https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=wSZZxlCZT00
So it’s good to see the two of you again and thanks again, Guy, for inviting me to that drop-in video drop-in session on Sunday. That was quite wonderful. I enjoyed it a lot. Yeah, drop-in. Well, one, I just appreciated you making the time and drop-in felt you seemed particularly dropped in. I don’t know exactly how to put it, else to put it, but just a sense of like you just were bonk. I appreciated it. There’s a lot of good questions from that group. A lot of good questions. Yeah, it’s a good group. Yeah, it’s a good group. Well, I appreciate them watching the series. So I thought maybe we could follow up on the discussion that Johannes and I had on Heidegger and the questions around science, technology, and spirituality. I think that would be a good place to pick up. But, Guy, we could also weave it together with perhaps the Dio Logos project, broadly construed, because I think those two should be brought into a deeper conversation with each other. And so I think that would be a good place to pick up and sort of weave together. What do you guys think about that as a proposal for going forward? That sounds great. I could share too just some of my thoughts about like kind of tensions or questions that I’ve been walking around with is a couple of things. Like one is I just I would like to get Heidegger’s notion about the technological age and the history of being and the history of metaphysics in conversation with the in nihilism and in conversation with the meeting crisis. Yes, very much. I’m just seeing because in my mind, on one level, I think about it, I’m like, I don’t know if I actually have a difference, if there’s a difference there, but I imagine there’s some key differences. But I just I would love to get them talking to each other. I would imagine they would deeply inform one another in ways that would be really funny. That’s really good. I think, Johannes, we didn’t finish. I don’t think we actually caught around to the topic of Heidegger’s thesis that the history of metaphysics is the history of nihilism. I think we were just sort of broaching on it. Am I remembering that correctly? I think that’s about where we were. And we’re just about to get onto that. Of course, the connection to the meeting crisis, I think, is pertinent and relevant. I start off the whole section on the profits of the meeting crisis with Heidegger because I think he’s a pivotal figure. So yeah, I would like to talk about that. And that goes towards sort of the broader topic that I’m trying to explore in this new series I have, Voices with Reveke, because I’m trying to get at this relationship between science, spirituality, and the meeting crisis. So that’s one, is getting those two talking to each other. The other one is just kind of attention I notice I’m having in that’s just come about. And it’s I was really one of the things, Johannes, I really enjoyed your conversation with you, your last conversation with your teacher about nihilism. With Ivo DiCinato. Yeah. Excuse me, what was the name? Ivo DiCinato. Yeah. I just really enjoy him a lot. Like just his rigor of thought, but his fluency at the same time. Just a real unique being. One of the things he talked about was how do we respond to the withdrawal of being? And what is, how do you respond to that? And I think one of the things I notice I have a wondering or a tension when I listen to other people, and when I think about it myself, is on one level, I see a lot of people so-called responding to it. Right? However, it seems to me that in some way, the way that they’re thinking about it demonstrates the very embodies the in their response, like furthers the issue of technology, right? Kind of like this notion of like turning the world into a problem to solve. Right. I just noticed I think I have this sense of what Heidegger is talking about with temporality and the understanding of being is that it’s actually, we are inside of it. Right? Right? There’s a quality of like that it’s not under our direct control. And like that there’s something in there about, and given that, right, what is the authentic about being a mortal, right? And being in touch with the actual phenomena. So that’s like one of the things that I’m noticing is, and just also thinking about it in terms of like the ecology of practices, right? And I, and your, John, your, my understanding of your repeated insistence that not to imply in ontotheology, right? Yes. It’s about the process of exercising the machinery, right? And like we don’t need to assert, we don’t need to assert a being, right, or God or something, but there’s a mystery and an untouchness that you can get in it through the exercise of it, right? And I think there’s like deep parallels there, but I just get irritated with people a lot when they talk about like this kind of mania of like, it’s up to us to fix the world or something like that, you know? And there’s a tension in there for me. So I mean, that might allow me to a couple issues I want to frame and then maybe we’ll let Johannes any issues he wants to frame. So in connection with your second point, I’m interested in putting into a more clear and clarifying discussion relationship what the ontological aspects, the existential and the psychological aspects of the meaning crisis are. Because in connection with that, Chris and I have been working on an article for the side view on the symptomology of the meaning crisis and trying to develop that. And as you know, you probably know, I think you’ve seen this before, we distinguish between sort of reactive responses and reflective responses. And I think for the project that we’re trying to do, I think that’s adequate. But that pretty much sits at sort of the intersection that it needs to be teased out better between the cognitive and the existential. But it doesn’t get too much into the ontological. And I’d like to get that a little bit clearer. And that might be a way of going back to the first point of clarifying the relationship between the meaning crisis and nihilism. And then the other point that came up was, which was a point that Johannes and I did talk about quite a bit, which is, you know, I’m struggling for a verb here, but it’s not quite adequate, but something like the reconceptualization, but in a very profound way of sacredness. And what does that mean for us now? And what relationship does that have