https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=wtMLYUcHmME
with meaning, let’s just say it’s… Well, I think it is. I think that connectedness with what is that affords transformation is what people are even talking about in the psychological literature, ultimately, about meaning. So two things come up then to tie back to previous things. Like the discussion of the origin, I think, resonates with the discussion we were having about tradition. And then I think of the enlightenment, right? And the enlightenment’s rejection of tradition as an oppressive, it’s a Gnostic attitude, right? It’s in the pejorative sense of Gnostic. The rejection of tradition as an oppressive structure that is keeping us from the promised future or something like that. And then I think that is bound up with what we were also discussing, this truncation of rationality down to basically monologic inferential argumentation and losing the connection with Ratio and Logos. Those two things seem to be coming to me together at sort of a historical moment in the enlightenment. And that’s pertinent to me because we have people, obviously, the person that comes to mind is Steven Pinker. Yeah. Basically saying enlightenment now, right? The problem, the doubling down, right? The idea, the problem is we’re just not accepting how really, really wonderful the enlightenment is. And again, to be Heideggerian about this is to not deny, seriously to not deny everything the enlightenment has given us, right? And science is an important thing. I’m a scientist, I value it. The increase in healthcare, that is not, it’s not a minor thing in human existence, et cetera. So not, and he puts up all of his graphs and there’s no denying, well, actually some of the graphs I think are controversial, but there’s no denying most of the graphs. But there’s a sense in which the graphs, for all the ways in which they’re graphic, they miss the point. They miss the point of how the enlightenment, again, cut us off from Ratio and cut us off from tradition. And in that significant deep way, cut us off from a cultural cognitive grammar for falling in love with being. Yes. Yeah, it’s, yeah, it’s, you know, to make a Heideggerian point of full agreement, the trouble is enlightenment forgets darkness, concealment, and- Yes, and the horror, right? Yes. It forgets that part of the sacred is the horror. Yeah. If you’re not open to horror, you’re closed off to awe. And if you’re closed off to awe, wonder differs from curiosity and that wonder calls everything into question. Yeah, but yes, and on top of that, you could say horror comes back to haunt you on a different level and more fundamental and then you’re no longer even capable of dealing with it because you’re not used to it being there, being part or at the heart of existence. You could say, why is death so extremely outsourced or denied in our epoch? It’s, Norbert Elias spoke about the loneliness of the dying. This is a tremendous societal problem. But death itself, what is it for the Greeks? For the Greeks, death is at the heart or is an irresolvable mystery or problem at the heart of existence. But for us today, it’s according to Harari, just a technical problem waiting to be solved, right? And I think maybe Pinker would be in agreement with Harari here. I don’t know, but when I, I don’t know if you, you might know John Gray, he’s a British philosopher. And in one of his books, I think, The Soul of the Marionette, which is a reference to Heinrich von Kleist, he says that what he sees with this new enlightenment movement by people like Richard Dawkins and Pinker and others is that what’s the world they want to live in? Do they want to live as in the machine stops in a bunker somewhere looking at graphs where they get a newsfeed every day how much better the world is? And in terms of, oh look, it’s all going, moving upwards. But what’s hidden in these graphs is that even if we’ve got all the best healthcare and people live longer, et cetera, the intricacies, the existential problems of being a human being don’t go away. They don’t just disappear. They are still, right? You still have to die. You still face all the horror that everyone else has faced. And hopefully not as bad as some have had to go through, but still this is not, it forgets darkness, this enlightenment movement, but it brings back another kind of darkness, right? If you keep staring at the sun, the sun will turn dark and you will turn blind. You can’t just be in sheer light all the time. Yes, yes, I agree with that. I think that was very, very well said. Yeah. It strikes me even if we move to the sort of popular culture because I talk about this in the book. Talk about how, even in my class, in fact, even many of the movies we call horror movies are not horror movies. They’re just, I call them startled and puncture movies. They’re just movies that are designed to give us more and more intense experiences of our fear of predation. We’re wired to be afraid of predators because we were preyed on for a very long time. So that’s deep in us. So we can push that button just like you can push the glucose button and people will gorge on sugar and they will gorge on the fear of predation. But there’s very few movies that actually give you, like there should be something that’s on the same scale. There should be an aspect of wonder in horror. Like in wonder, you call yourself and your grip on reality into question and horror should be where you and your sense of self and your sense of your grip on things is called radically into question. Now there are some, I found there are a couple of movies that do do that. They try to do horror. But I think it bespeaks the point we’re talking about that popular culture actually