positive, we regard that as something very, very negative, right? And if the errors that Guy were making were neither systematic towards you or systematic of him, let me explain what I mean by that. So one of the great insights of Piaget is everybody was doing IQ testing way before him and they were throwing away the error and only looking at the success rate. And then Piaget said, I wonder if the errors are systematic, if there are patterns in the error, because the systematic error actually reveals the competence of an individual rather than just circumstance. And lo and behold, there’s systematicity in the error. And what I mean by that is if his errors, if they have this kind of ordering, rather than the content of the error, you get a sense of how he is constraining. And also, right, if, right, right, so you get insight into him, but you also get the way he’s giving you feedback on the errors is also giving you information about the constraint. Yes, exactly. And this is, you know, Heidegger’s notion of the connections between error and going on an error. Oh, yeah. Right? Yeah. And so the idea that, and I’m trying to get on your notion here, but that there’s something disclosing about the self-organizing pattern. There’s a logos in the error that, right, is nevertheless the logos, right? Yes, yes. And so in a predictive processing framework, right, the system doesn’t orient just to error. It orients to patterns of error and rates of error. Because those are actually deeply informative about how it should update its model. Yes. Is that? And that’s why, boy, yes, and that’s why giving an account of your error, which there is a sacrament for, we talked about in reference to Kierkegaard, called confession, is actually an instance of the logos, right? Being accountable to, giving account of, is exactly the act of gathering oneself together and making conscious to oneself and to the thou you’re facing what the constraints of your encounter actually are such that you can know them. I’m going to throw away one more piece of cog-sci and then talk about a sort of a meta-virtue that is, I think, we were thinking about maybe softness and as a meta-virtue, but I’ll come around to this. So one of the heuristics that’s proposed for enhancing insight, the hot insight, is called the notice and variance heuristic. And what this heuristic is is, I failed to formulate this problem, I failed to formulate this problem, I failed to formulate this problem, I failed to formulate this problem. Now I can just leave that as arbitrary, or I can say, maybe there’s systematicity in my error. I’m going to look for what I’m not changing in each one of my mistakes, because that’s probably a good thing to try and change, so I’ll get success, and that will actually provoke insight. But that requires a terrific kind of epistemic humility. It requires you to look at the errors and pay serious attention in them in order to see if there might be systematicity in the error, because that can actually disclose. So if you’re seeing that you’re getting the feedback and you’re realizing that there’s a certain kind of constraint that might be limiting from the systematicity in the error, then you know, well, maybe that’s what I press on, maybe that’s what I challenge or open up, because then that could get me closer to the connection. Yeah. Does that make sense? That does make sense. Okay, but here’s the problem. Yeah. That works really well as a model of you and I. How does it work when we’re doing it with a virtue? Right. Because the virtue, like, we, we are in a weird double role. First of all, the meta, the meta virtue of humility comes to the fore, but we are somehow having to stand in for the virtue for each other and act as the feedback on that. We are giving the voice to the virtue by which it does this with each other. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And what, and what is it, what is it then that is letting us know, yay, no? Exactly. If it’s not, if I don’t have the authority and the virtue, and you don’t have the authority and the virtue, what exactly are we, what’s giving us? So is there a possibility that, right, we are also, we’re at least implicit, like, implicit learning, and I mean that like in the card size sense, we’re picking up on patterns in each other and through each other of ourselves, and that we’re actually using that to give voice to the virtue, to tell us how, whether or not we’re sort of dead reckoning towards the virtue. Yeah, yeah. So the we space is a defining constitutive feature of this working. That’s a fundamental way in which it’s different from dialogue, because this we space is performing an irreplaceable role that can’t be captured in traditional, just interpersonal dialogue. That’s the argument I’m making. So I just want to make sure I’m getting what you’re saying. So there’s a way that we’re implicitly recognizing patterns in each other’s bodies, tonalities. I’m almost guaranteeing you that we’re doing this. That’s how implicit learning works. Totally, totally. And the geist comes out of