https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=OmeP_9xvSmw
It’s always sort of wellian. Yeah, we are watched by the machines all the time. All the time. So thank you, John, for talking with me. Perhaps we just start talking about what you said just right before we started with the recording, right? Yeah. The kind of likeness between Neoplatonism and Nishitani in the sense that they both want to overcome nihilism in its privative form, towards, let’s say, the no-thingness shunyata in its fullness, in its superlative form. Yes. I’m really interested, perhaps in your opinion, and perhaps you can even back this up a little bit with research from your cognitive science. I’m really interested in what happens in this turning, in this shift, in this conversion, in this metanoia from the nothingness to the no-thingness, from nihilism to shunyata. Nishitani alludes in this in the last chapter of his book, for example, when he talks about Nietzsche, that Nietzsche had really participated in nihilism, what Zen calls the great death. But then Nishitani says in various points in the book that in Nietzsche we still find traces of the will, the will to power. We still find traces of the reification of the nothing. And he says, for example, that one major example in the West for this conversion is the story of Job, and that it comes from the other side. That’s why we have to pray, we have to be faithful. We have to, there’s this element of faith in that sense that we have, because the conversion does not happen from out of our own self-will, from out of our own power, but it’s this co-coupling of ourselves and reality. And then this turn happens. And I would really be interested if… This is absolutely pivotal to the work I’m doing right now, the kogsai work, but I do think there is a plausible way to re-situate it back within this deeper philosophical project that you’ve articulated. And trying to get clear about what this is, and I think it’s a multi-aspect phenomena. So I’m going to use the broader term metanoia that you used, because I want to be able to refer to the platonic Christian position or Christian Platonism, that people change their order around, depending on their particular allegiance. And then, like you said, this move that Shatani makes, which is related also to his idea of, where you sit on the, I don’t know how you pronounce it, S-I-B-E, where you’re sitting on the platonic Christian opposites. And that reminds me, of course, of Nicholas of Cusa, and of course, Young makes a similar move, also coming out of the Platonic tradition of the transcendent function. So there’s something there about that. But then I want to relate it to the work I’m doing. So there’s a very… There’s a central problem about… There’s two problems. One is how something can fundamentally change while remaining the same to us. And then there’s the problem of transformation itself. And of course, the two are linked together. So let’s go a little bit tighter and a little bit more concrete, not because I’m saying this is an instance of the broader thing we’re talking about. I’m saying it’s an instance of a cognitive continuum that might give us some machinery, theoretical machinery, to talk about this. So I’m thinking, and I do a lot of work on this, I’m thinking about the moment of insight. The moment of insight, like the nine dot problem, or even when you do just the network cube and it switches. And Wittgenstein talked a lot about this, too, this aspect shift. And you say, of course, nothing’s changed. It’s still the same network cube. It’s still the same nine dots. But also everything’s changed. And what is typically meant by that is the salient’s landscaping. What I mean by that is what’s salient, what’s foregrounded, what’s background. So it’s a fundamental aspect shift. What’s interesting about insight as a phenomenon is a purely rationalist or purely empiricist approach to insight is going to are going to be inadequate to understand the phenomenon. What do I mean by this? Or maybe a better way to put it, not even rationalist, is a purely romantic or purely empiricist. Let’s do it that. That’s even easier. So what’s what’s the empiricist? Well, I just wait and the insight will come. There’s just wait. And for a minor things like the network cube, that sort of works. But for the nine dot problem, it doesn’t. You can’t just sort of passively receive it. But if you come into the situation and say, I’m going to make myself up an insight, it doesn’t work either. It doesn’t work either. And so it’s not a romantic expression of the will, and it’s not an empiricist reception of the already made intelligibility of the world. And instead, what seems to happen in an insight is and this is really, really interesting is you seem to participate in it. You have to be involved. What you’re doing is you’re. This is some paradoxical, but you’re actually disturbing and disrupting your cognition enough so that the underlying machinery of self-organization takes over and self-organizes and you get a new configuration of how things are salient to you. So insight requires disruptive strategies. Which is a very interesting thing, because so I’m asking for a bit of charity here, but you’re actually introducing some non thought into thought in order to get the insight that brings you to greater thought, which is a and it’s not and it is expressed as a fundamental process. It’s absolutely not an inferential procedure. You’re not building one premise on the other. I mean, there’s a lot of evidence and theoretical argument to back up what I’m saying, but I’m just going to the gist of it now. And for me, aspect shifts, especially when they are aspect shifts that fundamentally shift the intelligibility of it. And I don’t necessarily mean the conceptual intelligibility. I mean, the way in which we are fundamentally related to it, even ontologically. So that’s a fundamental point of insight. We’re talking about something in which there is this interpenetration of non thought into thought that makes thought possible. Does that does that? How does that sit with you as as just a proposal? No, I think I think perhaps we can even say that’s in Sen when they kind of like say they hit you with a stick or so, they bring the non thought into and then then write this is I mean, this is literally disruption. Right. Yes. And then you have kind of like that’s kind of like these moments of insight. Right. It comes from comes from somewhere. And I think that’s also what I wanted to evoke with the job story. Right. That’s why we often said in with the shamans, for example, that it’s like it’s like the psycho pump. It’s Hermes. So we have this insight comes from. Right. Yes, very much. Now, the interesting thing about this relationship between. If we understand thought as propositional thought, I mean, we can change the meaning of thought. But let’s just mean it that right now. Right. This relationship. So the relationship between thought and non thought is is an interesting one because the non thought can’t take me out of the home field of thought. So, for example, if I hit you right and sort of not that won’t bring about the right. Same thing if. So, for example, if I want to try and trigger an insight in you, and that’s perhaps the right word. I want you to be I want to get is for you to be moderately distracted from the problem at hand. If you don’t if you don’t if you stay thinking about it, you don’t get the insight. But if you pull away too far, right, you don’t get the insight. You have to you have to get this moderate distance. So. The thought and the non thought have to have to be in a kind of opponent processing with each other. They have to be bound together. They’re not separable from each other. They have to penetrate each other in a profound way. And I see and I’m not saying this is an exhaustive explication of the Shatani by any means, but I see Nishatani doing that. I see him trying to set these two right. He’s trying to avoid two things. He’s trying to avoid people simply equivocating and also or or just making the two equivalent in some fashion. And I see him doing exactly this. And for me, that it’s called opponent processing that kind of opponent processing. Is actually a central feature. It’s a grounding principle of how cognition works. So I think once we start to see what’s going on there, we have this why I invoke the neoplatonic notion of participation as part that we participate in it. And that means it’s not even just a new thought. Especially when it’s a metanoic kind of insight. It’s