https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=iu9fa4TkWE0
Welcome back to Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. So last time we looked in depth at Corbin and Jung and tried to draw out very deeply the notion of the relationship to the sacred second self. I launched into sort of a critical, sort of mutual criticism between Corbin and Jung and brought in some boobers along the way and then I pointed to somebody whose work also deriving from Heidegger integrates aspects of all of these together in kind of a profound way. Tillich is deeply influenced and aware of what he calls depth psychology, the kind of psychology in Jung. He of course is deeply aware of Heidegger. I don’t know, I don’t think that Tillich was aware of Corbin, but he is deeply aware of the symbol, of the symbol in an imaginal rather than in a merely imaginary way. Tillich takes the Meaning Crisis seriously. He writes perhaps his most well-known and I think it’s a masterpiece book, The Courage to Be as a response to the Meaning Crisis. Like Jung and Corbin and for very related reasons, he’s deeply critical of literalism and fundamentalism throughout. But he takes it deeper, as I mentioned. He really deepens it in terms of Heidegger’s critique of ontotheology and he becomes critical of literalism and fundamentalism as forms of idolatry in which we are attempting to have rather than become. So there’s some excellent books on the relationship between Jung and Tillich. This is a series of ongoing work by John Doerle. I recommend two books to you, The Psychic and Sacrament, which I tweeted about in my book recommendations. I would also represent his later book, Paul Tillich, Carl Jung, and The Recovery of Religion. But make no mistake, Doerle is not talking about a recovery in a nostalgic sense. He writes another book called Strategy for a Loss of Faith, where he is trying to get beyond classical theism. And so I recommend Doerle’s work as a comprehensive way of bringing about a deep dialogue and a kind of integration between Jung and Tillich. Okay, so Tillich sees the main response to the meeting crisis, and here’s how Tillich is not just theorizing. He is trying to give us guidance on how to live. And let’s remember that this really matters because of the way Tillich resisted the Nazis. Because what Tillich talks about in The Courage to Be is courage. Now, he’s careful to note that this is a kind of existential courage that ultimately allows us to confront and overcome meaninglessness in its depth, but also, of course, to more practically respond to perverted responses to the meeting crisis itself, like Nazism and its Gnostic nightmare. This process of encouragement. Now, he is like Aristotle. He’s talking about something as simple as just bravery facing danger or fortitude, the ability to endure. No, for Tillich, courage is a virtue. There’s something of wisdom in courage. Courage involves within it that central feature of wisdom, which is seeing through illusion into reality. The brave person faces danger, but that’s all we can say about them. The person with fortitude endures difficulty, but that’s all we can say of them. The courageous person sees through the illusion and the distortion of fear or distress to what is truly good and acts accordingly. So, what is this seeing through? And how does it help us confront the meeting crisis? So, this notion of seeing through, seeing to the depths, as Tillich often says, right, is related to Tillich’s notion of faith. And notice how we’re circling back around, and this is really a circle, because Tillich’s notion of faith is not the assertion of propositions to be believed. He is circling back, right, to the ancient Israelite Hebrew notion of the ath. And now we can add that that participatory knowing in a course of being is an aspirational process. Tillich understands faith as ultimate concern, that which concerns us ultimately. His notion of idolatry is to treat something that could be a symbolic icon through which you articulate and develop your ultimate concern. You transform that into an idol, an object to have and possess to control and manipulate. And you thereby are using the machinery that is appropriate for ultimate concern for something that is not ultimate. What is ultimate concern? What is concern? Well, when you’re concerned about something, you care about it, but you’re also coping with it. You’re committed to it. You’re involved in it. It encompasses you even though you are being involved in and through it. It is deeply perspectival and participatory. That’s what he’s trying to get at. And it is aspirational. And it is open-ended. It points towards the inexhaustibleness of the ground of being. So, of course, this Tillich’s notion is directed at Heidegger’s notion of Dasein. This concern, that Dasein is the being whose being is in question and therefore, by our participatory, our perspectival participatory knowing of our being, we come into deeper contact. But remember for Heidegger, that requires a deep remembering, an overcoming of our forgetfulness and alethea. We have to have the ontological wonder towards the ground of meaning, the ground of being. This leads right into Tillich’s notion of God, which I’m going to try and propose to you is transgressive of classical theism in important ways without it being identifiable with atheism in important ways. So, Tillich understands the importance of the ground of