https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=ylEGSDrWRnE
Well, great. I’m so excited to be with both of you. So just my tiniest little outline that we’re going to do will be a weird practice I want to start with. And so I’ll just go first and then Eric and then John. And this is called the 5-4-3-2-1 grounding technique. So all you have to do, it’s very simple. I’ll just do it first. Just name five things you can see right now. So I can see your faces, I can see my speaker, my desk, my hands, and my water bottle. OK, 5-4-3-2-1. I see my cell phone, my mouse, my mic, my other pair of headphones there, and my little portable heater here. I see my frog, my stone, my watch, my speaker, my mug, and one of my bookmarks. Now, four things you can touch. So my shirt, my desk again, it’s bamboo, my remote for my blinds, and I’m touching the air right now. OK, my desk, my keyboard, my water bottle, a book on the irrigation culture, my desk. I’m touching a notepad, my chair, one leg is touching the other, my foot is touching the floor. Now, three things you can hear. I can hear the outside, I can hear the fan, and I can hear my computer. I can hear a slight buzzing from my light, maybe some traffic noise. And the silence of no one else talking. I can hear my own voice, I can hear the computer fan, and I can vaguely hear outside. It’s indistinct. And then two things you can smell. So I can smell this strawberry candle and a little bit of the trees outside or something in the air. Hmm. I don’t have a strong sense of smell, so that’s a tough one. I really, you got me there. I can smell the background smell of my apartment and vaguely the deodorant I’m wearing. And then one thing you can taste. And then one thing you can taste. And so I can taste like a little bit of the coffee I was drinking like an hour ago. Hmm. I had some chocolate covered cherries earlier, so a little bit of that taste. Yeah, I can taste what remains in my mouth of this energy bar that is egg whites, peanuts, and dates. Very cool. So that’s the 54321. And then I’m just going to read this Heidinger quote. That’s like about three minutes that I think is on this topic. And this paper doesn’t mention Heidegger as much, but his other longer works do. So I’m just going to read this, and I want us to maybe both of you to react to it if there’s anything that is interesting. And then we’ll just frame, I’d love for John, you just to say even five minutes about why you like this paper and what it was exciting or why you want to talk about it more. And then Eric, kind of your, and frame it, John, too, for the audience. And then Eric, kind of maybe your reaction and any lingering questions, and that’ll kind of start. Yeah, go ahead, please, John. Yeah, maybe if I could have a little bit more than five minutes, because I think for the audience, it would be good if I gave at least a schematic presentation of the core arguments and an argument that I think is implicit in here in relationship to my work. And then that will, I think, properly frame it. I will give what you asked for, the sort of the motivational framing, why am I interested in it? But I also, for the audience, like what’s the key moves being made? I’ll only present it very schematically. I won’t try and make sure it’s, you know, absolutely logically tight or anything like that. I’ll just lay it out as part of the framing. So maybe I could have ten minutes around that if that’s fine. Yeah, that’s perfect. I love that. And I’m going to link the paper and all the platinus that he mentions. I’ve pulled all that out of the NE ads. And so if any readers want to kind of read either of those, those will be in the description. And we can also mention the book right here. A little blurry, maybe you could read the title for us. OK, so Heidegger, Neoplatonism and the history of being relation as ontological ground. Perfect. So I’m just going to read this Heidegger. It’s from a recording he did in 1957, and it’s very Heideggerian. It’s very like emotive and a little paradoxical, but I think very interesting. So. In the present age, due to the haste and ordinariness of everyday speech and writing, another relation to language dominates ever more decisively. That is, we take language like everything we deal with daily as an instrument, namely the instrument for communication and information. This notion of language is so familiar to us that we hardly notice its uncanny power. The notion of language as an instrument for language is totally driven to extremes. The relation of man to language is undergoing a transformation, the consequences of which have not yet been grasped. The course of this transform can’t be stopped by direct intervention. Moreover, it goes on in the most profound silence. Certainly, we must admit that language appears in daily life. As a means of communication and as such a means is used in the ordinary relations of life, but there are still other relations than the ordinary ones. Goethe calls these other relations the deeper ones and says of language, in normal life, we make do with impoverished language because we only signify superficial relations. As soon as the talk is of deeper relations, there immediately enters another kind of language, the poetic. And then there’s like these kind of stanzas. He goes like, what is it that we can question? What is worthy of questioning? What is worthy of a question that is the controllable nature and supposedly true world seizes upon all reflections and aspirations of man? He does it a couple more times. So, yeah, what do you think of that? Maybe Eric first. Does that remind you of this paper at all or is it utter nonsense? That’s quite a dichotomy. Yeah, maybe somewhere in between. Yeah, so it reminded me of the attitude towards language that you find in the Platonic dialogues, where there will be times when Socrates moves into something more poetic, almost getting into verse. And there’s also that shift between kind of poetic and poetic. That shift between kind of prosaic, dialectical investigation and then more mythopoetic, dreamlike exposition. And that’s interesting that I’ve identified for a while that those mythic sections often contain the deepest insights about the nature of reality. And those insights are often theological. And I was just having a discussion yesterday about the nature of the gods in Platonism and Neoplatonism. And the gods really transcend all the orders of being. So when we use theological poetic language, we’re referencing this aspect of Plato’s ontology that is inherently relational. It cuts through from first hypostasis all the way down to souls and diamonds and even idols and physical spaces embody that kind of mystic energy that we access in language, inevitably through a kind of poetic vein. Like it’s a power that draws these insights out of us. Also that poetic. And rhythmic aspects of language are sort of inbuilt and reflect the inherently analogical relationship between language and the structure of reality in a way that we can’t think of as like authored by us entirely. You know, I don’t get to decide what rhymes. It’s built into the structure of things. So, yeah, that shifts between language as an instrument and then language as that kind of reflection of the underlying relations in things. That was excellent. I want to, I think, build on that. But so Heidegger is and this is Filler’s point in the book, Heidegger, Neoplatonism, the History of Being. He also has an essay you can get for free on Heidegger and relationality. But Heidegger is calling into question the subject predicate structure of language and logic. He’s calling in to question the sender receiver model. He’s pointing out that below communication, there’s communion and communion, as Eric just pointed out, requires some participatory relation that language and reality share fundamental principles in some important way, and we participate in language as much as use it as an instrument. And of course, if you think about your identity’s relationship to language, your selfhood, your personhood, that becomes immensely clear. Trying to separate your selfhood from language is a very problematic thing for us to at least your selfhood insofar as you understand yourself as a person. And then what that calls me to, and it was mentioned, is, of course, the relationship between sound and silence. And the subject predicate and the sender receiver and the communication privilege the sound over the silence. The communion, the participation tend to privilege the silence over the sound. And I think Rosen is right in his critique on Heidegger, where he says the sound is the primary way in which we understand dayanoia reasoning. And noesis is the primary way in which we get silence, that sort of the aha, the ineffable insight. And those are bound up together in poetry, as and mythopoetic languages, Eric was saying. Rosen’s critique of Heidegger is Heidegger tends to overemphasize the silence at the expense of the speech. Rosen’s argument, which I think is the final piece missing from