not only an aspect shift outward on the problem. It’s an aspect shift inward on the problem sector. Right. And so I point a phrase for that. It’s not reframing a problem. It’s participating in a trans framing because it’s both reframing both the problem and yourself in a way in which both the object is transcending itself, the object, and you are transcending yourself. And that’s the platonic notion of participation. And so first of all, I think Nishitani is invoking something like that when he talks about the aspect shift from the nihil to shunyata. Or when Titani or Porphyry talk about the deprivation of, right, that’s absolute matter in the neoplatonic system versus the superlative non-fingeness and non-being of the one. I’ll pause in a second, but I just want to remind that there’s the other poll, which is this brings out a paradox, this capacity for self-transcendence. And Strassen made the paradox very clear in a famous paper, Galen Strassen, where he said, so the problem of self-transcendence, the problem of self-creation is if I create it, it’s not self-transcendence because it’s just an extension of me. If something else makes it happen. So it’s genuine novelty, genuine creation, but then the self is not involved. And so, and then L.A. Paul has done similar work with when I’m going through a transformative experience, right, I’m going to be transformed in both how my salience, the landscaping and the structure of my character, of my cognition. And yet somehow I’m aspiring to do that. So I’m aspiring to not be me in a way that will make me fully be me. And how do I do that? And how do I overcome the paradox? So the aspect shift is bound up with, for me, the paradox of self-transcendence. And here’s part of the answer that Chris and I were arguing. Is that the neoplatonic practice of dialectic and the dialogos. Dialectic is something you do. Dialogos is something that takes shape, the life of its own, is a practice in which we bring these two together because the solution to the paradox of self-creation is we always transcend to other people that we’ve internalized into our own medical mission. So and this is this is a key idea from developmental psychology. So the process by which that paradox is resolved is a dialectical process, like only if it becomes dialogos, only if the process takes on a life of its own. And then the idea is that process of self-transcendence can be read to a fundamental aspect shift about. The relationship between like thought and non-thought intelligibility, non-intelligibility, etc. Sorry, that was a long speech, but I was trying to lay out the core architecture of how to start. Sorry, I was too full. How I would propose starting to think about bringing the neoplatonic tradition into dialog with the shittar. And that was that was already excellent, I think. Where do I go from that? That with the paradoxes, I think was superb because, right, Nishida and Nishitani, they really espouse this paradoxical logic of the seven non or the sokohi in Japanese. And perhaps we can say that, right, in this middle of let’s say the paradoxical or non-logical relationship between thought and non-thought or perhaps our self and reality. Yes, there’s perhaps in between there, there’s perhaps where the logos rests, you can say in the neoplatonic tradition. There’s where the dance happens, right? Yes, yes. It’s a fundamental logos. Yes. Yeah. So there’s Nishitani says in a late essay, which I find is very, very humble of him. He says that his book, Religion and Nothingness was kind of like a first not not yet sufficient attempt to form your love. So he says or he was he was interested, right, in religion and nothingness. He was interested kind of like how we can or like like the individual, the self can kind of like get to no thingness, step back to no thingness. This place, right, that we inhabit when we are children. It’s kind of like this place where we always afforded kind of like play and wonder and all. There’s a late essay of Nishitani, which I can send you if you like, that’s called Emptiness and the Mediacy. And there he talks about imagination a lot. And it’s quite similar to Corber for example, Nishitani also talks about imagination as a kind of middle realm. And in this essay, he’s more interested in kind of like how emptiness shines into us. Perhaps similar, right? Like, as you said in your lecture series, how the second divine self normative shines into us so that we can aspire to it. Yes. Nishitani is kind of like trying to lay out something similar and kind of like trying to lay out the opposite dynamic, kind of like what happens, how the moreness kind of like relates to us. And then, right, because in this middle point where the paradoxes are kind of like held in this optimal tension, this kind of like coincidentia oppositorum like way. But there’s, I think you also said this once, that’s perhaps also the imaginal where all the transformation is happening, right? Yeah. Yeah. So, yes, that dimension of serious play and the imaginal. So, just in case people are… The imaginary is just, you know, mental pictures in your mind. The imaginal is between you and the world in a fundamental way. So the difference is they’re picturing a sailboat in your mind. And that’s an interesting thing to be able to do. The child pretending to be a pirate by picking up a stick and standing on a porch and waving it around, right? The child isn’t forming mental pictures. What the child is trying to do is shape their agency so the world can take on the… So they can aspect shift the world so a particular arena becomes available to them. And I think that… And what you see is that serious play, that’s the child… That’s what I mean, where the child is taking the perspective, the possible perspective of an adult in a particular new kind of identity or role, right? And the child is reaching out to it, indwelling it, and then internalizing it back in. So the serious play and the dialectic, the way I see it being portrayed specifically within the Neoplatonic tradition, where you get in things like theurgia and theoria playing off each other. The dialectic and the serious play are deeply interwoven. Now, what’s really interesting is that I also propose that serious play is how we overcome the transformation problem in L.A. Palsworth because you can’t use… The problem with… So when you can think of development, like in a child development, not as an insight here, but as an insight across… That trans-framing, an insight across the whole way of being and their whole of their agency. That’s what it is to go through a developmental stage, I would propose. And so when you think about it, L.A. Palsworth says, like the problem when you’re going through transformation is… And I’ve used this language, my language, in her presence, and she’s happy with it. So that’s why I’m not imposing… And I’ve spoken to Laurie. I recommend everybody to get involved with L.A. Palsworth, just a strong recommendation. She literally wrote the book on transformative experience. And so the problem there is, I don’t know… Think about standard decision theory. You assess the probabilities, the risks, and then you attach the utility to it. What’s the value of these various possibilities? And what she says is, we don’t have risk, to use sort of bounded rationality language, we have uncertainty. I don’t know what my perspectival knowing is going to be like once I go through this change. I don’t know what it’s going to be like to be this radical other than I am. So the example of becoming apparent. I don’t know what it’s like, what it’s going to be like for me. That’s what I mean by perspectival knowing. What my salience landscaping will be like and how the world will disclose itself to me until I’m there. And I’m also ignorant in participatory knowing fashion. This is… I’m going to be a different self. I’m going to be a different… There’s going to be a different… Not even just an actuality, a whole different set of possibilities for agent arena relationships after I go through the transformation. And these transformations are irrevocable. Once I make them, I can’t come back. It’s just… You can’t know what it’s going to be like and you can’t know how you’re going to value what the new arena is going to be in the new agency. It’s radical uncertainty. So you can’t reason… You can’t infer your way through it. You can’t reason your way through it. So when I was thinking about this, and I’ve talked to Laurie about this, well, I think kids obviously do it. And she said, oh, right. Children, when