that. Right. And then the geist is what gives voice to the virtue. And that is the only way we could do it. Whereas if we didn’t have the we space, the geist, the logos as an agent, there was nothing to give voice to the virtue so that we could enter into that relationship. Right, right. Okay, so this is good. So then what’s the relationship between the emergence of the geist from that we space and the vulnerability that we dispose toward error and the consciousness of that error? Because I think there’s a connection there. What is that? Well, I mean, from a cog-side perspective, and that’s not going to be sufficient. We’re going to have to bring it back into the existential. So this is just to get the ball rolling. I think what we’re getting, and this is a way of, again, sort of understanding vulnerability. I’m just on the edge of this, so give me space. But remember that I was saying about the systematicity, the kinetics, right? The radius, right? The rate of the error, being information independent of the content of the error, right? And so what if, as we are open to the geist, we that we are experiencing an enhancement of the rate at which we feel we are moving towards the virtue? Say that one more time, if you would. So the geist is constellated. And then the geist has, and I’m not saying the consciousness, but the geist has a collective intelligence, right, that is giving us this guidance of how to move towards the virtue, giving voice to the virtue. And what if we are picking up that our vulnerability to that is being rewarded, I’m trying to use some of the language, rewarded by the increase in the rate at which we are feeling guided by the geist. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. That’s the feedback, the sense of the sacrifice of my vulnerability towards it, right? The rate in which that vulnerability is fed back, is like on, off, on, off, is coming from the geist. Yes. Right. And the slowness or the rapidicity of that is what’s giving, that’s the relationship between the vulnerability and the geist. Right. So the way I would then try and bring it a little bit is that we’ve talked about this as a flow state this way, but I’m now thinking that there’s something like a flow state this way between us and the geist. And as long as we’re in the flow state, we’re getting basic feedback, keep doing what you’re doing. Now, the flow state is not perfect, but it’s really, really good, right? All the arguments, the ogarth and the stuff that Leo and I published about. But what I’m trying to get at is I’m trying to get at a non-supernaturalistic account of what it is when we’re talking about the voice of the virtue. I think the geist takes shape this way, and we get religio, we get bound to it and with each other to it in this way, such that it becomes the voice of the virtue. Yeah, we conform. So the virtue can become a thou for us. Because the virtue is not a thou in and of itself, right? Right. Yeah. So that collective presence that emerges gives us a kind of generalized model of error and reflects it back. And basically, the reflection of that generalized model of error becomes then the center of the dialogue. Right. It’s like how each one of us is sort of picking up an aspect of Spinoza in the philosophical fellowship. And we all know, at least implicitly, it’s inadequate. But the sense of somehow between all of these, we could remove bias and get closer back to the original presence of the perspectives of Spinoza is something like that. But it’s almost a negative presence, right? In the sense that whatever, however it is that the… It’s like Socrates’ demonium. It’s not telling you what to do. It’s only telling you… Telling you what not to do. It’s telling you when you’re erring beyond the point of where you can return to track. It dialogues with your error, in effect. Right. So I think properly understood, and this goes to some stuff that we were talking about with one of the crew. The negative theology. Well, not just the negative theology. I’m proposing the Geist as the persona for the virtue. Right. Yeah. So it’s a kind of gradual emptying out. Yes. Right? And of course, that’s what the dialogo says, right? It’s a gradual… It’s a kenosis. It’s a gradual, gradual withdraw and emptying of the virtue unto itself. The more that the error gives greater resolution and negative reference to it as it withdraws. Yeah. Something like that. Yeah, I think we’re saying the same thing. What I’m saying is I think the Geist provides the face for the virtue so that we can face it in an I-Thou relationship. But like a persona, it is always properly presenting, but also withdrawing. Right. And this negativity strikes me as super important. Okay. Go with that. I just had this thought the other day about the logos, and I was thinking about, is it really true that we address the logos? And I don’t think so. I think it’s always true that the logos addresses us. In fact, and then I started thinking about, well, that’s… I started thinking about, well, what is it to have an address? Well, I have an address. You have an