also, and this is such a Heideggerian thing, it hides horror under the mask of what it calls horror. It actually prevents us from encountering horror by putting this mask on front of it, which makes it basically a monster to be killed. Right? All you have to do is actually, if you could just face your fear of predation and turn and face the monster, da da, right? Kind of thing. Whereas no, right? Horror should leave you with a mystery that undermines your sense of ultimate security. That’s part of what horror should do for you. It should be like, it should have an aspect, to my mind, it should have aspects, I mean, it is just psychologically, it’s not a continuum with awe and wonder. Yes, there’s something about bringing in a contemporary culture, right? Of where is it, and this is one of the things, I think I’m getting more of a sense of, okay, to relate with, to look for the place where we can genuinely find the horror, right? Is the sense, what’s really interesting is that, and this is one of the things about this notion of the age of technology, right? Is that, for example, when I go to, actually I was in Atlanta visiting my mom, she lives in Atlanta, and we went to this temple that they had actually shipped over block by block from India. And it was a, like a Hindu temple, like to the monks, right? And I remember I went in there and the whole thing, and every single part of it was carved and animated and told a story, and I didn’t even know what the story was, I couldn’t understand it, but like you just, it communicated just this deep sense of this ever infracting sense of recognition of being nothing, everything, like, you get to the center of the thing, you look up and there’s this, like it goes into, it’s just like you’re, you’re walking out, you’re just like present, man, like vibrating it. And then we walked back out and I looked up and I looked across the street and there’s this, like there’s this shopping center, right? And there’s just the people walking along and like this awful, this awful road, right, with, and I just, I was so struck and horrified, but here’s the thing that’s like, here’s the thing that seems horrifying, it’s not that we live in places like that and that they exist, it’s that, and that they’re horrifying. The horror is that everybody’s walking around and nobody is saying this is horrible, right? There’s very few people that are walking around and they’re just in the flow of it, but as you look like at these houses that are the same, just a little bit of difference, like buildings are built to look like something, right, versus being something, right? Yeah. Like there’s a, that’s where I feel a particular, the thing that is horrifying and fascinating, and I’m wondering if this is like an example of starting to actually look at the withdrawal, right? Seeing the withdrawal and being in relationship to it is it seems like part of the withdrawal is no one is noticing the withdrawal, right? Isn’t that? Well, Nietzsche says in the Genealogy of Morality, he also speaks of the horror of aqua, so the sheer horror of emptiness, and he says, rather than not willing, the will wants nothing, right? So I’d rather become a great destroyer. Yeah, yeah, Fromm said that too, right? When people can’t make anything, rather than doing nothing, they’d rather smash everything down, because at least they’ve got the last vestiges of their agency. So I’m wondering about what Guy just said. There’s a sense in which people, and I mean, that was part of the whole book that I wrote with Chris and Philip, right? The zombie. The zombie is the being that is completely unaware of the fact that it’s a zombie, that it disconnected from the world, from itself, from its, the zombie is all of the disconnections unaware of the disconnections, and it’s a symbol, but you know, Leo and Anderson and I, we reviewed a couple of movies on the week that are gonna come out on the Minding Media series, Joker, in which you see a shift from the zombie to something, and it goes to the point we just spoke about, where of course, the Joker, spoilers here, by the way, spoilers, Joker’s about the meaning crisis, I think that’s very clear, because all of the tropes of meaning, his connection to his past is undermined, if the very story that we’re watching, we lose any sense of dramatic irony, because we don’t know what’s real and not in it, right? His name is Oxy Moronic, he’s Arthur, the great king Fleck, a meaningless piece of crap, Arthur Fleck, like, you know, like we’re getting pounded over the head, and then we see him sort of devolve into all he wants is whatever kind of attention is left, right? That’s all, right? There’s no meaning, no value, no connectedness, it’s just the sheer, it’s even beyond, right? It’s even beyond sort of destructiveness, it’s just, right, you know, the last, narcissism is the last vestige of attention, well, at least, you know, things are, people are still paying attention to me. And then what was interesting about that is, you know, the way, again, what we’re talking about, instead of the shuffling zombies at the shopping mall, you have the angry crowd in riot, focused on a figure that’s not a leader in any sense, but who, what he’s doing is he’s trying to make the environment as absurd as his own narcissism, because that’s the last bit of conformity that’s possible for him, that’s the last bit of him having a connection to reality available to him, right? And so you, I think, and the fact that that movie was so, like, popular and got so much attention, yes, people aren’t talking about it, and so, you’re right, Guy, they’re still zombies, but I’m afraid that we’re actually moving to something beyond them not talking about it, I think we’re moving to the