being. So, Fillich understands a symbol, an icon. God symbolizes the ground of being, and therefore God is no kind who can against that. to an idol as an imaginal symbol for the ground of being. God symbolizes the ground of being and therefore God is no kind of being. There is a no-thingness to God. God is no kind of thing. And any attempt to reify, to think of God as a thing is for Tillich a form of idolatry. So here’s what I’m trying to get you to see what Tillich means. Here’s meaning, right, and here’s reality, and here’s the relationship between them. God is the simultaneous grounding of all of these. You can see the influence of Heidegger here. God is the ground of the meaning-making, of reality, and of the relationship between them. And any attempt to limit God to any one of these three components, just to the meaning, just to the reality, just to the relationship between them, is for Tillich a profound kind of idolatry. This is why literalism and fundamentalism are so pernicious to him. So ultimate concern, if we allow ourselves to truly come into question and quest in a wondering way, if we participate in an aspirational trajectory motivated by ultimate concern, this puts us into a resonant relationship. This gets to what is known as Tillich’s method of correlation. This is how he saw himself doing theology. I know, it’s kind of odd for a naturalistic cognitive scientist to be talking about theology again, but I think we’ve gotten to a place where that seems to you as a viable and valuable thing to do. What’s the method of correlation? That there is always this ongoing tonos, this polar tension, which we talked about earlier, between existential questioning, understood as existential questing, and what Tillich calls revelation, the way the depths of reality reveal themselves. So these are always resonating with each other. The revelation has to fit the existential questioning, but the existential questioning has to fit itself. So there is a mutual dynamic fittedness going on. No, I want to get a verbal rather than an adjectival. There is an ongoing resonant fitting, mutual fitting togetherness of the existential questioning and the revelation. You can see how this is very similar to an agogay. I think one of the problems that I see in a lot of interpreters of Tillich, and I’ve read quite a few, is that this method has been, this correlational method has been misunderstood as just propositional theology. This is all about propositional proposals, look at the word proposition, propositional proposals, and then what we get are other propositions from the sacred text, the Bible, and what we’re doing is we’re putting the propositions of theology into concordance with the propositions of the Bible. And I think that’s to fundamentally trivialize Tillich, to not get at the depths, the existential depths of the method of correlation. I want to propose a different way of understanding that, that picks up on the tonus and takes us towards God as the ground of being, as I’ve represented it to you. And this is the language Tillich’s used. Tillich talks about the depths of reason. This is the neoplatonic, this is the platonic notion, that which makes reasoning possible. It’s all the relevance realization machinery, I would argue. The recursive machinery of rationality, the aspirational rationality that Kallard talks about, all those things, the depths of reason. And Tillich talks about that, right, we have an ecstatic relationship, ecstasy, with the depths of our reason, we’re standing beyond ourselves. It’s the depths of the psyche, but not just in the psychological way that Jung means, but also the depths of the grounding depths of our rationality. And then what stands between is a symbol in Corbin’s imaginal sense, and Tillich is so clear about that, right, the symbol to the depths of reality. So in the psyche, the depths of reason are experienced as ecstasis, self-transcendence, moving beyond myself, so crucial to aspiration, genuine self, genuine transcendence, and genuine self-transcendence. The depths of reality, Tillich talks about, he uses two words here, sometimes he uses the word miracle. And this is probably like, I know for me, that’s like, oh no, right, that’s like angel because this looks like magic in the pejorative sense of the word. He also talks about it as mystery. I think there’s two ways using some Heidegger, which is fair because of the Heideggerian influence on Tillich. We can think of miracle as that aspect of being that we’ve talked about as the shining, and we can talk about the mystery as that aspect we’ve talked about as the withdrawal into the moreness, the combinatorial explosive depths of reality. And of course, I’ve tried to argue through Heidegger and through Corbin, but especially through Heidegger, how these two are inter-affording in our sense of realness. And then the idea, the method of correlation is basically, as I suggested to you, the anagogy between the ecstasis as we resonate with the depths, the grounding and formative depths of reason are resonating with the grounding and formative depths of realness, and they are anagogically cycling together. So, you’ve heard all of this before, but let’s quickly repeat it. For Tillich, the symbol is much more than a sign. Chris Master Pietro in his first discussion with me brought this out excellently, and that is clearly the case in Tillich. The symbols are participatory. The symbol