https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=YoPEtuQpiT4
The good is therefore the through line between the true, the good, and the beautiful. So I’m using the good here with a capital G. It’s this onto normativity good, not ethical good. But the good is the through line that we found when we thought about the true, the good, and the beautiful. Wait, they’re not identical, they’re different aspects, but they bleed into each other and they flow into each other. You can aspect shift between them and get a sense of onto normativity. Exactly. The good is the through line of the through line. It’s the through line between the true, the good, and the beautiful, the three transcendentals. It’s what we’re experiencing as we’re being drawn into onto normativity. Welcome back to After Socrates. This is episode six. Last time we deeply explained the nature of Logos as recursive relevance realization and its connectedness to finite transcendence as a fundamental orientation. We are still reverse engineering dialectic into dia logos, believe it or not. We have gathered so much and it’s going to provide us with a very rich structure by which we can reverse engineer dialectic into dia logos. I would like to continue this process of reverse engineering, but I just want to reassure you it’s not going to be interminable. In the eighth episode, we will be discussing and going into depth, actually explaining and giving instructions on how we can practice dialectic into dia logos. We will get to there, but I want to provide this very rich framework for dialectic. In fact, why we need the whole phrase dialectic into dia logos. I’ve received criticisms of why doesn’t he just say dialogue? I hope you see now why I don’t just say dialogue. There’s an entire framework I’m trying to build around this so that it can serve its proper role of initiating us into the Socratic Platonic way and also give us the functionality we need for it to be a proper meta practice for any ecology of practices dedicated to helping people awaken from the meaning crisis. What are we doing in this episode? This episode is deeply influenced by work done with Christopher Mastapietro. Every episode is Chris’s one of my most important co-authors and deepest friends. Also Guy Sandstock, a lot of the work we’ve done, the three of us on dialectic into dia logos and the pedagogical program leading to it. Also to work I’ve done with Dan Schiappi. Dan and I are constantly doing work trying to integrate Platonism and phenomenology and 4e cognitive science together into a livable but also intellectually respectable framework. But most importantly, especially for this episode, I want to thank Johannes Niederhäuser and Daniel Zaruba. We’ve done a series of videos on YouTube moving between my channel, my channel and Johannes’s channel and Daniel’s work on called the Return of the Forms and we’ve been doing all of this work around eidetic adduction. You’ll find out what that means in this episode. Tremendous debt to the two of them for what’s going to unfold in this episode. So where do we start? It’s well-attested that there’s some deep connection between dialectic, which as we know Plato did not describe in detail or give us instructions for how to practice, but there is a connection between the practice of dialectic and knowing what has been called the forms. There’s some kind of connection in some sense and there’s a really important deep connection. So dialectic was somehow something that is a continuity of Socratic and Lincus but was also supposed to afford people having knowledge of the forms. And we briefly touched on the forms earlier but this goes to sort of, well this is a controversial issue which is why I’m sort of hesitating a bit, but I have to start somewhere. All of this about the connection between dialectic and the form goes towards this idea with Plato’s so-called theory of the forms. Why so-called and why did I do that? Well first of all, Plato never actually proposes or presents such a theory, just like he did not actually give instructions for dialectic and I think that’s not happenstance. I think there’s a good reason for that. Now the standard interpretation is that Plato had this idea that the forms, there’s sort of a cognitive side to them and an ontological or metaphysical side. The forms are something like definitions of eternal essences. They were somehow non-spatio-temporal, non-spatio-temporal, they exist in another world and the sensible things are reflections of them, participation in them and this was understood as the central thing that the philosopher kings, for example, of the republic would come to know because they had moved up the divided line and dialectic was at the top etc. For those of you who are not familiar with any of this Platonic scholarship, don’t worry about it because the point I want to make is I largely want to reject this whole framework. That’s why I’m not spending too much time unfolding it and one of the great benefits I think of third wave Platonism is how it’s pretty much dismantled this. So like I said, the standard idea is what’s an essence? An essence is a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for being something like what’s the essence of a triangle, straight-sided, three sides, closed figure, interior angles add up to 180. If anything has those characteristics, it is necessarily a triangle. Those are all the characteristics that are needed for being a triangle. This model works very well with mathematical entities and there’s been a lot of scholarship around the relationship between mathematics and dialectic etc. This whole way of understanding what Plato was talking about is deeply influenced by Aristotle and the thing about Aristotle is he has a very reduced notion of dialectic. He thinks about it just sort