https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=7eSCIJVPQ2w
Welcome live and we are about to introduce your new course, Ultimate Reality God and Beyond. So before John begins to introduce the course, we would like to invite you to ask questions. If you have any questions for John, specifically on this course, then please use the chat and raise the questions. We’ll get to them at the end. We also received some questions via email. We’ll get to some of them as well at the end. So John will now introduce the course, which begins on the 5th of April, which is a Friday. We will be meeting eight times in total and we’ll have two hours with John on Fridays. There will be some Fridays in May when John isn’t around, so we’ll skip May, but then continue on towards the end of May and then June. So that gives you enough time in between to read everything, to catch up with the reading, et cetera. During the first hour, John will lecture. In the second hour, you will be in a group seminar together with John Rovecki. And yeah, so thank you everyone for being here, for listening, John. Floor is yours. Thank you, my friend. It’s great to be here, Johannes. I’m really excited about this course. So in some ways, this course is a follow-up to the previous course, Beyond Nihilism, but it’s also standalone. You don’t have to have gone through Beyond Nihilism in order to do Ultimate Reality, God of Beyond. But if you did Beyond Nihilism and you found a good course, you’ll find the connections also very juicy and tasty. And so I just wanna get that out there. This course is a course that is trying to grapple with the philosophical dimensions of what I see happening. And I see a lot, and a lot of people are agreeing with me, they see happen. Some of you may have seen a conversation I had with Iain Le Gautres and Daniel Schnackenberger about sort of the advent of the sacred. It seems like the sacred, and I’m being very vague deliberately, is trying to be born in a new way for us. And that strikes me as a very important potential response to the meaning crisis. Now there’s all kinds of dimensions around that. This course will talk about the philosophical dimensions, and it will especially talk about things that I have found very provocative. The title is Deliberately Provocative. How can something be beyond God? That isn’t God the ultimate? What are you talking about, John? Isn’t that a contradiction? I’m deliberately being provocative and paradoxical because we’re gonna be brushing up against those in this course, hopefully in a way that you find edifying. And so the idea is that the sacred involves some relationship to ultimacy that we find transformative and that we find grounds, our judgments of value and or virtue. And what has been provocative is people have been suggesting, this came up in Beyond Nihilism, Paul Tillich, that the God beyond the God of theism is what is being born right now in order to respond to the meaning crisis. Or you have Robert Carter in his astonishing book, The Nothingness Beyond God, that the Kyoto School, especially in Nishatani, were trying to point to something like this as well. We could have a relationship to ultimacy that is transformative and grounding of our cultivation of virtue and value. But is nevertheless something other or beyond at least a standard notion, a shared standard notion, at least across the Abrahamic religions of what we mean by God. Now, many of you may say, but those traditions also talk about the God beyond God, Eckhart and the Godhead, or God, I pray to God that he free me from God. And that of course will come up in the course, what could Eckhart mean by that? We’re not gonna read Eckhart specifically, but that idea is gonna come up. And what we’re gonna do is we’re gonna look at this in four books. The first I’ve already mentioned is Carter’s, The Nothingness Beyond God, which really raises the question, poses it profoundly in this cross-cultural and genuinely global perspective. And it gives us a lot of powerful conceptual tools to really wrestle with this issue. Then we will read Evolutionary Religion by Schellenberg. And this is a proposal, he also has a book called Religion After Science, that the discovery of deep time, deep time into the past and deep time into the future has not been properly taken into our conceptual, philosophical, and he argues, our religious frameworks. He considers himself an atheist because he thinks the personal model of God is inadequate to this deep time. And some of you may say, well, that’s not what God, God doesn’t have to be personal. And that’s precisely what we’re gonna discuss in this course. That’s precisely what we’re going to discuss. But his proposal is when we open up ourselves to deep time, then how we think of the relationship to ultimately fundamentally changes. And he actually proposes that what becomes central is an imaginal, not an imaginary, but an imaginal relationship to the ultimate. And that of course jives with a lot of work that I’ve been doing in the cognitive science of the imaginal and around ritual. And it is really interesting for an atheist to be arguing for a relationship, an imaginal ritualistic relationship to ultimacy that will be deeply transformative. And I think you’ll find that book very rightfully so, thought provoking. We