https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=wepLHBUWjrg
Thank you. Welcome everyone to another voices with Reveke I’m very excited for today’s discussion with me I have the great pleasure of talking with john russon, many of you know that john russon has had a significant impact on my work and on the work that Dan shabby And one of the one of his books bearing witness to epiphany has had a huge impact on me. I’m reading his current book, politics money and persuasion which is book on the republic. I see john as doing something very interesting something that Dan and I are doing a lot of work on something like a phenomenology of intelligibility, trying to make sense of how we make sense if that doesn’t sound too circular. And, and in a similar way, john is bringing together elements from the phenomenological tradition and the platonic tradition something that I’m also working at length to do. And so, john, welcome to voice with Reveke. Thank you very much. I’m happy to be here. So, john maybe you could say a little bit more about yourself and anything you’d like to bring to the table. And if you want to start on one of those two sort of feeder topics I gave you, feel free to take it how you want to, in which direction you want it to go. Yeah, I mean so I currently I teach at the University of Guelph. I’ve taught at a number of places I taught at Penn State University for eight years I think it was. And at that time, Penn State well I mean as it is today Penn State was a major department for continental philosophy in North America. So it was a very vibrant and exciting environment and I think a lot of my thinking and work developed in that context. And mostly I do work in phenomenology. But, you know, since the very first reading in the very first philosophy class I took, Plato has been at the heart of my experience first thing I read was Plato’s apology and that has, you know, accompanied me through my whole life and I, when I first read it and and still today I think of it as the single greatest work of philosophy, I think everything is in it. So, so in many ways I think my, my philosophical journey has been an ongoing attempt to, you know, think with the resource, think about and think with the resources that the apology offers so your remark about Platonism I think is, is, is apt. That really is my home context. And I think the reason that I was so drawn to phenomenology or part of what my attachment to phenomenology is, is a sense that when I study the works of you know Heidegger or Merleau-Ponty, I feel like I’m doing very much the same thing I’m doing when I’m reading the Platonic dialogues. I think that’s the most exploration of the way, the way our lives and the way the world is meaningful. And in the context of, in the context of that study that you know begins at a very immediate personal level like just trying to make your life into something or trying to figure out how you feel, you know, as you start investigating that more deeply, it takes you into reflections on, you know, the nature of reality like when you start down that path, everything, everything makes its way in. And so I think that, I think the Platonic dialogues are extremely rich and, and also extremely rigorous in their treatment of all those themes, but because Plato writes in this, you know, very complex and challenging literary style you can’t just read the doctrines off the page. And so I think phenomenology is, you know, much more obviously a sort of manifestly sort of scientific discipline, not scientific in the sense that it, you know, worships the natural sciences but scientific in the sense that it is methodical, rigorous, and so on. And so I think that phenomenology, in my experience has been the, the, the method, the rigorous method that I have been drawn to and relied upon to explore the themes of meaningfulness. But in doing that, it has constantly been the case that whatever I learned from phenomenology, I then I go back and read Plato and I find, yeah, right, that’s what that’s what they’re talking about over here. So my life really has been a, my philosophical life, well in my personal life has been a constant dialogue between the rich provocative character of the Platonic texts, and the sort of rigorous study of the phenomenological texts and I find they’re extremely mutually reinforcing and invigorating and that so that’s that’s where my work has been. And I’ll just add one more thing. You mentioned those two books bearing witness to epiphany and politics, money and persuasion. I’ve written a number of other ones to bearing witness to epiphany is sort of in the middle of a trilogy of books I wrote this first one was called human experience where I was really trying to study, starting sort of from childhood and family life how how we form our bodies, which, which turns out to be much the same as how we make sense of the world and so on. So, but looking at those things in particular trying to understand where adult psychological troubles come from you know what we commonly call mental illness, but human experience then bearing witness to epiphany was the second one. And then the one I’ve written more recently it’s about adult life is called adult life and it’s distinctly about the, the rich range of adult experiences trying to define what that is exactly but then studying the domains of life that adults have to deal with from, you know, emotional and emotional issues like courage anxiety, etc. through to political economic family intimate issues and so on. So those. So I just mentioned that because other books too but I mentioned that because I think if anybody were interested in bearing witness to epiphany they might very well be interested in looking into that larger trilogy because I really have tried to do something systematic over the course of my whole publishing career base because taking me 30 years I guess to write those. Anyway, that’s me. I’m certainly interested. So there’s a whole bunch of threads to pick up on from that. Well, let’s let’s pick up on the trilogy. I haven’t I haven’t read adult life but now now that you know that I realized there’s a trilogy I’m going to read it. I did see you give a talk at the University of Toronto for you to zoom. I think it was my recommendation that they invited you by the way, so that I had that suspicion. And in there you