https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=3bV7JYJ2tWU
Welcome everyone to another voices with Reveke. I’m very excited about today’s episode. So when I was in Cambridge, and this is a great story, when I was in Cambridge, I was giving a talk and the gentleman who you’re seeing here walked up and he said, I’m Sebastian Morello and I knew I knew the name but I couldn’t place it and I was thinking and then he said, you’re always talking about my book and this is the book I’ve often talked about, The World is God’s Icon, which makes a very clear and I find convincing argument for a neoplatonic reading of Thomas Aquinas and it aligns with readings by Clark and DC Schindler and other it’s a beautiful book and I said, wow, Sebastian and I was excited. So I said, when I get back, we got to set up a conversation. We’ve already talked privately and I foresee this is going to be the beginning of a long and fruitful philosophical fellowship. So welcome, Sebastian. It’s such a pleasure to have you here. Thank you so much for having me. I’m very grateful and I’m glad you’ve taken such an interest in my in my work. So it’s great. Thank you. So Sebastian, maybe tell us a little bit about yourself, where you are, what your background is and then we can get into some of the topics you’d like to discuss. Sure. So I live out in Bedfordshire in England with my wife and three children. I spend most of my time wandering about in the fields and the woods in the surrounding areas with my with my whippet and thinking about well, I generally fluctuate between thinking about rather abysmal state of affairs in the political world and the god who makes it all OK again. And I write a lot for a particular publication called the European Conservative, which is a publication that really just writes pieces about European civilization and history. And I do a bit of editing for them. And other than that, I’ve got a book coming out later this year with Routledge on political theory, particularly focusing on second person perspective and the kind of interpersonal presuppositions and commitments that I think are necessary for a stable political life. So I know that’s an area that you’re really interested in and hopefully we can explore a bit. And I’m just writing another book at the moment. I’ve just started it, which is less a work of academic philosophy, but really just about Well, it’s just about how I came to fall in love with God, really. And my travels around Asia and things like that. And just writing that down. So that might be a bit of fun. And I’m supposed to be taking up a job in September in Princeton University at their Department of Politics. Right. So probably by the end of the year, we’ll be on the same side of the Atlantic, and we can meet up again, which would be nice. That’d be one. That’s me. That’s me. And the thing I mean, what I’m obviously I’ve been I have been watching some of your material from which I’ve benefited enormously. And I loved meeting you in Cambridge and having that chance to chat and we’ve chatted since. And there are three areas which are reoccurring themes in your own thought, which, you know, each time you move into these areas, my ears prick up, particularly. And the reason why I think is because they’re areas not only where we share a mutual interest, but they don’t converge in an obvious way. I’m not saying they don’t, but they don’t in an obvious way. That’s one your particular preference for a neoplatonic framework to understand wider reality and also to recapture an aspect of the world that entails meaning, right? Yes. Which you’ve talked about very eloquently. The other is the notion of the person, not so much as an object in the world and not simply as a synonym of human being as just our species kind, but really this condition of relatedness and interpersonal relatedness, which is much more what we mean, I think, by person, which gives rise to the kind of unique non-transferrable entity that we’re really talking about. The more I’ve thought about that and the more I’ve listened to you speak about that, the more I’ve realised that notion of person is very, very deep within our language even. When we talk about, look, I want to see you in person, we’re saying I need to be in person to you in order for- Right. Right. Then just finally, something that you talked about a bit in Cambridge, this notion that knowledge is not primarily, or not solely, I’ll say, knowledge is not solely propositional knowledge. Yes. Yes. But we have to start thinking about knowledge as the embodied experience of the world. Yes. This doesn’t only chime with this existentialist notion of person as a condition of relatedness, but also I think it brings in this incarnational aspect to a neoplatonic ontology. Yes. We’ve talked a little bit about the fact that the academy used to have this, the academy itself, it used to form the whole person as if the seminar and the lecture hall was not the only part of what the academy was trying to do in the bringing to the fore of human flourishing. The dialogue that you’re bringing out of this tripartite framework is one that I find incredibly compelling. I’d just love the opportunity to chat more about it with you. Well, thank you for that, Sebastian. Yeah, I really enjoyed our brief talk at Cambridge and the more extensive one we had a few days ago. I’ll start with some of the comments I already mentioned to you around those three polls and how I start to see them possibly weaving together so we get an integrated intelligibility for them. I’d like to start with the notion of person. Oh, by the way, before I forget, I ordered that book you recommended on the second person perspective within Aquinas’s work. Yeah, Andrew Pinson. Yeah, Pinson, exactly. So thank you for that recommendation. Yeah, I should get it in a couple days. So, well, the thing I very much see personhood the way you say is an inherently relational thing and I want to talk about its existential aspect and how it’s, I think, properly iconic for an important feature of our ontology, which I call transdictivity, and try and put those together in some important way. I tend to think of personhood as the fact that there is something about you, just for example, that I can internalize that becomes a proper part of me, which sounds really odd in a particular way. But here I’m thinking specifically of the Vygotskyian notion. When I internalize your perspective on my perspective, I get a capacity for self-transcendence or to use a more psychological term, metacognition on myself that makes me distinctly responsive in a way that other animals aren’t. I take it that Proust is right, that animals have procedural metacognition. They can sort of, they’re aware of themselves insofar as they can correct their behavior, alter their attention, but we have this other capacity to rise above and reflect on ourselves and take a critical stance to our lower order perspectives, see ways in which we were egocentric or biased or irrational, or also positively, ways in which we were particularly virtuous or right. And so we have this capacity. I internalize you in a way that makes me reflect on myself, but then makes me open to a call from you to justify my behavior precisely because I have this metacognitive capacity. So precisely because I’m not just intelligent like an animal and I have procedural metacognition, I can have what Greg Enriquez emphasized so beautifully in his work. I’m called into this other sphere where I have metacognition and then I have language broadly construed. I don’t mean just spoken, I mean logos, and we