they’re going through development, they’re facing this. I said, of course. And how do they do it? And so the idea is, let’s say, having a parent, I use the example of what I see people doing is getting a pet, getting a dog and then treating it like a child. So they move into this liminal space where they’re triggering some of the perspectival knowing, some of the participatory transformation, but they’re not so far in that they can’t pull out. If they’re making a mistake, right? That’s serious play. That’s what children are doing all the time. They’re engaging in serious play. And so there has to be an aspect of serious play within the transformations we’re talking about. And then the question becomes, and notice the question is like the question we just said, what is it to play? What is it to play? It’s not just doing or expressing. It’s not just receiving. What is it to play? Hmm. And I’ll make this even more provocative because I’m proposing that at a fundamental level, and I mean this deeply, and I don’t mean it trivial. That’s why I keep calling it serious play because we tend to reduce play to a trivial entertainment. I’m talking about a serious play that constitutes self-transcendence development. I think Nietzsche is proposing for all of his seriousness, right? Nietzsche was incapable of playing the kind of fundamental play with no thingness that allows for the fundamental aspect shift that that trans framing that constitutes the real self-realization of reality. Hmm. You know, I read this in a critique of Nietzsche. Nietzsche also often evokes laughter, right? Yes. But this critique was this kind of divine laughter. It’s this kind of almost unhuman laughter, this kind of detached laughter that no human being would laugh like that. Because Nietzsche was so ahead of himself, so to say, that he couldn’t. This is even, right, in this dimension of serious play that there needs to kind of like, we need this kind of like inducing, right, what you often also say with the true meaning of education, right? People have to be induced into this space of transformation because if you, there’s a talk with this Jungie and Edward Edinger, I don’t know if you know him. Yes. And there’s this talk where he says he can’t read Nietzsche. And many people have the same thing with Nietzsche because their instincts are kind of like rebelling against it. It’s like, he’s bringing you to a space that’s too much, that like this, it’s kind of like, they can’t fathom it. It makes you sick. It’s like, that’s why also he thinks that Nietzsche went mad. He kind of like, he has immersed, he has gone through the process, so to say, without really transforming himself. That’s Jung’s critique, right? Kind of like he was ungrounded in his life. He was just, he was kind of like, he was going into this sage-like mode without becoming an adult, we could perhaps say. I think that’s exactly right. I think Nietzsche is still bound to the Kantian-Partesian framework in this fundamental way that he doesn’t understand the way I see Nishatani understanding of fundamental truth about perspectival and participatory knowing, which that there are truths that are only available to us if we are willing to undergo fundamental transformation, right? So Nietzsche, you know, he’s the philosopher with the hammer. All he has to do is wield this tool. And that’s just a very aggressive version of Descartes’ idea that he has the universal method, right? And that he, you see it, you know, if you compare reading Augustine to Descartes, and they both have, they have similar arguments about, you know, something like the cogito and that somehow the structure of the mind is the structure of God, so there’s, there are these important similarities. But Augustine clearly gets that there’s transformations that he can only at best participate in that are necessary in order for certain truths to be revealed to him. Whereas in Descartes, no, no, I just have this method, and as long as I apply this method, all of the universe, all of reality, you know, even the reality of God is disclosable to me. And so I think that’s what I mean when I say Nietzsche is fundamentally incapable of serious play for all of his laughter and all of his dancing, and I honor that, by the way, I think Nietzsche is fantastic in disruptive, right? But we start, Chris and I start the paper by putting these two quotes side by side, and they sound so similar, but they’re so different. And Nietzsche says, you know, if you look long enough into the abyss, it begins to look back through you, and you get a feeling of terror. And you read Eckhart, the same eye by which I see God is the eye by which God sees me. And instead, you get the sense of a fundamental transformation that’s available to you. Propositionally, they’re almost equivalent, but in terms of the requirement for transformation, they are so fundamentally different. There’s another paper, I can’t say, that’s in this book. I don’t know. It’s a great study by Ian Alexander Moore, Eckhart Heidegger and the Peritive Releasement. Oh, I would love that old books. This book is an early essay of Nishitani in the first English translation, where Nishitani compares Eckhart and Nietzsche. And that’s his kind of like early early Nishitani, that is more sympathetic, I would say to Nietzsche where he thinks, and he does the same thing. He quotes them both with, maybe I’ll find it. He kind of like, here we have kind of like, peak and abyss, they are now merged as one, or noon and midnight have become one. It’s kind of like coincidence of opposites, which he sees also both in Eckhart and in Nietzsche. Then in Religion, Nothingness, he says, no, Nietzsche hasn’t kind of like broken through, no thingness. But I mean, Nietzsche was close, I guess. But, but, he, I think he’s also a little too influenced by Hegel, where he understands the no thingness more in terms of negation. I mean, this is Heidegger, this is what I understand Heidegger’s critique is, you see basically Nietzsche pursuing a strategy of negating Christianity, basically like negating sort of its fundamental structure, rather than trying to find out, no, no, what’s, and this goes back to the logos point, what’s the fundamental shared framework within which this works, right, and to get to that deeper point. And by the way, I just want to use this as an opportunity, that point you made about the logos, right, as that which gathers together the inner and the outer, the thought and the non-thought, and makes them possible, right, and getting that sense of, you know, the dynamic grounding of whatever oppositional conceptual structures we build, that for me, that’s one of the telltale markers that dialectic is becoming the logos. That people are getting a realization of, wow, wait, I can’t tell if this is inner or outer, I can’t tell if this is you or me, and it’s somehow more real than either, when you hear people saying that, and they say things like that, even in circling, right, they’ll say, I can’t tell if it’s like, it’s you or me, or it’s more real than you, you know, that for me, that’s when people, that’s when the serious play is getting people to that grounding logos point, and it’s expressing itself through them. And right, Nietzsche, in his unpublished notes, he always mourns that he doesn’t have friends, and then he kind of like, he tries to recreate the dialogical framework just in his head, kind of like by adopting these multiple perspectives and voices, but not in a real dialogue, right, that’s why he’s kind of like, he’s always stuck in himself. That’s right, that’s right, and you can see the weird, yeah, the pursuit of the multi-vocality is exactly what I think, it’s a hunger for genuine escape from monologue into the logos, that’s clearly the case, and then he has these weird relationships, like so, I think a quote that’s pertinent right now is, you know, I hate Socrates, he’s so close to me, I’m always fighting him, right, and he, they’re, they’re, they’re, he’s deeply attracted to the Socratic project, and he’s deeply repelled from it at the same time, because I think there is an unacknowledged intuition there that he needs the Socratic project, but he is, he, but he actually needs fellowship in order to enact it. Yeah. And that’s right, that’s what Nishitani in a sense had, so right there, it’s, it’s famous, it’s a famous tale, kind of like, they were always walking together on the, the, the philosopher’s path in Kyoto, they even called it then out, this, this path, that’s just in the near side of the university, and then