https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=nUazZDrQF7A
Thank you so much for tuning in to this pretty special conversation that I just had with John Vervecky. It’s kind of, it emerged spontaneously. And it’s very much connected to something that we will officially announce here shortly as soon as we get the dates down. John Vervecky and I, through the Circling Institute, will be leading a course together. And it will be a course that in some capacity integrates circling and deep philosophical dialogue or via logos. Most likely it will be a weekend, it will be in July, some weekend in July. So we’ll let you know when that’s coming. It’ll be through the Circling Institute, so it’ll give you an opportunity to dive in in a very experiential dive into exactly what we’re talking about in this video. And so we had some technical difficulties on this, and I just tried to edit as much of it out as possible, so hopefully it doesn’t come across as too clunky. But essentially we were diving into this notion that Mr. Vervecky has been bringing up or brought up about listening to reason. In the capacity, not in the instrumental reason sense, but in the way in which a reason is something innate to us and revealing of the ground of the good as such. And so it was a deep dive into that conversation. Of course, that ended up culminating into essentially what talking about fellowship and friendship and these ways that the two are so mutually indwell and dwell into and indwell by each other. Enjoy the dialogue. Stay tuned. I’ll be giving out announcements everywhere I can about the courses coming up. And enjoy. I have to agree. Yeah. So coming, like I said, in response to this amazing book by Schindler that I’m reading with Dan Schiaffi, the question that’s forming in my mind in response to his analysis about the truncation and trivialization, the technologization of reason as an integral part of the meaning crisis, what does it mean? What would it mean to recover reasoning as something intrinsically valuable? And so the question that I want to explore is what does it mean to listen to the voice of reason as the logos? What does it mean? Because there I’m hearkening back to the quote from Heraclitus, don’t listen to me, but listen to the logos. Right. And it is wise to acknowledge that all things are one. You have another translation, but you get the core idea. And so, and I mean, in one side, we’ve been exploring all of this, right, in terms of the logos and the listening. But more importantly, I want to I want to now try and explicate what he’s on about, which is the interrelationships between the logos and the being able to listen to the voice of reason so that we come to appreciate reason for its own sake. Yeah. Which is very, very different than rationalism. Right. That’s the point he keeps trying to make. And so I’ve been trying to understand and as I was saying, I’m trying to understand that. I’m trying to be helped to understand that by the analogy that you and I have pursued about Rusin’s idea about the musicality of being and that we can there’s been a similar degradation in our listening to music. We used to listen to music for its own sake because it humanized us. If you allow me to have a clunky verb in there. Right. And so I think that it was it was it was a place within which the good so Plato has this idea that the best lens for the good is the good life. Right. Well, that’s that’s the whole project in the Republic. What we’ll do is we’ll what’s what’s a good life, both of individuals and a community and only when we see what a good life that’s the lens through which we can understand the goodness of being. Yeah. The ability to listen to that goodness is supposed to be inherently valuable to us. It’s supposed to be integral to a good life. And then the idea is that that requires that requires a relating and getting into a right relationship with reason and reasoning as an as an enactment of the logos that you do like you’re you’re valuing it for its own sake. You’re valuing the relationship rather than I reason because I want control over nature or I want to manipulate or persuade people or I want to win a political position or I want to get to the bottom line or I don’t care about reason. I want to know what are the applications, what are the practical implications like that voice that’s really like powerful these days. And the point he makes is all of those all of those sort of diminishments of reason. And also, I think it’s convergent with my argument of how we have truncated reason into All of those things are significantly contributing to the meaning crisis because if we are not capable, his thesis is if we’re not capable of listening to the voice of reason, we are incapable of of escaping. We’re fundamentally deeply incapable of escaping our egocentric bias. Yeah, you said fundamentally escaping the intrinsic sense of bias, right? Yes. So all I mean, this was a thesis I’ve made before, right, that the deepest commitment in reason is the commitment to the realization of self-deception and that what that does, right, is requires self-correction and every genuine act of self-correction is ecstatic. It requires some self-transcendence. Yeah. In order to self-correct. Right. And so the idea is if we don’t have the good as an aspirational goal in our acts of reasoning, we will not be able to appreciate the need for self-transcendence. Yeah. And therefore, we will not be able to deeply appreciate the need for self-deception. So we might be able to manage some superficial self-deceptions, but we’ll be able to do it ultimately in the service of a kind of narcissism and more pervasive self-deception. Right. And what he’s highlighting in that book, what’s been lost about Plato and reading Plato, which is what seems to come through all the dialogues in multiple forms, is this, I think what I heard is that Plato was in a certain sense arguing for not a reason in the instrumental sense, but that reason is what humans do because there is the good. Is that, it’s like there’s the implicit way, there’s the implicit sense in which human beings, it’s, that’s what I heard you say, right? And it’s like the, it’s the nature of human beings to reason, right? And that it shows in some level are the native ground that we have for the good, something like that. Yeah, I think that’s exactly right. The idea is that, and Plato’s great argument to my mind is the interconnecting of these things. We have these two great, I don’t know what to call them, these two great meta drives. They’re constitutive of our human personhood, our human agency. Yeah. In person, somebody told me that person in some deep etymological sense means. Yeah. So yeah, I was just saying that human beings have this, these two deep constitutive, things that are constitutive of their