https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=lbOuWPy6PtY
Welcome everyone. I’m here with my beloved friend, Christopher Mastepietro. He’s here on behalf of the Vervecki Foundation, which is hosting a new course that is starting at the end of April. Chris will put the link in the chat for everybody. For the landing page, this is a course on literature and the meaning crisis. And I’m very excited about this. It’s going to be a course. We’re going to go through a series of important works, most of the novels, but also some poetry. Well, for example, we’re going to start with Moby Dick and then we’ll go into the Heart of Darkness and we’ll be doing Albert Camus’ The Plague, Dostoevsky’s Notes for Underground, Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice. And we’ll do some poetry like Matthew Arnold’s Dover Beach and Yeats’ The Second Coming. All of these are works of art that are wrestling with the meaning crisis. It was important. Chris and I talked about this, that we have this course because part of the argument that I have been making is that a lot of the way in which we can properly apprehend and appreciate the meaning crisis is not just through philosophical argumentation or even through philosophical discourse, but through art and literature and poetry are important aspects of this. There will be other courses around film and popular culture, but we wanted to start with this one because these are pivotal books and we can dig deeply into them. Each session will be two hours long. There’ll be an hour lecture by me and then there’ll be an hour discussion. I want to be very clear. I am not going to endeavor to present a comprehensive review of the entire book. Moby Dick, it is different. We’re giving two weeks to Moby Dick because it is such a large book. But even with two hours, I will not be able to give you some comprehensive review. Of course, we will talk about the overall structure. I will zero in on some key moments from the work. And then I will amplify that with work from other people who have reflected on Moby Dick and my reflections on it, how it ties into the meeting crisis. And then we’ll take Q&A. I would hope that everyone would read the book along. Some of you will be able to register for the course and also have a one on one session with me as part of your registration. In that, you have been read the book, you can bring, of course, other parts of the book or the poem to bear, and we can talk about that. So please read the books in total, read them along with the course or in advance of the course. There is a tier structure. I’ll let Chris maybe describe a little bit the tier structure, how you can join, what is the exact timing, what to expect from us. So I’ll turn things over to Chris for a minute. All right. Excellent. So I have a few questions of my own that I think I know the answers to, but I suspect are questions that a lot of people will have. So I’ll get to those in a second. Just a practicality, we will put the link to registration in the notes and in the chat. What I would say that two tiers that are available are one is live attendance, which is $650 for the course, which is to actually be in the room with John at the same time, to have the live lecture in real time, but then to also be able to participate in the course to ask questions. Something that’s much more akin to a standard classroom format where you have that interaction, you have that two-way dialogue in the way that you would if you were attending the course in person at the university. And then there’s another tier that is a self-directed version of the course, which is just that you get access to all of the lectures, basically all of the content that you would in real time. It’s just that that participatory element of being able to ask questions and participate in that sort of more seminar kind of environment, obviously that part is removed, but you have access to the lectures and you can interact with all of the material, especially if you want to undertake a reading of all of these different works. It would be a very useful companion to have. So those are the two tiers that are available and you can find those under tickets if you go on awakentomeeting.com forward slash courses training. And so you’ll see it among a suite of other courses offered and you just drop it down. You’ll see the reading list that’s on the page and then you’ll be able to actually sign up. So we do have still spots available. So you can feel free to look into that. The other thing I would say, John, is that I think we need to give a little bit of attention to the question of preparation in advance of the course. A lot of people are probably thinking, like, you really, you want me to read Moby Dick in the next couple of weeks and all of those other books to follow suit? A lot of the books are actually quite short. Moby Dick is really the exception. And I’m curious to hear what you say about this. My perspective is, you know, having been a student of literature in addition to philosophy and one that didn’t always do his preparation in advance of those courses. One of the experiences that I had a lot taking literature courses specifically is that actually taking it wasn’t so much that I read the whole book and then took the course and then was able to track and follow all of the lecture content. My experience was actually often the inverse of that. My experience was often is that I was actually I was my appetite for the book was actually wet and my appetite to read it and my my sense of actually wanting to undertake it, because, I mean, who has time for these things in general? You need to actually really have a reason to undertake books like this, especially a book like Moby Dick that is really quite. I mean, it’s just vast, it’s so voluminous, it can barely be described. And so to really be to really feel. To be inspired to undertake that in lieu of all kinds of other things you could otherwise be doing, I think requires you to understand or maybe appreciate why it’s so meaningful. And sometimes actually taking a class is the very thing that actually what’s that appetite. So I would say my reaction to that is, you know, I think it’s important to say, listen, if you can undertake to read some of it before the course, obviously that helps. But I wouldn’t say that people have to read these books necessarily before coming to the lectures. My sense is it can actually operate in that the reverse order. But I don’t know what you think of that. You know, I think that’s exactly right. I think people who want to, like I say, do sort of a one on one interaction with me during the seminar part of the course obviously should maybe at least read some of the book. So they have something that they can base their questions on. But, yeah, I would not expect people to have read all of Moby Dick before they come to the first lecture or even all of the Heart of Darkness. We have chose books that are fairly small, but they’re not an easy read. None of them are beach reads, even Moby Dick. And so I totally agree with you. And I find it helpful. You’re reframing very helpful. I. I think that is actually the way we should properly frame it. And the part of this is to do something like an appreciation class. And for some people, that might be wedding their appetite, facilitating their orientation, giving them a way into the book that might be something that affords them being able then to take up the reading of the book. I agree. I think I think you’re the correction you’ve made. I actually think it’s a correction and I think it’s an excellent correction. So I’m going to amend what I said. I do think you should read some of it before you come. I get a sense of it. But I think a lot of these books, you might be wanting to read them along with the lectures and you might finish some of them or all of them even after the course is done. I think the way I knew I wanted to hear on this, Chris, and that is an excellent example of why that is exactly the right way to frame this. This is very much something in which I want to be on a journey with people and I