https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=-VBl9Jv8eR0
Welcome to Voices with Raveki. I’m joined once again with my friend and colleague JP Marceau. JP and I have had a series of very engaging and enriching conversations. JP, why don’t you just reintroduce yourself a bit and then let’s launch us into the deal logos for today. Yeah, thank you, John, for having me again. Yeah, I have a background in philosophy because I was interested in solving, let’s say, my own sliver of the many crisis how it appeared to me and my classical studies allowed me to try and address this. I especially became familiar with panpsychism as a way to address one of the aspects of the crisis, sort of the idea that maybe I’m just matter or that my consciousness is somehow disconnected from my body. And over the course of becoming aware of Jordan Peterson’s work, Jonathan’s work, your work, eventually was able to get in touch with you and have a dialogue more precisely about panpsychism. And something interesting happened in there where it turned out that, let’s say, the reasons why I was trying to use panpsychism to address my sliver of the many crisis, you were also able to address with your non-reductive physicalism. And some of the points, some of the problems are really mirrored there. So in panpsychism, the problem of the one and the many shows up really clearly in panpsychism because you know, how is it that different consciousnesses can somehow combine because that’s all claimant in panpsychism. If consciousness goes all the way down and that’s the reason why we have consciousnesses, then you need to explain how it is that those smaller consciousnesses, my cells or atoms and so on, how is it that they can combine? And I was to use some Berksonian ideas to get clear with that and Berkson was very influenced from neoplatonism. So on the other end, when I was talking about with you and it turned out that with your non-reductive physicalism, you make use of neoplatonic ideas to explain the same basic idea of the problem of the one and the many. Doesn’t show up in terms of consciousness itself, but still you have the problem of how is it that some abstract patterns, some unify the entities, some formal structures can interact with their constituents in a way that allows them to get at the same time one and many. So we had sort of parallel sets of concerns and throughout the last year really, because it’s been just a bit over a year, I think since we last spoke, I’ve been more and more exploring this idea of emergence and elimination and to see how much I can get from a more standard naturalistic ontology without having to go full blown and psychism already. And this led us especially to converge on the thought of neoplatonic Christian thinkers such as John Scott de Sirigena and also Saint Maximus the Confessor. Yep. And really over the course of just the last few months, I’ve been rereading some authors that I had read more in depth a few years ago, such as Saint Thomas Aquinas, and was able to find this basic pattern of emergence and elimination in Aquinas as well. And what I was interested to figure out today in our discussion was some of the reasons why this dialectical worldview between emergence and elimination was not clearer to me or to people in general, whereas I think you can find it in Aquinas. Or even to go further back, Jonathan Peugeot’s brother, Mathieu, wrote a book, The Language of Creation, commentary on the symbolic, basically on Genesis. And he makes quite clear in this book, although it wasn’t clear at the time when I read it two years ago, but when I reread it now, knowing what I know now about emergence and elimination, although Mathieu uses different language, it’s clear to me that you can see the same pattern between emergence and elimination right away from the start of Genesis. In the beginning, God created the heavens, the forms from which structures emanate and created the earth, which was without form and voice. So that’s just the potential from which things will emerge. So this was surprising for me to see this recently. And I was interested to see, so not only how is it that this dialectical worldview of emergence and elimination became unclear to us today. And I was thinking that it probably has to do with the dialectic across people or across thinkers as well. Not only that our worldview has become flatter, where we have a harder time thinking of our different layers and track together, but one of the reasons why older traditions were able to have richer ontologies, such as you find in Aquinas or also in Israel, was that they also add the much more dialectical view of society in general or people’s roles. So the best philosophers tended to be priests. People were actually in contact with a lot of people. They were able to sort of abstract from the lives of all the reparationers. And they also had to mediate between them and higher levels in the hierarchy. So they were living the metaphysics that they were trying to lay out in books. And I think that our loss of this metaphysics, is really paralleled by our loss of our mythical relationships in general. Yeah, yeah. I think that’s, wow, that’s really beautiful, JP. So there’s a lot in there I’d like to respond to if you give me a bit of time because that was really rich. So I don’t know if you know or not, but I’m working on an anthology called Internet of Dialogues with Christopher Maestro Pietro. We’re editing it, contributing to it. And what we’ve got is people from Paul’s, Paul Vanderkele is contributing to it. We have people from many spots of what Isabella King calls this corner of the internet. She’s contributing to. All these people involved with these emerging practices and all this dialogue. And what Chris and I are exploring is the effort by many of these, like the circling communities, the evolved community, right? All of these new dialogical communities and even other communities like Grave Kelly that incorporate a dialogical component to it. All these practices, all these dialogical practices are an emergence. So what we’re trying to do is figure out what is going on there. That’s one thing. And then what really sparked my interest in this was a couple things. I had a discussion with Jordan Hall and he talked about the need for a meta-psycho technology that curates and coordinates the ecology of practices. And I realized for the ancient world that was dialectic. So I’ve engaged in a long project of trying to sort of reverse engineer what dialectic is as a practice. And so there’s lots of stuff, lots of videos about that. The book is coming out. Anyways, we’re trying to figure out what dialectic is. Where that is leading me is into a lot of the ideas that you just said. The idea that dialectic always had a horizontal and a vertical aspect to it. There was a horizontal aspect in which you and I, you and I are both engaged in projects of individuation and participation, because every human being is, Tillich talked about that, and Jung has a similar kind of notion, that we’re locked into this tonos, this creative tension between individuation and participation. And then what we’re doing in that is that there is often between us an emergent logos. And you and I, and this is one of the features