at at utism, the University of Toronto’s International Symposium on the mind that’s what the acronym stands for. You gave a talk about adult life and you spit you particularly zeroed in on what is commonly understood as a trait, although I think And I thought that it’s a virtue and then what was at the core of the virtue was a very sort of platonic motif. And this was that one of the core virtues of adult life is maturity. And the way about maturity resonated very deeply with, you know, a theme running through Plato, which is this, you know, facing the real turning towards the real. Could you say a little bit more about that because I, I think that’s something that is very no doubt this is in your mind, it’s something very pertinent for today’s world. And I think that’s because we have so many avenues and venues in which we can turn away from the real and get at least a temporary reward for doing so. Yeah, yeah, that’s what you say is excellent. I think. Yeah, I mean, I guess I would just, you know, so as not to go on infinitely. I’ll say two things. What about Plato and one about one about the book that I wrote. About with respect to facing the real. I think that’s your, your very right to associate that with Plato and I think one of the things that’s been so striking in Plato. I mean, you certainly see it in the Apologies Socrates, you know, before the court, and that but also you very strikingly see it in the Republic, and the talk about the divided line in the cave that facing the real, you know, it means being realistic, but in the, but in the sense, it means recognizing the good. Yes, facing the real in a profound sense means recognizing feeling the imperative to, to be good to be moral to be a good person. So, I think, you know, there would be many things to say about facing the real and Plato but I think the, the sort of high point of that story is that if you’re actually truly going to be honest honesty is the word I like to use for, I think the same thing you’re talking about. Yeah, really going to be honest about what’s going on. You have to recognize an imperative to be good. And that that matter of facing the real that isn’t isn’t just, you know, an abstractly cognitive notion of acknowledging something, it is a life changing commitment like it’s like, yeah, feeling that the nature of reality is not that it’s an alien thing. But that it’s something that demands of you intrinsically to your very being that you, you know, turn towards it and be good. So that’s what I, the thing I take out of Plato as a, as a real orienting point. And then in my book adult life. I am exactly trying to talk about the demands of facing the real and, and there I really try to articulate, you know, what are the dimensions of the real that we do encounter as adults human beings. And there are, you know, personal ones like the, I start off looking at the virtues courage and sort of self possession and things like that, as aspects of what it means to face the face the real like that we have to develop certain character traits. And then, and further second one I think this is probably what I talked about mostly at the University of Toronto. Is that part of the reality of our existence is that we are aging and mortal. And so, you know, another thing about facing the real is learning to sort of own up to what it is to be an aging being and an aging being who is going to die. And that’s the second topic but then the third one and I think this will come closest to the point you were making. The third thing I really focus on are the broader sort of dimensions of social and interpersonal life that are the reality we all inhabit. And I think the most immediate and engaging one is our intimate life our friends our family you know, and so on. So I study those dimensions of intimate life, but our intimate life is always contextualized by sitting in a social world that is also economically structured and, you know, politically governed. Right, right. So, so I think that as adults. The reality. The reality of our reality the reality of our existence is that our life is structured and defined by relations of intimacy, economics and politics and being mature being adult means, you know, owning up to those things recognizing what they are and learning how to engage with And so I think what you said is right that there are, there are all kinds of ways that we are invited and encouraged to trivialize disregard ignore turn away from, you know, these huge meaningful dimensions of our life of our lives, often for sort of short term term gratifications, but in doing that, what’s really happening is that we are irresponsibly mishandling these things that are real dimensions of our life our political involvements our participation in economic system our intimate involvements and so on. So, so yes I think there are many ways we are encouraged to turn away from those things and what I’ve tried to talk about in that book is the, the way that trying to be adult, which relates to this platonic notion of being called to be good really requires us to understand and grapple with the intimate economic and political dimensions of our social world in addition to those personal things I mentioned like character and aging. And I’ve tried then to lay out, you know, something about how those things work so I’ve tried to do a sort of phenomenological study of intimate life, economic life and political life and so on. So yeah, so I think the thing you said is right on and that’s, that’s how I have been trying to take that up in my own thinking and writing. So, that’s wonderful. That was very clear. So, I’m, I’m first of all I want to note something and then I’ll reflect something back to you, because I want to note the way your relationship to the real is a transformational process. Right, which is very, very, and I don’t mean this in any kind of criticism, it’s a much more ancient approach to our contact with reality rather than an informational relation, where what we’re trying to do is gather propositions, we have a more ancient proposal and so we have to undergo fundamental transformations in order for reality to disclose itself. That is that right. So I think that that for me is a very powerful thing. And then I’m wondering what came to mind when you were talking was Murdoch’s quote about love is when you recognize something else