want them to be coming at this with, you know, with fresh eyes if possible, even if they’ve read the book before and new eyes if they have not read it before. So thank you for that reframing. I am 100 percent in agreement with it. Excellent. Good. OK, I’m glad we’re on the same page about that. It’s hard to know how much of that is just an idiosyncratic personal experience and how much of that is generalizable. But I’m glad you agree, because I also think, you know, just sometimes there’s a there’s a feeling it kind of can it can disrupt the joy that you can actually take if you feel as though if there’s this there’s this sense of obligation, oh, my God, I didn’t finish the readings, which means I can’t participate, which means this course doesn’t have value to me, which means that I can’t give anything back to it. It’s just a terrible spiral that that throws us into. And there’s really just no reason for it. It’s really just, you know, so. Yeah, this calls to mind the fact, actually, and you’re calling me to my own best practice. Students in my academic courses at the university will often ask me, should I do the readings before or after the lecture? And I say, I can’t tell you because it’s a 50-50 split. Fifty percent of the people find doing the readings first helps. And 50 percent of the people find going to the lecture helps with the readings. And so I suspect that that split, that demographic split will continue. And so, yes, very much if you want to come in not having read very much and get a sense of how you could read these works, especially in relationship to the meeting crisis, then I think you should find yourself most welcome in this course. OK, excellent. Agreed. So one thing I thought that might be fun for us to do is maybe go through the reading list in a little bit more precise detail. Sure. And I’ve put you through these paces before, which is I’ll bring up the book and maybe, I mean, I won’t make you do it in a phrase, which is what I’ve done before, although you can do that if you want. But maybe what we could do is I’ll bring up the book and maybe just say a few words about each of them, about maybe what inspired. Obviously, we compose this reading list, actually, you and I in dialogue. But of course, you know, this wouldn’t have worked if all of these books hadn’t been known to you and close to your heart in some way. So obviously, each book has been carefully selected. So why don’t I why don’t we do this? Why don’t I bring up each of the books week over week? And then maybe you could just say a few things about why this book matters, why it belongs on this list, why it connects. And in broad strokes, obviously, we can’t drop down to the level of detail that will be in the course, but maybe just say a few words about why each of them belongs among among a on a list that is named literature, the meeting crisis. Let’s do it then. I’m excited for this. All right, let’s do it. OK, so well, I mean, let’s let’s let’s start with the white whale. Let’s start with Moby Dick. I know that’s very close to your heart. Yeah, Moby Dick, I think. And it’s not just me, Dreyfus and Kelly have written a book on this and other people. The Moby Dick is very much the harbinger of the meeting crisis. And what I find so profound about Moby Dick is. It it activates and draws up. A sense of living in the biblical text, it draws up all these illusions, all these symbols, and not as conceptual reflections, but as the very lens by which you’re understanding yourself in the world. And of course, this was how Christianity was the sacred canopy of the West. But what happens with Melville is he draws all this up and then you’re waiting for. The T-Los, why has this been summoned? Why have I been summoned into this? And instead, it’s like a wave without a shore. It just dissipates off and you’re left like Ishmael on the wide expanse of the ocean going, where am I? Who am I? What am I to do? And the book just is profound in the way it does this. And of course, it ripped Melville apart. I think it’s Eddington. We’ll talk a bit about his take on Moby Dick and how Melville was close to like almost like a psychotic break when he’s writing Moby Dick. And he just ripped him apart because he let himself be the vehicle for that very experience. That’s what I want to share with people. I want to share that sense with them. Like, why is he called Captain Ahab? Why is he called Ishmael? Why is the prophet that portends what’s going to happen called Elijah? What was the relationship between the biblical Elijah and Ahab? Why is Ishmael in here? And why do we never find out his real name? Why do we only call him Ishmael? And how are we calling him? And how is that taking the place of God calling Ishmael and God calling Isaac? And it’s just like, so that’s Moby Dick. That’s Moby Dick. There’s a passage from Moby Dick, which is your favorite of Moby Dick, called The Leashore, which is actually just in tribute to Moby Dick and its presence in the course coming up at the end of the month. That’s going to be in the Verbecki Foundation newsletter that goes out. That’s going to be this week’s quote. That week’s excerpt that we use for Philosophical Fellowship is actually going to come from Moby Dick. So there’s a little preview of it in that newsletter for people who might want to know, what’s John really, really going to focus in on? I have a feeling that that passage is going to have a presence. That passage is definitely one of them. There’s the famous passage of Ishmael in the crow’s nest and he’s dissolving. There’s the opening passage of the book. There’s Elijah’s prophecy. There’s the sermon before Ishmael and Quakewake take to sea. And what is man that he should live out the lifetime of his God? And so those are some of the key sections, probably ending the book and I alone survived. So and of course, that’s from he’s alluding to the very famous passage from the Book of Job, which has resonance throughout. Melville was deeply enmeshed in the wisdom literature of the Bible. The Book of Job was having a profound impact on him when he was writing Moby Dick. All right. Very good. Okay, we’ll leave Moby Dick there. I think we could drop down further in, but if we go, we’re not going to come back out. So we’ll leave Moby Dick where it is. Before we move on to the next book, there’s actually a question. It’s just sort of a question out of interest. It doesn’t relate to this reading list about Cormac McCarthy. You and I have never had a discussion about Cormac McCarthy. I haven’t read much of him, but he is often cited as one of those very, he just died recently, actually, I think, as one of those very contemporary, pivotal figures that fits into this pattern. He’s not part of this course, but did you have any thoughts on him? You and I never talked about this. So I never had the chance to read Blood Meridian. I had the great pleasure of talking on a couple of occasions with my stepson, my partner’s son, about it because he was reading it when he was in high school. And I found it deeply intriguing. Is his other book Fight Club or am I misremembering? No, I think that’s Chuck Palahniuk. Yeah, that’s right. That’s Chuck Palahniuk. The Road is. The Road, the Road. That’s what I get, the Road. And of course, I have not read the book. I saw the movie, which I’m told is a very good adaptation and interpretation of the book. And it was a profound experience of this kind. I am very, very grateful that I saw the Road and I never want to ever see it again. And I think it is a significant antidote, not anecdote, antidote to those who wish for the collapse of civilization. You don’t know what you’re wishing for. Watch the Road 20 times and then tell me you want the collapse of civilization. So I don’t have much familiarity. Unfortunately, I am aware of the fact, but only secondhand, that the work is clearly profound. It’s clearly provocative and it’s clearly meant to really reorient people at a fundamental level. Unfortunately, it is only secondhand and that’s all I can say. Yeah. Yeah. No, I’m with you. I’d like to get around to a couple of his books. Of