Heidegger that would bring him closer, finish Filler’s argument, if I may be presumptuous, is because I want to meet James and actually talk to him about all this. I’m going to be meeting him. Is that actually either pure noesis or pure dayanoia leaves you in nihilism and it is only the relationality between the two of them that saves you from nihilism. And I think that’s what Heidegger was also looking for, where the noesis is sort of vertical relationality that Eric was pointing to. And then, of course, Heidegger was emphasizing the horizontal relationality in very many ways. And there’s a more modern analogous move exactly to what Eric was talking about, about the analog versus, let’s say, the digital. And of course, this is Ian Miguel-Kris’s current work on the left and right hemispheres, where the left hemisphere is basically working in terms of formal systems. And it works in terms of articulation. And it works in terms of dayanoia. The right hemisphere is very much about noesis. It’s about noticing opportunity and danger. And it’s very much not about articulation. It’s about gestalting and so on and so forth. And of course, I tend to think Ian overemphasizes the right and a little bit villainizes the left. It’s compensatory for the fact that we have tended to prioritize the left over the right. I’ve pointed out to him in person a couple of times that insight is a phenomena that actually requires both hemispheres to work in a kind of opponent processing. And so all of that, which I think is very consonant with what Eric said, is what came to my mind when I heard Heidegger. Awesome. And so I just my last comment is I love that, too. I’ve been teaching reasoning and analogy to very precocious students, and they’re great at argument. They want to argue with me about what reason and about what analogy is. And then we get into these very philosophical like a porias. And I start teaching them about analogy. It’s so fun. But they’re so good at arguing. Like it’s not for lack of argument today and skill that they’re like Ian is kind of pointing to that they’re lacking. It’s this creative learned like, how do I make a myth? How do I appreciate a myth? How do I do analogical reasoning that might transcend identities that are more Aristotelian and things like that? And then, like you said, that the dialectic between those two systems, if you could think of them as systems, is what generates like ahas that are intelligible rather than intuitions that are kind of blind. And Descartes point is there Descartes point when the godfathers of computationalism is every inferential argument has a little aha moment in it in which you gestalt the whole argument and hold it all at once. Or else you don’t actually get the argument. And so it’s the interpenetration of the two. Yeah, that’s that’s that’s very much the case, I think. Excellent. So then, John, if you’ll just give us like the 10 or 15 minute overview and why you like this paper. And then Eric can kind of add to that. And then just I think that’ll open up everything. Well, why I like my paper, why I like this paper is not my paper. Why I like it. That that was a weird fordian slip. I’ve sort of identified with it, I suppose. Why are you obsessed with it, John? Yeah, yeah, maybe. Well, fair enough. For me, this helped to well, I’ll speak sort of first personally, which is not in this paper, but in the book, I got the first presentation of the symbolism of the Trinity that actually ever made any sense to me. And that was a sort of an interesting thing for me who who has a troubled relationship with Christianity, to put it mildly. So that was sort of an idiosyncratic thing for me. I imagine that would be of value to many people. More, I guess, to say more sort of professionally, philosophically, for me, it helped to articulate the non logical identity relationship between being and intelligibility that was presupposed by Greek philosophy and is fundamentally presupposed by science. And it helped to explain how and why those two are non logically one. And that gave me a profound, profound, aha. And then the second thing was, is this critique of substance in the Aristotelian sense, where the subject predicate nature of logic and language is the same fundamental structure of reality, that reality is made up of independently existing things that contain properties or enter into action. And then, of course, there’s long debates about whether or not action is a property and blah, blah, blah. We don’t need to do that right now. But the point is, right, because I’d always seen there seems to be tight relationships between that substance, metaphysics and a nominalist epistemology, because it tends to say that relations aren’t real. And then you have to account for them. If you’re going to have any intelligibility, you get into a nominalist proposal. And then I think nominalism profoundly implies dualism. And I’ve made that argument already, and you can see it unfolding historically. And then I think dualism with a substance, metaphysics gets you inherently into adversarial processing, which I think is a huge driver of the meaning crisis. So this looked to me like a profound way of trying to deconstruct the grammar that drives an important aspect, especially the cultural, political aspect, the culture war aspect of the meaning crisis, while also giving us a new way of understanding potentially the meaning of the meaning of the word. And understanding potentially the relationship to ultimate reality and a way that we could make we could find sacred that our relationship to it could be profoundly transformative, because as we enter into it and conform to this, we could be liberated from that adversarial way of being. That would be sotterological. And we could come to understand why, you know, why onto normativity? Why do we find the really real, inherently valuable? And so that would be something that was therefore sacred. So it was a way of and you can then see and there’s some thing and I haven’t articulated between this reinvigorating of the notion of the sacred and this reproach more with the Christianity’s Christianity symbolization of the sacred is inherently relational. Now, of course, for me, I’m a pluralist. I think other great traditions, and this is part of the argument I’ll make later, have have converged on this idea of the inherent relationality of ultimacy. And it is not a uniquely specific Christian thing. And that’s one thing where I think James and I will probably come into disagreement. But for me, that those are sort of my primary motivations of what attracted me so deeply and like you say, it’s almost obsessional because I my relationship to it has not been just intellectual. My Freudian slip pointed to the fact that I almost I think it’s something I have already begun. Yeah, I think this is right. I’ve begun to internalize into a way of thinking and a way of seeing and being and not just a theory that I’m holding and asserting. So that would be the motivation. I’ll pause here in case either one of you want to ask me any questions about the motivation or you can let me do that sort of framing, which which you I’ll pause for a second. I’m happy for you to keep going. It’s fine. Yeah, that was very helpful, John. Thank you. So those are my reasons. And then, of course, you know, in the sense of motivation, but you want good reasons in the sense of justification and you want the two kinds of reasons to come together well. So now I’ll move to what is what is filler’s argument and how I think I can amplify the argument. And then one amplification will be a sort of parallel deductive, abductive argument, which is the kind of argument he’s giving. And the other one will be not an argument that could stand on its own, but sort of a historical plausibility argument. And I’ve already alluded to it with the convergence, but let’s let’s outline the argument. So there’s two arguments that filler is making, and they get tangled up in ways that I think we might want to slow down and ask some questions about. One is an exegetical argument that this is what neoplatonism was claiming. And more specifically, this is what Neil, this is what platinus was claiming. And filler admits not as much as he should in the paper, more in the book, that it’s more he’s saying if we made platinus more consistent, this is the arguments that would come out. And it’s it’s really difficult to know what to do with rational reconstruction arguments. So who are we attributing the argument to? Are we attributing it to platinus? Are we attributing it to filler? Are we attributing it to some third personal thing that is unfolding between filler and platinus? So I’m going to say right up front, I find that a little bit problematic. Now that’s and I want the the the listeners to understand he doesn’t cleanly separate these arguments from each other. Right. He doesn’t pose that sort of a standard scholastic exegetical argument. And then epistemological ontological argument, he weaves them together. And that’s interesting