https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=SNuwBQUzctM
When you consider what these awkward things called relationships are, they’re how we become people. We become people through them. And they’re inherently messy. They’re inherently uncomfortable. If you think about all the possible things that could happen by you and I just engaging in a conversation, you could say something to me that I misunderstood that could hurt that I need therapy for 10 years. Or you could say something to me that could enlighten me. There’s this range of possibilities that could happen in any interaction. And so that’s inherently scary. So if you make it optional, our nervous systems are just going to do the easier thing. And I think we see that all over the place. Before we move into it, I want to express some gratitude. I want to thank all of you for hanging in. I want to thank the fantastic crew for all the work they’ve done. I want to thank the work of people behind the scenes, Casey and Chris. I want to thank all three of you who contributed in irreplaceable ways to the content and the flow and the exemplification of the series. I want to thank you all. The series has been daunting throughout. And I’ve relied upon the support that all of you have provided in multiple ways. So I just wanted to express my thanks. So we’re going to move into something following up for where we really tried to unfold what dialectic and dialogous is. The reverse engineering of something like how we could be Socrates to each other. And that sits within the longer arc of what the Socratic way is, how it relates to the Kierkegaardian and Christian way, how it relates to Buber’s way. And I want to take all of that and turn it towards this question, which I want to share with these three friends, which is the general observation that there’s a family of things that are like dialectic and dialogous. There’s a family of things that overlap with it. There’s authentic relating and there’s circling. And there’s things like empathy circling with Edwin Roy. And there’s Buddhist insight dialogue. And there’s the amazing work that Thomas Stadinger is doing in Germany. And so many more. I don’t want to try and list everybody because I’ll leave somebody out. If it was looking like I was trying to be exhausted, then someone would be would be offended. So I’m just going to leave it at. So the question is, why this? Why now? Why this? Why now? And of course, if you happen to connect it to this thing called the meaning crisis, that would be wonderful. But why this? Why now? And I don’t want to speak to the question first. I want to propose it and hear what you all have to say. Whoever would like to go first. Given that we’ve just had this rich, not even taste, this rich drinking of what dialectic and the dialogous is. Why this? Why now? Well, I would say this is not exhaustive, but I think it is. I want to see if I can distinguish that we’re in a time in history where something’s happened with relationship and communication, primarily due to the internet that has never happened before. If you look at it like this, before texting and emailing and answering machines, before all that, if you had to have exchange of information, you had to at least talk on the phone. You had to do it through relationship. There was television and radio where there was one way communication, receiving. The exchange of information always involved relationality. And because of that, to function required out of necessity so much relationality just by virtue of functioning. I think the first sign of this where it was used like this was relationship and communication got uncoupled with the answering machine was the first time. And then it went into email and then texting and social media and TikTok and the multiple array of things such that we’re actually at a time where it’s starting to occur for like say the Gen X tradition. The Gen Xers, or not Xers, is it Z? Showing my age. Who don’t have a memory before synchronistic communication was optional. They don’t even have a memory for that. Therefore, they don’t even have it as it’s almost like relationship on some level occurs as this unnecessary thing. That I even I just happened to go on YouTube and there was a I saw a thing where it was a streamer, the guy who just streamed just playing games and talks on YouTube all day talked about his sex life. He’s like, why would I actually go out and have a real sex? That wouldn’t mean I have to go out of my apartment and I’d have to go down and talk to people and go to the bar and then maybe meet somebody and bring them back and then I have to take my clothes off. And I could just go to this Discord server and I’ve already broken my computer persona sex. I’m de-virginized there already. Why would I do all of that? So I think and then if you also think about it where we’re also in a time where all you need is an internet connection, a computer and like you could literally have a ton of connections, no millions of people. Start a company, become world famous, become a billionaire and you could do it without ever having to have an actual interaction. We’re in a time where that’s possible. So whenever you uncouple anything from anything else, the same thing happened with the industrial revolution where it uncoupled like machines brought the world right in front of us. So it uncoupled functioning from movement. Boom, you uncouple those things and then we have this that transformed our relationship to our body. I think something at a basic level like that is happening with relationship. Now when you do that with this, when you consider what these awkward things called relationships are, they’re the things, they’re how we become people. We become people through them and they’re inherently messy. They’re inherently uncomfortable. If you think about all the possible things that could happen by you and I just engaging in a conversation, you could say something to me that I misunderstood that could hurt me so bad that I need therapy for 10 years. Or you could say something to me that could enlighten me. There’s this range of possibilities that could happen in any interaction and so that’s inherently scary. So if you make it optional, our nervous systems are just going to do the easier thing. I think we see that all over the place. So I don’t think that’s the whole reason why dialectic and the dialogos and everything that we’re doing here, I don’t think it’s the whole reason, but I think it’s a big reason why it’s speaking to us. Because there’s an intuition that we have that something is missing. And what’s interesting is I just saw a series of papers come out about the epidemic of loneliness. And what’s really interesting about the particular kind of loneliness that people are experiencing is it’s a loneliness that they experience, but it’s not a driver to go out in a relationship. It has them go further into isolation, which is really striking to me. You would think, well, you’re lonely, so you want to be around people. So you’d be moved to do that, but you’re lonely, but it’s a kind of loneliness that actually does not presuppose to you to be driven to be around people. And so I think that there’s a pathology going on and underdevelopment going on with us that we only get through interaction and relationship that is become optional. And so I think that’s a big part of it. That’s one proposal I’ll make around it. That’s really good. Yeah. I think that’s a big chunk. That’s a big piece. Might not be exhaustive, but it’s somewhere very near to the heart of it, I think. It’s interesting that last point about how the loneliness does not incentivize company. And maybe one of the reasons for that is because in the absence of a manner of sociability that authenticates itself, that actually invites intimacy and disclosure in the way that we’ve been trying to exemplify. In the absence of that mode of engagement, company is, I think, a more severe form of loneliness than solitude, right? Because there’s a normative contrast. There’s a tension. When you’re in company, you ought not to feel lonely, or so you think. do when you do suggests that there’s something wrong about reality itself. There’s