https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=bILiVpljIxw
So dialectic moves us into the non-propositional so that we may cultivate. Notice the word I’m using. Cultivating is, it’s not just something you do. It’s not just something you wait for happen, you participate in it. Dialectis, dialectic makes us realize the non-propositional so we can cultivate the Ratio Religio that is so central to virtue. Welcome back to episode three of After Socrates. So last time, oh before I forget, please if you get a chance, if you haven’t, take a look at episodes four and five of Awakening from the Meeting Crisis. So last time we explored the Socratic problematic. Trying to understand Socrates, turns out to be very challenging. We found that Socrates, and this is by his own admission, and also by Plato’s representation of him and other characters’ interaction with him, Socrates is a typos. He doesn’t fit into any categories cleanly. He’s monstrous. He threatens a lot of our primary categories and understandings of ourselves and how we relate to the world and how we pursue the good life. He’s liminal. He’s on the boundaries of our thinking. And related, he’s paradoxical. When we try to understand him, we find we’ve got sort of contradictory claims that both seem to be true, but undermine each other in some fashion. He makes it difficult to internalize him because he’s ironic. We’ve got to come back to that question of how is the irony so important and relevant to him? And of course he does not have a method. So simply following him by following a method is not available to us. He threatens and challenges many of our assumptions and presuppositions around success, completion, conclusion, and their centrality to living a good life. And yet we can’t turn away from the Socratic way. We can’t reorient ourselves or take up an orientation away from Socrates because of the things he does claim to know. And they turn out to be important because of his ability to see through some of the things that he’s been doing, his ability to see through self-deception, pretension, bullshit, inappropriate attention, misdirection of care and love. He affords transframing. And so that is the reason that that transframing is central to the cultivation of wisdom and spirituality. He inspires important wisdom traditions like Platonism, Stoicism, Neoplatonism, etc. Finally, if we reject Socrates because of this paradoxical nature, we would be pressed to reject a lot of other sages. And that would be very problematic if we want to cultivate wisdom and enhance meaning in life. So we looked at two things. We looked at dialectic into dialogos, which is a relationship between mutual midwiving and having a living logos. And how that is in a relationship with learned ignorance and how they mutually afford each other. But we must therefore ask two important questions that come out of all of that, especially that last point about dialectic into dialogos and learned ignorance. Namely, what is dialectic into dialogos and how does one practice it? The related question is, what is this logos that I’ve sort of been only referring to intuitively that’s so central to dialogos? We’re going to start with the first question. And as we answer it, it will give us what we need to answer the second question. So what is dialectic into dialogos? Everything is coming down to this. What is it? Well, you might expect that because of the centrality of dialectic into dialogos to this whole Socratic project, that Plato would give a very clear description of it and an explanation of how one practices it. We would expect to find within Plato, here’s the instruction manual. Here’s how you do dialectic. But that’s absent. You don’t find it anywhere. And many scholars comment on this. This is so central to Plato, so central to the life of wisdom. And yet he doesn’t tell us how to do it. He doesn’t even give us a very clear description. He gives us some examples, and they don’t hang together that clearly. It’s like, what? It’s like everything is to this. And then all I get is these breadcrumbs that might lead back to how one does dialectic. So why? Why is this the case? Is this just some sort of stupidity on the part of Plato, who’s in other ways such a fantastically brilliant thinker? That’s kind of implausible. And what supports the fact that it’s probably not Plato’s stupidity is this lack of description and explanation. Instruction manual for dialectic is found throughout the entire tradition. So Plato’s around 390 BCE. Let’s go all the way to 270 CE, Plotinus and the advent of the Neoplatonic tradition. A lot of time there. He writes a whole treatise on dialectic, says how important and central it is to the life of wisdom and to taking up the Neoplatonic path. And we’ll come back to that later. What I’m saying is here’s somebody about 500 to 600 years later in this tradition. Again, here’s the treatise, so important, so central. And you read it, you go, and how do I do it? Plotinus? It’s not there. It’s not there. So it’s actually quite implausible that Plato’s just leaving it out or being sloppy. So what’s going on? What’s going on? Well, here’s where we have to hypothesize, because there’s nothing in the literature that tells us why dialectic isn’t there. That’s the point. However, I do think there are three plausible reasons or explanations for why the instruction manual on dialectic is missing. Perhaps, here’s the first one, perhaps dialectic is like plumbing. You could maybe read a textbook or get an instruction manual, but that’s not how you’re going to learn plumbing. That’s still not how we teach plumbing. You know how you learn plumbing? You apprentice to a plumber. It’s a complex set of skills and reframing and adjustments. And it takes a lot. You have to basically apprentice with somebody who can do it. You have to catch it from somebody. You can’t just pick it up from an instruction manual. So that’s one plausible reason. The reason why we don’t get an instruction manual is you don’t learn it that way. You learn it by apprenticeship. And you see later, especially when we get into it later in this lecture and the next lecture, that makes a lot of sense. It makes a lot of sense. However, there’s another plausible explanation. Dialectic is probably maybe a meta practice. It has a meta practice role. And that’s why it sits on top of an ecology of practices and constrains and informs them, but is also nourished by them. And that ecology of practices perhaps is within a school. And that school is within philosophy as a way of life, the way Hedow explains in his seminal books, like philosophy as a way of life and what is ancient philosophy. If that was the case, that would mean that dialectic would be both venerated and taken for granted because one can only practice it within this way of life, within the school, within the ecology of practices. That makes sense too as a real possibility. Three, maybe the focus of attention was not on the practice of dialectic, but the results it produced, the virtue and the wisdom. Perhaps, in fact, if you were directing attention to the practice, it might have thought that might have been detrimental for people really focusing on virtue and wisdom. Now, I presented these as three separate explanations, but they’re not really necessarily competing with each other. Instead, they could all very well be true together. And I think that makes a lot of sense. I think that makes a lot of sense. Okay. So it’s probably not, as best as we can make out, happenstance that we don’t have the instruction manual. There’s probably good reason for that, and we have to respect that, and we have to come up with any account we have of dialectic that respects these three hypotheses. So what are we going to do then? Well, this is what I propose. And I’m