course, Blood Meridian seems to be the one most celebrated, but I’m also curious to read that and The Road. I had very similar experiences you did. Watching The Road, although I think I’m actually maybe acquiring an appetite to revisit it. Just because a certain number of years go by and as we change, our encounter with works of literature, whether they’re set to page or screen changes too. So there’s a little bit of lingering curiosity if there’s something to… Just like a book that you can revisit a book at different times of your life and find something completely different in it because of how much you’ve changed in the intervening years. And I think to some degree watching a film can be like that as well. And so I wonder about that, but you’re right. It’s a tough hang as they say. Okay, let’s go on to Heart of Darkness. I’ve read Heart of Darkness multiple times. I keep returning to the text. I’ve taught about it multiple times as I have of Moby Dick. The Heart of Darkness represents a theme I’ll also talk about in Moby Dick, but a theme, a thing that’s sort of fraying, at least to my mind, or at least fraught in Moby Dick that comes to a more clearer, a clearer presentation in Heart of Darkness. And this is of course the confrontation with the fact that the numinist doesn’t disappear with the advent of modernity. But what it does is it becomes more and more devolved into the horrific. And what you see therefore is an appropriation, but an inversion of the Christian, or even ancient Greek quest motif, turns into a kind of a ancient Greek quest motif turned on its head, where of course you’re questing for something like the grail, but the grail, the numinosity of the grail is not going to be the revelation of God’s agapic love or the kingdom of God. It is going to be the horror, the horror, the horror of unbridled narcissism and European imperialism and colonialism. And of course, Conrad does this without flying into all of the tired tropes that are now filling the airwaves. He does it in a much more profound and nuanced way. And what comes out of this, the character of Marlow who’s telling the story, and there’s multiple layers of framing. Marlow is identified by the framing with the Buddha, explicitly so, because there’s a sense of something that Buddhism tries to do. I think, grapple with and that Conrad comes to, which is human beings are finite beings who are open to the call of transcendence. And if they do not heed their finitude when they are called to transcendence, they will become filled with hubris that leads to horror. And that of course is Kurtz. But if they remember their finitude and fall into it and do not hear the call of transcendence, you meet the many people that Marlow meets on his journey for whom he has contempt and for their smallness and their pettiness and their almost bestial cleaving to small projects and overweening greed. And so the idea is you have to avoid both despair and hubris. And this is a theme that is fundamental to Plato, made explicit in Drew Hyland’s work, which we’ll talk about briefly in the course, but exemplified a lot in Stoicism. And Marlow takes a vow to both continue the quest, but practice the restraint to remain committed to inhabiting and identifying with his finite humanity in the face of the quest. And so while you don’t get any resolution to what you might call the cosmic dimensions of the meaning crisis, you don’t get a sense of, well, how do we rebuild the sacred canopy? You get from the heart of darkness an answer, a kind of personal performative resolution that you don’t really get in Moby-Dick, which is, well, how can I undertake to properly respond to the fact that the numinous, the sacred doesn’t disappear. It just mutates, and it mutates in ways in which it is no longer something that can educate us, but typically only horrifies us. And so the heart of darkness, that’ll be the main theme we’ll tackle in the heart of darkness. Beautiful. Beautiful. One of the things that also occurs to me about heart of darkness that’s more sort of more formal rather than content related is just the incredible economy of that novella. And also the economy mixed with just the absolute beauty of the prose. Like it’s one of, I think of the various books on this list, at least in terms of the English, obviously in this case, it’s written in English as opposed to being translated into English, but that obviously helps. But the beauty of his writing, I think, you know, when I look at the different books on this list, that’s one of the ones that stands out to me in terms of just the achievement of it as a piece of literature, just in the poetry of it is absolutely beautiful. I mean, that was one of the things that drew me to the book in the first place. I was drawn in by the lyricism, but the economy of the lyricism, Moby Dick is also lyrical and it has great flourishes that are astonishingly beautiful. And at times Melville will let that drop away because he wants you to feel the monotony of being at sea as well. But in Conrad, that lyricism is very, very tempered and very, very measured. And the fact that I think English is his third language, I believe, there’s Polish and something else before he got to English is just truly astonishing. Yeah, but and he captures things. We’ll talk about it in one of my favorite scenes from the book is he comes upon a European gunship that is shelling from the river onto shore for what, who knows what military or economic reason. And he says, and there was something very close to this. This isn’t quite verbatim. We’ll get the verbatim when we’re reading the text. And there it was a ship shooting at a continent. Sense of the jungle just spreading to and this tremendous sense of absurdity just washes over you with like, like, how well that is set. So this is a good point that you’re making. I hope to share with people the deep tasting of these works and not just unpacking their philosophical import there. I want to very much appreciate in all senses the word of the artistry. Yeah, excellent. Excellent. So I’m just looking at their chat. So there are there are a few questions about other books, books that aren’t part of the course. Maybe I’ll what I’ll do is circle back to them at some point. I do want us to go through the suite of books that we’re actually doing in the course. But there are a couple of questions about other books and whether you’ve read them and whether you’re interested. Maybe we’ll circle back to those. So these books are just to clarify for everyone who might be listening, like there is going to be a different week. In the case of Moby Dick, it will be two weeks. In the case of each of the other novellas, it will be one week or short stories, as the case may be. It will be one week dedicated to each. So there will be a week in between. There will also be a break in the schedule of the course. There will be where you can actually look at the calendar and see where that break will be. So essentially, it’s there’s one focus from one text per week. And most of the texts are short enough that if you actually dedicate, you know, a few evenings, you should be able to make a pretty significant headway into each work, if not to finish it before the next class. But the books that we’re all talking about in this Q&A are all the books that are going to be in that course. Now, there will be, I will say, future iterations of this course that will focus on different media. We’ve talked about that. We haven’t actually done that announcement yet, but I suppose we’re doing it now, aren’t we? That there will be future versions of a literature course that will focus on works of theatre, for instance. Or maybe works of music, for instance. So consider this to be the first in a series of literature. If we think of literature in a broad sense, this will be the first of the various courses on works of literature that seem to invoke the meaning crisis in some way. So let’s talk about the death of Ivan Illich. The death of Ivan Illich was the book that made me profoundly aware of the different kinds of knowing. The death of Ivan Illich opened up to