something wrong with you or about the nature of what’s happening. Something is out of sorts, but whatever is out of sorts is reflecting itself back on you. It’s your fault, or so it feels. And I think maybe that’s why a lot of people know this feeling. I know this feeling from experience. I think most of us probably do, that if we’re forced, if we’re going to opt for one kind of loneliness or another, one kind of isolation for another, whether it’s the isolation that comes in company, or the one that comes with solitude, I think the solitude seems far more appealing. this idea that relationships have become very, very transactional. I think a lot of it has to do with it. It’s as trite as it sounds. It really does sound trite. But the loss of the meaning of friendship, phyla, I think has a lot to do with this as well, right? Even the term, it’s so equivocal. What it refers to is so equivocal, right? It refers to every shade of acquaintance imaginable, from the very remote to the very intimate. And I think that it’s difficult to understand that as a necessity, as something you need to nourish your soul, as a place you find yourself, as a place you find yourself, not as something incidental, right? But something that is essential to you being able to uncover yourself and make contact with yourself, right? We’ve spent so much of this, so much of our dialogues in the series, and you’ve spent so much of your time talking about this alone, that we make contact with ourselves by finding deep, deep level of acquaintance in the experience of being known beyond what it is that we could have known about ourselves, being touched in that sense, right? And I don’t even know if I could begin to speculate or enumerate the reasons why that is so scarce and in such short supply, that phyla. A lot of people have made some very sophisticated arguments about it, I know. But whatever it is that has brought that about, that has depleted it, its depletion, I think, is a big piece of this as well, right? Because of course we’ll be thrown back into solitude if the only option is meaningless interaction. I have no desire for meaningless interaction, right? I’d opt for solitude over that any day, and I think most people would, right? If you’re going to choose an inward form of scarcity or a social form of scarcity, one, I think, is often a little bit more repellent than the other because it suggests that there’s something wrong with you and something wrong about the way that the world is fitting together in the first place. And I think it’s that that is, that quakes us sometimes. Yes. Mm-hmm. Yeah, it occurs to me there’s something about this transition or this new oncoming Gen Z, but also previous generations spending more and more time online. So maybe for Gen Z, there’s a never knowing of what’s possible. And then for the older ones, getting Gen Y and into Gen X and Millennials, there’s a forgetting as well, like a forgetting of what that was like. Maybe you had that when you grew up, but the way that that happens is you go through school and you build a life. You sort of distance yourself, and then as the technology comes in, it creates a wider gap. So it occurs to me that the meaningless conversations are probably happening because there is a forgetting or there is a never knowing of what’s possible. And therefore, when people are coming together, they’re not making contact. They’re talking past each other or they’re doing perhaps even worse, sort of engaging in more of a political, the religion of politics, the culture war sort of, and that’s the engagement. And then it’s just like, I don’t want that. So it makes perfect sense of why there would be that step back into solitude. Yeah. Yeah. I think the way in which the emergence of social media, obviously there’s a quantitative aspect that we’ve been talking about, but there’s a qualitative aspect too that I think is really important, which is. Right. The idea, we have an idea of communing underneath communication as common union, as a process of continuing. We are the primates that have the longest childhood, and we have to go through cultural maturation, which is as significant as our biological maturation. And the idea that that process, like nobody ever says, well, I’m mature enough, I’m done. Right. And in fact, maturation is ongoing. And it’s interesting, John Roussen talks about maturation as, you know, and notice the language we use, it’s a capacity to face or to face up to reality. And it’s the facing, right, which is an interpersonal thing. And that maturation is a process you catch agapically from other people. Right. So we have lost the person making maturation function of communing because we have put such an emphasis on the quantity of information and how rapidly we can transmit it to each other. And so this has been a big refocusing of what the point of communication is. The point of communication is this pointless, how much information is being moved around such that the movement of the information can make different people wealthy or powerful. And that has lost out to, well, under the TS Eliot, where’s the wisdom we’ve lost in the knowledge and where’s the knowledge we’ve lost in the information. Right. And so I think it’s not, I’m not disagreeing that it has had these practical effects. And you know, I try to talk about this, about propositional tyranny, but the idea is there’s this fundamental notion that we have lost, we have lost the maturation person making functions of, and we’ve lost layers of that. We had friendship, we still have friendship, although the number of true friends that people has has been regularly declining, but we’ve completely lost the category of fellowship, which was a much more comprehensive co-commitment to person making. And so I think there’s this, there’s this overall move towards, there’s this overall move towards this diminutive. You can see a parallel thing in which, like we talk about the horizontal and the vertical, and how they feed into each other. We’ve lost the contemplative sense of ratio as coming into right relationship with that which transcends us and coming into right relationship with that which grounds us. And then we reduced it in Descartes, Ruchet’s book about how Descartes hated logos, and he proposed logic instead. And we reduced the contemplative to the computational. And then we’re now witnessing that the computational isn’t even for what it was for Descartes, trying to get the truth. The computational is now just the quantification of how much communication, and that’s the only standard. So we’ve got this co-commitment reduction of ratio, we’ve got a maturation of person And I think it means for us that we are losing ourselves as anything other than instrumental in nature. So when you get, when you lose community, and when you lose contemplative ratio, you lose the sake of ratio for its own sake, or personhood for its own sake. If rationality becomes merely instrumental, if communication becomes merely instrumental, and we are the creatures of ratio communication, we are the creatures of logos, then we ultimately become merely instrumental. And I think that is a fundamental undermining of our capacity to be the intrinsically inherently valuable and meaningful things that persons are. And I think that is fundamentally what’s driving this in a really profound way. We are losing, we are losing, not in some technical academic sense where we can give propositional definitions, but we are losing the existential deciding for oneself of being a person and the phenomenology of what that is, deep and profound way. We’re hitting ourselves. Yes, we are losing the thou in possibility. And this is, in that vertical and horizontal dimension, is precisely what comes together in Deo Logos. Yes, yes. Right? It’s precisely what comes together in Deo Logos. The communing, the phylia, the friendship, the transcendence, all of it comes together. And to me, when all of that comes together in a relational context, that’s nothing less than the profoundly sacred, participating in the sacred. And here’s the other part, where in some sense we’ve also lost where religion and religious belief is becoming less and less viable for