going to propose something that comes from my practice as a cognitive scientist. I’m going to propose that we reverse engineer dialectic. What’s reverse engineering? Okay. Well, what you do in reverse engineering is here’s some cognitive phenomenon, some product behavior of cognition, and there’s something going on that’s causing that, but you don’t know what it is. You know, this is actually a deep problem in an attempt to understand the mind, understand the brain. Yeah, sure, we have fMRI, and we now have dense EEG and other things, but we still do not have a lot of access to people’s brains. And secondly, we can’t perform many of the experiments we would need to perform on people in order to test out our hypotheses because we would be potentially damaging their brains, doing unethical things. So what do we do? Well, what do we do is we say, well, look, there’s something that’s making or causing intelligent behavior. People are general problem solvers. What’s going on? We’ve got all kinds of evidence. There seems to be a general factor of intelligence. What could be causing that? Well, here’s what we’ll do. And this is actually the project, at least the scientific project of artificial intelligence. Let’s make a machine that can produce the same results, the same phenomenon. And then we can make an argument, a plausibility argument. It’s not a deduction. It’s a plausibility argument that the same mechanism that we’ve made, the same set of processes, structures, and functions we made in order to generate the intelligent behavior, are going on in the human brain. This is exactly the project of artificial intelligence, especially artificial general intelligence. Now, is it a deductively certain argument? No. Is it sort of directly inductively based? No. And this is why it’s always possible to say, whatever that AI is doing, it’s not doing the same thing as we’re doing. It’s a plausibility argument. The problem with sort of just simply denying it is as our creation becomes more and more capable of doing what we think only we can do, it becomes a more and more powerful candidate for explaining how we do what we do. OK. So I’m not going to try and make a machine, but I am going to try and reverse engineer dialectic into dialogos from the phenomena it was supposed to generate, the results it was supposed to produce. Because Plato talks quite a bit about this. And even more luckily for us, we have a lot of excellent scholarship about what dialectic was supposed to do. So not only can we look at Plato and other sources, for example, Plotinus later on, but especially Plato, we’ve got a lot of excellent scholarship going through this. People who really know the ancient Greek, who know the history of the ancient Greek, who know the other literature. So I’m placing a certain amount of trust in them. But of course, you always have to. You always have to. What’s interesting is how a lot of this scholarship is converging around a lot of central themes. So we can use this scholarship to say, OK, this is what dialectic into dialogos produces. And then we can use this scholarship to say, OK, this is what dialectic into dialogos produces. And then let’s start reverse engineering what the practice must be like in a way that’s consistent with our three hypotheses, such that we could produce similar results. Now, in the end, somebody can always criticize and say, you have no way of knowing that that’s what Plato was doing when he was doing dialectic into dialogos. You’re right. I can’t give you a deductive, inductive argument. Nobody can. So we have a choice here. We can either say, that’s it. Too bad for us. Or we can say, let’s use a method that we know can be powerfully successful for all of its caveats and do the best we can to reverse engineering. In the end, like I said, I’m not concerned of ultimately about historical accuracy. I’m concerned about affording people the ability to practice a way of life. OK, so one of the first books. In fact, if you want to do anything about dialectic and dialogos, this book, this book by Gonzalez is just an astonishing book. So this is his book from 1998 called Dialectic and Dialogue, Plato’s Practice. Notice the language here, a philosophical inquiry. This book and Gonzalez’s work in general, it was seminal because it was one of the books that launched what’s known as the Third Way of interpreting Plato. And this is the sort of, I don’t know what to call it, camp of platonic scholarship that I think is winning the day. And I’m going to rely on. I can’t do the whole back argument as to why I think the third way is this superior. I’m just going to, if you want to look at it, you can take it up. Gonzalez edited a book. OK, I’m just going to make the argument that he makes. So he makes a strong case that dialectic helps people to realize non-propositional. That’s his language, not his language. This is in and of itself is revolutionary because the other ways of interpreting Plato put so much emphasis on arguments, conceptual analysis, logical definition, essences, et cetera. And to emphasize this is a revolutionary way of interpreting Plato. And that non-propositional knowing is central to the cultivation of wisdom and virtue. Now, for me, this is something that, I think, is very important to me because I think that’s the way to interpret it. And I think that’s the way to interpret it. And that that non-propositional knowing is central to the cultivation of wisdom and virtue. Now, for me, this is something that is convergent with some of the most important work in the kind of cognitive science I practice called 4E cognitive science. And some of the papers recently published I’ve recently published with Dan Schiappi and with Gary Hovinesian and others with Brett Anderson and Mark Miller. So I’m going to present a case for what these non-propositional kinds of knowing look like. Many of you familiar with this. And if you want, I do, I think, a deeper presentation on the invited lecture I gave at Cambridge. It’s on my channel if you want to take a look at it. I’m only going to go over it sort of somewhat schematically here. So first of all, the kind of knowing that we tend to give priority to and often think is the only kind of knowing is propositional knowing. This is knowing that something is the case, knowing that a particular proposition, knowing that cats are mammals. They have a particular kind of memory associated with it called semantic memory. You know that cats are mammals. There’s no episode in your life tied to that. It’s just a propositional fact. So it’s stored in semantic memory. And it has with it a special sense of realness, which we often equate to truth per se, which is a sense of conviction. Yes, this is well evidenced, well argued for. But there’s another kind of knowing. Not propositional, procedural. This is knowing how to do something. This is knowing how to modify your sensory motor loop so that you can change the world as you need to. This is knowing how to ride a bike, knowing how to swim, knowing how to kiss somebody you love. Your skills are what result from procedural knowing. Propositional knowing gives you beliefs. But procedural knowing gives you skills. Beliefs may be true or false in our standard sense, but are skills true or false? Instead we talk about whether or not they’re powerful or not, whether they’re effective or not. This is a different sense of realness. And they’re stored in a different kind of memory. Psychologists, prosaically enough, call it procedural memory. And it’s very distinct from semantic memory. You can lose semantic memory without losing procedural memory and vice versa. Now notice that the procedural memory is actually the space within which you manipulate your propositions. You have to know how to manipulate them, move them around, relate