of like negative argument. He doesn’t seem to have any of this other sense of all this other stuff around it and that clearly should make us sort of slow down and hesitate about just adopting the Aristotelian view. The other problem with that view is it makes Plato largely obsolete because outside of mathematical entities and some very specific kind of scientific entities, many of our categories don’t have essences. This was a point made famous by Wittgenstein and it’s now becomes almost a political cause of resisting essentialism and Plato’s the big villain behind that and etc. I think this is all largely mistaken and misplaced. A good way to challenge us initially is Plato never makes this statement about the theory of the forms or these kinds of definitions having these kinds of logical properties anywhere in the dialogues and as we’ve already noted many of the dialogues do not end in definition. They end in aporia but that is still somehow the part of the best possible way of living and practicing. You remember that’s part of this Socratic problematic. I think even more crucially this standard definition of the forms is totally propositionally based. It’s grounded in propositional knowledge, logical relations, etc. and therefore it’s not consistent with the centrality of non-propositional knowing to Plato or the primordial nature of logos that we’ve been exploring, the primordial level that with logos works, etc. Also this way of thinking of the forms is abstracted from the process of becoming wise. Why would knowing these definitions in any way contribute to people becoming wiser? We already have good evidence that people who are very powerfully trained in propositional thought, analytic definition, and conceptual theorizing about ethics does not translate into them becoming wiser or becoming more ethical. So here once again I’m also influenced by both Rusin, especially his amazing book Bearing Witness to Epiphany and Kirkland’s book that I’ve already shown to you. We need a phenomenologically present and experientially effective sense of the forms to really be true to the Platonic text. That’s the main argument I would make. Now let’s start with a word that is used in English for these weird entities that Plato sort of refers to but he often does indirectly. Form. The thing about form is it conveys shape and that’s misleading. So it’s a translation of the Greek word eidos or idea depending on which gender you’re using. Now one way of understanding that, and here’s where Aristotle is helpful, is you can understand that as the structural functional organization of a thing. That which binds all the features together into a meaningful gestalt or as known as the formal cause in Aristotle. I think this is very invaluable. I’ll try to say something that connects that and I presented that as the sort of main interpretation in Awakening from the Meaning Crisis of Eidos. I now think that was incorrect, not because structural functional organization isn’t important and I certainly needed it to talk about Aristotle and thereafter, dynamical systems etc. But I think as a presentation of what Plato meant by Eidos, I think it’s largely off center. There might be some overlap with Aristotle in some ways but I want to go back to the pre-Aristotelian sense and there’s been a lot of scholarship that can help us with that. So what does the word Eidos most literally translate into? It translates as the look of something. How does it look? So in a very real sense, a close English equivalent is aspect. I’m seeing this as a bottle. This is the aspect. Remember we talked about how representations are always a particular aspect of the thing. There’s aspectuality. Relevance realization is always doing aspectualization. I’m seeing this as a bottle or I’m seeing it as a weapon. That’s how it looks to me. So it’s very clear that I think we should be thinking about Eidos as aspect and that even more tightly binds it into relevance realization, recursive relevance realization, and that gets up into wisdom because of all the things we’ve already seen. So that seems like a good first step to take. Drew Hyland in Finitude and Transcendence and Kirkland on the ontology of Socratic questioning both also make converging points around this. Remember that the word phenomena means shining into intelligible objects. So we’re going to have to think about that. So I’m going to go back to phenomena means shining into intelligible presence, how it looks to me, how it’s aspectualized to me, while also withdrawing into mystery. Now think about that word withdrawing. It’s drawing us, withdrawing. We’re being drawn with it. I want you to note an English word for that drawing out, that drawing us beyond ourselves into mystery. Drawing out is the meaning of the word to educe, E-D-U-C-E. It’s where we get education from. Interesting that education originally meant to draw outs from somebody rather than to put something into them, but I want you to remember that word educe and because education now means something different, I’m going to use another word that comes from educe. It’s a legitimate word. It’s not a made-up word. It’s called eduction. Eduction means to draw out, to draw out. So shining into intelligible presence but also drawing us out beyond into mystery. Okay so what I want to do now, remember I mentioned Gonzalez and his pivotal seminal book from 1998 and third wave Platonism and Dialectic and Dialogue and Platonic Inquiry. I want to now read from an essay from literally this year in this book that I’ve already told you about, New Perspectives on Platonic Dialogue. I want to read you some important quotes because he’s actually dealing with the topic of dialectic in the Republic, but he broaches what’s the connection to Eidos, to this notion that Plato seems to be centrally