Nishida and Nishitani and all the Japanese, the students were always walking there and discussing their thoughts, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, you have to, and, and people forget Stoicism, of the Stoa, where the philosopher, Stoicism, which seems like an individual project of self-mastery, no, no, no, it was born at the Stoa, and it’s an inherently dialectical process, inherently, inherently. So I would like to then, you know, propose that, I think we’re, this is really catching, it’s starting to take on a life of its own, and I want to, I want to relate that to something you brought up, and, and, and give your thoughts on it, because when I start to get that sense of connecting, like, dynamically to this grounding that is inherently transformative and calls serious play, but it’s taking on a life of its own, and I only participate in it, I don’t make it or receive it, it’s neither passive or active, but beyond them, it’s neither subjective nor objective, but beyond them, that brings me to, that topic you mentioned, faith, that there’s a kind of faith that, like, and, and I agree with you, there’s a profound sense, right, of faith and an appreciation for religion, religion and nothingness, in Nishatani, that is absent in Nietzsche, although Nietzsche tries, of course, to write the Bible, with also Sprockets and Othustra, and he tries to bring back self-transcendence through the ubermensch, but, but, so, so what do you think, like, there’s a, in my mind, there’s a connection between this, this dialogical participation in the inexhaustible, like, sound of intelligibility of the logos, that is always, if you’ll allow me, you know, spewing out, like, distinctions, but also gathering them back together, right, and faith, but to me, this is one way where I want to be different from Nietzsche. I don’t want to invoke what I, what I have come to, many people have come to identify faith with, which is a statement of belief, an assertion, an assertion of belief. So what are your thoughts about that connection? I mean, right, we are just reading Nishita’s last writings. I just got that book, no, I’ve got the last, no, no, I read the last writings. I just got another book by Nishita on, it’s new to, on intelligibility, essays on intelligibility. I can’t remember what the title of it is, but anyways, go ahead, I’ll introduce it. No, but, but in the, so today we, in the reading group, we read the introduction, and Nishita thought that in Kant, right, because Kant really tried to make his system, right, and, but he, for him, all things in the numinal, like God and these things, right, they were like the matter of faith. Yes. And some, for example, Nishitani in this one essay in the book that I showed you before says that kind of like, Kant really tried to crowd it out, kind of like the system where reason could work, but he also, we could see that how in, after the Enlightenment, how sparse the place for faith has become, also how lifeless, right, and then you just have this propositional creed, right. So what Nishita thinks is that Kant should have written a fourth critique on religious consciousness, and I think that’s what then Nishitani takes up with his notion of religion as the real self-realization of reality, this deep participation, right, with ourselves and reality in this kind of like paradoxical form that we’ve outlined before. Yeah, yeah, I agree. I mean, I’ve said before, but I’ll say it again, I use realization in the double sense precisely because of that quote from Nishitani. That’s where I got that idea, you know, that realization means both the subjective aspect shift and the objective new disclosure, but something beyond and deeper that makes the connection and conformity between those two possible, because if there’s no connection or conformity between them, we are stuck in, you know, radical skepticism and radical meaninglessness. And so for me, right, that participation in the real self-realization of reality, and that’s what happens like when the dialectic catches fire just to invoke parathritis, like it, and people talk about the geist, they talk about the logos, it’s this something’s being real, some intelligibility is realizing itself between and beyond us, it’s not separate from us, but it’s not reducible to us, right. And for me, that is the closest I can come to, you know, that ancient notion of faith, you know, that, and you see it across culture, you see it especially, you know, in ancient, the off, Hebrew, and that the best metaphor is something like sexual intercourse, right, that that’s what we’re talking about, what we’re talking about faith. If you’re making love with someone, you’re not doing it, they’re not doing it, you’re not just acting, you’re not just receiving, you’re participating in this thing, right, and so that’s why you see across culture and across history, people come to that as a metaphor for faith, that is fundamentally different from I assert that I believe that. Right, and what Nishitani is doing, right, in the text, this is always, I mean, when I read this book, I always have slowed down, it’s more really like what you select, you’re the winner, and then I see, right, Nishitani is always doing this dance, and then he always, he finds this, what he calls, right, the Samadhi mode or the middle mode, right, where we are, so to say, one but two, or two but one, so to say. Yes, yes, and you find this, like I say, and you find this deep reflection again with the neoplatonism, you know, and the three hypostasis, the one in the mini, the one mini, and then the one, right, and you’re trying to, and you can see them, so the play between the hypostasis is a way of trying to understand, you know, this, because the problem also, like, is we have to think of dialectic, and this comes out in Erogena very clearly, it’s not just horizontally between you and the world or between you and other people, it’s also like hypostatically between the different levels of realness, and so, like, like what I’m trying to say is that the dimensionality of the paradox is multidimensional, it’s not just a single dimensional paradox, and so when you talk about coupling to that dynamically, it’s like, I’m thinking of almost Jasper’s notion of the encompassing, it completely encompasses the whole, sorry, I’m getting too excited, but your whole framework of, you know, of how you’re trying to, from the most practical to the most esoteric, make sense of yourself and the world in a connected way, and I see faith, therefore, deeply, deeply interwoven with that process, rather than, as thought seemed to see it, as something outside of the process by which we’re making sense. Right, it’s even, right, it’s even how we relate to things, right, in the Kantian paradigm, did that mean, if you tiny cause that we have to work, or turn Kant’s standpoint once again, so it’s not that things have to convert to us, but we have to confirm to things. Yes, yes. He uses the master servant, kind of like, we become masters of ourselves, in a sense, but we also become servants to all other things, so it’s a kind of like a double, it’s again this double move that he sees in this master servant trope, and it’s even, I watched you and Bernardo Castro discuss, I watched, even watched the live stream, and then me and another person, we were like typing to Kurt, right, he should ask about Kant, because, right, you really, I think Bernardo was, he’s Schopenhauer and then Jung, they are really, they are affirming Kant, but I think the biggest difference to you would have been that you would kind of like also call for kind of like a critical examination of Kant’s standpoint, because that, and I discussed this with Johannes the other day, right? That’s a very good point, Daniel, that’s a very good point. I discussed this with Johannes, but Kant tried to build kind of like a world without contradictions, because, right, what we said before, right, we are in the midst of paradox, and Nishida even says this in the last writings, that the ultimate paradox is kind of like that we are alive and we have to face death, and it’s so unfathomable that we kind of like, this contradiction, he says in the introduction, it always, it vanishes into our own bottomless contradictory depths, and what Kant, right, with Kant we have a world we can control, we have a world that is, so this, right, like a plastic bottle, we have millions of, millions, tens of millions of those, but what I said with Johannes, what happened is, this has exhausted itself, and now things don’t speak to