https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=kOYTkFPK04Y
stop reflect into aporia light itself is invisible you can’t see light you can only see by means of it you see through it just like the eye is invisible you see by means of it and through it and you’re starting to feel why people could see these as deeply belonging together welcome back to after Socrates this is episode 4 but it’s kind of the second part of the argument that began in episode 3 so last time we turned to two important questions one important question was how do we actually practice dialectic into dia logos and we took that as our first question but there’s a related question about what is the logos what do we mean by this term within dia logos we saw that the historical sources do not provide any direct instructions on how to practice dialectic and they do this probably for three good and interrelated reasons which we need to respect in our interpretation I propose that what we need to do is reverse engineer dialectic there’s a good Latin term used by Philip Carey in his book on Augustine’s invention of the self but Carey says I don’t like the word invention I like the Latin word inventio because it means to make and discover and that’s what we’re doing in reverse engineering we’re trying to make something but in making it we’re trying to discover the principles behind a phenomena that we’re trying to explain and I took you through the example of how that works in AI and then what we’ve been trying to do is reverse engineer dialectic and that we can do this because we can know we’ve got a very good sense of what it is supposed to produce what its results are supposed to be we have discussions about that in the sources and then we have excellent scholarship about that and we turn to that scholarship and we took a look at several think important think recent thinkers and we looked at that dialectic is supposed to produce non produce our awareness our realization of non-propositional knowing noesis and gnosis and help us to appreciate in both senses of the word of understand into value the centrality of non-propositional knowing for meaning making for wisdom for the cultivation of virtue we also took a look at how dialectic is supposed to result in second-person perspective coming into prominence within dialogue and I want to I want to stop there as part of this review and expand that a little bit so I’ve been engaging in a lot of participant observation and participant experimentation and things like circling I did that with Taylor Barrett and a wonderful group of people Peter Lindbergh was there within Toronto talked a lot and done practices with Guy Sandstock one of the inventors of circling and circling is one of these practices in which you get into this shared flow state within the collective intelligence of that distributed cognition the cognition no one person is it’s like like I said that conversation that takes on a life of its own that living logos no one person is responsible and what you’re doing in circling and we’ll talk a little bit more about this later in the series what we’re doing in circling is you’re doing that kind of foregrounding of the second person perspective because of the intense flowing dialogue that’s happening and what people talk about is they talk about the we space there’s this there’s this thing and let’s remember the caution about not thinking of everything as things but there’s something there’s a presence and when you say that it sounds like I’m doing early 20th century spiritualism or something like that but there’s this presence of a sense of a guiding intelligence that does not belong to any one person but is being right generated by the collective intelligence of all the people bound together in this living system of dialogue and what’s really intriguing is first of all what does that feel like from the inside it feels almost like a psychedelic experience because because you are keeping track of all of these different perspectives but you’re also being very mindful of yourself you’re engaging in mindfulness as you’re doing these practices as I’ve been teaching you some mindfulness and you you are taking all these these perspectives and integrating them into your self-awareness and you’re taking your self-awareness and integrating it into all these perspectives and what that means is different parts of the self and I actually think different parts of the brain are talking to each other that are normally not talking to each other and it’s very much has that kind of pregnant presencing that you get in the flow state or even in psychedelics now that’s all happening right but that is just one pole and everybody feels that heightened I don’t know what to call it that heightened inner dialogue and the heightened outer dialogue are completely resonating with each other and it’s not centered in anybody it’s centered in something between them all and all of these people and as far as I can tell many of them are non-religious or post-religious secular in some sense they all start talking about this we space using religious language it’s really interesting they talk about spirit and they talk about right a sort of higher presence when you think and we do you even in everyday language we talk about team spirit about something that’s important above and beyond just adding together all of the team individual effort of the players on the team but but that which you can have a vague sense in when you’re playing in a team sometimes like I’ve done some sports you’re in when you get into that collective flow state you really feel something but in these practices these dialogical practices it’s even more intense I’m trying to convey that with comparing it to like a psychedelic experience so this this transjectivity this this right this we space this second this prioritizing of the second person perspective this is this is a very powerful thing I’ve experienced it and I’ve seen multiple times multiple groups of people experiencing it reliably and how powerful it can be so I wanted to stop there in the review and really give that you know more of a concrete experiential content the third thing we discussed or disclosed perhaps is even better about dialectic is that it will expose us to radical aporia that leads to a fundamental reorientation to reality and this is will be a perspectival and participatory and even primordial reorientation and we talked about how a lot of our most fundamental ways of thinking like subject-object divide we’re moving into trans activity prioritizing the first person and third person we’re prioritizing the second person perspective we think about the world in thingy terms but that ultimately is just a couple steps away from aporia and when we really want to think about and enter into ratio religio with the reality of ourselves other people and of the world we have to engage in that fundamental reorientation okay so let’s continue the