address. You have an address. But does the logos have the address? No, the logos addresses the ones who have the address. In fact, the fact that where I live and where you live is probably through the interaction of the logos and our identities and where we are. But the logos itself seems to withdraw. It doesn’t have an address. It addresses. And we answer its call, but we don’t know where it is. There’s this kind of constant relationship where it addresses us. We always hear the call of the logos. And I think this is what’s going on in the circling of this, is that we’re always hearing the ring of something, but it’s got a negative withdrawing quality to it, right? I think this is good, but I want to make sure that we’re talking about this. This is good, but I want to play with it and probe it, right? Because there is a dialogical sense. So what I hear you saying is there’s a sense in which we feel the logos is voicing to us, speaking to us, right? But we don’t speak back. But of course, you have a whole tradition, Christianity, that claims that the face of the logos is such that we can speak to, not just be spoken to. And this, of course, is Christ as the logo. Right. So sometimes the persona, at least in one tradition, maybe others, but this is the one I’m familiar with, sometimes the persona is a person in the sense of hypostasis, not in the sense of a human being, right? Something we speak to, not only something that can speak to us. Yeah. So do you see what I’m saying? Yes, I do. I’m challenging. But I’m not sure about that either. I’m bringing this into because we want to give people the clearest possible way in which they can articulate this experience to themselves so it doesn’t become confused or vague without being falsely precise. Yeah. Do you see the challenge I’m raising? Yeah. Yes. Yes. Yeah. So for me, this is part of the Socrates Kierkegaard thing too. Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. Well, we’ve said it. So we’ve said at times that one way, and this is no less abstruse, but let’s see what we can do with it, is that, okay, I like this idea that we’re basically tracking with a withdrawal of the logos, right? And the reason that error is necessary in that project is that it is being an error that tracks the withdrawal because it is everything that is not what we say of it, everything that’s not what we profess of it, everything that’s not what we propose. But not just empty negation. But not just empty negation, right? So one insight I remember came up in one of our dialogues some time ago is that the relationship between speech and silence in terms of its conveyance reverses in dialogos, right? Or at least by analogy, I find it very helpful to think of it that way so that we’re used to thinking, well, I convey by my speech and I listen with my silence. It seems to be inverse. It seems to be that the conveyance of the virtue is actually the silence. It’s in the aporia. It’s in the ringing that follows the speech and that the act of the speech is actually an act of listening, right? The probing is in the speech. Yes. The probing is in the speech. The listening effort is in the speech. And then the spokenness of the virtue is actually in the silence that precedes it, that follows it, that braces it from all sides, right? That’s why it’s negative, right? Not as a negation, but a pregnant negative, right? And so that being the case, if we think of every act of speech in dialogos as an instance of listening and every instance of silence in dialogos as actually the act of speaking forth the virtue, using one another’s generalized error as the measure of listening, what happens to this? I think what you said was very astute. And I’m trying to process it in terms of, I’m trying to get who’s the thou in the relationship to the virtue. And this is, I’m trying to get the notion of the persona, the the notion of the persona, the geist is something that is present, and therefore it can take on the role of presentation, the speaking to us. It can be the persona, the mask, right? And I’m trying to connect that with what you just said. Let me just add one more thing. You brought up Jesus Christ as an example, right? The logos of Christ in the Christian tradition as being an example of… The persona is actually a person. Right. And I’m trying to think of, you know, I’m trying to think of examples, scriptural examples of the various interactions that Christ has with people in scripture. And there are surely many that I probably contradict this observation I’m about to make. God knows it’s not exhaustive. But in every example that I think of, when I think about those interactions, whatever is professed to him, whatever is spoken to him is always erroneous. Yes. Right? Always. Right? I say something to Christ and Christ says, no, it’s… Yep. Yes. Right? Christ, nope. It’s a shift. It’s always a shift away. He always withdraws from what is said to him. And Socrates won’t actually pronounce either. And Socrates too, right? So he always, he always withdraws from the framing of what is said. He always