will then go do Griggs Beyond the God Delusion. And that book is important in that, but obviously it’s alluding to Richard Dawkins. And Griggs is trying to argue for a conception of God that will happen after this confrontation with new atheism. And in this way, the book was very prescient because as many people have been saying, we’re sort of moving out of the heyday, the high mark, the tide mark of new atheism and something else is emerging. And Griggs book is prescient about that and helps us to get some orienting philosophical framework around that. And throughout all of this, the question of ultimacy and God and beyond keeps coming up again and again and again. This is a shared theme. And then we will go into Bracken’s book, The Divine Matrix. And The Divine Matrix is an attempt to come up with something like a deep shared grammar so we can afford a deep dialogue between Western philosophy and Asian Eastern philosophy. And what Bracken does is he goes very carefully through some central Western thinkers and argues for this notion of ultimacy as pure relationality in a white headian sense, that’ll promote. And then he shows how that is present in Taoism and Vedanta and Zen. So this is very much part of my overall project of Zen neoplatonism. And in conjunction with all of those, especially in preparation for the Bracken book, I will be asking you all to read Jane Spiller’s excellent paper on Platinus and the One where he proposes that the neoplatonists were arguing for ultimacy as pure relationality. And I have a lot of arguments for why I think that is good. And of course, this plugs in to Filler’s astonishing book, Neoplatonism, Heidegger and the History of Being, which I think is an masterpiece. And I will be talking to Jane Spiller in April in person. So I’m looking forward to that. And so this proposal of ultimacy, ultimate reality as relational, of course opens up questions of its relatedness to itself, of our relatedness to it. These are properly spiritual or religious questions, but they’re also philosophical ontological questions. And it challenges kind of an Aristotelian substance ontology where what is ultimate in reality, the grounding entities for reality are individually independently existing things that are the subjects of predicates and are disclosed by subject predicate logic. Filler argues, I think quite convincingly that Neoplatonism was challenging that. Of course, it was also deeply influenced by Aristotle. And I think you see this at work in all of these thinkers. It’s clearly in the sheet that it’s clearly in Greg, Greg or Greg, I think it’s Greg. It’s clearly in Braken. I think it’s pretty strongly implied in Schellenberg. And that means how much is our standard, I don’t have a better adjective, notion of God bound to a substance metaphysics that God is ultimately some kind of thing or person, some kind of super subject that it is the bearer of predicates and the source of action. And that is how we might be going beyond God. And of course, there’s many of you will say, well, Dionysus, the Areopagite and Eckhart talked this way and others, and I agree with you and so does Filler. So this does not necessarily exclude Christianity or Judaism or Islam. In fact, there are many people arguing that they could enter into a deep dialogue with God. We will be exploring all of this. And we will be exploring it. In an orientation towards a larger project I have, which is called the Philosophical Silk Road, is can we create something analogous to what the Silk Road was philosophically, whereby all of these deep traditions can enter into mutually transformative deep dialogue with each other and thereby afford the advent of the sacred help to exemplify it and educate towards it as a deeper response to the meaning of presence. So that’s all I have to say to set up. Excellent, thank you very much, John. So I just one thing, if you could, while I speak, maybe briefly click on your settings button and maybe change the microphone to your shore microphone. Oh, where is the setting? Settings is the little wheel all the way to the right. If you don’t find it, that’s fine. I’ll just mention a few things now. If you want to enroll in the course, you can do so now. The link to enroll is in the description of this video. If you see this after the live stream, or it’s actually now also in the chat here. We’ll get to your questions now. Just want to show you what this looks like. So this is the landing page. And describes the course here. You see again, what we’ll be reading. Now, the first live lecture and seminar will begin on Friday, April 5th, from six to 8 p.m. UK time. That’s one to three p.m. Eastern Standard Time. This is not available. This course is only for those who enroll. It won’t be made available on YouTube. But I think it is part of what John is also working on anyway. So from a different angle, you can talk about this maybe in a second as well. Your next project for YouTube. So you’ll be participating in it before it goes live. But this course is onto itself. So we’ll be meeting five times, sorry, four times in April. All Fridays in April. Then twice in May, that gives you a couple of weeks in between three to four weeks here to catch up on the readings. And then twice more in June. So that’s eight sessions in total. If you