can come back to that. That means you have access and you can place a demand on me precisely because you know that I have this metacognitive ability because you also have it, and we are then bound in this way that other organisms cannot bind each other. And for me, that intertwining of internalization, self-transcendence, and then being called to, and notice the word, a responsibility, ability to respond to you in a particular way. For me, those are the essential features of personhood. Just to pick up on a point, it’s interesting that one of the first things before we start speaking to one another as we’re developing as little babies, one of the first things we start to do is point. First you have the interpersonal relatedness, but out of that, so I’ve held my little babies and they’re looking and they’re gazing right up at you and you’re having this interpersonal relatedness, but then very soon they start to point. It’s like that interpersonal relatedness transitions into shared perspective together. I want to call your attention so that you and I can share the same attention with this third object. And this seems to me the emerging of person that you’re actually watching happening in real time. Right. And then, by the way, I think that’s very important because I think relevance and salience are sort of the normativity for cognitive emergence. And so that ability to, the baby’s ability, not the baby, we have the baby, I guess, infant, the ability to draw you into their salience landscaping and also soon after allow you to draw them into your salience landscaping because you can point and they will start to look. And trying to get another animal, we can sort of do it with dogs because we’ve been doing selective breeding on them for 50,000 years. They’re sort of at the stage of sort of like two-year-olds, but they’re really exceptions to the rule. I agree that’s right. And then you have the next move where they learn language. And notice the order. First they get what I would call dialogos, which is not necessarily spoken, but this binding. And they’re starting to internalize your perspective on their perspective. And even at 18 months, a child will pick up a picture and turn it towards you. Or even with a younger child, you can put on the table a bunch of things for them. And they only like the goldfish. They don’t like the broccoli. But if they see you pick up a piece of broccoli, they’ll pick up a piece of broccoli and give it to you, even though they don’t like it. You can see the beginnings of all of this. And then you get language. And what’s really interesting is language, especially around three years of age, they get quite good at it, but they have no declarative metacognition. They obviously have very sophisticated procedural metacognition. We’ve already talked about it. But then language takes them out into the world. And for a while, you know this, they can’t lie. They can’t step back and have a metacognitive awareness of language as a thing in itself. But around four years of age, they get that, oh, I can use this to make dad think that. They’re horrible liars. But the first time your child lies, not by accident, but you can tell with intent. That’s a very pivotal moment. And so then they get that. And then very, very quickly, with that, I remember my younger son was about four and a couple of months. And we’re driving in the car. And he did something that he had never done before. He reported introspection. He said, Dad, Dad, it’s snowing outside, but only in my head. He was imagining it. And he couldn’t be it, right? And if you ask a three and a half year old, what’s going on in your head or your mind, they’ll say blood or something like that. They can’t do that introspection. And then right after they get that, they start to get better with narrative. Like a four-year-old’s narrative is pretty incoherent. But then they start the kind of fluidity with metacognitive perspective taking that you need in order to do narrative. And around that same time, and these overlap, they start to do metaphor, which is again, an ability within language to play different perspectives off against each other. And you can see, and for me, I think of that whole process as this process of this increasing internalization. It’s not just quantitative, but qualitative, self-transcendence, and then the growing sense of a responsibility to others and even to language itself. And for me, that is the whole arc of personhood. Yes. Well, I wonder whether the kind of way you’re framing personhood has serious ramifications also for the field of aesthetics. Right. I mean, when you go to an art gallery, one of the first things that a lot of people notice is that there’s this huge qualitative difference between walking around an art gallery on your own and walking around with a friend. Yes. The sharing of attention on these works and talking about them completely qualitatively changes the experience. And then it’s very interesting because when you are getting into criticism of works of art, what you find is that you are treating the merit or demerit of the piece of art as if there’s something objective here to talk about. You’re not merely describing your tastes. No, no. You’re treating it like that, but you realize that the kind of arguments you’re making are not the hard propositional or syllogistic arguments. You’re inviting your friend to keep such and such in mind when he or she looks at this piece or to remember what the artist’s life was like when this piece came out. And if you like, rather than making propositional arguments, you’re making the kinds of arguments that are invitations. Yes. You’re making these teasing invitations. And that’s not in any way to say that aesthetic judgment isn’t itself objective, but it’s something more like saying perhaps part of the objectivity of the brilliance of such and such a piece is found in the kind of perspectival thinking that the piece inspires so that you can enter into communion with the object. Yeah, I think that’s very well said. There’s two things that come to mind for that. The first is something parallel, strongly, maybe even isomorphic in the work I do on human reasoning, human rationality. So it’s becoming increasingly apparent. There’s a book, The Enigma of Reason by Mercier and Spurber that collects a lot of this together. I have criticisms about the modularity thesis, but that’s a specific thing for a coxsai. The thing that is really provocative in the good sense of the word is just this massive amount of converging evidence that we reason much better dialogically than monologically. And so for example, you can take tests like the waste and selection task, even bright university students, very simple task, but test very basic conditional reasoning, and only 10% of them get it right if it’s abstract, if you put content in it and it’s not clear whether they do better, but reliably. And these are the brightest cream of the crop people, very simple task. And it’s just one among many examples, 10% success rate, reliably, robustly, no replication crisis with this result. You take that same task and you put people in the group of four, and I’ll let them talk with each other about it. And the success rate goes up to around 70%. Reliably. And this is just an example of many, many instances where the dialogical actualization of the collective intelligence of distributed cognition is much, much better. It’s becoming, I think, a very plausible hypothesis that we evolved to do problem solving and reasoning dialogically with other people. The we space is actually really important. Now