me. I often use, in fact, the death of Ivan Illich to explain the difference between propositional knowing and non-propositional knowing. Ivan Illich had always known he was going to die the way you knew that two plus two equals four, but now Ivan Illich knew he was going to die. The proposition remains unchanged, but that’s because it is no longer the propositional content that is of most relevant. What’s relevant is taking up the perspective of someone who is now confronting death and identifying with our mortality and the kind of knowing, the perspectival and participatory knowing that come up. And so this is again about getting what work of art can do, what work of art can do that theory can’t do. Works of art can use propositions to deeply invoke, invoke, summon up some of the things that are so relevant to understanding the machinery, the processes of meaning in life, of religio, and confronting how they may be absent from your day-to-day awareness, even though all of your cognition intimately relies upon them on a daily basis. And so this is about the process of understanding the machinery, the processes of meaning in life, of religion. And so this is about the process of understanding the machinery, the processes of meaning in life, of religion. And so this is about the process of understanding the machinery, the processes of meaning in life, of religion. And so this is about the process of understanding the machinery, the processes of meaning in life, of religion. Do you have any sort of more general thoughts about Tolstoy, that abstract a little bit away from Ivan Illich? So Tolstoy is of course, and this will be part of what we talk about, Tolstoy is also wrestling with what is happening to Christianity with the advent of modernity and the modernization that is taking place in Russia. And of course, one piece is about the confrontation of modernity with the religious framework of Russia at that time. Of course, Napoleon represents the titanic figure of modernity slamming into the religious home of Russia in powerful ways. And Tolstoy is wrestling with that and trying to understand very much almost like Kierkegaard, how to separate Christianity from Christendom, wrestling with that, trying to get back as to what would it be like to actually follow Jesus. And he’s wrestling therefore profoundly with the relationship between religion, culture, modernity, and the meaning crisis in very powerful ways. Excellent. There’s a question, there’s just a, there’s been, it’s come up a couple of times in the chat, I’ve noticed, Jung. And one was just imploring you to do Jung also at some point in time. And another was asking for your perspective on memory streams reflections. Now I bring this up just because it came up a couple of times that might be worth mentioning, but also because a lot of the themes and motifs and invocations that will be found in some of these works are things that can be understood through a Jungian kind of prism. I’m not saying that that’s what you’re going to be doing. I do think that this provides an opportunity to maybe address why you spoke to this a little bit at the beginning, but why it is primarily works of fiction that you were doing and not works of, you know, of psychology or a philosophy or of more overt intellectual objectives. And why, I mean, we’re not doing Jung in part because Jung was not a fiction author, although I understand that so much of, I mean, things like Libra Novus and his writing did verge into the floral and artistic and impressionistic and did absolutely reach down into the fictive and into the mythic. So I know that that part of him exists and it’s perhaps in all likelihood, in my view, the most important part of him. But there’s some, there’s a difference between what he’s doing in those works and what is going on in the works in this course. So that’s just my sense. I’ll hand that back to you. Maybe you want to address just if, if, and to what degree his presence has any in the course, direct or indirect, and maybe a little bit about why these works of fiction differ from the kind of works that he produced. Yes, I mean, okay, first of all, Jung will show up in the course. He will show up either week one or week two. I will present to you the work done by Edinger on Moby Dick, which is a deep Jungian interpretation of Moby Dick. We will consider the Jungian interpretation. We will compare it to the interpretation given by Dreyfus and Kelly. We will compare that to, I can’t remember the author of the book, Melville’s Wisdom. And I’ll also bring other aspects in from my own work. So Jung is going to be there in name and in spirit through Edinger’s book on Moby Dick. So that is definitely going to be there. I want to do a book. I want to do a course for the Reveke Foundation on the Imaginal going through Ibn Arabi and then doing Jung, Korban, and maybe a couple other people. I’m not sure, but definitely maybe Hillman as well. Maybe that would be the set. I would do those four people and then that would be, you know, and probably two weeks on each, so an eight-week course on the Imaginal going through. And so that is in the work as one of the courses we will be working on. We are finite beings called to transcendence. You might have heard that. And so Chris and I are doing things as sort of as timely as we possibly can and as is our want, our dreams exceed our grasp. I think there’s a Robert Browning quote nearby, but that is something that I’ve been planning. And I haven’t even brought it up to Chris yet, so he’s finding out about it right now. I’ve been planning a course for the Reveke Foundation on the Imaginal and then there’ll be a follow-up course on the nature of ritual. So there’s going to be two paired courses around that. And so all of that, within that, there’ll be a deep exploration of Jung. Why these novels, as opposed to psychological or philosophical work, is precisely because it is in literature that you get the invocation of the Imaginal, the enactment of it, the provocation of the non-propositional, the triggering of the machinery of identification. You can read the best argument from Bertrand Russell that you absolutely have ever seen in your life and you don’t identify with it. You read Conrad and you identify with Marlow and it goes into the guts of your psyche and opens you up in a way that no propositional argumentation can. And this is the great gift of the novel, that it is the profound provocation of your perspectival and participatory knowing and opening you up to the possibility to seriously play in the liminal zone of the Imaginal with the possibility of your own metanoia, your own reorienting of how you are making sense of your sense making. And so I ultimately think that people are not persuaded in their depths by arguments. Arguments are not inert. I’m not saying that. I am not saying that. I am not saying that. But I think our, you know, Plato argues this, we are profoundly moved by coming into the presence of the personage of someone’s person and how that calls to us. You know, Plato does this obviously with the figure of Socrates. The Gospels do it with the figure of Jesus. Conrad does it with, of course, these two figures that are very interesting. The way Marlow is in the story, but he’s also framing the story. So he has this weird transcendent imminent relation, transcendent finitude, just on the framing. And then Kurtz, you hunger to meet Kurtz. You only get little snippets and then you’re not at the meeting. He’s always out of the corner of your eye. And that’s deliberate. And that makes his numinous presence, his twisted, dark numinous presence, so capable of invoking and provoking the reader. And so that’s why literature. I will continue to do books on philosophy, courses on philosophy. I will continue to do books on psychology. I will continue to do books, write papers, do things on cognitive science. I think I will be doing that as they start to shovel the dirt over me in my grave. But this is something different. And I want to keep, as Chris said, I want to keep doing more of these as well, because this is where we can open