don’t have time, let’s say you can only make it to less than five of the live lectures. Then you can enroll in the self-study tier, which is this one. If you have time for five or more of the seminars and live lectures, then you should join our philosophical fellowship that John leads. And you also will do, after the lecture, we’ll do a breakout session so you get to meet the others. There’ll be a course forum as well that you can use to stay in touch and you can start a reading group, et cetera. If you want to do one private session with John, then this one is for you. There are, I think, three still available. And there’s also a payment plan, just to mention this. So this is the technical side of everything. John will be leading all lectures and seminars. I’ll just be there to host. So you’ll be in a digital classroom with John. I will now get to, yes, thank you very much, Lizelle. She’s currently going through my Plato course. And she was in neon nihilism. Johanna, just a quick note. I clicked on the three dots and it’s normally giving me an option to deal with the video settings. I wonder if pairing it with YouTube is locking down your mic. Could be, yeah. But usually if you click on the little wheel and you go on audio, then you can go on audio input and choose your microphone. If it doesn’t work this time, then it’s fine. We’ll have good audio as we did last year for the neon nihilism course. So let’s go to a simple, a more or less simple question in the beginning. Any prerequisite knowledge required or recommended Sean Button? Just one stretch. Am I on the show now? Is this better or different? It’s the same. It’s fine. Doesn’t matter. I keep switching to the word. I think it’s a bit better now, yeah. Okay. Now it is, yeah. Okay. Okay, sorry, Johannes. I was just taking care of that. Could you please restate the question? Any prerequisite knowledge required or recommended asks Sean Button. I don’t expect you to know any of my work. I don’t expect you to have to read anything before we come into this. I mean, it is a philosophical course, of course, at being at Halkeon, that’s expected. I do require, or at least strongly recommend, I can’t make you do anything, that you read the filler paper and you’ll probably need to read it a couple of times. Okay. And so I think that’s important to read that maybe before, during, and even after the course. And so I strongly recommend that. Everything else, these books were intended to be picked up and read as is. The Carter book is very accessible. The Schelling book, Schellingberg book is very accessible. Greg book, very accessible. Now the last book, the last book by Bracken, that’s a challenging book. And that’s why I put it last. I will help you through this. He does do a chapter where he discloses and makes use of his White Hadean framework, but I will help you on that. I will specifically help bridge that for you. Excellent. Here’s a question from, that someone sent in via email. Is religion and communal ceremony essential to human flourishing? Will this course cover the impact of religious belief on the individual and community? Not directly, although we will be talking about the interface between individual and distributed cognition. And we will probably get into the discussion of the relationship between individual practice and collective ritual. That is something of course I’m going to be doing on a separate series with Zevi Slavin around ritual. Hopefully they’ll be coming out in tandem and you’ll be able to use that. I would like to do a course for Helkian on the philosophy of ritual, or at least the cognitive science of ritual. And very much working on that towards the philosophical Silk Road. So I don’t have it as an explicit part of the overall syllabus. I fully expect because of the intense importance that Schellingberg gives to the imaginal, the discussion of ritual and distributed cognition will come up in a central way. The first part of the question was, do you think that religion is essential to human flourishing? I think a right relationship with the sacred, individually and collectively, that is transformative and that orients and helps us navigate the cultivation of virtue and virtuosity is essential for human flourishing. If we should call that religion is part of what we’re going to be discussing in this series. Will the problem of evil be discussed? Indirectly. Schellingberg is famous for introducing what is considered a new argument for atheism, independent from the argument from evil. Most of the existing arguments are either arguments showing the inadequacy of the so-called proofs, or arguments that are variations on the argument from evil. What’s really interesting about Schellingberg is that he gives a different argument that is really magnified by the deep time. And the hidden argument is, I’m not giving the argument now, so don’t respond to me as if I gave an argument, because I’m not giving an argument, I’m just stating the thesis. And the argument is, if God has a personal loving relationship with us, why has he remained silent for tens of thousands of years? And across multiple cultures. And of course, again, I’m not giving the argument, we will look at the argument in conjunction with Schellingberg. Now, I think Schellingberg is right, it is an independent argument