opens up levels of reality otherwise close to us. The symbol opens up levels of ourselves otherwise close to us, and it does this in a mutually affording resonant fashion. Symbols are not made by us. And this, of course, is something we’ve talked about before, and we’ll see it come out when we get to Barfield. They are self-organizing, and they grow out of the unconscious within us and the unconscious without us. Symbols have a life. They can die. They can be born, they can live, they can die. Tillich worries that many of the symbols in Christianity are dying, and that fundamentalism and literalism are an inappropriate way of trying to hold on to them and keep them alive rather than affording the rebirth, sorry, that’s just the wrong word, affording the new birth of a new symbol that brings back the relationship, the resonant relationship that the old symbol possessed. Perhaps this is what Jonathan Peugeot means when he feels that Christianity in the meaning crisis is going through a profound death and rebirth of its symbolic structure. For Tillich, symbols have a surplus of meaning. There is a moreness to them. If they’re not resonating with moreness, they’re not symbols. They have a numinous character grounded in the resonant depth of mind and reality. And therefore, symbols are deeply transformative, they’re deeply transjective, they’re deeply translucent, etc., etc. So this is why correlation is not just propositional theology. If you’re not undergoing a profound transformation, you’re not doing Tillich’s correlational method. So how is this transformation, how is it realized symbolically? It’s realized symbolically, and you’re going to see, okay, how is all of this, how is it realized by you? Both senses of the word realized, taken into your frame, but also actualized in reality. How is this transformative power of the symbol realized? It’s realized in the relationship between the existential self and the essential self. And you see what’s coming here? This is the relationship to the relationship of the current self, the self in existence, to the sacred second self. The essential self is the self in the fullness of being. Remember Plato’s Anagogy, the self in its fullness of being that is capable of recognizing through conformity the fullness of being in the world. This relationship that Tillich is pointing to use, we can use language we’ve carefully worked out together, this relationship between the existential self and the essential self is aspirational. Tillich repeatedly talks about how the essential self is ahead, of course not causally ahead, normatively ahead. The essential self is ahead, not causally, but normatively. It’s ahead of the existential self. The essential self beckons the existential self towards fulfillment. It’s constantly tempting, if you’ll allow me this language, the existential self to a better way of being. It’s trying to tempt it out of the world in which it might be existentially trapped. This is the gnosis within Tillich. So the sacred second self, and for Tillich this is bound up with, when St. Paul was talking about, remember when we talked about Agape, I used to be this way, I acted like a kid, and now here’s the new way, I act like a man, this is the way of Agape. So my salience landscape is softerson, it naturally self organizes to constantly tempt me towards the good. Tillich wrote a very excellent little book on Agape, I highly recommend it to you. So this aspirational, transformative journey of encouragement, literally embodying encouragement, gets us to confront seriously meaninglessness. Now in The Courage to Be, Tillich goes through various historical developments. In the ancient world, the meaningless is confronted in our being as the finitude of our being, and he talks about how the Stoics responded to that. And then he talks about during the Christian period, and especially during the Protestant Reformation, because Tillich is deeply influenced by Lutheranism, in a very critical way though, of course. And the meaningless is confronted within our self knowing as guilt, and he talks about the Protestant Reformation as an attempt to seriously respond to the issue of guilt. And then now in our current period, we are experiencing meaninglessness in our self as despair, and he says that is being represented by the existentialists. Of course Tillich is writing in the period of the 50s and 60s when existentialism was still more prevalent. We of course can talk about things following on existentialism if we have more time, like postmodernism and other things that are represent, not represent, discussing and articulating a deeper way in which we are embodying the meaning crisis. But nevertheless, you can follow this trajectory through The Courage to Be. You can go through the Stoics, you can go through the Protestant Christians, you can go into the existentialists, and this trajectory leads us to a position beyond all three. The position that Tillich is arguing for, which he calls the response to faith. Remember faith is da’af for Tillich. It is not the willful assertion of belief. And here’s the thing, and this is why idolatry is so pernicious for Tillich. The no-thingness of God coming to really encounter the no-thingness of God is central to this notion of faith. The no-thingness of God takes into itself the no-thingness, right? So no, sorry I misspoke. The no-thingness, let me change how I’m pronouncing these terms because