us anymore, and now we are simply in the realm of the meaning crisis, right, where things don’t, we can’t have meaning, because things have, well, do not disclose this bottomless dimension to us. Yes, and so you’ve got the, you know, the Lutheran assertion, you know, coming through Kant, right, and Kant is, oh, back to some of the earlier, Kant can only speak to the world, he can’t listen, right, and the thing about the practice of dialectic is to, while you’re speaking, you’re speaking as you’re listening, and you’re listening as you’re speaking, right, they completely interpenetrate each other, even though that sounds paradoxical, but you think about that when you’re making love, and then the metaphor becomes much more clear. Yeah, I think what you just said, I mean, that, wow, wow, that Kant is trying to make a world free from contradiction, which means he necessarily is sealing himself off from the inexhaustible, right, he has to be, because, and you can even do Godelian reasons, you can’t have a system that is both complete and consistent, so if you make it consistent, it is necessarily incomplete. And one person, right, I think, I’m not sure, I think Heidegger in his Kant book writes that that Kant realized this no ground, this inexhaustible no ground, but he stopped, and someone said, and someone else, for example, Schelling, I learned this recently, Schelling noticed this, this ungrund in German, right, this no ground, this, not the abyss of nihilism, but the inexhaustibility of Schungater, that’s, by the way, why when Nishitani loved Schelling so much, that he even translated his work very early age, but Schelling, realizing this thing, then went completely silent for 45 years after writing his freedom treatise, because he had to abandon his system, that this thought of creating a system, and this is even the problem with Hegel, right, because Hegel, right, with his kind of like absolute idealism, he kind of tried to construct this system, and I mean, Kierkegaard argued that, that some argued that after Hegel’s death, right, this system collapsed. I think Kierkegaard’s critique, that Hegel made a system and then sat down behind it, points out that Hegel’s notion of dialectic captures the logic of dialectic, but leaves out the transformative requirement, leaves out the neo-Platonic, Christian-Platonic transformative requirement, and that’s what you then see Kierkegaard focusing on again and again and again and again. How do people actually go through, or fail to go through, the real transformations that are necessary to disclose the depths of their psyche and the depths of reality, and that’s, Kierkegaard hits on that again and again and again and again. And now I wonder that, right, this, so Schelling noticed this, right, and then, right, Heidegger picks this up then, so in his contributions he often talks about the off-ground, and he really comes to terms with this, right, the nothingness, so to say, really trying to get through to a place where he then, right, is very similar to the Buddhist notion of shunyata. And I think that’s also why there was this mutual sympathy between Heidegger and the Japanese, because they noticed, even in his What is Metaphysics lecture, that the Japanese students who listened to it said, we immediately understood what you meant. But like the European people, they were all like, what does he want? Like, we don’t know. And, right, I think even you with cognitive science now, when you talk, for example, about the combinatorially explosive nature of reality, but that we can’t ultimately have a perfect system, and that’s kind of like, I think, that’s what they were wrestling with all the time. And perhaps one thing, because they had really so much struggle to overcome it. I mean, with Heidegger, and that’s one criticism that I have with Heidegger, is that he’s very silent on religion. Yeah, I would say it’s similar to that, and this is where Heidegger needs Hideo. The difference between Heidegger and Shunyata is that Heidegger, for all what he talks about, right, he doesn’t give practices. Yeah. Right. Now, Nishitani has, and Nishida too, right, they have Zen practices behind everything they’re saying, they’re constantly alluding to them. Of course, Stoicism has its practices, and Neoplatonism has all of these practices. And, but where, to your point, where that becomes clear is that this living in faith, entrusting yourself to the inexhaustible fount of intelligibility, right, where it comes into people actually engaging in the transforming and the transformation is in religion. Because religion is, you know, it’s the homing of a dynamical system of practices for transformation, for furthering development, and not just for practical reasons, but for profound reasons of coming to the deepest meaning of life, the deepest disclosure of reality in oneself, all of what’s bound up in sort of the salvation notions and the transcendence notions of religion. And the fact that Heidegger is silent on that, and of course other people like Levinas sort of hit him for that, right, where is the dialogical Heidegger, where is that? I mean, you can see Levinas sort of pointing, and on the other hand, you have Huber doing something similar too, like where’s the dialogical, right, and both of them are deeply influenced by religion and about the practice of transformation. Yeah, and I think that is a significant difference, and for me, I would even say an advantage of Nishantani over Heidegger. Heidegger’s had a profound influence on me. I’ve read Heidegger deeply, I’ve discussed him deeply with people, and of course he’s a profound influence on 40 other science, but of the top five books I want to take with me to the moon or whatever it is, one of them is Nishantani’s Religion and Nothingness. I can’t think of a book by Heidegger that I want to take, but precisely because in the end, and I say this and it’s a bit of a slogan, but I put a lot behind it, I ultimately don’t want to know what you believe, I want to know what you practice, I want to know what you practice. Yeah, right. One friend of mine sent me a talk by, her name is Amy van Dozen, she’s from, she’s Dutch, she’s a professor for psychotherapy in London, and she also said kind of like about Heidegger, she had to stop reading him, she kind of like read him deeply for 10 years, but there’s this anxiety or this inner conflict in Heidegger that she noticed, and that kind of like made her then also move to other people, kind of like that’s always in Heidegger, there’s an anxiety. There’s even Johanna’s professor from Italy, Ivo de Ginao said once in an interview with Johanna’s and him that Heidegger managed to, he never says anything, he shuts up in 100 volumes, he never says what he really thinks, which is just very, right, it’s just a very harsh criticism, but it has some truth, Heidegger is very silent and always cautious of what he says and very anxious in general. And that anxiety is bound up with like, what’s it, Ravkowski’s book on Heidegger’s Platonism. Heidegger has these two different relationships with Plato, he has an early relationship where he really seems to appreciate Plato and the Anagagai, and then he has the turn where Plato becomes kind of like the villain that separated us off from the priest’s socratic. And Ravkowski argues that if he had read Plato rightly, the kind of reading that we’re doing of Plato now, the third way proposed by Gonzales and many other people, Eiland and Ravé, a host of people, that he would have seen it was much more constant of where he was going, but he would have had a framework, if you’d allow me, this is a bit fast on Ravkowski’s complex argument, he would have had a framework by which he could appreciate and articulate, appreciate in both senses of the word and articulate the religious dimensions of what we’re talking about here. And that might have prevented him from being attracted to Nazism, because I think I see one of the reasons for Heidegger, that’s a personal proposal, one of the reasons why there’s the attraction to Nazism is precisely because, like, he ultimately needed an ecology of practices, he needed a religious framework, he chose the wrong one, didn’t come up to my mind, but what I’m saying is, it’s always a mystery, right, there’s endless scholastic ink slipped, built over why did Heidegger get involved with the Nazis, so again, I don’t think this is an exhaustive explanation, but I think what I’m proposing to you is the difference between him and Mishitani is Heidegger can’t properly explicate, articulate, he