reframes and repositions. And he always answers in ways that were not anticipated by the formulation of the question. Right. So take that analogy and shift it onto this example. Right? We don’t have Jesus Christ to talk to. But if we think of the silent presence of the virtue as doing something analogous to that, that every time we speak into it, we speak in… Now, we have to listen for it. Right? We have to use our ear to substitute. Yeah. So, right, so I think it was a conversation you had to give him proper credit for this insight. I think it was O.G. Rose, one of your conversations with him, he said something I thought was very insightful, which was an observation he made about this practice, which is that it often happens, God knows I do this all the time, which is that, you know, we’ll make a proposal. I’ll make a proposal and I’ll go, no, that’s not it. Right? I’ll make a proposal and you’ll go, what did it feel like to hear that? I felt wrong. I’ll make a proposal. What did it feel like? Nope, it’s wrong. I’m listening with my own ear. I’m listening with my own ear. And we’re doing that collectively in this space, right? We’re listening for it. We’re listening for it. And the listening for it seems to take place in the abiding silence that accompanies whatever it is that we say. Right? So that sort of scriptural reference is just an analogy to say that if we’re listening properly, meaning if we’re speaking properly, we hear the error in our own voice when we’re listening on account of the virtue. Yeah. So what’s happening when we do that? So you’re proposing that although we’re speaking, we’re actually listening in the speaking, so it’s still ultimately the virtue speaking to us through the persona of the Geist, of the Logos itself? That sounds right. Okay. But then I see, maybe I’m just being overly scientific here, but… Someone has to be. Well, I want to say, right, so the thing in the analogy is Christ as the person behind the persona, right? And he constantly is rejecting the wrong persona. That’s why the shift keeps happening. Yep. Right? But if the Geist is the persona, what is rejecting, right? What’s behind it doing the rejecting? Is it something like the world or being? There’s something, there is something that’s going on in the world, right? There’s something, there is something that we are accounting ourselves to, but right, that has a causal impact on the conversation that is giving, that is giving that part of the I, thou, to the virtue. So I’m breaking the thou into, right, the way it can face us, and that’s the Geist, but I’m also saying the thou is that which withdraws. That’s your point. Yep. So what is it that’s, it’s not the virtue, right? Like, so what is it that’s withdrawn, but withdrawing in such a way that it is conveying to us the virtue? And is it something like the way we are fitted to the world or the world is disclosing itself to us? Do you understand this? I do, I think I understand that. I think you described that as being the logos, if I recall. Yeah. Can you say something about that? So, but this may be important. This may be that there’s, there’s, maybe there’s two senses of this word, or maybe we should split it up into the Geist, which is the persona generated by the WeSpace, and then the logos is something like the way the world, right, withdraws or something like that. That’s really big. Is the Geist the persona of the logos? Is that the, is that the logo you’re making? Yeah. Because that’s interesting. That’s an interesting way of formulating. Right, and I’m just thinking of it now because I’m trying to, I’m trying to get a sense of the different intimacies. Yeah. So this is Phylaea, that’s intimacy. Yep. And then the intimacy with the WeSpace is this relationship with the Geist. Yeah. But then people get an intimacy with being itself. Right. And that seems to me the fullest version of the logos. Right. That seems to be, to me, to me that seems to be, being, being itself seems to be something like the openness that, that the very, whatever it accounts for us to be open to each other to have this and all of that, that very, the factor or the facticity of that openness, or not facticity, the, the, the primordialness of that openness shines through. Right? But yes, but I’m trying to get at, I’m trying, like, persons have a suchness, like, like what? Okay. So. Yeah. The Geist gives the face to the virtue. Yeah. That seems to be something we’re at least got a little bit of traction on. Yeah. But right, there’s something behind that does the shifting and it’s got to be something that is specific to courage as opposed to kindness, as opposed to softness. Do you understand? Yeah. So it could just be the general withdrawal of the being. Although. Perhaps, but one of the things that we consistently hear when we do the workshops is that the deeper people get into the process and the further that the practice gets even in a single sitting, the more the interdependency between the virtues becomes manifest in the dialogue. Yeah. So one of the things that I consistently hear, right? We