people. And that has been the holder for fellowship for thousands and thousands of years. And so we’re in a time in history where that’s declining in participation more and more rapidly. And cultural importance. Yes, yes. And so in some sense, we are, I believe what’s happening in circling, ultimately why people come in and participate in circling is to participate in the sacred. Whether or not they call it that or not, it’s to encounter, to dwell in, to find themselves in the midst of encountering the sacred. And that seems to, it’s like a rip in the universe that opens up, that glows to them, that they can’t, that when they experience it, it’s not like they were looking for it. It’s not like they knew to look for it or something. But when they found it, they realized that’s all they’ve been looking for, in some sense. Well how frequently people in, like for example, when we do the workshops, how people largely from secular, or at least from the nuns, N-O-N-E-S, they start to talk about what’s happening using religious and spiritual terminology. And then how often they also pronounce, as you just said, this discovery of an intimacy they did not know they exist, but they always long for. And the two are interwoven together. We keep seeing that again and again and again. But I think those two things, well those three things, the decline in communication, and then what I was trying to articulate in the disappearance of the possibility of personhood, and then the decline of ratio, and the loss of religion. I think those are all, they’re not separate phenomena. They are all interpenetrating and accelerating each other. Yes, yes. Absolutely. There’s something I’m noticing in all of this, which is that there’s a theme of memory. Like in an amnesia sense. Maybe so. Maybe let’s feel that out a little bit. Because you talk about this idea of having lost something, not lost something in the But it’s more like having forgotten. You used it in those terms too, Taylor. This idea that we’ve been attentive to the wrong things. A relevance realization problem, you would say. We’ve lost the wrong details have become important. And I think about this as a, this is really a verbal, this is an oral practice. It’s an embodied, it’s not just oral, it’s embodied and it’s recorded and whatnot. I often wonder about that. I often wonder about, I mean, we’re doing it right now. So, you know, I’m calling into question the very thing that we’re doing. I guess that’s appropriate enough though. I wonder sometimes about the value of recording something whose import has to be understood existentially in the moment in an embodied sense when it is embedded in a particular context and implicature. I was having a conversation with a friend recently where we were both sharing, you know, instances of falling out with someone, memories of falling out with someone. Where you have, you know, we’ve been talking so much about conversations that are edifying and transformative in a positive sense. But you know, I’m sure we’ve all had instances of the opposite where you have a conversation with someone that ruptures a relationship and that relationship rupturing ruptures you. And you carry that rupture from that point on. It’s there, right? And it could be any kind of, it could be a romantic relationship, it could be a close friendship, it could be a family member. The point is that we were talking about the process of trying to come to grips with an experience like that and what tends to happen in the immediate aftermath of a fallout, especially if it happens in a conversation. I mean, inevitably it does, right? And the way that memory and your particular encounter with memory has a lot to do with how the experience integrates, folds back into you and becomes an affordance for change and transformation. And one of the things we were talking about is the difference between attending to the memory of that relationship and its fallout at the level of microscopic detail, right? What I said, then what she said, then what he said, then what I said, then what we did, then what happened, right? You know how when you have this falling out, the thing you do is you replay the conversation at the minutest level of detail. And each time you do it, you find a different detail around which the whole thing could have turned. Or if I had just said that differently, it all could have been different. Or if I had just remembered that one detail, right? That could have been the kairos. The whole thing could have turned around that one thing I said wrong or that one moment I stalled or that one thing I fanned on. And then I think as time goes on, you begin to realize consciously or not that the way that there is a truer form of memory, there’s a way that you can remember that that is actually more real, less factual, but more real. And I think this is where the anamnesis comes in a little bit, right? Especially when we understand the reconstructive nature of memory and that memory is a creative act in as much as it is anything else. Memory is about the future. Right. And so one of the things that occurred to me, occurred to both of us when we were having this conversation is that it seems important to be able to overcome and work through a sort of a traumatic, I hate to use that word, but a very, a very injurious fallout with somebody is to reset the level of resolution on the memory where you’re not remembering the finest details, the things that were said because they’re going to get refracted anyway. But you’re remembering something more impressionistic, something more essential to the character of what happened between. The truth of the relationship doesn’t lie in the recorded details. The truth of the relationship lies somewhere in the creative act of revisioning that relationship in such a way that it takes a place inside of your soul, if I can put it in those terms. What does it mean? What is its signification? Right. That kind of memory, that more creative, poetic form of memory that can’t be arbitrary, but also can’t be tethered to those fine details because you won’t find it there. You won’t find the church in the stone quarry, right, even if it’s built out of that stone. One thing that we have now with social media, which trying to bring this back now, why am I talking about memory, is that everything we say in that medium is recorded. There’s a lot of things that are recorded, the vast majority of which are irrelevant. We make a big show of throwing out our propositions when we do diologos for a good reason, because the propositions themselves don’t adhere to us and don’t adhere to the process. They’re instrumental, they pass through, and they’re gone. And that’s as it should be. They evaporate. They’re supposed to. They’re not the point. And I think this has a lot to do with the propositional tyranny that you often talk about. It’s that our level of recorded memory, the kind of memory that we pay most fastidious attention to, is the narcissism of small details, small differences. Small differences, right? And when we pay attention at that level of resolution, we deprive ourselves of the creative capacity to remember in such a way that we participate in the artful creation of what is most meaningful, in such a way that we can discover it again. It’s a loss of the poetic spirit. And I think that in the way that that can happen to an individual or between a couple of individuals when they have a falling out, I think in some sense that’s happening perhaps to our relationships in general, right? We’re just paying attention to the wrong things because we’ve misunderstood the nature of what it means to remember ourselves and remember one another in such a way that we can play a role in its significance. You know, if you’re going to tumble over a difficult topic, there’s a big difference between going to the pub, having a few beers, tumbling over a difficult topic. And then having all of the propositions vanish at the end of the night. Because what you’re left with, what you’re left with is the resonance of the contact that you can use as the raw material to envision its meaning for the future. But if what you’re left with is the letter of what was said, you will