reverse engineering there’s more there’s more like I said there’s a lot of scholars and they’re and they’re doing all this convergent stuff that is so powerful okay let’s step back and try to explicate something that has been implicit in what we’ve been talking about so far I want to slowly draw this out so when we’re talking about the we space and things like that and the trans activity and especially the second person perspective right we can talk about like a horizontal level of dialectic this horizontal dimension is right it’s the dimension the aspect of dialectic that’s between people in this deep sense of between that I’ve just talked about it’s between people it’s it’s the dimension of communion common union it’s the dimension of communion we can call it a communicative dimension but we have to put emphasis on communication not as the transfer of information but as the realization of communion so that’s how when I say if I use the adjective communicative I mean primarily right generating the connectedness of communion rather than the transfer of information that’s the horizontal dimension of dialectic there’s a vertical dimension that’s become also apparent we can call this the contemplative dimension communion communicative contemplation contemplative dimension what’s going on here is dialectic is creating a a transforming in how one is relating to reality it’s creating that fundamental reorientation it’s altering how one realizes an audience to reality and so it’s not between people it’s between levels of reality and levels of realization so you got the vertical contemplative and that’s why I’ve been teaching you these practices right and we’ll also be teaching you the horizontal practices so you got the vertical contemplative dimension and the horizontal communicative in the sense of communing dimension and then what of course we can ask what binds them together I’m going to talk I’m going to propose right now and I’m going to very slowly unpack this proposal that what binds them together is logos that logo somehow covers what’s between us it’s how the how the what’s between us works and it’s also how the between the levels of realization work how we belong together and how the levels belong together how we common unity how we become one and how the levels are one logos one of the meanings of logos is to gather things together so that they belong together but also so that they are made intelligible so that they can come into speech so that they could come into thought so let’s think about logos is that gathering together and that living intelligibility these dimensions are vibrantly dynamic in nature now another way of thinking about these dimensions and I really owe the work I do with Guy Sandstock and with Christopher Master Pietro to this and we bring this into the workshops that we do as you can think of the world the horizontal dimension as covering being covered by a Greek word phylia and phylia means a kind of love it’s not eros it’s not agape the Christian love phylia is friendship love but also and this is important a term we’ve lost quite a bit of sense for fellowship love you can be in fellowship with people they’re not necessarily your friends but they’re not strangers or acquaintances and for those of you who practice Christianity you know what I’m talking about when I’m talking about fellowship and for those of you who belong to a Buddhist Sangha you know what I’m talking about when I’m talking about fellowship these people aren’t all your friends but they’re not strangers there’s not acquaintances you’re in community common unity you’re in communion with them that’s phylia it’s phylia and what’s interesting again if you go back to and I’ve had experience of people entering into the we space as I’ve said and they’re talking about spirit but they also talk about they they discover especially when they do it for the first time a new sense of intimacy and remember what intimate means a sense of something a sense of something that’s about to be disclosed to you right doesn’t mean grasp intimate means oh I’m getting it so hear that when you hear intimacy we tend to think of intimacy is consummation intercourse mmm put that aside so these people are saying I realized a new kind of intimacy it’s not the intimacy I have with a lover or with a friend it’s this other kind of intimacy and I didn’t realize it but now I do I’ve been hungering for it all my life it’s like oh yeah so that’s phylia that’s phylia what about the vertical dimension the contemplative dimension that’s Sophia the Greeks have two words for wisdom one is phonesis phonesis is your sense of how to appropriately fit a situation that’s important but they had another word for a different kind of wisdom Sophia and Sophia is the ability to relate all of the levels of reality together in a comprehensive intelligible whole Sophia wisdom in that sense it’s about getting into ratio religio with all the logos of ontos being that’s where we get ontology from the understanding of being so this is right with ligio to reality and the reality unfolds and realizes itself and makes itself intelligible to us that’s Sophia and the two are bound together the phylia and the Sophia if you put those two Greek words together phylia Sophia you get this fellowship love this communing this flow within the collective intelligence of distributed cognition everything we’ve been talking about the we space blah all that stuff blah blah blah yeah and then Sophia all of that vertical phylia Sophia so we get our word philosophy from and what guy and Chris and I are proposing is that this is the way of recovering philosophy as a dialectical and ultimately dialogical getting us into the logos practice of cultivating wisdom and virtue and fundamentally transforming and transforming ourself and our relationship to other people and our relationship to the world I think this is very close to the revolution in understanding of ancient philosophy that was brought on by the work of people like Pierre Hadot and many of the Plato scholars that I’ve been introducing you to we see this is why people are really interested in stoicism and stoicism is definitely in the line we’re going to talk about stoicism is the philosophical religion of internalizing Socrates and trying to cultivate a logos with the your logos to be in ratio religio to the logos of being itself why is why are things like stoicism and Buddhism so powerful right now because of their philosophy in this sense their philosophy as opposed to academic philosophy I’m not going to rag on academic philosophy I have a PhD in academic philosophy right I think it’s important it’s powerful but it’s important for a certain set of things I want to keep that over there and for many of you and rightly so that sense of philosophy is irrelevant to you because you’re not worried about what is it what is science what is knowledge in that sense you’re not worried about you know what are