of the dialogos. I prefer to use the Greek rather than the modern term. In contrast to normal debate, or even conversation, is that you and I together can get to a place we couldn’t get to on our own. Yeah, it’s exactly the terminology that you can find. It’s not the exact same terminology, but the same idea that you can find in other areas that are popping up right now. So let’s say in the emergence notion in modern philosophy of minor cognitive science, when a new system has properties that you cannot reduce to the individual constituents, then you have a new emergent system that is not reducible. Or if you take the older notion of form from Aristotle or Aquinas, well, a form, a substantial form in opposition to a mere accidental aggregate of things, a substantial form is a pattern that you cannot reduce to its own constituents. It has attributes that are, it has new causal powers that you don’t find at lower levels. Exactly. So that’s exactly right. So you’ve got this notion of emergence of new logos, right, new properties, new patterns. And it’s because it has a formal cause, which I interpret dynamically to mean a system is self-organizing, as you said, not a mere aggregation or a heap. It’s self-organizing and especially it’s self-organizing in some way that’s self-perpetuating and self-preserving and that’s right. And so the idea is there’s that horizontal dimension, but that is always in connection with, it exemplifies and is informed by the vertical dimension. Because as you and I in dialectic, we’re not just getting an intimacy with each other. And I mean that, right, as a kind of intimacy of intellect and intelligibility. As we do that, we also get an intimacy with that very process of intelligibility emerging. And what that takes us into is the fact is that intelligibility is also something that, as you said, that is level, that is moving between emergence, right. And in the dialogue you and I will have, as you said, something emerged with the insight. But there’s also a sense, when you’re engaged in the horizontal dialogue, there’s also a sense of emanation. Because you’re not just arbitrarily saying things, right, there’s a sense of, right, that we’re uncovering the structures of intelligibility, the very structures by which we can make sense of the world. And they’re there ahead of us in some way. Yeah, there’s like meaningful constraints about us that tell us where we could take the conversation and we can sort of just select between them. That’s right. So you start to, in the horizontal between the individuation and the participation, you also start to find yourself exemplifying the vertical move, right, between the emergence and the emanation. You start to engage in a process of anagogue. So as you and I reciprocally open horizontally, there’s also a reciprocal opening vertically. And so dialectic becomes a profound act by which we simultaneously realize our humanity, because we’re making each other more persons, right, because we’re realizing, actualizing our personhood. But we’re also realizing, you know, what undergirds all realness, those patterns of intelligibility, those layers of relationship between emergence and emanation. So I don’t think it’s a coincidence, I mentioned to you this earlier before we just started filming, I don’t think it’s coincidence that you find, you know, Regina writing in a dialogue fashion, and Thomas Aquinas in the summa writing in a dialogical fashion. I don’t think that’s a coincidence. I don’t think it’s just a mere sort of pleasantry or ornamentation. I think they’re trying to exemplify in the form, because they’re aware of formal cause, you’re trying to exemplify in the form of the dialogue, right, the dialectic, they’re not just talking about things, they’re exemplifying, and what they’re trying to do is make the pattern of the co-presentation of ideas affine to, be affine, like have an affinity to, you know, the very pattern by which reality is presencing between emanation and emergence. And I think that’s a profound realization. When you do some of these practices, like the practice, the dialectic into theologos, or since Dysentz talks circling practice, everybody gets this sense of this third factor that there’s a between, and I don’t mean this disrespectfully, but you know I don’t mean that, you know, Jesus’ notion, where two or three are gathered in my name, there I am also. When you’re doing these practices, everybody gets a sense of the we space. I’ve talked to you this before, that’s somehow beyond. So the between also immediately makes people phenomenologically aware of the above and beyond. And so those two dimensions, I’ve talked about them abstractly, but when it happens, it’s not an abstract experience. It’s a palpable sense presence that is profoundly enriching and transformative to people. So this whole project of dialectic, I think it’s actually very, very central. And so I think to the degree to which we’ve lost the practice of dialectic, we have lost access to the horizontal and vertical dimensions. And then that, as you already argued, I thought very astutely, that truncates our metaphysics in a way that really hamstrings us and helps drive the meaning crisis. That’s what I would argue. That’s what I would propose to you. Yeah. And I think one aspect of it is when we talk about the vertical aspects of dialectic, the fact that Aquinas, for instance, was writing metaphysical books, where, as you rightly point out, the Summa is written as a dialectic between its objections and responses. But in his vocation, Aquinas was also a priest, where his job was to be a mediator between a cosmic dialectic. He has to listen to people’s confessions. He gathers the potential of his parish and of his students. So people feed him refined information, and he has to bring it all up into himself and try to make it fit within Christianity, within a- Why the world of you. Yeah. Yeah. Within something super abstract, something invisible. Within heaven, the realm of the invisible spiritual reality. And Aquinas has to mediate between all of those. I think that all of the mess that we see in philosophy starting probably with modernity is in large part due to the fact that people stopped doing this dialectic with other people, across people. And so for instance, this was really striking to me when I was in grad school in philosophy and taking different seminars. Let’s say you take a seminar in analytic philosophy and a seminar in phenomenology, and you can clearly see that this isn’t just the thing about, let’s say, some people think that phenomenology is better, and some people think that analytic philosophy of mind is better. People have different personalities. You can tell that they were largely influenced by the way they interact with the world. And so the loss of a dialectic between people in the academia and the loss of the dialectic between the people of the academia and the real people, like the people in the pew, this loss of dialectic that connected people, that allowed them to reach a higher dialectic is what has led to the huge fragmentation that we see today in philosophy departments or between departments in the university as well. Where if you talk to someone in literature or someone in physics, they have