it will help. The no-thingness of God takes into itself the nothingness of meaninglessness and it overcomes it. The no-thingness of God has a transformative power over the nothingness of despair. So this is the notion of a fundamental aspect, identity shift. And here’s where if I had time, and I’ll bring it out when I get into this other series, I would talk about Nishatani because his book of religion and nothingness is an extended philosophical profound examination of this fundamental aspect shift, identity shift. Remember what an aspect shift is? Remember the Necker cube, right? You’re looking at something and the thing doesn’t change but the aspect by which you’re seeing it changes. It flips and what’s salient, what’s foreground and background, but this isn’t just a shift of aspect. That’s why I’m creating this neologism, right? It’s an aspect identity shift. What does it mean? You come to see the no-thingness of God, you come to experience it as the inexhaustible creation of meaning. It is an inexhaustible fount of meaning cultivation. It is the ground of meaning, intelligibility, the relationship between them, etc. for Tilak. Nishatani thinks the same thing can be found within Buddhism, that when we deeply realize the no-thingness of Shunyata, when we participate it, when we identify with it, we gain the competence, the ability to aspect shift the nothingness of meaninglessness so that we come to see it instead as pointing to its ground, which is an inexhaustible source of meaning cultivation that cannot be drained dry by our despair. There is a fecundity at the level of fundamental framing and the way it’s coupled to being that cannot be drained dry by despair. When we stop trying to push away the nothingness but have instead an imaginal relationship to it and move through it, anagogically, in an imaginal fashion with the nothingness of God, then we overcome meaninglessness. We overcome meaninglessness. Nietzsche bumped up against this, he got close to it. If you stare long enough into the abyss, it begins to stare long enough into you. But you know what Nietzsche didn’t do? He didn’t stare long enough. He didn’t look deeply enough. That’s Nishatani’s critique of Nietzschean nihilism. This fundamental aspect shift in which the nothingness of despair is transformed into the revelation of no-thingness as inexhaustible being meaning. This takes, and Tillich talks about the mystical tradition, there’s a term from Gregory of Nyssa from the Eastern Orthodox Neoplatonic tradition. And you see it also in John Scotus’ Erogena, right, picks it up, this notion of epic-tasis, which is such a cool sounding word, it sounds so cool anyways. So this is the idea, so there’s a sort of standard, I suppose you might call it a teleological model of sort of salvation, where the point is, I’m moving towards a final destination, the promised land, in which I will see God and I will come to rest in the promised land. The whole point of a purpose is that it self-dissolves. When I’ve achieved my purpose, I’ve realized my goal, then the pursuit has ended. But Gregory of Nyssa and Erogena have this different notion of epic-tasis. So here you’re not trying to rest in God. God is not ultimately had, even in resting in him. So what the human being is engaging in, now for them there’s a myth also, this continues on after your death, in a life after death, and I’ll put that aside. But nevertheless, the notion here of infinite self-transcendence in the infinity of God, right, there is no resting. There is only the constant, the constant disclosure of the inexhaustibleness of the ground of being. The transjectivity and the trans-framing never stop. They never stop. So the method of correlation and the encouragement are therefore, are emphasized as transjective in nature. Tillich explicitly and repeatedly argues that the symbol joins together and grounds, it joins together but also grounds the subjective and the objective. He talks about how even Nietzsche uses this in the notion of will to power. Nietzsche in his notion of will to power is trying to use something that is, right, has a subjective meaning, will, but also like the will to power, power in existence, the way everything is sort of, right, like Spinoza’s, Canada’s, like pushing itself and maintaining itself in existence. He’s trying to get something that bridges between the subjective and the objective. And this is one of the ways in which therefore Tillich is different than Jung. And there’s criticism in Tillich of Jung, also appreciation of Jung, right. Tillich sees, of course, the process of individuation, very similar to the way Jung does. And this, right, this is perhaps the more subjective side of the symbolic-imaginal relationship. But Tillich always, and this is the tonos again, always puts that into creative tension with participation, not just in groups, although he’s not excluding that, but this is your participation in being. And he relates that to, and this is really interesting, neither the autonomy of being, sorry, that’s wrong, wrong word, autonomy of reason, emphasized in the enlightenment, nor what he calls, right, a hetero-heteronomous, or sometimes he even uses the more religious The demonic imposition of authority from without. And see how this just so beautifully lines up with the problem of aspiration, right. Remember it can’t be something that just slams you from the outside that you passively receive. It