the all the different positions about morality and these are again important that there are people working on this but you can plausibly say I don’t need that to live a good life and you can even more plausibly say because I’m on the inside I see this those people aren’t living better lives because of their academic philosophy in any sort of reliable discernible justifiable pattern I already mentioned that professors of ethics don’t seem to be in any way more ethical people so let’s take all that for granted again I’m not I’m not dissing it I’m not saying it’s a useless academic egghead thing what I’m saying is you can make a legitimate claim that you don’t need that you can’t make that claim for the kind of philosophy the philia Sophia that I’m talking about right now that is not optional to you that is not optional I keep making that argument again and again and again now notice when we get into this love of wisdom and we start thinking about these dimensions the horizontal and the vertical and it’s wrapped up with a kind of self-knowledge especially the non propositional non autobiographical self-knowledge we’ve been talking about here all of this would engender it engenders an aspirational sense of self-knowing so this is based on the work of LA Paul transformative experience but even more so the work of Agnes Callard her book aspiration let’s try and what’s what are we talking about when let’s try and get just at least an intuitive one aspiration aspiration is when you are engaging in a project of deliberate self-transcendence you are endeavoring to somehow become a self other than you are living a life in other than the life you’re living in a world other than the world you’re living in you’re trying to bring about a complete agent arena transformation and it’s paradoxical because how can this self want to be a self that it does not yet exist a self that does not yet exist how can from this how from this perspective in this sense of identity can I want that and and and it’s like but of course we’re inherently aspirational and we know this children are in the project of aspiring to be adults but as the child is to the adult the adult is to the sage so notice we’ve got that sense of aspiration let’s go in the self that’s coming out of this model is an inherently relational self right this is a point both the relational and the aspirational aspects of the self that’s discussed very well in this excellent book by Christopher Moore called Socrates and self-knowledge I always think of it as socratic self-knowledge but it’s Socrates and self-knowledge isn’t that a great cover right that’s that’s Delphi that’s the temple that had I’ve been there man does that put this zap on your head to be in Delphi you can almost feel Apollo and Dionysus when you’re there but that the temple at Delphi is where the inscription know thyself was carved so that’s why he’s got that there okay he argues more extensively for just such a view of Socratic self-knowledge so what does it mean that the self is relational in nature and this is the idea well first of all that self-knowledge is integral to being a self so organisms can be agents but if they don’t have any capacity for self-knowledge if they can’t pass the mirror test or things like that then we don’t think they actually have a self or sense of self okay so self-knowledge and selfhood are inter-defining but then Moore goes in and he argues that Socrates of course exemplifies this that we actually know ourself through other people there’s a line in the symposium where Socrates and Elsobiades are talking and I believe it’s Socrates who says the other person’s eye are the mirror by which we see ourselves and the Greeks actually made if you look very carefully in somebody’s pupil you can actually see the reflection so when I say through I mean beyond and by means of remember through my lenses by on beyond and by means of and you go what do you mean by that well first of all remember Vygotsky’s notion of internalization the child internalizes the perspective the adult has on the child’s perspective and that makes the child capable of taking a perspective on its perspective taken it gets metacognition which is essential to self-knowledge and therefore to being a self so we become and know ourselves through other people and you know this you take a human being right and bring it up amongst wild animals not in interaction with human beings it doesn’t become a kind of self now it’s still worthy of moral treatment I’m not denying that but it’s not self what else what else is going on it’s not only that we internalize other people we indwell other people now this notion of indwelling comes from Polanyi first of all he did give sort of a concrete example and talks about and model Ponte completely independently uses the same example when he’s trying to talk about like the non propositional kinds of knowing embodied knowing but plenty you know you’re tapping the blind person is tapping the floor with the cane okay now remember the language we I use when I taught you centering they’re not aware of the cane they’re aware through the cane of the floor plenty talks about a subsidiary awareness of the cane and a focal awareness of the floor same look I’m touching the table I’m not aware of my fingers I’m aware through my fingers now if I didn’t have fingers or they were anesthetized I would notice that I would get numbness and a lack of receptivity but normally I’m not folkily aware of my fingers I’m aware through them of the table so the blind person indwells the cane in the same way you indwell your body all right think about it you also know through other people you see the world through their eyes through their perspective they relate to you things that they saw and you see through them and you go no I don’t oh yeah how much how many of you actually participated in the experiments that gave us atomic theory I bet you none of you you know about that through books written by other people and through experiments done by other people this is part of what’s meant by distributed cognition there’s vast systems of people generating knowledge and you know through them about atomic theory about black holes about the deep past most of your knowing is through other people in this sense you indwell them so you both internalize and know yourself and you indwell other people in so far as you come into relationship with a lot of reality and thereby become an agentic being within an arena of intelligibility so remember these please internalization and indwelling and dialectic into dialogos makes this so present to you you realize that other people are coming into you and becoming part of your metacognition but you’re also looking through other people seeing right the world through them so you’re simultaneously how am I knowing and how am I being known in this loop and that is a kind of intimacy where you get intimations of yourself and intimations of reality