https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=L4BmfOSZOZQ
Welcome everybody to another Voices with Reveke. I’m very pleased to have James Schofield on again. This is James’s second time, so welcome James. But why don’t you reintroduce yourself again so that people know where you’re coming from. Yes, I am a philosopher. I have some analytic philosophical training, also training in anthropology, and my main focus is on anthropology or on phenomenology. And so I’ve been interested in working out something of the basic axioms that can be made for phenomenology. So phenomenology traditionally can’t really posit a foundation in a traditional analytic sense, but I’m trying to establish something in place of a foundation, a kind of basic place to begin a lot of investigations that might lead into replies to the major issues in metaphysics and philosophy of science. But lately I’ve wanted to transition all of that work, which initially culminated in a book, Dialectical Holism. I want to transfer that into some issues on social philosophy and ethics, because I think that’s really the sort of cash value of any system, is figuring out what we ought to do. And lately there’s been a great deal of discussions going on concerning possible levels of human cognition, sort of developmental trajectory, and of course lots of concerns regarding politics and what sort of political system might follow from any conception of what we are as human beings. And so I’d really like to work that out. And so your work has been really influential for me, because it seemed to me that the meaning crisis followed very directly from the things that I was working on in Fourier cognitive science, and of course it’s sort of metaphysical grounding. Yeah, so that’s an initial approach. Yeah, that’s wonderful. I really enjoyed our last discussion a lot. So maybe just, I mean, I’ve invoked it multiple times, but maybe a quick, your take on what you mean by phenomenology, and then how you might see that transferring into these issues, the sort of socio-cognitive, socio-political issues. Right, so this is the tradition that follows from Husserl and Heidegger, concerning figuring out the nature of our sort of existential disposition in our approach to the world. What are the conditions of experiencing anything at all, are the main questions that we start with. And there’s a series of methods that try to posit what the most basic structures of intentionality are in our encountering any phenomena at all. And so everything in phenomenology is grounded upon, of course, our embodiment. And this is where Fourier cognitive science has made some interesting developments, right, the Fourier’s that have been described at length by yourself in recent videos as well. So the important difference, as I previously mentioned, between phenomenology and other approaches to philosophy of science, and this would have a great deal of implications for how we talk about ethics especially, is that there’s we can’t posit basic particulars, right. So the first point that I’d like to make that I think can bring us into some discussions of ethics and our sort of the nature of our human being is the idyllic reduction theory. So I am very much in agreement with you that we can’t establish the essence of anything, right. And this came out, it was further developed rather by Sartre, of course, that existence precedes essence. This, what I’ve been working on recently in order to try to get at some lines of reasoning that could give us a sort of phenomenological epistemology and then phenomenological ethics is the issue that, so we are a sort of, we’re kind of blind spot, we’re positive of nothingness in a sense, that we begin with these constraints that are given by our bodily dynamics, and we encounter the world by way of our acting, our enacting, and our embodied coupling to what we take to be the world. And we’re continually associating ourselves, identifying ourselves with things, and at the same time, consciousness seems to be the function of negating those very identities, right. So this then creates a very troubling challenge in terms of how we go about addressing meaning-making, right, because meaning-making needs to be connected to truth, but it seems that we can’t clearly posit the essence of ourselves or our relationship, and thus our relationship to anything at all. Instead, it is this continuous kind of dialectical movement of making meaning and then negating that meaning. And this is, this then gives rise to all of the discontent and unease that the existentialist philosophers were faced with, right. It’s a basic introduction anyway. So my initial move then here would be to say that, right, so we can’t individuate ourselves. So individuation becomes a really important point to make, and it hasn’t been, I don’t think, maybe you’ve seen some philosophers mention this, but I don’t think that it’s been discussed this way. Like, individuation is discussed more in traditional metaphysics and epistemology, but in phenomenology it isn’t really addressed. And it seems though that it’s at the very core of the phenomenological method, is trying to go about carving out the world and understanding our relationship to it while lacking traditional uses of individuation, right. So then we need to do something else. And the next step, the next point or issue here is that our ethics or what we ought to do seems to be interdependent with how we go about establishing or knowing truth, right. Each seems to presuppose the other because we can’t really have a clear sense of what we ought to do without a sense of truth, and we can’t establish a sense of truth without a procedure that is, that tells us why truth is actually a good thing to aim for and isn’t how to go about getting it. Right. So that’s just my initial approach, right. And it seems my intuition, and I’d like to kind of put this to you for possible clarification and development. This is what I’ve come to lately because I’m having to run a course on existentialism, so all my thoughts are geared toward this issue. With that interdependent sort of co-arising of ethics and epistemology, it seems to me that we might establish a sort of beginning framework for dealing with both of those, and then that could give us a sense of how we ought to go about relating to each other. Right. And I think your work has already spoken to this, but this is just my approach to the issues, right. Yeah, very much. That was very clear, James. Thank you. Yeah. So being very deeply influenced right now by a bunch of people, especially DC Schindler and his book on Plato’s Critique of Pure Reason, Love and the Postmodern Predictum, and the Catholicity of Reason, and he’s basic, and then also Clark’s work on St. Thomas on Aquinas. And I’m agreeing with the current scholarship that Aquinas is not primarily an Aristotelian. The current scholarship is that Aquinas is somebody who uses Aristotle in the service of Neoplatonism. And so the ancient analog for Aquinas is not Aristotle, it’s Plotinus. And what all that is is just the idea, because it was something gets developed in Neoplatonism, about the interpenetration of what are called the three transcendentals, the true, the good, and the beautiful. And so one of the things I want to talk to you about is, what about the third normative dimension? There’s the true for epistemic, there’s the good for action, and then there’s the beautiful for