associated with the practice of dialectic. So I’m going to read a couple of quotes for you. So he’s talking about this third. He’s talking about moving beyond positions that are merely contradicting each other. You can think about what we talked about when we talked about opponent processing versus adversarial processing. This is a fairly long quote and all of them are fairly long so please bear with me. If the third enables us to affirm contradictory conclusions, for example, that the one is both one and many or that it is both like and unlike, it does not do so as a synthesis. So here he’s making clear for those of you who might have some philosophical training, the platonic dialectic is not Hegelian dialectic. It does not do so as a synthesis, that is as some proposition or doctrine that would subsume both opposed conclusions under a third conclusion. Rather what enables us to maintain that the one is both one and many, like and unlike, etc. is the instant, because Plato actually uses the word instant, that’s why he puts it in quotation marks, the instance in which it switches over from one to the other and in which it is not one nor many, neither like nor unlike, etc. Not even in the process of becoming many or one, like or unlike, etc. The third is not a synthesis of the opposite conclusions but a transcendence to which they do not apply. It is the instance with its paradoxical nature between rest and motion in which one switches over from being X to not being X, and the other one switches over from being X to not being X, without at that instant of switching over either being or not being X, and without even becoming or ceasing to be X, beyond being and becoming, not being and ceasing to be, it is also outside of time, etc. Now you’re going, that last little bit was kind of crazy, yes, but and I’ll come back to another quote by Gonzalez, what’s he talking about here? And I’ll come back to another quote by Gonzalez, what’s he talking about here? So you’re probably familiar with the Necker cube or the duck rabbit from Wittgenstein. So when you look at the Necker cube it flips on you, when you look at the duck rabbit you can see it as a duck or as a rabbit, and Wittgenstein called this by the way the dawning of an aspect, and that flip by the way is related to the capacity for insight, for breaking an inappropriate frame and making a new frame. In fact what your brain is doing is it’s flipping between two different framings, and you see, right, you can’t see the duck, it’s not duck and rabbit or some synthesis of some, you’re seeing that there’s somehow one thing there, but you can only see it as duck or rabbit. They’re one, but of course they’re not logically identical, but they’re not making use of any different evidence or set of properties. They’re all there, it’s the same drawing, the drawing isn’t changing, but it’s flipping. You’re moving between aspects, you’re doing what has been called with respect to the Wittgensteinian literature an aspect shift, and you can do that all the time, and there’s lots of pictures that are famous. You’re looking at it at one way and it’s two faces, and then you do a figure ground reversal and it’s a vase, and you can flip back and forth, you know what I’m talking about. And like I said this happens in an insight where you switch aspects and you go, oh she’s not angry, she’s afraid. It’s that, so see it’s not a synthesis, it’s an aspect shift, it’s, you’re finding the multi-aspectuality of some one thing, but you can’t see the aspects all together in synthesis, you’re constantly moving between them. Okay, so that’s the first important note. So stick with me, this will actually bear out in experience. What we see in all of these cases is Socrates taking advantage of the fact that the ID, that’s the plural for Eidos, in question are causes of wandering, that’s actually the word used. I remember Socrates says he’s willing to follow the Logos no matter where it goes, following the wind, the spirit. Causes of wandering in order to argue for opposed hypothesis, but this is not just an heuristic game that plays on the confusion of the many. Instead Socrates is able to argue in the way he does because there are two genuinely true sides to the issue, that in both being true while also opposed, so not adversarial, not one at the expense of other, but opponent processing, point to a third option that transcends them and shows the kind in question cannot be reduced to one side, or I would say one aspect of the other. Socrates insists that the forms, Eidos, are objects of dialectic, precisely because they are, and then here Gonzales, as academics want to do, gives a Greek word that he doesn’t bother to translate, it basically translates as sort of profound ambiguity, because they are ambiguous and causes of wandering and himself argues in a way that plays on their inherent ambiguity with the goal of revealing the truth about them in the totality of perspectives that they offer. So we’ve got this aspect, this aspect shifting, totality of perspectives, we’re not doing adversarial processing, we’re somehow using them to correct and counterbalance each other. Now what’s going on here? Well, what I want to do is try to make this experiential in a way that will enrich our understanding of dialectic. So let’s take an object. I asked the crew to give me an interesting object and they of course gave me a very interesting camera, because cameras mean a lot to them. Now I want to do something with this. First of all, I want you to notice that you think you know this camera, but I want you to know, slow down, step out, remember, of the normal and especially the thingy way of thinking. You can’t actually see, you never see all of the camera at any one time, you never do. You never see all of its uses or the way it can