let’s return back to the self is aspirational your present self is in such a dialogical relation to your future self what do you mean let’s talk about it concretely experiment there’s lots of experiments done by like this by Hirschfeld and others this one I think was done by pretty but there’s a whole nest of the nest networks not nasty network of this again take a look at my my my Cambridge lecture and you’ll get this in more detail if you want it so you go in to a university where there’s a bunch of academics there’s supposed to be our best thinkers trained to think rationally use evidence and you go in and you give them a really clear presentation that if they want to save for retirement they should start doing it right now right now you make sure do you understand yes any fundamental disagreement ask whatever questions and we go through yes you have no we’re convinced yes yes yes we come back six months and you see how many of you are saving for your retirement none of them put up their hand none of them this is because of hyperbolic discounting and I won’t get into the details you can as I said you’ll get it you’ll get that if you take a look at episodes four and five especially five of awakening from meaning crisis also in the Cambridge talk that propositional argument that they can are completely convinced by doesn’t change them doesn’t change their behavior now you do something different you get them and remember the imaginal imagination for the sake of perception for the sake of putting us into ratio religio with reality you get them to imagine their future self and they don’t want to do this you know why because the future self is ugly old and close to death so you’ve got to get them to reciprocally open to internalize in a you say imagine that future self as a family member that you deeply love and care about just do that forget all the argumentation just do that reliably what you find are two things when people do this they start saving secondly the more vividly they can make the imagination and get that sense of ratio religio to their future self the more they will save there’s a deep interweaving between the imaginal the aspirational and the dialogical and notice how crucial that is to actually being rational not in the logical I string propositions together here’s the conclusion but I am going to overcome self-deception hyperbolic discounting and actually proportionately and properly pay attention so that I can realize the appropriate goals about the reality of my situation as a being doomed to old age notice all the overcoming of self-deception so notice what we’re learning here not only we’re learning about the horizontal and sorry the vertical and the horizontal I don’t know why I keep flipping those we’re learning that this right this teaches us about the self the self is inherently relational indwelling and internalization and it’s inherently aspirational and the dialogical the rational and the imaginal and the aspirational are all interwoven and bound together and dialectic has to be true to that has to be true to that what’s really interesting and she quotes Christopher Moore is this astonishing book by Sarah Sarah Abel Rapay I believe that’s how she pronounces it her book and her work on neoplatonic contemplation and non discursive thinking in neoplatonism that’s another one of her book brilliant brilliant she’s gifted scholar so notice the title Socratic ignorance learned ignorance Socratic ignorance and platonic knowledge in the dialogues of Plato so she picks up on this and like I said she she’s read more and she’s incorporating this in she really focuses in on learned ignorance and especially the vertical dimension the contemplative dimension she says something that again sounds like you know like the triviality of I know that I don’t know and then we went through oh but what does it really mean and learned ignorance and she says something well the point of dialectic into the logos and the kind of learned ignorance it creates is it makes you know yourself as a knower I notice how much that’s bound up with metacognition and having a sense of self you know yourself as a knower now again you can you can have a trivial interpretation of that oh you know that that’s just that’s no more than saying I can affirm the proposition that I know things and other animals can’t do that well that’s not what she’s talking about she’s talking about a perspectival and participatory transformation that takes you into this primordial level of the self well yep step be willing to play with a porio what is it that you have that the animals don’t have that allows you to make that statement and really own it what what do you mean what makes that possible go to the primordial step below the proposition to the perspectival and the participatory that’s making the proposition viable to you oh so she’s saying so the self is bound up with this process of realizing itself as it’s realizing reality as it’s realizing itself as it’s realizing reality but then she does something about moving you into a poria getting you to realize the mystery of this and here this is so fantastic what could be so what could be more familiar to you than your own self but is it what is yourself now let’s be careful about how we’re using this word there’s a there’s a use of the word word self which just means a process recurs like when we say a tornado self organizes in saying that a tornado self organizes we don’t mean that it then has a self I’m not using self in that sense I’m using it and we say I want to know myself better I want to aspire to being a better person and personhood and selfhood are deeply interrelated and what is this mystery she goes into this and she makes use of a distinction that’s talked about many people James famously talked about and if you want to see this in depth and being developed dialogically take a look at a series I have on my channel called the elusive eye that I did with Greg Enriquez and Christopher Master Pietro about just this what is the nature and function of the self again you have to first defamiliarize what that term means in your sense of self in order to be able to possibly answer these profound but basic questions well what is the nature and function of the self I’m not going to try and do that completely here I pointed you to where I’ve tried to do that and I tried to exemplify dialectic into dialogous as I’m doing it with and through and because of two other people that I’m in constant dialogue with I want to go back to this the aporia well there’s something about self-knowing that’s central to being a self okay but what is the self that’s known and the self that’s knowing in self-knowing well what do you mean well when I want to know who am I I step back and look at some aspect of myself some way I was being an age in an agent arena relationship I step back and look at it and I go that’s me and I’m using James’s distinction here that’s me the me