perception. And given for e-cognitive science, talking about how massively interdependent those are, that’s at least a preliminary reason for considering that the three transcendentals, they’re called the transcendentals, by the way, because they’re supposed to be, as you said, they’re supposed to be sort of universal in our phenomenological connectedness and directedness towards all of reality. So in every being and in being itself, we are always sort of constrained and lined by these three dimensions of the good, the true, and the beautiful. So I think that that’s right. There’s something about, how does Shinda put it? He says, the beauty is primary, good is central, and truth is ultimate, something like that. They’re all sort of superlative, but in slightly different ways. And one of the things I’ve been doing is asking people the question, why do you find truth good? And what’s the connection between it? And then not only that, why do you find it good, but how did it attract you, which has to do with the beautiful? Because I’m concerned also, as you know, with relevance realization, why does something become salient to us is not the same as why do we find it good, which is not the same as why do we find it real, but they’re all interrelated in this powerful way. So my thinking is very much about trying to get that phenomenological interdependence clearer, and then how that ramifies into our notion of reason and what it is to reason. Because we have become focused on reason as directed just to truth, as if truth is sort of completely self-determining. Habermas talked about how we treat these three as if they’re autonomous, and that has been one of the big problems of modernity. But if we think of reason as having to do with the true, the good, and the beautiful, and especially of their interdependence, that we are going to shift our conception of reason off of just the obtaining of true beliefs. We’re going to shift it into virtuous actions, and we’re going to shift it also into beautiful experience, beautiful sensory motor. And then that’s a very interesting thing to pursue. Then, what does that mean for science and ethics and art? So that’s exactly what I’m exploring right now, and it sounds like it’s very, very much overlapping with your explorations. Yes, I think so. It seems to me, this is really just an intuition at this point, that the kind of approach that phenomenology can be developed into, and the kind of work that you’re doing, seems to suggest that there would be a convergence of different ethical approaches. For instance, the utilitarian positive maximizing something, the good, right? That good would then be convergent, it seems, with a particular definition of truth. And that can be cashed out in terms of the conditions of establishing truth, right? And then you get richer ethics by saying, this is how we ought to interact with each other in order to sort of maximize our obtaining of truth and our clarification then of our relationship to the world. So it’s very much a trajectory of sort of self-correction. Yes, yes. Inaugurated self-corrections that we end up hashing out here. Yeah, I think that’s exactly right. I think, and I would, I am trying to argue for self-correction and self-transcendence, because they’re inter-defining, as the essential feature of reason, of rationality. That what we’re talking about is the, when we’re talking about becoming people aspiring to, it’s not only that aspiration is rational, it’s that rationality is inherently aspirational. Because insofar as I am engaged in a project of self-correction, right? I’m engaged in a project of self-transcendence, and then I’m in the paradox of that. I’m somehow, right? I’m somehow othering myself to become myself. Rationality and aspiration aren’t like this. It’s not only that aspiration is rational, it’s that rationality is inherently aspirational. And so I’m trying to get people to realize that. One way of thinking about it is that, like about that, is think about how, right, we’re playing with these related notions of realness, something to do with truth, and then realizing it. That’s like in the sense of sort of knowing. But then, you know, self-realization, which is right very much the good, in an important way. Because we have tended to ultimately, I think one of the points of convergence is around, right, the connection between goodness and something about, how do I want to put it, you know, self-realization, self-actualization. I don’t want, I don’t mean just in Maslow’s sense or even in Aristotle’s sense. I mean, there’s that happiness is a deep kind of self-correction, self-transcendence, self-realization, and knowledge is a deep kind of self-correction, self-transcendence, self-realization. That’s what, and that both of those are aspirational projects in a deep way. But, and this is where I would bring in a sort of, not just D.C. Schindler, but some of my own work, all of that is always taking place within relevance realization, because we are finite beings. Our transcendence is always finite. So beauty, the proper proportioning of salience is integral to both of those aspirational projects of epistemic and ethical self-ethical realization. Did that make any sense at all at what I was trying to get at? Yes, yes. I think that it did. That does seem to reflect a lot of the concerns that I have. So I think I might be missing a step here, but it seems like the next step, and this is where I thought it would lead, is sort of positing some sort of structural trajectory of what that looks like, right? Yes. The very next thing that needs to be done is to say, okay, if that is our existential disposition is to be encountering this kind of process, this sort of dynamical self-reflective, self-transcending attempt to bring about increasingly clarified ways of approaching what is relevant and what is good and what is true, well, what is the trajectory that makes us bring about more truth and more goodness than where we are right now? And then we bump up against a lot of the discussions that have been going on lately concerning stage theories and the different theories that are on offer concerning them. Yes. So a first thought toward that end is, so maybe we’ll be headed in that direction, but I think that this is just something to bear in mind that has been on the mind lately. It’s the possible polarity between different methods within a phenomenological space that are their polar opposites, right? And maybe this is incredibly crude, but it’s like a first step is the paranoid critical method on the one side, which is essentially Dulley’s surrealism, an ongoing elaboration of associations in oneself. And it seems when you are too realist about that, you end up in something like a dogmatism. And on the other end, something like the positive, the continuous flowing through such associations without grabbing onto any of them. And if you’re too kind of dogmatic about that, you end up in something like nihilism. So it seems that if we are to posit a trajectory with any kind of rigor, it would be some sort of balance between the two, like the conditions under which we let go and the conditions under which we grab onto and run with our associations in the hope of bringing about more meaning into our lives. And of course, that’s the sort of internal exploration is working out the balance between the two of those. But then there’s another dimension, another vector on that space, it