from the problem of evil, but I do think, and I don’t think he would deny this, I think the two arguments interact with each other, and I think we will bump into that when we sort of keep bumping into this question about whether or not personhood is the category for which we should understand the personal nature, meaning the transformative and virtue grounding nature of our relationship to the sacred. None of these people will deny personal, if by that we mean existential and transformative. Full person, full psyche transformative relationship to the sacred. Does that then demand that the ultimate be itself a person? And this is exactly what the hiddenness argument challenges. And then that bears back on the argument from evil, because many people have responded that the argument for evil is only a biting argument if God is a person who is a person who is a person with intent. And so again, I have not offered an argument here, please don’t jump on me at this point. What I’m saying is that is something we will discuss. Excellent, thank you. Okay, one question here, that was good. Will you be discussing or contrasting ideas such as those defended by David Bentley Hart and the experience of God being consciousness bliss? I’ve read the book and I think I will be talking about the neo-Platonism that is behind David Bentley Hart’s work. And this is exactly what filler is doing. And that is definitely what Bracken is doing. So I would put it to you that while I won’t be foregrounding that particular text, the neo-Platonic framework upon which it is based and from which it is derived will be front and center in this course. Excellent, I just wanted to say thank you very much Harris, who has not only signed up but also sent us a super chat, I think they’re called, I have no idea what they are. Harris continues to be the first and only one on my channel to send me these wonderful little gifts. So thank you very much Harris, he’s also in the Plato course at the moment, he was in your Beyond Nihilism course. And I’ve had two discussions with Harris and we are working together. And so it’s a great pleasure to hear from you Harris. Excellent, very good to hear. Oh yeah, I put you in touch, I forgot. Okay, yeah, maybe this one is quite good and we skip the other one. Since music and story is so central to traditional religions, do you think this is still applicable to the God beyond God of theism? That’s to say, is it likely being less personalistic, is this relevant? I do think it is, I think that issues around narrative and music or poesis and mythos are going to come up in this course. And this goes towards a deeper discussion around faith, especially when we do Schellingberg’s book, because he is trying, and there’s a lot of philosophers doing this, trying to disconnect faith from belief that having faith is not some variant on believing. And this is where the imaginal comes in, in a very powerful way. And then things like music and poetry and narrative become very, very central. Can’t. The old can’t is responsible. The Hegel writes the Glaube und Wissen as a response, faith and knowledge as a response to Kant, who tamed reason to make room for faith. Yes. But in so doing, perhaps also did it a disservice a bit. Just briefly, Plato was a logical myth writer, we could maybe phrase it like this, in a setting such as this, is a bit more complicated than that. But it is important precisely because the forms do not just body forth by themselves, they need to be made finite, body forth, and that is what myth can do, if myth means story. I think that’s, well, we’ve had discussions on that, I think that’s deeply right. We have had discussions about this. And our new common friend, Douglas Hadley, has written many books on this, The Living Forms of the Imagination, sir. Yes. Anyone’s interested, Douglas Hadley’s series is excellent on this. Douglas is great, I hope someday to get him on Voices with Brevekian, talk about perhaps that book. Excellent, I think he’d be very happy to hear it. Yeah, he and I really hit it off. He said the same thing. No. No. Okay, I’m trying to, okay, this is an easy one. Which of the books do you suggest we start reading first? I can answer that, it’s the first book of the course, which is The Nothingness Beyond God. So we’re going in order, in the order that you see, let me just show you the enrollment page again, which is this one, it’s also in the chat, it’s in the link, sorry, in the description of this video, there’s a link to the enrollment page, and you’ll see here what we will read, and this is exactly the order in which we will go through the books and the courses, two lectures per book, and two seminars per book. Okay. One, there was another great question via email. For people skeptical of grand metaphysical claims, like the core claims of Abrahamic religions, how can they engage with divinity and theology, should they engage with it? So one of the things that I will do, is I, and I did this in Beyond Nihilism, and it seemed to work for people, is I will weave this philosophical argument in with the work I do in cognitive science, and I think that cognitive science is well vetted and well placed within a scientific worldview that is undergoing significant revision right now, especially because of the philosophy of