to my first question? Is sacredness a category, for example, that cuts across the cognitive, the existential, and the ontological? Is that precisely what it’s supposed to do for us? And therefore trying to situate it within any one of those categories is a mistake. But if it is trans-categorical like that, then what’s our appropriate way of understanding and relating to it? So those are the two issues I’d like to sort of try and get clearer about. And just one other thing in there that’s just the paper that you and Chris wrote is so good. Chris and I are going to, we’re going to actually start off our series of videos where we go through the Platonic dialogues with paper, because I think it frames it perfectly and grounds it in, you know, in our time. And there’s a way that you formulated the problem, which I just thought was, I’ve just been thinking about it ever since, which is the loss of the second person, like postmodernity as the loss of the other, basically. In a particular kind of way, yes. Yeah, that’s right. And I had never thought about it quite like that, but there’s something about just that sense of where we’re blind, right, to what presupposes what gives a genuine dialogos, right? Yeah, yeah. I think that that goes towards both my questions. I’m no surprise because, you know, I’m posing the question and I wrote the paper with Chris. So, but the idea that the dialogos might actually, again, cut across the three categories and it might be a place in which we’re also finding a way of reenacting and therefore reimagining in Corban’s sense of the word, imagine, the imaginal, reimagining the sacred. And so I would like to talk about that in connection to the two questions I raised. Yeah, let me just briefly maybe summarize what DiGinato and I talked about. Please. I think I’ll just say something else. It was on Nietzsche and Heidegger on definitions of nihilism. And for Nietzsche, nihilism is that beings are nothing. Beings are senseless. They amount to nothing. And that, for Heidegger, means that Nietzsche here turns all of metaphysics on its head, but is still a metaphysician. Why? Because it links with beings and then leads to the beingness of beings. And then Heidegger in the second Nietzsche book writes or argues that authentic nihilism, eigentlicher nihilismus, would mean not meaninglessness in this sense that we usually, how we usually think of it, but would mean that being itself always already stays away. Being itself amounts to nothing. And that’s not a value judgment. That’s not a moral problem. But being is always already withdrawing. And what metaphysics has, perhaps you could say failed to see or failed to understand, is that being itself is that which withdraws, self-conceals, self denies itself, and has instead posited the beingness of beings, has ratified being, for example, as a, to come back to what you mentioned, John, the ontotheology, posits being as the causa sui, that means the ground that causes itself, and tries to give ultimate grounds. And here we have, as Heidegger also says, the connection to the sciences, which try to give a ground for all beings. Whereas what we perhaps in exercise can learn or should learn is that ground always with withdraws, that it’s temporal, it’s historical. Yeah, so those are just a couple of thoughts, maybe to begin with. So one quick, one connection, maybe we can pick up, we don’t have to do it immediately on that, because I’m interested in Nishitani’s take on that, because in religion and nothingness, he enters into a long sort of reflection on that. And he makes the argument that Asian, particularly Buddhist philosophy, has an advantage because it doesn’t have an established history prioritizing being over non-being and prioritizing actuality over a possibility. And that, in fact, in Taoism and Buddhism, you see the inverse, actually. And he argues that it’s that kind of ability to stand on the inversion point between the two metaphysics. He talks about the pivot point, and that’s what you’re trying to get in your thinking, right? You can pivot between these two and you can get to this place where you do this sort of fundamental aspect shift on. So you’re not changing, if this is the right word, I don’t even know if it’s the right word, I seriously don’t even know if it’s the right word, but you’re not changing the fact of nihilism, you’re doing this sort of fundamental aspect shift on it. Yeah. Going from seeing it as some kind of deep privation to seeing it as some kind of deep affordance. So I’d like to pick up on that too, because I didn’t ever get a chance to talk about the Kyoto school in this series. And it’s really interesting because I think they’re doing some, well, I particularly think Nishitani’s work is brilliant. Yeah, I do too. So Heidegger in Being in Time says, possibility stands higher than actuality. The possibility is higher than reality. That’s an inversion of the history of metaphysics. Hegel is still perfectly clear, actuality is higher than possibility and actually subsumes, consumes all of possibility. And that’s simply a dialectical version of Aristotelianism, a very logical syllogism. And then Heidegger inverts this and Heidegger, the Kyoto school, of course, originates because they go to Freiburg and listen to Heidegger. Wow, this is all of a sudden someone we can actually also understand. And then, you know, Heidegger is in touch with Japanese scholars throughout his life and there’s a text, a dialogue published that he synthesized from conversations he had over his lifetime with scholars from Japan where he says, we do live in different houses because we live in different languages, but there is still a neighborhood. It wouldn’t make sense to speak of a house without a house is only a house if it’s a neighborhood with its surroundings, its landscape, another house, another village somewhere else. And there must be, and I think this is why Heidegger also gives up even on the word of philosophy, right? He says philosophy is over. It’s the end. It’s come to an end. Now thinking must break free. And I think this is this kind of because European philosophy never had to deal, what we call metaphysics didn’t have to deal with Japanese thought. It didn’t have to deal with Indian thought much. It was circling around itself and blah, blah, absolute spirit, let me be your prophet. But now it has to deal with it and Heidegger breaks free from this. And that’s, I