a lot of different cultures, whereas that wasn’t the time if you went back to a time when people had more unified metaphysics, or when the university was more unified. And this really concerns me because I’m not sure how we can recover this sort of better center in metaphysics nowadays. I think that’s right. I mean, yeah, there’s several problems. One is a problem that I’m trying to address with a bunch of people, which is, can we bring back simultaneously the practice of dialectic and situate it, home it within a worldview that legitimates it and valorizes it? But then there’s, and I’ll talk about that in more than a second, but then I don’t want to forget the other point you made, but there’s also, you know, there’s also a social institutional issue about how we’ve separated the monastery right from the university. And that has led to what you, I think you’re discussing here. So let’s not lose that point, but let’s come back to the first point. So I think that point you made about human beings living, especially people who had a mediating function, it’s also very, very apropos, because if you look to the father of dialectic, Socrates, he sees himself as always metaxu, always mediating between, right, always between the divine and the human, and even sees eros as something that is between the divine and the human. And so that, the sense of being something that inherently mediates between what emerges and what emanates is very, very pregnant in Socrates. And then it gets carried through and developed very extensively, as you know, in the neoplatonic tradition. And also even within my tradition, within the geochristian tradition, you have prophets, or you have priests, you have people who mediate between the people and God. They’re never just like trying to bring the people to themselves, they’re always trying to turn the people ultimately to God, to the higher story, even Christ. When he comes down, he says that he’s always just trying to get people to the father. Like it’s not about himself, it’s not about just him gathering people or him having something below him fit well, it’s always about mediating between creation and the creator. Right, right. But also exemplifying, so he’s gathering people, the logos, into like there’s the emergence of the church, right, very much. But he’s also exemplifying, right, he’s emanating, right, he’s emanating, I don’t, again, I’m worried that I’m, well, you and I know each other, you know that I don’t want to be insulting. He’s, in some sense, he’s emanating God, and that sounds like a heresy, but you know the language I’m trying to use. Well, yeah, we can just say that he’s emanating the father. Yes, that’s fine. Yeah. So what I think happens though, is that, like, there’s a historical issue. I think you get the shift, right, from the dialogue to the treatise, and you get the shift to non-transformational purely propositional thinking, and you get figures like Occam and so forth, and you get nominalism, which at the same time removes the sense of there being these layers and these patterns, and then you get the rise of that sort of monolithic, isolated, individual mind removed. Like, so in the Ecclesia, you really have a version, I don’t want to be too anachronistic here, you have something like an understanding of distributive cognition, that most of our cognition is done in an embodied fashion in which we are embedded with people in distributive cognition, that most of our reasoning is and should be done in concert with other people. And that’s what the cognitive science is now showing, that our cognition is distributed, it’s extended. The work of my friend Greg Enricus and the work of Mercier and Sperber, that reasoning, argumentation works better in concert with other people than on your own. So that monolithic, monological mind model, I think, has been very, very disastrous. It actually has cut us off. And the cog side, I would argue, is now returning us to the view of the importance of the horizontal. And it’s also simultaneously, and you’ve already alluded to this, starting to return us to the vertical, because it’s reminding us that we are, well, at least the kind of cognitive science that I practice, this discussion of bottom-up processes of emergence and top-down processes of constraint are now rife through for a cognitive science in a profound way. And so the vertical and the horizontal dimensions are coming back into prominence at precisely the time, I think, when they’re most culturally needed. What that means back now to the second point, I’m sorry, I’m talking so much today, but the second point about what the institution will look like, I don’t know. What I see happening is I see these new emerging colleges of practices that I’ve gone to, like conferences like the Movement Summit, and I’ve been on panel and talking to them. And again, no disrespect, but they seem to be trying to bridge between the separate functions of the university and the monastery. These communities are schooling people like the academy, but they’re also demanding and affording self-transformation and self-transcendence and community building like the monastery. When you look at what Rafe is doing, it’s like, I said this to him, he’s telling me about all of these things, and I said, you know, Rafe, you’re actually building a church. And he laughed, and he sort of acknowledged that there was something going on there. And so I think that perhaps, I’m trying to be very cautious here, this emerging cognitive science understanding of the horizontal and vertical dimensions that are realized in DIA logos is coming more and more into contact with, maybe I’m a mediator, I just thought about that, that’s a joke, coming in contact with these emerging communities that are trying to create institutions or communities that are between or beyond the division of the school and the monastery. I’d say sometimes call themselves even secular monasteries or this school or that school. So I think that’s what I see happening. Sorry, that was a lot, but I wanted to answer. You keep saying very pregnant things. Yeah, that’s good. I’d like to try and bring something related. I have never sort of tried to think about the history of, last time in our last discussion, we talked about the idea of Christianity spreading through deaths and rebirths. And I have never tried to think about explicitly in terms of dialectic. I’ve tried to think about it in related terms, and I think maybe it could help us in this discussion right now. What seems to have happened is, okay, so we talked about metaphysics going awry in the West. We talked also about how the surrounding institutions went awry also. And I think I’ve been playing with the idea that you can see this as a, within an even broader historical dialectic maybe of, okay, so as I alluded to, you can see already in the Hebrew scriptures, this dialectical worldview going on between heaven and earth, between the forms, the invisible and the matter, the potential. Jacob’s Ladder. Yeah, you can already see this in the Old Testament fairly clearly, I think, especially in Matthew’s book. I think it gives so many examples that it’s quite overwhelming. And then when Judaism will become Christianity later, it will spread both East and West. And