talked about this a little bit because it came out in the most recent one, which was very interesting, is that it seems to be that the more the dialogus actually catches in the practice, the more that the virtue itself that is under discussion when probed, when known, when intimated more and more and more reveals its interdependency with all of the other virtues. It opens, it fans out. Right, but it doesn’t fan out into a homogeneous blob. Yeah. No, it fans out into a multiplicity. It fans out into like, yeah. What, you know, Plotinus thought of the news. It fans out into the holographic relationship with all of the different, between all the forms. Right, right, right. But what I’m saying is you said, well, the thing that is withdrawing has to have something to do with courage. Right. Right? If courage is the virtue that is subject to the dialectic, then the withdrawal of the virtue has to somehow. Oh, so let me see if I understand this. So when the virtue, when we’re getting that withdrawal into the holographic, the hologram of all the virtues, right, that is when the intimacy with being is coming. Is that what you’re saying? I think so. Because that is sort of the grammar of intelligibility itself, not the meaning of any particular virtue. That’s right. That’s right. So as the persona, so the persona is the, the persona is the specificity of the virtue that we’re trying to access. And the withdrawal is something like the opening of that one virtue into the good itself. The thing that made all of it possible in the first, in the first place. Right. Okay. So then we have sort of the two components for how we could enter into an I thou relationship with a virtue. We have the we space taking on the role of the persona and giving voice to the virtue. And then we have the, we have, right, the withdrawal into, you know, the system of intelligibility, like something analogous to the platonic forms. The wanting. Yeah, the wanting, which acts as the mystery of a person. Yeah. Yeah. There it is. There it is. Right. We’re so cartoonish. The suchness and the moreness. Exactly. But articulated in this specific way. So it might mean that theoretically we might want to, we’ve been using Geist and Logos interchangeably, but it might be that we want to actually differentiate them in order to pick up on these different layers of the phenomenology. I know. I think this works much better. It works much better because then the Logos is properly a movement of withdrawal away from the dia Logos itself. Right. It’s the movement of the part. Well, you see, I would want to say. It’s not away from the dia Logos. It’s within and around and through, but it’s, we talk about the movement of Logos as being the gathering of Logos as being a movement from the part to the whole. Right. And it makes sense in that respect that the movement of a single virtue to virtue itself. I think it’s both. Follows, tracks that exact pattern. I think it’s both. It’s the sentient. I think the accountability of the Logos is not just the withdrawal, but also the fact that it faces us. Yeah. And what I just want to make sure that I’m getting what you just said is like, it’s that the I thou with the virtue is established because as we, as we speak into and distinguish the virtue and it comes to present, that’s like the persona. Yes, that’s right. That’s the face. Yeah. Right. But then at some point it, that withdrawals, but yet shines through it and withdrawals is the intelligibility. Yes. Yes. But not a particular intelligibility. We’re, we’re, we’re, we’re putting into a network of the eligibility that gets us some of the profound patterns and principles of reality itself. Yeah. And that starts to come through the, through the persona, we start to see, oh, through this virtue, all the other virtues start to speak. Right. And I’m supposing that I can face Chris because he literally has a face, but then he also has an enacted face, the persona. Yeah. Right. And that’s the, the, the, and that’s how I can be, I need something to account to. Yeah. But he is also, he, he is, he’s, his, his, his suke is the through line of all of his aspects, right? Yeah. And they, they form like what we’re doing with all of the virtues that they have to, so he withdraws into that. Yeah. Right. Yeah. There’s a through line that is incompletable and is not any one of his aspects. That’s the mystery. Right. Right. I, I, I come into an I, thou relationship with something when I can do that and I can do it most properly with people for the persons, for the reasons. And I’m trying to get at how could we possibly do it with a, with an entity that is in some ways only an abstract entity, a virtue. Yeah. And I’m trying to say, we get this, we get this error systematicity, this, this self organizing of error that in the we space, so the we space can give us feedback. It can be the face, the persona of the virtue. Yeah. And then the way the virtue has, is multi-spectral with all the other, like, right? Yeah. Right. That that’s, that’s, that’s analogous at least to the mystery of a person. Yeah. And