that’s the first point. And the second point is that lines up with something else that you’re mentioning with the work of art, but you also need it. There’s something trans propositional, trans logical about rationality, which is exactly this. It’s also looking like many of the biases, all are just different aspect of the my side bias, a specific kind of egocentrism in our reasoning. And you can be extremely logical within that, but you need something trans logical that breaks you out of it. It’s like, you know, Spinoza, maybe one of the most logical philosophers said, you know, in the end, reason can’t do it. You need love because only love is the only thing that can reorient. So the supersalience of the egocentr can get displaced and the arrow of relevance can be turned. And dialogue, especially when it’s what I call the logos, when it has that platonic element where people are both inviting each other and affording each other to self transcend. I think that’s Plato’s great insight about how deeply that is needed by rationality. And of course, DC Schindler is arguing this very much. And so you can see that the art, the aesthetic, I should say, and what we sort of maybe prototypically think as the rational actually are not far away from each other. They’re much closer than the Enlightenment has told us. I would argue. Sure, sure. I mean, one of as you were talking, I was thinking a little bit about Martin Buber’s thesis. And, you know, as you know, he makes this case that actually you can have two perspectives on the world. You can have an I it perspective or you can have an I you perspective. Well, another way to say that, if we were to transpose that into the kind of language we’ve been using so far, is you can have a second personal relationship with the world. Or here’s another way to put this. Persons have the capacity to extend the notion of personhood analogously to impersonal objects. Yes. And so you can enter into that relationship, which is a relationship of meaning. It’s one that calls you to account. It’s one that’s self transformative. Or you can have an I it relationship, which is fundamentally third personal. That’s a third personal relationship. Now, if you were to put this into questions of dialogos, it’s quite interesting that in this country, as many people know, the most successful universities that comprise Oxbridge are the other the universities where the tutorial model of teaching still prevails rather than the lecture hall model, where it where in the end, the relationship you have with your teacher and with your fellow students is always third person. You listen and then you reflect on what he or she said, or the questions that were asked by him or her. But what but but when you’re in the tutorial model, you’re having this constant dialogue going on in the room. And and the consequence of that is that the students do flourish. I mean, you know, these universities have their own problems, but the students do flourish and the you know, the jury is in on that the date the data indicates that quite clearly. Thank you for sharing that, because I totally agree with that. I think that’s right. I think the evidence and now and so there’s that which you could call, you know, well established case study evidence. We’ve got this experimental evidence, we have good philosophical argument. So there’s, they’re all converging in a way that affords tremendous insight. So I think this is a highly plausible argument that’s being made. Two things about that. So that I mentioned this to you last time we’re talking, Boobers I, that relationship. You know, and I talked a lot about this in the series I did with Zevi Stave and with Guy Sendstock. But for me, God is that kind of no thing. I have to speak apophatically. That is kind of the maximal or optimal of this capacity to it to be internalized into the depths of my psyche, which you might call my soul, the depths of my psyche and afford the most self transcendence you might call my spirit. Right. And so, right, for me, for me, that’s how I understand Boobers argument that you can only, you can only properly, and I’m doing this so people don’t hear propositional knowing, you can only know God in the eye that relationship. And then as you said, that is not an isolated thing precisely because God is not an isolated thing, right, that transpose, it’s like it transposes and transfers potentially to the whole world. And you can see convergence things from, you know, the Kyoto school and, you know, Robert Carter, knowing the bamboo, the idea, as you said, that we can take this second person perspective and come into knowing things that way. I’ve been trying to explore this, Daniel Zeruba, Johannes Niederhäuser, and other people about, and Guy Sendstock, Christopher Pietro, that you can move from an eye relationship, you pick up an object, and what is its watch, right, into what I think, this is aligned with, I think, what work Jonathan Roussen is doing, a phenomenological Platonism, and this will get us into the Neoplatonism at some point, but I can look at this object and instead of doing that, I can realize it’s multi, that it’s actually multi-aspectual to me. There’s no, I can never actually fully see the object. And if you remember, word Eidos originally meant look or aspect of a thing, right, and all the visual metaphors. And then what you realize, and this is, you know, a point that Husserl makes, but I think Marlo Ponti gets it better. Husserl thinks that this is kind of a completable in some conceptual way, and you can get to an essence, a necessary set of necessary and sufficient conditions, but Ponti thinks, and I agree with him, Marlo Ponti, that no, no, this is inexhaustible, right, and because beyond all the perceptual things, then I can bring in all the imaginal, not imaginary, all the, I could imagine, well, you know, what would this watch look like from space, and also, you know, what could this watch symbolize to another, like all the ways in which this could be, and I’m using that, you know, like, right, and then you get this sense, right, of like the depths of it, and this is like the relationship you have with a person, you’re, right, and then what’s interesting for me is there’s a through line. These aspects are in no way experienced as incoherent with respect to each other, right, there’s this inexhaustible, and so I call it the through line, and the through line is not itself an aspect. It is that beyond all aspects which binds them in this inexhaustible intelligibility, there’s a musicality to it, and for me, that’s much closer to how I understand the Eidos, but the thing, do you notice what was happening? You’re getting into a dialogical, but it’s not, you’re not talking to the object, like in some sort of crypto-animism, what you’re doing is your perception is taking on the capacities that have been trained by personhood to unfold this in a way that can’t be unfolded if you have an eye at relationship to it. I’m sorry that went for a bit, but I just wanted to- No, no, no, no, no, no, I mean, there’s so much there. One of my favorite passages in Bubba’s Iron Thou when he talks about the god of the atheists, and I mean, he says in his own terms something very similar to what you just said, that he has this passage in which he says, who is the real atheist? Is it the devout self-professed believer whose prayer to God is always framed in terms of what I need and what you need to deliver for my use, right? And then, I mean, he doesn’t use this term, but the kind of divine vending machine, no, yes, which has reduced God to an object