seems, that is the way we relate to other people, the way other people question, criticize, interject, and help clarify what we believe is the case about ourselves and our current situation in our movement. So we are also relating to the perspectives of others, and we need to say something about the conditions in which we integrate versus resist their perspectives with regard for what we find in that initial polarized spectrum. That’s good. I like that, the polarity. So I suspect when it’s functional, we have something like opponent processing rather than just a codivy or opposition, that they reflect like they’re bound together in a relationship of mutual self-correction and self-affordance. So one way, maybe this maps, one way I’ve been trying to understand this, because the pursuit of the trajectory is, you know, a name we’ve given that traditionally is wisdom. Like we’re trying to find that, how do I find the trajectory, right? And that’s sort of the epitome of the wise person. But what I’ve noticed is that different wisdom traditions put different priorities on these various poles that you’re talking about. I thought about it slightly differently, and now we’ll see if this matches up, because I think it does to a certain degree. So there’s one, like you said, where you’re opening up, right? You’ve got association and image like Dolly does, and you get surrealism, and surrealism really lines up very well with, you know, with Corbett, I think with Corbett’s notion of the imaginal. And the point of the imaginal is not imagination that distracts us from our engagement with the world. But the point is, the imaginal is supposed to be for the sake of perception. So for example, when I’m doing Tai Chi Chuan, I’m doing all kinds of, I’m using all kinds of imagery, but I’m not off in a fantastical world. I’m doing that so I can enhance, I’m using sort of predictive processing ideas, I can enhance my perception of the world. So it’s more like I’m pretending than I’m forming mental images, right? And the thing about the problem that the surrealists fell into, I would argue, I mean, this is an existential critique. This is the critique that the existentialists made of them is they didn’t have anything to confront the Nazis, whereas the existentialists said, no, no, we have a frame, like we’re engaged with the world. So to put a label on it, that’s a pretty good psychological label. One of the dangers with the imaginal is it can become spiritual bypassing, you can get disconnected. And I think that’s what you’re alluding to. And then you point to this other thing where, right, moving into non-conceptual space, non-imagery, non-conceptual space, no pictures, no propositions. Like I regularly have people who like are almost like filled with missionary zeals. John, if you could just get into non-conceptual, non-duality, you would see that as the answer. And I’ve experienced this and I’ve read, I’ve read Nargajuna and Plotinus, I’ve studied them, I’ve not just read them and I get that. And Plotinus was worried about this himself. Chris and I wrote about this, right? You have to, like, you get to this place where you’re, like you said, where you face this really difficult and it’s phenomenologically difficult problem of this non-being. What’s the difference between, as Plotinus put it, what’s the difference between the non-being of nihilism, the privative non-being, and the non-being, right, the superlative non-being, the trans-conceptual, the one, right, and God, if you want to, right. And like that requires a lot. Now, one thing I would want to put in there is also, well, I want to put in the interpersonal like you did, but I think of about a fourth one, which is wisdom traditions that, right, you can emphasize the dialogical, platonic, right, the platonic tradition. You can emphasize the non-conceptual, the neo-platonic tradition, various mystical tradition. You can emphasize the imaginal. Jung is a clear example of a spirituality wisdom tradition built around that. But there are also traditions, and this is where I’m thinking of Daoism, although it has a bit of this, where the sensory motor domain is emphasized, where that is really emphasized, where what I’m doing is my dynamic, you know, embodied coupling to the world and flow states and things like that. Now, the problem with that, right, is, right, is that that, of course, can get hijacked. You want to get flow states that germinate, that generalize and generate. Let me give you a clear example. For me, Tai Chi Chuan has been great because it permeates my life and percolates my psyche, but people can get into flow states when some people in some video games, and it doesn’t do that. It locks them in and it disconnects them in a powerful way because they haven’t properly got the sensory motor machinery engaged. So I would put to you that there’s four, at least that I see, places where different wisdom traditions put different emphases on different dimensions of our phenomenology in order to say there’s where you will find the trajectory to wisdom. How does that strike you? Right, so again, it seems to me that when we sort of spell out the space of our phenomenological disposition and we get these different vectors, my intuition is that we’re my intuition is that just having the sort of conditions by which there are these dynamic co-emergences of the different domains that we are trying to interface with, that in itself kind of gives us the trajectory. And interestingly though, that seems to end up sounding a bit like a natural law theory. And that’s another issue I wanted to put to you. We end up saying, and this comes back to a different issue that I was going to mention at the beginning. So the suspension of the natural attitude in phenomenology, this is the way I’ve understood the developments of phenomenology through Mary LaPonte is that by talking about the conditions or the constraints of our body, what we’re doing is like we’re sort of bringing back a little bit some sedimented layers of a natural attitude. And it gets very explicitly developed, I think, by Sean Gallagher in his front loading phenomenology, because he’s explicitly positing the feedback loop between the sort of things that we come to in our phenomenological experiences, the structures and constraints, and then using them to inform our next phenomenological investigations. So when we end up with some conditions and constraints that are invariant across lots of different situations and people, at least for respective domains or things, topics that we’re interested in, it seems to me that we’ve already begun to sediment a kind of natural attitude insofar as we are using that at all to do more phenomenology. I’m curious to know if that interpret it differently, but the further implication of all this have taken as far as it could possibly go is that you end up with these basic structures more than embodiment. Let’s just say that this process continues for hundreds of years. You end up with a series of structures that are, in a pragmatic sense, we take them to be ontological because they don’t seem to vary, and they seem to be very stable and predictable. And then we’re deriving from them conceptions of what we should do and the nature of truth. And it seems to me that that’s something similar to a natural theory, but altered very significantly because nature is altered in this line of reasoning. How does that? Yeah, no, I think that’s