https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=u5C_9OhdbvM
Yeah, let’s do that. So I clicked on record. If you like, I can upload it. Nice hassle for you. Okay, you can send me the file. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Yeah, because like you are the host. So I can’t record on my end unless they use me permission. So if you just yeah you can just, you know, drop box or Google Drive the file to me and I’ll upload it on my channel as well. Yeah, okay, cool. Yeah, let’s do that. Well, what should we talk about? Well, I’m, I’m, I’d like to broach a topic with you because I’m trying to enter into a bunch of discussions around this topic. And I thought you would be A really good person to talk to. It’s sort of the main theme that you know my series is oriented towards and that my channel is building towards and of course I’ve I touched upon it. In this series, which you know is the relate the modern relationship or the current relationship moderns now. Yeah, a question term. So let’s call it the current relationship between science and spirituality and I think heidegger has a lot to say about that. I think he does and I was wondering, and I know that you and Guy have been talking about that. And I imagine that when the three of us talk, not that long and I’m looking forward to that. This would get this would give sort of maybe some preliminary work like we don’t need to resolve anything or anything pretentious like that today. But, you know, get the topic going and then maybe the three of us could pick it up. How does that sound as a proposal to you? Sounds good. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. So one I think sort of relatively easy way to start might be With heidegger’s proposal to proposals, perhaps that are linked in my mind around this question. One proposal is that the history of Western metaphysics is basically the history of nihilism. Yeah. And then the other proposal is that this is not just an epistemic ontology, but it’s actually woven into our environmental ontology in terms of technology. The idea of the way, you know, technology has basically in framed us in that ontology, put the world in a standing reserve. And it seems to me, those themes are very relevant to this relationship between science and spirituality in the current time. And as you know, I touched upon those, at least the first one. A little bit the second one, but I touched upon the first one in awakening from the meeting crisis. Yeah. So I wanted to hear what your thoughts are. If you think it’s fair for me to bring those two points together, if they’re relevant to this topic and then what some of your initial thoughts are on that. Yes, I think very relevant. As you know, Heidegger speaks of Gestell as the essence of technology, which often is translated as in framing, or you could translate also as positionality or positioning or the concentration of all forceful demanding positioning so that everything is turned into a standing reserve, standing ready to be exploited for the sake of something else. That’s the will to will that kicks in. The will that wills itself, you can kind of see the positive feedback loop that kicks in here as well. And that’s what capital functions like, etc. That always runs in parallel. So Heidegger himself says in an interview with Richard Wisser in the late 60s, that he’s not against technology. He doesn’t oppose it. He is, I’m, I’m not against technology. I’m not against technology. He doesn’t speak of the demon in technology of something evil that’s occurring there. It’s simply he just tries to understand its meaning. And he actually also says that he sees a preview in technology, what he calls ereignis, to the event. So that’s a very interesting quote. That’s something maybe we can pick up at some other point too, because that’s really weird. But anything that Heidegger, when he starts, publicly, and this is also very important, I think, that Heidegger becomes a sort of a public intellectual, because the idea, of course, of Heidegger is he sits in his hut. I mean, he basically didn’t, he lived there when they were younger and they had no money, but they didn’t live there. He lived in Freiburg with his family, and then later on back in Mecklenburg in his hometown. But he did spend time in the hut, of course, throughout his life. But he was also very, so as he starts working or thinking through the meaning of technology and its origin, he begins to be very public. So he gives the talk on the question concerning technology at the Technical University of Munich to an audience of engineers. And he gives talks on traditional language and on original language and technical language to teachers, to high school teachers. So simply to professionals who will then go out into the world and have to make sense of what’s going on. But everything he writes on technology and framing, et cetera, is always in parallel with his writings on the gefiert, which is a weird German word. It means it’s usually translated as fourfold or the four regions. Mortals, us, Earth, sky and gods, which are or remain unnamed. But there’s, you cannot have one without the other. So in framing, Gestell runs almost in parallel. These are two different dimensions. We’re kind of in at the same time. You can’t have one without the other. And this is what you would say the technological and the spiritual are. Right, right. Okay. That’s interesting. So my, I was taught to translate it as in framing and that you said that’s an okay translation, right? Right. So the idea is You know, the positioning, am I to understand this, that this gets into Both of these modes that you’ve described the fourfold and the technological and framing. I want to try and translate that into more phenomenological terms for people. What does that mean for people like to say that the Like when you say, you know, everything is put at a standing reserve. That sounds like a purely conceptual thing, but that’s deeply not Heidegger’s point, right? Yeah. I mean, I take it to be something along the lines, you know, it’s sort of woven into our cultural cognitive grammar in a very profound way so that it’s almost transparent to us. It’s kind of almost like the lens through which we’re seeing ourselves and seeing the world. Yeah. Is that an appropriate way of talking about it? It’s good. So transparent, I’ve not thought of that term before, but it’s so transparent that we don’t see it. Right, right. I think that’s an interesting way of putting it when you say it’s transparent. It’s yes, it’s, it is, it has to do, I think, with perspective. And it’s not just so exactly. It’s not about a concept. So Heidegger is not one to give us a concept by which to understand. He says the way that beings now appear to us as, for example, an airplane or a chicken. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There’s almost no, there is no difference. Because they both, in some, on some different level, just stand ready to serve some, some means. So it’s all in a different terminology. You could say it’s all. Yeah. And we do, right? You think of like human resource departments at the university, right? We are resources, right? And we are resources. And there’s all this idea and Fromm talked in a similar manner about, you know, the marketing character, how we, we’re sort of self promoting commodities. Yes. You know, we’re also, under neoliberalism, we’re each, you know, we have our own brand. And the funny thing, of course, we have to play with that a bit, but we have to play with that a bit. And then from within, which is you can play with that matrix. But only, I think, if you see it, right, if you purely think of yourself as a resource, you will be exploiting yourself. And that’s violent language. So there’s a certain violence in that, too. And he says, herausfordern. So, you know, you can’t just say, hey, I’m going to be a herausfordern. So in opposition to, and this is a literal opposition to the, because he wants us to come back to a primordial understanding of nature, which is, as you know, is physics. Yeah. The notion, so Heraclitus says, physis cryptis tae fillae, nature likes to hide herself. We can’t see nature, but the way we understand nature is that we try, we use it as a tool for our means. And that has to do, to come at this from a totally different perspective, from Hegel, for example, that has to do with human freedom. So we are free to do so. That’s kind of our emancipation. And of course, the current discourse on deep ecology, environmentalism, etc. recognize that there’s something profoundly at odds between us and nature. What I think we can read from out of Hegel and out of Heidegger is that nature must have its own essence. It must be allowed to be in its own terms and its own right. And to some degree, this means that nature is not fully accessible to us. And that has, so that comes back to, we can talk about, you know, Does that switch the accessibility of nature? Does that correspond to a switch in us? What I mean is, we have a kind of an egocentric in which we are seeing, we’re thinking of everything of how it’s in service to us. And rather, you know, and I don’t mean sort of at an everyday level, but at a deeper level in the way in which we might be in service. So let me explain what I mean. Previous cultures saw their, you know, their soul, their who they are, a person was there ultimately they’re being in service to God, right? The direction of the ontology, the direction of service was ontocentric rather than egocentric. So is that switching in the accessibility of nature? Does it also bring with it like an inversion or a reversal of that orientation of service? Yeah, definitely. It’s that’s that’s the tragedy of modernity as a whole, I would say. That’s the trajectory that all of modernity is on. That’s that’s what so the, you know, people talk about acceleration is a capital, whatever you want to call it. What this is, there is a certain explosion that takes place in just in knowledge, knowledge production. Yes. And also, a literal explosion in terms of human beings. Also in power. I mean, literal physical power, our ability to exert power on the earth is tremendous now. But every time we exert power, we, we deny that there’s something that remains hidden and concealed. And at pushback, that’ll that’ll come to haunt us, right? It’s like the outside is the underworld that all of a sudden will flip and the sheer horror will begin to show itself. Modernity begins and you can call whatever you call this. It has to do with power and explosion of power and intelligence. Yes. And that explosion kicks off, I would say, when when the tea loss is abandoned. So teleology, bacon explicitly gets rid of the tea loss. Yeah, that’s it was an impediment to the sciences for 2000 years. So he blames Aristotle for having come up with the and everything explodes. Right. So the call there’s a wonderful book by Alexander query, which is not much read today, which is from the closed world or from the cosmos to the infinite universe. Right. Yeah, of course, the multiverse. So you can see these explosions in all directions were exploding towards the infinite multiverses. But it will we’re also exploring exploding further and further down into the subatomic quant level and whatever levels. So that explosion goes in all directions, we can mash up everything. And it’s I think there’s the day cup kind of articulated is that the ego is at the center of this self differential. Ego that simply is is holding on to itself and only to contact is only on itself. Right. The contact with the world that’s so central in the Aristotelian worldview has withdrawn into the cogito right kind of thing. Exactly. So it goes it totally it’s exactly this right. But when you read the meditations, right, not a not from from the scholarly perspective, but simply as from a common sense, even from a common sense perspective, you read it, it’s quite some of it is really violent, right, quite cruel. I’m looking outside. I don’t even know if these people are real. They could just be these robots. What do I know? And then the only way that he can come back outside into the world is because God guarantees