is real. And I was wondering, right and of course, right, and Eros shows up of course in Bearing Witness to Epiphany, and Eros is, you know, all through the process, it’s, it’s, it’s a defining feature, if that’s the right way of putting it, of Socrates, and the transformation of the notion of Eros in Plato’s hands as he tries to figure Socrates for us. So, what role does love play in that process you’re talking about? Yeah, another great question. You know, I guess, if I could again turn autobiographical for a moment. I said that, you know, the apology was where I really got started and that really, you know, fired me up and that’s true. But then right after that we read Socrates talking with Diatim in the symposium about Eros and I thought that was the best thing ever. And that’s also the case that the, the discussion of Eros in Plato has been, I think the thing that I’ve been sort of trying to understand. And so I’ve written quite a bit about I’ve got lots of essays it comes up in lots of books. And that has always been kind of what I keep turning to, to say like this, this is where this is what you really got to grasp. So yeah, I think, you know, Eros, I, there are lots of ways to translate Eros you know you use the word love, could also think of the sexual desire, sexuality, something like that. And I think those things are all right. But often, I like to think as a starting point for grasping what’s, what’s sort of coming out of that platonic study of Eros, it’s just the notion of passion. And I think that’s a sense that you know when you have a real passion for something. I think, I think that’s a, if you think of what it’s like to experience a passion for something. You know it’s this overwhelming attraction to something, but it’s, but it’s not an attraction to it where you want to use it or take advantage of it right it’s an attraction to it, where you think it’s great, like it’s it’s it’s very much defined So like, you know, in my life nowadays I have a passion for jazz music. And that turns out to be hard work is very demanding, I gotta look at that stuff. So the passion for it amounts to sort of submitting yourself to its guidance in a way right to initiating yourself to its reality. And then the other thing about passion is that it is also sort of fiery and and all consuming, you know, so I think of that as the experiential character of Eros, and I think that the one of the points then that Socrates makes in his conversation with Diatema or maybe Diatema makes in her conversation with Socrates is the better way to put it, is that that’s the thing we commonly think about is sexuality. That’s the sort of the place in our lives where maybe in the most sort of immediate and gripping way we experience that capacity to be passionate and it that is it’s like sexual energy is is in a way what’s fueling those passions. And so sexual energy, especially is about other people. And so, in the symposium, Diatema really focuses on that way that our sexuality sort of grows and develops in tandem with our engagement with other people. And I’ve really tried to think about that link a lot about the idea that Eros or sexuality at its basic level in human life is a passion for others or for another. And so exploring our sexuality and exploring what other people are are really, you know, the same story from different angles. And it seems to be that within the context of If you have a passion about your passion, right, if you in the context of, you know, honestly exploring your sexuality, not not which is going back to the thing about facing the real right that that’s different from taking whatever immediate thing is advertised to you. Right. If you honestly explore what’s going on in your sexuality. I think that it that is a thing that develops, and it does develop into these other sorts of passions it develops into a passionate embrace of the human world, you know, and so diet team has says you know if you develop your ass, you know, you’re going to care about virtue, you’re going to care about politics, you’re going to care about those things that’s that’s on the path. And I think it’s right, both that the healthy development of our sexuality should will will leave us into a passionate concern for those things. And I think that’s also the sort of flip side of that, that an honest, you know, a good engagement with politics, and the rest of that really requires that it be rooted in that kind of passion, then that starts in our erotic character so there are there are there are distant or excessively theoretical or detached ways of being involved in politics that are all going to fall short of a relationship that comes out of that sort of lusty engagement with the human world. So, I mean I kind of, I kind of went off a bit of a ramble there but it’s it’s what I think of. Well, so let me, let’s discuss this a little bit because this is a really interesting point for me. So I want to, I want to get your thoughts on, of course, there’s, there’s, there’s sort of cautioning within diatema about don’t get stuck at this level. Right. It should scaffold you to the next and it should scaffold you to the next. And I think of froms warning to a modal confusion that we can we can confuse being in love with having having lots of sex and, and therefore, turn away from the developmental call that you’re, I mean, you’re putting your finger on I think that that’s, those are very real possibilities that and I think Plato is picking up on that. But that that. So I’m hearing. This is something I’ve seen in Plato to that this way of, you know, responsiveness and responsibility have some deep intimate connection with each other. Right. And then, and they and they and they sort of, they co define our responsiveness and our call to be responsible or bound up together. Right. And I mean, of course, in the symposium diatema take Socrates up to, you know, the beautiful itself and I’m not going to try and get into the abstract elements of this but what I what I see in there is, again, this platonic notion that we do have a desire to, to, to be in contact to be intimate with the real, And this is an example that is within the domain of eros. So I’ll, I’ll ask my students, I’ll say how many of you are in satisfying romantic relationships. And you know romantic relationships are for many people the surrogate of God in