personhood, even their agency. One is we’re trying to remove inner conflict. And one is we want to be in contact with what’s real. And we find those, we find those good in and of themselves. They’re not morally good, aesthetically good, or even epistemically good. They’re just good, right? They sort of, they’re part of the sinews of a good life as a good person. Right. Yeah. Well, I’m just thinking about this. As you’re talking about this, I just, I keep just flashing to, I mean, one of the big, essentially what circling is so much about has to do with listening, right? And in the stage, in the second stage of circling, right, first one is sovereignty. The second one is explore. And explore is about the subtitle of that is, or in parentheses, is the art of getting someone’s world. And one is there’s the art of getting someone’s world, right? Because it’s not technical per se. However, it’s like, I keep flashing to that sense in which, yeah, when you really listen to somebody, and you really, really listen in a penetrating way, right? In a way that’s like, not just what they’re saying, the arguments are in the stuff that they’re talking about, but who’s saying it. And the way you start to hear is what people start to hear is they start to hear a care, it seems to me. It’s all like, it’s like, you start to hear like, what, who is this being that’s like, cares so much to be baffled by the thing that they’re addressing, right? Like, what’s the, you can start to hear. And I think what you start to hear is this, something like, it’s hard to put into words. I mean, it’s, you start to hear goodness, right? You still do. It’s almost like you start to hear goodness itself, like, oh, you’re good. Right? It’s like, it sounds kind of trite, but like at that level of hearing somebody, somebody being deeply seen in that way, I think what you see is this fundamental good. And it’s like, it’s like it shines. And everybody, and you can just say, it’s so many experiences of people kind of having this experience of like, they start talking about some problem that they’re having with themselves, some shame that they’re having, or some problem that they’re, and they go backwards and backwards, and you start to open it up. And then you just see something that transcends and includes all of that, right? Is somebody’s trying to grapple with something, but that they’re, that they care, is it this relationship to goodness? And it’s almost like you can feel the goodness itself emanating as their being or something like that. So I keep flashing to what you’re saying. And when I hear him like bring up the intrinsic nature of reason, right? I think that’s right. I think that’s an excellent connection. That’s really good. And what’s interesting about that is, so like, and you do this better than I do, but like when you’re getting somebody’s world, right? Yeah, you’re getting, you’re getting, you know, the sensibility transcendence that Wright talks about. You’re getting, you have to go through this kind of ability to re-see things, to really get that other person’s world. Because the temptation is just to see their world as a version of your world, right? That’s the temptation. And then the point is, so, and then Wright talks about that, you know, he uses Murdoch’s example of the mother-in-law and the daughter-in-law. And you know, I’ve talked about that before, but the idea is, no, I’m doing this thing, and the verb that comes to my mind is, I’m tailoring my sensibility to you. So that, right, what is, I don’t like these words because they’re, they drip with romanticism, but what’s unique about how you care about the world, like I’m really trying to get that. But, so there’s kind of this, your suchness, if you’ll be along that language, right? The way that, there’s a particular doorway to reality, you know, a network of intelligibility that only you have woven, and I need, and I’m trying to see what that weaving is. But, I’m also hearing something that is common, so that we can have a common unity, a community, which is you, underneath it, are trying to get inner peace and be in touch with the world through your caring. You’re taking care of yourself, and you’re caring about the world, and those are fundamentally bound together, and you and I share that. We have a shared commitment to that, in so far as we are committed to a good life as good people. Right. I don’t know how much of that you heard, Guy. Yeah, oh yeah, it was gorgeous. Yeah, I heard, I heard all of it. Can you hear me? Yeah, I’m, you’re coming through on this end just fine. Yeah. In fact, I really heard that sense of, when you said in touch, in touchness, right? Yeah, yes. And that is that, that is that there’s this warmth, I notice, no matter how trippy and abstract the stuff that we talk about in, in Dialogos Gitz, what grows and grounds is often this experience of unbearable affinity, right? Like, that’s just it, the two are there inseparably together. So, I’m doing some Lectio Divina on Spinoza, and I’m reading this passage where he says, God does not have abstract ideas. And I was like, what? And what he means is, like, we have to go to this abstraction to get to that level, but, but that level is also in the most intimate connections we have. We, we, we set these two as opposite as somehow opposite to each other or distant from each other. Yeah. But the, like, the move is that they’re distant, and then they come back together. Yeah. And so, like, that’s exactly it. So, when I’m listening to reason, and this is the question, like, I’m trying to explore with you, there’s a way in which, when I’m listening to reason, I’m listening to what is common, not only common to us as people, but ultimately what’s common to us and being, right? Because we, we commune with it. So, I’m doing that, but I’m also listening to you. And, like I said, your own, the way in which you are a particular perspectival and participatory portal into being can express itself. And those two have to be held together. Yeah. Yeah. And, and, yeah, the question that’s coming through for me is they’re not identical in a logical or categorical sense, but there’s this, like, like, I’m trying to get, because there’s, because there’s an irony in Heraclitus’ statement, right? Because if we took him literally, we would stop reading the text, and then we wouldn’t get the rest of his text, and we wouldn’t get the instruction to pass beyond the text to the lower. Oops. I’m sorry, John, this is, it’s kind of a bumpy ride. That’s okay. We got you, we got you right back to the, to get beyond it, to the logos. Well, that’s a good point. I mean, yeah. So, I mean, what I was pointing to is the irony in Heraclitus’ text, right? There’s a deep irony there, because we have to listen to him, right, to actually get his recommendation to listen beyond him, right, to the