that there’s some Interdependence between cogitans and extensor. That’s also that’s ultimately even putting God in service. Yeah, right. God’s ultimate function is an epistemic function, right. God’s there to guarantee as guarantor of my truth claims ultimately, which is like, again, this part of this huge, huge inversion. Rather than God rather than God representing the inexhaustible of the sacred depth. God is now this perfect guarantor of my assertions, which is like, yes, such a huge inversion. Yes, it’s okay. Yeah, it’s good. Yes. Yes, I can just say yes, it’s true. Because when you look, you know, the way we can look at this now and coming back to choir is book from the close world to the infinite universe or something. The book ends with an anecdote from Napoleon and Laplace. Yes. Presents to Napoleon his model of the universe, which is a pure like a clockwork. Yeah. Napoleon asks about Laplace, but where is God? And he says, I no longer need this hypothesis. Need that hypothesis. And God is a hypothesis. The master of the clockwork in Descartes and in Bacon. It’s already there. And that’s simply that’s perhaps also what Nietzsche refers to when he speaks of the death of God. How were we capable of doing this is precisely because the inexpressible or the inexhaustible, the exuberance of the divine, that’s totally gone. Heidegger says somewhere, the God of metaphysics, and I think he points this out as well in some of the lectures, the God of metaphysics is not a God you can sing and dance for. It’s not a God you fall down on your knees in awe. It’s the hausa sui, that means the self causing cause. That is just an hypothesis. It’s nothing that could inspire, there’s nothing dangerous about this God. Well, there’s nothing that will give you an aporetic challenge to cause you to aspire to some deep transformation. And I mean, there’s a couple points I want to make here and see what you think about it. One, that seems to me to be the culmination, right, of the idea that we can do theology, talk about God, without having to undergo any kind of deep transformation. The next one is, I’ll just list these and then you can respond to them at length. You talk about this explosion, but it seems to be inherently bound up with this exploitation that we’ve also been talking about. So while we’re getting a quantitative increase, there’s kind of a shallowing going on. I was thinking when you were talking about that, I was thinking about Hans critique, his critique of Foucault, he said, you don’t need huge oppressive systems because we have an framing in which self exploitation is our fundamental way of being. He talks about that whole achievement, we’re just working to work because things work because that’s how they work, because technology works. And it’s all that sort of spinning. And I thought that was something you might want to talk about. And then maybe gather that together back towards, because I feel it’s now looming on the horizon of our discussion, which is the history of metaphysics, is the history of nihilism. Where that doesn’t mean the coming to the fore of a particular ideological position. It means something more like this, you know, this modal emptying of our capacity to get to the depths of ourselves and the world, things like that. So those are sort of three points you can play with. Have fun. Points. I love to play with it because when you said the first point was so we can talk about theology. Yeah, yeah. Actually, that’s what we’ve been doing, right? Yes, yes, very much. So what I mean by this is the explosion works on all levels. Yes. Explosion of knowledge and an explosion of historical data. We have access to everything. That’s extremely odd, because while we have this extreme access to all kinds of data points and information, at the same time, we seem to be cut off from something rather crucial, which is a genuine experience of something divine, religious. So we can look at all the different religions across all civilizations. We can find more and more and more. It seems like we get less and less access to the divine. A short story I sometimes like to mention by Ian Foster is The Machine Stops, which describes 1910, I think, more than 100 years ago. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. People live on the ground. And all they do is they’re connected like us now online, and they talk about ideas. The word idea is all over the place. And so they talk about ideas of all the, for example, music in Aboriginal Australian culture. Now, all of this can be very interesting and enlightening on some level, but it’s never, it doesn’t get to, and this is why I think why he makes, you know, gives the metaphor of some people living on the ground. It’s because they’re no longer even on the earth. And there’s an illusion to Plato, right? There’s a, I took it to be an illusion to Plato’s allegory there. Exactly. It’s that’s the cave. And I would just, I think that we live basically through the cave. Right, right, right. You need to show itself, right? That there’s truth to what philosophy is trying to tell us. And so we, and the same counts, of course, for philosophy itself, right? We’ve never had, so philosophy is, is not dying actually in academia. So yes, it’s getting defunded all over the place, but there are more philosophers probably now than ever before. And there’s all kinds of historical engagement with any kind of philosophical school ever that there ever was. But the question is, is there a genuine access to these experiences? This is something Heidegger says again and again, is you can read all of this, but you have to have made the experience. If the experience is lacking, then it’s kind of a simulacrum of the, of the real thing. It is a part of Plato’s critique too, right? Yeah. I mean, I think that was one of his main ideas. Sorry for interjecting, but I thought that was important at some point. Yes, it’s so, and this is something that I think Heidegger, Nietzsche himself, just by the way he lived, showed us that it needs, if without it being genuine, what we begin to do is we begin to