what seems to have happened as it spread especially in the East, or let’s say in Hellenic culture, it includes Rome at the time, you had a culture where people were largely Platonists, especially in the intelligentsia, where people were, or in general, the Hellenic philosophers were used to see the world in terms of emanation. They didn’t think so much about the matter. They didn’t think that God created matter, the potential. They thought that God, let’s say the Anoven mover or the Form of Forms or the One, that from this form, from this set of constraints, from this source of constraints, we can even say, shapes will come to give order to the potential of matter. So you have this top-down view of the world. So when Christianity spreads in the East, in Hellenic culture, the challenge will be to get people to see the bottom-up thing as well, because there’s the idea that God created matter as well, and that there are genuine bottom-up emergence. So the challenge was to get the Greeks and the Romans to care about the body, at least the philosopher ones. So the kind of eresis that you’ll see is an eresis where people have this name for matter, or you have Origen who has word theories about matter, or about sometimes maybe the body being bad. So maybe you can see it as a solid top-down source of eresis. And what happened in the West is sort of the opposite. You had Germanic tribes were fairly materialistic. And I think his name escapes me right now. I read a book from an author, Red Saw Cold, which Paul directly added on his channel, and good conversations. And he wrote a book on the history of transubstantiation. And in the book, he references an author whose name escapes me. It’s a Catholic theologian who makes the point that the Germanic cultures were fairly materialistic. You can see it sometimes in Roman documents, like the Romans will sort of mock the Germanic tribes because they they venerate the visible things, like they’re not able to abstract as much to the invisible. And also, there’s also the fact that because they were always warring with one another, tended to make them more pragmatic and to sort of make them really down to earth people. So what happens as Christianity spreads in Europe and the European tribes become converted and have now they were fine with seeing the world bottom up, seeing like concrete things. But they have to start to see that God created the heavens as well, like that God is behind both heaven and earth, that is beyond emergence and emanation. And now the source of eresis that you’ll see is that they tend to see the world just bottom up. So already in like the eighth or ninth century, when you not only have Romans doing theology there, but when especially like the Germanic tribes start doing their own philosophy and theology, you can start to see eresis where people will only see the bottom up aspect of things and they sort of make more and more receding the emanation from heaven. And so in the case of the Eucharist, you start to see disputes about people saying that, well, either it means that the Eucharist is like, even in the accidents, is flesh and flesh and blood, just like my flesh and blood, like the same flesh and blood that was on the cross, or you’ll start to see people doing, well, then it means that it’s just a symbol. And symbol in sort of the pejorative sense that it’s just a symbol. So I think what has happened is, okay, so you had like within the Jewish Christian culture, especially from like the early Hebrew heritage, you have a worldview where both emergence and emanation work really well in the East, when Jewish Christianity, it’s only a culture. Now the challenge is to see the bottom up thing as well. But when it moves West, the challenge is to see the top down as well. And I think that what has happened, especially throughout the years, throughout modernity, the West, by seeing the world bottom up and making a bunch of theological errors, but because what you said, maybe that the church or the Jewish Christian worldview, because it still improved upon what was already there, it sort of gave power to the bottom up worldview of the Germanic tribes and led to science. And it’s only just compounded because you were seeing real successes by seeing the world only bottom up. But it’s only recently started to fragment this worldview, realize that if you only try to see things bottom up, you hit like tons of problems that you see in philosophy of even just chemistry. It’s not clear how you can explain the emergence really of chemical compounds that have properties that you don’t seem to be able to reduce to their individual components or same thing that happens with life. It’s a huge problem with consciousness. If you don’t have it like genuine emergence, if you don’t have genuine forms that will then emanate down to the matter, you can’t really explain consciousness either. So overall, I’d say that in my more optimistic days, I see that I don’t try to just, some people, when they see that, okay, Christianity went wrong there or went wrong there, they try to sort of respond as a reactionary. Then let’s just roll back to the last thing that worked and sort of let’s stay there. You can see this in Protestants or even some traditional Catholics or Orthodox, they just, oh, if we just go back to the Church Fathers or if we just go back to the Cocodas and everything will be fine. But I more tend to think that it’s all part of one story where this seed, this worldview where Emma just mentioned what we’re meeting well in the Judeo-Christian tradition, like as it spreads east, it has a certain dialectic to go through until it reaches the more stable point and same thing in the west where you still have to go through like cycles of dialectic to get people to see the top down and the bottom up as well. Do you think that helps? Yeah, wait, I like this. I think this is a really brilliant idea, a new way of, a new schema for interpreting the history of Christianity. I think that’s really cool. So let me make sure I get you that, and you started with top down, but at the end you also alluded bottom up, which is well done by the way. So I might be presenting in reverse order the way you presented, but this is the way I’m making you understand. Like both east and west have a dialectic between bottom down and top, between bottom up and top down, right, between emergence and emanation. But the, but nevertheless, overall the east tends to emphasize emanation and the west tends to emphasize emergence. And so there’s also a higher order dialectic between the east and west. Yeah, it is very fruitful right now. It’s worth saying that right now the dialogues are really cool, like the happening between the Catholics and the Orthodox or between the Protestants and the Catholics and the Orthodox. Like this, this plant is, I don’t know if it will really get fixed in our lifelines, but at least there’s a very fruitful dialectic that wasn’t going on a hundred years ago. Yes, but first of all, did I understand you correctly? Did I? Okay, so that is a very cool idea. That’s almost a Hegelian idea. I mean, I have qualms with Hegel’s understanding of the dialectic, but nevertheless, that it’s almost like the dialectic within the church, right, within