interact with the environment, you never do. Yet you somehow have a sense of it being one thing. And what’s actually happening is you’re shifting between aspects. Those aspects are not identical, they’re not logically identical. You’re doing an aspect shift, they’re not in competition with each other, but neither are they logically identical. Logically identical. Every object thing is actually multi-aspectual. It has an unending sequence, is that the right word, collection? It has unending number of aspects, but these aren’t separate, they’re not a cacophony, they don’t seem absurd, they flow into each other, they belong together, logos, they are gathered together to belong together and somehow the whole is, you can, it’s intimated to you, there’s a hole here, but you actually don’t perceive it. You can’t even imagine it and you can, like I said, you can extend the number of aspects indefinitely. Let’s put this together. You’re wandering through all the aspects, but it’s not random, it’s not dissonant, it’s not incoherent. There is a through line that goes through all the aspects. It’s like the thread going through pearls and stringing them together so that they all belong together and because you can move through the through line and it’s never disappointed, I don’t turn the camera up to some position and you go, ah, you go, right, that’s, it’s like a melody. The notes aren’t the same, but the notes follow each other in a through line where the latter notes make sense of the earlier notes and vice versa. That’s why I talked about that melody of patterning. So there’s all the aspects, the multi-spectrality, and there’s a through line running through it unendingly. Unendingly, we can wander through it and we can do aspect shift after aspect shift after aspect shift and we get a sense of the whole, but it’s not a definition. It’s not a definition. It’s a pathway that we can follow. So we have this open-ended aspectualization, but it’s multi-spectrality. There’s a through line, a melody running through it and of course as I mentioned earlier, this all ties in so well with realization because aspect shifts are like shifts of insight. Okay, so this is going well. Everything’s tying together nicely. Now here’s the thing to stop. Two things. Remember what I already said, you never see the whole object. Try to imagine it and you’ll imagine one aspect. Okay, so you never see the whole object. You never see the whole object. You never see the whole object. Okay, so you never see the whole object. That’s kind of interesting, don’t you think? And secondly, the through line between all the aspects is not itself an aspect. It can’t be. In order to be the through line, it has to not be any particular aspect. So it is not an aspect. You’re already getting a sense of the non-thingness of this. It’s not a thing and you actually never actually perceive the whole thing. And in one really important sense, you never can. You can’t imagine it. You can say, well, I can sort of conceive it, but what are you conceiving? Aren’t you just conceiving ultimately the through line that is not a thing? Okay, so I’m giving you a new way, an enacted way of thinking about the forms. Now here’s how we can start to build towards dialectic. Because not only is the through line a through line of aspects, remember the one Gonzalez quote, I sort of emphasize this point, but it’s also a through line between perspectives. So I can be doing this. Here’s the multi-spectrality, there’s the through line. And then there’s a person over there who has a completely different perspective and they have a through line through multi-spectrality. It’s coming from that perspective. And of course, I could take their perspective, they can take mine. So not only do we have the through line of the multi-spectrality, we have the through line of all the perspectives. And that’s what’s actually pointing us and drawing us, inducing us towards the reality of this thing. But it’s not something we can see, and it’s not something we can complete in any kind of mental definition. So let’s go to the father of phenomenology, Husserl. And I want to draw a concept from him called eidetic reduction. Okay, so the fact that he calls it eidetic tells you that he’s deeply influenced by Plato. He’s also deeply influenced by Descartes. So those two things and Aristotle. So those are all mixed up together in some way. I’m not saying he’s a confused philosopher, he’s one of the greats. Okay, now eidetic reduction is actually something you do in order to practice phenomenology. Phenomenology isn’t a set of doctrines, it’s a way of practicing how to see. Heidegger said he couldn’t understand phenomenology until he learned how to see the way Husserl taught him to see. Okay, so first of all, that way of seeing. I strongly recommend this book. There’s the first edition, it was really good. Get the second edition, it’s even better. This is called experimental phenomenology. It’s how to do this. It’s how to find a through line through aspects and through perspectives. You’ll learn how to do it. This is where I got this idea from, from this book. The book goes on in the reduction for Husserl, at least standard interpretations, and standard interpretations are always both valuable and misleading. So, but I, you know, I have to take some things just as they’re presented to me. With Husserl, you do eidetic reduction till you get to the essence. You find the invariant, and Heidi will talk about that. You find the invariant structures, the ones that stay there no matter what you’re doing in this aspect variation. That was his notion of essence. Notice it’s not a propositional conceptual notion of essence, so that’s already shifted away from the standard interpretation of Plato. However, I think this is where Marla Ponte is a good