find fault and error and sin in every single word. And if that’s what you attend to, that’s what will be most real. And if that’s what’s most real, then we’re all in a lot of trouble and we’re all implicated. What you just described is that you leave and all the propositions disappear, but you’re left with, what did you say? The resonance. The resonance. And that resonance you carry with you into the next conversation. To me, this sounds like practice. To me, this sounds like practice. To me, this sounds like Plato and the Phaedrus when Socrates is worried about writing, destroying actual theologos. And of course, the irony is we only know of this because of writing. And so I think maybe what we could say is we’re facing a kairos because I agree with everything Chris said. And of course, in some ways, I agree with what Socrates says there, but I also disagree with him because I’m in a performative contradiction if I completely agree with him. Right. And so you see, you see, I would argue in third way, Plato as a marketer, you see Plato trying with the dialogue format to try and bring beyond the propositions, the drama, the character, the effect of setting time and place. And Plato is always even within a dialogue, the Republic, he starts and then he starts again to let you know there’s no absolute starting point, all the stuff that has been discussed in the series. So I put I put it back to you, Chris, that what you have described is the left hand of this, but there’s the right hand that but we could do better than the mere written text of the Teutonic Dialogue. We can even better keep the recording of the drama of the character. Right. And so that’s what I’m trying to now put it on. What I’m getting from is the possibility. And I think this is almost like a Kierkegaardian choice. It’s at least a Fomian choice of right. We could do it. We could we could be misdirected by this. And the way it’s it’s antagonistic to the creative, the creativity within reconstructive memory, we could be misdirected and enhance the propositional theory. That’s what I hear you say, the left hand. But then I also want to say, but we could write even we could we could do something even better. I don’t mean artistically, but I mean, we could do something even better in terms of memory than the Platonic Dialogues. By the way, we can record so much of the nonverbal, the nonverbal, the nonverbal so much of the embodied, so much of the drama, so much of the way character and context and timing is showing up. And then so that’s I think the right hand. Just to use one of Jonathan Peugeot’s waves of talking, that’s the right hand of what we’re being offered here right now. And so then I think the the the the issue might be. It’s not just. I don’t know if you intended this, Chris, but so it but it’s not just a reflection on why this why now, but I think what’s coming out of this also is what is the choice before us now? What is the choice before us now? Because there is the possibility of the exacerbation. I think Chris made an eloquent case for it. And then I’m trying to say this is this has a perennial aspect to it. It’s in Plato and that we can in some sense offer the choice that Plato offered us. We could appropriate this medium, at least this one, in such a way that we could choose to go this way, the platonic way, rather than the propositional tyrannic. It reminds me of the idea of the Platonic way. It reminds me of there’s a line I always loved that Nick Mount said of good literature, good poetry specifically, which is that its job is to strive for its own extinction. And I agree with you. It’s like what seems to me that the choice that Plato made was to create a form of recorded dialogue, a form of a form of record that could undermine itself. Yes. And in undermining itself could create from itself a process that people could participate in and symbolically work through. And notice this dialogue right now. We’re in some sense, we’re talking about the impossibility of what we’re doing as we’re just as we’re doing the very possibility that’s being expressed. That quana. Yes. Parabolic nature precisely makes sense. Parabolic nature precisely makes it not a dialogue because dialogue in the everyday sense of dialogue never calls itself into question as an entity in service of something beyond itself, like what we are proposing here with dialogue. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Absolutely. And we just spent the previous dialogue or dialectic into dialogue trying to around dialectic and we were struggling over that. Right. We were struggling over a process that is bidirectional, right. That is moving away from itself as it moves toward what it’s after. Yeah. And I think that’s what you’re proposing in response to the problem I raised. Yes. Yes. And so I’m thanking you for raising it to a notch because and I don’t think we should leave the first level behind. The first level of what’s the ideology? The second level is what’s the causal factors that are at work making this happen. I think those are relevant and they should be integrated. But the second level, they should be integrated with the second level. The second level is, yeah, but above and beyond that, above those historical factors, right, there’s something much more perennially structural at work here that we need to properly address. That’s what I heard you say. Absolutely. Yes. I mean, it occurs to me that the answer to what do we do now is it’s that movement of recognizing where the salience landscaping of, say, social media has gotten us and maybe suggesting that it has us moving away from wisdom. So what does it look like to move towards wisdom in terms of social media, in terms of technology, in terms of the platform, the medium, the practices? To me, that seems to be the direction that we need to be moving in and reinforcing and paying attention to the right things where we were paying attention to the wrong things. And there’s… Yes, this is something just to… Like this has been one of your themes that this, I mean, you once explained to me that circling emerged from out of how can I enact Heidegger and how can I enact Heidegger’s critique of modernity and technology and the loss of the logos and the forgetting of being? And so I think what you’re proposing in constant with that is how do we situate… the choice isn’t just the left and the right. It’s like, what do we do now? Part of it is properly seeing how this is part of that larger project. And I’m pointing to you because you’re an exemplar of trying to… And I’ve been trying to do that through this whole series. How can we recapture the full Socratic platonics and put it into practice in a way that allows that framework to come to light so that whole framework can critique all of the modernity and the technology and the surveillance capitalism and all of the problems, all the pseudo-religious stuff that’s emerging, et cetera. I just wanted to get that in before you said something because I really wanted to point to how you have exemplified this. Right. And it’s interesting because how all that started was a group of our friends started to have these interactions that something glowed that struck us as deep and significant and deep and significant in a way that was a different kind of deep and significant from all the other deep and significant things that we were doing at the time. And then we just noticed it and then started following it. Right. And as you talked about, started to reverse engineer what exactly was happening. The important thing to get about this is no one came up with something. Right? No one looked at something and then go, okay, how do we market this? And how do we make it digest? Something like that. No, it was in the encounter with it and being surprised by it. Something exceeded us. There was a surplus of something. There’s a positive reason for why now. The negative reasons we were articulating had to do with the fact that we were articulating that. But there’s also the positive lead in that you just put your finger on as well. We’re getting three kinds of answers and I think they’re all important. We’re getting a historical answer and then we’re getting a, I’ll just