that’s how we can enter into a deep I, thou relationship with the virtue. Yes. And that, and that what that might mean is we could give better guidance, better pedagogical instruction. Yeah. To people if we, if we try to break up the phenomenology because we’ve, we’ve been noting this, the sequence of intimacies for quite some time. Yeah. And we’ve just been sort of noting it. But if we could, if we could properly give people a framework and then attach, well, this is how this is, and this is how this experience is functioning. Yeah. We might be able to make them more fluid and fluid as they move into the process. Right. That’s what I’m proposing. Right. Right. That’s so interesting because it’s consonant with the sort of an agogium symposium, right? It’s the withdrawal of the beloved. Yes. Right? Yeah. So with this, right? So the Socratic era, the eros directed toward Socrates is basically left, it’s sort of, it’s, it’s, it’s basically led into a poria because of the withdrawal of Socrates as the beloved, as the beloved object of the eros. But he’s the figure. And that’s what the virtue is doing. Right. But remember what, about Socrates, he’s like one of those statues, right? There is the persona that, and you try and open it up and then there’s something different inside the treasure. Yeah. And you, right? I’m trying to get that Socrates, and this is part of the Socratic irony, is Socrates properly faces his interlocutor. In fact, he’s famous for being able to shift his persona. Yeah. It’s, it’s, it’s, and you pointed about how Christ shifts away, but Christ also shifts into. Christ also can adapt himself to say the right thing. Yes. To the person in that situation. Yes, yes, that’s true. So there’s a bidirectional movement. Yes. And I think that’s exactly what you’ve been trying to say, right? There’s a bidirectional movement here, right? There’s sort of an infinitizing movement away. Yes. Right? The sort of inexhaustible open-endedness that’s opened by the withdrawal. And there’s also a kind of binding. Yes, a relivio. Yep. Right. That’s what I’m, and so if we can more properly articulate the dimensions and the moments, I mean that in a phenomenological sense, of this, and perhaps be a little bit more precise in the terms we’re using for different moments and dimensions, I think we could give more helpful pedagogical advice to people who are undertaking the practice. Yeah. It’s like we can, you can say, we can start to use this, you know, poetically and technically use this language where it’s like, can we start to see the face of the virtue? Is it coming? Yep, yep, yes, yes. Right? Are we putting skin on the ghost in some sense? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yes. Great way of putting it. And that how we, the we, like I said, but let’s not forget the original gem that started it. It’s not the content of our error. Right. It’s the way the error has a systematicity, right? Well, it has a logos to it. A feedback. A canadus. And that, right, that gets constellated in the we space as something that is giving us guidance that we, no one of us can give to ourselves or we can’t even give to each other diatically. Yeah, yeah. Something. Something’s bothering me. No, no, no. I just, I have this, there’s some intuition that something about the way that like, let’s think about error in terms of finitude for a moment, right? Error is, it evidences the way in which we’re circumscribed and finite, that there’s a lot that we don’t have access to, right, that we’re confined to perspective and don’t have an infinite array of them at our disposal. And our aspectualization of virtue itself into a particular virtue has something to do with those constraints, right? So the way that we’re generalizing or modeling on our own error, I think has something, has a correspondence to the way that we’re aspectualizing virtue itself into something in particular, right? And so. Oh, that’s good. Right? And so there’s something about accounting for one’s error that realizes a person as being exactly the kind of person that one is, right? Well, that’s what I meant earlier about the systematicity in the error. Right. It can actually disclose to you the constraints that are largely transparent to you. That’s right. That’s right. So I’m just trying to find a, I’m trying to repeat this so that we better understand the move that we’re making. So that’s something about the generalized model that the geist that emerges as a reflection of the collective we space, which is really a reflection of our collective error is basically, it’s a facing of one’s own error. But that’s what I want to say. That’s why I wanted to intervene. It’s not just collective error because the collective error affords something like the notice invariance heuristic, which tells you what you might want to change in order to reduce the error. Remember you could, the more multi aspects I bring, so I get all of these aspects and they’re all in error in some way. Then what I can look for is what is not changing across all the aspects because it’s doing one of