corrective to Husserl, because Ponte thought that that process was open-ended. It didn’t, you couldn’t complete it and come to a resolution in an essence, and this was bound up also with his notion, Marla Ponte’s notion of the chiasm, not the chasm, the chiasm, C-H-I-A-S-M. This is, this is basically his term for something I’ve been teaching you. This is his term for the transjectivity of our sense making, and this is why Marla Ponte has been such a huge influence on people doing 40 cognitive science, like, you know, Evan Thompson, myself, Sean Gallagher, a whole bunch of people. So the transjectivity and the open-endedness, I think, recommend Marla Ponte’s version over Husserl’s. So I want to rename it, Ponte didn’t, Marla Ponte didn’t do that, but I want to call the process where we’re going through the, all the aspects, finding the through line through the aspects and finding the through line from all the perspectives, I want to call it eidetic eduction. We’re constantly drawing out the through line and following the through line. So I think the eidetic eduction of the through line of multi-aspectuality is in constant co-determination, co-articulation, co-generation with dialectic as a process of doing eidetic eduction for the through line between perspectives. So in dialectic, we’re doing that between our perspectives, but each person is also doing it with respect to whatever they’re talking about. So in dialectic and to dialoguist, we’re usually talking about a virtue and people are doing the eidetic eduction on the virtue, trying to find the through line going through the multi-aspectuality, but they’re also trying to find the through line between all of their perspectives. And those two are feeding each other constantly as we do dialectic and to dialoguist. And people get a profound sense, often awe, about what it is they’re reflecting on. So you can do this, of course, as I just mentioned, at the individual level or the collective level, and you can get into a flow state where you’re basically flowing through these two intermeshing through lines. And you could be flowing both multi-aspectuality or perspectives that are synchronic or diachronic. Synchronic meaning happening at the same time or diachronic unfolding across time. And people play with both of those. They don’t have these names for this. They’re not trying to do the science. They’re trying to engage in the practice. But what they’re doing is they are tracking, because they have the proper orientation, the ligaments of intelligibility. They are disciples following the logos. Now this leads us to the most mysterious thing for many people in Plato’s theory, which we put aside of the forms, which is the form of the forms. So if you’ve been doing your homework, you’ve been doing the allegory of the cave, people come out of the cave, the illusions and the shadows. They ascend and they eventually see the sun, which is the source of life and light. And the sun is the analog to what is called in the platonic literature, the good. There’s a big dispute of whether or not what Plato calls the good and what he calls the one are the same. The Neil Platonists argued that the one and the good are the same. I think they’re right. I’m not going to go into that. It’s not really crucial to what we’re doing right now. What’s the good? Well, remember, Plato makes a couple things really clear. You can’t really look at the sun directly. And the light that it makes is invisible. And the way it gives life to you is invisible. So remember, we talked about all of that already. So this seeing the sun, it’s not like looking at an object. How can we think of the good? How does it light up the Eidos, the idea, the plurality? How does it light them up? Especially if they’re not things, especially if they’re these through lines of intelligibility and being. This is what I want to propose to you. This is deeply influenced by D.C. Schindler’s book, Plato’s Critique of Impure Reason and the conversations that Dan Ciappi and I have had about it and the series that I did with Robert Breedlove on his channel about it. The good is the continually kept promise. I’m using my language very carefully here. The good is the continually kept promise that the through line will be there. The through line through multispectrality and the through line through the perspectives. Right? It’s a promise that is true to intelligibility, not true, but true to intelligibility, that is trustworthy. So it is in that sense the through line through all the through lines. It’s basically the ability to find these pathways of intelligibility and conformity to deeper and deeper reality. They will not fail. We can fail them, but they will not fail. The good is in that sense the promise that corresponds to the presence of antinormativity, the really real that calls you forth into following, being drawn into conformity with it. The good is therefore the through line between the true, the good, and the beautiful. So I’m using the good here with a capital G. It’s this antinormativity good, not ethical good. The good is the truth, the truth, the truth, the truth, the truth, the truth, the truth, the truth, and the beautiful. Wait, they’re not identical. They’re different aspects, but they bleed into each other, and they flow into each other. You can aspect shift between them and get a sense of antinormativity exactly. The good is the through line of the through line. It’s the through line between the true, the good, and the beautiful, the three transcendental, the three transcendental. shift between them and get a sense of antinormativity exactly. The good is the through line of the through line. It’s the through line between the true, the good, and the beautiful, the three transcendentals. It’s what we’re experiencing as we’re being drawn into