history. There’s also a dialectic within history you’re saying that is exemplified in the history of the church, because it’s exemplified. Now that strikes me as plausible, at least prima facie, precisely because I think that processes of distributed cognition, which is what churches are, are going to be inherently dialectical in nature. And precisely because I think ultimately that has to do with something with the structural reality itself as well. But I think, again, both the vertical between people and sorry, the horizontal between people and the vertical between the sort of levels of your ontology both cry out for a dialectical approach. So what you’re suggesting is that even if people weren’t consciously or deliberately practicing dialectic, nevertheless, there’s dialectical processing is still at work within their history. Is that a fair thing to say? Yes, yes. I think we’re embedded in all kinds of levels of dialectic that we’re obviously not aware of completely. That means another function of dialectic is by is through exemplification to actually explicate and make bring into self-consciousness the fact that we instantiate and exemplify layers of dialectic. That’s what so there’s an aspect of self-consciousness and coming to self-realization that would be an additional function of the practice of dialectic. So whereas what you’ve said is often people this is happening implicitly and unawares, but when people can like like erigina or aquinasia, when they can explicitly take up dialectic, they can exemplify and bring into awareness, bring into self-consciousness those implicit patterns. Do I take it well? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think you can see it as within this whole, let’s say cosmic, historical dialectic that’s appearing, there will be like pockets where this dialectic is exemplified best and around which like more pockets of proper relationship between images and the nation will spread. So you can see sort of erigina and aquinas as playing a part in the larger story and they can’t fix it all the way by themselves. The whole process of the West having to go to the end of its bottom-up view of the world to realize that it doesn’t work, like aquinas and erigina were able to contribute to pockets of harmony in that whole schema, but it still takes hundreds of years to unfold. I mean it’s a long process. But thank you for saying that, but I just, there’s something here that came out for me as an insight, this idea that I almost want to say like there’s another dimension to dialectic. There’s the horizontal between people, there’s the vertical, there’s the ontological, but there’s the historical. We are embedded always in processes, dialectical processes, and one of the things we can do is bring them, and this does sound more like Hegel’s notion of dialectic, we can bring them into self-awareness, we can realize them, and that’s an additional function of dialectic. Thank you for this. I know that you’re fairly critical of narratives though, so especially you know I think this dialectical worldview of history, I can make sense of it within Christianity, but I would be curious what would be your reserves? So that’s a very good point. There’s, I can’t remember his last name, Strawn, he’s on my Discord server and he’s been writing to me and he said don’t you think that dialectic is a kind of narrative, but he called it a non- teleological narrative because he says it doesn’t have the typical structure. I mean the typical structure, you have the protagonist, and they have to overcome the antagonist, and there is the climax and the denouement, and the problem is resolved, so it’s a finite game as Parse would say, and that’s the structure, and I’ve come increasingly to realize that I’ve over identified that as narrative to core. I think to be a little bit fair to myself precisely because I think the culture has over identified that with narrative to core, but I think what’s coming out in the discussion with Strawn is the idea that dialectic is kind of trans-narrative. So James Carr is going to be talking to him, you know our traditional notions of narrative, right, like the story, right, are finite. The point is for them to come to an end, right, but the point of theologos, because it’s about enacting emergence and emanation, it’s an infinite game. The point is it’s not supposed to conclude, it’s supposed to continually afford the re-realization of right relationship to yourself, to each other, and to the world, right, and so he was saying but isn’t it in that sense, like if you could say sort of the finite structure of narrative, this is what I took him to say, and he seemed to agree when I gave it back to him, I hope I’m not imposing on him, but if you take the finite structure of narrative and you were to unfold it into what Carr spells an infinite game, right, where the point is not to come to a conclusion, right, and it’s not primarily oppositional where the protagonist is supposed to overcome the antagonist, but it’s like what happens in theologos. Isn’t that kind of trans narrative in an important way, and I thought that was really interesting because one of my critiques of narrative is it seems to, at times, I gotta be really careful here, it seems to limit people to a sort of a linguistic, imagistic level of cognition, and for me that it doesn’t make enough space or home for the mystical dimension, for where people experience non-propositional states of transformation, but I think given what we were saying a bit earlier, you can see diologos, if properly understood as trans narrative, mediates between finite narrative and the mystical, that’s something that I’m sort of playing around with as an idea right now. Yeah, I think that makes sense, and I just, you probably saw my eyes light up because it mapped onto something like a tension within, I shouldn’t say tension, between like two poles of one phenomena within the Christian worldview, and there’s, okay, the idea that you can see the narrative that’s laid out in Christianity as a sort of finite story with a start, a middle, and an end, and that’s it. You can say, okay, so God created the world at that time, and then he came at this time, and then he’ll come back at that time. So it’s one way to see it, but you can also see that the events, all of these events of creation actually occur all the time, like the way creation always unfolds at every instant is always following the structure, so God always emanates forms from heaven, he always emanates potential, all of these always meet to create the heaven and the earth and everything in between, it always comes back to God, we always mess it up with a fall, and then there’s always like some potential that will drop back up to save us and will be judged against that potential, and we come back to paradise. That’s one, one Christ, let’s say, eyes on the cross, he says to the good thief, today you’ll be with me in paradise. Paradise is a direct coming back to paradise, to the garden, so like it loops back not to, let’s say, finite point in history necessarily, but it loops back also to the restart of the story, restarting the dialectic, you can say, and so you can see the narrative as both like occurring in time with a start and an end, and you