of use. Or he says, is it the atheist who nonetheless in the night looks out from his window into the void and speaks? And Bubba kind of leaves this open, but essentially, he’s making the point that actually God can only be known in the I-Thou relationship. And this is why Roger Scruton in his book, I think it’s The Face of God, it might be The Soul of the World. Anyway, one of the two last books he wrote, he says that the person who’s really seeking God, the person who really wants to know God, and one of the mistakes is he will go to, if you like, God’s officials, he will go to the clerics or the, you know, and they will start offering catechetical instruction, or they will start to give theological propositional knowledge, or they will start to give philosophical arguments for why it’s reasonable to believe in God. And Roger says what the person is asking for is a biography of a mystic, right? Because what he really wants to know is what does a person look like who is in an I-Thou relationship with God, because that’s the kind of relationship I’m looking for in my life. And so Roger concludes, you know, he says, really, the only God I’m interested in is the God of the mystics. And this is kind of the conclusion to which I arrive in that book, which you kindly mentioned a moment ago in my book on the neoplasism of Aquinas. We don’t need to go into the technicalities of his metaphysical structure or the ontology in which his metaphysics is worked out, but what that ontology gives rise to is the notion that when you behold the world, albeit with its manifold imperfections and its fallenness, when you behold the world, you’re looking at something like a portrait of God. And that’s great, because that means the world is the emanation of God, it’s the self-communication of God. I think actually, rather than a portrait, which gives rise to a kind of the metaphor itself is kind of deistic, I like Tolkien’s idea of, you know, the world as music. Right, exactly, the same thing. But in any sense, you get this model of the world as the self-communication of God, but the problem is that’s fundamentally third personal, right? It’s still this thing which can say something about me, and this seems to be resolved. And I think for Aquinas, it was resolved in the mystery of the incarnation, where God can enter the world and say to those whom he wants to communicate himself to, you know, he who sees the father, you know, then suddenly the whole need for I Thou and the whole overcoming of the frustration of natural religion, I suppose, that is all resolved in the mystery of the incarnation. At least that is how I’ve read it. I think, I mean, this gets me into dangerous waters, because I don’t consider myself a Christian, but I always attempt to talk in deep good faith to Christians who want to talk to me in good faith. So I say this carefully, I think Christian Platonism, Neoplatonism in some important ways is superior to non-Christian Neoplatonism. However, I then would, I’ll counterbalance that with saying there’s something really important about Neoplatonism, because it seems to be able to go into other many religions and do this. It can go into Islam and get Judaism, it can interact with Judaism and get Kabbalah and other forms of Jewish mysticism and Zevi Slavin is exploring that beautifully. And you can even see that coming to fruition in Spinoza in a really profound way. And then there are people, Thomas Plant is a Christian, for example, but he’s saying, you know, you can take Dionysus’s Neoplatonism and you can get into this deep mutual shaping with Pure Land Buddhism. And so there’s something to me, and I hope you take this the right way, that is trans-religious about Neoplatonism that is very, very important. It seems to be, and one more thing, Neoplatonism also seems to be able to do this with respect to science. You’ve got multiple times the Renaissance and also at the beginning of the 20th century in which Neoplatonism and close things close to it enter into this reciprocal reconstruction, not with religion, but with science in this really fruitful and profound way. So I don’t just not disagree. I mean, I wholly endorse what you’re saying. And actually, I think it’s very important to recognize this. Neoplatonism as a school distinct from Platonism has emerged in opposition to Christianity. And Proclus wrote a book called Against the Christians. And I think I actually see something providential in this. And the reason I say that is that I think it’s important that beyond the supernatural superstructure of what Christians understand to be the revealed religion, there is a natural structure which that comes to redeem and bring to fruition. And that structure is one that I think Neoplatonism gives us. And because it’s a natural structure, it’s a common language for all the different wisdom traditions to be in dialogue with one another. And I think it’s Christianity that comes to illumine that. One of the things that I think Christians can be proud of regarding the kind of history of our civilization is precisely that when Christianity spread out across Europe, for example, and it found Greek wisdom tradition, and it found Roman law, and it found Northern European folk cultures, it didn’t seek to destroy them all or supplant them. It seek to raise them up into an embodied liturgical life because it believed that it had already found a common language which it could elevate. Let’s put it that way. And that I think is what is very important, I think, for Christians to recognize Neoplatonism as a common language. Thank you for saying that because I’ve been trying to make the argument that Neoplatonism can serve as a philosophical Silk Road. It can serve as a courtyard of dialogos as opposed to the courtroom of debate that has now become endemic in our culture. And so thank you for saying that. I mean, one specific way in which I want to sort of redeem the promise of why I said I find a superiority in Christian Platonism. That move that I mentioned earlier, that essential move that within personhood of self-trend sentence because I can internalize and then I can turn the arrow of relevance away from egocentrism to not how and think about your petitionary prayer. How is this relevant to me? I can turn that arrow to how am I relevant to this? How am I relevant to how and that’s what responsibility is ultimately, like true responsibility, not you’re doing it begrudgingly but what the Greeks might call sophism, you naturally dispose to doing this. That for me, that is that, as I said, that takes love. Now you can see Plato in the Neoplatonic tradition transforming and stretching and trying to reshape Eros, the Greek notion of Eros and they can’t, it can’t quite work. And then the Christians come in and I do think this goes back to Jesus of Nazareth and they pronounce the radical nature of a Gopic life, right? And you see something very, very similar in Buddhism around Karuna, the same metaphors of youth, the mother relationship to the child as the primary metaphor, right? Where a Gopic love is exactly, wait, I’m a person and I have been made by other people in this way we’ve been talking about, dialogically, and I’m profoundly obligated, but not only obligated, it’s what Frankfurt calls love as a voluntary necessity. There’s a necessity, but I want to do it. I want to love agapically. I want to be invested in the creation of persons that have an existence and a value independent of my egocentrism, right? And for me, Christianity said, this is overly simplistic, Sebastian, so take it as like says to Neoplatonism, well, you’ve