possibility that they might start acting out from it, not acting on it, but, you know, how we talk about somebody acting out, like when they’re acting out, like when a child is acting out an issue, that it doesn’t properly understand, right? That’s how I’m trying to use that phrase, because that’s what Joker is, right? He’s the child man that’s acting out how the meeting places is shifting from the zombie horde to the violent, absurdist narcissist, and I think that’s something to really, really pay attention to, and for me, that brought with it a kind of horror that goes beyond, sorry, I’m not trying to trump you or anything, Guy, it goes beyond the horror of the zombie. The horror of the zombie is that vacancy, right? But the horror of Joker is a different thing. It’s that this is now twisting in a way that I think is extremely dangerous, extremely dangerous. If it portends, if the movie isn’t just a movie and is a myth of some kind, it’s emerging. The fact that it takes place around a mythic character is also, you know, kind of something thought-provoking, I would say. This is, I just wanna make sure I got what you’re saying, like the extra, the new loop around, right, which is it’s not just the vacancy, right, of being a zombie. It’s that I act out of being that vacancy, and my only, the thing you said about conformities, the last conformity that I have left to- Last way in which I can be identical to the unfolding of being is if being is, if the unfolding of being is primarily absurdity, right, and especially if that’s how I’m participating in it, because a narcissist’s existence is one of enacted, embodied absurdity, right? If then I can, you know, if I can make the absurdity out there as comprehensive as possible, then at least I have that final last ditch connection to things. But this is extremely important to think this through further, and also make as many people as possible aware, because I think what we’re pushing against is, you can call it late modern subjectivity, hyper modern subjectivity. Exactly, exactly. But it’s subjectivity collapsing into itself, and it’s becoming paranoid. You can see how it’s losing its grip on reality, how it’s losing its sense of certainty that it was given by Descartes and others, right? Absolute sense of certainty is now collapsing, and all I’m left with is, as you said, is this absurdity, is being unfolding as absurd, and now all I can do to make sense of anything, or posit myself again, is by acts of sheer and utter brutal violence, for example. Yes, exactly. That is bringing my horror that I can’t cope with, because the world isn’t supposed to be horrible, but somehow it’s completely absurd. I bring this horror into the world, and I assert myself with it, and give myself some certainty before I ultimately collapse. What I see in all of the madness is subjectivity pushing to its utmost limit at the moment. Exactly. I think that was beautifully said. I think that developed my point very well. I really like what you just said. I think that’s, that dimension you added is insightful. It’s interesting. It’s kind of like there is this, there was a sense of that movie, actually, right? As everyone gathered along, that it looked very much like some of the protests at Berkeley, right? Like I remember walking out one time, I used to live right across the street from Berkeley, like the main campus, and we had a meeting, and helicopters were going, and you’re hearing noises, and there’s riots, and it was just, I don’t know, it was like Ben Shapiro or something speaking, right? And you walk outside, and there was literally hammer and sickle spray painted on all the buildings. And it was this, it’s interesting, because I’m thinking about this sense of like, it was a very moral stance, like how could you have this, whatever the assertion was about that person. But it was like, uncanny, it was eerie walking out in the streets afterwards. And yet it was very tied to a morality, weirdly enough. And I’m just, it’s tied to morality. At the end of that movie, when everyone was like, rah, right? Like totally. There was no morality. It’s tied to anything. Yeah. And the thing is, I don’t wanna get into the politics of this. Yeah, yeah, totally. There is, but there is the collapsing of morality to the assertion of rules and propositions. So morality in those kinds of protests has been divested from virtue. Like it’s been disconnected from virtue in some really, really important ways that needs to be talked about. Again, I don’t wanna claim that people within a democracy shouldn’t protest. They obviously should, et cetera. I’m clearly not saying that. But what I’m, I’m talking about the content in which the protest is expressed, not the fact or the goal of the protest. Okay? So let’s be clear about that. I’m talking about the fact or the goal of protest. I’m talking about the content in which it expressed and whether or not that expression actually sits well with the fact and the goals of protest. I mean, it claims to be, it makes moral claims, but when you separate morality, I think, from virtue, especially the virtues of wisdom and courage, right? And soft person, then your protestations, literally, about justice are going to be very hollow in an important sense that we’re talking about. And then, so I see that as actually what you get sort of before you get what you see in Joker, which is what you’re pointing to. You get the protest that is just protest. It serves absolutely, it’s not even, it’s even given up the pretense of virtue signaling or making moral assertions. It’s just smashing and anger. And let’s just make everything, let’s just break apart whatever structures are left, because structure itself, intelligibility itself, has now become