logos. And there’s that, it’s almost like a Kierkegaardian irony or a Socratic irony. Yeah. I’m trying to get, what’s the relation, and I don’t mean cynical irony in the way irony is used now. I’m more, and that’s why I don’t even want to use the term, because people are going to mishear it. But there’s this sense about, I have to, I have to both, I have to listen to, in order to listen to reason, I have to get good at listening to something other than my own monologue. Yeah. That’s, that’s the primary thing. But, but, but, right, so that means being able to really listen to others, which of course is the point of circling. Yeah. But I need to also be, but myself and the others, we need to be able, insofar as we’re hearing each other, we need to be able to hear something that is common to us and beyond us. Like, I’m sorry, I’m stumbling here, but like listening to reason is about fundamentally getting into, you know, getting into right relationship with reality. Yeah. And, and, and, and caring to do that and caring to do that. Sorry, I’m struggling, but I’m This is great. And I appreciate the struggle, because it’s like you’re highlighting something that’s there. It’s not totally revealed, though, but it’s, it’s, it’s present, it’s present is concealed, right? And so we’re in, we’re addressing it. I think that right there, it seems to me like this is a moment where we’re listening to something. Right. It’s like there’s something about like, where you sense it’s almost like you sense a unity. You sense that there’s something making this intelligent that’s unaccounted for. Right. Yes. And you hear it first. And this is why I was going to ask you, what is it? Why does it make more sense? If it does, right? If I put it like this, to say, to say, listen to reason, and not see reason. Yeah, right. There’s something intelligible there. I just I’m wondering about what’s the No, no, that’s good. And I think and part of that has to do with so much here. Right. Because, I mean, he’s also Schindler is also acknowledging that the point of the dialogues is right. And he’s trying to get this actually dialogical thing between these two traditions. You know, we have the older tradition that the point of the dialogues are the propositional arguments. And then we have the newer arguments from Highland and Gonzales, as others, the point rapé is the non propositional knowing. And then what Schindler says is no, no, no, they’re both right. And it’s about get it’s about actually the dialogue between the propositional and the non propositional and getting that. And the idea is, if I get that into right relationship, I will be able to get into right relationship with reason, or maybe better, I will embody the right relationship that is reason to reality. That’s so I think when we’re saying listening, and again, this is back to the irony I was just talking about, we use that because we know there is some deep connection. And this is the other this is one of the meanings of logos, there’s deep connection to speech. Yeah, deep connection to speech, right. And communication. Yeah. But, but it’s not. But the listening is trying to remind us to that which is outside the speaking and speech. In fact, draws is for because there is no listening, there is no speech without listening. That’s, that’s the blind spot, I think, in linguistics, a lot is that there’s, there’s, and communication, anything self help is like, usually think about communication, they talk about what you say. But no, that it’s there is no, like, speech would not make any sense unless it was already in a response to something addressing it, calling it forth, right? Yes. So that’s what I mean when I when I when I want to challenge the monological model of reason, that reason is to produce a monologue, right? Yeah, that reasoning is if reasoning is about caring, and being responsive and responsible, responsive and responsible to reality, then it’s it has to be inherently dialogical. And so I think why we involve listening, rather than seeing is precisely because we are taking this ironic attitude towards language, because we’re trying to point to the inherently dialogical nature of the relationship. Right, right. Because there is that yeah, there really is that quality of because it could so bringing that back into just the experience of talking with people, right? And what is when you really like someone, right? In this experience of in what you’re talking about these bringing these two together, right, the suchness and the moreness, right? The idea and the object, right? The inside, the outside, the speakable, the ineffable, this this kind of paradox that when you really look at things, you kind of can have this incredible relationship with that seems to be really, really opening. Is that is that I notice it with with this experience of the universal when I was talking about before of like getting someone’s world or the experience of being gotten in this experience of feeling like you’re encountering goodness itself. Right. But here’s the thing about it is that it’s never but it’s also simultaneously with getting the particularity of how fucking peculiar that human being is. There is a way, right? It’s like there’s it’s like the particular way you’re broken, right? In the way that you respond to that, you’ve overcome that you’ve weaved that together. This weaving that is that’s like so peculiar, like there’s no one like you everywhere else in the world is that that experience is like almost it’s like shining forth between something universal like but that’s exactly it. So I mean the the the dialogue, the Deologos actually exemplifies the inherently dialogical nature of participation. Right. So the good I mean so and this is why you have this whole metaphysics about emanation and emergence and their interpenetration and that’s valuable and important but I what they’re trying to get at, right? Look, you know, horizontally we unfold something in a drama in dialogue. It’s narrative and narrative is our primary initial experience with non-logical identity. I’m going to go I’m going to become identical to somebody other than I am right now through you, right? That’s what a narrative is the way in which we have become we acclimatize ourselves and we accustomed and pay very careful attention to those words ourselves to non-logical identity. But what we forget what our culture has forgotten is that that horizontal narrative which we and that’s the drama within Deologos which is it’s essential. It’s not the only form of non-logical identity. The other form of non-logical identity is participation. The non-logical identity between the suchness and the moreness between the like the particular is like the one is a source of determination which means things become determinate which means they become self-determining which