look back and just applies, you know, is it this kind of isn’t or is it that kind of isn’t? There’s a very short note by Heidegger in a book that I think it’s volume 14 or 13. I’m not quite sure anymore. It’s just five sentences and it’s an introductory remark he added to the Holzweg to off the beaten track in the fifties or sixties. And that short paragraph, he says something very weird. He says the history of metaphysics has not, you know, has fulfilled itself, has come into fulfillment. But we’re now only just now we have to come to terms with it. So we are now facing what metaphysics has tried to grapple with. And I think that’s what we’re living through, right? Because he says technology is an extension of metaphysics. Yes. And this is all we’re trying to make sense of. And I think frankly that this is why people come and watch your stuff, for example. Is because it’s not, oh, you know, is it this kind of isn’t or is it that kind of isn’t? But no, it’s trying to read from all of what’s coming there as a wave that’s coming from behind and from all of us. It’s coming back at us and we’re trying to make so meaning crisis. What’s a meaning crisis? There’s something at stake, meaning itself. That means so that’s the question, right? The question of being is the question for the meaning of being. Trying to reconnect and we’re trying at the same time, not just to look back at, oh, they could argue this and they can argue this. No, we’re trying to make sense for what is coming. Yes. Yes. Yeah. And I’m sorry, I told you I’d let you play, but I just I want to so I mean, I think you I just there’s a point here that I think that should be emphasized. Right. This this isn’t because I sometimes hear this accusation of Heidegger and I don’t know if it’s fair of Heidegger. It doesn’t seem to me it is, but regardless, it’s not fair to my thinking. So I want to want to state that, which is all of this argument is not an argument for nostalgia. It’s not like we people are somehow just so well, I’ll just reject the scientific worldview as if like they don’t get how permeated like the way we’ve been talking about, how permeated it is into our ontology, our way of the salience landscaping we do our concepts of identity. Notice the level we’ve been talking about. We haven’t been talking about this at the level of, well, I just won’t use this tool or I don’t believe in the theory of evolution. We’re not talking about science at that level. We’re talking about it, as you said here, as the culmination of a of a particular metaphysical history. Yeah. And you can’t you can’t just oh, well, let’s let’s just reject all that. That’s not being argued for here. That’s what I want to claim. Yes. And and I mean, that would be that would be the very violent project of the Futurismo, the future futurist movement out of Italy from the early 20th century. They wanted to cut. They wanted to burn down everything that was left of Rome and kind of bury it under a level of concrete and make way for the future. But but science itself and the scientific worldview is just that it is a worldview. It doesn’t it’s not absolute. It’s not total, I would say. Of course, of course. I don’t I don’t. I don’t have certain presuppositions. So in Heidegger, for example, says science does not think he says that’s not a criticism. That means science itself is just a methodology. As soon as the scientist begins to think, for example, the physicist begins to think about certain particles that physicists is a metaphysician. Yes. It begins to be philosophy. And and it’s not about certain beliefs that you believe in evolution or anything like that. No, I think it’s what are the presuppositions of and what out of what is something arising and without I think without knowing where this comes from, there cannot be this revolution in thought or consciousness to speak with Hegel that people are after at the moment. You see what I’m trying to say? I think I think so. I mean, and that’s sort of I mean, for me, that point in the point, the second point I gave you to play with are deeply interwoven. I take, you know, Hans critique to be that, you know, this is permeated so deeply into us that, you know, and, you know, and it’s bound up with other things, our Protestant heritage, etc. But that whole idea that we’re in a fundamental mode of self exploitation, which I thought was kind of a really profound insight and how we’ve been sort of terrified. And, you know, and this it’s so short in the agony of ecstasy, right? Right. No, the agony of error. Sorry. There’s this little tiny three page critique of Foucault. But I thought, wow, that was sort of I thought it was one of the most brilliant things I’ve seen. It’s like, no, no, I mean, we don’t it’s not so much we don’t. He basically says we don’t need the panopticon state because all we have to do has deeply internalized and identified with self exploitation. And we will just work ourselves to death for capitalism. Right. And that’s what I mean about you can’t just sort of say, oh, well, I’m not going to it’s in the way we work. It’s in the way we it’s in the way we think about ourselves. That’s how profound it is. Yes. So it’s not coming from the outside. That’s right. That’s right. So the panopticon is us. Yes. We’re watching ourselves. We’re objectifying ourselves. An experience becomes real when we put it up on Instagram. Exactly. That’s a perfect example. And then ultimately, for all that technological connectedness, the loneliness and the radical discontent it breeds within people. Yeah. That’s a perfect example of what I’m talking about. And that’s why I think these weird conversations that we’re having online. Yeah. So I think too, because people because this is not scripted. No, we’ve talked once before for an hour, which wasn’t recorded. And we’ll have a conversation. But there was we didn’t I didn’t email you anything. Like what do you want? No, nothing. There’s nothing. It’s just happens or it doesn’t happen. Yes. Yeah. And but there’s something about to experience. And so looking at Han and this kind of this, you know, this is a