them. And that knowing how to transform, manipulate your propositions is not itself a set of propositions. This is a point made by both Aristotle and Wittgenstein. You might say, oh, well, Ryle made a similar point too. You might say, oh, that’s interesting. Huh. So there’s a different sense of realness. There’s sort of truth, and then there’s power. Power is also a way in which reality is sensed by me. And I don’t mean just perceptual. I mean that when we’re making sense of things. But then you may ask, is there a space below procedural knowing where we actually transform, manipulate our skills, where we decide which skills to activate, how to coordinate various skills, or which skills we need to acquire? Yeah. That’s the space of perspectival knowing. That’s what gives me my sense of situated awareness. So what’s your perspectival knowing? What’s it like to be me here now in this state of mind correlated with this situation? So, for example, I’m sober, I’m in the studio, and I’m doing this particular thing. So a lot of skills are not being activated or coordinated right now. I am not activating my swimming skill, at least as far as I can tell. Nor am I activating my skill of how to kiss somebody I love. That would be creepy and weird. What tells me which skills to bring online, how to properly coordinate them, and which ones I might need to acquire? Well, this is your perspectival knowing. What it’s like to be you here now in this state of mind in this situation. It’s your salience landscaping. Salience is what stands out to you. What grabs your attention? What arouses your metabolism? What triggers your affect? And what salience is constantly shifting around? It’s a dynamic topography. It’s your salience landscaping. So I have a state of mind. I’m sober. And I have a sense of here now-ness and how everything is together in my awareness. And that glues on to a particular situation. That’s the other pole. And then between them, the salience landscaping is taking place. And that is actually what we mean by a perspective. What’s it like to be here now looking this way, this salience landscape? And so I see this part of the world as a particular situation for me. So this is knowing what it’s like to be in your state of mind in this situation doing this salience landscaping. It has a different kind of memory associated with it. It’s episodic memory. So compare this to when did you learn that 2 plus 2 equals 4? I don’t know. I’m probably in grade school. But you’re inferring. You’re not remembering. Compare that to episodic memory. What was the most interesting thing you did last night? Oh, well, I did this and this and this. And then what do you do? What’s an episodic memory? What’s an episode? Well, it’s a chunk of memory around perspectival knowing. When you really go back into the episode, oh, that was my state of mind. That was the situation. And this is what I was finding salient in it. Yeah, that’s what episodic memory is. And again, it’s different from semantic memory. It’s different from procedural memory. And notice it has a different sense of realness to it. It isn’t so much power or truth in the sense of conviction, being convinced that a belief is true. It’s that very word that I mentioned a few minutes ago. It’s a sense of presence, being here now in the situation. Dan Schiappi and I have published three papers about the scientists using the rovers on Mars. And they look for people who can get that sense. Somehow people who can look at still black and white photographs that have come from the rovers on Mars, time delayed. And yet they can look at these photographs and get a sense of being on Mars. They have a sense of presence, of really being there. And it turns out that that’s actually central to them being able to do the work. Another way of looking at this is all the work being done on the psychology of virtual games. What makes a game real to people, a virtual game, isn’t necessarily very simulitude. How realistic it looks. It’s instead the ability to create this sense of presence. People can get that sense of presence with games that aren’t realistic. They can get it with Tetris, for example. They feel like they’re in Tetris. And they’ll even start to have episodic memories and dream in the Tetris world. So notice this has a very different memory, different sense of realness to it. You may think, well, that’s the bottom level, right? That’s so I get it, right? Propositions have to do with our sort of reasoning capacity. And procedural is maybe sort of our basic skills and cognition. And perspectival is about consciousness in the mind. And perspectival is about consciousness in how it affords a particular way of knowing. That’s it, right? No. It’s not it. It’s the fourth way. Now, let me say something about this before I explain what it is. Because it’s actually central. And this is a big sort of move that has come through philosophy, especially epistemology, over the last 40 years or so. I’m going to say this carefully because it can be really confusing. You don’t have to know that you know in order to know. What? OK. So there are many things you know, and you might not know that you know them. You might not be able to justify that you know them. OK. That sort of makes sense. Well, what’s the problem? Why are philosophers so concerned about that? Because if in order to know X, I have to know that I know X, then how do I know that I know this? Well, in order to know this, I have to know that I know it. But then I have to know, oh, right. This is going to get me into an infinite regress. So this is where we really get into. We can sort of sense propositional knowing when we’re doing it, and procedural and perspectival. But this fourth kind, participatory knowing, is at this deeper level. OK. Well, what do you mean by participatory knowing? Well, first of all, notice that you actually shift between perspectives. Oh, yeah. I do that all the time. Where are you doing that? Well, I’m doing it in my mind. That’s just to say it’s a kind of knowing. Where are you doing that? Wow. That’s a really good question. What is it that’s affording and constraining which perspectives you take up? How do those perspectives emerge? What do they emerge from? Right. Good question. OK. So here’s what participatory knowledge, participatory knowing is. I have me. I’ll just use me as an example, but you can put you there if you wish. And I’m an agent. What does that mean? Well, what agency is a big topic. So I’m not going to give a full definition. I’m going to give something that I think is central to what an agent is. An agent is able to determine the consequences of its behavior and alter its behavior in order to make sure that it’s not going to be a problem. And alter its behavior in order to change the consequences and bring about consequences that it wants. OK. So what? That means there’s a relationship between your agency and whether or not the world will accommodate and support that agency. So let’s do something that’s a very sort of simple example. I take up the agentic role of being a tennis player, and I run into a football stadium wanting to play tennis. It’s not going to work. I’m literally in the wrong arena. So there’s a co-identification. You can only be an agent in a particular arena, and you can only be a particular arena for action if there are particular agents available. And this doesn’t have to do just with humans. This has to do with, in biology, what’s called niche constructions. Organisms are shaped through evolution to fit an environment, but organisms through their actions shape and change the environment. So there’s a loop. There’s an agent arena relationship. Niche construction. And we’re doing it all the time. In fact, I want you to notice that all the time, right now, you are assuming an