people up to the most powerful encounter with the energies of the meeting crisis. Excellent. Okay. So thank you, Ponder East, by the way, you’ve put the, you’ve reposted the various texts week over week into the chat. And I was going to say, Marco, in response to your question, if you click on the link in the show notes, it’ll take you to the course page and then you can see the reading list there as well. And we also had someone asking about Joyce, Camus, Dostoyevsky, a couple of others, how appropriate, because the next one we’re going to talk about is the plague. So I’ve only recently just read the plague, read it during COVID, because that seemed most appropriate to read it at that time. And I read it with my very good friend and collaborator, Dan Schiappi. I had already read Camus, I had read the myth of Sisyphus, I’d read The Stranger twice. And some people might ask why the plague and not The Stranger? And I had taken a look at The Rebel. I need to go back and reread The Rebel. I’ve also found out, of course, and it makes so much more sense of things now that Camus did his dissertation on Christian neoplatonism. And so, yep, there it is again, neoplatonism, neoplatonism. So yeah, the plague, I’d carried around one of the characters, an important character, not the main character, not the doctor, but a companion of his, but he makes a statement which I think epitomizes the profound, at least I identify with it, profound spiritual existential response to the meeting crisis. The character, who we’ll talk about, we’ll talk about this scene when we do the book, he says, I want to know how to be a saint without God. That is the whole problem I am up against. And that, for those who don’t just simply fall into hedonism or a simplistic superficial nihilism and cynicism, that is how many people many of the nuns, to varying degrees of articulation and elegance, are responding. They are trying to be saints without God. And what does that mean? And does it mean that we need to re-understand what God might be? Does it mean that we have to accept that the universe is profoundly absurd, although it is filled with light, lucidity? This is Camus, and I’ve just been told and I’ve just come to appreciate this. This is the tonos in Camus. It comes out more in The Stranger, but it’s there, right? There’s the light, there’s the lucidity with the absurdity, and they interpenetrate each other. And it’s so much like Nicholas of Cusa that you just, it gives me chills. But that’s what the book is about. And so the character, he represents that sort of post-nominalism, post-modernity, neo-Platonism, post-nihilistic neo-Platonism. How can I be a saint without God? And then the main character, the doctor, he clearly is stoicism. He is stoicism through and through. It is absurd. People are beset by a plague and they’re trapped and they’re going through profound domicide and they’re realizing that all their bullshit narratives are ultimately failing. And he resolves that he will keep working, trying to heal who he can heal, who he can save from the bubonic plague. Not because he believes he will succeed very much, not because he believes that he is part of some divine narrative or plan. He is not, nor do we have with respect to him any dramatic irony. How he sees it is pretty much how it is, at least in the world that we’re inhabiting with him. And yet he resolves, and this is like Marlowe, he resolves that he will continue to do the virtuous thing because to do otherwise would be to abandon his humanity. And that would be the final form of death in the face of the plague, and he can resist that form of death. Let’s let that sit for a moment. So before we move on to the next novella, there’s a question that came up. Who asked this? Andrew asked this. I’m going to rephrase it slightly. I’m not 100% sure I understand the question, but I’m going to at least draw a question from it. Hopefully it’s approximate to what the question intended. Which is, you know, we’re doing this course and future courses and courses you’ve done on other platforms such as with Halcyon. Those courses exist outside of the classical academic structure, right? In a typical situation, although not always because there are platforms like Coursera, there are continuing studies programs. This is not a new invention, this idea of taking non-degree or non-program courses simply for the sake of the joy and the love of it and for whatever value it happens to add to your life and however it plugs into your personal sense of purpose and mission in what you love to learn. But maybe we could just spend a few minutes on that, and you’ve now had experience in both of these domains. You’ve had experience teaching within a degree structure, a program structure that feeds into that classic academic pathway. And you’ve also had now experiences of teaching courses outside of that setting that have much more to do with the intrinsic value of course, which is not to say that studying in the university has no intrinsic value, but I think you know what I’m getting at, right? There’s sort of an instrumental effect that taking courses in the university setting provides as opposed to taking courses like this that are for their own sake. So I wonder if you just want to give just a reaction to that and just talk a little bit about, briefly, just about your experience in both of those domains, how they differ, and what the value of something like this is, contra, let’s say, doing this as part of a degree program. Yes, so let me be very clear. I’m very grateful to be a professor at the University of Toronto. I have a very good relationship with that university and with my students, and this is not meant to be any kind of competition. I frankly don’t see it that way. The advantages of the university setting is you have tremendous extracurricular support. There are resources. I get to spend a long time with people, often in multiple courses, so the possibility of deep mentorship, Chris was a student of mine at the University of Toronto, is available, and all of that is good. The downside is the students have to, by necessity, take at least to some degree an instrumental relationship to the course. What do they need to do in order to get the mark? How are they doing? There’s tremendous anxiety around that because their lives hang in the balance in some way. They are taking other courses, and so they cannot give this their all, and a good professor should acknowledge that and take that into consideration. That points to the upside of these kinds of courses, like the literature of the mean crisis. I hope and hope to afford that students can bring their all. I know you’re doing, many of you have jobs. I’m not insane, but what I mean is in terms of a project of deep and hopefully transformative learning, this is not competing with other courses you’re doing. You’re not doing this in order to improve your socioeconomic status. You’re doing this out of, and this is the right word, you’re doing this out of love. Love for the truth, love for what is good, love for what is beautiful, love for being into deep phylia with other people, sharing with other people, this love accompanying other people as we all try to endeavor to get into the depths together. I don’t know how many people end up having in the course, but 20, 30 people, something like that. It’s like the fourth year courses I teach at the university where you get to know people. There’s a lot more one-on-one interaction, and that is tremendously, I think, beneficial to students. I think it’s tremendously beneficial to me as a teacher because I can more properly fit what I’m saying to the particular perspective of the student. And then there’s also the opportunity of this kind of work becoming part of the larger conversation, the public conversation that I get to participate in in this little corner of the internet, as it’s called. And in that sense, I’m very grateful for having students along for the journey. It has been my ongoing experience that I do my best teaching when I’m learning with my students, and I do my best teaching when I’m sharing that