biology. I just had an excellent discussion with Greg Enriquez and Michael Levin, Michael’s work I think is, and he’s, I once posed it to him that his work in biology is actually Platonism, and he’s now, he agreed, and he’s now working on that, and he wants to bring that out. So here’s a biologist wanting to talk about platonic forms, and a cutting edge biologist. And so I would put it to you that everybody has a metaphysics. I don’t think that anybody is free from a metaphysics. And what we could do is say that your metaphysics, like many people who consider themselves secular or at least skeptical about grand narratives of religion, they of course have the grand narrative of the scientific worldview, and it claims to be a grand narrative. It claims to be able to pronounce on knowledge claims found across multiple contexts, multiple histories, multiple cultures, et cetera. And many other people would argue this, Tim Maudlin for example. There’s a metaphysics presupposed and implied by science. It’s woven into that worldview. And part of what I want to argue at a sort of crucial crux point in the overall argument of the course is the fundamental presuppositions of the scientific worldview around information causation and intelligibility actually dovetail very, very well with Filler’s proposal about relationality as ultimate reality. And I think that is a way of getting into the metaphysics via what you might call a secular route that doesn’t require you buying into the particular mythological metaphysics of the Abrahamic religious heritage. Excellent, thank you. Alex, who’s been coming to my courses for many years now, will this course cover the convergence between science and religion in addition to philosophy and religion? Yes. Yes. That was easy. The answer is yes. And I mean, I can be so brief because of my previous answer, very, very much. That is running through here. And part of what a lot of people are doing, my friend Evan Thompson has a new book out called The Blind Spot about how there’s this sort of hole in the scientific worldview that is exacerbating the meaning crisis. And the chapter on The Blind Spot on Cognition has a central section on, get this, relevance realization. And my work is being cited. And the other two authors are a theoretical physicist and a astrophysicist. So talk about all of these things converging. They’re converging in that book. And I’m not the only person that sees this convergence and is seeking for it and trying to understand it. This is what I mean by the advent of the sacred is taking place at many layers, very abstract theoretical layers, but also at a layer of people coming up with new ecologies of practices. And many of you know, I do a lot of participation, participant observation, participant engineering, participant experimentation with these emerging communities. All of this is happening. So the answer is very much yes, not only philosophy and religion, but also the convergence with science. For me, that’s inevitable. That, I’m not a positivist, but I think wrestling with these questions, we can’t leave the scientific worldview off the page. It has to be brought into the discussion. Very good. There’s a very long question by Ben Esra, which I would put it to you, Ben, that you perhaps sign up. And then we discussed this over the eight weeks. Maybe this one is also quite long, but it’s more pertinent to what we’re discussing. How is the good, is the promise of intelligibility different from Descartes’ God as guarantee of knowledge, which you say it is the same fundamental intuition, but with conformity truth, I think, as opposed to correspondence. I think that insight is a good insight. I think that what you’re moving is to conformity, alithetic notion of truth, and that the promise then is one that can be properly understood, not as just a conviction via argument, but something more like what Brandon talks about in his glorious work on Hegel, spirit of trust, reciprocal recognition. And this idea that the world and the mind are reaching out to each other. The conformity is not unidirectional, it is bidirectional, and they’re reaching out to each other. There’s an embrace. And of course, that goes back to deeper Hebrew, and also Greek, but especially Hebrew notions of our relationship to the sacred is one of mutual embrace, mutual interpenetration, and many of you are probably getting inappropriate, you might think inappropriate sexual imagery out of that language, but the sexual imagery is actually quite appropriate. And so I think that if you build deeply on the distinction you made, and you really deeply probe what is meant by conformity rather than correspondence, it opens up the other kinds of knowing and the other ways in which we are connected to reality beyond conviction of belief that are central to giving us that relationship to ultimacy that renders it sacred. You can have Descartes God without having to have any kind of relationship to that God, as long as he’s there. And of course, the deists picked up on this really quickly. Well, God doesn’t need to be doing anything. He just needs to guarantee, and that’s it. He sets things up and guarantees that the world will run that way. Yeah, he’s a guarantor. He’s a guarantor of the movement of the wheel work. Yeah, but thank you. But if we