identity for yourself. I’m a student. I’m a philosopher. I’m a psychologist. I’m somebody wanting to be more Socratic. And you’re assigning an arena. The place that you’re in is a place that suits those kinds of actions that come out of that kind of agency. So there’s an agent arena co-identification process. But the way to understand it is that both the agent and the arena are participating in forces. I’m trying to use a neutral term here, in factors that shape them to fit each other. And you go, what are you talking about? I can walk around. I can walk around. I can walk around. Gravity has shaped this and shaped me, so I can walk around. Oh. Biology has shaped me through evolution and also had me, well, human beings and their ancestors, shaped the environment to fit bipedalism. Bipedalism is one of our huge evolutionary advantages. That’s also how I can walk around. But culture has shaped me and this environment. There are floors here, flat floors. I have shoes on. I’ve been taught how to walk around in particular environments. For example, in this environment, there’s tape on the floor telling me, John, you have to sort of stand here because we’re doing this cultural thing of making a video, et cetera, et cetera. So the environment has been shaped, tape on the floor. I shaped myself to fit it. So the physics shaping us, so walking is possible. The biology shaping the agent and the arena, so walking is possible. Culture shaping me and the arena, so walking is possible. And then my ongoing cognition is capable of finding what’s relevant in the environment for moving around and seeing those aspects. Oh, that’s a flat place through which I can walk and shaping me to it. This is how I should walk. Oh, but there’s an object, so I have to move around it. So the environment is shaping my sensory motor pathway and my sensory motor loop is also shaping the environment because I’m moving around and I can move objects in that environment. All of these co-shapings, co-identifications are creating affordances. This is a term from Gibson, central term in 4D Cognoscience. An affordance is a real existing possibility for action. This floor affords walking. Is the walking in the floor? Blue whale can’t walk on it. Oh, is the walking in me? I can’t walk in space. Nothing’s happening. The walking isn’t in the floor. It’s not in me. It is a real agent arena relationship resulting from co-shaping that is there. It’s not in me. It’s not in the environment. It is between us. It is between us. And remember how Socrates’ Metaxu, between that transjectivity. So what’s the kind of memory that goes with that agent arena relationship, all the roles and all the identities? This is the weird kind of memory you call yourself. That’s what yourself is. Yourself is this set, and we’re going to talk a lot more about this, the set of roles and identities that you’ve stored. And how do you know that yourself is real? By participating in yourself, by being yourself. What’s it like when participatory knowing isn’t working? Well, what you’ll find is the affordance landscape dries up. When does that happen? Culture shock. Go to another culture. It’s shocking. That’s what anthropology relies on. Home sickness. I’m in this wonderful hotel room in Austin, Texas. I’m stranded there by Air Canada, and I don’t want to be there. I want to be home. I can’t be myself. And home is a place where the agent arena relationship is really working. That’s why if we experience being homeless within the cosmos, that tells us something very important about how that agent arena relationship is breaking down for us. And when the agent arena relationship breaks down, the participatory knowing breaks down. The ability to make connections and act appropriately breaks down. And then the perspectival knowing breaks down. Then the procedural knowing breaks down, and then the propositional knowing breaks down. Participatory is the space in which we move and generate and shift and coordinate perspectives. That’s what yourself is doing. So the participatory knowing generates affordances. The perspectival knowing selects which ones are salient to me, that enter into my salient landscaping, that I’m going to act upon. As I get that situational awareness, I know which skills, which procedures to engage. And as I do that, I start to get evidence about generalizable patterns. I start to form propositions about facts. So why, let’s go return back to Gonzales now, why is the non-propositional so important? Well, notice the non-propositional is the place in which I can fundamentally transform the propositional. In fact, in which I can transform the procedural, in fact, in which I can transform the perspectival, even in which I can transform the participatory. So it has, that’s the place where transframing can occur. The non-propositional, that’s what makes all of this intelligibly meaningful to me before I bring it in to proposition. And notice how difficult it is to capture the non-propositional in propositions. What do you mean? I do this sometimes with my students. Give me instructions on how to tie my shoelace, and I’ll follow the instructions exactly. And it’s like, oh my gosh, it’s really hard. Tell me, give me the complete and exhaustive set of instructions for riding a bicycle so I won’t fall off. Oh, yeah, right. Tell me a particular, give me in propositions a particular, you know, that captures perfectly your particular perspectival knowing. What was it like when you first made love? Translate it completely into propositions for me. Yeah. And then more penetratingly, translate who you are yourself into an exhaustive set of propositions. Like, that’s ridiculous. Yeah, exactly. The non-propositional is central to trans framing and to the foundations and the dynamic connections of meaning making. If you are not accessing and educating the non-propositional, your chances for virtue and wisdom drop significantly. I think the failure, and I agree with many people, Stanley Rosen and many people, the failure of purely analytic philosophy, the purely propositional manipulation of concepts. What do you mean it failed? Well, I don’t mean that we didn’t learn a lot, but it didn’t generate wisdom. It’s questionable if it generated that much knowledge, and it actually generated a lot of arguments showing how it had to be radically insufficient. Many of these arguments that have been given to you are ultimately originated within some of the giant figures of the analytic tradition. Okay. So, the non-propositional is central to wisdom, central to that connectedness to the world, to other people, to yourself, that is so central to finding your life worth living, to having meaning in life. When you’re facing your death, people don’t seem to care about their possessions or their power. They care about what relationships did they form to themselves. Man, I’ve just been an asshole my whole life. To other people, nobody really loves me. I don’t think there’s anybody that I love. I’ve been out of touch with reality. Now, what you can find is you can find figures that try to deny all those three, and they’re in a narcissistic fever nightmare. And I don’t need to talk about specific examples because we have more than we need of those. Or you can turn to non-propositional knowing to educate the dynamic relatedness, connectedness, religio. It’s the root of the word religion, but it means to be connected, to bind together. Meaning in life is how are you, how are you religio to yourself, to other people, to the world? Wisdom is about ratio, religio. What’s ratio? R-A-T-I-O. You probably pronounce it ratio. Right? And it’s about the proper proportioning of things. Notice that we sometimes say, notice, putting things into perspective. Oh, right. There’s a ratio. Why are you pronouncing it weirdly, John? Because