very well said. I can’t remember the title of the book. I got this book on integrating phenomenology and naturalism in some fashion, and you put your finger on something. I have a handbook I want to read that’s on phenomenology and naturalism. I’m not sure if that’s the one you’re familiar with. No, it’s not a handbook. It’s like it’s an argumentative, theoretical, philosophical text. I’ll try to remember it and put it in the notes, but I haven’t read it. I’ve just got it because of this issue. This is like a touchstone issue, I think, for 4-E cognitive science because it’s deeply influenced by Marlo Ponti, but of course it also wants to take up the practice of science. I think that’s right. For me, well, first of all, in terms of the philosophical heritage, that’s why I ultimately have a preference for Stoicism over existentialism because I agree with Taylor and the reading on Heidegger that what comes out, and I’m not sure I agree. I’m very critical of Sartre. I’m not sure I agree with Sartre’s take on it, especially in being in Nothingness, but this idea, I like Taylor’s take on it better, I guess what I’m saying, that we in some sense don’t fall cleanly into any scientific worldview because unlike other things, we are self-defining in the way that the existentialists highlighted. The Stoics actually talk very significantly about that, and there’s important connections there, but the Stoics also emphasize something that, for example, Heidegger emphasizes. We’re mortal, and we can’t self-define that away. We can do a lot of stuff about it mean, but this is a hard constraint for our existence. In Marlo Ponti, we’re embodied, and that’s a hard constraint. For example, and Verveki would argue, we are absolutely bound to relevance realization for our cognition and things like that. So I guess what I would say is, insofar as the phenomenology reveals these constraints, and this is part of the battle between Marlo Ponti and Sartre, is you move away from a purely existential interpretation of the phenomenology, and you start to pause it, and this is one of the things that I think is coming to the fore in the four ecog side. You see Marlo Ponti, Dan Shapi and I are reading Lowe’s book. Lowe is trying to complete, like he’s using Marlo Ponti’s lectures and stuff, he’s trying to complete what the argument of the visible and the invisible is, and you see Marlo Ponti moving towards this, and he’s moving more and more towards the idea that our self-defining is intermeshed, the chiasm as he often puts it, with the self-defining nature of nature. Nature is also a self-defining thing, and our self-defining, and its self-defining affords a mutual indwelling, which is not homogeneous, it’s not an identification, but they are bound together, and that for me is sort of where I feel my ontological position is going. Now I wonder if that’s natural law or if that’s something other, because natural law seems to, at least the versions I’m familiar with, seem to have it as there in some fashion. That’s right, right. That’s the key difference, I think. Yeah, yeah. This is very dynamical and ongoing, and even instead of positing structures, right, there’s constraints to the dynamical trajectory, but it still, I think, has a deep resemblance to the logic of a natural law for epistemology. I agree. Schindler brings that out. In fact, he argues that when you, and I can’t do the whole argument here, so I’m going to just gesture out, but he argues that when you’re pushing at truth and you’re pushing at realness, you’re pushing at the fact that reality has a for-itself-ness, like we have a for-ourself-ness, and those have to properly respond to each other. In this way, we’re trying to get beyond either empiricism or romanticism in our fundamental epistemology. Yeah, I guess this is exactly the tricky thing. I’m really enjoying this. You’re really making me step back and slow down and think about this, right? I’ve been playing a lot with this about, and oh, who was I reading about this? This notion of inventio, right? That it’s, Kerry used it in his book on Augustine, but the Latin term, it hangs between discover and make, and the idea that, right, and Polanyi was about this too. He doesn’t use the word inventio, but he said the paradox is that we seem to generate standards that we then find ourselves bound to. We think we’re making them, and yet we find that we are always constituted by being bound to them, and we get this thing. It’s like we have this inventio. We’re making as we discover, and we’re discovering as we’re making. I mean, you acknowledge it, but I think that is a very significant novelty. I think that Polanyi was really, really wrestling with it in his work because he was trying to get that inventio towards the inexhaustibleness of reality is our primary way of tracking the true, the good, and the beautiful to get back to our trajectory thing. I think that Verilla was referring to that when he talked about walking the razor’s edge. He might have been meaning something else, but I think that’s how I’ve always interpreted it. It’s very, very difficult because it’s so incredibly easy to collapse into a rigid metaphysical answer or some sort of solid ontology of some kind, but this is an ongoing process. It’s endlessly challenging and I think frustrating to try to make sense of what exactly is meant by constructivist because, of course, the four ecogsci people and phenomenologists are invoking something like a constructivism here, but exactly to what extent we are constructing what is to be spelled out. Because it’s a weird kind of constructivism. If you take certain people at the core, there’s deep connections between… Let me try it this way. A lot of constructivism is bound to a kind of nominalism. It’s bound to the idea that, well, there’s no real patterns and I impose them on the world. For all of his nuances, Kant is the epitome of that or the culmination of that. Again, there’s a lot going on in Kant, but the problem with that, of course, is two things. How does the mind know its meaning? Is that also constructed and then you get the infinite regress? The constructivist has to sneak in direct knowing of some point and then also, if there aren’t any real relations, what’s the through line? What’s the continuity of the knower of the mind that’s doing the construction? Surely it has real patterns. So it’s not only direct knowing. You end up denying to the mind the very thing you’re positing about reality. Like you said, you get the nothingness and you get this deep duality. Whether or not they’re succeeding is a legitimate question. But the phenomenologist for E. Cognitive Science constructivism is a constructivism that is deeply rejecting that dualism and deeply rejecting the nominalism and that we’re cut off from the thing in itself and all these kinds of severance moves, all these dualities and severance moves. That’s really clear in Marleau-Ponty. Whenever that comes up, you know, no, and he tries to take it apart and he tries to take it apart. So again, I guess I’m posing to you a question. It seems to me that the constructivism is really not constructivism like the natural law really isn’t a typical natural law. It’s like it, but there’s a significant novelty in there in some fashion. Right. Well, so this creates a opposition to a lot of folks who have been advocating for a Gibsonian approach to affordances. Like just for one example, right, there’s a lot of