is whatever I can bring into my frame into my framing you go oh that’s me and you’re there probably isn’t a single me there’s probably sort of a dynamical system of me’s you know I’m a father I’m a lover I’m a friend I’m a teacher etc these are all me’s but notice what happens when I’m doing that you know what I’m not seeing and I’m gonna pun here I’m not seeing my eye I’m not seeing my eye capital Y what is it that’s looking at the me James used this term the eye this is the observed self the me this is the observing self the eye well you oh I can I can I can see the eye well look at it no no it’s a me now that’s in the frame but you’re not looking at the source of the framing because you can’t look at the framing you’re always looking by means of it and through the frame at the me that has been framed has been made into a thing you can never see the eye in that sense it’s invisible to you you’re always seeing by means of it this is a in one of the panache ads Brahman God is not anything the eye sees by but that by which the eye sees how could that and the ground of being be the same okay we’ll work towards that hold that very very carefully the eye is no thing remember not thinking of reality in thingy terms whenever you have a thing that you’re calling the eye you’re actually pointing at a me and never at the eye and no matter how you try to step back you will never step back out of that and see the eye the self is strong between a pole of framed intelligibility and unframed because it is the source of framing mystery no thingness you can’t see it you can only be it you can only understand it as a source of perspectival knowing and you only know it by being it by participating in it the fundamental no thingness it is strange beyond the strangest it’s the moments of reflection a moment well I know myself yeah but and those aren’t identical they’re certainly not logically identical and one is a thing or a system of things and the other is no thingness and where is it centered because sometimes the eye is coming from your mind your sort of intellect sometimes it’s coming from your emotions sometimes sometimes it’s coming you’re centered in your body and your loins and what’s that space it’s moving between those centers it’s imaginal it’s not physical in any straightforward sense there’s this imaginal movement of the no thingness of the eye that is central to you being a self that’s what she’s pointing to you know oh but what about that stuff you said a few minutes ago from the panache yet and by the way that’s not imposing something weird on her you’ll see the idea is the no thingness that is the primordial ground of your selfhood and this is what people are trying to point out when and they get into this these weird antinomies right no self but that’s the true self so I’ve heard I’ve watched the Zen master monk say you know he’s a Buddhist there is no self but then when asked what is the fundamental responsibility of a human being he says it’s to know yourself you know right and you realize that the no self and the true self as no thingness are actually non logically identical with each other the same way the eye and the me are non logically identical with each other okay so the no thingness that’s the ground from which yourself and therefore all of your knowing all of your agency emerges insofar as it’s perspectival and insofar as the perspectival plugs into the participatory that that and that and how it’s a weird identity not only non logical identity between the eye and the me but between the eye from here and the eye from here and the eye from here it’s that participates in the no thingness the non thingness the oneness that’s the ground of all reality from which all of the things the objects are realized are emerge now I didn’t give you an argument for that I was just trying to explain this claim that you find in many traditions about people experience I’ve experienced it too and again that’s not an argument but I’ve experienced that non duality that fundamental non logical identity between the inner ground and the outer ground the deep as the psalmist says the deep calling to the deep the deep within the reality in the world the deep within me they resonate they reciprocally open to each other there’s a kind of profound love because love is that reciprocal opening that makes us one but not logically identical and that love of reality and that love of the self they’re inseparably bound up with each other and you say really she’s talking about all that and she’s a western philosopher she does something really astonishing she insightfully I think very insightfully compares Socrates and remember his capacity for entering into deep trance she compares Socrates to the great and by the way they killed him too just like they killed Socrates the great Persian and Persia is really important in world history Henry Corban right the Persia is what what binds the east and the west together and the Silk Road she compares Socrates to Suryavarti I’m probably mispronouncing that my partner she’s Persian she’d be probably upset with me but she tolerates my mispronunciations this very famous book called The Philosophy of Illumination he’s a great Sufi mystic it’s also a great philosopher you’ll start reading this book and you’re expecting oh mysticism there’ll be all this poetry there’s all this logic and then he moves into he’s a great philosopher and then he moves into the mysticism the philosophy of illumination what’s going on there well illumination notice how we use that word both physically and mentally right illumination that this space is lighted and that makes it intelligible to me and that means the there’s an agent arena relationship for me that’s why the first thing God creates is light because without light there isn’t intelligibility without intelligibility there isn’t there isn’t being there isn’t because being and being known although not logically identical are nevertheless interwoven with each other so light can point to awareness and we talk about and we use all these mental light metaphors imaginal light inside of your it’s you know 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 it’s important where’s that coming from so light can point to that awareness that awareness that’s coupled to right understanding and it can also point to the intelligibility of things that they can be understood light binds light makes this understandable to me we can bring those two senses together if we play and I’ve been doing it all through this series and you know that many of you know I do it all through awakening from the meaning crisis and I got this from one of the top five books I’ve ever read in my life which is religion and nothingness by Nishatani he uses realization in both senses realized like when he said I realized that she loved me because this is to come into you know intelligible awareness but realize also means to make real like when we talk about