that’s probably the Latin pronunciation, and it’s in our word rationality and rationing. Again, what are you doing when you’re rationing? You’re properly proportioning things so that they are fitting the reality of the situation. Rationality is the proper proportioning of your attention, of your affect, of your arousal, of the relationship between the four kinds of knowing so that your religio is, I don’t know which pronunciation to use, I use both, right? Because I hear both, right? That your religio is enhanced. It’s not being torn apart by self-deceptive, self-destructive behavior. It’s not foolish. You want ratio, religio. That’s found mostly, not totally, but mostly in the non-propositional. The propositional has a role, but that role should ultimately be in service to the non-propositional, not dominance and tyranny over the non-propositional. So Plato, way back when, is doing this? The Greeks have two words. Gonzales relies quite a bit on the Greek word noesis. And noesis is the process. Noose is the noun. Noine is the verb. But what is this process of noesis? Well, the original meaning is noticing, at least according to Maitzen and some other people. Maitzen and his book, Sentience. The closest thing is noticing. And notice how noticing is an inherently perspectival thing. When I want you to notice something, what I’m doing is trying to get you to shift your sentience landscaping so that you transform your state of mind to fit a new situation. So noesis is that other people emphasize, and I think legitimately so, that noesis has an all-at-once-ness about it. Like when you have an insight and you suddenly get a new perspective on a problem. I think that’s right, too. And so it has the… If you put these two together, sort of noticing and the way noticing can generate insight and how insight transforms what you’re noticing, what’s salient to you, what you’re considering relevant, how you’re bound to a context, religio, I think you get noesis, and Gonzales is basically saying, and other people have noted this, Plato’s trying to awaken us to noesis. I think Gonzales is right. Gonzales is brilliant. Like everything he writes is really good, and he’s been enormously influential. Many scholars, he’s highly cited. But I think Gonzales leaves something out. I think noesis is generally the perspectival, non-propositional, that Plato’s trying to get us to realize. But think about this. Socrates is all about know thyself, the Delphic inscription, know thyself. But the know there isn’t noesis. It’s gnosis, G-N-O-S-I-S. It’s in our word diagnosis. Now, gnosis has a tangled history, because it’s later, it’s taken up and made central in gnosticism. And I’ve tried to see if I can make sense, and I’ve given some talks on my channel if you’re interested in it. What is gnosis sort of independent from gnosticism? Because there was something there that was taken up into gnosticism. And I won’t repeat that argument at length, but I think gnosis is how we deal with when we need to fundamentally transform ourself and our world so we can be a different person in a different world. It’s a knowledge that allows you to transform someone. So diagnosis is you’re going to at least biologically transform someone. You’re going to transform them from sick. It’s going to allow you to transform someone who’s sick into healthy. You’re going to liberate them from sickness and disease. In a similar way, gnosis is a transformation that liberates people from how they can be existentially diseased. They can be sort of feel like they’re trapped. They can feel alienated. They can feel that reality is absurd, et cetera. Gnosis is that kind of knowing. Well, what kind of knowing is that that’s transforming the agent arena relationship in this Selvik manner? Well, that’s participatory knowing. So gnosis, perspectival, gnosis, participatory. Those are the really important non-propositional. And you say, well, what about procedural? Ah, that’s so interesting. Because Plato regularly does this, and Socrates is doing it. He’ll bring out the proposal that wisdom is a kind of techne. That’s where we get our word technology from. Techne is knowing how to do things, like knowing how to be a blacksmith, knowing how to be a cobbler. He’ll bring that proposal out because it’s clearly non-propositional. And people will, yes, in the dialogue, yes, yes, that’s it. And then that’ll be destroyed. And it’ll show, no, no, the knowledge of virtue is not a techne. There are probably skills in a virtue, but they’re not sufficient. Think about everything that goes into a virtue. I’m going to be honest. I have to have certain beliefs. Is that enough to being honest? No. In fact, being able to really manipulate propositions about virtue really well doesn’t produce virtue. You get the astonishing and often noted remark that the philosophers who teach moral reasoning and ethics, that doesn’t translate into them being particularly moral or ethical people. It’s needed. It’s necessary. It’s not sufficient. Is being honest having certain skills? Well, of course, I have to know how to reflect, judge the truth, discern what’s going on. Is that enough? No. Of course not. Being honest means I have to know, I have to really be able to have situational awareness. You have to be honest at the right time to the right degree. Imagine if you were completely honest all the time about everything. First of all, you would just be talking constantly and you would be destroying all the relationships you have. Oh, right. I have to have the right sensibility. I have to have that right ability, the perspective. But the difference between being honest to a three-year-old child, being honest to a stranger, being honest to your lover, being honest to a friend, being honest to your students, are they all exactly the same? Of course not. You have to know which perspective. Oh, right. And then honesty requires me cultivating particular traits of character. If I don’t have those traits, my character, if I haven’t set up important constraints that I’ve habituated to, that I live within, inhabit, habit, inhabit my character, then I won’t be honest. This is one of Aristotle’s great insights. So a virtue, notice how a virtue requires the integration of all of the kinds of knowing. So procedural knowing is not enough. So Plato is not only pushing us out of the procedural, he’s saying don’t land and think you’re done by moving to the procedural. So he’s not only moving us out of the propositional, sorry I misspoke. He’s saying when you move to the procedural, don’t land there and think you’re done. It’s more important to move into the noesis and the noesis, into the perspectival and the participatory, if you’re going to get virtue as you fundamentally need to cultivate it. Okay, so dialectic moves us into the non-propositional so that we may cultivate. Notice the word I’m using. Cultivating is, it’s not just something you do. It’s not just something you wait for happen, you participate in it. Dialectis, dialectic makes us realize the non-propositional, so we can cultivate the ratio religio that is so central to virtue. Okay, notice that these results actually, this result that I’ve just argued for, sits very well with our three hypotheses about why we don’t have a direct instruction manual for the non-propositional. Dialectic, because what would an instruction manual look like about getting people to move this way and to cultivate the relevant virtues? Could you give an instruction manual on how to be kind? Hmm, okay. In fact, perhaps an instruction manual would mistakenly encourage people to think they could reduce all of the non-propositional to the propositional. Here’s a set of rules or an algorithm or a recipe for how to do that. So, let’s say that we have a non-propositional, and I would reduce all