positive. But there’s also something something that the self exploitation is the self doing it to itself. Yeah. And there’s nothing coming from the outside. This is why, you know, and framing. Yes. But this is us doing it. So it’s it’s position. So what is being being is very simply ends clients that’s Latin beings as beings being is the ass being is just in the ass. So beings show up as standing reserved. That’s being is not some magical entity that’s odd like and floating around doing something. It has to do with a hermeneutics that is historical, that is larger than us, that overcomes us. We’re born in thrown as how to go would say thrown into it and then have to make sense. Right. And as we read so we cannot, you know, as a not like a toolbox, we can reconfigure beings being itself at will. But we can see that there are other dimensions, other areas within being right within this interpretation of beings that all of a sudden it no longer just is a standing reserved. But there’s that has to do, I think, with with accepting death and finitude, because this logic of self exploitation for the sake of self exploitation, etc, etc. What that always blinds out is limitation finitude. Exactly. It not blinds that out. I just wanted to just again, because I’m really because I’m I’m I want to be careful about the uptake of certain these terms. I think it’s completely right to use the word hermeneutic and interpretation. But again, you’re not describing something that is just just or even folkily cognitive. It’s not that kind. I mean, there’s a cognitive dimension to it. But we’re talking about this like this hermeneutics is in what, you know, sort of the the the the grammar of your existential moding. Yeah. It’s not well, you know, what what what what what he what what he meant there when he talked about hermeneutics is, you know, I sit back and I reflect and I think and I come up with it. And we’re not talking about that. That’s not what we’re talking about. We’re talking about, well, something that if you’ll allow me my language and I use Dreyfus as a bridge from Heidegger to this language, I think this, you know, this gets down into the guts of our relevance realization machinery, that fundamental process by which, you know, our agency in the world and salience landscaping what stands out and how it stands out for us. As you said, the way things are, you know, beings coming to be as particular beings, I think that I’m talking about that level and not talk with that. I think and I think you are, too. We’re talking about that kind of funding. The hermeneutics that constitutes our agency, not the hermeneutics that is after our agency is sort of established that we do some reflective stuff. Yes. Yes, because this is what Heidegger already points out in Being in Time, as you know, is that the hermeneutic circle isn’t sitting down and writing something and then reinterpreting some texts. No, the da sein itself, the openness to being, to that being appear as something. The tree can be a source of energy. The tree can also be the tree of life in the Bible. These are totally different ontologies almost, but the hermeneutic circle is the way that da sein is in the world. Exactly. Exactly. Exist and exist has to do with time and all of this comes in. But yeah, it’s not it’s much deeper than just the reflective. Right. Good. It’s what modernity wants us to do, right? That’s what Descartes wants us to do. Yeah, exactly. To deny everything and put everything into doubt methodologically, to live at some absolute certainty. And that is what Heidegger pulls the rug under from the beginning. That’s what he pulls that away and says, the only certainty da sein can have is death. Yeah, yeah. It’s a bit of a, you know, a bit brutal maybe, but he, I think, so the cogito ergo sum, which takes modernity on its trajectory, is counted by Heidegger and he says sum moribundus, I am because I am towards my death. And this being towards this ultimate horizon gives, is what then grants meaning because when you begin to see the finitude of everything. But that’s the word I wanted to pick up on. Yeah. So when people hear this, they hear just the finality of death. They don’t hear the finitude of mortality. And those aren’t, I mean, they’re not disconnected from each other, but they’re, you shouldn’t reduce the ladder to the former. Right. The fact that we’re in the finitary predicament, as Cheney talks about it, is really, really fundamental to the, I mean, I in fact argue this extensively. That’s fundamental to our capacity of making meaning, at least meaning in life kind of meaning, that we don’t have that, if we weren’t in the finitary predicament, we wouldn’t be cognitive agents at all. It’s, right? It’s just, it’s in the very guts of our ability to make sense. Yeah. Yes, we couldn’t. It would be simply because there would be nothing to project. Death establishes this ultimate horizon and against which horizons just light up and begin to make sense. And there’s, there’s, there’s, there is something, the weird thing is to get across that it’s not morbid. It’s not pessimistic or anything like this. It’s to say that, look, look at the wonderful moment that just so occurs. A red letter day, as the British say. Yeah. That just occurs. But it also occurs because bound up with it is already, it’s, it’s, it’s limitation. It’s ending. It’s, it, it, it will end. This day will end and then it becomes a memory. But it’s, it, it isn’t nothing that should, would just extend out forever. Yeah. As a nun stanz is standing now, could have this kind of exuberant beauty. I tried to get into that when I brought, I tried to bring in, in one of the lectures, that Buddhist notion of the horror of immortality. Oh, I want to live. No, you don’t. Like, you know, it’s a real challenge because it would just, it would just, it would like, I tend to think, you know, of a salience landscape, almost topographical. Right. And then if you stretched it out, right, you would sort of lose all the topography and you would get the absolute flatness of kind of an absolute nihilism. Because why would