think, where we have to go is to have this dialogue between these different houses of being, if you like, these different planes of existence, because exactly as you say, they don’t consider what we call nihilism from a moral perspective. We say, oh, no, this is dangerous. Don’t go there. Don’t go towards nothing. But for someone like Heidegger and for Kyoto school, you begin with nothing. You have to accept this withdrawal, this denial, concealment, however you refer to it. And only then, all of us, weirdly enough, beings light up again in their wealth because they’re no longer attacked as standing reserve, for example. That’s a way of thinking of beings as in terms of a beingness of beings, as something waiting to be explored. It’s connected to thinking of beings only insofar as they act. I’m picking up on this on the key of actuality is how things act, right? It’s different, right? From how they are in the sense of both the phenomena, they shine into it. But as you said, they’re also withdrawing at the same time. Yeah. And this is what I think even Aristotle shies away from this because dynamis, which is the word, so dynamis is potentiality in Greek. We get the word dynamics for that in English. Dynamis carries with itself nothingness because it’s not yet actualized in what is not yet actualized is, of course, there’s the nothing or some version of it lingering there. But that’s something the West or Western thoughts or Western philosophy, metaphysics, etc. has been scared of, has been shied away from. As both of you know, I’m a deep fan of neoplatonism, but this is one area in which I have a deep criticism of neoplatonism. And Nishatani makes it, of course, in the nothingness because you see, for example, in Platinus, that potentiality becomes equated with evil explicitly. Now that had an important cultural, even ontological function because it gave a locus for evil and therefore rendered it in some sense metaphysically intelligible. Saying that it’s a place of non-intelligibility only makes sense if you can situate it within a field of intelligibility. And so I get why that was an attractive idea. I see why that’s a very attractive idea, why people would adhere to it. But I think what I’m saying is, I think it’s converted with your point, is it permanently besmirched potentiality with the taint of the chaotic and the evil and the demonic. And that’s why it’s very hard. When I’m even trying to teach dynamical systems, which is directly related to dynamism, to And I try to say, look, you have to shift and I’ll put a piece of chalk on a table and I’ll push it and I’ll say, well, why did it move? Say, well, because you pushed it. And I said, well, but why else did it move? And they’ll look at me and they’ll look at me. Well, you wanted to move. And I said, no, no, no, no, no, no, not that. Why did it move? And there’ll be a silence for a while and then silence. And then somebody will say, well, because there was like open space in front of it. And it’s like, ah, so but why are you so fixated on the event? Why can’t you see the constraints that make things possible as opposed to the events that are making things act? Right. All right. So we like, we like even just trying to teach them something, you know, this is not pure philosophy. This is just trying to get them to understand dynamical systems. I have dispersed. I have to do this metaphysical move at the beginning of the class of getting them to break away from regarding actuality as a synonym for reality. And just getting them to break that in their mind. And then it takes them some time to do it. But once they do it, I can I can I can see this sort of, oh, oh, and then you see all these and then they realize all the possibilities for addressing a lot of, you know, sort of really tricky, thorny problems are now have a space in which you can address them that you couldn’t address them before. But I’m only pointing out to this because it’s just how how pervasive this way of thinking is. And that’s why, like when I read religion, religion and nothingness for the first time, it just like it really blew my mind because I got Heidegger’s idea about that Nici just inverts. But I didn’t get I needed something like Nishatani to say it. But what’s different from the like just the inversion? What’s what’s the trans framing, to use one of my terms of this look like? And Nishatani gave me a sort of a really my first deep understanding of what that might look like. Yeah, yeah, totally. And that that sense of, you know, what that that exercise that you just said so much demonstrates, I think is, is the is the thing that Heidegger is getting at, which is about this whole techno in framing movement where it’s it’s almost like it’s like it this time it figurizes everything. Right. So like the moment the moment the ground right or background, it it just keeps figuring out like it’s only valid if it’s positionable, right, locatable. And it’s and that’s the thing that’s just really I think I keep finding myself impressed with that, that that sense of know that there’s an intelligibility, right. There is an understanding that that I’m inside of, right, that organizes everything, which that I don’t it’s not even personal. It’s something I’m that’s constituting and how things make sense. Right. And so that motion where that just just that there’s that issue where it’s like, well, why do you always just figure the events and you just have to be after it, sit, sit with them to be able to see that there’s a there’s a ground that allows for this, that withdrawals that you can’t figure. Right. That is very much. Well, can we can we pick up on that? Because that goes towards the was it my first question? Like that understanding you’re talking about, this is what this is what I want to sort of slow down on and try and zoom in on, because that’s what I’m trying to get at about. You know, something that’s trans categorical that somehow encompasses it’s not it’s not orthogonal to, but it’s not reducible to any one of these categories, not reducible to the cognitive or the existential or or the ontological. And I suggested to you that maybe sacredness is like that. And I think you’re it sounds to me. Let me speak very clearly, carefully. It sounds to me like you’re trying to point to a kind of understanding, a kind of comportment to that kind of trans categorical sacredness. And I think that we could touch on unpack that together. I think