tensions that can result because even within for E. Cognitive Science, I think that there’s a lot of different positions that have tried to maintain a direct realism of some kind. And what it is that they’re directly aware of seems to me to be very unclear for all the virtues of Anthony Chamarro and his work and Michael Silverstein. Like they, it seems that there’s a problem in their conception of realism or what it is we’re directly encountering. I guess that there’s really no way to tease apart what it is that we’re saying that is real and what it is that we’re saying that is constructed. Instead, it’s just we can talk about the constraints of our encountering or enacting something. And then we talk about the process by which that takes place. And that process, though, this is the important bit is that it can’t be sort of decoupled from the world’s process of coming to be. So our cognition, this comes back to my kind of somewhat long standing line of argument is that a proper conception of evolution, even going back through cosmology, is connected to a proper conception of cognition that that for what seems to me to be the best line of reasoning for phenomenology and in activism, you literally can’t take those two things apart. There’s no way because once you start talking about like our processes in any sense differentiated from the world or doing the constructing, you collapse into some kind of dualism or essentialism. And if you try to go the other way and try to talk about what the world is, what that process is sort of independent of us, you end up excluding consciousness from that framework. And that’s like not allowed given a phenomenological approach. I agree. So what do you think then of Marla Ponte’s proposal, right, that the dehiscence of the body, the oneness, doubleness of the body, which is not a duality, right? The lived and the living body? Or you can get it in the sense that my body both touches and is touched, right? And so there’s a sense in which any constraints I posit for myself transfer to the world because my body is a body amongst other bodies, the body in that sense, right? But like you said, if I just treat it that way, that’s just how my body touches the world, but I lose the fact that whenever I’m touching any object, and Polenium does a good job about this and Meek puts them together, whenever I’m touching an object, I’m also at least in a subsidiary fashion touching myself, right? And those two are bound together in a particular way. So what I mean is embodiment is an attempt to try and address that. Now, I want to immediately say, perhaps this is your point, I don’t think that’s still, I think that’s beautiful, but I don’t think it, I mean, as in, you know, how do we do it, so to speak? The psychological cognitive question, I think, is addressed well. But, and given your previous point, this is an important point, I do see what you say, right? There’s the, like, what’s the ontological relations that are ultimately being, like, if we, what is it, Uxfeld and the Umfeld, right? The lived world, right? Presumably the lived world is not the only world because we can move from one lived world to another, right? So there’s a space in which there’s a space other than lived worlds in which lived worlds, you know, can be individuated or transformed or moved between. I don’t know which metaphor you want to use there, but the point is, we, the very disclosure of an Umfeld and its dynamics seems to disclose something outside of the Umfeld, right? And I sometimes feel a deep tension within four ecogsci between ontologies that want to say there’s nothing but the Umfeld and ontologies that want to say, no, no, there’s an independent world, right? Because they want to get, they want to get, they want to get, because I think we’re approaching a paradox in which I want to say, I think both things are true, that meaning is co-constructed by me and the world. I don’t do meaning and I’m not a blank slate and the world’s not an empty canvas, right? I think that’s right. But then, and then if intelligibility and meaning and being are bound together, we’re tempted to say that being is co-constructed by the world and us and then that just makes no sense, right? And so I feel that tension. Is this close to what? Oh, yes, very much so. Yeah, yes, very much. There’s a lot of problems that I’ve seen trying to think of how to say this in a diplomatic way. There’s some problems lately in various philosophical publications that take, I think, too seriously the life world that we’re in and culture and its impact on us and its reality, right? So our, it should be said that our knowing ourselves depends upon our positing some other perspective that’s outside of us. And doing so, though, immediately gives us the opportunity to say that not just a perspective within our culture or our life world, but there could be one outside of it. Like this inference is automatic, it seems for any conscious human being. And that effectively sort of logically negates the life world that we’re in as being ultimate. So you end up with a world horizon, I believe it would be called in terminology, or the horizon of all world horizons. And it’s from that vantage point that you’re positing the possibility of some other perspective, even beyond the immediate ones that we’re encountering that allow us to know ourselves. So this horizon of all world horizons is what allows us to negate all cultural associations. And it seems to me that this also provides us a sort of framework for infinite orders of intentionality, which then becomes God. And it’s from that vantage point that we’re trying to posit the limited truth that our modes of engaging in culture and using cultural structures gives us some limited truth. So that gives us, it seems to be like a possibility of using a conception of God. Is that showing up in our philosophical? Yeah, I think that’s right. I mean, I think that’s right. And I mean, and I don’t mean this as any kind of criticism. That’s a kind of neoplatonic argument. The neoplatonic argument is that, right, you don’t just pay attention to sort of your phenomenology, you pay attention to the structures of your intelligibility. And you’re trying to trade back and forth between them. And you just did that, right? Yeah, here’s the phenomenology, but something, there’s something outside the phenomenology that makes the very possibility of the intelligibility of the phenomenology, right? That kind of, that it’s not, it’s not, it’s not so generous, right? And you make that kind of argument. And that’s exactly what the, you know, you’ve got things, and then you’ve got, you know, you have to keep positing these larger and larger frames of intelligibility until you get to the frame of the frames of all of them. You get the one, right? Just as like an aside, I think this is, this does speak to some possible problems that have arisen in some discussions, peripheral discussions, and also in like transpersonal psychology, certain iterations of it, where I think that the tendency has been to like, try to live there in the context. And the problem is that you end up not being as embodied or not really as engaging with the world and not taking serious the actual limitations of your knowledge. And so you can’t really push those limitations. You have to sort of bump up against your own personal, existential, cognitive limitations in order to understand what those limits are and to