doesn’t have a space, right, for the religiosity, the faith aspects, the practice aspects, that are actually gauging the transformation, and so I think there, and I think Hadegger is right, there’s a hunger there, there’s a hunger, and that makes Nazism attractive to him in a fundamental way. He obviously saw it, you can see this, right, he obviously saw it as an engine of profound transformation, and I think that’s what was attractive to him, and I think that Mishitani and the Neoplatonic traditions, like Eckhart, the similarities between them, like D.T. Suzuki noted the similarities between, you know, Zen and the Neoplatonic tradition and Eckhart and others, right, I think they give us a way of articulating this so that we are not hungry for the transformation. The problem I get with Heidegger, the problem I have when I read Heidegger initially, the first time I studied him five years as an undergraduate, is I was left hungry after reading Heidegger. I was like, yes, yes, but how do I do this? How do I do this? And I turned to religion, I turned, but I turned to Daoism and Buddhism, and thankfully that took me, right, because we’re basically talking about how do I cultivate wisdom, and this is the sub, this is the other silent topic in Heidegger, right, he’s obviously trying to get us to wake up to how we’re losing wisdom in the pursuit of manipulative knowledge, but again, let’s talk about it, right, let’s talk about it. And right, it’s great actually how the, kind of like the Buddhists kind of like reached out their hands to Heidegger, and kind of like, right, they kind of like, they needed each other, because right, this point again, like praxis and theory are kind of like married together, that’s so important for the Kyoto school, it’s so important, you can’t separate them, like we’ve done for so long, right, we have separated even philosophy and religion, right, so there’s a paper by Brett Davis, very famous Kyoto school scholar, one of the most important in the West, he has a paper commuting between Zen and philosophy, and he kind of like describes how he was always kind of like, after his work at the university, when he lived in Japan, then he was kind of like bicycling to the Zen temple, where also Nishitani studied, and kind of like he was kind of like outlining in this essay, the problem that you also outlined, right, that when we in the middle ages, after the middle ages, we separated right the monastery from the university, and he’s kind of like going, he’s also mentioning Hado, right, kind of like, because Hado is is a very profound example from the West, to kind of like try to bring this together again, we don’t have an answer for that, right, because today, I mean, I don’t want to like go off like the university system, but today, we obviously, this is so lacking, and this is creating this huge hunger in young people, because they can only, right, Yude Chinau, the Johannes professor, is really, he’s really, really Nietzschean on this, is like sense making has only become kind of like, we can only make sense in a moral way anymore in modernity, and kind of like, we have really lost these transformative practices that you want to bring back to our culture, and now the universities, right, they are degenerating year for year, because these practices are lacking, and we kind of like, we have to go search somewhere else to find them, and this is so, this is right, this is creating this hole in our culture. One of the things I see Johannes, and I expect also you, one of the things I clearly see Johannes doing is to try and bring those two together, because I see in his work, I see, you know, the intellectual acumen and the explication and the explanation, right, but I also see, but this is a spiritual practice in Hado’s, this is a spiritual exercise in Hado’s sense of what’s ancient philosophy, the Platonic-Socratic sense, right, and I see that, I see him doing that, and I can sense that this is also what you’re trying to do in your Nishatani course, like, how do we, like, we need to talk about transformation, but that ultimately has to be in service of transformation, but we need to talk about it deeply if we want deep transformation, absolutely, absolutely, and I think that’s important, and I generate that, but we have to talk about it deeply in a way that affords and, like, and actually makes us aspire to the deep transformation. Yeah, and, right, so it must be, right, it must be honed, perhaps, perhaps you can go back to serious play, so it must be honed in a kind of play space where it’s not that I’m in the center, that’s, I think, important, otherwise it becomes, right, I’m now doing the transformation, and so I did tea ceremony for a while, and after I encountered your work, I’ve called it now, kind of like, it’s almost like a dance between moreness and suchness. Yes, yes, yes. In a tea ceremony, what you have, right, what’s in the center is, of course, the tea, it’s not, it’s not about, it’s not about me, that the kind of, like, the person who’s doing the tea, it’s also not about, like, one individual guest, it’s about the whole thing, and there’s this, there’s really this, this first, this going inside, this kind of, like, savoring of the tea, savoring of each moment, which is also expressed, right, perhaps you noticed this, Ichigo Ichi, it is one moment, one meeting, so that really, also trying to savor the suchness of each moment in time, and the, right, the unique non-repeatability of each moment in time, but, right, what then also happens is kind of like this moreness, so you really become attuned to the depths of reality, and perhaps it’s not so, it’s perhaps not so salient, let’s say, for, if you just look at the things, so like, the tea or the bowls, it’s even, right, you have to pick up the bowl and look at the bowl, like, in a very, very careful way, and it’s this savoring, right, of all the details, and, but I did, I did a tea ceremony with a teacher of mine, and for a while, and in there, there were suddenly, like, people started crying, and it’s very, it’s just, like, like, they feel like, now I’ve been recognized, it’s similar perhaps to circling, Yes, yes, yes. Because, right, it’s, it’s then, it’s becoming so salient when we look at other people, because, right, we relate to each other so strongly, and they’re really, there were people there, and they really, they felt accepted, or seen, or, right, that they really had a lived connection to other people for the first time for a long period, and that’s so, so wonderful, and I think, right, what, with the serious play again, we don’t have to be kind of, like, be as, as, what, as quick as Nietzsche, perhaps, who kind of, like, stormed into that place, without any friends, without any, any guide, without any, right, that’s why he needed Socrates, right, but we need really a structure of education where we are gently, right, tutored into that domain, so we can really, you’re also right, you don’t start, start with meditation, like, I don’t know, with, with, with, like, a one week retreat, but you start with 10 minutes, and then you slowly, and slowly have to be tutored into that dimension, because otherwise, right, it overwhelms you, and that’s perhaps one aspect of, of, of play that’s important, that we, we really, we really have to be very attentive to, and you, you, you, you, you emphasized this also as well, we, not, also then, not, not, not being too clutchy, let’s say, that we kind of, like, we kind of, like, want to possess the other, or we want to possess the tea, but we also, we also don’t want to be kind of, like, purely, like, like, receptive, and we’re just going to sit and look, and we have to be in this middle mode, where, where, kind of, like, particip, it’s really, it’s really participatory, right, it’s, it’s not what you, what you said in the beginning, and I mean, I love this, that we are not kind of, like, like, romantics, and we are not, like, pure empiricists, but we are, we’re in this middle mode, and, right, that’s, that’s also where, I think, where flow happens, right, where we are, where it’s not too difficult, but it’s not too easy as well, so. So, the metaphor I have for this, that was all beautiful, Derenda, just let me say that, that was just really beautiful, that was like music, the metaphor I have for trying to draw this into sort of something to hold in mind, is I, is, you know, not clutching, I talk about, you know, the conformity of a caress, when you’re caressing something, when the beloved, right, right, and so, you’re not trying to