label it a perennial structural answer. But there’s a positive phenomena that’s also happening that’s also explaining why now. Yes. And I think it’s precisely in some sense, if you want to bring in Heidegger around this, I think the thing that caught us essentially is what Heidegger would call being. Right? And the being that is forgotten in the substance metaphysics that we’re all indoctrinated in, that organizes our thinking and therefore conceals that. There’s something about relationship and the dynamic of I, thou when that starts to unfold, it’s a breaking free of this metaphysics in some way. And the thing that withdrawals in metaphysics shows itself. It’s like out of the corner of your eye and then it moves. You try to articulate it, but you can kind of just do the outlines of it. But there’s something around that. And what’s interesting around that is it draws communities around it. It feels like they’re the seeds of culture or something. Well, common unity. Yeah. But it’s not a unity of the one, like of a thing or even a set of proposition. It’s a common wanting. Yes. Right? Yes. There’s the wanting of being, tutors you in the wanting with each other. It’s really hard to articulate or turn into a method, but there’s something, this is at least the Neoplatonic. Coming into communion with a fundamental wanting empowers you, tutors you, induces you into better wanting yourself and wanting with others. Yep. Yep. Absolutely. I cut you off a minute ago. Yeah. It just sort of occurred to me, a few phrases were coming up, you talking about that contact point occurred to me as like the really real. That’s how I sort of experienced it of the not knowing, but then the remembering and the engagement of it. And it’s like, this is more real. This has more gravity. This has more substance. Going back to a trust, there’s something inherent where it’s just like inside, it’s like a yes. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. Absolutely. That. That. And I think I get the sense that it’s the thing that continues to sort of call us that when people have that experience, there is some form of remembering. Even if it’s more of a evolutionary biological remembering, it is something about that that we’ve lost. Yeah. And so coming into contact and in these particular ways in which we do, yeah, it seems to just flip that switch. And I think it’s important, right? We can talk about the loss, the loss of organized religion or the way in which we’ve lost that. But there’s also a way where in some sense, what that used to hold in some ways is wiggled free from the structures that held it before. And I think there’s an opportunity there, right? I don’t think that that’s just a mistake or something that just maybe went wrong, but there’s an opportunity there that seems to be part of the movement of all this itself in some way, right? Because I think that the… It’s like it become democratized in some way. Well, I was going to go in exactly that direction. With the rise of things like democracy and science where we see the dynamic, like self-organizing power of distributed cognition and collective intelligence. Yes. And then what we have is powerful analogs in our technology, right? The internet and the interfacing of computers so that we release the power of distributed computation. So we’re getting all these hints of this power and its capacity to grasp, optimally grip hyper-objects, the aspects of reality that are inaccessible to our own individual cognition like evolution or global warming or the United States of America, right? Or something like that. And so what I’m saying is I think what we have is we have the disclosure of the possibility of the power of the collective intelligence within distributed cognition to be educated so that it can more and more better coordinate the optimal gripping on aspects of reality that are unavailable to individuals. And I think that has a sense of more real and realness to it that was typically only held by the distributed cognition of the ecclesia, where I don’t just mean the church, I mean also the temple, the mosque, whatever, right? You’ll allow me. These were the cultural distributed cognitive machines that allowed people to grok aspects or dimensions of reality across generations, across space and time between the imaginal and the sensible and the imaginally intelligible that individuals on their own could not do. What I’m saying is all of this has the present possibility of constellating together in a way in which the functionality that was previously held by religion doesn’t have to be held by religion but it still can be made available and functional in people. That’s my attempt to articulate it, the wiggling free. So there’s a light side also to all of this in its capacity. I don’t know why I keep speaking on behalf of the light. I’m usually the dark guy. But there’s a light side in all of this because of the speed and the connectedness, we can now see possibilities that we could only realize when we were within religious fellowship. Yes. That’s what I’m proposing to you. Yes. And also, I may be off with this, but there’s also something too with this where technology actually can be a place where a platform is created. Such that, and we were talking about this, you brought this up earlier about what are these conversations for? Are they for us? You’re talking and you propose that like… These are cathedral building. You’re building cathedrals. Yes. I have such a reaction to you saying that, that it’s visceral. Why? The generation building it is not building it for that, for themselves. Nor are they going to see the fruits of it. No, I understand. I understand. But I think we need to address the reaction and the offing that comes as a consequence of a statement like that. Please. One of the differences between the traditional sacred canopy that you’re describing that was embedded in the Ecclesia and these systems of collective intelligence that you’re describing in the now are separated by degrees of acceleration that are like momentous. The idea that maybe this is the seed for something that will bear its fruits and the far-flung future is one thing. That’s a remarkably fascinating thing to imagine. There’s part of me that is enthralled by that. Make no mistake. But I also think that we need to be very, very attentive to the magnitude of risk that comes as a consequence of that displacement. When that wiggles loose, it can careen. And when it careens, this is a powerful like promethean… Promethean destructive force. Yes. Let’s not forget that. Right? You get the Battle of Kursk from this. I get it. Yeah, yeah. I know you get it. I know you get it. But I think there always needs to be that countervailing sense of restraint, which I think is a Socratic restraint as well, as much as it is anything. When we face the impulse to be triumphant in the face of that open-ended possibility… Without having the tradition that grounds… Without having the tradition that grounds it out. The traditions that you’re talking about, the syncretism of those traditions is something that gathered itself together over an enormous amount of time, like centuries and centuries and centuries. We spent so much time talking about the sensing around error and how incremental that process is. And this idea that we now have the affordances to scale this in ways that maybe were never available, all of the possibility that it tends to that, as enthralling as it is, it is just as dangerous. I don’t disagree, but it’s unavoidable. Yes. So I don’t disagree, but I think the power that the acceleration gives us to do in days what took people years to do is not going away. And so we can either let it run at the behest of who it’s running for now, the state, the market, or we can try and find a way to appropriate it within a project of trying to induce that, whatever we want to call it, that ecclesia towards the individual and collective cultivation of wisdom. And the thing that we have going for us is we do have the history. I keep saying this, we have to avoid both the nostalgia and the utopia because we’ve learned the deep lessons about how those put us into fundamentalism on one hand or the Promethean