go a bit further. So this is all to say that I think the ultimate sort of world horizon, right? In a way, it’s quite empty. And so we can’t live there and we can’t ever reach it. And there’s a lot of problems that can result philosophically and cognitively when we try to think that we have achieved it or that like there’s one way to get to it or that we understand that vantage point. This is for me why, especially, well, you know, Howland’s, not Howland, Howland’s work on Plato and finite transcendence, but also some really good work within the Christian Platonist tradition. Because one of the things that Christianity did when it merged with, I’m not advocating for it, I’m just using it as a template, right? I’m not denying it either. That’s not my place. Right. One of the things it did is it tried to bring in humility, you know, love and logos together. What I mean by that is you need the horizon. And I would put it to you that the horizon, qua horizon is empty, but the horizon as it functions as a horizon isn’t empty. Because what it does is it gives you, you know, using the metaphor, it gives you a field of trajectory, an orientation, so that you can track the true, the good and the beautiful like we were talking about earlier. And so, insofar as it functions, it has a presence. And you can see, you know, the cataphatic and the apophatic relationship to God is trying to get that. No, no, we walk the path, but we always, we’re always aware of the fact that it transcends us, but it’s imminent and it’s like, can you get all of that? And what I’m trying to say here is the answer, putting in scare quotes, the answer isn’t like a conclusion. It isn’t I’m there, right, or I should just stay here, right? The answer is to put those two into right relationship. It’s to put the fact that I am inescapably finite into right relationship to that which transcends and by transcending grounds, right, all of my possible experience and sense making. And for me, and this will raise some hackles for some people, this is ultimately a spiritual when it’s individual and religious when it’s a collective project, because it’s about right relationship, right self-understanding, and right community with others, because, right, you said it. I can’t, like, I couldn’t get to the sense of the world horizon unless I indwell your perspective on my perspective and allow you to indwell mine. I mean, this is Vygotsky. I can’t do any of that. It depends on interpersonal, interperspectival, mutual indwelling, right? And then you and I can only do that within a community, within a history, within a culture, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? And so I think any attempt, so wow, this is going to sound really overconfident. I’m coming to the conclusion. I’m arguing now that any attempt to situate and to situate and identify with either one of these poles is a fundamental mistake, but it’s like, no, no, I just stay within the umwelt, right? No, no, no, I’ve achieved oneness with the absolute or something. I think those are fundamentally undermining of our attempts to come into relationship with what’s true, good, and beautiful. And so for me, and this is where Kierkegaard is helpful, figuring out the right relationship, and that doesn’t mean having an idea. It means crafting existential modes that comport me in the best possible way towards what we’ve been talking about is sort of the central existential task. We need a culture. We need a community in order to be and become and thrive, but that community hopefully is oriented toward a trajectory of its own self-transcendency. Exactly. Thriving of its members. Yeah, that’s so in a very abstract sense. That’s what I’ve been trying to clarify lately. And that leads us to, I think, a proper ethics and also a kind of political philosophy for how that community, those communities might be organized that could facilitate this. And of course, I think you’d agree that the answer is infinite. There’s infinite ways to go about doing this. But at the same time, there’s going to be homologies, I think, between them insofar as there is some sense of what human being and human thriving looks like in a universal sense, which I do believe that there is. And it’s just that we have to sort of learn what those limits are. So one of my starting points for all this, of course, this is like reminiscence of the existence precedes essence ideas that we should be interested in establishing the conditions that could allow us to sort of explicate what the definition of being human is, because we haven’t got it yet. And probably we never will. And so far as humans continue to live. And that, I think, is really important, again, for this first step toward establishing what kind of political organization we might have on any scale of a community, is that we don’t even know what we are. So we can’t do the traditional line of reasoning that starts with some conception of how we are and how we think and how we operate and then derive from that something of how we should best be in a community. The whole point is that we’re trying to continually figure this out by relating to each other. And so the question is, under what conditions could we relate to each other in a way that would bring about ongoing clarification to this question? Yeah. And yeah. Yeah. I mean, and you see, I mean, so Habermas tries to do that in one way. He sort of says, well, the core of what we’re trying to do is communication and communicative action. And then what are the constitutive principles of communicative action? I think that’s good, but I don’t think it’s like sufficient. I think communicative action and meaning making and sense making and also, you know, coordinated labor. There’s all kinds of stuff that has to be brought into this. Yeah. Again, I keep bumping up against this because I, let me give you an example of what a proposal for exactly that. So I think one of the things we should advocate for is the idea that we are both flawed and self-deceptive and that we should use a kind of opponent processing. Right. And that means a particular vision of democracy in which the process of appointed processing always takes priority over your position or my position. Right. And that what we have is the loss of the appointment processing within democracies, especially, I guess, right now, the United States, and it’s been replaced with an adversarial zero sum game winner take all approach. So much so that it’s not clear why either party wants to be in power other than to be in power and prevent the other party from being in power. Right. And it’s having disastrous and I would say it’s having disastrous consequences for the United States. So that’s what I mean about how, but for me, I would say that’s sort of getting at trying to get at sort of the cultural framework within which any political action has to take place. Because, for example, if you’re locked into a adversarial zero sum game way of being, right, right. I don’t care what policies you make. You can even make policies that might be good for people, but the way you’re making them ultimately undermines the process of self-correction. One of the great things I’m afraid of right now, and so I’m just giving this as a related proposal, I’m worried about the fact that we are allowing our visions of substantive justice to completely erode our commitment to procedural justice. We’re like, you know, they’re evil, we’re good, and, you