that would be very helpful because I think that goes towards this issue about what the meaning crisis is and how it I agree that we shouldn’t identify the meaning crisis with nihilism. I think nihilism is a perennial aspect. There’s a certain sense in which it is now maybe to use your term, it’s more foregrounded, more figured for people. And I would but I still don’t even want to equate that exactly with the meaning crisis. I would say something like nihilism is an aspect of the meaning crisis, because when I’m when I’m pointing to the meaning crisis, I’m trying to point to not just a kind of what’s the word like an event or rights. I’m trying to point to also I’m trying to point to all three of these categories. I’m trying to point to the psychological aspects. I’m trying to point to also the suffering, the loss of agency, the distress. I’m not just pointing to a particular realization, if that’s the right word, about our relationship to being trying to point out that this this erodes. Into certain fundamental aspects of how we try to do how we how we try to fundamentally make sense and adopt agency in the world. So I think it’s for me, it’s a it’s a larger category than just what is encompassed by nihilism in both the popular sense and also I think the more profound sense that we’re talking about when we’re talking about sort of the Kyoto school. So the meaning crisis then is something distinctly modern, something distinctly of this epoch. I think so, although I would want to say that there was something deeply analogous to it in the Hellenistic period that you had something like that in which there was, you know, pervasive sense of this connection of a loss of touch with realness. And there was and this is where the whole metaphor of the philosopher as the physician of the psyche comes into prominence. Right. And it’s it’s actually it’s actually the progenitor of most of our cognitive therapies today comes out of that particular meeting crisis. And what what was interesting was the culture was able to sort of reconfigure philosophy and what it meant. And then that had impacts on religion that sort of seemed to have alleviated a lot of the suffering and the distress. Whereas we seem to be in a place that’s worse off, if I can put it that way, because of our disconnection from our wisdom traditions. We don’t seem to have access to the resources we need in order to bring about the transformation that are analogous to what happened in the Hellenistic period. So in one sense, yes. But that’s how I’d answer that question. Yeah, this just maybe a broader point, but this maybe makes it more accessible. What what it is that Heidegger means when he speaks of the scientific as in height of the oblivion of forgetting of being. Yes, this being cut off from what you would say is resources of wisdom. Yes, without being totally divided from. And so we’re trying to make sense by accelerating, right? Or seeing ourselves as workers or giving ourselves meaning. But the trouble kicker guard says if we just give meaning to ourselves or to something, we can throw away that meaning the next day. Yes, there must be something deeper. It can’t just be positive by us, which is the postmodern subjectivity that tries to get that get that done. But that totally doesn’t work. This paranoia that maybe kicks in to with with late modern subjectivity now. And yeah, and this sense of being cut off, I think, is what. Perhaps even what what depression indicates or so, right? Sometimes I was going to say, I was going to say, I mean, here’s the clear instance of where, you know, the existential mode, the way. OK, so there’s an ontological thing. There’s our relationship to being. And then we get our existential mode, right? Obviously picked up on by Kierkegaard. But then you see it connecting to psychological factors, because, I mean, the the cognitive science on meaning says that one of the biggest. So we tend to emphasize our culture likes to say that, in fact, we’ll use this as a synonym, and it also shows, again, this collapse into actuality that we’ve been talking about, right? That that my that my my my life is meaningful if I have a purpose. And it’s this right. It’s the purpose. Right. Now, having a sense of purpose, in fact, does psychologically contribute to meaning life, but not as much as a sense of mattering, which is a sense of being connected to something that is larger than yourself, that has a value independent of your egocentric desires. Right. And so it so basically what it does to put it into a phrase and this then takes it back into Kierkegaard. You’ll see why in a sec. It challenge you to it challenges you to aspire to transformation. Right. Because the only way of appropriately relating, the only way of connecting to something that you accept is larger than yourself is through some kind of transformation, some kind of self transcendence. Right. And so that mattering to people is actually psychologically crucial. But it takes you into this existential project of aspirate of the aspiration to self transcendence. And then that puts you back into the ontological problem of what the heck does self transcendence mean in our ontology? So that’s what I mean about how I see all three connected. Maybe that’s a good sort of case study of exactly what I’m trying to talk about here. Yes. I just I just I love what you’re what you’re put. I love what you’re possessed by, John. I’m sorry that I just I didn’t mean to do I don’t know. It’s overwhelming. I just like it. I’m actually feeling like I’m just a voice for the pregnancy of these connections speaking themselves. Right. That like the way that the cognitive and the existential and the ontological are all they’re not identical. I’m not claiming that I’m not doing a reduction here, but you see how they’re interdependent and therefore the problem is that they’re not the same. And therefore the problem, if that’s the right word of word for it, what would the issue that we’re trying to address is not one that can simply be addressed by therapy or even by philosophy in the academic sense. Yeah, no, no, no. It must be back in the polis. It must be back in in where where philosophy always was strongest. Yes, yes. It must be back in the college public sphere, whatever. But it needs and it needs to be right when you speak of. The sense that I matter, but I matter because there’s something else that matters more than than just I. Yeah. A