can also see it occurring at every instant, and what occurs at every instant is the much more mystical part, the part that, you know, demand that requires transformation that can actually apply to your life right now. It’s a point that sometimes people will, like, priests will say in Amelies, like if we read, let’s say, parts of the Revelation or the Apocalypse, if we read parts of Christ’s pronouncements about the end of the world, and if we think that it only like matters for, let’s say, that day when the end time comes, then it means that like almost all Christians, for almost all us people, have read this for nothing, because it’s, yeah, but we should like see this occurring at every instant, and so we should like always be in the dialectic. We do, I mean, I do think that there is such a thing as, let’s see, a global history of this pattern that will actually, it’s, I’m not sure what the end will be, because it’s described as a city or as a garden, so it’s not like it will be a state where nothing changes, but I do think that it will unfold across time. I think it is unfolding across time, but I also think that at the same time we can like mediate between this story that takes forever and our own lives right now and apply all of this spiritually. I would agree with that to a large degree, precisely because one way you can think of mythos is precisely as something that’s trans-narrative in the way I’m talking, because you get a story and a myth or even more so a parable, right, that looks like a finite story, but it’s not, right, it actually sets you into an infinite sort of trans-narrative dialectic. And so, myths, I think, when properly understood, and I think they’re improperly misunderstood when people, and this is the sin of literalism, where you bind it into a particular time and place and location, you make it a purely finite story rather than seeing that the prodigal son, for example, the parable, is something that is going to occur to me every day, and there is no conclusion to the parable of the prodigal son. Like when people just allegorize it and come to a conclusion, I think that’s almost blasphemous in some ways. Sorry, my language is getting very religious here, but because, I mean, at different points in my life, I have found that I identify and take the perspective of different players in that little drama, and what I’ve come to realize is that story doesn’t conclude. It’s always a perpetual time bomb that will go off and remind me that in my pursuit of justice, I have to remember compassion, and in my exemplification of compassion, I cannot destroy the structures of justice, and that there is a recognition of human finitude, but also human aspirations, and all of that I have to keep remembering, because I will tend towards extremes, and I will tend to gravitate to those sinkholes of local minimal, but what the parable does, this little finite piece of text puts me in the infinite dialectic where I’m constantly moving between individuation and participation. I’ll use your language, between heaven and earth, and I never stop. I never stop, and that’s what it is to grasp, I think, not to grab, that’s the wrong word, to grasp, to grasp a parable and to be grabbed by it. That’s what I wanted to say. That’s what I would argue that mythos and parable are the language, they’re sort of the, they’re kind of the artistic twin to what you see in more propositional language within dialectic, but this comes out in the practice. When you’re doing these practices with people, they move between their statements and all of the, all these metaphorical poetic gestures that they actually enact over and over again, and they get a sense of these deeper patterns that are repeating throughout their lives, coming to the fore. Yeah, cool. I’d like to try to bring it back to us today in 2020, because if my best guess, you know, regarding this whole historical dialectic, right now I don’t think we’re seeing the end of a, let’s say, a strictly bottom-up worldview of just trying to see matter and how it combines, and this mirrors a breakdown in our view of, let’s say, social systems, where we have all kinds of social systems that are breaking down. Dialectic isn’t working really within the university, it’s not really working within individual and society, between groups and society and so on. We see sort of this widespread collapse in our systems, but on the other end, you see the emergence of new systems, like you mentioned all of the movement summits and so on, like new emerging practices that promise to, on the one end, they emerge through dialectic, through people interacting with one other and across communities, and from this emerges finer and finer sets of practices and institutions and so on, that will take the place of the fading ones. And on the other end, I do think that even within Christianity, you see this as well, we touched on it just a bit last time and I was a bit more mindful of it recently, but you do, there is definitely a shift going on within, especially within Christianity, because that’s the one I know most, I know that people are moving away from more sort of simplistic, non-leturgical kinds of practices, people are moving back, let’s say even within the Protestant churches, they’re moving to more leturgical practices, people moving sometimes right away to either Catholic or Orthodox denominations, because they have richer worldviews, more dialectic across people, more dialectic, just even like in the setting of a church where you do dialectic, with your neighbors and also with your priests, this is richer, that I think is richer in the older traditions, within the Catholic church, there’s like, it may actually be a problem of, like so many people want to move back, that it’s a, that some, yeah, it may cause problems, people want their masses back in Latin and so on, and the older churches are gathering more people, so you see emerging, even within the church, certain sets of practices, certain theologies being more favored than others, so by trying to tend to those favorable emerging positions, I do have, just because of my Christian commitments and seeing this worldview as viable to me, I do have a fair amount of hope in all of this, that this will be heading in a good direction, doesn’t mean that it will be good necessarily for us, churches have gone extinct and so on, but like that overall, the course of this dialectic will mean it’s direction, and I’m fairly comfortable with just tending the garden, where I tending the places where the emergence, where I see the emergence of good aspects of this center, I don’t know exactly what it will look like in practice, but I say we, there’s something really good occurring in this corner of the internet, I think, so I do my best to try to foster this one. I agree with that. I think people are hungry for mythos, and given our discussion, this is enmeshed with a hunger for diologos and for practices like dialectic, which will help realize diologos, I think there’s a hunger for both of those, and it’s profound, so yeah, it doesn’t strike me at all coincidental that there’s these simultaneously these innovative new communities of ecclesia coming into existence, and then more dynamically layered and dialectical and