anything matter more than anything else? Why would you do one thing, all of this, all of, yeah, exactly. All of it, all of it goes away. Um, and so I mean, I wonder if there’s a, cause I know Heidegger didn’t pick this up, but there’s, there’s a, there’s, there seems to be a little bit of a, I might be over reading, but some, some illusions until it towards this, that there’s a, there’s a deep complicity between sort of the, you know, the project of immortality and, and, and, and, and, and this kind of forgetfulness that we’re talking about. Right. The idea that, you know, you know, well, this project is the ultimate project is, is for me to live forever. And that, right. And so you see what I’m suggesting? I, this is not a well-worked out thesis, but it’s, we’re talking here. There’s an idea here that there’s a, there’s a, there’s a, there’s a hidden complicity between the immortality project and nihilism, the emergence of nihilism. That’s what I’m suggesting. Absolutely. I think that’s, yeah, I think that that’s, that’s, that’s more work, more brain power needs to go into that, that suggestion, that idea, that trajectory, because that’s absolutely the case. I think I, but we’re trying to find out why. Immortality and increasing nihilism of the crisis of meaning collapsing is actually there. Now, why is that? We could come at it simply from, from, from Hegel, for example, we could say, you know, life that is, that doesn’t phase up to death is just sheer immediacy. Sheer immediacy, that’s, he says it in the phenomenology, sheer immediacy is just sheer givenness. And once you live in sheer givenness and there’s no resistance, there’s no opposition to you, then everything becomes again, flat, right? And Nietzsche says something goes, cause we’re, we’re riffing off here, but so Nietzsche says the last man lives longest, he flattens the earth. So this idea of flattening the earth, Right! Longest. Yes! I forgot about that! Yeah. And life, Hegel says, the full life, life that breathes itself, subsumes death and strides through death, because that’s negativity. So without negativity, you only live in sheer immediacy, but immediacy must be mediated and it’s mediated through negativity. And you can also say that education, something we both care about deeply. Very much. Education is not something you can consume. There’s a struggle. And struggle means there’s something that’s resisting. There’s something that you don’t understand, there you are, that’s negativity. So you have to stride through what you don’t know. And then you get to a place where you begin to know, but that’s not something you can just download into your brain because, you know, the advocates of transhumanism, for example, who want to live forever, have digital humanity, for that everything is just a given. It’s like the matrix, oh, Neo, do you know how to fight? No, we’ll just upload it to your brain. You can’t, like that’s if there is no struggle, there’s no pushback. You won’t. Would you learn how to walk? Yeah. You need to learn how to walk by getting up and falling back down and getting up again and until you know how to walk. Okay, so there’s two, there’s two rift points that come out for that, Avni. One is because, you know, I’m doing the work on the After Socrates project and we lost the role of the aporetic, right? We’ve lost the importance of aporia, right? We’ve lost the importance of aporia. So that I think is points direct and how central that is to dialogic reasoning as opposed to monologic reasoning. Because, you know, we sort of we keep doing this. We sort of get to and like we even have these little momentary aporias that then and then they get folded back in. Yeah. And then, sorry, I think I lost my other point. Oh, geez, it was a good one, too. There was the aporetic, the loss of that. And I was trying to think about something you said. Oh, yes. And then that gets that now I remember. Thank you. This brings because I alluded to Tillich and Tillich has that idea, right? It’s a Hegelian, but it’s also post-Hegelian, you know, that the God beyond the God of theism is the God that always is taking non-being back into himself. Right. And that and that and I thought which is like I don’t think that people get how radical. I mean, I think the Kyoto school and they saw they got oh, wow, this is really this is a really radical thing. He’s doing he’s proposing a deep kind of non-theism. Right. Because he’s saying, I think, right, that we should give up a perfectionist model of God, that God is a finished completeness. Right. And that we should we should stop trying to achieve, you know, that kind of everlasting completeness or perfection. That that is a fundamental, inappropriate framing of the divine in order because he was dealing with the meeting crisis. I mean, that’s clearly the case in the Courage to Be and he was saying like we’ve got to fundamentally break out of that way of thinking in a deep, deep way. So I gave you sort of two things to play with there on that one. We still have to get back to the history of metaphysics as the history of knowledge. Which kind of doing it. Yes. So aporia. Yeah. And this is I think goes important just as an aside on Heidegger. Heidegger does not, I think, does not, I think, at least does not deconstruct, does not want to get rid of metaphysics or any of the texts. No, it’s just re-reading and picking up on something that’s lost in the tradition. Yeah. Which has to do with this forgetfulness and the oblivion of being. There’s much so much that comes together. And he says, for example, in a letter to one of his friends that Heraclitus is right behind him. Yeah. Yeah. And I don’t think that that’s a metaphor. But aporia is a wonderful notion because it can mean, of course, being perplexed by some logical argument or something that doesn’t really conclude. Or it just means what it means, which is roadlessness. Yeah, yeah, exactly. No longer a road. Yeah. And that, of course, just by association is reminiscent of Heidegger’s Holzwege, of off-beaten track, of going into the woods, of finding your own path. So the