antinormativity. I cannot prove this to you. That’s why there isn’t really a theory. Well you should try. Everything should be proven. I’m a rational person. Wait, wait, wait, wait. I can’t prove it to you because all argument, all experimentation, all science, all experience, presuppose it. If the through line were to fail, all those other things would fail. If the through line of the through lines, if the good were to fail, all of those were to, all of those would fail. But they continue to not fail. Oh, individual arguments here and there, but that’s not what you, that’s not what I mean. The ability to get closer to what’s real by finding the through lines does not fail. If it failed, there’s no way I could give you an argument or an experiment or an experience or a story or anything because all of those would also be failing. I don’t mean here in their instances. I mean failing as kinds of beings. I can’t prove it to you because it is the most primordial of all. But we can trust it and be true to it. That’s what Plato is arguing when he’s not really arguing. That’s what Plato was presenting to us and that’s why he needs a dialogue to do it because he can’t argue for it. You can only show it disclosing itself. You can’t do the logos. It has to appear of its own accord and draw you through these through lines, maybe to the through line of all through lines. And you can ultimately say I reject this. Yes you do, but then you have to give up all of the presuppositions that underlie science, that underline finding your experience to have any reality to it, that underline any of, that underlie any of your attempts to find a through line between thoughts or premises in argument or discourse or narrative etc. Can you live that way? Can you even think that way? I can’t prove it to you but it’s trustworthy and we can be true to it. So I have a proposal now building on this, connecting dialectic to the Eidos in the cultivation of wisdom. Wisdom is the meta-optimal grip and the meta- orientation, the fundamental framing that draws us, Eidos, that draws us to follow the path of the good as beings of finite transcendence. There’s a word in Greek, one of the Cardinal Virtues, Saffrason. It’s sometimes translated as temperance or moderation. Most people say those are horrible translations. Some people try sound-mindedness and that’s kind of right because it has something like that sense of that sort of fundamental framing but I think it misses something and I won’t go into the great detail but there’s a contrast between Saffrason and Encrata. Encrata is when you’re, like when you are controlling yourself because you’re tempted by something that you know is not good. I shouldn’t drink the alcohol. I’m gonna hold myself back. Encrata. So I’m tempted by what is not good or what is lesser good but I’m resisting it. That’s Encrata. But Saffrason is, I’m not fighting being tempted by what’s wrong, by what’s vicious. Saffrason is to be continually tempted by the good. I like to use the example that St. Paul uses in Corinthians when he’s talking about agape as the most excellent, what does he call it by the way, the most excellent way. Now he’s talking about agape here but he does this one part that’s really important for Saffrason because agape by the way is a species of Saffrason because if you really love that way you’re constantly tempted towards the good of the other. You’re not having to engage in Encrata. That’s what Augustine meant when he said love God and then do whatever you want. Okay so the connection is a fair one and St. Paul says you know when I was a child I spoke like a child I thought like a child but when I became a man I put childish things behind me. That’s somehow agape in its Saffrasonic function. How to think about that? Well think about you know I like to use the example I use this also in awakening from the meeting crisis. My younger son used to have a whole bunch of superhero toys when he was little and I would play with him right. Now toys these toys were like you know getting him to stop playing with them was really hard. They were super salient to him but I’m an adult. They didn’t hold that charm for me. It’s not like I was oh I do want to play when I’m an adult I can hold back. They just don’t draw me at all. I’m tempted by other things hopefully if I’m more mature things that are more oriented more broadly and deeply to reality. John Rusin argues that that’s the key of maturity. I played with them because of my son. My friend Anderson Todd talks about this time I didn’t I don’t have this episodic memory. I forget how old he said he was and he got all of his toys out and he just played with his toys a couple days before. He has a really powerful episodic memory and he got all of his toys out and he was starting and they just weren’t alive for him anymore. His salient landscape had matured to the point where they fell silent. So he wasn’t tempted by the toys anymore if I can put it that way. He was tempted by the dimensions of adult life. That’s a way of thinking about softerson. So dialectic into dialogos should give us that sense of we get to the place where we being drawn into the really real constantly tempted by the good onto a normatition. And some of you have seen awakening from the meeting crisis know what I mean. We have many different sciences that study the mind and many different levels of analysis. Neuroscience studies the brain it uses imaging FMRI EEG. Then you have artificial intelligence it doesn’t do any of that studies the mind by trying to build machines that are intelligent you do algorithms and heuristics and deep learning etc. Then you have psychology that studies the mind at the level of behavior you run experiments you talk about working memory and the executive functions etc. Then you have linguistics