symbolically informed forms of Christianity, which are called older, which is completely right, I think, are also coming into prominence. What needs to, we need caution on both ends, we need to avoid the conservatives bias that the old is therefore better because it’s old, and the radicals bias that the new is better precisely because it’s new, and both of those, I think, if left unreflected upon and unchecked, could make this go awry in powerful ways, like you could see the, like you said, you’ve already said, there’s probably problems with people trying to go back, like do you need to bring things back in Latin, right, should we dress in Roman tunics, how far back, and then of course there’s the innovation for the sake of innovation, which has become an intoxicant for our culture, is also a particular bias. So that’s the two pools of dialectic, either going all the way back to your position where you don’t change, or going all the way back to the other position to which you’re aspiring, and without like doing any realisation between the two, to a point that’s actually fruitful to both. Yeah, and I think, I don’t have a lot of time to talk about it today, but what’s coming out as also a potential topic is the relationship between relevance realisation and dysfunctional mediation that you’ve been talking a lot about, because, you know, obviously dialectic enhances relevance realisation in powerful ways, but as we’ve noted both within the Christian context and in the Socratic-Neoplatonic context, it also enhances mediation in important ways, and that’s something I’m also trying to reflect on. Even the self-naming as Phileas Sophia, someone who’s always in love with wisdom and never will come into, right, a full possession of it, that’s a statement of that we’re inherently, the relevance realisation is always a mediating one. What I would like at some point to explore that German idea with you a little bit more too. Yeah, sure. There’s something going on there, because Jonathan has made this argument to me, and then Mary, Mary Cohen, somebody you and I both talked with, also powerfully made that argument about, you know, and I noted it at the time being important, so it stuck with me as a seed plot, you know, this role of mediation, and then you, independently, but I think convergently with Mary’s point, you know, that people, when people cease to experience themselves as intermediaries, right, so that the monolithic, it’s not only that the monolithic mind was monological and self- enclosed, but it was also, this follows from it, it was also in no way a mediating mind, and that’s also deep, your point is that’s also been deeply problematic, and that’s Mary’s point too. I think this is something that needs to be, it’s juicy, I can feel it intuitively that it’s a juicy point, it’s filled with epistemic and transformative juices that we need to try and get back to at some point. Maybe the three of us should talk again at some point about that topic. Yeah, yeah, that’d be fun, I’m sure she’d be happy to. You know that Jonathan and Paul and I are going to have a joint dialogue soon. Yeah, that’ll be great, because I think that yeah, the event in September probably won’t work internally. Yeah, it’s been canceled, that event, well at least, it’s been canceled, but like in the sense of postponed to when it will be possible again. Yeah, yeah, but yeah, I was hoping maybe I could go, but I’ll be very happy to just listen to the three of you as well. Well, yeah, yeah, well that means me, that brings a bit of sadness to me, because if we had had the conference, I would have got to meet you in person as well. There’s so many people that I’ve never met in person, I’d very much like to. Is there, I mean, we’re getting close to an hour, is there anything more, I mean, I think we’ve touched a lot in a very rich fashion, is there anything more you want to address or bring out on this? Not really, quickly, I do think what you just said about real nationalization coming into the mix is relevant to another thing that I’d like to talk about, it doesn’t have to be today, because it’s a big topic, but I think there’s something there that could really help Christians such as me understand miracles in a way that’s not too fraught with problems. When we talked about a year ago about the advantages and disadvantages of our respective positions, one of the worries coming from a religious side is you have to find a way to, let’s say, call, if you can bring miracles in your anthology, you have to do it in a way that won’t lead to you bullshitting yourselves. And it does look to me like whenever you look at something emerging, there’s always some aspect of a miracle there. And some people, you see people often within the religious side or even like the Pentecostal side and so on, telling non-reductive physicalists that, well, your idea of emergence is just miraculous, it doesn’t work. But I’d like to use it the other way around, rather than saying that it means that non-reductive physicalism is to be thrown out the window. I think if we can use the ideas and the empirical research around emergence to better understand how somehow an overarching pattern, an overarching form can meet with potential, with matter in a way that explains this miraculous emergence, I think it could help Christians better deal with the problematic aspects of miracles. It looks like there’s a continuity there. If you look at any time, just a particle appears from the bottom layer of physics, it looks like a small miracle. If you look at the way when I make a decision, if you were to look at what happens in my brain, all of the coordination of all the different networks, it would also look like a miracle. And I think at the highest scale, if you looked at the incarnation and all the different miracles that Jesus performed, it does look like a miracle when you look at it at our human level. But if you take the theologian point of view, if you try to see what’s the meaning of those, then it can become part of a pattern that makes sense all of a sudden and that also gives you a criteria for determining which miracles are real and which aren’t. That doesn’t just argue about the material aspect of it, but that is more concerned about the overarching pattern in all of it. Does the pattern make sense in the same way that if I were to look at my decision occurring when such and such miraculous occurrences happen within my brain, that I could sort of map the two. It has to do directly with the role of brotherhood realization between dialectic. How is it that the many in the potential can combine into something that under a certain pattern? So I would definitely hope that to have such a discussion at some point. I would have more time today, but I don’t know if you do as well. I don’t have too much more time today, but I’m also very happy to meet with you again and talk about this. I’d like to set this aside because I mean I set aside for our next meeting, not dismiss it. What I mean is let’s make a commitment. I make a commitment to let’s have another discussion about this. I like what you said there because, sorry again, between friends. I’ve never quite understood the commitment to miracles. I never understood why it was like why is it so