self-realization to make really and he uses and he says I want you to understand those two together in fact he does this really provocative thing he says I’m going to offer you a definition of religion religion is the self-realization of reality and then he qualifies it even more it’s the real self-realization of reality I would add for its own sake on just to be clear there what he’s saying is religion is when realization as awareness and realization as the unfolding of reality so that is intelligible are actually at one with each other we realize their fundamental belonging together this deeper ontological logos so we can use light in that non sort of purely physical way so sort of R T is talking about reality he thinks of all of reality is sort of condensed versions of light and he’s playing between light in so far as it points to understanding and light in so far as it points to intelligibility it’s about how self-realization and reality realization are ultimately and here you see what I’m stalling because I’m trying to come up with a word I right that gets deeper to try and explain it but I don’t have it it’s about the belonging togetherness the logos between intelligibility the realization of reality how it unfolds itself into patterns of being and intelligibility and our self-realization and how those are all bound together when we internalize we’re basically taking the world into our self-realization and when we indwell we are basically moving into how reality is realizing itself and as I already said there is a loop between this we indwell to internalize and we internalize to indwell notice how much this will is relying on the second person perspective on perspectival participatory knowing on the transjective but notice that horizontal in so far as I’m indwelling I can internalize reality and then transcend be able to rise above my previous perspective into a more encompassing more realistic perspective and then that of course allows me to better indwell and see through see more deeply into reality the Greeks have a wonderful word for this seeing into it’s called the the word is theoria it’s where we get our word theory from but we think of theory it just now is a proposition but a theory originally meant the ability to see to indwell these patterns and see through them into deeper reality that’s what we do when we theorize but not all of our theorization is propositional a lot of it is non propositional and that’s it but that’s the original meaning of theoria theoria by the way is translated in Latin theory is Greek it’s translated in Latin into contemplatio you hear the word temple in their temple is to look up into the sky originally look into the depths trying to find a sign of the divine and of course we get our word contemplation from it and notice our culture and I’ve published about this with Leo Ferraro we’ve said oh meditation and contemplation are just synonyms for each other no they’re not meditation is comes from sort of a sense of reflecting on oneself and contemplation means to look more deeply out into the point I’m making is this loop and I talk about this when I talk about the cave allegory and I hope you’re still practicing it imagineally and I hope you get a deep sense of it if you watch episode 5 of awakening from the meaning crisis this is this loop is the anagogic loop that Plato talks about the ascent because that spiral makes me self transcend self realize and that self transcendence is built up built into realizing the levels of reality and how there is a self transcendence not in process or awareness but between these levels so the loop is actually also a spiral upwards I’ll come back to this one more time though God says logos let there be light he’s not talking to anybody he’s talking to himself sort of but not really there’s a logos and of course there’s two books in the Bible that begin with in the beginning Genesis and then also John’s gospel in the beginning was the logos and the logos was with God and the logos was God and everything that God made is made through the logos and so that I’m not claiming that the Christian sense in John is exactly the same as Heraclitus and logos but I’m claiming there’s a continuity of development there and I’m appropriating all of that as I try to explain to you deal logos I think we need all of it when God logos the light step and think for a moment yes it makes everything else intelligible and he’s creating both physical light and mental light and the connection between them is that you can’t see light stop reflect into aporia light itself is invisible you can’t see light you can only see by means of it you see through it like the eye is invisible you see by means of it and through it and you’re starting to feel why people could see these as deeply belonging together okay I now want to move into three books that are networked together to try and furthermore what does dialectic into deal logos produce these three books I’ll hold them up in sequence here’s Kirkland’s the ontology of sequat of Socratic questioning in Plato’s early dialogues there’s ontology of Socratic questioning in Plato’s early dialogues this book blew me away I’m obviously recommending recommending books I’ve read lots of other books and I’m not recommending them typically because they don’t say anything that’s relevant to the project that I’m engaging in here they often teach me other important things but not needed here that book makes use of this book so Gonzales is one of the premier figures in third wave Platonism or Platonic studies I should say but the person who really opened me up to it was Drew Highland especially the question of beauty in Plato and there’s a book he wrote on the Carmenides and I can’t remember it’s a specific top beautifully written but this book finitude in and transcendence in the dialogues in the Platonic dialogues finitude and transcendence I’m going to talk about those two books I won’t talk too much about this third book although I highly recommend it because this third book brings those two books together and brings them into the questions the kinds of questions we’re asking here this is Magrini’s book Reconceptualizing Plato’s Socrates at the Limit of Education the Horizon of Wonder a Socratic curriculum grounded in finite human transcendence excellent book excellent I strongly recommend it I won’t discuss it in detail but it really it’s also a thin book and it really does a good explanation of those two books and then draws them together and draws them into the question we’re asking here because but how do we actually create you know a way how do we educate ourselves in a way so that we can do dialectic into dialogos all right I’m going to start with Kirkland Kirkland argues that Socrates is not in his questioning Socrates is not after objective answers that’s not what he’s after there’s a lot of scholarship that assumes that’s what Socrates is after and then he just sort of demolishes that