done some really great work on logos. You’ve really helped to really lay that out and you’ve got something about that, but you need this, right? Because you really, you can’t get the depths of logos and dialogos ultimately without agape. Agape and logos are inter-defining and for me, that’s one of the primary messages, right? The New Testament, John, in the beginning was the logos and God is agape, right? These fundamental pronouncements, so that is what I find really, really, and what I see happening, again, I’m trying to say this as charitably as possible, but I see like when Neoplatonism goes into Islam and you get Sufism and then this kind of agape glove comes to the fore again, right? Like there’s a deep cognitive cultural grammar that’s being accessed and activated and actualized in a very profound way. Yes, and I think you find something similar, as you said, among in the monastic tradition in Asia, which I was, you know, among the Buddhist monks, I was very fortunate to spend a lot of time in Buddhist monasteries when I was in Asia. I think you find something similar among the ascetic tradition in Hinduism and that’s why I think it is important to recognize this common wisdom language that Neoplatonism affords us. Now, I’m going to say something that is not very ecumenical, so you’ll have to sort of… Yeah, yeah, yeah. But one of the things that I think, I want to put this delicately, one of the things that I think was very unfortunate about the Protestant Reformation was precisely that because of Luther and Calvin’s conception of natural creation as completely destroyed by the introduction of sin into the world, this gives rise to an anti-metaphysical attitude. Very much so. And what’s interesting is that this emerges in a way that coincides with a contractual conception of how salvation takes place, which is very interesting because one thing I don’t have with my wife or my children is a contract, right? I have a relationship, I have a covenant, right? We never signed saying, you know, these are the terms you’ve got to honor or whatever. We are just living together and day by day just growing and trying to flourish and bring about each other’s flourishing and we’ve got this kind of ongoing dialogue. And of course, this is what, this is, if you like, a perfect analog of the devotional life. This is what monks in the Western tradition on, you know, Benedictine Abbey and on Mount Athos and this is what they have made their entire life about, which is seeing this metaphysical, apprehending the metaphysical framework of the world, seeing that they have found themselves in a world that is not completely wrecked by sin but is fallen and corrupted but nonetheless pregnant with meaning and the context in which they work out their dialogue with the author of that meaning and they do it through just as I kiss my wife as I pass her in the hallway or whatever, so too they take the holy water and bless themselves, they attend the liturgy, they, and all of the entire liturgical life is just, if you like, an elaborate way of repeatedly saying I love you to God, right, and so one of the things that, you know, I obviously want to work closely with Christians of, you know, any form or colour or whatever, you know, but I think from a historical perspective we have to recognise that this this bringing into the inner chamber of a liturgical life the primacy of logos and dialogos for a meaningful life was one of the monumental achievements of the Christian tradition and this was morphed in some way at the Reformation, but I don’t know if you agree on that. Well there’s a couple things to say about that. I agree in ways that have gotten me into trouble, pleasant trouble, I’m going to be having a dialogue with Paul VanderKlaai, and I forget the name of the gentleman who has criticised my take on Luther, and Paul VanderKlaai has been critical of it. I, you know, perhaps I should have attributed some things to Calvin rather than to Luther, you know, I don’t know. For me, the fact that the monasteries are shut down in Germany is telling about something deep, a deep change that had happened, and this is the loss of, to me, this is the beginning of the loss, no, sorry, that is exactly wrong, this is not the beginning of the loss, this is of the wisdom tradition, it starts earlier, the rise of normalism I think really starts, and whether or not Luther was a normalist, I think it’s very fair to say he was deeply influenced by normalism, that’s why he reduces the number of the sacraments, it’s hard to explain it in any other way, right, and things like that, but that loss of, that is a particularly important rupture, right, that accelerates the loss of the wisdom tradition in the West, and that’s where you can see the connection between Christianity and Plato being severed in kind of a very deep way, and so… This gets us quite nicely to the topic of embodied knowledge, I think. Yes, I think, I think, I think you put it contractually, and I don’t disagree with that, I put it in terms of that what happens is you get propositional tyranny, you get that, that the other kinds of knowing are not important, what’s important is the possession, assertion, and fealty, I’m not trying to make it, you know, a pious fealty towards sets of propositions, this is where credo, to use my language, credo stops being in service of religio and starts to dominate it, right, and for me, that is, I think that’s how I would put what you were saying, and for me, that’s, it’s no coincidence that this is being bound up with, right, the idea of the new way of reading, you’re not reading transformationally, you’re reading to be informed, to gather propositions, into logical coherence, I mean, and it’s very, it’s not very long thereafter, when you get the idea that I don’t need to undergo transformations to have fundamental truths disclosed to me, all I need is a universal calculus, right, and it’s no coincidence that Leibniz is in Germany, right, I need a universal calculus, and you know, you see it in Descartes too, and all, and then I can just calculate all truths, and notice how that removes me permanently, right, from the second person perspective, so here’s something I would want to say, and then this gets us into the connection to, for e-cognitive science, I think it’s very strong, which is this idea, the stuff we’re talking about, the relationship, the personal relationship to other persons, the agapic logos, right, and also how that gets a kind of optimality, but also an inexhaustibility, right, that like I was trying to do with the eidetic induction on my watch, right, right, God is that for me, that’s how I understand many people in this tradition talking about the no-thingness of God, it’s not privation, it’s that, it’s this, yes, right, all this comes together in this, in these, for me, ideas that I think are very importantly coming into prominence in for e-cognitive science, that there are huge aspects of cognition that disclose and are realized in both senses of the word, in the fact that there are real relations between us and the world, and that’s the core of cognition, cognition isn’t in the head, cognition is fundamentally between me and the world, and this discloses what I call the transjective dimension, that dimension that is lost in the so-called exhaustive dichotomy between the subjective and the objective, this is a point that I got very powerfully from Tillich, all right, obviously influenced by Harriot, no, no, but there has to be something below the subjective and then the objective, or else they could never be in relation, they