true sense of awe, a sense of dangerous divinities. Yes, I like to think that, you know, God is rational reason with a capital R and we all bow down to our own magnificent powers. But there’s something. What Heidegger keeps talking about the uncanny, right? The uncanny of the world. And this is not a moral statement. This is to say there is something uncanny even just about existence. The sheer facticity of existence is uncanny. But that uncanny is is an invitation that uncanny is an invitation to think after what’s actually going on. And that what’s very important to me is is memory is shared. If you like, in English, I think as you could say something like a shared sense of memory, that’s larger than just my memory. Now, I’m going to I’m going to be leaping around a bit now, so apologies for that. But when you think of how transhumanism, for example, tries to sell us immortality, which would mean that all our memories get shared in the cloud. That’s a copy of yourself. That’s probably not how I would think how memory works. I think that memory is much larger. It’s shared as a shared extended self that you are thrown into. And you share in that a sense of memory that we are being cut off from because we are basically encapsulated, isolated, pinned down just on us, just me. And it’s just my subjectivity that matters. I’m the ground of my world. Transformation is just about optimizing myself in order to get better, in order to achieve this and that. But it’s never or not often, at least, getting back to a certain sense of understanding again what what are the fundamental questions of, for example, existence? And if we do so, that would have to accept, however, finitude and death and also certain powerlessness, not an entire powerlessness, but to a certain degree of powerlessness in the face of existence itself. So that’s interesting. So there’s two things I want to bring up about that then. So a question is a relationship between Heidegger’s sense of the uncanny and Otto’s sense of the numinous, which Chris and I talk about quite a bit. They’re both post-Kantian, so it’s not completely irrelevant. Yeah. And and then the what what that has to do with again with this this this thing I’m talking about, the sacredness, because presumably the sacred would would do exactly what I said. It would give you the psychological mattering that puts you into the correct existential mode of aspiration, right, that then also gave you a sense of an affordance of self-transcendence that wasn’t just subjective projection that was in some sense had some kind of connectedness to reality, to it. And so that’s again helps me to sharpen that a little bit. And so what role does the like is the uncanny like the numinous? Or are they just different ways of the same thing? And then what and again, what that has to do with collective memory, because one thing I see religions doing, and this has come out in my discussions with Paul Van der Kley, is they represent a distributed cognitive memory of encounters with the sacred. Right. And that it’s not it doesn’t belong to any one person precisely. That was the whole idea of the ecclesia, the body of Christ. Right. It’s a it’s a distributed a thing across time. And John Kars really talked about this a lot in his book, The Religious Case Against Belief, where he said, we’ve lost that sense of, you know, what you actually have. You have like this this I don’t know what to call it. It’s this sort of structure that keeps forming around mystery. And it sort of carries it forward. And that’s how it’s remembered. And then we’re losing that as we’re trying to solidify and still it into sets of beliefs. But the point I’m trying to make is that the church is I’m using the church as a categorical thing. I don’t mean like the Roman Catholic Church. Right. It seems to me that one of the places in which you get a clear instance of where cultures have tried to maintain that distributed collective memory of the encounter with the uncanny or what I might call the sacred. Right. And to try and continually bridge between the cognitive, the existential and the ontological has precisely been in religions. Religions, in fact, seem to be where you get that kind of distribute, not only distributed synchronically across people, but diachronically across time. This is the whole religious idea of tradition. Right. Tradition seems to be that kind of thing you’re talking about. Or am I making a mistake? So I’m hoping. No, no. Tradition, yes. And the trouble is Heidegger, one of the essays that’s not very well known by Heidegger is on traditional language and technical language. And it happens for Heidegger greatly in language. We speak more and more in terms that are very technical and not no longer connected to the sense of poiesis. And poiesis, of course, is connected to the sacred because the sacred means is, I would think, means something that simply to let something occur, to let something be, let something shine in and of itself and not want it to be in sheer available actuality, for example. And about Otto, there’s a friend of mine, Francesco Cataneo, which has published a book on Otto and Nietzsche in Italian, which is La Presenza Delle Idei, The Presence of the God. Right. And for Otto, there is this sheer presence of the divine in beings. And I’m not sure. So with Heidegger, I think it’s a bit different because for him, the gods remain unnamed and they remain withdrawn a bit to a certain degree. And I think that he’s trying to do, at least on my reading, I’m not sure if that’s correct. What he’s trying to do in the fourfold is to remind us. Think about when he writes this 50s and 60s, he gives public talks to engineers, etc. He tells at a time when there was a great belief that technology could save us, liberate us once and for all, we could have utopia. And Adorno at the time and Ernst Bloch talked about how utopia would come about when we finally give up on death. Right. So once we become immortal, that’s when we have utopia. Or when death becomes an option for those who want to die for whatever reason. But in that time, I think he reminds the human being of a simple truth, of this capacity of being mortal. And that capacity is only, however possible, to even think of when there are immortals. For Heidegger, you can never think one without the other. Right. There’s this. So unheimlich, uncanny in German means unheimlich, unhomely. So the world is unhomely, but it can also be homely. And it’s all. Yeah, that’s what I wanted to get to. Yeah. Because one of the things, you know, that Chris and I have thought about is that the sacred seems to be doing both of these. It seems to both be a way of homing us against horror. This is Geertz’s notion, right, of the sacred. While at the same time, also at times, as you say, unhoming us, putting us outside of that sense. And it mediates between. OK, go ahead. Go ahead. No, this is like this is super, because one of the things I’ve been thinking about is horror. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Horror is so important because the way we think of horror is, I mean, just in everyday terms, horror is a movie. Yeah. Horror is something in a film that’s horrible for two hours. And then I go home and maybe I have a bad dream. But no horror. Horror. And the weird thing is what happens again, thanks to Immanuel Kant or maybe not thanks to him. How does he define boredom? He calls boredom the horror vacui, the horror of emptiness, which is that perhaps a ride in the horse cart is rather dull. Right. It is incredibly bourgeois, a definition of horror. But that’s what a vacui. But he’s almost like because the numinal, what’s the what’s the numinal? The unnamed, that’s what it means. That’s what Kant is doing. He’s pushing even the essence of things all the way to an unnamed outside, to a realm of uncanny, maybe to a realm of of sheer horror, to, you know, H.P. Lovecraft. You could think of him, for example, here. But but when you think of this in terms of Heidegger, again, in terms of the history of metaphysics, metaphysics forgets concealment, metaphysics forgets self withdrawal. Maybe metaphysics also forgets horror. Maybe this history forgets this sheer horror that also is at the heart of existence, not only, but also. Well, that gives me two connecting points. The way to go back to circle back to mortality, the way Eastern or Asiatic religions, I’m thinking, you know, especially, you know, of Indian and Chinese, especially Buddhist. But there’s the horror of immortality. Yeah. Right. Which which. So, you know, when I talk to people in the West about this and I say, I try to get them to understand this idea about about how important your mortality is. Well, no, but, you know, we all they’ll say they’ll say as if it’s axiomatic. But we all just want to live forever. And I say, well, actually, you don’t. And that’s not true of other cultures. Right. Other cultures actually experience the prospect of immortality as deeply, deeply horrific. And, you know, reincarnation, for example, is the thing you’re trying to break free from in many versions of Hinduism. And of course, the same thing with sort of the desire for perpetual existence is what binds you into suffering within Buddhism in profound ways. And so I think I think what I’m trying to what the connection I’m trying to bring it back to is, I think the absence of horror in our metaphysics is actually a telling thing. I think it again points to the fact that we are ultimately seeking a kind of security for our intelligibility rather than always trying to nourish our intelligibility through awe. And I think those are fundamentally different projects for us. And that’s the the the security, I think. And this is where I think what the response to is how you would say the withdrawal of being through the withdrawal of sense. Right. And one of the things I liked in that interview with your teacher, he where he was talking about the our response, right, is to the withdrawal of sense is is is is to take this hyper morality position. Right. Oh, great insight. Where we go, we experience the loss of sense. But we don’t we don’t recognize we we we compensate for it by just being really upset about things. Right. And being offended about things. And what’s interesting is you can notice that like rationality doesn’t have it. It doesn’t even consider rationality. No, no, no, no. And that that that response to the to the withdrawal of of the sense of beingness of the of the fullness of things. We’ve we’ve excluded from our notion of rationality any any sense of this whole side of the spectrum, if I could put it that way. Rationality has has been truncated to confirmation, coherence, the idea that insight and transformation and a capacity for wonder in Plato’s sense, not Aristotle’s sense, because I think for Aristotle, it’s more like curiosity for Plato. It’s clearly off that all of these things are actually crucial to forget, for example, overcoming all of the self-deception that our egocentrism and our narcissism makes us pray to. And they should therefore be central, central to our ideas of rationality, not peripheral things that are somehow romantically pursued when our rationality is done, what it needs to do for the day. I think that is a very crucial point. What you just did, God, to try and the way in which we’re talking again. This is again, we’re talking about something ontological and then we shift into the existential and then reverberates back into the cognitive. Now, because now we’re bringing up the whole notion of what does rationality, because if this is about, you know, sense making rationality should be in this discussion, but obviously in a reformulated way so that it comports with what we’re talking about. And I think one of the things that I’m if I feel into it, like if I. I think one of the things I like about about what I’ve gotten out of reading Heidegger more than his ideas or his views. And it’s been to read them is to walk on the path of looking to that, which reveals its uncanniness. Right. I wanted to ask you about that. Yeah, it’s almost like it’s been a practice for me. Well, totally. But I have found that to be the case. And I think I had to go. I had to go, but actually like me saying this. So there’s maybe a bit of a a performative pun here. I found that to be the case with all of the really great philosophers. Like I find you don’t read Spinoza. Yeah. You you you you you I don’t know what you immerse yourself in Spinoza until like you you I’m going to use this word because I think it’s appropriate. You have to read you have to read Spinoza. You have to recite Spinoza to yourself religiously. You have to you have to go through like if you don’t get scanty into a diva when you’re reading, if it doesn’t occur to you, then you all and all you’ve got is the arguments of Spinoza. I think you’ve