because in some sense, he’s actually emulating platinus, which is kind of admirable aesthetically, but it makes it a little bit problematic. So I want to I want to I want to have this huge caveat over what I’m saying. I’m very. I think I’m open to the fact that in platinus, some of this might have been there, at least in potential. I do agree with him that in later neoplatonism, especially by the time we get to Nicholas of Cusa, I think this has been excellent explicated and articulated. But that’s all I’ll say about the first start, the first argument. The second is a series of epistemological ontological arguments. And this has to do around relations. And implicit behind this is the that I don’t know the insight. Intuition, not quite sure what the cognitive act is, that intelligibility has this nonlogical identity with being that we get access to being through intelligibility. And this, of course, goes back to Parmenides, et cetera. And then what he’s trying to do is understand knowing and intelligibility are inherently relational. Because the one in platinus is simultaneously grounding how things the being of things and the being known of things. And so he’s trying to get at that. Now, the argument is about the reality. If we take intelligibility to be real, then the reality of relations becomes an issue for us. And then what he tries to ask is where like, where do relations reside? And he challenges our common sense notion of substance, which is the notion that there are things that would fully exist independently, not causally. OK, please don’t make that mistake. Nobody’s saying there, you know, trees could exist on the ground. Could exist on their own if there wasn’t the history of the world or anything like that. It’s not causally, but ontologically a tree, a tree has all of its properties. It’s a subject that to which predicates apply. Right. And so we have subjects and then there are relationships between them. And I’ll just say substances, because subject sounds like it’s a living being or something like that. But remember, it’s ultimately grounded on the subject, predicate structure of language and logic. And so he says, where are the relations? And he says the relations can’t be in the things as a property, because then you wouldn’t one thing would not need the other in order to have the relation. And that makes no sense. It can’t emerge between the two because without independently existing, because then you would return back to that it have to be a property of one or the other, or it would have to come from a causal or constitutive relation between them. And then you’re prioritizing a relation that generates the relationality. And that means you’re ultimately admitting that the relations have ontological priority. And so that’s the initial key move. And then he makes the next move and he says, OK, let’s look at intelligibility. So that’s the first argument. Intelligibility requires determination that things are determinate. We can. This is a cup. Right. And, you know, this is a pen. And that determination is where is what’s presupposed by our subject predicate language and logic. And then he says the problem with determination is it requires two relations. Sameness. This is the same. And it’s different from right. So sameness and difference. Those are both relational. And the relation between sameness and difference, which is at the core of determination, can’t be either identity or difference. It has to be something, as he says, undifferentiated, indeterminate, indeterminate, better word, I should say. So not undifferentiated. That’s the wrong word. I apologize. Something indeterminate. And that would, of course, be pure relationality. And then I would like to add to that two arguments. Now, one argument is basically to the effect that when we’re trying to understand intelligibility on the ontological side, we have relations of if we take intelligibility to be real, OK, then we’re committed to the intelligibility of causation and the intelligibility of information in the technical sense of probabilistic relationships between events that can ground knowing. And, of course, causation and information are intrinsically relational entities. And this would mean intelligibility is inherently relational. And therefore, we then fold into Filler’s argument. You can then ask, what’s the relationship between information and causation? They’re inter-defining, right? You always end up using one to define the other. And as soon as you do that, you then are, well, what’s the relation? What is that inter-defining relationship between causation and information? Well, it’s neither causation or information, nor is it separate from causation and information. And you get back to the indeterminate relationality as the ground of everything. What underlies informational networks and causal networks and how they fit together. On the epistemic side, you may have this vague remembrance that I’m obsessed with relevance as a relation and, of course, I have made the ongoing argument that relevance is inherently transjective and it doesn’t fit into subjectivity or objectivity, but grounds the relation between them. And then on the epistemic side, you get back down to the same alethetic argument that there’s indeterminate pure relationality as the ground of the possibility of truth and knowing. And you put those together and you get a very strong argument that I think amplifies Filler. The final argument, and this argument does not stand on its own, neither I would never offer it as a single argument, but is the historical argument, which is an argument for plausibility, that you get many independent lines of inquiry converging on this idea about the ultimate ground of being or being itself is indeterminate pure relationality. This is, of course, the Tao. You can make a good case for this being the Tao. You can make a good case for this being Indra’s net and Shunyata. I think you make a good case for it being Brahman, etc. And so there seems to be when people are independently doing this kind of abductive, deductive, transcendental reflection on intelligibility, they seem to come to this conclusion across different cultures, time, space, historical situations, and so on. So the last argument is the weakest. It’s a plausibility argument that says this argument should be taken very seriously. And then Filler’s two arguments and my amplification arguments are more sort of deductive, abductive, transcendental style arguments for the ultimacy being, and then the argument is that the argument should be taken very seriously. And what’s interesting about that, and this is part of the plausibility argument, is a lot of mystics seem to get to this place of paradoxical symbolism of the ultimate. Nicholas of Cusa, the coincidence of opposites, which points to exactly the kind of thing that Filler is talking about. And so, the question is, what is the reason for this? And so, the question is, what is the reason for this? And so, the question is, what is the reason for this? The kind of thing that Filler is talking about. So that’s my attempt to, like, I, and I, before we started this, I said to Eric and Robert, I wouldn’t present this as a premise by premise, lockstep, absolutely logically valid argument. I do think that is possible, but I think doing that would bore everybody to ultimate death. And so instead, I presented it in what I hope is a plausible and intuitively graspable format. Okay, so that’s my, that was my, I give the case of my motivation, why I like it so much, why I’m internalizing it, and then I gave what I think are the overall arguments for it. And why I think it, our relationship to it, if the arguments are true, would be sacred, because this notion of ultimacy would liberate us from a profound kind of way in which we are fettered, epistemologically and existentially, and it would help to explain why we find sort of the really real inherently valuable, because it grounds and makes possible all other intelligibility, etc. I’ll shut up now. All right. Thank you for watching. This YouTube and podcast series is by the Vervecki Foundation, which in addition to supporting my work, also offers courses, practices, workshops and other projects dedicated to responding to the meaning crisis. If you would like to support this work, please consider joining our Patreon. You can find the link in the show notes. Well, you have lived with filler’s thought a lot more than I have. But so far, as I’ve interacted with it, there are a lot of very good insights. I think it does have ethical implications. It clarifies our understanding of ontology, and I agree with filler that a lot of this inherent relationality is explicit in the Neoplatonists. I would be a little bit more charitable with Plato himself than filler is, and I disagree somewhat with his interpretation of Plato’s ontology in the Timaeus. In he discusses also the Billabus, which is kind of technical, exegetical, and I essentially side with Proclus as I usually do. But yeah, a lot of very good insights