would be incommensurably divided from each other, and that transjectivity is only accessible in this kind of existential personal transformation that human beings go through, and you have people, like L.A. Paul, transformative experience from the heart of the analytic tradition, writing about, well, you know, you can’t infer your way through, you can’t reason your way through a transformative experience, because it involves perspectival and participatory knowing in profoundly, and yet the most important personal decisions, existential decisions I make in my life, like whether or not to marry this person, whether or not to have this child, whether or not to change my career, are transformative experiences, and we put people into these experiences, and they have no language, no metaphysics for transjectivity and transformation and how they’re bound together in this profound way. We’ve talked about this before. This seems to have had a very dramatic effect on how we understand what the purpose of the academy is. Yes, yes. So we think of knowledge primarily as technical principles, with which people must be equipped so they can apply them in some role, which of course is a third personal approach to somebody, because it makes them a transferable, replaceable entity in some kind of organization or productive machine. They can be switched with somebody who happens to have accumulated the same technical principles and can apply them in the same way, and so the academy itself has gone through this process of becoming the very thing that reframes you as a commodity, which can then be injected into the market, rather than the academy being the place of self-transformation, where the question is not what can I do with my education? The question is what can my education do with me? How can I be transformed? And of course things like the things that we used to think were ends in themselves, things like the learning of an instrument or the reading of poetry or the criticism of a great book. We think of these things as useful insofar as we can derive some knowledge from them, but then we’ve completely misunderstood the point of returning time and time again to a poem. The reason why you pick up the poems of John Donne or whatever and you sit there and you read the same poem and you do it the next day and the next day is not because you’re accumulating applicable principles, but because each time you read that poem it’s doing something to your heart, right? And that’s not something that, I mean I don’t know, maybe you could make some argument that this is applicable insofar as you then return to the world of interpersonal relatedness changed, able to participate in that world better. Yeah, so there’s two that I agree with everything and I mean there’s sort of three points I want to make. One is we’ve lost the Socratic aspirational sense of the self and part of it is, you know, due to romanticism there’s lots of great stuff in romanticism, a big fan of Blake for example, but at least how a decadent form of romanticism is not your identity is a possession rather than a relation and your only responsibility is to be true to it and here I’m thinking about Adorno’s critique of authenticity as this, you know, superlative value. It’s like, well, we could mean authenticity in the Heideggerian sense which is very relational or we can mean, no, no, the only relation I’m talking about is to the self I have and I have to be, right? And so that I think like really undermines why it would be important for you to undergo transformation. Like if you think of the self that way, you’re not caught, you’re like, why do I need to transform? All I need to do is fit, I just need to find myself. The language is telling, the language is really telling. So can I interject? It’s interesting that, you know, in Hamlet, Colonius says, you know, to thyself you must be true and he’s the idiot of the play. Yes, very much. And his incapacity to enter into like abiding relationships with things, like Hamlet plays with the fact that he can just get Colonius to see things differently without realising what that means. But that brings me to the other point, which is the Dunn poem. For me, this is, yeah, I’m going to be a little bit strong on this. For me, this is the defining feature of sacredness, is that biological inexhaustibility. But I don’t mean that passively. What I mean is I read Plato, a certain stage of my life, it transforms me. I go out into the world and things are disclosed to me that wouldn’t otherwise be disclosed. They affect me. I go back and I now see things in Plato that I hadn’t seen before. And for me, this is the anagogy that Plato talks about. Like when you’re leaving the cave, right, you get into this dialogical loop with the world and you start to go deeper into the sinews of the psyche and you start to probe the deeper patterns of the world. And you get, you can literally, like when you put human beings into relationships of mutually accelerating disclosure, they fall in love. That’s what that’s right. And you can, and Plato’s great insight is, well, you can fall in love with what’s, you know, the really real within you and without you and how they’re bound together. So for me, what you just talked about with the done poetry, I think that that is like, this language, I want to say you’re educating, but almost in the Platonic sense of a drawing out, adusing, right? You’re educating people in a capacity for the sacred. And the sacred is what we’ve, it’s a kind of touchstone experience, right? For me, that, like when I get that sacredness with the Republic, for example, that doesn’t stay, or like when I’m doing Tai Chi Chuan, and I get that kind of sacredness with the chi, the chi isn’t an energy in you. It’s this kind of musical relationship between you and the environment. And what happens is, and I don’t even need to do it. I participate in it. That percolates, like out through my life and permeates through my psyche. And I start, for me, like if you had asked me, what’s the most important thing you do, I would say, well, that is, because that, right, that makes everything else of value, valuable to me. Yes. So for me, like, the fact that we have gotten so far from seeing how important that is, to being a person, like it used to be, it wasn’t that long ago, but you could say, why am I going to the university because I want to become a better person? And people meant it deeply and seriously. And now they don’t say that, but what happens, and I’m not trying to take credit, what happens in some of my courses, when I sort of share my participation in this with my students, they wake up to that. And then many, many, many of them said, say to me, this is what I wanted university to be. Yes. Yes. I think it’s one of the, it might be the foremost problem, epistemic problem of late modernity, that we confuse ends and means. And the university, it seems to me, is the place of ends, right? That is the place where you say, oh, all this world that I’ve seen where people are doing things for the sake of, and suddenly I’ve arrived at the place where the thing for which they labour is disclosed to me. And I can just let myself be formed by it, and therefore enter the, because of course, education at that level was always education for the polis. Yes. And people will still say that, but they don’t know what it means. So the guy who goes and does his PPE or politics degree at university, he thinks that he can then enter the political arena, because he’s got a set of political principles that he can then go and apply as a politician. But what