missed the ethics. I think you missed the ethics. Same thing with Plato, right? Like Plato is sacred to me because I like I can I can keep following Plato. I can I can go to Plato. I get insight. I get transfer. I get the challenge to transformation. I go out into the world. The world disclosed itself to me in a way that it couldn’t before. That transforms me. I go back to Plato. And then I see something again in Plato that I didn’t see. And I can and so Plato engenders and a Gage Spinoza engenders scanty into a diva. I think the great philosophers engender again this a state that’s between beyond the cognitive, the existential and the ontological. They put you into this place. I’m struggling for words here that isn’t captured by those categories. And that’s the thing of any great philosopher is to get to that place with them. Right. And that’s and I think I’m right. I think I would like that. Sorry, I need to interrupt you, but you think you like that reading of the great philosophers? Yeah, it’s I mean, I think what you’re describing is what you could call the apparition of thinking, right? This just bursts in. Yes. And there’s nothing. And this is this is what I thought philosophy would be. Yes. Yes. In academia. And it was a bit like that with Ivo Liginari in Italy. But it’s because it’s a very small university. And I came here and it was a bit different. But it’s it’s yeah, I think that’s ultimately how philosophy should be taught. Right. I don’t care is it this is and that isn’t that’s not ultimately that important. It’s not that important what is why you might disagree with Plato on some things or others. But what is it that why is it that we read these texts in the way we do? And what is it that they do with us? And why do we why is it that we can come back to them again and again and again? It must actually. I’ve read the cave category. I don’t know how many times. Exactly. Exactly. Still, I’m reading it. I could read every week and I would still. Oh, right. I forgot. Oh, really? This is every single time that. Yes. Yeah. Back to you, because I cut you off. I’m sorry about that. I just was wondering if we look at I think I really want to like I think this is exciting because it’s drawing. I think it may be bringing something together. If we look at what is it that happens in. That relationship of reading a philosopher, right? Like, what are we exercising? And I’m wondering if it touches in on the ontological, like the cognitive and the existential these three things. So that’s that’s that’s what I’m saying. And then and then for me and of course, you probably first saw that I was going to do this guy. This then translates also into dia logos as something that’s happening between people. It also has that. And so there’s something right there. And it’s no coincidence that, you know, Plato writes dialogues, right? That it’s not a coincidence. That is not a coincidence. There’s something about what we’re doing here and how you should read a philosopher. They need each other. This is what I mean about when you know, this is a deep meaning of what I’m trying to what I’m trying to work on with you, Guy, about trying to bring philosophy, not academic philosophy, but philosophy into like into circling and to get the two of them, you know, working together. But that, you know, that what’s happening in the circling feeds into reading the philosophers and reading the philosophers feeds back into that. That’s that’s that’s the project I’m on right now. Exactly with you. With you, right? That’s all the text I send you. Yeah, I didn’t get a chance to respond to the last one you gave me. I’m sorry. It was it was very good, by the way. It was very good, by the way. So I think that I think the thing about well, it’s actually like bringing in the conversation that you had with Andrew, what I was writing with you about the second conversation, you mean, second conversation. I really, really got at a deeper level this this sense of of what was it? How rationality is rationing for where to bring your attention that reveals wisdom. Right. Yeah. The rationing and the ratio. Yeah. Proportioning that it’s it’s it has as much to do with logistics as it does to do with logic. Yeah. And and the proportioning isn’t like just a it isn’t just an intellectual proportioning. It’s like it’s like in the fourfold, the correct proportioning of human beings to the gods and to the earth. That’s ratio. Right. That’s ratio. Right. Because it’s closer to it’s much closer, like I say, to logos and all that was, you know, the best best word from another culture is Dharma. Dharma is a word like Buddhism that has all of that kind of sense to it. Right. Yeah. And that’s just I just really just got that sense of. Oh, that there’s a way that there’s a way of listening. Right. That’s. There’s a way it seems like listening seems to be the right metaphor here. Right. I like her canning better. I like your harkening better because for me, harkening carries with it the sense of also a receptivity. Yeah. And and and making one’s oneself sensitive, almost vulnerable and opening in that listening doesn’t connote that for me, the way harkening, because harkening like it’s a bit, you know, harking is a call to you. Right. Ah, you’re listening to the call and that there’s something about it where is where I think this is starts to break. This is starts to be break free of the metaphysics. Right. Because it’s it to hear is is to be unclear about what you’re hearing, but yet to be attuned to what you can’t quite make out yet. Right. That would whispering to you and to to be or because this is one of the things I notice in circling and leading circling of just I noticed this last weekend is just sitting with people and and harkening to what is the what are they what what’s really present, what’s really present. And just to turning into that is I can I kept feeling this sense of in this growing sense of tuning in to the movement of showing or something like the that’s there’s an orientation that just keeps drawing it. It has an auto poetic quality to it. It does. It’s not an object. It’s not looking for an object or an answer. It’s something else just at the edge of intelligibility or the. It reminds me I when I was circling last night, it reminds me. So I said I want to follow the circle where it goes. But I was invoking Socrates as a point of follow the argument wherever it goes. That’s that’s that kind of