oppressive to us. Yeah, I agree with that. I agree, I think that’s right. Now you see where we are. We’re in the depths of the meeting crisis. We’re in the depths of talking about the meeting crisis. Yeah. Yeah. Do you think, as a question on that, that intelligibility has become oppressive to us? Is that, has that anything to do with what I would think of as paranoia of late modern subjectivity? I think so. I think that we’ve lost, and well, you could correct me on this, but I think that this is something I sort of see in Heidegger. I see it also in Wittgenstein in a way, that intelligibility is supposed to be something that gets us beyond our subjectivity. That it is not just about what you get, what starts to emerge right in the 11th century. It’s not just internal coherence amongst my propositions, right? It’s not just the coherence. That intelligibility is supposed to give me, it’s supposed to give me some kind of access beyond my subjectivity. And I think when you lose that, right? When you lose that sense of intelligibility that way, then of course, isn’t it gonna go from being like a lens through which you see, if you’ll allow me this metaphor, it has some bad connotations that I don’t want. But if it goes through, I wanna pick up on the double sense of the word through. And intelligibility is something I see through, like beyond and by means of. If I lose the sense of seeing through, all I’m gonna get is looking at, and then that’s a wall. That’s a wall. If I can’t see through in both senses of the word through, then I’m looking at, that’s a wall. All it is is just the echoing of my own subjectivity. It’s just the prison, right? It’s just the prison. I think that is exactly what you’re pointing to with what you said. And that’s why I place so much, like I talk a lot about the transparency, opacity, shifting of attention. And we have to remember that. And then we have to somehow work that back into our understanding of understanding. Yeah, yeah. Understanding of understanding, yeah. What I think is just in line with what you just said is, so we look at someone like Fichte, right? For Fichte, Fichte says something along the lines of, I always recognize myself in nature. He has to say that because nature is just fiction for him. Hegel and Schelling could try to rescue nature a bit, but that didn’t really work out. And what I’m trying to say is that the trajectory we’re on is that the self-certainty of the self-asserting self-referential subject or ego has lost its certainty with the death of God, most importantly. And because God, let’s not forget, God is a hypothesis that Laplace no longer needs, right? God is a hypothesis that Descartes needs in order to guarantee that the world out there is actually there. It’s his imagination. And make sure that actually all these people out there, they’re not robots slash zombies, right? They’re actually human beings. God makes sure of that, but I can’t really be sure of that myself because all I know is me, me, me. And once this certainty disappears, once the causa sui, this ungodly, this non-godlike God, just evaporates into an ever exploding non-cosmos and black holes, what we’re left with is something subjectivity doesn’t know and can’t make sense of. So hence, it’s, as you said, stuck in a wall, stuck in itself and it reacts violently. And I keep saying it because I don’t wanna pin it down on anyone, right? Because I think it is ultimately structural, historical. Yes. But there is, to me at least, there clearly are paths out of it. And they have to do with what we talked about now is you could say you call it tradition, you could call it sources or origin or wisdom, sources of wisdom, et cetera. Those would be different paths out of it into a different way of, as you put it, an understanding of understanding that takes us out of ourselves and into this non-propositional poetic world. Well said, well said, beautifully said, yes. What did he just say? You didn’t hear it. I just, I wanted something to hit you there. I wanna hear it. Well, I got from that, I think I agree with the idea that Descartes represents this pivot point in which the conformity to the world is withdrawn until this fictitious moment of self-conscious conformity with itself, sort of pure subjectivity. And what Descartes needs is he needs, he needs something that gives him egress, something that gives him a way out of that and God is supposed to do that. But this is the God of certainty, right? This is not the God of sacredness. This is the God of certainty. And the problem is that God ultimately evaporates, as Johannes says, and then what we get is we get trapped within this subjectivity. And I think it’s not even that it becomes opaque. I would want to add that it’s collapsing because if what you’re trying to find is the moment of certainty, it’s vanished, it’s vanishing and vanishing and vanishing towards it. And so the wall is closing in and closing. So rather than paranoia, Johannes, I would suggest it might be something more existential, claustrophobia that we’re in, right? That we’re sort of like, oh. I heard that. That’s what I heard. That’s what I heard him saying. It’s something about like if I sit with, all right, so it’s like there’s a sense of claustrophobia like I’m being closed in, right? And a rage has come out, like joke movies, like all of that. So if we bring back in, is it Nikitashi, the guy? He’s a Johnny. Yeah. It’s funny, I just found myself going like, okay. So if that’s how it’s happening, this is how things are occurring for us, right? Yeah, yeah. If we look at it, like I just thought about this of like, okay, what would he do, right? And there’s a sense of where I was like, oh, he would probably, I just had this sense of