that talks about the mind in terms of language you talk about deep structures and surface structures and transformations. Then you talk about anthropology that talks about mind as the collective intelligence of distributed cognition culture and you do ethnographies right and the point I made there was if these are like different countries where they’re all talking about the mind using different terms different methods gathering different kinds of evidence and so we actually have this completely fragmented account of what the mind is also and that’s that’s very disastrous both epistemically or for our science project and existentially because we’re basically being told that we’re completely fragmented. But here’s the idea it’s highly highly improbable and implausible that these levels of the mind are not causally interacting constraining and affording each other. How are we going to capture that bottom up and top down flow from the cultural to the neurological and back up again? We need discipline that bridges between them gets them to talk to each other so that they can mutually inform and transform each other so that we can better capture that bottom up and top down causal flow. That’s what cognitive science is and it uses philosophy in order to try and bridge between the discourses to find the through line between all of these disciplines and therefore the through line between all of the levels. This is synoptic integration. Synoptic seeing the whole such that it can be integrated. Synoptic integration. When I was reading DC Schindler’s book and he was talking about the wise person in the Republic this being drawn through the through line to the through line of the through lines. Schindler was about we’re always being drawn to the whole we’re always pursuing he talks about this synoptic integration with the synoptic vision. Wow. We love the whole but never as a totality. This goes back to Levinos’s great book Totality and Infinity and he talks about Plato and how Plato has an infinity but totalitarian regimes have a totality. They have an account that claims to grasp everything completely and fully. It does not draw us it captures us into captivity. One of the greatest antidotes to totalitarianism is the love of the good as the through line of the through lines that takes us constantly towards a whole. Remember that we can never see and that we can never fully define or grasp but that is always available to us an inexhaustible fount of intelligibility that it constantly keeps its promise to us to guide us as we try to transcend ourselves and become wiser but we never transcend out of our finitude. We never have totality. We are always on the open-ended road of infinity always moving to the horizon of the good. We are lovers of wisdom. We are never gods that possess it. There’s no final relevance. There is no final relevance. There’s a you can’t point at something this is will always be relevant other than relevance realization itself. Relevance realization is inherently interested in relevance realization because it’s inherently dedicated to correcting itself autopoetically but other than that something can be relevant one minute irrelevant the next because it’s constantly evolving. We’re constantly walking the path. There is no final relevance but there is ratio religio to the real self-realization of reality. So what are some points to ponder? There’s a way of turning the thingy theory of the forms even if they’re not even if they’re immaterial into a way of practicing dialectic and I’ve shared that with you with the help of many other people. This connects well with no thingness, non propositional knowing, logos, recursive relevance realization, etc. So now I’d like to move to a practice. The practice that is designed to get you to read a text, a philosophical or religious text, such that you are not trying to totalize it, consume it, grasp it, but you are engaging in what I’ve been talking about here following the through line and letting it draw you. You’re not trying to be informed by the text you’re trying to be transformed by it and you’re trying to put the propositional in service of the non propositional. What’s this kind of reading called? Here’s one book got the name right on the title, Lexio Divina. Renewing the ancient practice of praying the scriptures. It’s interesting that this is called praying the scriptures. Now these two books are from the Christian perspective and if you’re a Christian, no offense, if I sometimes talk about it in non-Christian fashion and if you’re not a Christian, I also hope, no offense, if I use these Christian, some of these Christian ideas to talk to people who are not going to pursue the Christian pathway. We’re trying to be in this together in good faith. That’s one of the presuppositions behind dialectic and dialogal. So this is a good book, Lexio Divina. This is a better book. Both books are good. I think this is a better book. It’s called sacred reading, the ancient art of Lexio Divina. It’s by Michael Casey, it’s author, who is the author of a book called Toward God. Interesting language, Toward. This is very good. If you want one of the classic texts introducing Lexio Divina, and I’m not quite sure how you would pronounce this, GUIGO the second, GUIGO, GUIDO, I don’t know how, the ladder of monks and twelve meditations. This is sort of the original, there’s a translation, this is the original presentation of Lexio Divina. There is good reason to believe, and I won’t go into all the scholastic argument, that Lexio Divina predates its Christian use, that it was part of Neoplatonic practice, especially a Neoplatonic practice called Theurgia, which I’ll talk a little bit about when we get into the Neoplatonic strand of dialectic into dialogos. I’m going to take you through how to do this, but