learning with my students, and they’re sharing their learning with me. They’re not as much more available in this kind of format. Yeah. Yeah. Well put. There’s a kind of a freedom, I think, that becomes available when you’re not worried about your performance as much as you are about metabolizing and interacting meaningfully with what you’re learning. And the demands of evaluation can often get in the way of that. The demands of evaluation have some very constructive and useful purposes as well. I don’t think that they’re bad. They’re not a bad thing, but they also can obfuscate some of the uninhibited sense of curiosity that you can have when you’re taking something for the sake of taking it, when you’re studying for the sake of studying, reading for the sake of reading. There’s a certain kind of inhibition, I think, that is removed, and you don’t have to so much worry immediately about how you’re going to represent what you’ve learned, but you can have a kind of open-ended sense of inquiry that’s sometimes circumscribed or curtailed when you know that you’re going to have to bring yourself to bear and perform before it. So I think that there’s something to that. I think that that’s really powerful. And then the orientation and the purpose just become slightly different, but I think you’ve spoken to that well, and there’s room for this, and there’s obviously increasing room for this because it’s happening with there’s a higher volume of these kinds of courses now than there used to be. And to me, it speaks to the appetite of such things. And this specific topic, this specific reading list dedicated to the specific topic is not something that you would find somewhere else, not that I know of, not in this exact way and certainly not by you. And so there’s a specificity to this. There’s a dedicated specificity to exploring one particular topic or theme by way of these works that is particularly novel, no pun intended. And that’s at least for me and putting this together with you, that was a great impetus that the specificity of this is the luxury that we have in this space. We can get very, very specific about the kind of courses we do because we’re not trying to build a profile or a repertoire of skills or encyclopedic knowledge that has to amount to a certification. We can actually explore things for the sake of exploring them. This also gives me the opportunity to say something I should have said earlier, but this is now apropos. I want to, of course, thank Chris. He has been working with me, helping to construct this course and put it together and as you can see, helping to promote it. So I just wanted to take this time to publicly thank you for doing that. That was by definition, it was my pleasure. It was really fun. I had just a really good time pouring over the possibilities. We had a long list. Many, many more books. We can do more of these courses, that’s for sure. Oh yeah. We had a long list. We had a lot of plays in that list too, which is why we decided to separate the drama of The Meaning Crisis out into a separate course at a later date. And the science fiction of The Meaning Crisis. And the science fiction. We want to do books like Dolores and things like that for sure. That’s right. And I know that’s also close to your heart. Okay. There was one more question, which I’ll address, which is about the pricing of the course. The pricing of the course is, if not identical, virtually identical to the Halkian Academy course that John is doing right now. We come by these in as far away as we can. It has to do with John’s time and the amount of time that he’s putting into. If you’re signing up for the course, the time that you’re spending with John, it’s not all the time that he is spending on courses. I’m sure you know, there’s an incredible number of hours and days that he’s dedicated to putting together and preparing his lectures, preparing his teaching, preparing the format of the course. There’s a heck of a lot of work that goes into this course and it’s time that ultimately takes away from all kinds of other projects and things that he could otherwise be doing. That’s true to some degree of the foundation that is putting on the course, right? Some of our time and resources are dedicated to it as well, but I would say the lion’s share of that is a reflection of how much of John’s time he has to put into this. A lot of that time is going to be invisible to you, even though you’re going to get the product of it. That’s what I would say is lingering in the background of all of that. Like I said, it’s very similar to the Halkian course. What we try and do is fairly account for that time as we would in any other context, in any other occupational or professional situation. This is an accounting, a fair accounting of time, but even so we’ve tried to make it, you know, as accessible as we can make it. And I think having those two tiers is also a way of doing that. We have the live version of the course and then we have the self-study version of the course. And I think that model will be continued in future versions. Okay. So I just wanted to speak briefly to that. Okay. So let’s talk about Death in Venice. So I read Death in Venice a long time ago, and so I am not, it is not as present to my mind as the ones we’ve been talking about so far. But of course, as soon as you proposed it to me, sort of leaping like some bell being rung from the core of my soul was, yes, of course. And I was like, now, of course, I have read Thomas Mann, but I didn’t want to do the Magic Mountain, which is his masterpiece on the meeting crisis and modernity and even prescient about post-modernity and all kinds of stuff. But the book would kill people. I mean, it’s vast and it’s overwhelming and I don’t want deaths on my conscience. So Death in Venice is much more accessible. He’s still wrestling with issues. And of course, what you have in there is this reflection on sort of Eros, but Eros mixed up. It’s Eros, but in a philosophical, I’m sorry, better word, not quite the right word. Eros, but in a platonic sense, but that doesn’t mean the modern platonic sense of, I don’t want to have sex. It means it’s this sense of Eros that is leading you beyond yourself ecstatically and drawing you into a deeper confrontation with reality. But of course, the title, so obviously, I’m not giving anything away here, no spoilers, Death in Venice, right? This is what happens to that platonic Eros when it’s found in the meeting crisis and when it’s found in somebody who is beset by it and is in some way drifting and what happens in that encounter. He has a lot of sort of stayed frameworks in place that are being smashed as platonic Eros is one to do. But when you smash those frameworks and you don’t have the platonic anagage available, well then, and of course, Venice is important too, the fact that it’s in Venice, in the watery world, the world that’s inherently liminal. Zach Stein talks about how we’re in a time between two worlds. Venice is the place between two worlds. Venice stands on between the medieval world, the Renaissance world. It’s right on the cusp between the ancient world and the advent of modernity, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? There’s all of this going on. But that’s why, and of course, part of what I’m looking forward to is because it’s been a long time, I’m looking forward to relearning this book with everybody and exploring the themes that I’ve just mentioned. But I expect also that there’ll be emergent themes coming out of this fresh reading. And so I’m very excited about that book in particular, because I’m excited about all of them. But this one has the excitement of going, I went to Greece once, but it was 20 years ago, and now I’m going back and it’s that, it has that kind of sense for me. Beautiful. I’m personally really excited about this. This book just bowled me right over the first time I read it. And I’m glad you described the Platonic Eras, because that was probably the, that was the most striking thought I had as I was reading it, is I thought this is probably the most powerful rendering in my