as well. The fundamental criticism that I have, though, is really semantic. I take Iamblichus seriously in his essay on the, or his letter to Aenebo on the mysteries of the Egyptians. The names of the gods in that work, he says, are providentially given. So we don’t arbitrarily name Zeus Zeus or call him Osiris in Egypt. The local differentiations are characterized in, again, a way that taps into this essential kind of analogy between language, the setting, the people, and this kind of integral fashion, which again, underlines the importance of this kind of ontological relationality. But we have to respect the traditional names that have been given. I interpret Plato largely as a Pythagorean, and the Pythagoreans have their table of opposites, right, where they have in the column of monad, odd. That’s a good point. That’s a good point. Sorry, enthusiastic. Sorry, it’s a good point. Keep going. Sure. So they have the odd, the masculine, the straight, et cetera, versus in the column of the dyad, the even, the female, the curved. And this is a kind of asymmetry that ultimately does resolve and is contained in the one above the monad and the indefinite dyad. By the way, that’s one thing that I disagree with filler on. Filler seems to treat the monad as synonymous with the one. I think that’s somewhat of an exegetical mistake. Yeah, I agree with that. I don’t dispute that. Okay, well, good. So I do agree that ultimately, you know, you have to go beyond the one and the many to capture the ultimate. But the Pythagoreans believed that we should denominate that ultimate principle after the chief member of the column of the limit, because that is also the column of the good. So there’s a kind of ethical teleological asymmetry in things that then provides a foundation for ethics. So the significance of calling the ultimate principle the one and the good is in kind of grounding all of these other value judgments. That also then changes the emphasis from pure relationality, which is kind of neutral. I’m in a relation with someone when I’m wrestling them or when I’m making love with them. And it’s sort of like as intense and real in either case, one obviously is like loving, the other is more contested. Whereas oneness captures something that is inherently ethical in the relation and gives it that kind of valence. And then there’s a movement away from the good relation of unity towards the bad relation of separation. To my mind, both separation and unification are equally relations, which at one level does to my mind signify that yes, filler is on to something in identifying inherent relationality in the first principle, because it’s that generic that it’s beyond oneness in a certain sense. But still, this is about the semantics of what we highlight, what we emphasize is like worthy in the first principle. And oneness also just to defend that not necessarily being posterior to relation. Any relation between two things can equally, I think, be said as a kind of unification of those things at one level, even the people who are wrestling or like two atoms that are moving in opposite directions. If we’re going to describe their relation, we’re describing a way in which they’re unified, some kind of field in which we can register these two things. That’s the transcendental unity behind any opposition. You can call that relationality. I think you can equally call that unity. And so, well, relationality brings out some aspects that might be obfuscated by like reifying the simplicity of the one. And forgetting the kind of inherent multiplicity that’s involved in all actual unities. Nevertheless, I think the ethical consequences of upholding that side of the table of opposites, the column of the monad justifies it. So there’s that kind of semantic point. And then at another level. Could I respond to that? Yeah, that’s fine. Yeah. First of all, I think that’s great. I think that’s right. And I think what you said in some sense fills out, no pun intended, fills out the point I was making about, you know, about there being a sacred aspect to it. And I think you’re right. I think the platonic or Pythagorean platonic, Neoplatonic tradition is trying to emphasize the sacredness. So it’s a religious realization and not just a intellectual realization, however rarefied. I think I’m in agreement with that. And part of how that turns back into a critique of the ontology is I have I don’t know if this is fair or not, but I get the impression of a very Parmenidian sort of model of pure relationality is sort of static, like a field or something. And what’s missing from this is the dynamic aspect of it. And what I mean by that is that when you’re when you there’s the you can’t separate the relationality from the emanation and the emergence from the procession and the return. If you want to make a claim that it is grounding intelligibility, because if you look at intelligibility, you see the emanation and the emergence completely interpenetrating. And that’s an argument I’ve been, of course, making a lot. And then again, you have to say, make the argument that there’s something in reality, your notion of analogy that corresponds to that emanation and emergence. And so that dynamic nature is missing. And I think as soon as we’re into that, we are into that that issue around humans seeking self-transcendence in some fashion. And then I think that brings out and you seem to be nodding, Eric, so I think you’re in agreement that brings out the point you’re making that we will prioritize language, not because we’re making ultimate ontological claims, but because we need to express our religious relationship to ultimacy, because that is actually the proper ethical, broadly understood ethical relationship we should have to it. Does that sit well with you as an argument? Because that was an argument I was also considering. Yeah, I mean, I think that’s essentially what I was trying to drive at. Yeah, I agree with that. The names we use, not only do I have as being a little bit more conservative in disposition in many ways, just more of a respect for tradition. Like we can’t don’t change the names, don’t change the rituals. We have to keep everything the same. That’s been my inclination, at least as an adult in life. But not only that, we also have to look at the way that we’re comporting ourselves towards these concepts holistically, which is why, yeah, like there were multiple aspects here, why I think the one has to be preserved as that designation. Just to go on with that. Actually, before I do, I think it’s interesting that Filler’s argument for the independence of relationality is very similar to the argument from the lysis for the way in which we participate in friendship. So Socrates argues that friendship can’t emanate from one person feeling filia for another person or for both feeling for each other, because then certain classes of filial relations, like a father and an infant son who’s not yet verbal, who doesn’t have awareness of otherness in the first place, then those classes of filial relationship would be discounted or not real, not authentic. So if you want friendship to subsist in all of the ways that it does, not just like from voluntary affection and independent agents, you have to acknowledge that we are receiving that unification from above. And in that case, friendship is not just a neutral relation, even there, it is a species primarily of unification. Because again, we can kind of come into relation in a positive or a negative sense. And I think you want that that goodness baked in to your conception of ultimacy and your conception of what grounds the good relation, because we’re not just seeking like relationality generally, we’re seeking the good unifying relation, which again, I think points to what I was talking about earlier, I believe, regarding like analogical relationships and the gods cutting through the orders of being. The logos, I’ve tried to like situate where exactly is the logos in Platonic ontology, like noose you can locate the souls are easy, you know, but where is that proportionality? Well, it’s there even from the relation between monad and the indefinite dyad, the species of unities, the species of intelligibility, the logos is certainly transcendent of intelligibility in the first place. It’s the vertical through line. It’s the vertical. Yes, it’s so it is the epistemic pole, don’t separate the two to which participation is the ontological pole, right? It’s so that’s how I understand it. Right. And it’s also inherently proportionality. Well, that’s one meaning. Yeah, of course. That’s the Platonic notion of participation that occurs with it. Proportionality. Right. So I think analogy and proportionality, we need to recognize kind of as inherently asymmetric and not perfectly symmetric. If the one and the many were perfectly symmetric, then we, in a sense, wouldn’t have these like intermediate orders that join. Like imagine you have one, two, and then four, and then you just keep dividing. Everything is sort of fundamentally on