our culture right now. And so they put up their hands. And then I say to them, how many of you would want to know that your partner was cheating on you even it meant the destruction of the relationship, And then I asked them, well, why, and here’s all these you know and they’re all sort of John dissed and post Nietzsche and everything and then they utter innocently, well because it’s not real. It’s not real. Right. And so they’re like this, that they don’t write, even though all of their desires are being gratified in one sense and they can hear all the words they want to hear the fact that it lacks this deeper dimension robs it of all of that call that and I’m wondering I wonder what you’re thinking about that because I hear in play dough that and this is what hon talks about in the agony of arrows to he talks about, you know, ultimately arrows requires a vulnerability to the other. Something I think Murdoch was picking up on that to your love is when you confront something other than yourself that’s real. It’s like when the arrow relevance goes from from how is everything relevant to me to how my relevant to that. And so I’m wondering what you think about that about that that that it’s a, it’s a, there’s a sense in which that call the call of responsiveness that becomes the call of responsibility also has a capacity to deepen itself to draw us further and further along. Yeah, yeah, I think that’s right. So I would say a couple things so first I would say, in terms of people’s you know actual sort of empirical practical sexual lives. There are lots of things people can do that can be, you know, rewarding and lots of different ways so I don’t, you know, I don’t want to start off by saying well you shouldn’t do this thing exactly. Yeah, exactly. And I think that, nonetheless I think it’s true that we do have a deep desire for intimate companionship. And, and for there to be intimate companionship. We need to make ourselves vulnerable to that other person. And similarly the other person needs to make themselves vulnerable to us. Yes, in that sense. So, so you could find out that you thought you had that. And then if you found out the other person had been stringing you along, then there’s a way in which it wasn’t real, you know there’s a way in which you didn’t get that. And so, so I don’t automatically want to say oh you shouldn’t have sex with people you’re not deeply in love with it’s not not that but I do think people get themselves into relationships, where there’s a thing they actually want, which is this deeper relationship that I’m talking about. And they equate what they’ve got with that, but you know, rightly or wrongly and so that can mean a couple of things that can mean they want that but they don’t really quite know what they’re after and so they go for the thing that they’re told they’re supposed to go for so people sometimes. Yeah, substitute, maybe naively substitute. And so that’s really unsatisfactory relationships that look like the thing you’re supposed to have for what is really a deep and intimate bond. And so that I think is an unfortunate thing that happens to a lot of people that they that we don’t like we, that’s why we don’t, we don’t automatically know how to make sense of our own feelings and desires. And so we, we do the things that look like maybe that’s what I’m supposed to do hoping they’re going to fit. And often they don’t. So I think that’s, that’s one side of it. And then I think. So it can be that that people sort of pick the wrong thing to to fit the desires, or it can also be that people bring are sort of confused and bring the wrong standards to bear on what they’re doing. But so so lots of those things can happen but but I do think that the deeper thing is, we, we do want and need. We’re going to be healthy and happy we need intimate, intimate companionships. And exactly as you say that that requires the, the companions to really be, you know, passionate about each other to really be vulnerable to each other. And there’s, there’s something you know really unsatisfying and unfortunate about a situation that’s supposed to be like that that isn’t like that which is where you’re being deceived I guess. But it’s also really unfortunate that people don’t don’t understand that about themselves or are discouraged from understanding that about themselves. The wrong thing in place, because I think there is a pretty big, pretty big. I don’t know propagandistic I can’t think of the right word but pretty big sort of advertising effort to tell us to tell us not to take those things so seriously you know and. So I think that that the mismatch of the kind of relationship we develop with our deeper needs and aspirations I think is the source of a lot of unhappiness in people’s lives. That’s well said. I want to pick up on that. And what about Plato’s proposal that that that sense of intimacy, and that sort of reciprocal opening between you and the other can move beyond people and to aspects of reality itself, and, and towards the beautiful and I think this is actually pertinent to some of what is going on and bearing witness to epiphany because one of the things I love about that is you shift the template for intelligibility off of math and do something that’s really into some ways very platonic you shifted on to music, and you you sort of unpack the musicality of intelligibility how there are rhythms and there are melodies, and there are harmonies and how patterns of intelligibility, open up for us. And like music. It’s not out there and it’s not in here. It’s both and there’s a resonance going on. So that I think is genuinely beautiful, not only in your prose but in the, in what you’re referring to. And so it seems to me and this is what perhaps what Plato was holding out that we could come to find the very processes. I’m not going to claim this as an adequate account of the forms or anything like that, but we could find these various patterns, various processes of the disclosures of the beautiful patterns the musicality of intelligibility something that we could desire to have a more intimate transformative relationship to. Yeah, I mean again I also will will try not to get too far into that but but I think at a basic level. I mean, I would just call that actually understanding, you know, I think, as we, as we learned about reality like it’s very interesting