means they become different from each other and in differing from each other they don’t form some sort of homogeneous mass. But that is the proper expression of the principle of determination. Like this is Pearl’s analysis. There’s a non-logical identity that goes this way the non-logical identity of participation. And the thing that Plato’s trying to do is he’s trying to get the non-logical identity of participation and the non-logical identity of aspiration integrated together. So you can see them as having a kind of pedagogical affinity. They affine to each other and they teach and instruct each other. And so when you’re listening to reason like the point is you notice what you did there. You’re simultaneously listening to the person but you’re listening to the way in which reality self-realizes. Like they’re inseparably bound up together. Exactly. Exactly. And what’s that? The nesting of the relevance realization of the person and the corresponding unfolding of intelligibility. And this is the thing that Whitehead is really impressing on me. How much this is also dialogical in nature. Inherently dialogical in nature. Same thing with Spinoza. Even though Spinoza wrote in a monologue. But the point I’m making is I’m trying to understand reason as this profound kind of responsiveness to the drama of aspiration and I don’t know, the self-transcendence. But we self-transcend in both directions. It’s not quite right but the participation and aspiration dimensions and how they are bound together when we’re listening. So could we come this way? I want to play this point and we’re sort of rediscovering it. The primary way in which I can correct for my bias is to really listen to you. To get your world. Right? Because you have different biases. Can we take that relationship? Can we cultivate that relationship interpersonally so that we can take it trans personally? So that I can see the world as the bearer of a perspective from which I can correct myself. Yeah. Wow. I’m hearing a couple things. One is it strikes me that in some sense where there are these distinctions that we’re bringing together that are operating and that there’s something concealed that’s not that we can feel it. We can hear it. Because when you go, I’m like, this is good. We’re right at the thing that kind of calls forth reason in a certain sense. It transcends reason. It calls it. In some way alludes to it’s in some sense it’s not gotten there yet but yet it’s sensing it. What’s interesting is that we’re describing something that people, humans do and they engage in and they find themselves engaging it. So we’re talking about it but not on one level. This only would even make sense because we’re describing something that shines forth in our intelligibility. And so if you kind of feel into what it takes to understand that and explicate that, what you’re expliciting is not theoretical fundamentally. It’s non-theoretical at its base. It happens. And this is where Heidegger I think really kind of comes in in this way of this kind of sense in which this from our embedded situations, all of this unfolds. And this very grounded sense. I think that’s exactly right. I think that all of us to the degree to which we’re not animals and the degree to which we’re aspiring to be people, persons, living good lives, we are called to reason. And maybe Heidegger is valuable here too. I mean when I asked the question how to listen to reason, part of the question and this is is Schindler’s point is we fail to. We also fail to listen to reason. And I’m interested in given given what we said like how is it? I mean I know what I answered that question as a cognitive scientist, as an ecologist, I know how to talk about biases and how they’re rooted in relevance and how they’re rooted in relevance realization. I get all that but I’m trying to get at what makes us turn away from them. I mean I think this is what I called onto normativity. The normativity beyond epistemic and moral and aesthetic normativity is onto normativity. The really good is simultaneously the really real. And it’s really good just because it’s the really real. And those two are inseparably bound together and then we get called to it. Yes, and we get called to it and people have these experiences of the really real and onto normativity and we talk about them as mystical experiences and that’s legitimate and there’s even a mystical dimension of course in Socrates, Plato and Plotinus and in Heidegger. You know Meister Heidegger is all through Heidegger right? Glazenheide is from Heidegger. And I appreciate that and what I want again, another way of saying it is in Plato and it comes to fruition and for me in Plotinus and then later in Spinoza is the interweaving of the mystical and what is more frequently, not properly, a mistake, what is more frequently called the rational, where what’s meant by there is argumentation. And for me, I want to understand how I know, sorry I don’t want to sound pretentious, I think I understand, I have good reason and good evidence to understand how to get towards the really real in mystical practices. But I have a sense of how to get to them in dialogical argumentative practices and I want to understand that. So another way of asking the question, because you can think of the mystical experience as pure listening, that’s what it is, it’s pure listening. You shut the mouth, you shut the eyes, you just pure listen, right? Pure consciousness event is one pull of that. But I want to understand because the other thing I see in Plato and it’s right, is that sense of onto normativity is essential to reason. I also get this in Augustine too and it’s like how can we recover because what we’ve fallen away from, we have fallen away from the linking of propositions as a way of linking us to the non-propositional. We have the only non-propositional, so here’s a proposal that we have fallen away from that and that what we do is we, the linking of propositions and the non-propositional is the bottom line, the practical result, the technological implications, that’s the non-propositional for which we are doing the linking of the propositions. So for me this is a kind of confusion, right? And so how do we remember, no, no, no, that is all ultimately dependent on, parasitic on, a relationship between propositions that carries us to the non-propositional that is the really real, that is really good just because it’s the really real and it’s intrinsically good because it’s the really real and we experience it that way and we experience it at the foundations of a good life and of being a good person. So it’s at the foundations of virtue and life. And that these, this way in which ethos, kind of this sense of ethos that these conversations somehow kind of dwell in and deepen in or are dwelled by, right? That’s why the