and goes into the text very carefully and makes his argument and it’s it’s very convincing but and this is he equally makes this case neither is Socrates after subjective opinion So he doesn’t want an objective answer he doesn’t want an objective response subjective response well that’s it those are the two categories realities divided into the subjective and the objective and that’s all there is notice we’re on or in an aporia here there’s no way forward if we reject both of them we’re stuck we’re stuck notice Kirkland is actually aligned with Gonzales Socrates isn’t after an objective answer he isn’t after an answer from the third person perspective he’s not after an answer from the first person perspective the subjective opinion the objective definition but when we put it that way we get a little bit of weight is the subjective and the objective answer the subjective answer is the subjective opinion but when we put it that way but when we put it that way we get a little bit of weight is the subjective and the objective all there is no no remember that there’s the second person perspective not I or it but you and we Kirkland argues in fact that when we try to pigeonhole Socrates into the subjective or the objective we’re actually imposing a Cartesian frame a frame we got from Descartes in the scientific revolution on Socrates’ life and we’re actually imposing a Cartesian frame a frame we got from Descartes in the scientific revolution on Socrates that is anachronistic inappropriate and does not fit the platonic text or everything we’ve been talking about here because Descartes is not about the non-propositional he’s not about the second person perspective and he’s very much about method doesn’t mean he’s a villain by the way Kirkland instead argues for a Heideggerian phenomenological ontology he says that Socratic questioning is directed towards what he calls a phenomenal ontology I think that’s technically right especially when you understand phenomenology but if you haven’t done phenomenology you haven’t read Heidegger phenomenal just may mean sort of really extraordinary or if you’ve got a little bit more you know education in it and I’m not insulting anybody here it can mean not just how things appear to you subject and you’ll just equate it to subjectivity when of course phenomenology and especially Heidegger were very much trying to overcome that Cartesian dichotomy So instead let’s look at a central concept that Kirkland and Highland infinitude and transcendence talk about and they talk about it in Heidegger and there’s a bit of a thing I can’t get into here because both of them engage especially Highland in criticizing Heidegger’s sort of fundamental misinterpretation of Plato and he’s not just talking about the Heidegger’s sort of fundamental misinterpretation of Plato I really recommend that especially for people who follow the post-Heideggerian post-modern tradition of making Plato and I think Persig does this to some degree too even in the novels Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance of blaming Plato for how we lost everything I’m talking about here and I’m clearly making the case with all these other people that that’s not what Plato’s doing it’s amazing how Heidegger gives this great care to unpacking the historical context and the etymology and really trying to bring phenomenology into understanding the presocratic scene he does none of that with Plato he just takes a standard view that Socrates is the mouthpiece of Plato the dialogue is irrelevant the contexts are irrelevant and all we need to do is extract the propositional arguments and just look at that it’s really and I think Highland does just an excellent job is like what’s going on there take a look at Rokowski’s book Heidegger’s Platonism and he talks about how Heidegger starts really really enamored with Plato and then there’s this sudden turn and it doesn’t seem to follow from any sort of argumentation but more about something of how Heidegger was seeing and understanding himself I recommend that book anyways all of that aside what is this Heideggerian even though it doesn’t take Heidegger’s view of Plato what is this Heideggerian phenomenological ontology that Kirkland is proposing and it’s oh John’s piling stuff on me again okay well this ontology what’s the what’s the logos of being of Socratic questioning what makes it real and realizable so we’re going to go to that notion that Heidegger focused on which is the Greek word alifeia alethea sometimes people put an ia or eia because we’re trying to translate Greek pronunciation it doesn’t map one to one to English pronunciation so what’s going on there so this word is often translated as truth and then we think oh I know what truth is truth is how my propositions properly cohere so that my propositions represent reality correctly they what’s in my head corresponds to the world and of course that is our central notion this representational coherence correspondence notion of truth and it is you know and many people have been pointing this out even within you know the Anglo-American tradition within pragmatism and of course within post-modernism within phenomenology and post-modernism then the continental tradition that that whole framework just actually doesn’t work well and Heidegger was actually key to that he says well what does aletheia mean well lethe it means forgetfulness concealment and aletheia like atheist right the opposite means unconcealment things coming to light and I’m using that deliberately coming to light and this sense of things coming to light and like light it attunes the knower and the known it makes it possible for them to enter into relationships of correspondence between each other and for the propositions to be clear to be lighted with respect to each other so aletheia attunement is more primordial and makes possible the subjective and objective notions of truth aletheia is profoundly transjective aletheia is profoundly transjective and it’s grounding and primordial and affords subjectivity and objectivity and their relationship together in what we typically call truth the truth we assign to our propositions and our representational level of mind and there’s another aspect to aletheia because as things are coming to light and drawing our attention our framing other parts of the reality are necessarily being concealed there are they’re fading into listen to the words back ground ground but behind us the mysterious no thingness out of which the things emerge so the word phenomenon where we get phenomenology is a greek word it means shining light bouncing off them things are shining they’re they’re intelligible to us we are drawn to them we are put into relationship between them this is all this illumination through the light that we’re seeing and we’re seeing the light that we’re seeing in the world this is all this illumination through the light of intelligibility but remember that the light