estimation of like, really what is meant by Platonic Eras I’ve ever read. And it’s so phenomenologically immersive. It saturates you. It’s so enveloping, very much like Conrad, the economy and the beauty and the lyricism of the language is absolutely astonishing. And it’s so enveloping that I think it’s so, there is something visceral and tactile, and very charged about the idea of longing, and the despair and agony of that longing, but also the beauty and the rapture of that longing. And what is it exactly that he’s longing for? Right? What is it exactly that he’s longing for? And that question persists and persists. And Venice being, I like that, the comment you made about Venice, not only as a liminal place between worlds, right? Between worlds, East and West, between worlds, terrestrial and aquatic, between worlds, terrestrial and celestial, in some sense. But it’s also a place of great enchantment. Right? If anyone who’s ever been to Venice knows this, it’s just a place of just astonishing beauty, and there’s absolutely no place like it. And it creates a world that envelops you, a maze, has a maze-like quality that disorients you, that throws you back upon yourself in a very powerful way. And so the environment and the particular longing that strays inside of it are all of a piece, I think. And it’s extraordinary, extraordinary work. And it’s very short. You can read it in a couple of days, or a day if you really want to. Yeah. Excellent. Okay. The final book, not counting the poetry, the final novella is Notes from Underground, Dostoevsky. Now, there’s a reason why that’s at the end, because, and this is to actually exemplify the thing I talked about, about learning. I’ve not read Notes from Underground. I know about it, and I’ve read many people citing it and alluding to it, and it has deeply intrigued me. I want to be reading that as I’m doing this course and with the students. Dostoevsky, of course, has to be in here. I mean, the Brothers Karamazov is in many ways, this isn’t quite the right way, but in many ways the sequel to Moby Dick, if you can put it that way. And of course, Crime and Punishment. But this is early in his career, and it gives a lot of the important themes and a lot of the important motifs, this fundamental rethinking of Christianity in its confrontation with modernity and nihilism. It’s just, I wanted Dostoevsky, I originally proposed Crime or Punishment or The Idiot, which is his book where he really tries to represent Jesus. But The Idiot is, again, a big demanding book. It’s as demanding as Moby Dick, and Crime and Punishment it was a very close second, but I wanted to get something very fresh to my eyes. And so Chris actually proposed this, and I said, yes, I want to do it. And that was exactly the framing in which I wanted to do it. It’s nice to have at least one work that you are learning anew, and I think that is the book. Of course, it’s at the end so that I have time to work through it. I want to be reading it as I’m teaching the other books. And yeah, somebody said in the comments, lecturing, you’re right, it’s not lecturing. It is teaching. It is joint exploration. There’s accompaniment going on, and there’s guidance, perhaps, and I think that’s the book that I’m going to be reading. Joint exploration, there’s accompaniment going on, and there’s guidance, perhaps, and perhaps I’m something of a navigator. Melville would love that as a metaphor. And so maybe, yeah, that’s what I am. I’m the navigator, and I’m not so much giving a lecture. That’s why I agreed when you proposed Notes from Underground. Yeah. Well, you were very game. I appreciated that a lot. There were certain things that you absolutely wanted to include and that the course couldn’t possibly have done without. And then there was a little bit of latitude to be able to play and try some other things. And yeah, so you were remarkably open to that because I know that for you, as for anyone who, I think, does this properly, that the learning and the teaching are simultaneous. They are up to piece. They have to be. They are the same process. So I think that’s the other thing that people should know when they’re coming to do the course is that this isn’t just a one direction. This isn’t just a unidirectional transmission of information. This is a living, breathing process. There’s a dialogical, I mean, this is John, this is a dialogical element to this course, just as there is to all of the work that he does, that we do. And so the classes are going to involve that, right? The perspectives and the experiences brought by the people in the course inevitably help to shape it. That is true of any such course that follows a kind of seminar format as opposed to being a lecture with 300 people in a hall. So that’s a really, really important part of all of this. And because these works are so visceral, they are also quite provocative, right? We have really personal experiences when reading some of these books. And that, on that basis, they have something quite unique to give us. And this goes to your earlier point about the distinction between these florid works of fiction and an explicit work of philosophy that’s trying to exposit as opposed to a work of fiction that is an open-ended question falling over itself, dizzyed by its own pain and longing, which is what most of these works are. They’re not responses to a question, they are the questions being lived out. And that is the fundamental difference, as I hear you describing it. Yeah, I want to pick up on that. I’m coming at this, I’m not an academic, in the sense of coming at this from the academic angle of somebody who’s an English or an English-let or literary studies. And that’s not primarily what I want to be doing with these books. I’m not saying you shouldn’t treat the books that way. But there are plenty of academic opportunities to do that. I’m coming at this from somebody who’s an argonaut of the meaning crisis. And I’m bringing what I do in response to that, cognitive-scientifically, philosophically, as a practitioner, etc., somebody who practices and helps to develop practice. So all of that, that is the angle that I’m coming from in this. Because I do think that, I think, I want to be really careful here. I think many of the authors would find the take I’m trying to make to be very faithful to their intent. Whereas some of the more academic approaches, and they do have merit, I’m not denying that, might not present the books in a way in which people are being called to transformation in the face of the meaning crisis. And that is how I’m teaching these books. So if you’re coming in about this and you want to, you know, you’re looking for sort of in-depth, well, you know, structuralism, post-structuralism, blah, blah, blah, blah, that’s not what we’re going to be doing in these courses. These courses are meant to be psycho-spiritual existential responses to these works, insofar as they serve as vehicles for psycho-spiritual existential responses to the meaning crisis. Excellent. Well put. Okay, so those are the books. There are also some poems. I feel like we should leave, we should just sort of leave the book. I think we should just sort of leave those, let them speak for themselves. There will be an entire session dedicated to those poems. They are listed along with the rest of the reading list on the website, so you can see what they are. There’s no mystery to that. But there is so much detail yet to come with each of these pieces in the course, but we’ll leave the poems altogether silent for now until they are ready to speak. I will say one thing, one question that was posed is whether this course conflicts with the Ecology of Practice program that the Raveke Foundation has just launched on Awakened to Meaning. There’s no conflict. This course will be at 10 a.m. Eastern, and each session of the Ecology of Practice from Monday to Friday each starts at 12 noon. Okay, so you could conceivably sign up for this course and jump right into those practice sessions right afterwards. Be no worse for wear and not miss out on anything. So just to clarify that point. And