grasp a hole, but you’re not detached, it’s constantly moving and shifting, you’re constantly opening up, it’s exploratory, but also there’s trust, because there’s contact and conformity, so this, this conformity of the caress, or the caressing conformity, is more and more, and, and of course, it’s bound up with the idea of love as reciprocal opening, right, I’m trying to, that, that notion that we’re trying to come into this kind of caressing conformity, and the way you describe the tea ceremony, just saying of that, like you’re, you’re almost like you’re caressing the bowl, you’re caressing the tea, you’re caressing the other people, and you’re letting yourself be caressed by, by all of these things too, and, and it’s hard to think of authentically caressing another human being without each serious play. So, right, and that, that for some reason then opens up, right, we get then tuned, kind of like, both to suchness and moreness, and kind of like, perhaps, perhaps the shift happens when it doesn’t overwhelm us anymore, but we really become so, that there is something, right, there is something in Agape that, that, that seems to open up this, this field, I mean, Nishitani, at the very end of the book, right, he talks about how Agape opens up this field, where we have this encounter, right, with beings, and he quotes Francis of Assisi, kind of like, kind of like in his, in his, what the canticle to the sun, right, he, he, he almost greets every other being as a fellow brother, so to say, or fellow sister, and that’s kind of like, so he sees as if, as if Keir or Agape opens up this kind of like place, this, this playground almost, where we then can have that serious play, where we are in that, that we can have this transformative relation, right? Yes, yes, children only engage in serious play if adults are putting them in, within a field of Agape. Of course. Right? And think, and think about what you said earlier about master-servant, think about it, in Agape, I’m, I’m, I’m, I’m, I’m the creating one, as it, like, let’s take the parent-child model of Agape, I’m trying to turn, I’m trying to create a person out of a non-person, that seems like mastery, but actually, within that mastery, I’m completely in the service of the child, because it’s not how, how the child is relevant to me, I have to transform myself, it’s how I am, always, how am I relevant to the child, how am I relevant to the child. And so, I think Agape is, I think, I think that you see in Agape, you can bring those two ideas for Nishitani together, that what’s going on in Agape is, you’re creating the kind of relationship that is the, I would, I’m going to be fairly stronger, I think it’s the necessary affordance of serious play. Right? And Nishitani argues in the very end of the book, right, that that’s also the field where we can overcome all the problems that are besetting us, because it’s, it’s all, because then it’s, right, even when we, when we think of the dialogos, then, let’s say dialogos happen in the same arena, then, then, right, there’s only this sense-making between ourselves. And if we write, I mean, you emphasize this very, very well, right, that in this kind of, like, when we just try to out-argue each other monologically, instead of having, having this agapic care, even, even, right, what Jesus, right, even love your enemy, and it’s this kind of, like, it’s, it’s, it’s that, that kind of, like, relation to the other that we kind of, like, need to cultivate, in a sense. And that, that what’s affording, like, us is that, that field of religion, like, or this field of shunyata, as Nishitani called it. Now, I think, I think that’s, that’s, that’s this place of serious play as well. And I would even make it, maybe I would even make it a bit stronger. So, so Johannes is very concerned about the ancient concept of, of scolae, this kind of, like, right, where we have the word school from, scola in Latin. So, scolae is, is, is this, there’s a, there’s a quote by, by the German Catholic philosopher Josef Pieper, he says. Yeah, I know, I know, Pieper, yeah. What, what scola is to, to space? No, no, what, what scola is to time is the temple to space. So, so we have, that is, because we also, we don’t have, we don’t have temples anymore, really, in our culture. They’re just like historical attractions or touristic attractions. It’s also very sad. But scola is where we learn sufficiency, where we can kind of like, where we can, so that’s, that’s Johannes argument. He thinks scolae, so, so is, is, we learn a measure of sufficiency. We learn kind of like, and only from then we know what’s, what’s, what’s necessary in a sense, because, right, necessity and freedom is also this, it’s, it’s this old topic in, in philosophy, right? This, we always have this conflict between freedom and necessity. So, when, when I heard Johannes talk about scolae, I thought that that’s the field of Shunyata Nishitani is talking about. We learn, we learn a measure of sufficiency, because, right, what that also is, is kind of like, it’s, we know then kind of like, we don’t fall into self-deception, we don’t fall into craving, because we know, we know when, when we have the right sufficiency and that there’s a kind of like finesse involved. So, we know that, we know we have to, right, you have to, you have to know when, when something is enough, you have to kind of like, right, it’s, it’s very difficult, right, even when we’re eating or when we’re drinking. It’s, it’s, that has to do a lot with the will-to-will. It’s kind of like, because our culture is so pervaded by the will-to-will that we don’t, we don’t know when to stop. We don’t know, we don’t know, we don’t, because we have no measure of sufficiency. Oh, I hadn’t thought about that. That’s really good. Johannes, by the way, should talk to my friend Zachary Stein, who wrote Education in a Time Between Two Worlds. Zach and Reagan Ricketts and I are doing a new series. We’ve recorded three episodes and we’re talking about the relationship. It’s entitled Towards a Meta-Psychology That is True to Transformation. And how to, and Zach is a developmental psychologist who, who’s seriously interested in really re-understanding what education is and what it could mean. It sounds like he would, he and your father would have an excellent conversation about this. So I just wanted to recommend that right now. But I like this idea, this idea of sufficiency. I mean, because you can see it, you can see the Stoics doing this thing. They’re taking, so cynicism in the philosophical sense is very much an education in sufficiency. Like you can be radical. All I need, and which is always attainable to me, are the natural laws of Fuses and Nomos, right? That’s all I need, right? But the Stoics come in and they say, yes, but the point of that sufficiency is that it liberates you for your proper obligations to the world. So my favorite quote for this is Marcus Aurelius, it is possible to be happy even in a palace, right? Which really makes that like really, really very clear. So I like this idea of a sufficiency that liberates you. So, and I’m using Frankfurt’s idea of love. He says that love is a voluntary necessity. So, right? That, right? A sufficiency that liberates you to love, to get it back to the agape. And a love that is actually a kind of obligation to another. Yes, yes. Is that what you’re pointing towards? I think that’s what Nishitani tries to outline in the last chapter of the book. That’s kind of like where he tries to resolve this problem of freedom and necessity by kind of like placing it in the field of shunyata, also through, with the help of agape, right? And we bring ourselves into the service of the other. He really emphasizes this so much, even in the kind of like in the framework of ethics, because he really thinks that also the Kantian framework still is too anthropocentric. Oh, very much, very much. I was going to say back to what we said, we self-transcend from others. We take this carefully, please. We are tutored by agape into being in service and centered in something other than ourselves, which should ultimately be extended, because this is the true Christian idea, not just to others, but to what’s to ultimate reality, right? That, that, that. And it’s interesting because one of the things, you know, I’m reading a lot now on Christian Platonism, and I’m trying to figure out why did these two come together? Why did they come together so powerfully? And there’s a sense in which they also deeply need each other. You can see neo-Platonism, although