and we want to learn more about it. I mean, you know, let’s go back to math. You’re right. I do think we shouldn’t have mathematics as, as our paradigm for thinking what intelligibility is but as a place. Yeah, but, but it shouldn’t be the paradigm but nonetheless let’s think about it. You know people commonly, when they study math. They get excited about it and they want to learn more of it because you know there’s something quite like my son, who’s almost six has been doing a multiplication and division and stuff for a little while and he’ll say that let’s do some division. Because there’s something thrilling about having the fact that reality works a certain way suddenly start opening up to you, you know, and, and he’s. In a, in a, in a some sense of the word like he’s turned on by it like he’s, he’s, he wants to do that now. Exactly. And so I think, and I think that’s common you know people who study math seriously. Maybe they have practical interests they want to work in, you know, designing airplanes or something I don’t know if that’s possible. But I think it’s common that people study math because they think it’s, it’s beautiful. They like they, they, they love the experience of working with these relationships. I think, so I pick, I pick math as my example here because I think that phenomenon I’ve just described is pretty well known pretty well recognized. But this, that same thing it seems to me is also true of, you know, what I would think of as deeper structures of intelligibility, and so I think, you know, that’s really what comes out of philosophy when you study philosophy and of course you can study it, because you should be a good person and so on like there are lots of things to learn about about that. But a big part of philosophy is also the domain that’s traditionally been called metaphysics right the study of what the nature of reality is. And that’s a, you know, it’s electrifying to study that it’s it’s extremely fascinating and so you know you can, if you’re in the wrong mood for it and somebody hands you the opening pages of Aristotle’s categories and you read about something that’s predicated on something else and what a substance is and stuff, it can seem like the most boring thing in the world. But if you actually are led into that well and you know that grasping the notion of substance is life changing, grasping that that that you need to have the notion of a substance, grasping the meaning of a property. And so those things I think are, I mean those are some of the biggest lessons I learned in my life, and they matter they don’t just matter because I want to answer a question about Aristotle like they, they affect the way I think about every issue every day. Right, right. I think, I think metaphysics is, I think human you know Aristotle says, all human beings naturally strive towards understanding, and I believe that. And I, so, and I think understanding means, figuring out how reality is so. So I think that there is basically a natural human desire to do metaphysics. So, I think, I think in that sense it is part of our part of our development will in the unobstructed development of a human being, you know, a properly supported development. It will naturally be the case that we would, anyone would develop an eros for thinking about the nature of reality and eros for metaphysics, because it is, it is. It’s so profoundly meaningful and so impactful on everything in our lives to understand those things. Most people don’t find themselves in that situation because, first of all, it’s not the. Well actually let me change that. Most people don’t find themselves in that situation I think because both in our everyday social world, and in our structured education. The study of metaphysics has been treated as a dry arcane trivial thing, you know, and so if you’re going to come upon that all. You know, it’s going to come upon it in a really tedious context and so there’s only going to be a few people who are ever going to get there you know and they may even be kind of twisted souls like in the book Six of the Republic. They’re talking about the philosopher and they talk about what real philosophers should be, but then they say yeah but in reality the people that we call philosophers like they’re either, you know, vicious people who want to use arguments to take advantage, or, or sort of, you know, weirdos, you know, some truth, or not it’s not entirely true but there’s some truth in that. But so, so I think that the structures of reality should be deeply intimately meaningful and exciting to us grasping them, and I, and in my own experience they are they, they, my ability to interact with erotically with someone is really influenced by the fact that I’ve studied, by the substance and property and attribute. But, but as it happens. It’s, it’s not really made available to people that’s in an engaging way. My own experience of teaching is, it’s not actually hard to turn on that interest in people. Yeah, you know, but it means, but to do that, you yourself have to have that kind of relationship to us. Yeah, but I find it’s not at all hard to turn people on to that and so I, if I teach introduction to philosophy like I always teach, like, one of the things I commonly have taught is Aquinas’s proofs for the existence of God because, you know, just, just as a, you know, a poster for metaphysics like that’s just a topic that, yeah, people are lucky about metaphysics they’re sort of, they’re always interested in that question. And that’s kind of the, the route into thinking about the nature of reality. Yeah, so I think it makes a lot of sense to say that, you know, the processes of reality are things you could have an erotic attachment to. Yeah, like, when you first say that sentence it sounds kind of silly but if you actually think about what it means in the context of letting it totally true. So as a cognitive scientist, one of the things I do is, you know, I study consciousness and cognition and transformations. And one of the things I’ve studied is when people have experiences that are sort of called higher states of consciousness. And typically, what’s really interesting about those is this weird reversal that happens for people. And you have this experience, often ineffable to them, but the way they most reliably talk about it as as the really real. Right. And