move to this alternative, which you’ve pointed out very astutely in the distinction you’ve drawn, the notion of promise, of course, is the notion of trust, which is then brings with it this notion of reciprocal participatory knowing. And there’s another great question here by R. Marsana. R. Marsana that we’ll get to in a second. I just, I guess a lot of people just came in now. We’re discussing John Mravecki’s new course, Ultimate Reality Garden, which is a live online course. So we’ll record the lectures live. You’ll be in the classroom with John. And then there’s another hour with John in a group discussion. So if you want to enroll, you can do so now via the link in the chat, but also just below the, should be in the description of this video as well. So it’s for anyone who’s interested in religion, theology, the divine, even from a scientific standpoint or especially even. So I don’t think that you should, if you’re a staunch atheist, all the better if you come. And this question, now there’s another question that goes in that direction, which maybe we’ll get to now. Is the idea, and then we’ll get to the other one. Is the idea of garden necessary for human life? So I am deliberately not foreclosing on that question. That is exactly what I am trying to explore. The proposal that there is, that reality is structured and we can talk about ultimacy I think is plausible. I think you get a cross cultural, cross historical proposal that human beings can get into specific kinds of transformative relationship with this, that they find salvage or that they find healing, or they find educating, they find help them grow in virtue and wisdom, reach enlightenment, et cetera, all the various metaphors. I think that’s also plausible and therefore it needs to be taken seriously. The question then comes, is that necessary for human life? I do think that relevance realization and that sense of connectedness is essential for human flourishing. That religio is, I’ve argued, and I won’t repeat the arguments here, but their extent is very much what is at work, at play, in meaning in life, which is very essential to human cognitive flourishing and human personhood and agency. It’s deeply connected to the psychology of belonging. Karen Allen and other people work, and if you don’t have that sense of belonging, you’re in trouble psychologically, socially, probably physiologically, et cetera. So that connectedness, that religio to what is real from us, and Iris Murdoch always comes to mind here, love is the painful recognition that something other than oneself is real. And so that kind of loving recognition of a reality that we want to be connected to, which seems determinative of belonging and determinative of meaning in life seems to be very central to human agency and cognitive agency personhood, both individually and collectively. Whether or not that relationship to sacredness needs to be configured into what is typically meant by God is precisely the question of the course. That’s where I’ll leave it, because I’m not answering this question right now. Part of this course is completely selfish. Part of this course is to use this course as a bunch of really devoted, intelligent people coming together in good faith to reflect on these questions, because I am deeply reflecting on them for part of, I don’t know what to call it, the existential spiritual preparation for walking the philosophical Silk Road. And so you will be very much contributing to that process. And so some of the things that I will come into this course with will be deliberately open questions like that one. Which is why at Hellkion we speak of course participants and not students so much. And maybe because I think quite a few of you are watching this on John’s channel and you’ve never heard of me. I founded Hellkion four years ago. I was still in academia back then and left three years ago. To do this full time. And one of the reasons of course is that it gives me the freedom to teach whatever the hell I want on a whim. Teaching play to at the moment. And Kant is next, because it’s a big Kant here. It’s his 300th birthday. But I also can give wonderful people like John Rovecki a chance to teach without red tape. John sends me an email saying, look, this is my proposal. Yeah, okay, let’s do it. Let’s see what happens. And then we can go on this journey together. So if you’d like to participate, the link to enroll is in the description. And that also helps us keep the lights on over here. Okay, so here’s the other question I mentioned before. How can we know what we see is really reality? Do we not just see what our brain shows us so that what we need to know in order to survive and live to provide? So this is evolutionary. Yeah, and this is kind of a Donald Hoffman argument. And I’ve had the great pleasure of talking with Donald. Like many of us, Donald has two personas. One is the persona that shows up on YouTube that is initially very sort of, very, very super confident in very, very controversial proposals. But when you’re in good faith discussion with him, and I’m not accusing him, I’m not accusing him of hypocrisy, but when you’re in that discussion, he’s much more humble, much more open to question, much more open to reflection. And I would therefore suggest to many of you that you also take