endeavor on the other. I totally agree with that. But we also like, think about this. This is collapsing privacy and publicity. It is collapsing written and speaking. It is collapsing a spatial temporal bound conversation and a meta conversation that’s taking place in conceptual space rather than in like, it’s collapsing all of those. And so what I guess I take seriously what you say. So I’m going to try and put this as I hope, and I hope the hope is a rational hope, and that’s a weird meta hope, but I hope those new powers and the lessons we’ve learned about nostalgia and utopia mean that we can offer a better choice for how to appropriate the acceleration than the one that is being currently made not for us, but without us by the cultural machinery that’s at work right now. So that’s my response. And I would say that there’s one other thing kind of going for this, right? Is that although this may arrive via technology at people’s screens, I don’t think this is technology, what we’re doing right now. This is not increasing technology, this conversation. It’s not collapsing distances and making of resources. These are these long meandering dialogues that may or may not make any sense at the end of the day. This is not an optimization of something. Right? So I think that’s what I’m really interested in this. I don’t know exactly what to think about it, but it’s like that we can in some sense bring this on a technological platform, that that technological platform shows something fundamentally un-technological, right? That doesn’t lead to just more technology and makes it available, right? In what we call this quarter of the internet. This little quarter of the internet. I don’t know what to think about all of that, right? Speaking of which, but that’s just Perseguian insight too. Yeah. Really good Perseguian insight. Yeah, I agree with you. I think that there’s very, very good reason to think that the technology doesn’t have to be technologizing. Yes. But I mean, I didn’t mean my response. I want to add that to what I said to Chris. I didn’t want, like I wasn’t trying to refute you or anything like that, because I take seriously what you said. I want to hear more of a response. I take very deeply what you said. Very deeply. You know this. I am. When we un-mour this stuff from religion, we face huge dangers. But the two things I’m saying is given technology, leaving it more to religion also subjects us to fundamentalist nostalgia and Promethean totalitarian utopias too. I want to hear more. I think you are right to speak, to give voice to that risk. I’m sorry, I’m not giving you anything specific. I just want to draw you out. Well, I guess it’s, you know, if I didn’t think, obviously, if I didn’t think that there was a gathering, if I didn’t think that there was logos in this enterprise, then, you know, I wouldn’t be sitting here with you. So I think that, but that reminder, that Socratic doubt, I think is just, has to be a perennial, irrepressible feature of this work. Yes. In the way that the dialectic and the dia logos corrects the proposal each time it cycles, and the way that the proposal is dissolved and reformed and dissolved and reformed and dissolved and reformed. Okay, yes. That the faith in this has to be ultimately must ground out in a faith in the logos itself, and the true, the good and the beautiful. Right? This is the bono centric movement. And if there is a way, and I think that we’re committed to the idea of, committed to the project of keeping that at the center always, and I think that, but doubt, doubt in ourselves, doubt in the enterprise, and doubt in, doubt such that we remain vigilant to the myriad of unintended motives and consequences, and very, very real human frailties and digressions that creep into the best laid plans, and the most decent of intentions that just has to remain a feature of this work. And so in giving it voice in this moment, what I’m doing is I’m making sure that it becomes a feature of the very work itself, and that’s what makes it dialectical. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right? I think you’re absolutely right. I’m glad. If we lose that, then we’re guilty of something very severe. Let me return to my interjection, but I think that was properly what was truly happening when people were building cathedrals. I think you’re right. There is the non-eco-centric commitment to the true, the good, and the beautiful. And so if you’ll allow me to put that back into what I was saying, I think I’m being honest when I’m saying I was trying to also convey that, but I think this idea of, and you’re right, and you call it out, right? And this is, we see this in Socrates and in Kierkegaard, this continual reminder of the need to suspect ourselves of being guilty of hubris or despair in ways that we’re not understanding or acknowledging, and how that can drive us into totalitarianisms in very powerful ways. I think that’s really, really powerful. And I hear you, and I hear you even doing this when we were doing the series within the series, I hear you, and this is meant as a compliment, I hear you trying to articulate this new and different non-Cartesian sense of doubt. And I think there’s a deep calling in you to this, and I hear you carefully and incrementally in the positive sense of the word coming back to this again and again and again. And I just want to afford you the opportunity to maybe take another step at it or another stab at it or whatever is the non-violent metaphor that’s appropriate, right? You really resonated when I gave that back to you as a proposal. And I think this is right. I think part of what we’re doing here is trying to, it’s not the only thing we’re doing, but a proper corrective part, a proper normative part of what we’re doing here is trying to articulate a non-Cartesian, non-merely skeptical, non-merely cynical notion of doubt that is needed now. And I want to give you, and I’m not trying to say, now, Chris, do it, finish it, come on. I’m not doing that, but I want to give you the opportunity to take another step at trying to articulate that because I feel like that’s what needs to be heard from you right now, amongst other things. But it seems to be really landing with you. Like you’re trying to articulate, and I hear that all through what you and I were doing with Kierkegaard, and I didn’t get a chance to bring it out, but this seems perfectly opportune. You’re trying, you’re like, there’s this non-Cartesian, non-postmodern sense of doubt that is needed here. Call it Socratic doubt. Yeah, but that’s to name it correctly, but that’s not to explicate it properly, right? Is that fair? It’s beautiful. Thank you. I really appreciate you seeing it and inviting it and valuing it and seeing it as an essential ingredient in what we’re doing. I really appreciate that. And I know that’s true of you. I know that’s true of you, but I appreciate you calling it forth that way. I really, really do. I really do. I think how to explicate it. I mean, I don’t know. We’ve done so much of that already through the series within the series. I mean, maybe just to put it very simply or to begin to put it very simply, I think you’ve already done it in a sense that this kind of reflexive suspicion, and that doesn’t need to be self-loathing. And I know that you’re wary of regressions or digressions into self-loathing, and I’m sensitive to that. And that’s not really what I mean. It’s not affectively what I mean. It’s just a recognition of finitude, properly speaking. And it is a Socratic self-doubt because it’s the recognition that we, each of us, as individuals and collectively, do not comprehensively know ourselves. We cannot take comprehensive account of ourselves, not simply because our perspective of ourselves is finite, but because we’re always changing and unfolding in a Heraclidean way. We can’t get a final and exhaustive purchase on our capacity to elude our own expectations. And that’s why the commitment to whatever perspective is supernal to the sum of interests that we have at any one time is a decision we have to make at every single moment. And the minute we don’t make that decision, we make the opposite. I mean, that’s really the