can’t be something that you just autonomously make, or you don’t actually get genuine self-creation. Or what I would call self-transcendence. Tillich sees this overcome in what he calls a theonomous. Which literally means God ordered, God governed, but of course God here means the ground of being the ongoing epic paces of the inexhaustible, the affordance of ongoing trans-framing. So what we see here is trans-jectivity, the sacred second self, we see the anagogic ascent joining reason and revelation together, and the fundamental aspect shift, the deep criticism of fundamentalism and literalism, and there is of course therefore something that is deeply about Gnosis. And the connection to Gnosis-ism and the transgression of theism is explicit in Tillich. Tillich talks about this whole process, and this is why I qualified so much the use of the word theonomous. He qualifies this whole process as the process in which we are responding deeply to the meaning crisis. He calls this as a realization of the God beyond the God of theism. The God beyond the God of theism, which is a deeply transgressive statement. It’s very Gnostic in the sense of seeing God as that which is the demiurge entrapping us within existential entrapment, the existential entrapment of the meaning crisis. This whole process is so transjective and so transformative in nature that, and it is so deeply resistant to literalism, fundamentalism, and idolatry that it is going to take us to the God beyond the God of theism. This is the non-theism of Tillich. Non-theism is a position that tries to transcend theism and atheism. Many people are talking about it now. There’s related ideas like anathetism, which is sort of the kind of theism that you get after going through atheisms. I think this is a better way of talking about it, non-theism. Non-theism is the correct and appropriate way, as I’ve already mentioned, of talking about religions like Buddhism and Taoism. Theism is the rejection of the presuppositions that are shared by both theism and atheism. I will go into this in much greater detail in another series. This is not an exhaustive list. It is just a preliminary list, but nevertheless I think a good starting point. What are four shared presuppositions between the classical theist and the atheist? Number one, God is the supreme being. The theist accepts that, gives a yes to that, and the atheist gives a no to it, but they both accept that proposition as the one they are debating about. The non-theist rejects that. Number two, God is accessed primarily or even solely through belief. The theist and the atheist agree to this. They just disagree about whether or not there’s really any access to be found. The non-theist rejects both of these. Number three, theology or antitheology, which is what atheism often engages in, although I’m not equating atheism to antitheology, but theology and antitheology do not require transformative anagogy. All you need to do is have possession of the propositions and be able to infer the correct implications, thereby losing everything that we’ve been talking about in these last four episodes. The theist and the atheist agree with that proposition. The non-theist rejects it. Number four, sacredness is personal or impersonal. The theist and the atheist disagree about which one of those to pick. The theist says it’s personal. The atheist says it’s impersonal. I agree that trying to say that the atheist has nothing that functions like sacredness in their life just does not sit with their performative existence. But I do agree when the atheist says that they do not share the theist’s notion of sacredness as something fundamentally personal. The non-theist rejects that. The non-theist rejects that sacredness is personal or impersonal. Rather because the non-theist rejects the Cartesian grammar that drives it, the non-theist argues that sacredness is transjective, participatory. It is aspirational. This is what Tillich was going on about. My main criticism of Tillich is, although in one way he’s way more practical than Heidegger and he’s giving us guidance on how to live, how to cultivate courage and faith, he does not offer practices of transformation. See Jung actually created a practice, intra-psychic though it might be, he created a practice for enacting and cultivating the imaginal. He created active imagination, which is not just to, in an imaginary sense, call up images. It’s not just to conceptually think about things, it’s to allow images to self-organize in an autopoetic fashion such that the depths of the psyche are revealed so that the self and the equal can talk to each other. Jung creates a practice of active imagination. He creates a practice of dream interpretation and that is sadly missing in Tillich. Tillich is better than Heidegger, I would argue, and then Tillich gives us a way to live, courage and faith, deeply reinterpreted, but he does not give us the processes that Jung gives us. This notion of deep symbolic participation that is translated into practices, I think goes to the heart of Owen Barfield’s work. So Barfield is one of the Inklings, he is part of the ongoing discussion and fellowship between Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, of course Barfield, Charles Williams, those are the core four, and then a bunch of other people. I would recommend three books to try and get a better sense of Barfield. Lost Knowledge of the Imagination by