up his proposals with the same epistemic attitude that he so beautifully exemplifies. Now to the question, of course, that is part and parcel of the whole predictive processing, relevance realizing framework that I’ve been talking about. And the idea is, yes, in many ways, you’re only picking up on the relevant information and not all available information. In some ways, the call to the sacred is to try to open the possibilities of that framing both quantitatively and qualitatively so that you see more and you are changed by more. Now the question is, then you can sneak in a Cartesian framework. Well, to the degree to which you’re ignorant is the degree to which you don’t have certainty, which is the degree to which you don’t have knowledge. And then of course, you then slam against Mino’s paradox that if you don’t know it, you won’t recognize it when you find it, and if you know it, you don’t need to search, and therefore knowledge and learning are impossible. And the way out of both of these binds that really undermine everything else we’re doing is to acknowledge something like partial truth that we can, that to say that we grasp parts of the world insofar as they are relevant to us doesn’t mean that the world is a blank canvas. So for example, if you invoke evolution, notice that you are saying that evolution is itself something that has come to be known. And then if evolution is known, you have to understand, of course, all the work that Lyle did, and you have to understand plate tectonics, which means you have to understand geology, and you have to understand planet formation, which means you have to understand solar systems and gravity and causation and weather and meteorological things. You have to understand biology, which means you have to understand chemistry, which means you have to understand fundamental parts of physics. You have to understand ecology. Do you see what this means? You can’t just say, oh, well, evolution is true, and we only see the, well, if evolution is true, then all these other things have to be true, and that means we have actually a lot of true knowledge. Is it the same as reality? Of course not. We are not gods. But does that mean it counts as ignorance or an illusion? The problem with that is the word illusion is comparative. One thing is only an illusion in comparison to something else that I take to be real, which is actually going on in the question. You’re presupposing that the information patterns disclosed by evolutionary theory are real. Well, then I get to play that game. I get to point to all the other things presupposed by evolution as real and so on and so forth. And then saying most of my experience is an illusion becomes very problematic. It comes down to a lot of mere appearance could be understood to be illusory, and so we have to do rational reflection, philosophy, and science to get to reality. Yeah, I agree with that. I really do. But I think everybody since Plato has agreed with that. Now, I’m not trying to be dismissive of your question. I’m taking it seriously. But I think the question has to do with two presuppositions that I want to challenge. That’s how I would answer that question. Someone’s been reading Hegel. Yeah, yeah. You bet. Dan Schiappi and I have been reading Hegel. We’ve been reading Brandem on Hegel. We’ve been reading Pinkard in Hegel, Farnath on Hegel, all of this. Yeah, Hegel, I mean, because we’re doing this book, we’re writing this book together, the being of rationality and the rationality of being. And Hegel is, we’re on a large, deep read together about Hegel and Hegel’s proposals about the normativity of rationality. And for anyone who’s interested in Plato in book seven of the Politeia, the Republic, as it’s usually translated in English, a terrible translation, the state would be much better. Anyways, in the Republic, in the Politeia, in book seven, after the cave myth, Plato actually relates the need for dialectics to move behind to the origin, to the Arche and get behind the presuppositions which the scientists cannot do as they work off hypothesis, hypotheses. So let me see, there was one question that actually was in line with the sacred which you addressed at the beginning of this, which… Is an important one, without invitation from the sacred divine, is it possible to be introspective by sheer effort on our ego part? There he is again, Descartes. So we’re gonna bump into this question, especially when we do the Kyoto School, the first book, Nishida. And Nishida bumps into this. And this is Schlagerland’s book, Trying Not to Try, this paradox. Here’s a typical sort of Buddhist, I think this is even a Zen thing. Enlightenment is not found by seeking, but only seekers will find it. Typical very Zen thing to say. But the idea there is we’re trying to find participation which is between mere action and imposition and mere passion and merely receiving in, we are participating. And part of what goes on here is what does that mean for our epistemological and ontological models? And also what does it mean for our understanding of practice and ritual? And I think that you can start from an egocentric framework in good faith. And if you take up the proper practices that can orient and make possible to you participation, that you can then move into participation. And