of the non-propositional to the propositional. Here’s a set of rules or an algorithm or a recipe. That’s all I need. And that would actually be to undermine, trying to call people to remember, sati, the importance of the non-propositional ways of knowing. Their importance to wisdom, to meaning, and to virtue. Gonzales also, in this astonishing book, goes on to point out something else that dialectic does. It lines up with the non-propositional, but in a really important way that advances our understanding. So, what Gonzales points out is when Socrates is doing in Lancashire, many scholars say there’s deep continuity, if not identity, between the Lancashire dialectic. So, I’m not going to do a lot of sort of hair splitting here. So, when Socrates is doing his thing, what you often see is he steers between two different modes of discourse. Gonzales goes into the Lachis, which is a Platonic dialogue about the nature of courage, and Socrates is talking about two generals, and they’re trying to decide if they should send their sons to this particular instructor. Well, what are these two modes of discourse and thought? Well, the first is the first-person perspective of intuitive pronouncement. This is one of the generals. He’s the one that dialogue is named after. He’s the man of action, and he just knows what courage is. I know it. There it is. I know it. First-person intuition. I know it. And Socrates comes in and does his thing and just demolishes this, and shows how that is insufficient. You probably need intuitions about any virtue in order to cultivate and recognize it, but that’s not enough. The other general has been trained by the sophists. Again, go back and look at episode four of Awakening from the Meeting Crisis if you want a little bit more about them. What does he do? He offers a technical definition, one he in fact thinks Socrates will agree with, and it’s a technical definition given from the third-person perspective. This is just the objective definition of this. And Socrates goes in and… And you go, well, what’s left? This is our world. There’s subjectivity or objectivity. What’s left, Socrates? And of course, in one sense, that’s where the dialogue ends. There is no definition. There is no propositional account of virtue. What Gonzales points out is something really interesting. Is that Socrates actually is steering between them and beyond them. Let me try and use an analogy. I have my left visual field and my right visual field, and my brain integrates them together, so I have depth perception. I see, by the way, in perspective, 3D perspective. So… Socrates, this is really an interesting claim, is he moves to a perspective that’s neither first-person nor third-person, and this is also connected with him actually exemplifying the virtue that cannot be defined. How do we know that he is exemplifying the virtue? Because when the dialogue is over, both generals and Socrates admit they have not come up with a definition. The propositional has failed them, but the generals want their sons to learn courage from Socrates, not from the original person who was proposing to teach courage. Why would they do that? Because Socrates was exemplifying the virtue in a powerful way. So… Socrates, only in dialectic with the two generals, only in that dialogue, only in that dialectic, only in it, can he do that. Only in that dialogue, only in that dialectic, only in it, can he exemplify the non-propositional virtue of wisdom. He can dramatically present it, even though he can’t propositionally define it, only in his interaction with them. And he can only undermine the attempts to reduce the virtue to subjective propositions, subjectively generated propositions or objectively generated propositions. It’s only in the dialogue that that can actually happen. Socrates is Mataxu. He’s between. He’s between. He’s within and without. He inhabits the second-person perspective. What? What’s the second-person perspective? Oh, right. So first-person perspective, I. Third-person, it. It is right. Second-person, you. It’s the perspective that only exists in dialogue. He takes up the second-person perspective. And this is inseparable from dialogue. This is why Plato wrote dialogues. Socrates moves beyond subjective intuition and objective perspective to a transjective perspective, a betweenness. The second-person perspective. There’s a fundamental shift of perspective that results in a new orientation. Fundamentally new orientation. So here’s the second-person perspective. A new orientation. So here’s really a recent book, 2022, excellent book. It’s an anthology. I love anthologies. Because people who write books are forced to come up with much more concise essays and then you get a multiplicity of voices. This is called New Perspectives on Platonic Dialectic, a Philosophy of Inquiry. I’m going to cite a couple of articles from this. The one that I want to point to right away is an article by, I forgot its first name. Oh yeah, Vassilis Politis. It’s entitled Dialectic and the Ability to Orient Ourselves. So first of all, we’re going to do a lot about orientation. But let’s just, oh right, orientation is this combination of assuming the right agent arena relationship, the right perspectival knowing, so that I can find my way. So orientation is deep, it’s primordial. It’s presupposed in everything we’re doing. When you come into a place, before you start to do anything, you have to properly orient to it. Ratio religio, you have to properly orient. OK. So he proposes that dialectic brings about this reorientation by exposing us to what he calls radical aporia. Now many people have noted, and it’s part of the way Socrates is monstrous, that Socrates generates aporia in people. What does aporia mean? Well, it means the original meaning is something like, I’ve lost my way. I don’t know how to go forward. I’m stuck. It’s confusion, but confusion in the real deep sense of disorientation. You’re disoriented. I don’t know how to go forward. I don’t know how to go back. I’m lost. We know that Socrates does this. It’s mentioned frequently in the Platonic dialogue. Scholars talk about it all the time, about Socrates. And you can even get it in the way the characters who are interacting with Socrates talk about him. They talk about him like he’s a stingray. You’ve been stung by a stingray, and you’re like, oh, you get all disoriented. You’re like, oh, I’m lost. You’re disoriented. You’re disoriented. You’re disoriented. You’re disoriented. You’re disoriented. You’re disoriented. You’re disoriented. You’re like, oh, you get all disoriented. Or he’s like an enchanter, and he puts a spell on you, and you’re all disoriented. That’s a poria. We talked about how Socrates brings you to this state, this realization of your ignorance, but especially at the perspectival and participatory level. OK, I want to read a quote from Paul Itis’s excellent article. Read the whole thing. It’s beautiful. But here’s the one I want to, I think, really captures the core of his argument. If one recognizes a radical aporia and acknowledges it, wow, what is the kind of knowledge that goes into this argument? Wow, what is the kind of knowledge that goes on in acknowledgment? And acknowledge it as radical, then one will recognize, oh, look at these words, this kind of knowing, and acknowledge that one cannot rely on those everyday ways of thinking and the basic concepts and elements of thought that people, including oneself, previously never thought of questioning. One will come to think that these everyday ways of thinking, even the most basic among them, may be illusory, and that establishing the extent of the illusion requires nothing less than one’s taking up, working through, and resolving the aporia, whose radical character showed up in the illusion. This is a journey