Lachman, which I’ve already recommended to you. The Fellowship, The Literary Lives of the Inklings, and there’s that word Inkling again, The Literary Lives of the Inklings by Philip Zalesky and, oh is it Carol Zalesky? There’s the two Zaleskys anyways, that’s a very good book. And then the book I would most heartily recommend, it’s a book that I’m finding brilliant, is the book Owen Barfield, Philosophy, Poetry and Theology by D.F. Fiscia. All of this will come up of course on the panels. So a couple of things, Barfield is definitely influenced by Gnosticism. He’s influenced by Rudolf Steiner and I won’t go into it, you can read the book in depth. Steiner has, I’ll either say too little or too much about Steiner. It’s a mystery to many people, myself included, why Barfield was so taken with Steiner and thought so highly of him. But if you reinterpret Steiner as basically a modern Gnostic who’s generating a Gnostic mythology, the two worlds and the divine spark and all this kind of stuff, then you understand perhaps why Barfield was so enamored with Steiner. I think Steiner was the vehicle whereby Gnosticism comes into Barfield’s thinking. So Barfield is therefore influenced by Gnosticism, he’s influenced by Neo-Platonism through Coolridge, the romantic poet who also engages in some important philosophy. D.Fuscia makes very clear, this is one of the most profound parts of the book. The deep indebtedness that Coolridge had to the early Romantics or the post-Contians, people that follow Cont and go on a different path from the later Romantics and Hegel. So a prototypical figure here from these early Romantics or post-Contians is somebody like Schlegel. And what these early Romantics emphasized is they emphasized the infinity of reality. This is really interesting, I find it so infinity, right? When I’m trying to get the nonfiniteness, the lack of being bound, being fully frameable rather than just being uncountable, although I’m alluding of course again to combinatorial explosion. So they emphasize the infinity of reality and this term is used by them and by D.Fuscia and his examination of Owen Barfield. This is the inexhaustibleness, the inexhaustible moreness. And the idea is that the inexhaustible moreness is that which continually draws us, constantly draws us and affords us into self-transcendence, that inexhaustible moreness. So Schlegel had a way of putting this, the finite longing for the infinite, the finite longing for the infinite. And it’s this induction, I’m using this word to draw out, right? Which of course became our word education, which if we think of education aspirationally is fine, the way Kallard does. It is this induction that discloses or reveals the sacredness. So our transjectivity, our finite, our epistasis, our epistatic trajectory, our finite, our always finite, our always framed longing for the trans-framing that discloses but never completely discloses the combinatorially explosive inexhaustible moreness of reality and simultaneously discloses the ongoing capacity of relevance realization to adapt to that in a coupled manner. We experience and we participate, I’m using this as a transitive verb, we experience and participate this in creativity. Not creativity just in the sense of making but the creativity in, like you experience in the flow state. See how this is different from the later Romantics? This is not being, this is not to find the contact in realness in some irrational locus in the psyche or in Hegel as the dialectic of a system, a propositional system. But instead is to find sacredness in the flow of self-transcendence within creativity. And this is what is meant by poesis, what we translate as poetry. Barfield picks up on this poesis as ecstasis in creativity, the way we stand beyond ourselves in creativity. And he’s very clear about how this is, right, it’s a transformative experience, there’s a felt change in consciousness that self after is both continuous and discontinuous from the self before the transformative experience. All that stuff we’ve been talking about with the sacred second self and aspiration. There’s an ecstasis within the creativity, there’s an ecstasis in creativity, there’s an ecstasis in creativity found within poetry and the poetical aspects of everyday language that can reawaken us to this kind of connectedness, to the inexhaustableness, a connectedness that experiences it as sacredness. So Barfield looks at words, the etymology, the history of words. I touched on this briefly earlier when I was talking about symbols and I had, I made some sort of criticisms of Barfield which I noted at the time were preliminary and promissory and I promised to come back to them in more depth as a way of trying to both defend my criticism but also to defend a deeper reading of Barfield. So you remember the idea here is we have a word like Pneuma, the Greek or Spiritus. And Barfield knows if you go for, and for us, right, it, right, so for the Greeks or for the Latins, the Romans, for Spiritus, it can mean both wind or what we now think of the word spirit, sort of the self-moving aspects of the psyche. And we divide it into, right, spirit is this. We really don’t, can’t see it that way but there’s a division here and for Barfield this division replicates the sort of Cartesian division between the objective world of like wind and the subjective world of what’s going on in the psyche in its self-movement or self-contact. But