it would just go. And something, it would. I like the noise. The noise is great. Yeah. Something about, and I think this is one of the things that I like kind of in a certain sense, being right sized to what’s actually happening in being, still being mortal and realizing on some level that we are, like ontologically, being is that one thing that we can never get clear on, right? Yes. Western, Western late modern subjectivity, we’re all fichtians, that’s what I’m gonna say. We’re forever saying, but I am I, I am I. Ich bin ich, ich bin ich closing in. But that I know, right? Even if everything’s absurd, I can still assert myself by bringing sheer horror and absurdity to a hypermodern hell hole. But the other response would be, I am mortal. I am nothing. You begin with nothing. I am sheer withdrawal. And all of a sudden, it could go away. That’s the exercise. Because if I am nothing, it doesn’t, it’s not a nihilistic self denial and your self annihilation. I shouldn’t be nothing of the sort. Now, there isn’t this core self perhaps, but there is a sense of nothingness, but in a different way that we think of it in the West, right? And beginning from this stance, you open up again and this wall that Chong was describing, this wall disappears. I would, yeah, I’m gonna say something that I think is definitely convergent with that. You, Nishatani would say, as you move towards the center of the self, you’re not moving to the foundational certainty. What you do is you suddenly uncover the mystery of the no thingness from which the self is always emerging, but never in some sort of fixed and stabilized way. And if you can get, and I think James was getting towards this too when he made the distinction between the me and the I. The words aren’t totally right, but that’s what he was trying to get at. He was trying to get at, when you move towards the center, you don’t move to the fixed foundation. You actually move into the no thingness. You move into that aspect of mystery that is at, I don’t like this metaphor, but it’s at the center, right? And so Nishatani would point to the fact that if you follow it far enough in, you find that there’s no difference between moving in and moving out. That you find a different kind of conformity rather than the absurdity absurdity. There’s a deep conformity between the no thingness and the no thingness. And then that affords, right? That affords you moving back into anagogy. That’s what I see him basically articulating. So that if you can see the no thingness as that which affords radical trans-framing rather than as the privation of graspable, securable actuality, then you can get out of the claustrophobia. That’s what I see him as saying. It’s because the West can only, if you’ll allow me to use these two words, because the West can only represent no thingness as nothingness, that it can’t make that move. And so all it does is keep, right? It gets to that point. It gets to that point. Yeah. And then we need actuality. We need actuality to come back to that. So what do you mean by that, Johannes? No, so the self is the actual. Yes. Rather than the potential of the possible, sorry. Yeah, you were saying. Yes, yes, yes, exactly. I’m sensing into that kind of figure ground shift of like… It’s an aspect reversal, yeah. It’s a fundamental figure ground shift, yes. And it’s a perspectival participatory thing. It’s not an argumentative thing. Yeah. It’s not an argumentation. Argumentation always works within a stabilized perspective and existential mode. And we’re talking about a fundamental reversal. The argumentation can come after and perhaps engage in explication and elucidation, but the process itself is not an argumentative process. Right. So it’s like really, like I’m wondering about just the sense of… So when I kind of just feel into it, one thing is like I simultaneously go, there’s some kind of risk, right? So if the walls are coming in, there’s like a risk. I in some way actually have to… I have to almost like let go of all of Western metaphysics. Right? Like there’s some kind of leap in there of rather than pushing away, but actually whatever the experience is, I keep getting the sense of keep watching it. Like I’m getting the sense of meditation in that sense of the word of some kind of vulnerability to be with the whore and everything that we’re talking about. I’m just sensing a certain kind of like a response is a certain kind of vulnerability. There is. I mean, within my own practice, you get to this place where you step into sort of… Because you can’t grasp it. You can only be it. You can feel, I’ll use Johannes’ language because it’s perfectly appropriate actually for the phenomenology. You feel the perpetual withdrawal, the meditation, right? The perpetual withdrawal. It’s like the back falls out from behind you. That’s why I like your whoosh. Yes. Like because in meditation, you’re stepping back and you’re stepping back and you’re looking at and then all of a sudden, what you’re stepping back into, it like whoosh and you get the sense of whoosh. That’s why I like that noise. You get that sense of withdrawal which is not the sense of a thing. It’s not even the sense of a presence. It’s that, I have no other word for it. It’s just the phenomenological experience of the sense of withdrawal. And that can be initially really, really, as you can imagine, horrifying to people. It can be very horrifying. Right. Yeah. Especially having facilitated experiences of that horror, that sense of everything slipping away. Yeah, you shouldn’t. And then that very thing that you just, it’s almost like the last bit of concern or care is glaring on and then at some point it goes, and then you’re everywhere. There’s a sense of like that was, that’s