two things. It’s showing me something beyond that. I don’t understand warm very often. What it’s showing you is a constraint that you have built in that needs to be given up in order to stop making the same mistake over and over again. Right. That’s when that and it’s in that, that the possibility opens back up. Exactly. That’s what I want to say that the Geist is not just a collective error. It’s a collective error and something like the collective affordance of the notice invariance heuristic application that none of us are capable of individually. We could open up how many perspectives are in error so that we have a greater chance of finding the deeper invariant that we need to challenge. Right. So then it’s in the process. It’s in the process of collectively accounting for the error that opens up a kairos of passing beyond it. So I’m basically saying like if we could what we’re doing here and we could continue is if we could sort of more articulate the phenomenology of what’s happening, we could give more pedagogical help so that the proper functioning is more and more afforded. That’s what I’m suggesting. Yeah. This is sort of synchronizing with something I was one of the things we’ve been trying to do is understand how the project of coming into relation with a virtue is related to the project of self-knowledge. Right. That dimension to the Socratic project. Right. Because it’s in virtue of knowing what not in any final or exhaustive way, but it’s in part in virtue of coming to know the kind of thing that you are that you understand where you end and where everything else begins. And there is something about the confirmation of not the confirmation in the logical sense, but the confirmation of error or the embodiment of error that brings you into the coherence of error. Sure. Yeah. The sort of the coming into consciousness of error brings you consciously into resolution for yourself. And it has, I mean, we were talking about that in respect of Kierkegaard, right? That the giving account of yourself in the form of confession brings a kind of lucidity to yourself and the constraints that bind you to being exactly the kind of thing that you are. And it’s the gathering together of that consciousness of error that binds you to yourself as you are necessarily. And that seems to be a pretty good example of how the kind of thing that you are that seems to be a precondition for being able to participate in everything that’s beyond you. Right? So that’s part of that bi-directional move, right? You’re coming into clarity. Yes. Right? Not exhaustive clarity, but graduating clarity about yourself. And that’s also allowing for and affording a movement in the other direction, which is to say, I can’t be everything, but if I can understand the kind of thing I am and be it wettedly, I can participate in everything. That’s excellent. So that’s really good. So does that mean that confession, I’m going to have to twist the meaning of the word, but I want to twist it to bring out a contrast like I’ve sometimes done with other words. The confession is a practice for the cultivation of humility. It is a kind of humiliation experience. Yeah. Oh, yeah. And the fact, even the fact that that word has become negative, purely negative, means it’s very difficult for us to pay attention to gather together in a logos, to gather together so they belong together, our errors, so that they cohere and we find ourselves accountable to them. Yes. Right? And so I’m trying to get the word humiliation to be the act of encouragement. Right? Right. Here’s that reversal. Yes. And that’s that true line with the virtue. Exactly. That significance line. Right. Exactly. And so, yes, and that’s amplifying what I’m saying. And then do you then see confession as the practice of humiliation? Yes, I do. In the sense I’m now twisting it to, twisting it back to what it originally meant. I do. And it’s a humiliation and it’s a sensitization. It’s a sensitization. It’s a disposing of oneself and vulnerability. It is what allows one to willingly become a thou. Right? So if I were to convert that back into its Christian language, it would be something like sensitizing myself to receive the solicitous son, the love of God, right? Which is in that tradition one of the greatest sin, which is to refuse to be a thou before the one. Right? Right. And this is all through Dante. Of course. Yeah, yeah, absolutely, right? To refuse to be a thou before the one. To refuse the love of being so known and thus to be forgiven by him. Because you’re refusing the call to personhood. Yeah. Which means you’re fundamentally, you’re fundamentally undermining the capacity that is fundamental of agape, which is the constitutive call to your personhood. That’s right. That’s right. Refusing that agape. Right? And so confession is a preparation. Confession in some sense, we talked about this with Kierke, confession is a Socratic preparation to receive agape. Right? It is a Socratic self-knowledge and preparation to receive agape. Right? It’s a bringing into vivid lucidity the error in order