question, that’s why all the dialogues are about virtue. Virtue is about that, right? That perspectival participatory transformation. Would you say a little bit more about virtue, like that sense of, I mean virtues are really, people usually think about virtues and they think they know what they’re, they know what that is. If you ask them, you think that’s like, well, they know what that is until you actually ask them. You’re like, you really start thinking about virtue. Virtues are quite trippy, right? Because they have an inherently aspirational proleptic structure to them, which tempts us in two ways. So let me try this argument on you. Okay. So let’s take it as if you had no honesty, I can’t teach you about honesty, right? Because you can’t, that’s the ultimate version of the Minos paradox, right? If you don’t see the value of honesty, I can’t teach it to you because anything I’m going to do requires you being honest with me, right? And admitting your mistakes, for example. So if you’re incapable of honesty, I can’t teach you honesty. Yeah, totally. Right? The point I’m going to, and this works for all, right? This is why Plato’s knowing is virtue and the Minos paradox. All learning requires the virtues, right? If you don’t have them to some degree, but the thing is you don’t completely have them. So there’s two temptations because you must have them to some degree. You can fall into a, you know, a common sense intuition. I know what courage is. I know what honesty is. I can feel it. I know what it is. And then, you know, what you’ll see in the dialogues is Plato, Socrates will basically demolish that and say, that’s insufficient. You haven’t understood honesty because you think that you think that this intuitive beginning is sufficient. It’s not. And then some people will recognize, oh, I need something beyond. And then what they’ll get is they’ll get, you know, an authoritative description of what honesty is. You know, the third person technical definition. And they’ll say, oh, that’s what honesty is, right? And then Socrates will destroy that because it doesn’t represent aspiration. It just represents appropriation. It just represents somebody like owning the proposition and think by that they’ve acquired the virtue. And his points is no. So the two temptations are like you lose the aspirational element of the virtues when you degrade down into either the like, well, I know what it is because I have to have it in me. Of course you do, but that’s insufficient. Well, I know what I have to get beyond me. So I’ve got to go to something third personal. You’re right in a sense, but you can’t, it’s not third personal without you connecting it to the first person. Right. And this is why Socrates is on and on in the dialogues. Don’t say it if you don’t actually live it. Yeah. Don’t just give me the definition. You got to tell me, right? Like, do you really believe it and believing it? Well, he doesn’t even mean believe it. What he means is we mistranslate that often. What he means is, are you really committed to that? Are you really committed to that? Tell me where you’re committed. Right. Yeah. Yeah. And so I think, right. And of course, rationality is a virtue itself. And so we have to have the rudiments in it, or I couldn’t teach you. How could I teach you modus ponens? Well, if you see if P then Q, I have to use modus ponens to teach you modus ponens, right? Yeah. Right. You have to have, but that, are you fully rational? That’s ridiculous. So what is it? Well, I could state some, you know, algorithmic ideal out here that you can’t ever like makes no sense. Oh, just be logical at all times. That’s what rationality is being logical. We have life. Notice how many people we have on YouTube telling us what rationality is. Really? How did you come so easily to that, to that position of rationality, that definition? I’ve been studying it, I’ve been studying it deeply philosophically, cognitive science, cognitive psychologists for two decades. And, you know, and people better than me have been studying it longer. And, you know, is there like, do we know? Well, oh, wow. Like you think you, like, so you see the sophistry of well, lot rationality is just being logical. That’s false, too. That’s false, too. That’s insufficient. Doesn’t mean logic is irrelevant. But it means that just giving into a formal third person definition is not going to get you into what the virtue is because virtues are inherently aspirational. Right, right. Sorry, that was a long thing. But I’m just trying to get an argument that I’ve been working on. That’s great. This is, this seems to be just at the heart of it. Right? Like the whole, just in terms of, just in terms of to listen to reason. Right? Yes. Like, like one, you’re listening, it puts you right there is like to listen to reason is always to listen to someone. Right? It’s some, it’s like you got to listen to somebody to listen to reason, I think. Right. Well, I hope you can do it. I hope we can, like what Chris says, I hope we can vow the world. Part of what, what I’m arguing is part of listening to reason is allowing, vowing the world in the right way, not anthropomorphically, not projectively, but so that you can actually listen to it. Yeah. Right. And so, so is this what Gershaw was getting to with his work on species and trying to grasp the species of plants is kind of in a certain sense is to listen to the secret of nature, like to hear it, to hear it in some sense. Yeah. Cause we, yeah. So his sense of seeing, his sense of seeing really is more, it’s, it’s, it’s trans sensual. It’s, it’s a seeing, that’s a hearing, that’s a touching, that’s a listening, right? It, it, yeah. Very much. There’s something there with Gerita. I’ve been like looking at that and wondering about that. What, what that talk about a peculiar soul Gerita, man. But, but, but, but notice what you’re doing here. Yeah. I just want to pause before we move to good to properly, because notice the question you’re asking, right? Notice we’ve moved outside of the nominalist framework. We’re not asking the question about how do my propositions need to be related to each other? Yeah. That’s an important question. Yeah. And I want to be clear. We don’t abandon that question because like we’re talking about how do I put my propositions together so that they relate to the non-propositional? That question is essential, but it’s not exhaustive because we’re asking two other questions now. We’re asking is what kind of person do I have to be in order to listen to reason, which is a different question from how do my propositions relate to each other? And then, and this is the, this is the question that, you know, Geerson makes, you know, super salient at the heart of ancient epistemology, which is like the, our epistemology, because we’re after, after nominalism is how