of radical reorientation. It’s a journey of understanding, understanding in one’s thinking and oneself. Notice how everything we’ve been talking about comes together in that very perspicacious quote. So aporia, what does it mean? Well, let’s start sort of in a toy example, so when I was living with my step-sons in a previous marriage, I formed a very deep relationship with him. But the older step-son, he had a white board in his room, and I would try to be Socratic with him. Now, much later in life, it turns out that that seems to have made a good impression on him. And so I would try to be Socratic with him. I would try to be Socratic with him. But I would do things like this. I’d go into his white room and on his white board. When he wasn’t there, I’d write, like, does time take time to happen? What? Well, time is flowing. But doesn’t flowing take time? Oh. And notice what happens here. You’re trying to step outside of time to frame it, and you keep finding that it’s behind you. Oh, there’s time. Oh, no, it’s back here. There, no, oh, oh, oh, oh. And you realize, and Augustine said this. So beautiful. I know what time is until somebody asks me. Not what time is it, but what time is. You can sort of run along, like we all do. I know what time is. But then when you step back, do I? Do I know what time is? Let’s do one, and it’s one that Politis actually talks about. And the radical aporia. And it’s taken up in this book by Graham Priest. The title is One. I’m doing this for two reasons. As an example of radical aporia, and also because we’re going to need to talk about one a lot, especially when we get to Neoplatonism. So he asks us what seems like an obvious question. How was something one? One book. How is it one? How is it a unity? And you go, well, all the parts fit together. And he says, what do you mean? Well, you know, there’s a wall. Here’s the brick. And the bricks are held together by the mortar. What holds the mortar to the bricks? Well, there’s sort of some bonding that’s going on maybe to do with positive and negative electric charges. Well, what binds the charge to the electrons and the protons? I don’t know. But notice how much you just presuppose one. There’s one. There’s a thing. There’s a thing. We thingify the technical term in philosophy. We rayify the world. There’s a thing. Things are what reality is made of. And those realities are one. But when I ask you, how is something one, you go, I actually don’t know. He proposes a term for what it is that binds the parts to make something one. He calls it a gluon. He’s sort of playing with funny, like some kind of subatomic particle. But even at the beginning of the book, as he’s setting up the problem, page 14, there’s a subsection actually entitled the aporia. You get into an aporia about one. And then he tries to get out of it. And he says, in order to get out of it, I’m going to challenge some of your fundamental ways of thinking. In order to avoid an infinite grasp, at some point, there’s an identity relationship between the gluon and the thing that it’s gluing to. Because if there’s any relation between the gluon and the thing, I just get the infinite regress. So he does this thing. We’ll call the gluon what unifies. And it has to be identical to part A, or I’ll get into the infinite regress. And it has to be identical to part B. You go, OK, that sort of makes sense. And then he does this. He says, but you notice that doesn’t mean that A is identical to B. The front of the book and the back of the book have to both somehow be identical to that which unifies them. But that doesn’t mean that the front of the book and the back of the book are identical. You go, oh, this is hurting. And he proposes. Within the analytic tradition, he proposes the only way we’re going to explain how something can be one is if we give up the principle of non-contradiction, which is like, what? That’s the whole foundation of logic. Aristotle thought it’s the whole foundation of all of science. But he’s proposing that the oneness, how this is one, is based on a non-logical identity. And you go, ugh, OK, fair enough. But please remember this discussion about one. And then please remember how much, how quickly and easily I can put you into a poria about there being a thing there, a unified entity. Because we take thinghood as being the fundamental nature of reality. And yet, oh, that’s not the way it is. A reality. And yet, oh, a few questions, a few bit of reflection. And we go, oh, radical poria. And we’re going to talk a lot later about this term. I have been mentioning it throughout. And Paul Itis has brought it to the foreground orientation. But again, it’s perspectival in nature. It’s participatory in nature. And as Stegmeier, in his book, which I’ll talk about next time, called What Is Orientation, points out, orientation is primordial. It’s there making everything else possible. Because if you’re not oriented, you can’t act, you can’t reflect, you can’t think, you can’t question, et cetera. You’re just in a poria. You’re just disoriented. OK, so we have two threads. We have radical reorientation. That’s about transforming, transforming our perspectival participatory knowing and getting into this primordial aspect of our ability to make sense. And this is taken up by Sandy. Sande, in his book, A Study of Dialectic in Plato’s Parmenides, goes even further. I should mention that the Parmenides is considered one of Plato’s most difficult dialogue. And it’s a dialogue all about the one, or what is it for something to be one? And it’s really, ugh, right? So what does Sande argue? Sande argues that the demonstration of dialectic in this difficult platonic dialogue about the one, Parmenides, is a dialogical practice. What we’re seeing is not an instruction manual, but we’re seeing, again, one of the results of this practice. What’s happening is, and it’s interesting because Parmenides is actually questioning Socrates, reminding us that even Socrates needs to go to this depth. And what is he doing? The point of dialectic is to get people to not think about reality ultimately in thingy, T-H-I-N-G-Y, in thingy terms. The reality ultimately isn’t grounded in things, that understanding the world as things is not the best way to enter into ratio religio with reality. So why do this? Why get into non-thingness? What’s going on here? And how is this relevant and related to the other threads that we’ve got from Gonzalez and Politis? So I think that’s a good question. What’s going on here? Well, we’ll come back to it. But notice what’s going on with the dialectic. We’re getting challenged in a fundamental reorientation, like I was doing a few minutes ago, to stop seeing reality as something that is not grounded in reality. Seeing reality through the lens of prototypical physical objects. Thinking that the world is ultimately made of things in that sense presupposes a non-problematic oneness unity that grounds our standard logic of identity. A is a, a pencil is a pencil. But as we’ve just seen, dialectic calls us into radical aporia and calls all of that into question. It brings us to the horizon of wonder. Is there an aspect of reality that is ultimately not thingy in nature, fundamental to reality, but of which we are tempted to continually think of as if they, these, I don’t know what to call them, are not fundamental to reality. But we are tempted to continually think of them as if they are fundamental to reality. I don’t know what to call them, are things. You go, oh, yeah, stay quick with me. What? OK, we’re not thinking about reality through the frame of things. And we’re going to be getting at something that is more real. But we’re going to be constantly tempted to try and think about that underlying realness and reality in terms of thinghood, as if it’s a kind of