then what you see is the arrows and it’s exactly what we’re talking, there is this tremendous desire, this drive to conform, they will start to transform their structure of their psyche, their relationships, their careers. And if you study the reason they’re doing this, right, is because they’ll say well I want to, I want to, I want to be more in touch with that I want to live closer to that I want to, so they engage in this tremendous process of transformation. And again, and of course, and then, right, what I’m trying to point out is, they might like might not call this metaphysical what they’re doing, but they’re invoking the really real, and they’re invoking it and what’s like, and just think about what they’re willing to do john. And normally when we have these aberrant states we say that wasn’t real because it doesn’t fit in with all of this. What they say is that was really real, and this is less real, and I have to try to like the arrow gets. And you see this tremendous drug and by objective measures. And I think that’s clear in many many measurable ways. And I think that that means, and the thing is, you know, this is hard to get totally accurate, but there’s reasonable estimates that you know 20 to 40% of the population can have these experiences. And it’s often the case that these people struggle to find the language that they need to articulate the both what they’ve experienced, and the aspiration, the aspirational project that they put themselves into. And I think, for me, that’s a way of disclosing, you know, the point we’re talking about here, there are certain experiences in which for a variety of reasons I won’t go into a lot of the other sort of salient concerns drop away. And so I think that that’s also very good evidence for the kind of thing we’re talking about and that, and for me that helps to also make sense to those aspects of where Plato is describing this like the Anagoga out of the cave, or the divided line, which get, you know, get described as mystical right away because he’s trying to articulate that, like, once you start making this journey and you start to get, as you said, an erotic attachment to these deeper aspects, it can sometimes draw you into some very profound transformative experiences. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, a couple of things come to mind when you say that. One is, yeah, you know, people refer to these things as mystical. And I wouldn’t usually myself adopt that language. I think there’s something right about it in the sense that, going back to your earlier point, people start studying things that they don’t know about. And I wouldn’t usually myself adopt that language. I think there’s something right about it in the sense that, going back to your earlier point, people start studying things that they realize take them sort of beyond the terms in which they’ve otherwise thought about things. Right. So there’s something right about that and then partially to call it mystical is just to recognize, oh, I got to change something. And then that said, I don’t think there’s anything particularly otherworldly in Plato. I think that the whole point of this is to appreciate better appreciate more honestly, the reality you’re dealing with right here and now. I wouldn’t waste my time studying any of this if it didn’t basically immediately translate into enriched engagement with this world. And so when you said this thing about people’s lives getting better, I think of course that’s true. That’s true. Like that’s the only thing this is about is appreciating more deeply and more honestly what’s actually going on with you already. And so it’s not about going to another world. It’s about improving your perception of your own life. And in many cases, it’s about correcting ignorances and misrepresentations you already have about what’s happening. Yes, yes, yes. And so, you know, I really like speaking of lives getting better. Like I’ve just been making some lectures on YouTube about the Republic and I just completed that with a lecture on Book 10 of the Republic. Talking about the thing that gets called the myth of Ur. And anyway, related to that. One of the points that Socrates ends up making is that, like he tells the story, it’s just a story but he says imagine the Greek hero Odysseus were in the afterlife, you know, and he got to choose a life again what would happen he chooses the life of an ordinary man. And part of the point that’s being made there is the thing that makes a life good or better. It’s not more money. It’s not more fame like those, you know, you might or might not like those things. But those aren’t the things that will make your experience of living better. What does make your experience of living better is at the deepest level, trying to be good and actually becoming a good person. And then, you know, all these things we’re talking about like developing a more honest, but for that reason a more capable relationship to what’s actually going on in your world. And that’s that I think is the ultimate point of the Republic is that all of these things we’ve been studying in the cave and all the rest of that. And I think it’s important to think about all of these sort of higher structures of reality that might think people might think of them as some mystical world beyond. Yes, yes, yes. Studies of. Yes, what you’re doing with the result that the goal in life isn’t to go elsewhere. It’s also not to get rich, it’s, you know, Odysseus should be happy to be an ordinary person like the goal is to be able to do well at, at living your life. I think that’s what it’s about and I and I, my own belief based on my experience of working with these things and living is that it’s entirely true that these studies make life a lot better. I feel like a very happy person. Me too. We share that. I think of Ursula Goodenough’s contrast between the notion of transcendence as transcendence beyond, which Nietzsche of course savages and stuff like that. And I think that’s what she’s talking about is transcendence into. That’s great. Yeah. And so that sense of, for me, and this is where I find Plato deeply phenomenological. Plato is a way of articulating how to get into the depths of my, my meaningful experience. So for me, like, I think this is the sense I’m getting for you. Metaphysics isn’t about like arcane things, right? It’s about