do I relate the propositions together such that, you know, what is knowing? Ancient epistemology takes it for granted that there is knowledge, right? And so then it asks this question, what does the world have to be like such that it’s intelligible? Which is a different question. What does the world have to be like such that it’s intelligible? Which is the central question of the platonic thing. And notice what’s happening now. Now the central issue for us is wisdom. The central issue is what kind of person do I have to be? What kind of virtues do I have to be such that I can undergo the transformations such that I can come into right relationship with the way the world must be in order for it to be intelligible? Right. Let’s say the last part again. So I still, I was just still like, what does the world have to be such that it’s intelligible? I was like, whoa. Okay. And then the second thing that you said, uh-huh. Yes. Yeah. So it’s the two, it’s the two sides together. We were talking about like, so what kind of person do I have to be? Not, not, not what kind of formal relationship to my propositions. Again, I’m not excluding that. I am not excluding that. I’m, but I’m trying to open up our frame. We have to ask what kind of virtues must I possess in order so that I can enter into the right relationship with reality. And what does that mean? Is it, is, is trying to come to a profound understanding of what must the world be like in order for it to be intelligible? See, that’s listening instead of speaking at the world, like the romantics, right. And saying, this is the way it is. I’m posing. I’m expressing it’s, it’s that the world is intelligible to me. And I, my ability to respond to it presupposes that what, what, where I have to get the world of the world, where, what, what must the world be like? What must the world be coming from in order for it to be intelligible to me? Yes. Yes. And then there’s the question. And then, and then in some sense, we ask the question, I automatically go right back into what is this, which is, which is asking it, right. In what way is that part of the world? And then we start to go, it’s very wide and specified in personal, personal, we’re just right there. This is, I think what you’re, what you’re, this right here is my understanding of your work. This is your, I think we’re right here. If I understand your work correctly, this conformity, right. Yes. Is where you’re pointing to it and you’re saying this is your response to nihilism. This is your, in some sense, your answer to nihilism. This is what we’re pointing to right here. Right. Yes, exactly. Exactly. So what I want to know is, in some way that’s analogous to the transformations in attention that bring about the mystical conformity to the really real that is inherently good. Yeah. It’s an act of falling in love with being, what is the process by which I link propositions together such that I also enter into a conformity with the real, a transformative process that brings me into conformity with the really real that is inherently good just because it’s the really real. Yeah. That to me is like, that’s the question about, and so how, the virtues are how do I learn to transformatively listen so I can be, you know, I can be conformed to the really real. Yeah. So I mean, it’s going to be both. I’m going to be listening and proposing. That’s the propositions. How do I, how do I, how do I, how do I tack like sailing between the listening and the proposing. There’s where it could fall astray. There’s where it could fall astray. And I think this is your, this is your answer. Like in some sense, it’s like, it’s precisely because, because it’s so interestingly, I’m thinking about, I’m thinking about there, right, the English there is, right. Of this sense in which it’s like, Heidegger talks about it as is, is schaken, right, which, which roughly translate into shock. But it’s that process of being here by stepping back, right. This kind of sense of like the there, right. Like, and then the being there is what, you know, he would say is the thing that that side sustains with its being this kind of, it’s like this primordial sense in which you get the sense that there’s, there’s foosess, right. But then there’s, then there’s this kind of, in some way, there’s a human being is something like this shock, this stepping back, right. This, but, but that’s true. Think about, think about, and this is again, again, listening to the voice of reason, because you see it, you see it in the Socratic dialogue, you see that shock, that’s the aporia, right. And notice that we have these two different senses of realness. Yeah. So one is confirmation. This is how things are coming together and homing us, like the walls, we’re gathering the walls around us, and the walls are well structured, and they home us, they home us, right. That’s confirmation. Yeah. But we have the other sense of realness, it was when we’re taken totally by surprise, and when we’re shocked, and we’re when we wake up, we have a sense of waking up. Yeah. And so that’s the horror, right. And so, you’re right. And so, like, yeah, the proposing is like, we’re building these walls. And then what we do, right, and that’s homes us. And then we get shocked by some, but the listening is to, well, as you said, is to be vulnerable to the horror, at least the wonder, the awe that opens it up. And then, and we’re doing this, right, we’re doing this all the time. And what that reminded me of is that reminds me of what’s called, you know, structural realism in the philosophy of science, where they talk about, you have all these paradigms, you know, in a Kuhnian sense in science, here’s a paradigm, and here’s a paradigm, and here’s a paradigm. And what people take to be rational is always within a paradigm, right. But Kuhn thought the relationship between the paradigms was non-rational. But people have been arguing in structural realism is no, no, no, Kuhn emphasized what was lost, right, between the paradigms. And he wouldn’t pay attention, he wasn’t paying attention to what is being carried through the paradigms, such that there’s actually history, rather than a random chaos. And I was thinking, well, that’s interesting, because, right, we can write, it’s like, right, what we can do is, as we build our build these little homes of proposition, and then shatter them, as we open ourselves up again to the world, and then rebuild them, right, we can sense in that trajectory, what is being carried through all of the different paradigmatic homes we’re in. And there’s a book, I can’t remember the author’s name, on Heidegger and Transcendence. Caring, where, right, yeah, exactly, exactly. Isn’t that perhaps what Heraclitus is getting on about, because he’s on about, you know, the logos and the tensions. When I’m hearing through all