one more book to recommend to you. Those books will tell you how to actually do the practice as a practice, as like as part of your ecology of practices. I recommend this book as well. Okay, Lexio Divina as contemplative pedagogy, reappropriating monastic practice for the humanities by Mary Kitor. This is about how to, once you’ve been practicing Lexio Divina, you really understand it, how can you extend it into reading any text at length, which I think is very important, because you want to have not only things that are working in your particular practice, but building frameworks around them so that they transfer to other domains of your life. I’m going to talk about that later as a crucial feature of any set of practices. Okay, so what I want to do is I want to take, this is a translation of The Vision of God by Nicholas of Cusa, who we will have an episode about in this series, definitely dialectic into dialogos. In some ways the culmination of the whole thing. I’m going to first, I’m going to tell you how you do it, right, how we, how you would do it. So first of all, it’s a good idea, right, to stick with, like, don’t just flip between things. I used to recommend that initially for novices, I’ve changed my mind about that. I think it’s a good idea to have stick, like, keep going through one book. Actually I recommend two or three books, and I’ll explain why in a second, but I’ll do it first just with one book. So there’s basically four stages. They’re called lexio, reading, meditatio, which is reflection, reflecting, meditating, oritatio, speaking, and contemplatio, contemplation. So let’s go through this step by step. We’re trying to, we’re trying to change our orientation from consuming information to being drawn into transformation. Okay, so we’re not going to try and read a whole bunch of the text and what does it say and what does it mean instead, right, in that normal way. Well, I’m going to summarize it and take it, but I’m going to disagree with it here. Okay, we’re going to read it on a much smaller passage. We’re going to do engaged reading. We read it aloud, so we could pick a passage here, right. If I should say that the infinite is limited to a line as when I speak of an infinite line, then the line is drawn into, onto the infinite. For a line ceases to be a line when it has no quantity nor end, and an infinite line is not a line, but a line at infinity is infinity. So you read it and you try and find something that really grabs you. That’s the lexio. The lexio, so I’m reading it with, I’m trying to get something that grabs me, not in the intellectual sense of I disagree with that, but it sort of echoes, it resonates with you, it’s sort of ah, whoo, ah, that, the way I like to put it is that was kind of tasty. Hmm, I want to go back, I want to savor that. So what I do is as part of the meditatio, sorry, as part of the lexio, right, is I’ll reread that one passage. I may even chant it, right. For a line ceases to be a line when it has no quantity nor end, an infinite line is not a line, an infinite line is not a line, infinite line is not a line. What’s he doing there? Especially because I’ve been talking about the through line. See what I did there? I made it an association for something that was alive for me. I’ve been talking about the through line and here’s this line, and this line that goes to infinity is not a line. Oh, that’s how it’s speaking to me right now. Hmm, hmm, that’s really interesting. So I’ll chant it a few times, let it really reverberate, associations form in me. And then I move to from the lexio to the meditatio. What I do is I imaginably engage with that. I let all those associations, they’re still active in me, and then I do, and I, so I’m going to draw a line to infinity and I’m even going to say it’s the through line and right, because if it goes to infinity it’s not a line, because lines go from one point to another. But it is a line, but it’s not a line. It’s like, whoa. And then I do oratio. Nicholas, what are you trying to say to me? I try to talk to the author, but what I’m trying to do is I’m trying to mind-sight him. What was his state of mind such that he could produce that text? I try to resonate with that. I try to get into his state of mind. Remember internalizing the sage, internalizing the adult? I’m internalizing Nicholas of Cusa. What’s his perspective? It’s bigger than mine. I’m trying to understand what, what was his mind state such that he could produce that? I want some sense of it. What’s, what’s it like to be like that? To be able to really see that, to realize it. I play with that for a while and oriented towards his mind, almost presencing his perspective. Then when I get some sense of I’m starting to internalize it, then I move to the contemplatio. I open my eyes and I try to see the world as Nicholas would have seen it when he uttered that phrase. It’s a good idea sometimes to have two texts. It’s a good idea to have them from at least related traditions because when you do it with one text and you do it the second text, not only do you have the lexio divina for each text, you get a lexio divina between them like the third and it makes the two of them sing even more because they start talking to each other as much as they’re talking to you and then the whole thing takes on a powerful life of its own. And of course that’s one of the hallmark features of the emergence, the presencing, the appearing of dialogus. As always, thank you very much for your time and attention. But having other people with other perspectives that they are presencing to us and challenging us allows us to afford each other to overcome bias. There is a collective intelligence in distributed cognition that supersedes just the aggregation or the summation of the intelligence of the individual people.