thing. Now, this takes us into the very famous discussion of Plato’s theory of the forms. Like many people in the current scholarship, Plato never presents a theory of the forms. Even calling it a theory is an example of our propositional imposition and tyranny over Plato. We try to think of the forms as definitions. How could that possibly work with what we’ve been talking about? We’ve been trying to think of them as logical essences. How does that fit with Plato’s emphasis on non-propositional knowledge? So we can’t think of the forms that way. You’re just telling me what they’re not. What are they? OK, there’s a lot. And we’ll come back to this. But the forms are something like fundamental principles of intelligibility and of being. The forms are the principles by which things are and by which they are known or knowable by us. And you’re saying, that’s really abstract. Yeah, it is. But think about it. There’s a process. Reality is unfolding moment by moment. Are the moments logically identical to each other? No, of course not. But yet, they’re somehow one. One. What’s holding them together? Well, other moments. Oh, I just say other moments. Oh my gosh. Right. And those moments somehow form patterns. Are patterns things? Objects? Oh. Think of the pattern of evolution. Is evolution in a particular place? Or what about this pattern from physics? E equals mc squared. Is that in a particular place? Does it take up a certain amount of space? No. What holds it together? It’s everywhere and nowhere. And it’s somehow one, but not in a thingy way. And those patterns are ultimately based on principle. They’re organized in some way. And what’s that principle? It can’t be another pattern. Right. Right. Dialectic is getting us into that. So not only are we doing this powerful thing of midwifing each other, we’re also doing this radical reorientation. So let’s come out of the abstraction. Dialectic takes us into the non-propositional, second-person perspective. It exposes us to radical aporia and drives us into a fundamental reorientation to reality, trans-framing, in which we are giving up the priority we normally give to things, physical object, as our way of understanding what reality is. We’re not done with the reverse engineering. Whole another episode for it. But let’s gather some points. Dialectic into dialogos is both central. And yet, we’re not clearly told how to do it, probably for good reason. I gave you three, I think, good reasons why we’re not given the instruction manual. And then I built on those and made them even more plausible as we went along. We need to reverse engineer dialectic into dialogos in a way that is consistent with those three hypotheses. I’ve tried to do that. And with the best scholarship, which I’m opening you up to. Now, all of this abstraction, you’re very tempted to say, forget this. I’m going to put this all aside. But you’re only two or three steps away from aporia. You think, oh, I know how reality is. But you’re always just two or three steps away from aporia. Can you unlearn that? Aren’t you going to engage in a significant kind of pretense? If you put this aside, you’re going to put aside the Socratic way. You’re going to put aside the promise of finding a life that’s worth living. Are you willing to take that risk? Well, this is so hard. You know what’s really hard? Getting out of a life that is being torn apart by self-deceptive, self-destructive behavior, or a community being torn apart by self-destructive, self-deceptive behavior, or a community being torn apart by self-destructive, self-deceptive behavior, or a nation being torn apart by self-destructive, self-deceptive behavior. That’s what’s really hard to get out of. And while we’re trying to get out of it, people are suffering and dying and being violent and being brutalized and dehumanized. That’s what’s really hard. Or we can step through this portal. Yeah, it’s hard in one sense. But it’s not as hard as all of that. Consider that. Consider that. And now we’re going to move to our practices. So I’m gonna teach you a practice that’s going to help you enact a lot of what we’re talking about in this episode. And you’ll see how and why when I explain the practice to you. But first, make sure that you’ve centered, you’ve rooted, and you’ve done the Socratic Humble Wonder practice. That puts you in the right frame. What you’re gonna do is you’re gonna lift your eyes up and open them. And Austin, who’s done a lot of work on the brain, talks about these two different orientations and how this lifting up makes you reality-centered. And then looking down actually makes you ego-centered. Different areas of the brain are triggered. And notice we’re trying to put these into ratio-religio, right relationship, reciprocal opening. So you’re gonna open your eyes, open your mouth, open your hands, lean forward, opening up your heart. Not just opening your arms, but leaning forward, opening your heart, opening, opening, opening your eyes like in wonder, opening your mouth like in awe, and inhaling. Ah. Right to the horizon of horror. Ah. And then the opposite, exhale, everything collapsing in, eyes closing, head coming down, and ah, like into a warm bath, coming into the heart, hearth of home. To the horizon of horror. Ah. Ah. And then at your own pace. Ah. Ah. Do that at least four times. Second practice. We want to come into an awareness of awareness. You’re centered, you’re rooted. I’ll talk you through this. So close your eyes. See. Well, all I can see is the inside of my eyes. So what? See, just see. Listen. We’re doing all of your senses. Touch, feel where you’re touching. Taste. Is it taste in your mouth right now? Smell. Smell. Now do them all at once. Now what do they all have in common? Now what do they all have in common? They’re all awareness. Become aware of that awareness that they all have in common. The awareness of awareness. And then notice, there’s nothing you have to do to do the awareness of awareness. You just can rest in that place. The pure being aware. The pure being of awareness. That’s both within you and without you. Inside of you and outside of you. The awareness of awareness. Just being aware. The pure being of awareness. Pure realization. Pure realization. So those are two practices to practice for this week. The first one, just add it onto the sequence. The centering, the rooting, the humble wonder, and then the ah, ah. Horizon of horror. Heart, heart, hearth of home. The home of the heart, hearth. Whichever works for you. Back and forth. The other one, practice it on the side. Center and root first. Practice it on the side. Center and root first. Spend more time in it. Each one of the senses. And what do all the senses have in common? That awareness, that receptivity, that realization. That awareness of awareness. And then just, you don’t have to do anything. You can just rest there. The pure, just pure being aware. And then the just pure being of awareness. That pure realization within and without. And then next week, after the next episode, you’ll see how that awareness practice, awareness of awareness, pure realization, and the ah, ah, lead to a third practice and a fourth practice that I’ll teach you in that sequence. Keep up all your other practices. The study. The imaginal work. The dialogical engagement. And as always, thank you so much for your time and attention. So light can point to awareness, and we talk about, and we use all these mental light metaphors. Imaginal light inside of your, things are clear in my mind. What? There’s no physical light inside your head at all. This is an imaginal light that is allowing you to make sense and perceive the contents of your mind. And you get these people, I’m analytic. Things have to be clear. What do you mean by clear? What’s the phenomenology of that?