a par and equal and there’s no center of gravity. There’s nothing like joining the lower orders as much. Yeah. So I want to I want to again, I think amplify that point. And then I want to ask you a question. So as you know, I’ve been engaged in an ongoing project to integrate this with phenomenology. And if you look at the phenomenology of intelligibility, which Filler is not doing, so we want to be fair to him. We can’t say, well, you haven’t looked at all knowledge. That’s not fair. Right. But nevertheless, if we’re trying to not just do exegesis of Filler, right, I think we and this goes towards sort of, I think, deeper cognitive scientific issues. But I’ll just say the phenomenology of reality seems to give us an opponent processing part of what we mean by real is the phenomenology of confirmation. And like you say, there’s that. But there’s also right. There’s also we take that to be real, which surprises us and actually breaks up that now we can’t have right. We ultimately feed back the surprise back into the confirmation. We don’t feed. We don’t dissolve the confirmation into the surprise. Do you see what I’m trying to do here, Eric? And so the surprise is the differentiation, right? The ACM, the introduction of asymmetry, and then we feed it back in. And the way we deal with it is also, as you’re saying, in some sense, asymmetrical. We feed the surprise back into the confirmation. We don’t dissolve the confirmation into the surprise because that would give us sort of ongoing horror in our life, which would not add to like I’ve been reading a lot of porphyry. And he talks about division and definition. And so you can start to break things into parts with division, although that’s conceptual. So you really can’t do that about the one or the first principle. But within being, you can break things into parts and division. And then you can like describe things and just look at it’s like thusness. And that’s that’s he calls that definition. And he again says, I think that like the one is beyond definition. So when we’re talking about beginnings and being, we’re talking about something different than these poles or something like that. I don’t know. Do you guys like that or disagree with that? I think that’s in line with what we’re saying. But I think Eric’s argument is you can. You can simultaneously accept that ultimately is indeterminate in that fashion and not intelligible, but our relationship to it can’t be indeterminate and non intelligible. We can’t live that right. And so being in right relationship to ultimacy is what I hear him, I think, saying is this sort of proportional participation of it. You don’t just simply. I don’t know what what I’m looking for. You don’t just simply assimilate to the indeterminacy and the beyond intelligibility. If I’m getting the argument, human beings are oriented towards complexification, self-correction, self-transcendence. Is that fair to you, Eric? Because that’s what I’m hearing you say. Yeah, the divisions that we draw always have to orient us in a particular direction in one aspect. I guess like Pache Derrida here, but one aspect is going to have to be privileged to give us like an orientation in life and to like guide us towards the truth over the falsehood. Sure. Non-beings like pure difference is equated with falsehood and non-beings more or less in this office. And those also can be divided and there are species of falsehoods. And so like we can come into relation with falsehoods. What is there as a signpost towards the real in and simply like the fact that there is relationality because relationality in a way is transcendent of the order of the really real versus illusory like relationality encompasses the illusion as well. The way I’ve actually interpreted Plato from when I first started reading him seriously has been actually through a lens of Advaita Vedanta and sort of tantra where there is this kind of center Purusha Brahman that is more real and more encompassing. And then there is a way of falling away from that into separation into illusion. And that’s the fundamental asymmetry. That’s the Pythagorean table of opposites. I would try it this way. And then Filler makes this argument for Plato and the Republic, not Filler, Schindler. There’s a difference between the absolute and the relative. They’re not logically identical, but the absolute includes the relative or it’s not the absolute. And so you have that weird tension. Another way of thinking about it is the indeterminate can’t be a source of orientation, but yet we are oriented towards ultimate reality. And so we have to do this other thing. Yeah. And I agree with that. My concern is, right, you don’t want to end up in the Parmedian completely homogenous, completely homeostatic one, right, of pure integration. So I guess I have two questions for you. One is, I find part of what makes this sacred is it’s liberating. It’s liberating from that kind of the way a substance ontology drives us towards nominalism, dualism, and adversarial, a combative thing. And I think Filler’s argument is helping to show how this ontology can be liberating in that manner. I get your point. Liberation, freedom from also needs a freedom too. I totally get it. And once it frees us that way, we still need to orient in terms of it. That’s what I’m hearing you say. No objection. I think I agree with that. And I think that’s fundamentally right. Now, the other argument you make is that this, and I’m trying to see the relation, because they’re both having to do with the proper respecting of the sacred to my mind. And this is this allegiance to tradition. And now, to be fair to Filler, he does do that in the book. He doesn’t do that in the paper, but in the book, he makes the claim that this is properly homed in the traditions and rituals of Christianity because of the Trinity. But then you have the pluralism, parochialism problem. While I say, but other traditions, the Neoplatonic tradition itself, like you’re pointing out, right, the Taoist tradition, the Avedya Vedanta tradition, right, various forms of Buddhism Zen, right, right, also come to this same conclusion. Given that I’m granting you your orientation argument and that our relationship to ultimate reality should be, and I mean strong should, strong should be one of sacredness. And you say a respecter of tradition. Is this just contingently determined by where you happen to be born? Or is I mean, I’m sorry, Eric, I’m burdening you with the pluralism, parochialism problem, which right part of what makes Filler’s argument convincing for me is precisely that it seems to be cross historical cross cultural in really powerful and important ways. And you just you just made a connection. You made a connection to Vedanta for the sake of tradition. And I think that’s I think that is good to do. OK, so the issue, let’s say I’m granting your argument this, like there is his semantics doesn’t at least in the paper. I think the book’s a little different because the semantics doesn’t properly make room for how the ontology orients us in sacredness or orients us to to the sacred. But how do you escape parochialism around that? Right, I did watch your recent talk with Matt Siegel who I’ve known for a number of years and I think is a brilliant thing. Oh, I love that. Yeah, and I think Filler needs to turn into Whitehead. I don’t agree with Filler’s critique of Whitehead in the book, by the way, because that’s he does do that. I think it’s very I think it’s skimpy and not perfect. So I think that’s a very good thing to do. And I think it’s very I think it’s skimpy and not well developed. And I think Filler is missing that he in order to get the Rolata out of the relations, he needs the Whiteheadian self, you know, self determination, self creation thing, the recursive relationality, which he doesn’t seem to talk about only to. And Goethe does, right? Yeah. And that’s why I brought that Heidegger quote in was more for Goethe than for Heidegger, because that idea of autopoiesis really breaks you free of a lot of these kind of substance dualism. Exactly. And it gives you an account of how the things that Rolata emerge from the relations and how a self emerges out of non self autopoiesis. Right. And I think that’s all very powerful and important. And the thing is, Filler talks about it because he talks about how Aristotle has the unmoved mover thinking about itself, and that’s inherently relational. But he ignores. Yeah. But there’s a point to that, too. Right. There’s a point to that, because Aristotle is, I think, getting at the idea that you ultimately you can’t get the Rolata unless you have that recursivity, which gives you the Whiteheadian thing. Anyways, that’s to say that I think Matt is brilliant, too. And I think there’s an important way in which Whitehead and Filler need to have a better discussion than he does in his book. Well, the point specifically that Matt made that spirituality, religion in our age is sort of forced to be intercultural or like a kind of perennialist project. Simply because