what Barfield says is when you go back, there isn’t this, right. These terms are used and they’re treated as if they have a kind of identity, what I would argue is a non-logical identity but they’re not, they interpenetrate, they inter-afford each other these meanings that we see as so antithetical, so disjunctive with respect to each other. For Barfield, people who use the word that way were engaged in a form of participation. This is a way of being before the division, before the Cartesian disjunction. I would argue that what Barfield is pointing to is that these people had a more transjective, anagogic resonance with reality so that the wind is imaginable for them in that it discloses the self-moving aspects of reality and themselves in a highly resonant fashion. The reason I want to say that is because I’m not quite sure about his evolutionary hypothesis. I pointed to the work of Lakoff and Johnson that show we, we, unlike the people of the ancient past, we use language in this fashion. A way that is pervasive through all of our cognition and speech. Words have these dual meanings, an inner and outer meaning. I pointed to work that I’ve published on and the work that they’ve published on, how we use the word attack. There’s many examples, this is only one. That’s the point, there’s many, many of these examples. We use the word attack and we mean physical, physical destruction. I attack the castle, at least the intent to physically destroy it. But we also mean critical argumentation. He attacked that point that I just made. And we don’t feel, they’re not logically identical, but we don’t feel them as radically disjunctive from each other. Notice we do it with this. Yes, I want to do it that way. We can use something here and we’ll use the word see and we can use that to mean either visual experience. We can use see to mean to understand. And then that converges back, we can use understand or originally understand, but we change it to understand. And that can mean to stand under, but it can also mean conceptual understanding. And so there’s a weird synonymy between understand and see. I’m trying to point out to you how complex this is. Now what’s interesting about Lake Offon Johnson is they don’t claim this as an evolutionary thing pointing to inks and ways of being conscious. This is something pervasive in our cognition and our culture right now. And it doesn’t point to the evolution across generations. It points to psychological development within individuals. Psychological development within individuals. According to Lake Offon Johnson, we start out in sensory motor seeing and then that gets taken up into this conceptual sense of seeing. We start with a sensory motor way of understanding, that gets taken up. We start as a sensory motor way of attacking and that gets taken up. It’s a psychological process of development and it is ongoing right now and it is pervasive. There might be something sort of fundamentally wrong therefore with Barfield’s evolutionary analysis. Now Vervecky and Kennedy argue that the psychological development is deeper than as being represented by Lake Offon Johnson. We argue that the model is too simplistic. As I mentioned, we argue that there should be a top-down aspect to this psychological development, not just bottom-up. So there’s a sense in which we agree with Lake Offon Johnson that there’s stuff coming up from the sensory. But we think, and here’s the influence of Corbin, right? Especially on me. I don’t know if there’s an influence on John Kennedy, but definitely on me. Here’s the abstract intellectual and here’s the concrete sensory and then they meet together in the imaginal. When I say I see what you’re saying, this is an imaginal way that’s getting a top, a bottom-up from seeing as a sensory motor thing and then bringing into imaginal expression this abstract, not yet speakable sense of understanding. That helps to explain why these two very different sensory motor things, verbal experience, standing other or a totally different one, grasping or yet another one, getting. Why do all of these converge? Because there is something like an intellectual form that they converge upon, but it is also expressed, developed through these different imaginal renderings that connect back to concrete instances of the sensory motor. So, I argued that we can link that to Michael Anderson’s notion of the massive redeployment hypothesis, the circuit reuse, cognitive exaptation. I went through this idea of how the symbolic, now you can understand it as the imaginal, is this process of reexaptation. How I can invoke balance, I can invoke balance to talk about justice and then I have the image, not an imaginary, the imaginal statue of Lady Justice as a way of using, reexapting the physical balance machinery and using that machinery to give a structural functional organization to this hard to articulate ineffable sense of justice. Recycling that whole process and inducing new functions, it’s an enacted metaphor, it’s an enacted symbol. This is poesis, I think, in its deepest sense. This helps to explain the translucency of the symbol, why we can see through it, see it and see through it. I can look at it as physical balance, but I can see through it into justice. And justice and balance are not logically identical, but they’re not separate from each other. It also explains our temptation to literalism and idolatry. We can forget, we can