important? What does it matter? Right like other and what I mean in a non-question-begging fashion, I understand if you’re already committed to a particular thing and it has miracles within it, you have a derived commitment to the miracles within it. But there seems to be an independent thing which is no you know I have an independent commitment to this which I never understood. But you just told me how about something that was really really provocative. Are you really cooking with gas today? The idea that there is emergence carries within it some sense of the creation and I’ll just point out that you know for aerogena creation is precisely that which dialectically brings together emanation and emergence. That’s what creation is. It isn’t just making. We’ve forgotten that making is a model for creation. It is not the same thing as creation. And what I heard you saying is and I heard of Whitehead was in my head but you know how Whitehead said everything comes to all things come into one thing that is a new thing. Right that there’s inherent creativity as Whitehead puts it. Right. I think this is like Persig’s notion of quality too. What I heard you saying in all of these notions there is the creation of novelty and the proper way of thinking about that is to see it as therefore miraculous. Where miraculous doesn’t mean inconsistent or non-intelligible because you mentioned deep continuity but it’s only it’s always only intelligible after the fact. That’s sort of a Whitehead idea. You can’t see it. You can’t from this side predict the novelty because then it wouldn’t be novelty. But if it was just if you couldn’t reconnect it backwards it would just be absolute chaos. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Yeah. It’s meant it’s meant to bring us into something higher. In the same way that when I do realize what when realization occurs and you can see all of different networks coalescing in a certain pattern in my brain. It’s meant to bring all of those different neurons into an overarching pattern. Right. Like a spark of the miraculous novelty that brings the old constituents forward. And yes within a father Michael Dodds whom I referenced earlier in his book. I really like this book. It’s titled Unlocking Divine Action and it uses modern notions within non-relative physicalism trying to make sense of how God can. Yeah. And towards the end of the book when you finally know as laid out of all the machinery and he’s able to leverage it to talk about miracles and problems and so on. He’s able to say that well the goal of miracles is precisely this is that through different actions that God can perform in the world he will bring us into his own life. It’s all to bring it’s all meant to bring creation into God himself or you could say within like whatever the ground is of realization the ground of emergence and elimination like miracles matter because they they’re like pointers for us to get brought into the divine life to get brought into the very processes of realization. But if I understood you you’re emphasizing that there even in everyday events and this is where I heard Whitehead the notion of creative events even in everyday events of you know of oxygen and hydrogen coming together. This is the hackneyed example and water emerging and water is novel in some way to hydrogen and oxygen. You’re seeing that that spark of novelty that so there’s there’s a you can say a deep continuity like yeah that’s what I was just going to say there’s a deep continuity between the miraculous and the natural in what you’re proposing. Yeah typically what the what the the language that is up and used and this is modeled up because I think different people use different definitions but like typically people will talk about providence for everything that is like below below I don’t want to say the supernatural it’s such a like whenever God acts directly whenever you can say that the whatever heaven and earth meet directly what you see will be miracles. So at the highest scale when we would say in the incarnation what what occurred there was miracles but what occurs at lower levels say the fact that in our discussion today we’re able to to meet and we’re able to say meaningful things that neither of us have thought about quite well. Within within in christianism this would be providence it’s it’s like we have an emergence of meaningful patterns that you couldn’t have predicted otherwise but you can say that the ground of realisation still participated in that although at the more more common scale you can say than what occurred at the incarnation and it’s even more common if you look at this let’s say subatomic level it’s still meeting of emergence and munition there. That’s really cool because I typically and I don’t mean to be insulting I typically don’t find the notion of miracles you know useful or helpful my intelligent but what you did there proposing sort of a deep it sounded to me like you proposed then a deep continuity between miracles providence and something like the ground of being or the you know let’s say you can say maybe nature or okay okay yeah yeah that’s cool that’s very interesting wow I would like to talk about this because I would want to keep I mean yeah if you have pointers for what I could think about for the next discussion you know I’d be really happy to hear them and ponder them yeah well I mean the person that keeps coming to my mind right now is um is Whitehead there’s I think it was a book written by by Rose on an introduction to Whitehead it’s a really it’s a thin volume but it’s an excellent um really good introduction to Whitehead and Whitehead is of course deeply influenced by Brooks Hall but he’s also doing um what you’ve been doing and what we’ve been talking about I mean he proposes the notion of creative advance as a way of trying to understand the metaphysics we’re going to need in order to really deeply understand science he’s deeply informed by the advances both at the relativistic level and the quantum level there’s also um um Whitehead’s book might be really good religion in the making and also I’m going to be talking with him um oh I can’t remember I think it’s is it Matt I think it yeah it’s Max Tagall um he’s got some videos on um there’s the future the future faces of spirit I have a video there and he talked and he talks about uh sort of the Whiteheadian notion in language it’s very consonant with uh the work I do but also very consonant with what we’ve been talking about especially just now so I think there’s a there’s there’s some yeah there’s there’s a lot of people that are trying to bring back this this I don’t know I’m thinking of Weber here you know the disenchantment of the world they’re trying to bring back an enchanted view that is nevertheless uh very rationally and intellectually um responsible so I think that’s happening a lot right now cool yeah I’ll definitely check those out okay well that that’s great so uh let’s make a commitment then uh to talk maybe we can have a discussion of on mediation and miracles and uh um and try and unpack that a little bit more um yeah yeah I look forward to it so thank you so much JP and I hope that you uh you stay well and everything keeps going smoothly for you thanks you too John thanks