university was supposed to do is not give you a set of principles, but give you the heart of a statesman. And once you’ve got the heart of a statesman, then you can go and you don’t even have to remember the principles, because you are that thing, because of what you have been immersed in for the last three years. That’s what a university was supposed to do. It was supposed to educate you for the polis, which means a programme, I mean, it’s a terrible word, but a programme of self transformation. Yes. And you made this excellent point when we were last chatting, which was that one of the great tragedies is that the university has become separated from the sacred arena that it inhabited at its conception, where you went to these tutorials, you had this dialogue, and that dialogue went out into the cloister where you would walk with the students and continue. And suddenly it was becoming less formalised, it became part of your informal discussion, as you immersed yourself in this beautiful context. And then you would enter the liturgy and you would hear the chanting of the songs, and you would adopt different postures, you would kneel, you would stand, you would put your hands together. And all of this is a context of self transformation, rather than here’s some stuff that your job is to understand then, ascend to, then regurgitate at exam level, and then we’ll know that you’re something that can be sold to the market. Which is a complete, it’s a, I mean, sorry, I’m getting a bit passionate. No, please, I love your passion. No, no. We’re doing the wrong thing for these young people. Yes. That’s the issue at stake. Yes, I agree. Two things about that. I think part of it is the historical separation of the university from the church and the monastery, because you can think of the monastery, they interpenetrate, so this is only, I’m only making a statement of emphasis, not of essence. But the monastery emphasises wisdom, the university emphasises knowledge, but knowledge for wisdom, and wisdom for knowledge, right? And then the church emphasises, no, no, those things you’re doing in the monastery and in the ivory tower, they have to be translatable, deeply translatable, in both senses of the word, into the lives of people. Because if it becomes, and so, right, and that functionality was really, really important. Let’s do knowledge, let’s do wisdom, and then let’s have this, an institution that keeps demanding that the knowledge and the wisdom are not only for each other, but for the culture, for the world. Yes, yes. And I think that, I mean, what is the word that denotes the relationship that exists between knowledge and wisdom? I would submit that that word is understanding. Yeah, very much. And that is, it’s interesting, I picked up my dictionary of philosophy the other day, there’s no entry for that word, right? Philosophers have nothing to say about understanding. They do now, but you know where you have to look for them? In the philosophy of science. Yeah. I do, because I’ve done a lot of work on the philosophy of understanding, and there’s a lot of great work being done there. And also the philosophers who are like Keeks, who want to talk about wisdom, they’ll talk about understanding. Interesting, just a little bit of etymology. The German is actually, was interstanding to be among other people. Right, yeah. Right, was inherently and inherently dialogical notion. And the fact that we’ve shifted also means we’ve shifted the way we understand, like we know it’s that which is underneath, right? The substance, right? And we’ve locked, we locked, no, no, but the original meaning was, right, was dialogical, very, very properly. And you see this in Plato, that understanding is only gathered when dialogue is able to find, you know, just like I can have multi-aspects on the thing, we have multi-perspectives, right, on being, and the dialogue brings and tries to find the through line in them. Yes, yes. But the thing you said there reminded me about there’s a deep connection between culture, cultivation, cult, sacredness, right? And this is a point that Zach Stein makes, and I think it’s brilliant, you know, in his book, A Time Between Two Worlds, education used to be a commitment to intergenerational fidelity and affordance. That what was happening in education is one generation was passing the torch of the culture to another generation because, and this is well studied, culture gives us what’s called the ratcheting effect. You and I don’t have to learn from scratch. We have this, this, this savings, right, that this repertoire that is bequeathed to us, right, and here’s the right word, it’s entrusted to us, and then we are entrusted to ratchet it up and pass it on. I mean, he points out that this intergenerational, which I think Zach would agree is inherently sacred, understanding of education has been lost because of the short term that’s trained people for the market and prepare them for the market. We obviously have to help people be able to find a living. I’m not saying that that’s not a responsibility. If anybody attributes that to me, I’m just going to say you’re lying. You’re misrepresented. Yes, yes, yes, agreed. Right. But it does, this, just this intergenerational, the anthropological assumption behind that model of education, this short term model of education, is that the human being needs to be thought of as something as like an abstraction. Yes. So not, the human being should not be thought of in the context, the context, the river into which he suddenly emerged, right, and it continues on. Now, and our architecture speaks of this, right. I mean, when we build something, we build something in a year, and we build a big glass box, and then we shove everyone in to do their jobs. The people who started building gothic cathedrals knew they would never see their completion. Yes. But they thought that they were immersed in a context of ongoing moral and material betterment, and they were just part of the story. And they were, they were, they were already morally bound to all of those who had come before, and all of those who were yet to be. They were already morally bound. Now, what is it to be in a context to be an existential human being who is morally bound to others? That is to be a person. Yes. So in isolating a person, thinking of him as just an abstraction, we’re actually eclipsing the notion of personhood altogether. That’s the really scary thing. Yes. I think it’s both an abstraction and an atomization. Yes. There’s a sense of tearing apart and isolating. And again, I think, you know, Rousseau bears some responsibility for making this, right, you know, a premier value. Yes. Yeah, I don’t know. I mean, you and I both, you know, work in academic settings. You’re going to Princeton. And it’s funny when you mention it, because my undergraduate career went exactly the opposite way of the individual you’re talking about. I started out in poli sci, and I moved deeper and deeper out. I moved out of it and into philosophy, and went the other way because I was coming out. I had been particularly set up by sort of the way I was brought up and the way I had rejected the fundamentalist Christianity I’d been brought up within. I had been set up with a particular kind of hunger that meant I was looking for something different. But that’s very idiosyncratic. But what I came to see, I think what’s happened since awakening from the meaning crisis, and a lot of convergent evidence is the meaning crisis has put many people into that same kind of situation, where they are sensing simultaneously a profound need for meaning