of course, this goes back to the Platonic metaphor of seduction. You’re seduced into philosophy. And please don’t jump on me, this is Plato’s metaphor. I’m not trying to groom anybody to do anything ridiculous like that. I just will put that aside. So the idea is, yeah, originally you might be drawn from a very egocentric kind of lust into something. I originally was intrigued by the figure of Socrates because he seemed to win every argument. And as a young adolescent, I wanted to win every argument. And I got taken into that. But as you get taken into it and you get into the participatory mode, you start to open up to a possibility of being caught up in something beyond the ego, something trans-egoic. And you start to realize that Socrates also undercuts his own arguments. He questions himself as profoundly as he questions anybody else. And then what happens is you start to internalize that because of the participation and you’re drawn beyond an egocentric framework. You are seduced into the love of wisdom. And so those issues around participation and seduction are very prominent. And they also bring up issues around, again, what is it to participate in the ultimate reality? It doesn’t mean that we, of course, become sort of coterminous or coextensive with the universe or anything ridiculous like that, but what does it mean? And we can find even died in the world physicalists like Leonard Angel arguing that current science actually supports the truth, as he would put it, of mystical experience in a profound way. Because that science is saying, identities aren’t attached to Aristotelian substances, et cetera, et cetera. So I do think you can start there. I think you have to be open being seduced by a beauty that exceeds what your desires are currently attracted to. I mean, your desires will be attracted to something that is beautiful, but let them be seduced by something that is beautiful. And so I think that’s the way to go. So let’s not be attracted to something that is beautiful, but let the beautiful be shocking to you, let it be startling to you, let it challenge you, let it seduce you into deeper participation that will take you into trans-egoic transformation. Thank you very much. There’s one final question that I can address, and then you can wish everyone farewell and invite them to the course again. Sandy asks, is the course anchored to a set time? Yes and no. So if you want to be participating during the live lectures and live seminars, then yes. You’ll find them on the course enrollment page, the exact dates and times. So it’s Friday, April 5th, that’s when we begin, April 12th, 19th, 26th, then May 24th, May 31st, June 14th, June 21st, eight lectures and seminars. In total, always from six to eight PM UK time, that’s one to three PM Eastern Standard Time. Everything’s described here as well, how it all works. And if you can make, I’d say at least five, then you should sign up for the Philosophical Fellowship. If you don’t have time for the seminars, but you still like to listen and read along and do this all at your own pace, the self-studied chair is for you, that’s probably the best one. And of course, anyone who enrolls gets lifetime access to the course. That means you sign up once, you get access to the video lectures and seminar discussions, et cetera, for, well, who knows how long, until everything breaks down on the internet or God knows what. But it’ll be available to you indefinitely. And just to mention this, if you want to do one-on-one session with John, then that’s available too. There should be about three left. So that’s it from me on the technical side. If there are more questions, I’ll be looking out for your comments and try and respond to them. And aside from that, I hope that many of you can sign up and join us in exactly a month from now. John. Thank you, my friend. I hope you can all see, I’m extremely excited about this course. So this is not a purely intellectual endeavor. I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s never a purely intellectual endeavor at the Halkian Academy. So this is a good home for this course. I’m deeply invested in this. I’m enthusiastic about it. I’m hoping to be transformed by all of this. I look forward to the chance to get into dialogue and perhaps we’ll flow together into DIA Logos. I thoroughly, profoundly, and it had a huge impact on me, enjoyed Beyond Nihilism at Halkian. I’m looking forward to this. I hope you can come. I hope if you can’t come, you’ll at least consider doing the asynchronous stuff because I just want, this sounds selfish, but it’d be so great if so many more people were just talking about this and reflecting it and discussing it and challenging each other and pushing each other and calling each other to show up properly. That would be a great service we could all collectively and individually do for what is needed, I would argue, for the world right now. So that’ll be my closing remark. And other than this, again, thank you, Johannes, my dear friend for making Halkian and for making this opportunity available. Thank you very much, John. Excellent. Thank you all very much for listening, for your excellent questions and for this time with you here. These questions were really excellent. So we hope to see you. Goodbye, everyone. Goodbye. Goodbye.