itself is invisible so by making it it and this is these are bound together in making other things visible it actually makes itself invisible and thereby makes invisible what it emerges from that’s aletheia so Socratic questioning flows between shining into intelligible appearance but withdrawing back into the background the logos flows between intelligibility and mystery the logos flows between intelligibility and mystery as it flows between people and between the levels of realization dialectic and to deal logos must afford all of this Kirkland follows Highland who also discusses aletheia at length saying that the point of the practice of dialectic into the process of the logos is a proper orientation a ratio religio finite transcendence all three books talk about this converge on this explore this orientation remember is self knowledge bound up in right relationship ratio religio to the realization of reality what does this finite transcendence mean what does this finite transcendence mean to the realization of reality what does this finite transcendence mean why is taking that as our fundamental orientation so important why is it so central to understanding dialectic into deal logos and understanding learned ignorance we’re going to talk about that in our next episode and that will also allow me to talk more deeply about orientation and this amazing book by verner stegmeier what is orientation a philosophical investigation a philosophical investigation and it will allow me to propose to you what logos is how we can best understand how we can best orient to our ability to orient but before we do that before we move to the next episode i want to move to the points we need to ponder and then we’ll move to the practices so dialectic into deal logos must take us into the non-propositional it must foreground the second person perspective and the we space it must expose us to radical reorienting aporia and non-thingy thinking but of course thinking in a right not primarily in a propositional sense that’s grounded in the non-propositional it must have vertical contemplation and horizontal communion bound together by logos it will afford the internal internalization indwelling loop that will spiral in self transcendence and through the levels of reality realization it will allow therefore a sense of the no thingness of the self and the ground of reality the no thingness of being and just just a moment we’ll come back to this but just one moment on this being is not any particular being it is the oneness beyond between beneath and within every being but it itself is not a being it is no thingness and the best way to realize the no thingness that is being the ground of being is to realize the no thingness within because then they can participate in reciprocal realization you can come into the radio profound ratio religio dialect into dialogos will foreground aletheia and transjectivity and it will cultivate finite transcendence which we will talk about more in the next episode as our fundamental orientation now we’ll move to the practices so we’re going to try and bring into practice or bring you at least into practice that is relevant to what we’ve been talking about in this episode and also build on the last practices because just like the two episodes are part of a continuous argument the two sets of practices have a continuity you may be noticing you may be noticing these lectures are so long and the practices are so short well you should be doing the practices longer i’m just demonstrating the core of what you need to do but also in other episodes the lectures will be significantly shorter and the practicum will be significantly longer things will move around so let’s take it that you’ve centered and rooted and you’ve done the socratic humble wonder practice you’ve been doing the ah ah and you’ve also developed that sense of the awareness of awareness the pure awareness so we would do the ah four times and then we would come into a practice our eyes are closed but imagine as we inhale we’re doing theoria we’re seeing as deeply as we could into the depths of reality so we inhale and then as we exhale we’re coming into that place you developed in the awareness of awareness the pure awareness of awareness inhale theoria imaginably out to the depths to the horizon imagineally into that point of the most inner contact with yourself the depth of the ground of your own awareness back and forth do that at least four times or some multiple of four so this the gesture of the breathing and the visual and then we move in to the imaginal where we make use of that ability to come into the awareness of that awareness that center the most looking at the mind we can possibly do and then the most looking through the mind and through reality into the depths of reality that we can imagineally do imagineally in with the exhale imagineally out with the inhale out with the inhale back and forth back and forth and then we come to the third you can see how each one is building on the other developing and growing with the other had only implicit within it the third one as i inhale i let my sense of it extend out like the blind man through the cave sorry through the cane or the way we know through other people i indwell the world and then as i exhale i internalize the world but that allows me to better indwell the world my identity going out into the world indwelling it but then i internalize that i let the world form within me and of course it’s always forming within me because if i go deep enough into me i actually get to the way the world is coming into being inhaling indwelling inhaling exhaling internalizing the world indwelling internalizing indwelling and internalizing these three are layered and they’re deepening each other the ah ah the looking out the looking in and then the indwelling and the internalization you can see i’m taking you through the perspectival the participatory into the almost the primordial after you’ve done those three sit and see if you can realize simultaneously in and out that reciprocal opening now becomes almost one in and out at the same time you don’t have to do anything you don’t have to represent anything you’re actually instantiating you’re exemplifying you participating in this internal and external realization in both senses of the word just be with that let it unfold in its non-propositional non-logical mysterious yet making intelligible oneness as always thank you so very much for your time and attention so i want you to put these two together you have meta orientation i think you see stance meta optimal grip you see how they come together you see how they come together you see how they come together you see how they come together you see how they come together i think you see stance meta optimal grip you see how they come together that is your what i call your fundamental framing your fundamental framing it’s the most fundamental is coordinating itself