know, we’re going to crush them. And so we give up the commitment to opponent processing because we’re so convinced we have the pure vision. Right. And go ahead. Go ahead. Well, yeah, I was just thinking that both parties assume that their cultural vantage points provide a sufficient conception of what is needed for a human to exactly, exactly. And it’s like, isn’t that just like when you stand back and just say that plainly, like you just did, isn’t it just, it’s just a ridiculous and arrogant, like, it’s absolutely absurd. And you want to say, and I try to say, I find both sides absurd. Right. And people go, but you have to take a side. And I’m saying, no, no, the way you are saying I have to take a side is exactly the problem I want to challenge. Right. Right. Yes. Thank you. I appreciate that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I like where this is going. Yeah. The idea, you know, of getting at the cultural guts in such a way that we get clear, like exactly the way we’ve been doing it together. And you’ve been like guiding us really well. You know, we sort of really wrestle with our ontology and our phenomenology. And then that leads into sort of a cultural critique, which then would play out in ethical and political behavior. I agree. I think that’s kind of what I mean by steal the culture. Right. So that’s great. That led very well into the last thing that I was thinking about, that I wanted to discuss. And then after that, of course, I don’t know, could go anywhere. But it’s, well, there’s a few questions. One is, what would it look like to have solved the meaning crisis? That’s one way to put it. But another way, a better way, perhaps, would be to say, what would a community look like in its next stage from where we are right down? So it seems that you have amassed a great deal of interest in people and they are participating in different ways. And it seems that there is need for some kind of critical mass or a phase shift, phase transition of some kind to bring about an organization that could pool resources and distribute resources in a way that could help the people who are interested in participating thrive better, more directly. So the first step, it seems, would be, or the first sort of principle along those lines is that there would be more real world in-person engagement of different kinds, more embodied practices with each other. And another principle would be that it would probably remain decentralized and distributed across as wide a field as possible. And then after that, there’s a lot of musings that I’ve had, but nothing too concrete for suggestions at this point. Yeah. I mean, so much of my discussions with Jordan Hall have been like circling, circumambulation around this. Because I mean, as I’ve said to people, put on my tombstone, neither nostalgia nor utopia. I don’t want, like I want to exercise appropriate epistemic humility towards this, right? If this is generally going to be an emergent thing, we got to take the relationship to it being a genuinely emergent thing. Like it can’t be really heavily top-down is what I’m saying. There can be helpful top-down theory, but I don’t think there should be a lot of heavy top-down governance. What are the things I’m trying to do? I’m working, I did the series with Layman Pascal and Brendan Graham-Gademsey about the artful scaling of the artful scaling of the religion that’s not a religion and what might art look like and how might we socially organize this? I’m working, I forgot Nathan’s last name. I’m working, he was just on, he was with me with Edmund Roych and Cheryl. We just did the empathy circling. But anyways, Nathan and I are working, I’m sorry Nathan, I forgot your last name. We’re working together and he’s taking the lead on it, on trying to get these communities, these emerging communities of these emerging ecologies of practices to talk to each other, to support, to try to get a community of communities going, to get conferences in the real sense of the word and workshops, interactions going. One hand with Brendan and Layman trying to, the idea of a multi-institution was analogous to what the university, the church and the monastery did and the way they’re self-correcting with each other. And then new art forms for the generation, the ongoing evolving generation of the sacred, we explore that. So there’s that and then there’s the actual working with communities and then working with the communities of the community. This is becoming a bigger part of my work by the way, of trying to get that organization going in a way that is different from Iron Age hierarchies and not committed to spirituality within a two-worlds mythology. So that’s a very long winded-ance way of saying I take the problem seriously and I’m putting a lot of work into it, but I don’t know if I have, I mean, I don’t know if I have or if I should have, I’m not quite sure what my ethical obligations are here, my epistemic obligations. I don’t know if I have too much more to say about it than that right now. Right. It is very big. My approach to this issue has mostly been from a kind of systems theoretical vantage point because I’m interested in how systems organize and evolve and I’m just trying to imagine like what would be needed from where I can see the community is at right now in order to bring it somewhere further along its evolution and how might this look in terms of creating a kind of new community that does exist like 50% in a virtual space and is decentralized and how could such a new culture come about? I’ve really appreciated your conversation on the artful scaling of religion. It’s not a religion. I like that. That’s given me a great deal of food for thought. It seems that some sort of another wave of surrealism would be helpful along those lines and many integrated training programs, it seems, some people with lots of different skills, physical and artistic and academic, all sort of trading and giving each other trainings. Some sort of organization that facilitates that would be very good. The ultimate end that I’ve been interested in has been to reinvent the academy, sort of turn the current academy on its head. So the only concrete step toward that end that I’ve come up with is some sort of journal that could be made within this this community that could actually help. It would require a kind of a rigorous academic component as well to facilitate the meaning-making endeavors. So I’ve imagined a way that a journal could be organized that would be different from other journals. The wiki that has been started gave me some ideas for a kind of ground level. So you start with entries that are basically a kind of glossary of concepts and terms and people that are relevant for the philosophical vantage point. And then on another level, you have more like articles that are continually being rewritten by potentially lots of people that are sort of the core, the founding positions, the theories within the paradigm, you might say. And then on another level, you have dialectical discourse going on because assessing the relationship between the different theories. Because it’s given me, it’s led me to a state of great passion to see that there are disagreements that aren’t being explicated as well as they could be and have been in comparison to like other philosophical movements. And it seems that the kind of discussions that are going on in virtual spaces here, they’re really good in