Kierkegaardian point, right? That’s the continuance of the sin or the continuance of faith, is that every single moment that we don’t make that decision to renew that commitment to the logos and to renew the artful and sapiential suspicion toward ourselves, which is also a hope in both aspects, dialectically. The minute we don’t renew that, the minute we don’t renew that, we’ve lost it. And so that’s a hard thing. It’s difficult. What I’m asking of us and myself is something that’s very, very difficult to do. But so is the scope. The scope of what it is that we’re proposing and you’re proposing. And I think there’s a lot of beauty and valor and wisdom to the proposal and to the project. And I think that in order for it to have a chance, I think it needs to be paired with an equally rigorous commitment to that kind of reflective and reflexive scrutiny that cannot yield itself even for a moment. I think you’re doing what you… Yes, and to us, but I think, if you’ll allow me, you’re also offering another answer to why now, why this, why now, which is the advent of this doubt that is most needed, is new kind of doubt that is most needed right now. Can I ask, I think, to bring in another dimension to this doubt that I think is an important part of this. And I mean this, I feel this personally, I sense this personally in you, but there’s something deeper than just the personal around it. There’s some kind of grief or sadness about the loss of the church, the loss of all the institutions. There’s some kind of grief that I feel, I felt it in this conversation. It’s funny as you were talking about this, I think I felt it in you and I realized I was feeling it as well. That feels important around this. You said this in the car. You have to put a face on grief before you can grieve. This is us trying to interface to put a face. Oh, so just the fact that we’re bringing the books, all of this, it’s like that face is there. That face is there, that these things were once implicit, built into the architecture and different in these ways and the people who have died over it and the traditions and there’s a tremendous grief that that’s dying and in many cases dead, right? That I think seems part of this. I think that’s right too. I think you often, I think we share this, but you profoundly. I remember when you did this on, when we were talking with Paul about this, the hauntingness of the dying star metaphor you used, which was a metaphor of grief, profound grief. I think that you are, and I agree, I think the two are bound up together. I think part of what the, and why this could be offered to the culture as a whole, part of offering the new kind of belt is a way of trying to face the grieving that is needed properly. This silence that just opened up seems important. I think we should just stay in it for a bit. I think that was giving a lot of really pregnant, while the three of us were doing that, what was happening for him. Yeah, could you say that in another way? I’m left with there’s something here, like I’m always, so my hmms were me sort of trying to connect to the grief and follow the through line that you guys are weaving together. And where I landed just before you spoke was like it occurs to me that the screams of the grief have been the latching onto these other false religions, the move towards politics, the move towards whatever these other poor replacements for what has been lost. And you’re not a religious person, right? No, not at all. Church twice, I think, maybe in my life. Yeah, I know. And it’s like I can sort of like sense into it a little bit. You know, if I take a breadth of experience of being with people in like the despair or the anger or the frustration or the trying to keep it together, and there’s something about this idea of grief as like a through line that runs through all these experiences that turn up the volume and all the unpleasantness that we seem to be seeing. What do you see, what do you think of the proposal I made of Chris’s, you know, like exemplification in progress? Of a new kind of doubt as related to getting us into what we need to be in in order to properly face the grief. Yeah, so my experience of the discussion of the doubt, I went back to something Guy was saying and it’s like, well, that’s why we practice. Right. We continue to practice so that we do the asanas so that we turn around and integrate and come into more optimal gripping, you know, more of a responsive state such that we are not going, you know, some part of me is like, we’re not going to fall into that. And yet there are still things on the fringe that I think the doubt is very useful for. So that was how it was for me then. And then when I was trying to make like the need for the new doubt, something about that seemed like at first, like really mysterious to me. And then with the grief coming online, it’s something about like, you know, once bit and twice shy sort of situation where it’s just like, I think I imagine people are aware of their experience of that loss of meaning, of their disconnection from the traditions without a suitable or adequate facsimile or replacement available. And I would be really suspicious, hermeneutics of suspicion, and really hesitant and would want for me to extend trust. I think I would need to see the doubt. I would need to see the self analytical, accountable movements. It has to be a feature of the community, the fellowship, the practice that I’m about to move into, which I think again, speaks to that idea of like moving towards wise practice, wise community. Right. That’s what exactly in addition to the, our perennial fallibility towards vice, there is the historical moment of profound grief that makes us additionally susceptible to self deception, manipulation, et cetera. And therefore we need a new kind of doubt beyond the perennial norms or the forms of modernity in order to address this specific dimension that confronts us. Does that land for you? It does. I mean, I don’t think it’s new. I might challenge that. I think you mean new in the sense of new to maybe a great many people, new to- Yeah, I don’t mean new to humanity, but I mean new in sort of a post-Nichian new. Yeah. I mean, I think the kind of doubt that you’ve described it very eloquently. And I think that the doubt that you’re describing and the doubt that is so necessary is a doubt that has always been an aspect of faith. Yes. Yes. Yes. I totally acknowledge the perennial aspect, but I’m trying to get at also something that I think Taylor’s putting his finger on that, you know, and that Guy said we are in the rain shadow of God, right? Or at least the traditional theistic and well, the traditional modern theistic, not the traditional classical. It’s classical theism and modern theism are very different from each other. But we’re in the rain shadow of the death of the modern monotheistic God, right? And so I think that brings with it, I mean, and Nietzsche had a pre-sentiment of this, like how can we become worthy of it? We need to do festivals, but then he precisely did not tell us how to grieve. He did not help us how to grieve. And this is one of my critiques of Heidegger too. I don’t see Heidegger properly. He’s he’s in he’s he’s doing the death of God, but he’s not really. Let’s look at let’s look at what grief kind of is the structure of grief and see and see what this looks like. So I’m going along. I’m in a relationship with you or I’m involved with something and I’ve been involved for years and I’m close and I’m we’ve you and I have had bonding experiences and qualities of experience and like while we’re friends, I have a future of those qualities with you and then you die or you go away or the thing falls apart. And then there’s this whole period where my mind, the mind or the nervous system has it fused that there the qualities of life or qualities of being get are fused with that person or that thing, right? And so when that person suddenly goes away or that thing falls apart, there’s this whole period where you lose not just the qualities of being feel like they go with them, right, but also the future of having them. And so that gives that’s what makes grief not sadness. That’s like that’s