for the possibility of being beyond it, being known beyond it. Because when it becomes the measure of all that’s real, you have to be known away from it. Right? And you have to become a thou for that to happen. Hmm. Oh. So, I mean, I want to just, I don’t want to completely lose what Guy said. There’s this reversal and there’s this, you’re starting to track the through line of the soul in an important way. That’s what you were referring to. And that is tracking the through line of the soul or the suke, right, is a way of participating in the tracking of the through line of external reality as well. And so you’re coming into a proper participatory relationship. I’m trying to get a cognitive aspect to the affective aspect that you’re bringing up with agape. Does that track those two go together? I think so. That’s really, really interesting. Because it reminds me of work of Yaspers and others about the limit situations being, and this ultimately I think comes from Kierkegaard, the limit situations being the ones where we really get the self-knowledge that is usually hidden under our autobiography in profound ways. And you can see a lot of therapy about trying to get people to that humiliation such that they get underneath their autobiography to find the actual through line in their error. Augustine, right? You brought it up already, right? Augustine’s Confessions is somehow doing that. It’s not about the autobiography. It’s about tracing the through line of error through the autobiography. So he can see the hand of God. So that he can see the hand of God. Exactly. Exactly, right? So in this, and it brings us back to dialectic and theologos. So this tracing of error, so I’m getting these two shapes emerging. There’s the shape of the errors that I make in my propositions that are like, ah, almost not, right? You’re putting skin on the virtue. It becomes persona in that sense. But what I’m doing is I’m confessing sins with every single I keep confessing, right? And it keeps saying, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope. But as it’s doing that, it’s becoming this negative image, right? In some sense. And that starts to shine through the more facets. Being starts to shine through. Sin, right? My own shape. All of that kind of comes together. So I’m playing on face and facets. As we get more facets, we’re going to have to change the image. I’m playing on face and facets. As we get more facets to the face, we get more access to the holographic system of intelligibility. We have different, it’s like the compound eye of a fly or something like that. Right, right. Right. Very much. Yes. And more access to the patterns of our own relationship that we brought in the exercise. And here’s the, bringing you back to the vulnerability and the humiliation. Right? It’s a very different feeling. You’re right. It’s like this making a proposition going through the dialectic. Is this in some sense is continually making this error, right? The through lines through that. But also is this confession, which is somehow, as you were saying, giving me my own shape in some way. Yes. And think about how this tracks with the, you know, the one of the most reliable reports we get from people. They come into awe. And awe is a situation, and this is measurable in experimentation, one of the few situations where the sense of self is diminished, but it’s not experienced as threat. It’s experienced as what we’re talking about here. Right? And it’s experienced as something like, right, a sensitized vulnerability that opens you to reality. And it’s experienced in a way that you were not previously capable of. Yeah. And people regularly say they always had been thinking, you know, they often care about or think about honesty, but now they’re in awe of the virtue. They’ll say things like that very reliably, too. Yeah. Totally. Well, I think this is awesome. Yes. I think this was awesome and not awful, thankfully. So I want to thank everybody again for watching this. We’re going to move the next two episodes. Taylor’s going to be joining us again. And one of the first thing we’re going to do in the next episode is we’re going to do dialectic into dialogos. And the virtue we’re going to do it on is dialectic itself. And these two episodes serve as the framework for that, for you to following it. And then the following wrap-up episode will be a discussion about what, again, what do we mean by dialectic via logos? How is it different from just dialogue or discussion or conversation? Drawing this all together and trying to really clear fully articulate it as a way of launching the four of us into a collective, hopefully flowing reflection on why are all of these dialogical practices and communities emerging spontaneously all around the world right now? So thank you very much, as always, for your time and attention. And thank you, Chris. Oh, my God. We are had by the dialectic when the dialectic is actually taking effect. And that’s what makes it participatory, right? It’s not something that we have in hand, but we are had in its hand. Thank you.