been my experiences with those places where I’ve done a psychedelic or I’ve had an experience where it’s like, oh, like the ground starts to slip. Right. And then I can’t grip onto anything. And that sense of, and then there’s a kind of like a, some kind of threshold of where it feels like a death of some kind. Right. And a dissolving. And then this recognition that the whole time, the thing I’m expanding into was present the whole time. Right, somehow. Like, and I just, there was some way I was standing in relationship to it or identified that had it show itself as that, which was horrifying. Just that kind of process. Yeah, I agree. That’s, it sounds very similar to what I’m describing. So for Tani, that’s what I mean. I mean, obviously there’s argumentation in religion and nothingness, but religion and nothingness should not be read separate from a deep kind of meditative contemplative practice, just like you shouldn’t read the Tao Te Chin if you’re not doing Tai Chi Chuan. You’re just deeply not getting it in a really important sense. Yeah, that’s interesting. Cause I’m interested in which people have these kinds of experiences. Cause sometimes the phenomenology is one of like, almost like I said, this whoosh. And then the other is, oh my gosh, it’s like, it’s not directional. Sometimes the withdrawal feels that way, but sometimes it feels more like everything is, almost holographically, everything is opening up. Almost like sort of, you know, the help of the tiniest describes the one, you know, all the forms are reflecting and interpenetrating each other, but the one is what allows for all the opening up and interpenetration that is not actually in any one of the forms. And you get that, you get that too. That has actually become more common for me than just the withdrawal experience. Right, right. That sounds very familiar too. Yeah, totally. So the point, to get back to it, the point Nishitani is making of course is, again, you don’t stop doing the argumentation. I’m gonna keep saying that. You do, you create religion and nothingness, but you also do these perspectival participatory transformations. And then there is some kind of, allow me this metaphor, there’s a dialogos between them and the response is in that dialogos. It’s not in the text, it’s not just in the meditative practice, but in the that. That relationship. Exactly. Well, I started meditating, I went to a vipassana retreat, right? And then I think a few months after that is when I started reading Being in Time. And I remember that it, after reading Being in Time and meditating a couple hours a day, back and forth, that it changed my meditation, right? It was a kind of a sense in which, I think the reverse was also the case. I expect the meditation afforded you seeing things in, being in time that you wouldn’t have otherwise seen. That’s what we’ve circled back around again about trying to get to the place of the philosopher rather than just gather their propositions. And there’s all these, and this was alive for a long time in the neoplatonic tradition, that around the text was a whole ecology of practices and the text or the discourse and the practices were always in dialogue with each other. Yeah. And this is what Hadeu brought out so beautifully. I think this was one of Hadeu’s great points. Yeah, Hadeu, Hadeu, yeah. But when you look at, not to make this too biographical about anyone, but Heidegger had circles of students that he invited over for long extended sessions of simply thinking and sometimes they would collapse and sometimes they wouldn’t, sometimes they were successful. And he, as you know, he worked with Medard Bosz in the 50s to the late 60s, who was a Swiss psychiatrist in what’s now published as the Solikon Seminars. And there are still people practicing Darzhan’s analysis or existential therapy that came out of that. So Hadeu worked with psychiatrists for a decade or more until he couldn’t any longer. And that was his way of, and he provoked them, because they were totally within a Cartesian framework. They were very often outraged by what he said, that you can’t begin with the eagle, you have to begin here, you have to begin with Darzhan, and Darzhan is out in the world, and it’s being with others, et cetera. But he never shied away from that. It was about bringing it into practice. It wouldn’t have been him to do it. It would need someone else to do it. That was not his role, and he was aware of this, because for him this was ontic. This was something that others would have to do. But he provided the ontology for that, his thinking. And yes, it needs practice. And I see it with students too. That it actually, they come to university and they’re quite enthusiastic, and after a couple of years they sound like everybody else. And rather than still having, because what I always do is first seminar, first year students, ancient Greek philosophy, why are you here? That’s my first question. Sometimes I get, is this relevant for the exam? And sometimes, and sometimes I get. My mug, everything I say will be on the exam. Yeah, good. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Or, and I bring it, I keep bringing it back. I say, remember back, the first lecture, why did you come here? Because usually people are drawn to philosophy for a specific reason. They’re looking for something. What is it that they’re looking for? Well, usually they’re looking for meaning. Why are they looking for meaning? And why is it that, I mean, first of all, why is it that perhaps academic philosophy doesn’t really do this or doesn’t acknowledge it? But second of all, what is it that can be done, should be done, must be done in terms of providing again a space for these exercises, practices, et cetera? Yeah, I agree. Well, like I think I mentioned this to you last time. Yeah. I mean, discussion, and I mean, Guy also knows this, there are emerging communities of practice that are trying to create set ecologies of practices. But what I often find is that it’s missing from them is philosophia. So there’s a lot of the other stuff around, a lot of the things that we’re talking about, there’s mindfulness practices and movement practices and authentic discourse practices, and narrative practices and all of this. And don’t get me wrong, I think this is great. And I actively work to support and facilitate this. But what I often find missing is the philosophia. Right, right. And what’s interesting about that, right? It’s like I’m wondering about like, correct me if I’m wrong, but the religion without religion. Religion is not a religion. That’s my preferred way of putting it. Not a religion. Yeah. Like, I don’t get the sense from it. It’s not, you’re not looking to build a non-religious church or something. No, I’m not trying to found a religion. I will keep saying that. Yes. I will keep saying that. I will keep saying that. I will keep saying that. I will keep saying that. There’s, and I’m wondering about if bringing the thing that unites all of these practices the theoria, the philosophy, awakening, because to me, this is about like, philosophy is about awakening the wonder, right? And having that sense of things. And I find with teaching people that there is a sense where you have to awaken it. Like in a… Yeah, yeah. That’s why I called it awakening from the meaning crisis. Yeah. It’s, and it’s because people aren’t walking in with an awareness at all. In fact, the idea of word philosophy, they will proactively feel that that’s like assaulting or something to being in your head or something like that. So one of the things I’ve found is it’s like, and I think I’ve gotten better as a teacher over the years in that sense of feeling the place where you can have them see it. Yes. And then you can see that moment where like, they see something, they experience something that was right in front of them, their whole lives, and it never, there’s all, it never been questioned, and it’s a question and you can see that awakening. Socratic aporia. That’s really what, that’s what really what Socratic aporia is supposed to do. Yeah. To get you to, what you thought you, what was so familiar and so obvious suddenly is now mysterious to you in a profound way. I mean, that’s the whole point of Socratic aporia. I agree. I agree. I mean, that’s why, and Johannes picked up on that. That’s why I try to make a distinction between philosophy, which I think is still important, by the way, but, and philosophia, which I think is something more that, I’m not, I’m neutral on whether or not everybody needs to do philosophy, but I think everybody needs to practice and live philosophia in a profound way. And so I think that’s the whole point of Socratic aporia. And so I think those are, yeah, because I guess I want to pick up on that point you were making about, you can bring people to that point where they get, well, to use our metaphor, you get a crack in the wall. Yeah. Opening, right? It’s like the Leonard Cohen line where, there’s a crack in everything and that’s how the light shines through, right? I think everybody, because of what we’re in and where we are, I think that’s why everybody ultimately needs philosophia. So while I deeply applaud, and I really, and I put time and effort and talent into these emerging communities, I think there is still, right, we’ve got to get philosophia into them in some way. That’s why this discussion is very important, by the way. That’s one of the reasons, I mean, other than really liking you guys and enjoying the conversation, one of the reasons in this conversation is precisely because I want, I think it’s trying to do that. It’s trying to bring philosophia into this attempt to get these ecologies of practices going. Right. On this point of philosophia, perhaps also some other point, we’ll have to carve out what that is and what that means. Yes, yes, very much. And you might disagree with this totally, both of you, I don’t know. One of the dangers I see, and Hegel speaks of this, I think in the Differenzschrift, one of, he says it would be absurd to call oneself a Platonist today. And I think what he means by this is that you can’t just pick and choose. No, no. So you can’t just go back and say, oh, I’m an arist, I’m a new, no, I’m an aristotelian, I’m a Platonist, I’m a stoic, I’m this and that, as if from a metaphysical supermarket. Because that’s very easy to do, right? I’m gonna be a bit of a Buddhist over here, I’m gonna be a bit of a Lutheran. But what does it mean that we have this rich source or origin, but also this burden of all of this knowledge because philosophy is also extremely abstract and well, it also is a burden to have access to all of that potential knowledge. And the question is, so if we use the word philosophia, to some degree, that’s going back to the Greek word, of course, right, that’s the word, the word philosophia. But how, for me, I think it would be extremely important to not be some part from this isn’t, no, no, no, no, no. But something uniquely of this epoch, right? Uniquely of this age that speaks to this age, but that takes, of course, direction and orientation from the wisdom of what has been, but doesn’t sort of mix it up too much. You see what I mean? It’s generating itself out of that which has been, but in such a way that responds to us, to us specifically today in our. I totally agree with that. That’s why you, I don’t know how to articulate it. I often fracture on with metaphors. I talk about salvaging, which is my