we live in a globalized age. You know, I think tradition, it’s not arbitrary. It is providentially given, because I do believe that the way that reality unfolds in general is oriented towards oneness. Inherently, there’s a technical argument that I’d like to get to eventually for that related to relevance realization, actually, and related to this question that you raised before about like, is there something like relevance realization going on at the very most fundamental physical level? I think there is. That deals also with this discussion of matter that we had before, but didn’t finish. But in any case, I think tradition is providentially attended and we live in an age of an emerging global tradition. But still, I think those local parochial filters on the tradition should be preserved. I also like the work of Rupert Sheldrake, Morphic Resonance. And so I think that we are particular forms that have fallen into our particular creodes and that there is a weight of that, a real like dynamical impulse that we are constrained by, that we have to work within. And so part of it is you could call it happenstance. I would rather call it providence, and you have to respect those names, but also try to go beyond and universalize and see what is most real in all of the traditions. And they’re basically all shaped like pyramids where their points converge, right? Or it’s like one mountain and many paths kind of thing where when you first deal with it, the differences between the symbols are salient. And what makes your people distinct is what’s salient. But then as you ascend through the the grade, the genres of being, you eventually get to what is really real. And there all of these labels eventually come off. You come to the ineffable. And when you get to that level, like, I think you were right to identify that thing as the Dao, as Brahman. And we’ve called it the one. I think the oldest name for it is probably Brahman in the philosophical tradition. So in a way, what I see filler doing amounts to a kind of like, let’s just come up with one more name for Brahman. But there’s I sort of think there’s been enough of that. Like, we have plenty of names to get at this thing. And ultimately, it’s beyond any name. But to kind of move on to the next argument that I wanted to make. Do you think that each culture needs to find their own name? I don’t mean to interrupt, but like, just to preserve the difference. Does each person or each culture need to find their own name? Like, what is individuation within this magnificent one that you talk about? Right. Well, I would say that we don’t so much find it as we are given it. From the cradle list, the theory of language is this theory of likeness, just like the ontology is a series of emanations, likenesses from the most real to the less real. So our language, there is an inherent similarity between the syllables and the basic motions that they represent, like the letter pro in Attic Greek has the rolling that indicates rapid motion. So that’s kind of the basis of semantic value is the analogical, the literal, like, analogical relation between the structure of the syllables and the sounds that we make and the structure of reality. So I think that’s there just as something that we do have to discover in our environment. There are the true names, you know, there’s the there are real names of the gods that they call themselves, meaning there’s a most perfectly analogically appropriate way of capturing the essence of the thing that we’re talking about, which I guess is kind of what filler is trying to do. He’s trying to find that name that is like best capturing the nature of the absolute. So I don’t want to absolutely discount what Phil is trying to do. But just to move on to the next kind of logical argument that I would make against filler. So, again, like the relation can’t subsist in either of the Rolada. But then for the relation to be a relation for it to function as a relation, I would argue that it needs to be a relational medium characterized by relational syntax. And then the syntax of that relational medium has to have particular syntactic operators. Yeah. So it’s not as simple as like we have identity, identity and then relation. I think it’s in the relation for it to function as a relation, there has to be yet another level of the relation of identities. So in like math, part of the syntax is the way the subtraction, addition, multiplication, equal all of those operators function. Those transcend the particular variables or quantities in question, which are obviously identities. But we can’t lose that the relationship is predicated on the reality of particular syntactic operators. Chris Langan in the cognitive theoretic model of the universe talks about syndiffionic regression, where at each of these levels of relation, we have to recognize there is a kind of similarity, dissimilarity dynamic like Plato talks about. But there’s also that kind of syntactic structure joined by operators. Those operators are formulated in terms of a yet higher language, a yet higher syntax. And if we do that regress diving into the nature of these relational media, eventually we’re going to terminate in something that no longer functions as relation, quad relation. It’s going to be something unbounded, undefined. You could call it pure relationality, but at that point, just like Proclus will talk about the nature of the one as it’s participated and in relation with all things, where it does like abide, proceed and revert to itself. And then he’ll talk about the imparticipable beyond relationality oneness, which is not an identity. And that as we go to the foundation of things, diving into the syntax, what allows relation to take place there also, I think we’re going to transcend relationship or identity. And we’re going to well, Chris Langan calls it unbounded Thalesis, which I think is appropriate because it highlights that there is an unbounded, undefined character. And that’s what has to bootstrap all other definition. But also the Thalesis, there is some kind of. Like Schopenhauer will implicit in that there’s some goodness, there’s some notion of a value that’s there that transcends any other category. So that’s the more technical argument when by the time you’re calling something relation. A relation, it already involves those syntactic operators, which are themselves identity. So in that sense, relationality presupposes identity. And I think that’s the key kind of opposition that still has to be transcended. And according to that table of opposites, semantic argument I was making earlier, actually, we should still privilege identity over relation. Just because the table of the odd or the column of the odd, rather, is what orients us. Like Aristotle mentions that when we have opposites, one member of the opposite will allow us to measure the other. So a straight line can be used to measure a curved line, but you can’t measure a straight straight line with a curved line. And so and also like the odd number measures the even like if you divide up even numbers evenly, you eventually get to an odd number. An odd number then is kind of more fundamental or foundational than an even number. There’s something about this table which involves identity, which involves sameness over difference that I think we have to have a respect for because it’s just part of the analogical structure of things. So I’m just going back to that semantic argument now and to tie it again to like the logos proportion joining all the orders of being. We have to see the divided line not in like even divisions, which would be a kind of nihilism. We’re not valuing any particular division. It’s just like cutting nature up for the sake of it. Instead, there is a proportionality, a diminishing a series of emanations where there’s the more real to the less real. And yeah, I just think we have to in our language capture that aspect of things, you know, highlight that aspect of things. And I guess that’s that’s pretty much what I would say. I would also defend Parmenides, in fact, Simplicius in his commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics. Criticizes Aristotle’s critique of the Eliatics by basically reinterpreting what Melissa’s and Parmenides and them were doing in terms of a kind of mystic analogy. So Parmenides didn’t literally think that reality was a sphere equidistant at all sides, just static. But that was the best way of expressing this kind of mystic unity, which all of the various traditions will recognize has to be utterly ineffable. But I think what Parmenides was doing was very much in line with that Pythagorean tradition of venerating the column of the odd. So, yeah, that’s that ground for how we divide up the divided line and all of these things. We should reiterate the column of the odd for a second together. I think this is this is floating up into like language porn. And I would just like to slow it down and hear John’s reaction a little bit to like, yeah, I was just wrapping up. So that’s thrown out. Totally