the words, right, I’m hearing through all the particular meanings. And what I’m doing is I’m being carried through them. But I can only be properly carried through them if I do this. Because if I just do this, I’ll stay. If I just do this, I won’t be carried, I’ll just, I’ll just flail. But if I do this, I’ll be carried through them to find what is underneath all the sayings, if that makes any sense. Well, I’m just kind of feeling just how irony somehow is at the heart of all of this. Yeah, yeah, exactly. This kind of sense in which, you know, Michelangelo’s, the biography of Michelangelo is called The Agony and the Ecstasy. And it’s like, these two things, they don’t touch, right? And is that agonist or is that ecstatic? There’s something about the, there’s something, I get the sense of this, this exemplifying, and some level of the awareness that can become, can see things as intelligible, exemplifies and intelligible, that’s already conformed with the way that the world’s intelligible, of back and forth. And this way that it pushes out, it’s weird, it’s weird, it kind of pushes out this sense of making it something. Like inherently wants to grab it, but yet, then it falls apart, and then reveals itself through that this, this kind of like, is that it, I’m using the word irony. It, well, I think that’s fine. I think that’s fine. Yeah, I mentioned that earlier. And there’s there’s a Socratic irony, the Kukar Guardian irony. I think there’s also, you know, what’s, you know, the self-organizing criticality, right? You build the thing and then it falls apart so you can rebuild and it falls. And we’re discovering just how much, how, how pervasive through all the ontological levels, self-organizing criticality is. But the thing about it is, you’re right, is just that. Notice, notice what I, what just disclosed itself. We’re talking again about all these processes that are going through self-organizing criticality, but what we find is that they’re at all these different levels of ontological analysis. So again, the dimensions of participation and then the dimensions of sort of an aspirational unfolding. That’s cool. It’s so, it’s so, this is so interesting how fra, like, how fractal this is, as this conversation is going on. I’m just noticing how many, this is, this is one of the patterns I’ve noticed in our conversations and in Dialogos is at some point there’s a, there seems like there is some mapping that can be had about kind of the stages that often kind of happen in Dialogos. And I think we’re in one of them right here, where at some point everything starts to like to show itself and everything else, right? It’s the reason why Chris in that initial chapter, he wanted to exemplify an archetype of the, of our live conversations. But then he started listening to them and he’s like, it’s impossible because you get this sense in which everything that John’s saying, right, was just in everything that Guy just said, which is just in everything. It’s just this fractal. And I get this sense where I’m hearing now getting the overall shape of this and then thinking about something like friendship, right? And then something like fellowship, which I want to look at too about this difference between the word. And I got this from actually, it’s from Dan, one of his walks in, on the country path, he likes to put, puts them, we both do these, these like, take these walks and we just point the camera out. You can’t see our face and we just think and walk, right? He’s, he’s really great at that, but he, he started it off talking about actually your last, the last conversation posted on, on the self that you guys are doing. And he, and he, he, it’s this really interesting dialogue that he had. And I never thought about this difference that he said the difference between I think friendship and fellowship, right? That there’s, and the way he saw it was that there’s something about fellowship that seems to be more constituting of people, right? Whereas friendship has another element to it, right? Of, of where, where it’s, it’s a little bit more, you can have kind of opponent processing, there’s something, there’s something more going on there, but then there’s fellowship, which you step into fellowship and there’s this quality where fellowship is creative of the people in this very kind of primordial way. And so I’m just kind of, and I’m just noting like, oh yeah. And fellowship is what garners this, these conversations of like the heart of, it seems like the heart of, of listening to reason and responding to it, right? Exemplified in the, in the, in the platonic dialogue, what’s inherent in it and is held through it is fellowship, right? Yeah. And so yeah, I’ve had some conversations with Chris and Andrew Sweeney about the distinction between friendship and fellowship. Yeah. Because I was proposing that, yeah, that fellowship is the proper, the proper locus for dia logos. I mean, obviously friends can do it, but you don’t, I mean, because what I was trying to get was, and you know this from circling, that people report this sudden profound intimacy that is not the acquired intimacy of friendship. Yeah. Right? Like friendship is an intimacy that you earn by deeply committing to people’s longitudinal development, right? Where, like I was trying to get at this sense of people having a deep intimacy that emerges in like within fellow, like within circling or when people go to church, they go to church and they see each other once an hour or two a week, and yet they get this bond that’s formed, which is not the same as the bond of friendship. Yeah. You know, and so the model I was using for friendship was, right, was St. Paul’s notion of the body of Christ, right? So that what we’re doing in fellowship is maybe using the language we had here, right? What we’re doing in fellowship is we are trying to build good people leading good lives within that fractal framework. Yeah. That is disclosed at the depth. Yeah. Right? Yeah. Right? Whereas in friendship, what we’re doing is we are, I would propose, we are proposing, we are, we’re moving off of personhood within a community of persons. Yeah. That’s why it’s inherently a topic, fellowship. We’re moving into the crafting of the self. Friendship is about mutually shared selfing, whereas I would say that fellowship is about mutually crafted personhood. Right. And those aren’t the same thing. They interpenetrate and they overlap, but they’re, so every fellowship needs friendships. Yeah. All friendships need to be situated within fellowships, but they’re not identical because just like I think personhood and self and selfhood aren’t identical, but when you’re committing to someone as a friend, you’re committing to their project of selfing. Whereas if you’re in fellowship, what we’re doing is we’re committing to the project of the