those things that are like impregnating the very structures of how we make sense of our life. Yeah. And that’s why phenomenology is such a natural companion to this. I mean, you just mentioned phenomenology, but that’s exactly right. Like, because that’s, that’s what phenomenology tries to do, tries to take sort of the living fabric of experience as it’s happening and articulate its structure, articulate its, its, its structures, I guess, you know, which is exactly what you’re saying. So I want to bring up, this is flowing very beautiful, but I want to bring up a problem you pose. Now, forgive me, I’m only, I’ve only started the book. All right, so there may be things you said later in the book. And so, but this is just, but you bring up a problem, at least that’s being posed in the Republic, and I think it’s bang on. And you bring up the Greek word logos as this capacity for, you know, taking into account but giving account, responsiveness, responsibility, making sense, you use these terms interchangeably, and I totally agree with that. And then you bring up that there’s an ambivalence, and Highland does something somewhat similar, and Finitude and Transcendence, but there’s a, right, and Velman also does this a little bit in the reflectiveness gap, but this, that there’s an ambivalence around the logos because it is precisely our logos, our way of at least making sense is, has some fundamental, the different dimensions to it than what animals are capable of. Obviously, they’re not completely unresponsive to their environment or anything like that. But there’s a, we, as you, as you rightly put out, we’re in dimension, because we’re cultural, there’s dimensions of this that exceed what any animal is capable of. And then you, and then let’s make it a little bit, sorry, this is going to turn out to be a little bit of iron. I’m going to be making it more concrete by talking about our powers of abstraction. Which is, like, so the logos, the logos has this tremendous capacity to, to put us in touch with patterns, right, that are of a more abstract nature. And think about how, as you do in the book, how, you know, money is in one sense a very abstract kind of entity, things like that. And that, that terrifically empowers us to sort of be able to fit to the world, belong to the world that we’re in. But at the same time, it also has the capacity to remove us, to take us from. And I think that’s a great point. I think that’s a great point. I think that’s a great point. I think that’s a great point. I think that’s a great point. I think that’s a great point. I think that’s a great point. I think that’s a great point. I think that’s a great point. I think that’s a great point. I think that’s a great point. I think that’s a great point. I think that’s a great point. I think that’s a great point. I think that’s a great point. I think that’s a great point. I think that’s a great point. I think that’s a great point. I think that’s a great point. I think that’s a great point. I think that’s a great point. I think that’s a great point. I think that’s a great point. I think that’s a great point. I think that’s a great point. I think that’s a great point. I think that’s a great point. I think that’s Because we’ve been sort of talking about this in and rightly so the beauty of this the depth the air asks the attachment, the transformation, but there’s also this problem, if I can put it, there’s this, there’s this tension this issue, that’s also fundamental to the very structures by which also this problem, if I can put it, there’s this tension, this issue that’s also fundamental to the very structures by which we make sense. So I think we, in order to be responsible, should address the problematic aspect of this. Yeah, that’s great. There would of course be about that, but I’ll try to be succinct. Well, we were talking already about this idea that our lives are going to get better if we try to understand the reality of our world and so on. And so at at least one level, what that means is understanding what kind of thing we are, what it is to be an experience and being. And so that is part of metaphysics. I mean, that’s part of this study we’ve just been talking about, understanding a certain kind of reality, but it’s also it’s sort of autobiographical. Like it’s the study of ourselves, what kind of thing we are. And when you’re talking about logos, it seems to me that’s the core of that answer, right? There’s a basic way that we to understand ourselves, we have to understand that we are that kind of being that goes around taking account of things. Yes. And so on the one hand, that’s that you could think of that as a power in the sense that we can take account of things. That’s right. Yeah. But you could also think of it as a limitation in the sense that we can’t not take account of things. Yes. Yes. That’s us. Like we’re doing that. We’re figuring stuff out whether we like it or not. Yes. One of the things that’s so valuable about learning that about ourselves is or I’ll come back to that sentence. Let me just say we’re taking account whether we like it or not, but we can be better or worse at that. Yes. And so partially going back to the theme of sort of metaphysics and philosophy, but from a different angle, studying things like metaphysics and whatever else we’re studying philosophy in general, studying in general, if it’s done well, should help us to take account better. Yes. And ideally in the long run, grasping about ourselves what our reality is should help us to deal with ourselves in that situation better. So that’s kind of a kind of formal structure that I now I want to say something a little bit more concrete about that. We are beings with logos, which means we are always running around taking account of things, and that means the way we live is based on the sense we kind of harvested from the world around us. Yes. And the fact is we often can do a pretty poor job of that. And so we think what we’re doing makes sense. We think this is the right way to respond to the situation. We think this is what’s happening, and we can be wrong on every one of those accounts because we don’t get any direct input of truth about the world. Everything we do is a matter of us engaging with it and sort of shaping what’s happening in our experience. And if we’re weak in our abilities to do that well, we