and wisdom, but a profound lack. And so it’s almost inarticulate and inexpressible to them. They have this hunger and longing. And the number of people that my work and other people are not, this isn’t about me, but like when people, when I see people like yourself in this book, I think this book, and I hope you take this as a compliment, is a response to the meaning crisis. It’s a way of, yes, right. It was consciously that. Yes, great. I suspected so. So when everybody that is doing, and then what I see is when my students and even people that are in my social circle are touched by this in an articulate, in both senses of the meaning manner, the response is often powerful, almost visceral. So, right, they are disposed towards wanting a way of articulating and betrothing themselves to, no, no, there are things that should be of value that are not, they are not things that can be brought into the marketplace. Again, I’m not being a crypto Marxist here or anything like that. Right, right. But the proper recognition that- It’s very difficult to accuse me of that. Pardon me? It would be very difficult to accuse me of being a Marxist. Right. But nevertheless, we are both saying that the market, like all, it’s a powerful form of distributed cognition. It’s a dynamical system. It can do very great things. But we have fallen into a kind of idolatry by making it the sole dictator of our grammar and vocabulary for trying to articulate the meaning of our existence. And I think that- Well, that book, I mean, one of the reasons why I bang on so much about the instrumentalizing of education is precisely because that’s the kind of education that I largely received until I dropped out of school at 16 and went and joined an arts college. And I was able to prance about on the stage for the next two years. But what that meant was that I was reading great texts. I was reading Shakespeare. And I suddenly realized, oh, there’s material here, which just enriches my life and enriches my relationships, enriches the way that I can live now. And then I realized that actually there was this whole other kind of education out there, which used to be called humane education or liberal education in the pedagogical sense of the term, which was philosophy, theology, languages, poetry, great books. And that this education wasn’t to make you useful, but to make you flourish. That was the point of this education. And it wasn’t itself useful. The education wasn’t useful. It was meaningful. It was- Exactly. Yeah. So I sort of, I realized this. And then what happened was because I immersed myself in that education tradition, and I had to kind of dismantle the education I’d received and rebuild it up from the foundations as, you know, with a kind of Renaissance conception of what education was. I then went out into the world and I walked in the Chiltern Hills and I walked through the woods and I realized actually, it’s not just these books that are meaningful. It’s that the world in which I found myself is pregnant with meaning. And I have been told my whole life that it’s a resource, right? It’s a resource. And actually, it’s not a resource, right? It is something that, it is a world that we can use in order to make a home in this world, but it’s primarily pregnant with meaning and a source of meaning for me and for us. And so I went on this kind of philosophical mission to say, well, can this be rendered in technical terms? Can you make a robust, metaphysical and epistemological argument for the world being a realm of meaning, and that it’s right and just to see it in that way? And that book, that’s how it emerged. So two things about that. I’ve been talking with Jonas, or what’s his name, Solvik. He, I’ll release the video, I think this week. Jonas, I probably mispronounced your last name, please forgive me. He contacted me because he’s in Denmark. And he said, you know, the thing you’re talking about, I have this jokey phrase, the one stop enlightenment shop, right? And he says, you know, when you’re talking about that, right? Well, he said, I’ve been in, because here we have, and it’s state supported, we have what’s called Folk High School. And the education is exactly what you just described. They’ve completed high school. And what you do is you spend two years and you’re doing education. And it’s all about deepening personhood and deepening your discernment of the, you know, the meaningfulness of the world. And he said, yeah, you don’t come out of it with any special certificate. You don’t come out of it with any special designation. It’s in that sense, it’s completely useless. But he said, the Danish government, right, knows that this is right, they’re committed to, well, this makes good people. And right. And then you’ve got, you know, the similarity for the other Scandinavian countries, the Bildung movement, in which they created basically these secular monasteries where people would go as young adults, but you can go as an older adult if you wish, you’re not precluded. And you can basically spend two years doing exactly what you just described. So far, because I can hear people watching this going, oh, that’s so, oh, that’s so airy-fairy. No, no, no. Right. We have, we have, we have countries, which are often countries that place in the top 10 for places to live in the world who have committed to this, and they are reaping the benefits of it because they turn out to be some of the top 10 places in the world to live. Well, and for those who are dismissing what we’ve said, what people have failed to realise in the modern age is that if you, if you build something for useless reasons, the side effect of that is that it becomes the most useful thing. So people who educate themselves for flourishing don’t, the side effect of that is that they become the most employable people, right? And those are the kinds of people people want at management level, those are the kinds of people people want as front of house, engaging with others, those are the people that we want to employ. And that’s across the board. If you, people who build buildings for instrumental purposes very quickly have to knock them down because the technology changes and the working habits change and all sorts of things. But people who build buildings so that they’re beautiful, right, those buildings just keep on being reused. People want to use them as opera halls and they want to use them as restaurants and they want to use them as museums and they want to use them as railway stations and they just keep on finding new uses for them. Why? Because they weren’t built with use in mind, right? This is across the board and we really got to learn this lesson because we’re terrible at learning this lesson. Build for flourishing and you will always find the use, that’s the point. Seek ye first the kingdom of God, right? There you go. So Sebastian, we are not done by any means but why don’t we call it to a close for today and we can come back and pick this up and keep going. I want to thank you. This was rich and juicy and flowing and wonderful and it’s great getting to know you and to see you articulate this vision. I’d like to give the people who are on my show the last word. The opportunity to say what you, how, anything you want to say sort of simultaneously. I’m very grateful for this friendship. I think it’s hugely providential that you and I met each other in Cambridge and that we’ve kept up this conversation and I look forward to talking to you again and I look forward at some point to being with you in person. Yes, I would very much like that again too. Thank you very much.