roadlessness isn’t just a perplexing collapse of all meaning. It actually is an invitation. It’s an invitation to find, just like being in time ends on a question. Some people read this book and then, oh, it’s all collapsing. I don’t know. Why didn’t he write the second version? When I finished reading it, I thought, wow, it ends on a question. Could it be that perhaps time, right? Because he doesn’t conclude. It leaves it open. And by this leaving open in this aporia, in this roadlessness, one has to go off and find your own path. So you have to not repeat anything that someone has said, but you go off and from out of what you’re reading, you begin to find your path. I think the meaning crisis itself, or nihilism, is that sort of, on the one hand, is this meaning itself disappearing, but an invitation at the same time for it to make a comeback if we respond to that current situation appropriately. And there’s lots of people I’m in discussion with, not just philosophical discussion, but people who are building communities of practice, who are taking that up. I mean, they might not articulate it technically as clearly as you and I are doing right now. And that’s not meant as a criticism of it all. But they’re out there, real time and talent. Like, no, no, there’s an kind of fundamental transformation, a real orientation. There we are. I hope that helped. What happened there? You lost signal? I think so, yeah, sure. Sorry. I hope it was recorded. Okay, we’ll just edit that out. You had sort of come to a complete thought there, which was good. Yeah. Yeah. But aporia, I was trying to also, I was just saying, you know, there’s people out there that are, doing exactly what you say. They’re sensing the kairos, they’re sensing the opportunity, and they’re responding to it, again, not primarily propositionally, but in a much more existentially pervasive and profound sense. I also wanted to know, because I see that, like, you know, Rappi, Sarah Alba Rappi’s book on, you know, Socratic wisdom and Platonic knowledge and the role of aporia for waking people up, for bringing them, for making them sort of remember the being mode, remember that they are the beings whose being is in question, remember that they, in addition to all of their knowings, they have this, they have an awareness of themselves as knowers, and like, this sort of profound, right, that, are you still there? Yeah, yeah, yeah. You cut out for a sec. That sort of profound realization that we, right, that we have, well, you know, Heidegger seems to talk about it, that we have a kind of responsibility that the other things we encounter don’t have, because we are the beings whose being is in question. Yeah. So what I’m trying to say, I guess, clumsily, is I’m trying to say that what aporia does is wake you up to the fact that you are the being whose being is in question. And that puts me, that means to me that that’s, I think there’s a deep connection. It’s not just happenstance or it’s not just historical. There’s a deep connection between aporia and dialogue, right, because we are, dialogue is a much more powerful way for us to bring ourselves into question, right, because of the way we can question and quest, we can question each other and quest together beyond, you know, our sort of stable conceptualization. So I think there’s a deep, there’s a deep connection between dialogue and aporia. Like, I think they sort of really need each other because you see that, right, it’s sort of the syncretic induction of aporia. Like, people have all of these, they have this machinery that we’ve been talking about throughout the whole conversation that protects them from waking up in, you know, in kind of a pernicious manner. Right? And you, right? Yeah, exactly. Right? And you need, and one of the things that dialogue does, I mean, I’m sort of riffing on the opposite of Scott’s idea that hell is other people, but other people are openings, right? Go ahead, go ahead. Can you say, because that was, can you say a bit more on what’s stopping people to wake up? Well, so like I said, I think, well, part of what we’re talking about is, no, and I mean, there’s, there’s this long argument in awakening about this deep historical cultural cognitive grammar that kind of in frames us. And when I do that, in my mind, I’m thinking of by analogy, right, you know, things like the nine dot problem where we have a framing of the problem and it fundamentally prevents us from seeing what needs to be seen. I’m using it in that sense. And so we have this kind of profound cultural cognitive grammar in our way of being in the world. And it’s monologic. It’s self exploitation. It’s self speaking. And I’m ultimately talking to myself because all that I touch is myself, Kajito. It’s all this. Yeah. What dialogue can do if, if it’s dialogos and not just discourse, it can induce a poria because that’s what the Socratic encounter is in my mind. You get this person who comes in, looks like they’re going to do discourse with you. And then he goes, aha, right. He does this thing where and then suddenly there’s a poria. And then you wake up to who you wake up to the aspirational challenge. You wake up to the fact that you are the being whose being is in question. That’s the Socratic moment par excellence in my mind. That is that I take it that Socrates claim is bad. And that alone can motivate you to true philosophy. Anything else is kind of an intellectual curiosity or desire is phylo Nikea. It’s a desire to manipulate or win arguments. But only when you wake up to you are the being whose being is in question, then and only then can you pursue wisdom in a deep fashion. That’s what I mean about the deep connection between dialogue, dialogos and waking up. And I would say I would add to that language itself is, of course, at this at once the greatest danger. And on the other hand, also the what could lead to an awakening. There’s a wonderful quote which I only can paraphrase from Osip Mandelstam, who was a Jewish-Russian author. He wrote on poetry that, you know, speech in everyday in everyday situations is automatic, which