then so you can find, once again, I’ll just reiterate it’s in the show notes, Awakened to Meaning.com is where you find information and registration and calendar for all of the practices and most of what occurs on Awakened to Meaning is practice-oriented. This is actually quite an exception to that rule, that this is more of a classical, more of a classic course or more of a conventional course insofar as it includes lecture and discussion and reading. Most of what’s on Awakened to Meaning otherwise is very practice-oriented. So those of you who are familiar with Awakened to Meaning will see this as an exception to that. That’s absolutely right. But you can find information on both of those and all things related to these, to the practices and to the courses on that website. I think maybe we can leave it there. Maybe there’s one more question. First of all, is there anything else you want to say? Well, it’s come up a few times. Rilke has come up. Rilke will be in this course. So just hang in there. Rilke is one of my most important poets. And so yes, that’s going to be there. But Chris, do you want to do your last question? Yeah, sorry. My connection is just a little shaky today for some reason. Can you hear me correctly? You’re fine. Go ahead. You were fine throughout. It was just then. Okay. Okay. It’s just not my end. Good. Okay. That’s the relief. So there was a question way down and I don’t know that I remember it verbatim. I’m trying to find it again. But I’ll just use the impression I have of it because it provoked a question for me too, which is a question with going back to Plato. And it was a question that had to do with your self-styling as a non-theist and the question of what a sacred text is to a non-theist. And does that mean that a sacred text for a non-theist is necessarily a work of fiction? I think I know where that question is coming from insofar as perhaps the implication is that a non-theist will not be credulous about the mythology, the narrative or metanarrative mythology that adheres to a particular religion. And therefore they would have to understand that mythology as having a fictive quality. And on the basis of that, consider it to be sacred. So there’s a question hanging there if I’ve interpreted correctly. And there’s another question that I want to tack onto it and I’ll give these to you as a pair and you can answer them however you like, which has to do with Plato because Plato’s dialogues are works of fiction. They are dramatic. They fall more into the category of the meaning crisis. Of course, they precede the meaning crisis for deep and important reasons, except insofar as they relate to some of the perennial conditions thereof. But Plato’s texts are sacred to you. Yes. And those are by some definition of the term fiction. Yeah. So that occurs to me as just a that that’s nested in this question somewhere. It’s like where Plato falls in this scenario. Anyway, I’m just going to give you that and you can do whatever you like with it. That’s wonderful. Yes, especially the Republic and the Symposium are sacred texts for me. Probably also the Phaedrus, probably. And they are works of fiction. And we maybe we should think about sneaking one of the dialogues into the drama and the meaning crisis, even though it’s not about the meaning crisis. But it just seems so painfully relevant. Right. Now to your question. I think a non-theist. So this question, of course, is front and center right now in the course I’m teaching on Helkian. And the fact that we’re mentioning the Helkian Academy means the relationship between the Verveki Foundation courses and the Helkian courses is one of friendship and cooperation, not competition. And Johannes knows all about this and he’s very happy and very supportive. So but that’s that’s that question is coming to the fore in the course on Ultimate Reality, God and Beyond. The book we’re going to be reading in there, although I’ll be mentioning two books by Schellingberg is Evolutionary Religion and the other book I’ll be mentioning is Religion After Science. And he talks about what he calls the triple transcendent. In order for something to be sacred, it has to be transcendent in an ontological sense. It has to be ultimate reality. It also has to be sacred in what’s called a sotorological sense. Well, that means it has the ongoing capacity to profoundly transform you and transform you in a way that you will you and others reliably recognize as the as conducive to the cultivation of virtue and wisdom. And then the other is it has to be good in the sense that it acts as a normative guide, touchstone and North Pole star, North Star for you in your normative judgments. And of course, a theistic God meets that sense of the sacred. But of course, part of what Schellingberg and others argue, I think quite well is that definition also applies to many non theistic notions of the sacred like the the Tao or Shunyata or Eckhart’s Godhead, etc. So I think a non theistic sacred text would be a text that is an inexhaustible fount of intelligibility that constantly makes you feel wrong word constantly makes you sense and recognize that you are being called into a deeper and deeper relationship, right relationship, religio to ultimate reality. It should be an inexhaustible fount of intelligibility in that it is continually transforming you such that you read the text, it transforms you, you go and live in the world and you realize that you’re a little bit more virtuous and a little bit wiser because of this text. And then you return to the text with those the eyes that you have lived through and then you see something new in the text again. And it’s a text that you’re going to be able to read and you’re going to be able to read it again. And then you see something new in the text again, and it calls you beyond yourself again, there’s that ecstatic soteriological dimension. And then the text could also finally give you some sense of, and you know, if some of you have done the practice of dialectic into dialogos, right, where you get into right relationship to normativity to normativity of the really real and how it orients you properly into a living relationship with the true, the good and the beautiful. And so any text that reliably does that for a non-theist would be a sacred text. Notice that another requirement for many people from a theistic tradition, that that text makes claims to being a revelation from a deity is not a proper part of the definition of a of how a non-theist would regard a text as sacred. They wouldn’t forbid such a text from being considered sacred, but that is not necessarily a part of how a non-theist. So given that laying out of three criteria and the abstinence from a fourth criteria, books like Moby Dick are sacred texts for me. Books like The Republic are sacred texts for me. Books like The Tauté Chen are sacred texts for me and for many other people. And part of the education that you will be getting in the course is how can we appreciate some of these texts as sacred texts? Excellent. Okay, thank you, John. Thank you, my beloved friend. Thank you so much. My pleasure, my joy. So once again, the course will begin on April 29th. Let me just check that to make sure that it’s actually the right day. Yes, it is. Monday, April 29th, it will be at 10 a.m. Eastern. It will run through May into early June and then there will be a couple weeks break through June and then it will pick up again the tail end of it and finish at the beginning of July. Okay, so it’s going to be eight weeks in total. You have the reading list. You know what will be read, what will be studied, what will be discussed and the link that is in the show notes has the registration as well as that reading list. So I hope to see some of you there. I think it’s going to be wonderful. I’m really excited about it. And thank you all for those of you who have shown up and submitted your question. Sorry we can’t get to everybody’s question but hopefully you’ll be taking the course and be able to ask some of the questions therein. Exactly. Okay, thanks everyone. Have a great rest of your day.