forget justice and focus just on having balance. We can lose the iconic seeing through and only look at the concrete. Now back to Barfield’s evolutionary schema. He talks about that we had original participation and then there’s the division, which is the He’s really explicit about the meaning crisis. Read the opening essay and the rediscovery of meaning. He’s really clear about that. And we have the two worlds mythology and we have that everything is being broken up, the inner and the outer are being separated, the subjective, the objective, blah, blah, blah. You know all of this. But the idea is what we need to do is to move to what he calls final participation as a response to the meaning crisis. Final participation is a recovery of participation integrated within the gains of the rational sciences. Now he says that and that’s explicitly and importantly what he means and I take him at his word. Part of what that means and this is what he emphasizes is the recovery of the perspectival and the participatory. And I think that is deeply right and deeply consonant. But here’s where I’m critical of Barfield. I think it also means, and this is where Barfield does not do, I think, good work, it also means a science of meaning cultivation. How does that participatory and perspectival participation fit into our scientific processes, our scientific way of being? If you’re going to integrate in final participation, participation with the scientific rational mind, both sides have to be involved in this marriage or it will fail. That of course is what I’ve tried to do with relevance realization theory and then put it into discourse with spirituality, symbolism, sacredness and these great prophets of the meaning crisis. Now here’s more of a criticism of Barfield’s followers. I think there needs to be more understanding of how much Barfield is indebted to Coolridge and Schlegel and understanding sacredness as a poesis participation of the inexhaustible within transformative creativity. You can’t simply import Barfield into classical theism and say, oh he’s just talking about the things we’ve always been talking about. How is that going to bring about final participation? That is not fair to Barfield’s argument or his ideas. This leads to the point that D’Fuchsia argues, that this is what makes Barfield different to Heidegger. Heidegger as we saw took from Eckhart this notion of letting the rose be and he takes up this notion from Eckhart, glasenheit, John Caputo talks a lot about this, the letting be and he tends to emphasize a deep, so you can see what Heidegger is doing, he’s trying to respond but like Nietzsche he’s overcompensating Descartes’ notion of the complete activity of mind. So Heidegger responds by a complete passivity, glasenheit, letting be, letting be. It’s a deep passivity, it’s so bloody Lutheran. And there’s something deeply right about that aspect of Eckhart but Heidegger forgets the other important term in Eckhart, Dirkbrück, Dirkbrück, breakthrough, breakthrough. You know what breakthrough is all about? It’s about attentional scaling, breaking the inappropriate frame, moving through and making the new frame. Dirkbrück is just as important as glasenheit and this is something Barfield picks up on, that his notion of creativity as participatory is not to be just passively receptive. Of course it’s not what Heidegger criticizes either, the Cartesian technological imposition of our will on the world. That’s not what’s meant by poesis either. Poesis is synergistic. God, because I think Barfield is ultimately non-theistic in some very important ways, God plays the leading role but we contribute. And this was the original Hebrew insight of the Ath. We’re not just passive recipients of history nor are we its complete authors. We participate history, we participate in history and we are synergistically working with God in its making. Is Barfield a non-theist? I don’t know. I can’t make that argument as clearly as I can make it for Heidegger, for Jung, for Corbin, for Tillich. I suspect though if Barfield were to talk to these other prophets of the meeting crisis, he would also be led into a kind of non-theism. That is clearly the case for people like Schlegel who so deeply influenced him. What have I tried to show you? I’ve tried to show you that the language, not the language, the vocabulary, the grammar, the framework of relevance realization and how it can be developed to talk about spirituality and sacredness can be put into deep dialogue with Heidegger, deep dialogue with Corbin, deep dialogue with Jung, deep dialogue with Tillich, deep dialogue with Barfield and also afford deep dialogue critical but creative dialogue between them and afford a potential synoptic integration. All of this is what I’ve meant by and what I mean by awakening from the meeting crisis. Thank you so very much for this long journey we have traveled together. I’ve often taxed your attention, your patience, your understanding, your good spirits. I thank you for the ongoing support and appreciation and encouragement many of you have given me. And I look forward to an ongoing dialogue in the next series that I will be talking about. Thank you very much. I want to thank deeply the crew, Constance here, my brothers in this project who continually afforded it and made it possible to be presented to you at this exemplary level of excellent quality. Thank you very much, one and all. Thank you.