that they’re doing something that a lot of other philosophical movements did not do, which is to make it much more organic and connected to a wider audience so that a wider group of people can actually see the evolution of the ideas. But at the same time, I think that we could make use of the software virtual spaces that we have access to, to really make the movement itself, the philosophical evolution of the positions, the theories, sort of self-referential in this way so that people can see the movements that are going on and it can be condensed in a solid central space of some kind. Yeah, I agree with that. I think that’s right. Yeah, and that’s very much sort of, it’s very much in line with the stuff that Brendan and Laman are talking about, about a kind of collective generation of evolving art that is in, right, that’s in, that’s in resonance with, you know, dialogical practices and they’re mutually informing each other. And then we could have like that, like what you’re talking about here, where there’s a self-reflective component about that, yeah, and where people can bring sort of the best, broadly construed sort of cognitive science to bear on this. Yeah, I think, I mean, I think that’s very good. I mean, the things I know it shouldn’t be is, and this is why I’m hesitant to be too top-down, is I’m not founding a religion and I refuse, right, that job and I refuse to be labeled, that’s what I’m trying, that’s not, right, and that’s not going to be the answer. I’m also really, I’m really interested right now, I’m reading, I think, I can’t pronounce Plants book on a lost ways to the good and he’s talking about the Silk Road as part of the, right, and how the Silk Road worked and it didn’t work by everybody agreeing, but there was, he made an argument that there’s this framework that became sort of the conceptual, philosophical lingua franca, a version of neoplatonism, and he actually compares pseudodionysis to the founder Shinran of Pure Land Buddhism and he gets this stuff going and he says, look, I can get, see how I can get the two poles talking and he’s trying to make, right, and I’ve been thinking about that, I want to be very clear that I’m not misunderstood in a few seconds, but, you know, the fact that neoplatonism was able to enter into reciprocal reconstruction with Christianity, with Islam, with Judaism, and now, you know, even in the Kyoto school with Buddhism, and it’s like, and again, I’m not nostalgic, but I’m saying something like that, and, you know, I think we’re trying to craft it here, can we get a phenomenological, ontological, you know, dojo in which we can come in and we don’t have to come to agreement, but we can come together into real communicative relation, and so I’ve been looking very carefully at the sort of Silk Road and this kind of extended neoplatonism that served as the, it performed the same function for mines that the road performed for trade goods, it allowed, right, it gave a through line, and again, he’s basically saying, he’s proposing we need to try and find something like that, this is why I’ve been also disconnected to all the stuff I’ve been doing about idetic induction, right, right, about trying to find through lines, which is not the same thing as finding conclusions or finding agreement, but can we find through lines between you and me? So that’s all very vague and promissory, but that’s me trying to get at, like, we did this before, this was, that was globalism round one, and many people have argued that the Silk Road is the first version of globalism, and they had something very different than what we had, they had the Silk Road, both physical and metaphysical, if I can put it that way, without having homogeneous agreement or totalitarian control or anything like that, so I’m trying to learn what I can from that historical template. So it might be that the overarching framework that serves as a trajectory guide is whatever allows for the best synthesis and identification of homologies between your perspectives. So that’s what creates the synthesis basically, is homologies, and they’re being systematized, and that systemized result is being shared for a wider audience or for whoever the participants are, to actually see what the relationships are between perspectives. So that’s a sense in which you could apply a kind of function of a horizon to discussions in a way. No, I think that’s right. I mean, and your work is doing that to a significant degree. Yes, yeah, yeah. And Plant’s argument is that the neoplatonism framework on the Silk Road did that. It was kind of like, this is what I’m understanding, it was like a psychotechnology, actually a set of psychotechnologies for doing exactly that in a significant way, so that the Eastern and the Western Christian could talk to each other, and they could talk to the Muslim who could talk to the Buddhist, right? And like getting that, and where the talking isn’t just polite liberal tolerance, but genuine co-emergence, both people get to a place they couldn’t get to on their own. And I’m trying to figure out what was in that. So I’m trying to figure out what current people that I respect like you are doing to try to do that, and try to look at historical examples, and I’m trying to like, what can we glean from this? Yes. It’s very much a work in progress, of course. Yeah, I’m interested in principle, what it even looks like, and what the components are, trying to work that out. And yes, it’s very good to have examples as well, of when it seems to have occurred fairly well. And so the Silk Road, I hadn’t ever thought of that before. That’s really cool. Yeah. Well, like I said, I’ve largely got that from Plant. I had got that argument, and I had been sort of independent from him, getting this idea of Neoplatonism seems to have this enormous capacity for reciprocal reconstruction with other systems, and I thought, oh, wow, that’s kind of a nodal capacity, right? A nexus capacity. And then he made this historical argument, and they just sort of came together. So right now, I’m sort of like, oh, that’s very, very interesting. James, I’d like to wrap it up. And you and I are going to talk again, so I’m already extending another invitation, because this has been wonderful and fruitful. I wanted to let everybody know that James bears a lot of responsibility for this conversation, because he basically sent me this wonderful email laying out the topics and explicating them, and they acted like a really fantastic backbone to build the dialogue on. So I want to thank you for doing that, James, and I hope we can do it again in the not too distant future. I’m going to ask James, he’s done it before. We did it in the first few years, to send me the link to his current book and any other work that he might want people to reflect upon. Maybe you have some videos or anything like that, but I encourage you all to pay more attention to the work of James Schofield. I think this, the previous one was good, but I think this one is even better. This is a really clear demonstration of the value and the pertinence of James’s work to awakening from the meeting crisis. So thank you very much, James. I’ll give you a chance for any final word you might want to say, and then I’ll close it down for us. Oh, yes, I also enjoyed this very much. I look forward to talking with you again. Thank you for having me. I appreciated it a lot. Great. Thank you everyone for your time and attention.