it’s engaging in this continuance of Plato’s profound transformation of eros, they still don’t get to agape, but Christianity provides them with this notion of agape and that it is its own way of knowing and being. And that’s why I see, that’s why I see neo-Platonism turning towards Christianity. I see Christianity turning towards neo-Platonism in order to articulate the transformational power found within the logos. And that’s why the two are coming together. And so it’s interesting that what the way you put that there, the way Nishantani is, right, he’s working out the philosophical system, but he’s also, he’s trying to turn it towards agape at the end. Again, that this kind of, because in agape, in love, it’s a knowing, but it’s a knowing only through transformation, right? And it’s a coupling to someone and something beyond yourself, but also deeply within yourself. I wish I understood love better. I really do. I mean, I really do. And I’m not doing false modesty here or any of that academic bullshit. I mean what I just said. I really, really wish, because there’s something about, right, the combination of wisdom that requires a profounder understanding of love than I currently have. And I can sense that, you know, Socrates, everything begins, you know, wisdom begins in wonder. I’ve got the wonder of it. But it’s, and part of it is the practice. I mean, I can only, and I don’t mean this in any gross or coarse way. I wish I was a better practitioner, participator in love than I am. I wish I was a better lover than I am. And I mean that sincerely and deeply. I really wish, better way, because I aspire, I genuinely deeply aspire to being a better lover than I am. Me too. I think we can all always own, this is right, that’s a life project, can always, like we always have to aspire to that. Just the one thing I wanted to say is, right, that it seems to me that just came to my mind now, perhaps, perhaps the Logos is right, is the marriage of Logos and Agape. I think so. You can’t have the Logos without Agape and you can’t have the Logos without Logos. So, because right, the Logos is so, I saw this in the course we had, without the care, without the, right, this caress, what you describe, this doesn’t work. It’s not because it’s not just intellectual exchange. It’s not just, we are debating and arguing. It’s so much more. It’s always so, there’s almost this, right, this tendership, this tenderness in… Good word though, tendership. I like it. That’s a good word. I mixed fellowship and tenderness in my head. But that’s exactly right. You get, like you get, one way, you know, Chris and I are thinking about it is, dialectic, it depends on fellowship, it depends on phylia. But phylia becomes Agape when the dialectic gives birth to the dialogos. That’s what I think is happening. That’s what I think is happening. And right, just to make this right, even with going to Nishitani to make this even stronger, for him, right, for them, just dialectic is too little. There needs, right, there is this need of transcendence. Like, there’s this, we have to kind of like recognize the sieve at this middle point, where we transcend the dialectic, let’s say with, to stay in Neoplatonist terms, into dialogos. Yes, yes. It’s just dialectic is, and they really say this, their logic is not kind of like a dialectic in a kind of like just Hegelian sense. It’s a… There is this transformation is necessary where we, I don’t want to say, but there is this move or turn from dialectic to dialogos. And that’s so important. And I think that’s perhaps why Nishitani is so keen on talking about Agape. Perhaps Agape and faith are those virtues that afford us that transcendence, right? I think so. I think so. And here’s where the dialectic in the Hegelian sense between Tanabe and Nishitani can be helpful, because Tanabe is very much about, I mean, I think there’s an overemphasis, but he’s very much about, ultimately, it’s not a dialectic between positions or theories. It’s a dialectic between self-power and other power. I don’t know how you pronounce it, Jareki or Tarikki, but whatever. I’m probably mispronouncing it, but that it’s more fundamental. And that takes us back again to the machinery of insight, right? There’s this fundamental relationship between self-power and other power, interpenetrating, that affords the insight that you participate in. And I think that’s the way in which the neoplatonic dialectic in the dialogos is different than the Hegelian dialectic. And I think you’re right to say Nishitani is much more like in the neoplatonic tradition than he is in the Hegelian tradition. I think I agree with that. That’s how I read the book. He has so many criticisms. I mean, he follows related criticisms that Kierkegaard pointed to. And right, we could even… So, I mean, Nishitani says this too, and he has this from Nishida, and I think Tanabe is also saying this, but they again come back to this middle point, which they also think is the platonic, the kora. The kora is the receptacle between non-being, right? That’s also the locus where Nishitani thought there’s also this metanoic conversion from, let’s say, again, nihilism to shunyata, also from being, in Tanabe’s sense, being a sinner to having received redemption. Because Tanabe felt Tanabe was so concerned about the military actions from Japan in the world wars. And philosophy is metanoic. One of the things I like about Tanabe is precisely how much he emphasizes the need, the profound need for transformation. And we’re back to Galen. If you do it, Galen Strauss said, if you do it, it’s not transformation, right? But if it’s seriously also just imposed on you by fiat, then it’s also not transformation. And I like the way, and I don’t know if this is in the original Japanese, but it comes across in the English translation, well, sorry, the English transliteration, because the metanoetics, like he’s picking up on the metanoia again, but also beyond the noia, beyond the noesis, like that’s a neoplatonic illusion. And of course, he’s influenced Tanabe by certain understandings of Christian redemption, neoplatonic Christian redemption. Yeah, I find the two, I mean, I’m a paleo scientist, so there’s a whole raft of philosophical schools that are deeply important to me for my vocation. But the two schools that call to me in the middle of the night are neoplatonism and the Kyoto school. Those are the two schools that most, right, that most psycho-ontologically nourish me, if I can put it that way. Definitely. Daniel, I need to get going soon. But I would actually, you know, I would love to get a copy of this and put it on my channel as well. This was wonderful and I want to do it again with you. And if there’s some way we could do something, my schedule is really chaotic right now, but if there’s some way we could do something like this that could help with your course on Nishitani, I’m offering my services. I would like to help. I mean, I’m going to promote the course, but if I could somehow, you know, if you, of course, use this video in whichever way you want to promote the course or within the course or anything, I want to help you. And I would like for us to talk again. I would love to talk again. Perhaps if you want to put it on this channel, I will just say one sentence. You can, perhaps I will send you a link where anyone who’s interested in the course, it will start on the 21st of August. I will send a link with the information where you can enroll. So this is from the Halekian Academy of Johannes Niederhäuser. He also has a PhD in philosophy. He’s a Heidegger expert and he’s building his own academy. And I’m teaching a course on Nishitani for his academy. We will read Religion and Nothingness in the course over the span of eight weeks. So six weeks, one chapter at a time. So the book has six chapters. Then we have in the seventh week, we do a meditation seminar. And then in the eighth week, you can present a talk in the pro seminar on any of the topics that we have covered in the course. And that’s the idea. And there will also be forum access. So Johannes has a forum where we then can also have long textual exchanges, written exchanges, anything where we can exchange things, issues that we don’t understand or where we want to get clear about these things. And you can also then, I have a reading group. We read in the, in the, in the, with, so I read Nishida and we also read Heidegger, but we have put that on a summer break right now. So yeah, so if you’re interested, I can, I will put a link, I will send you a link, John, and then…