fine. So I think there’s an important point and that Robert brought up, I think, autopoiesis, which is recursive relationality, dynamic recursive relationality is needed in filler system. And I think there’s a relationship between the indispensable of our tradition and our autopoietic individuation. But we can’t confuse that kind of. Profound indispensable with claims of metaphysical necessity. So literacy is shaped me in profound ways, but I am not claiming that literacy is essential to being a cognitive agent. And you have to. So I think that’s how you get a kind of proper pluralism that avoids both parochialism and relativism out of it. And I’m I’m doing a thing with the philosophical Silk Road. Nobody lives on the Silk Road, but you use it to move back to your own home, but to visit other people’s homes. And Paul Van der Kley wonderfully provided to me that within traditions, that metaphor is also used. C.S. Lewis in Mere Christianity talks about the hallway between all the denominations and no one lives in the hallways. But if you don’t have a hallways, you don’t have a house. Everybody’s just trapped in their room. And so even the matrix, the keymaker that sits in the hallway in the matrix series, no one lives there but him. But he’s always helping people get to where they need to be. So and I would I would say to Eric that any understanding of syntax, so syntactic things are they’re part of the recursivity of a system. They’re about the self relation. They’re about the way in which it is self contained and a formal system. And I think that that again goes towards the need to get in the recursivity relationship into the fundamental ontology. I don’t think that entails and I, you know, I hesitate to criticize Langley and stuff like that. He has such a high IQ and all that sort of stuff. But as we know, intelligence is only weakly predictive of rationality. So let’s just keep going then, because I think I’m concerned that this is again, in the end, a prioritization of sort of left hemispheric formalization in terms of syntactic self-containedness. And then Godelian arguments come in. It can’t ultimately ground out in identity because we can’t get something that’s comprehensively consistent and comprehensive and consistent. And so that’s problematic. And then what is the relationship between consistency and completeness? Well, it’s neither complete nor consistent. And then we’re back, I think, into a fundamental relationality. Another way of saying that is translating the mystery into a formalism is not itself a computational function. And I’ve just got a paper out there making that argument. And I do worry about privileging. And this is where Heidegger comes back. And I don’t think this is in filler. So the argument has been helpful. Heidegger emphasizes the irreducibility of the relationship between the intelligibility and the mystery, and that the relationship between them can’t be one over which we have any kind of cognitive closure. And so I think ultimately, both intelligibility and mystery are relational. They’re relational in different ways. And the relationship between them is again. And now I understand what you’re saying. And I want to say something that sort of splits the difference, Eric. I think the relationship between the mystery and intelligibility has to be some kind of identity, but it’s no kind of logical identity of some kind. And that’s where the difference for me between identity and relationality starts to break down rather than I find myself privileging one over the other. Is the thing, the blank between mystery and intelligibility a relation or an identity? And I want to say both. And that’s where I would sort of land on that issue, because again, what Heidegger reminds us of is the phenomenology of our sense making. And we always are at we always have a horizontal relationship. We always have a we’re always at a horizon in which things are shining in with intelligibility, but also receding in into mystery. And so I can’t tell at this point, Eric, if I’m disagreeing with you or agreeing with you. And it’s a semantic difference. I am concerned about sort of ultimately trying to do a bit of the Mel Gillchris thing and talk about. That the that you have the left and right hemisphere and the translating into the formal systems is not itself a formal. It’s not formalizable. But that nevertheless. There is something indispensable to intelligibility, indispensable in the strong sense I’m arguing for. Indispensable to intelligibility of integration, of unification, etc. So that’s how I’m sort of trying to draw it all together. Yeah. Another way that I’ve thought of the series of emanations is in terms of polarization. You know, yeah, I’ve been using that metaphor, too. Yeah. Damascus and even Proclus talk about how the one is all things. Yeah. It’s it doesn’t just cause all things. It actually is. Yes. And I agree with that. Right. So if you imagine like the one as some kind of pure white light, then we can polarize the different aspects that are seminary contained in the one out of it. And the first polarization would be the limit and the unlimited. So limit identity, let’s say, and the unlimited or its relations are mutually entailing. Always. You can’t have identity without relation or relation without identity. And what transcends them, I think, deserves the traditional appellations, which is where I would differ from filler. But I with regard to the privileging of one side of that, the identity over the relation, I would really say like the argument has to be from their analogical manifestations at all the different levels of being. And that also reminds me like you’ve used this girdle point several times to indicate the inherently dynamical and kind of incomplete nature of discursive reasoning. But I think girdle as a Platonist recognize that so identity and formal completeness can’t be accomplished at that discursive level. But then it really is pointing to the existence of a yet higher kind of grasping of identity that we are intuitively capable of. Because the whole point is that we can know certain propositions in the girdle numbering system to be true without formally proving. I think that’s a formal proof of the distinction between a formal proof. It’s not really a formal. It’s an abductive proof of the distinction between noesis and dianoya. But I do think Rosen’s right. See, I agree with you about there’s a privileging, but I don’t want and I don’t want a severing because I think Rosen’s argument. If you sort of absolutely privilege one or the other, you get nihilism. If you have just dianoya, you have nihilism. Maybe you have just noesis. You have nihilism. And I think nihilism is that which is most antithetical to the phenomenology and the kinds of analogies you’re pointing out of intelligibility itself. Sure, yeah, and the yin yang dichotomy, it’s not that like yang is the act of energy is the only one that’s relevant. You know, yin is also relevant, but in general, the active must take priority and inevitably does take priority over the passive. You know, it always takes both, but one has to be the leading partner. Well, maybe that’s where I think we are differing then, because I think that can’t be established a priori. I think that’s a matter of relevance realization, because when you are fighting in Tai Chi, there’s a lot of time when the yin is way more important than the yang in order to win the fight. And so, yeah, that like I’m trying to acknowledge, I think the orientation argument and I’m trying to acknowledge in a deep sense, not just a parochial sense of an indispensable ability. It’s bound up with autopoiesis. It’s bound up with the inherent syntax of intelligibility. So let’s call it deep indispensable ability. I’m trying to acknowledge that, but I’m trying to not draw from that a kind of cognitive closure. I think there are definitely periods where the yin is prioritized over the yang. And that is the way that is what we should be doing. And this is part of the Kyoto School’s argument that the West tends to emphasize actuality and the East tends to emphasize potentiality. And I think the arguments for privileging one over the other are completely symmetrical. And so I come out with back to the global spirituality. I come out with, well, what we do is we flow between them. That’s what I think. I think you need the literal to generate symbolic experience and you need symbolic experience to make sense of the mundane. So I feel like if you separate those two, you can’t have new symbols. If you just have pure symbols, you can’t actually move in the world and connect to people. So like I want 50 trees and then like the form of the tree rather than like one over the other, if that makes sense at all. I also agree that like yin needs to have its place in the appropriate place. And a formal argument for why the exact proportion needs to be what I’ve mentioned before that there should be a preeminence of the limited or the unlimited. But they both have their appropriate sphere like