is say certain things. How are you? I’m fine. You know, blah, blah, blah. And everything’s kind of just automatic. And we don’t really question something. He says poetic speech interrupts this. Yes, exactly. Exactly. Don’t get that’s exactly it. You know what I sometimes do when I’m teaching one of some of my students, I’ll say, I don’t. Oh, we’re going to do some poetry. Oh, no, no, don’t don’t read poetry. What I want you to do for the next week is carry on a journal and catch all the metaphors you’re using and also catch all the metaphors you’re enacting with your gesture. Instead of it being let’s go back to our earlier language. Instead of it being transparent to you, step back. There’s the that’s the Socratic moment. Step back and see it rather than automatically seeing through it. Wake up to what and what is it reflecting back to you about the kind of being you are that your language is permeated and afforded by all this metaphor, both spoken and enacted. And then they wake up to the possibility of poetry, because if you just happen to start reading text, it’s just, oh, wow. You know, what did the author think? Right. What did they do? And, oh, he’s writing in Victorian England. He’s clearly representing blah, blah, blah. Yeah. But you see, that’s that there’s something there’s something very profound. I mean, it’s kind of funny because we’re talking on the same kind of on the same plane. Right. Because it makes us laugh, I think, because what we’re seeing is that there’s no thought that goes into this. And we can very quickly say, like, categorize. Oh, this is 18th century German poetry. This must therefore mean blah, blah, blah, blah. And this was written in 20th century America. This must mean blah, blah, blah. So it’s already formatted. That’s already a format. And this is everywhere. Everything is a format. So there is this I live in London. There are places here that you have to go visit when you’re in London because they’re all on Instagram. They’re Instagrammable. There’s a road in Edinburgh, which is now people are people who live there. Actually, now I’ve started petitions to get people to ban people from even entering the street because it’s overrun because people go there because you have to be there and have to get that Instagram shot. So it’s already a format. Now, I mentioned before the red letter day, a day that just so occurs that in its finitude reveals its beauty, its unique beauty for just one day for all times to come. We can now buy in the UK, I think from some company, red letter days. So we can buy the format. It doesn’t even the next step of capitalism is, of course, that you don’t even do it. You just pay for it. And then why would you even do it? It’s everywhere. Romantic weekend in the countryside. You can’t plan for it to be romantic. It either occurs or it doesn’t. Like Eros itself, but you mentioned Paham’s book on Eros. Eros is this not fully revealedness, not full transparency. There’s some concealment. There’s something hidden, this mystery. And that is the other always withdraws in Eros to some degree. The other is always beyond your grasp. Or it’s not genuine Eros. It’s just it’s just raw consumption. Yes. And you mentioned the word Kairos before. Yes. What is the Kairos is the Augenblick, the blink of an eye that you cannot will for it to occur. No, you just any more than you can will an insight to happen. You can do things that increase your receptivity for when it might occur. Right. And you can afford it. But you can’t you can’t manufacture it. And I think that’s something else we’ve lost. We’ve lost the distinction between affordance because, you know, Heidegger uses a lot of cultivation metaphors and we have completely lost it in the notion of manufacture. Right. And there’s there’s like we can afford we can afford a lot. Right. We can afford a lot. And we can we confuse that with what I think you’re alluding to that we can manufacture things. I have to go soon. So, I mean, well, I think let’s let’s let’s pick this up. Well, when the three of us when I and Guy Sandstock talk, I mean, there’s a lot here. I’ll let it out. Any of the parts where there was a gap. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But I think well, I’m going to use my own language. Yeah. I think we afforded a lot the return to that final question about the history of metaphysics is the history of malvism. I think we’ve laid a lot of affordance down for that. We could pick that up and extend the conversation with with Guy because I think he would really like that. I think he’d also like the stuff we were saying towards the end about the deep connection between aporia, the interruption. Yeah. Boeasis as opposed to just pronouncement. I think I think I think that would be excellent. Yes, let’s do that. Oh, you know, we’re going to of course keep talking. I this was such a joy, such a pleasure. I hope you enjoyed it. Very much. Very much. It was thoroughly jazzy for me. It was. Yeah, it is like jazz, isn’t it? And it should be. Are you a musician? Do you make music? No, it’s one of the great longings of my life because I’ve often, you know, I’ve often been in relationship with people who are musicians. My partner is gifted musically and it gives her a capacity for connecting to things. I get it. I mean, I’m a poet. I write poetry. Yeah, that’s it. There’s something musical. Yes. I was. And I’m a Tai Chi player. And that in Chinese, it’s the same verb is to play music. You play Tai Chi. So I have a deep sense of it, but I’m not myself a musician. So yeah, but there’s there’s something poetic. It was awesome. Thanks very much. I’ll send you the file. Yeah. And I’ve recorded it. I’ve recorded it here, too. Okay, perfect. Perfect. Cool. I don’t have to send it to you, actually. Well, if I got problems on my end, but we’ve got redundancy. And if you want it to like we each have it and the other needs it, we can send it. Perfect. Perfect. See you in a couple of weeks. Yep. I’m looking forward to it. This was so exciting. Thank you very much, sir. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.