fractal realization of personhood within reality. That’s how I would propose it to you at least. Wow. I’m glad we recorded that. Because it’s all, it’s in in writing this, this, this looking at in writing this paper I’m writing on Skolay, right? And this, this kind of really realizing that you can’t understand the ancient understanding of Skolay. Essentially the apex of ends and means. It’s like where the good and the means to the good are the same, right? There is no process going on. It’s the, it’s considered the pinnacle of, I don’t know, realization of being. And so, you know, like Socrates said, like, I think you guys at the end, of course, you’ve been Socrates, like, look, I think you, I don’t think you should kill me. I think you should pay me. So I don’t, I could spend more time in Skolay having like philosophical dialogues, right? And Socrates, you know, and Aristotle said that like, um, uh, uh, theoria happens in Skolay, right? This kind of, but you, but it’s interesting. You can’t, and it’s, it’s Skolay is translated, and I think lost into leisure. It’s still, right? Yeah. It’s often translated into leisure or, or idleness. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, I think it’s Pfeiffer who’s tried to bring back the notion of leisure in the, in the sense, um, uh, the, because leisure used to be considered a, at least a ground for virtue. Yeah. Um, the problem with leisure is we have, we have confused it with the time away from work in which we can recover so that we can work again. Totally. Right. But even there, but even there, what’s interesting, interesting about it is like that underlies almost all economics, right? Yes. And like, I mean, if anything, capitalism, it’s all economics, right? So even there, central, right? Yeah. But it underlies what we’ve been saying earlier. It was Schindler that we, that the productivity of reason is, has to be in something that it produces that has an economic value. Yeah. Um, yeah. Which is right. Whereas we should be thinking that reason properly understood is the epitome of leisure. Yeah. Where leisure properly understood is not the absence of work. We shouldn’t understand it privately. We should act yet. We should understand it providentially. It is where we are providing for our personhood. I mean, and our right relationship to reality. And, you know, I’m willing to sacrifice quite a bit of my economic lifestyle so that I can come into a good life. Yeah. And most people would do that, too. Uh, if they, if they properly understand, at least this is Plato’s argument, and I think there’s empirical research to back it up. Most people would sacrifice their economic lifestyle if they were convinced that it would lead them to a good life. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and it’s interesting because in trying to write about this, I’m realizing like, the reason why you can’t translate it, right, is because it’s, it’s, it, it presupposes a different, a different way of being in time itself, right? It’s a, it’s a different temporality that I think that, that, that in some senses is virtually lost, right? But it still peeks out in some of our phrases, right? When we say it’s like the right time or, or like meaning and time being so spoken together, right? Yeah. And so that’s, that’s what Han talks about in The Sense of Time. He talks about the ability to linger. We’ve lost the ability to linger. Yes. I’ve been trying, I’ve been trying to get back that notion with the notion of serious play, like when we’re seriously playing music. Yeah. There you go. Right. That, that notion. Yeah. And so that’s a great connection you’ve made because there’s a sense in which listening to the voice of reason means being able to listen to the musicality of being, which means being able to seriously play music and listen with serious play to that musicality. Yeah. And if you can’t hear that, I mean, and of course we had the mythological representation of that in being able to hear the music of the spheres, right? Yeah. If you, if people can’t hear that, if they’re deafened to it, then, then there is no way that reason qua reason can make an appeal to them. It can’t alter them because they can’t hear it. But, but, but I mean, they, they, remember what we said earlier about virtues? They, all of us must have some primordial beginning of reason or else we could never ever come to appreciate it, never ever learn it. Yes. So although, although people can be deafened to it, and maybe that’s part of what’s at the heart of the meaning crisis, it doesn’t mean we have to fall into despair. It doesn’t mean they’re forever lost. No, no, no. I have to go soon, my friend. I have to go soon. This is so good. So speaking of friendship, I just had this moment of just feeling the innate bond and affinity that I, that we’ve developed, John, and I just feel so grateful for my friendship with you. Yeah. So Guy, if you save this and if you edit out some of the blanks, you know, I appreciate having a copy. Yeah. I’d like to put this up on my channel at some point. So rich. Yeah, it’s so rich and the deep connections between listening to reason, deologos, realization, serious play, all of that. Yeah. I really want to, I really, I just want to, even, even if I just want to also just have it for my own sake, there’s a lot in here that was emergent, genuine deologos. Yeah. Genuine and emergent. Yeah. Yeah. We still, we started talking about our anxious attachment styles and this is where we ended up. Yeah. Yeah. Right. It’s really, it’s true. Yeah, there’s a deep connection. And I think that can, see, that’s what I’m talking about is like, this is the way that I would have, I would imagine where you end up when you listen to reason, because like we can talk, start talking about the most ordinary situations of our lives and with a certain kind of listening, you can hear, and it can start to, it could start to speak to you and then you can start to respond to it. And then it opens up and we end up in this whole world that exemplifies all the things that we’re talking about. Yeah. That’s, that’s, that’s the answer to the Tiva, but it’s also Blake’s, it’s also Blake’s mystical vision to see the world in a grain of sand. Yeah. It’s the two. Yeah. And we were exemplifying what my question is. How do we, how do we discourse and how do we dialogue and how do we propose propositions to each other? Right. Right. And clarify our concepts such that we get to the same place that we can get in the mystical vision. Yeah. Because that to me, to get to the place where we, we appreciate the really real as what was always calling us in reason, that to me is to listen to reason. Anyways, I gotta go. I gotta go. Much love. Okay, cool. This is great. This is great. Free course talk too. Bye. Yeah, very much. Very much. Okay. Bye bye. Bye.