the goddesses in neoplatonism are thought of generally being in the column of the indefinite dyad. But the indefinite dyad is associated with that column of the even, which involves like curved things and evil in some sense and, you know, all these native connotations. But we still revere the goddesses, you know, proclists, who’s I think one of the best examples of someone who is always pointing up and saying it’s very important that we are suspended from above, highlighting the emanation. All the causal powers are from above and we are just kind of getting a free ride from them, more or less. That’s an exaggeration. But even he like personally felt dedicated to Athena. Now, Athena is a goddess born virginally from the mind of Zeus. So for the head of Zeus, is it the thigh? No, it’s the head. Maybe you think literally or as an analogy. Let me just follow you, Eric. Well, I don’t think Athena was literally born. So we’re using an image to make sense of reality and wondering why Proclus was so reverential towards this higher power. But I don’t find any need for literalizing that story. No, but it just is indicative that even someone who emphasizes that column of the odd, who is always pointing up still in his personal life is guided by the goddess in the train of the indefinite dyad. Even if it’s a goddess that has especially archetypally masculine qualities associated with war and all the wisdom has feminine connotations. But I think that just indicates that you do have to give the passive its appropriate place and especially for like a mortal creature invested in the world like we are. Like you need that feminine side sensitivity to context, the more like outgoing, more schizotypal looking for associations and relations. You need that to navigate the world in its appropriate place. But if that goes unguided by the kind of more autistic, like cutting down to the most important category, subsuming as many patterns as possible under a unity, then it just leads to kind of dispersal and chaos. If you only do the centrifugal moving in towards what is most real, then you lose the ground of the really real, which I do think there’s a relation of mutual grounding. Emanation is, in a sense, grounded in emergence, in my view. Yes, not totally reciprocally. But there is this kind of proportional relation where one side is more real than the other side, just because like the universals instantiate more than any particular. So as we move towards particularity, any one particular has a lesser degree of reality. It’s less represented in the totality of things than the higher universal. So that’s, I think, the source of this asymmetry. What is most general applies to all things. The one is in all things, everything, absolutely. But the suchness of particular experience is more ephemeral and is just there. But if you don’t have that, then the forms have no content. You know, the universals have no content without which, which I think is the spirit of of Aristotle’s hylomorphism. You know, like the nature of the forms is that they are the things that have the causal powers that can fill out all of the particular instantiations. And I think that, like, without all the instantiations, the forms would just be empty. You know, what does it mean to be a form? The forms are defined, defined relationally in that the forms characterize the other forms and have particular analogies with the other forms. Like Athena is related to Zeus in a particular way, related to Aphrodite in another way. They all contain their their relative aspects in themselves and between each other as a whole class. But then they also are kind of defined by what they emanate because they causally contain all the things that they emanate. And so to think of the things that are emanating is at the same time to invoke seminally potentially all the things that can flow out of them and vice versa. So down in the realm of particulars to invoke the particular involves a kind of all and all mutual definition where, OK, where is this particular object? My water bottle? Well, you can’t talk about its existence without referencing ultimately the entire kind of causal set that it’s involved in the observable universe. So all is an all in a different manner for physical things. But then also the forms are implicated. All of the forms in some sense are implicated in even the simplest physical object. So there is mutual dependence. But the the basic asymmetry just stems from the fact that the universals are more ubiquitous, extend their powers further than the particulars. So that’s kind of the asymmetry. See, yeah. And Blackowitz argues against that in the essential difference that prioritizing generalization over essential differences will actually undermine any capacity for intelligibility. And Eric, I don’t know if this argument is going to be resolvable. I mean, I agree with a lot of it. And I even agree with the indispensability. And you are giving a lot of towards there’s the polarity and there’s the mutual groundedness and the reciprocity. And there’s an asymmetry there. And I can’t tell the difference between a deep kind of indispensability and a claim of metaphysical necessity, because, like I say, I find exactly opposite arguments in Eastern philosophy that prioritize the end, the potential, the emergence. And I find the argument, the meta argument between them to be one of symmetry. So undecidability. And I don’t know what we would do at this point. I don’t know how much hangs on it either. I think a lot, actually. So you think a lot hangs on it because ethically. Well, wait, I was willing to grant you the whole orientation argument, which seems to mean all seems to me all you need for the ethics. And so I’m not I’m very sensitive to the ethical requirement that we have to be oriented. We have to take a normative stance. And my my concern is, like I said, you mentioned variation and selection. I don’t think you can privilege either one. I think the reality is evolution. And I think privileging either one doesn’t make sense to me in terms of explanation. And this is where I think Whitehead is superior to filler and that I think Whitehead understands sort of evolutionary dynamics. I think that’s the proper understanding of the horizontal that has to be put into relationship to all of the vertical that we’ve been talking about, which, again, I admire. In fact, I support you in trying to emphasize the vertical because it has been neglected very dangerously. So in the West since well, since the beginning of the whole process that led to the advent of the meeting crisis. And there’s my shameless self-promotion. And I’m sorry, but I do need to go. Yeah, I think this was rich and valuable. And I think although there was a final point of disagreement, I think there was a lot of mutual insight that came out of this. And so I wanted to thank you, Eric. I wanted to thank you, too, Robert. You were very, very generous. You sort of sat back a lot and only intervened on behalf of the listeners when we were getting very, very esoteric. I was just worried a little bit because I just read behind us and actually get most of Fuller’s arguments. Tell her a quick, direct way. Filler, Filler, Filler. Sorry. Yeah, you can and you can’t. I think when Procolis and I am Lucas and I think if you start to go into the Platonic tradition, I do think this is a pedagogical point on Fuller’s behalf. I think we are very tempted because of where we are in our cultural grammar to read the Neoplatonists from a substantialist metaphysics. And that, well, I agree with you. You shouldn’t. But I think if people are not educated about this, that that is a perennial danger. And I think one of the things that Filler is doing is it does have that pedagogical function. The gentleman I really do go and I know this conversation could go on. Eric, I’m not I’m I’m not claiming to end here and winning the debate or anything like that. So I want to state that very clearly. I understand that there’s a point of disagreement about that we’re on. But again, I really appreciate it. I think there was genuine dialogos happening. And so I wanted to thank you very much. Absolutely. Thank you. I just wanted to get almost to this point of relevance. Let’s do another talk. Yeah, another time. But just to foreshadow that, I think that this is where this asymmetry versus symmetry is there like an inherent ontological privileging of one side. I think it all stems or comes down to the issue of relevance realization, the issue of matter and how matter and the absolute are related and how we negotiate that. So, yeah, I’d love to talk about that next time, which would have to get a little bit even more technical than this discussion. OK. And what I foresee is I want to do that. And I foresee that perhaps that is the issue or argument or discussion behind our point of disagreement. So let’s let’s set that up and do that. But I’m going to end it here. Thank you so much. Thank you, John. Thank you, Robert. Yeah, this was great. Wonderful. I had a great time.