literally painful. That’s agonist. And in the in my understanding is the process of grief, the process of like the denial, the anger, right? The sadness, the grieving, the rage is this process of your nervous system, basically uncollapsing the image of that person or that that that that relationship from there, the experience of being right. I would I would tweak it. I think the experience of grief is growing into a kind of person in which those possibilities become available to you again. Yeah. And so that you can pull them apart and so that you can get a future. Yes. Yes. And that the restoration of those qualities again in the future. Yes. And it’s in it’s but that’s also how grief can be transformative. But you write you but you can become Mrs. Caverchamp. Who’s that? Great expectations. She was jilted at the altar and she’d leave the room, right? Won’t allow it to be changed. Right. And she’s like in the all perpetually in that moment walked into the moment of the loss of the beloved. And like that she’s just a collapsed individual in profound way. Right. Or that you or you have the opposite you you have Caverchamp or callous. You just wow. Yeah. I didn’t really care. And then you just keep right. Yeah. So right. And so there’s something about and I’m trying I think this is really good. I’m trying to map that on. Yeah. How does that which I think is what you’re proposing is like what Plato does in the Republic. Yeah. How does that map on to our cultural situation? Right. Avoiding those two. Right. Is this fair? Yeah. This is fair. Okay. So I just I just wanted to lay that out of just that sense of the restoration of those qualities again in our future. But when they come into our future after going through that they come into our future in a much greater fuller way. They can. Right. Yes. Like if you really go through the grieving process. Yes. And it’s this in the in the process has to do with like how do you go through it? You cry. You you you you you sit in the emptiness. You talk about it. You get pissed off. You like. But you like. It’s this process of like. It’s that but you also rely on ritual. I did this with Bruce. And this is it. Yes. And David Pascal. The funeral and the wake. Like there’s a ritual. Yes. Yes. And crying is a social practice. Yes. Yes. Crying is a social practice. It I think it comes back to memory again. You have to find a way. We were talking about this before. You have to find a way to participate in the rebirth of the very thing that is lost in such a way that it passes into the eternal and it passes into the eternal in its loss because of how it becomes part of the new person that you are. That is simply more of yourself. Yes. Right. It’s like who am I in the wake of this loss? Who are we all in the wake of this loss? We don’t know. But I think that’s the way it is. In the wake of this loss. We don’t know. But I think the grief has something to do with the commitment to discover precisely that. So we could appropriate grief as a cultural aporia. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. And there’s something I would say one of the commonest experiences I have of dialect in the dialogos is these glimmerings of a sense of the future of what we’re dialoguing about being deeply in my future. Right. Right. That sense of the eternal. Right. And that starts to light itself up. I would almost say like the actual ritual of this process, whether or not it feels like we’re talking about grieving or if any of that stuff’s explicit, this very process, really interesting to look at this as the process of some kind of grief. I’ve never really looked at it like that, but I can start to see something like that now. Well, we’re gonna have to draw this series to a close and perhaps it’s going to lead me in a bit of grief. But before I say the final word, I’d like to give each one of you whatever you wish. It could be responsive, provocative, it could be summative, but each one of you an opportunity to just say what is called to your mind and heart right now as we’re bringing the series to a close. Maybe we’ll start with Chris. Sure. Well, first of all, thank you. I mean, it’s funny, to me, it’s been a very instance of following the logos because I don’t think I had a real idea of what it is that I was participating in until we came to be in the throes of it, right? Until it actually unfolded. I trusted in the idea and possibility of it, but that’s just my trust for you. That was easy to come by, but it remained very mysterious in what it contained. And it’s a beautiful example of that. And I think it’s a beautiful example to me that we enter into something not knowing what it is and who we are in it and what it means to us and what we mean to it, right? We have an inkling that it’s worthwhile before we understand why it’s worthwhile. And that’s the very way a dialogue or dialectic at the deal logos begins. And so to me, the journey undertaken exemplified its purpose and its character. And it was just a real joy, a real joy. Thank you. Very welcome. I just got flooded with images and memories and emotional memories of two people, my grandfather and Jerry Candelaria, the guy that I co-discovered circling with. And it’s so interesting. I’m just flashing back to just these particular basically deal logos moments of what we called it aspecting, when it was just Jerry and I going off to the beach, staying up all night, having these kinds of conversations. And I just had this moment of where both of them, in fact, I just looked at Booper’s eyes and it reminded me of Jerry’s face somehow. And I just had this sense of just, they just winked at me. And that just means a lot. Thank you. Thank you. I like that. Yeah, feels sweet. I’m just so grateful to be a part of this. Thank you. I really appreciate this series. I think I’ve said to you, I see it as a call to action. And I just love that. I’m a bit of a rubber meets the road kind of person. So I love that you’ve built this and filled in my gaps in knowing as well. I think it’s going to make me and has made me a better facilitator and leader and course designer. So internal gratitude for that. And for you guys, it’s just a blast to like hang out and have conversations. And I just had this thought, I think this is a saying that something that you said before, something about the essence of circling or something about what marks a good circle is like, coming out of it, seeing the world just a little bit differently. And I just sort of realized in this moment, like, that’s actually not also unique to circling. This is also happening in this conversation. There’s like, something has opened up. So it’s, we’re not just talking. Like I am now changed. I will now be looking through my experience of culture and society. And I will be looking and checking like, what are the signs of grief that are there? So, I mean, it’s just a great testament to what it is that we’re doing here. So yeah, thank you. So I want to again, repeat my deep appreciation, gratitude for all of you here. And Chris for the series within the series, and for the amazing crew and all the people working behind the scenes. And for all the people that have preceded this series and from, you know, from Socrates to Nicholas of Cusa to Boomer to Gerber, right? And intense gratitude. And then, this is a bit of a preposterous comparison. So I asked for charity from everybody. But Handel said when he wrote the Messiah, he felt as if heaven had opened and he had seen the face of Christ. I think, and I’m not saying I composed this the way Handel composed the Messiah, but being able to participate in this is something open for me. And I was able to see the depths of the Socratic way that I could never have realized on my own. Something shone forth. And it’s something that I feel accountable to and accountable for. And I’m very appreciative of the way you all embodied it and enfleshed it and just gave it a face so that we could look deeply into the eyes of what is being offered and what is possible for us. So I want to thank you all. I want to thank everybody here. And for the last time for this series, I want to thank you very all, all of you, very much for your time and attention.