sense. Yeah, I want to I want to hear what Johannes has to say, but I want to ask you one question, Guy, first. So this goes to the point we were just on. I don’t want to leave it yet because I sort of brought this up like sort of post circling and I was saying saying, you know, we’re harkening to each other and we’re even harkening, you know, to the third factor that’s opening between us. But but it seems to me there’s another like I said, you know, I have an allegiance to to you, the people I circling with and I have allegiance to the process. But I also want to be able to. I think this is part of being authentically participating in it. I want to be able to engage my allegiance to the topics that might emerge. Yes. So, for example. One one person sort of brought up sort of brought the circling practice itself into question. Yeah. Right. And what happened is people just did the circling and they sort of tuned into each other. And I was kind of like, no, no, I didn’t know. No, no, that’s a last that’s a lost opportunity. You know, we we should keep the circle going. But, you know, that person wants to wonder about circling rather than just wonder within circling. And those aren’t the same thing. And they should be put into dialogue with each other. And what does it what does that mean? Like to set back and you know, and what happened is we then started this discourse around circling, which, you know, that’s what I mean about, again, trying to get these things to talk to each other. We should both let Johannes say something that he’s been very patient and kind with us. Thanks. Just briefly on on harkening, I had not thought of this. I’d always just, you know, use the word to listen to. I will from now on say Harken. It’s also much closer to Harken in German. Hork, right, which is listen, but Harken in a proper that you have to now really hear what I’m saying. And what we now think of as the we’ve classified as the first fragment of Heraclitus, if it actually was his first fragment, we don’t know. He speaks of a couping. He speaks of the logos and that we already are in a hearing stance to the logos. Yeah. We’re not listening or now I would say Harken. Yeah. So this is one of the oldest wisdoms that we have or right. Testimonials of logos is that logos can be Harken to this. There’s always a hearing that’s always something addressing us, calling us. But what we must do is respond. We must respond. That’s ultimately beautifully in English to say this, because you can say that’s responsibility. Yes. Yes. There is this deep sense of responsibility. You mustn’t be cut off from. And it has to do ultimately, I think, with with the ecstatic temporality of history itself. That’s something that I that I see in circling happening because it works with what has been comes back towards you all time. Right. This is all the time. And I think this is how history works itself. And what we’ve done is we’ve made linear history and assume that we just move on into an empty field that we can at will rearrange and make make it just around where we please. And we’ve completely forgotten that that which has been is still coming back and maybe not just to haunt us, but also to give us again a sense of direction. Yeah, I think that is what it is. One of my translations of the. It’s all in the hands. Yeah, it’s like when Heidegger says that a wind in to get over instead of overcome, instead of over, you were common. So so techniques and framing must be forbidden. That means you don’t go over it. You go right in. And then you turn it from within because it’s not about getting rid of it. It’s about understanding where it comes from. Heidegger keep saying it does have an origin. We must find that origin because if not, then we’re cut off from it. We’re cut off. And that means we live in ultimately in a meaningless world. It’s quite vacuous. Huh? That’s that just that notion of origin, right? What the picture I get from how I hear that. Is it’s like different than source, right? Source has kind of like a from to right sense to it. Origin has more of this. It’s somehow present right now. Right. It’s like somehow present underneath the origin of something. I can add the sense of where I can reveal the set, the origin. Yeah. Of this sentence or the origin of this moment. There’s a quiet. There is this kind of quality to it. We carry that in the adjective original. Yeah. Where we mean it’s a current. It’s a property that something concurrently have that points back to its origin. Right. So there’s a there. There is that sense in the adjective to say that something’s original is actually to talk about how it is now, even though you’re presumably referring to something in its past. Yeah. I agree with you. Original does carry that sense. Origin does carry that sense with it. Yeah. Yeah. Origin is like this, right? In terms of the hand, it goes up. It’s the it’s the wellspring of meaning. Yeah. It’s it’s not a source. Right. We think that could give rise to being a resource, etc., which then could be sound like we’re exploiting it. But no origin. And this is what Heidegger keeps coming back to when he says that origin is not something two and a half thousand years ago. I’m not saying go back to the golden age of the Greeks. No, there is something of origin waiting in these texts, in these testimonials of logos, of knowledge, of ratio and of being itself, of course, that there’s still something to be found in them. Right. And the other way of dealing with philosophy. So we’ve made this distinction, John, you made a distinction between philosophia, of course, the law of wisdom and academic philosophy. Now, it means, OK, there’s a sense of origin. There’s something there. There’s something there. There’s something there. When I read these texts, I come to these texts not to be right or to to find the place it was wrong, but to be transformed by them. Because there must be a reason why Plato is Plato. Right. And what I see in academic philosophy now is something else, which is, in my mind, a bit cut off from origin, because what we now see is Spinoza a realist or is he more of an idealist? If he is an idealist, is he a dogma, etc., whatever he is, some kind of ism. That’s no longer this sense of an original access to this law, because ultimately this ism don’t matter. What matters is something else. And that’s this sense of getting back in touch with what there is. With meaning, let’s just say it’s.