way of trying to, like, you’re sort of diving into the depths and bringing up what was valuable and then trying to refurbish it. And it’s a poor metaphor, I need a better one. But that’s part of what I’m trying to say when I say the religion that’s not a religion. The reason why I think, even though I find Plato sacred and Plotinus is sacred for me too, I’m not a neo-Platonist in the sense that I can’t, the axial age, two worlds mythos is not viable for me. It’s just not viable for me. So while I want to respond to, and I wanna let the tradition flow into me, but exactly what you said, I wanna open to the, I want exactly, I think what you’re saying, that’s part of what I’m trying to put my finger on with the religion that’s not a religion. Yes. It’s up on the sacredness, but it’s for now. Okay, now I get, now I think I understand that name better because it now reminded me of Heidegger’s unnamed gods. He doesn’t name them because he doesn’t want to give us, oh, look, you should believe in Zeus and Hera. No, we can’t go back to Greek mythology. That would be a bit ridiculous. So they’re unnamed for now because this, unfortunately or fortunately, who knows, is an epoch where gods have disappeared, where the godly is disappearing and withdrawing, but what we can still say that there is a flickering, some lingering, some gloom of them still there, something that’s still there that’s still an echo of the divine, but we can’t name it. We shouldn’t name it because what I don’t like about isms is that they’re already ossified. They’re like, I’m this ism and that’s it. So this is what I, this is, no, if we, because that’s almost again, subjectivity is just asserting itself, right? Yeah, yeah. I’m this ism and therefore everything’s fine and I don’t have to worry about it. No, that’s not the age we live in. We live in the age of, nothing makes sense to some degree, but the tide is already coming back. There is, it’s like the, Nietzsche speaks of the halcyon tone, right? Of the tone of the halcyon bird, which already hears the, so the halcyon bird breathes during two weeks of, or a couple of weeks when the ocean is still and knows that tempest will come again and it’s prepared for the horror and the terror that’s about to come. But it’s so, but it doesn’t sort of, what I’m trying to say is this way of thinking, Philosophia is a good name for it because it’s also quite open, right? But if we stifle it with isms, then it’s almost like what would happen is you can produce a consumer product, right? Exactly, exactly. I mean, and so part of it, I think is actually a bi-directional critique, which the one we’re giving voice to now is to try to resolve this through nostalgia. And that’s a deep mistake. I think also trying to resolve this through a utopia, which has a completed picture of the future is also a deep mistake. I think these things are not the proper framing that we need for what I’m calling Philosophia. Well, that’s the work that needs to be done, right? That’s the, I’m not sort of framing all of Philosophia, but bringing, well, giving birth to Philosophia, right? Yeah, yeah, exactly. It’s more about exemplifying and participating in it. Again, I’m gonna be, I will of course theorize it because that’s also- Yes, yeah, that’s what we do, yeah. My job and my work. You tap on it and then, ha ha ha, theorize it. Oh yeah, kinda, kinda. But you know, it’s really interesting how hard it is. I mean, it’s coming sort of easy for us, but it’s hard to get people, because often if you say, give up nostalgia, they go, oh yes, I get that, utopia. Or if you say to people, no, no, not utopia, and they go, oh yes, I get that, nostalgia, right? And it’s like, no, no, no, no. The grammar that’s generating both of those is what I’m asking you to step beyond. And then that’s when there’s the glimmer of horror in their eyes, right? And that’s the moment that requires deep respect of the person you’re talking to, deep sensitivity, and a willingness to linger and be patient with them. And sorry, that came off as condescending, and I didn’t mean it to be condescending. I meant it to be caring. I’m gonna have to go soon, guys. We’ve been talking for two hours, and I foresee that we could talk for two more without any difficulty. This was extremely fruitful. I found this very helpful, and also deeply joyful to participate in. So thank you both of you very much. Thank you very much. Horrified with all of the both of you. Well, I’m hoping this is the first of many of these. I would like it if I could have the file of this, because I’d like to put this. So I’m gonna upload the discussion I had with Johannes to my Voices with Reveki site that comes out one, Sundays at one. And it would be great if I had this as a follow-up. I’ll send it over to you. That’d be great. So let’s keep doing this. Let’s meet up again. And let’s do this again, because I found it extremely valuable. Also, I just wanna say that from my experience of doing these, and putting them up and having people watch them, these things in themselves is awakening. Yes, totally. Meeting, there’s just gotta… Like a hero. It invites. It invites participation. It does. Something I just wanna say that the very thing that we’re talking about is actually the thing that we’re doing in some regard. And just people watch. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because I’ve heard people talk about it awakens something in them. Yep, yep. Totally, that’s Dialogos. It’s both what we’re explicating and exemplifying are in deep resonance with each other, and they’re mutually affording each other. That’s part of Dialogos, for sure, for sure. Yes. So, we will talk again soon, I hope. Yes. Thank you all very much. Thank you. Take care, guys. Bye.