come out, we live out of a very twisted sense of what’s happening in the world. We can live with a very twisted sense of the impact of our own actions. Because we don’t understand stuff well, we’re unhappy because what we do and what we interact with is actually working one way, but we’re understanding it a different way. So just going back to the remarks about sex and eros and romance, I was saying there, we can fail to understand our real need for intimate companionship and think that, oh, the way to get that thing people need is to hook up arbitrarily with somebody on Tinder or something. It doesn’t mean you should never hook up arbitrarily with someone on Tinder, but if you think that’s the thing that’s going to satisfy your intimate, you’re going to be wrong. And people do make that mistake. That doesn’t happen to, I don’t think that happens to a cow or a cat because they’re not the ones, they don’t come with that demand to sort of make sense of their experience in the same way. They have instincts. Their cows are going to know how to mate with cows and so on. But people have this thing where everything that’s going to happen has to go through our little processing system, which is our Logos. And if we don’t handle it well, we tie ourselves up in knots. So I don’t think there’s any way out of that. I don’t think we’re ever going to correct that situation. That is the human condition. So you were referring to the ambivalence and the problem of Logos that I talk about in that book. Well, that’s what I’m trying to get at here. The ambivalence of Logos is we have the capacity to make sense of things, but it’s also the curse to have to make sense of things. And we’re going to be stuck in our lives with having to live with our way of making sense of things. And if we’re not very good at it, we’re going to be designing poor and unhealthy lives for ourselves. So there’s no way to fix that problem in the sense that that’s just the human condition. But what that points to is the profound need for human beings to get good at taking account, get good at using their Logos. That’s what we live by. And if you’re weak at living by your Logos, you’re going to have a crappy life. But that’s why we need to study. So I think that gets to what you’re saying. Yeah. And that’s a beautiful apology in the ancient sense for philosophy, right? At least in Heddo’s sense of philosophy as a way of life and not just the technicalities of argumentation. So that’s interesting. It’s like we clearly see responsiveness in animals. We see some perhaps responsiveness beginning to be responsibility, especially in mammals, the parental role, things like that. And then even more so in primates, Greg Enriquez makes a lot about this progression. But there’s something about us about where, and I hear you sort of articulating this phenomenology. It’s like the call to responsibility makes us push our responsiveness much more deeper than animals. And simultaneously, because we can push our responsiveness and really penetrate to the depths of reality, the call to be responsible is also increased. There’s just sort of this reinforcing loop there. And so I hear you saying not knowing about that or misapprehending it or failing to, I’ll use Frankfurt’s term, failing to take it seriously can be a root cause above and beyond particular ways in which you mess up your life. This can be a root cause of how your life can go astray in a fundamental way. So I’m hearing you correctly. Yeah, that’s right. And we’ve actually now got to the point of all my books. This is what all my books are about. They’re about trying to understand our distinctive reality as beings with logos and trying to look at the concrete ways as we live our lives from children to adolescents to adults and all the rest, the concrete ways we are engaged with that issue of making sense of things. And to try to show, I try to show, here are the issues that are at stake. Here’s how you can do it. Here are things that can go wrong. Here are the things you have to take account of. And so I am trying in those books, again, you said an apology for philosophy. That’s also exactly right. I’m trying in those books to be doing my version of teaching philosophy. Where doing that is exactly the same as understanding the issues people face in their lives of how to make sense of things and showing how you can go astray. So this conversation has really, in this last point, especially as you were articulating it, has really brought us back to what all of that writing is about. Well, this seems like a good place to bring it to a close then. That’s a very good, a very virtuous platonic circle we’ve circumambulated. So that’s, John, I really want to thank you for coming on. This has been a fantastic dialogue. I felt like we were really finding a wonderful through line and things were unfolding and mutually. And I always like to give my guests sort of the last word, any last thing you’d like to say before we bring it to a close. No, I mean, I guess I would like to second that. I thought it was delightful talking with you. I hope we’ll do it again sometime. Yes, I would like that. I also, I mean, I hope if people are interested, I hope they will look up some of my stuff. The books, they might also check out the YouTube lectures, you know, because I’m passionate about this stuff. And I really hope we’ll have something to offer people. But it’s been great talking with you. So thank you very much. Yeah, Dan, I’ve watched a couple, but Dan is Dan Chappie, my colleague. He’s a psychologist at the University of California. He is a big fan of your YouTube. If he were here, he’d hardly also recommend. He thinks your lectures, online lectures are beautiful. Oh, great. So I trust him. He’s a dear friend and we’ve been working together for years. So on his recommendation, I can hardly recommend your books. And I’m going to go out and get at least adult life because this has just been wonderful. And I think everybody who’s watching John can clearly see his passion. I’m going to ask John to send me any links to put in the notes for this video. And I would very much, John, like to talk with you again. So I hope we can talk again. Maybe you can come on Voices with Vivek again, or if you’d like me to come on your channel, whichever, I’d be happy to do either. So thank you very much. All right. Thank you.