https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=5WQKc-wjPh8
Hi, John, I’m really happy to see you again. I’m really looking forward to this conversation, Savilla. I’ve been wanting to talk to you for quite a while, so I’m very happy to be here. And I’ve so enjoyed what you’ve been doing lately. And one of the things you’ve been doing lately is talking a lot about neoplatonism, which I’ve become interested in as well, more than likely through you. So I think one thing that I saw you reading at some point, I don’t remember which video that was, but it was fairly recently, it might have been with Paul VanderPly. Could be. You were reading this book, Unborn God. And so that really excited me because I was reading it at the same time. Since you put the idea in my unconscious and in my conscience. I’m very interested because of my interest in Persuix metaphysics and a metaphysical understanding of reality for some reason really, really appeals to me. It makes the most sense to me. So in the meaning crisis, you said we don’t have a place for wisdom. And then you said something really interesting in the Four Horsemen video. You said the secular humanism is, of course, the reasonable goal of well, has the reasonable goal of well-being or equality. But then you said, and here’s Australia, for all intents and purposes is a secular humanist paradise and yet suicide is outpacing COVID deaths. Yeah, that’s what I’ve been told. And they appear to be coming, you know, they’ve become very authoritarian. So the idea of the good for everyone can be enforced by rationality just doesn’t seem to be working. But this model says there’s nothing beyond rationality. In person, we call this a subject-object way of looking at things where there’s absolute objects and absolute subjects. And that way of seeing things, he calls it subject-object metaphysics, is yield an unquenchable desire and capability for certainty, mostly over the biological threats. But at the same time, you get all that boredom because you’ve conquered the purpose that we were put on, you know, in a lot of ways put on this planet to to contend with, which is nature, let’s just say. So nature is kind of removed from the picture. And here we are in this, you know, intellectual level hell. And there’s so so there’s there’s that. So Jonathan has said then unless we all are united under a highest good, then our spiritual attention gets fragmented towards the lesser gods. And he he jokingly mentioned the flying spaghetti monster, which is which is a trope from my generation. But we see that we see that this divide now, you know, it’s causing this divide, which is like a holy war. And each side is unwilling to update their dogmatic worldview. That’s one problem. Another problem is, again, you know, the real big problem, the meta problem is the meaning crisis. But, you know, that believing in God per se, like through Christian or, you know, another dog, another established lens might not be an option for people. And Jonathan and Paul have both talked about the Christianity has a certain inadequacy these days that maybe it’s going downhill, that maybe it’s coming to an end of a cycle and there needs to be some kind of revivification. Yes. So you’re saying that in that revivification, this is what I understand. You’re seeing neoplatonism, platinus and later neoplatonists as a possibility, in fact, as a strong possibility of a place to look, to revivify the world. To revivify this this lack of coherence on a spiritual level and that perhaps even is it fair to say that the religion that’s not a religion might be really grounded in neoplatonism? Yeah, it properly understood as a source for revivification, not the revivification itself. Right. We can’t go back to neoplatonism any more than we go back to shamanism or things like that. And there are aspects of platonism that are incommensurate with what is happening right now. Porphyry begins his biography of platinus by saying platinus always behaved as someone who is ashamed of having a body. There are aspects of neoplatonism that need to be, I don’t know, reformed or even rejected in order to deal with the profound, I think, emergence of the understanding of of our embodiment and how absolutely primordial grounding essential this is to all of our cognition and to all of our existential modes of being. So that the notion of perfection as static rest is also, I think, in an adequate aspect of neoplatonism. And thirdly, neoplatonism has to be has to return and it is doing this, by the way, the work of DC Schindler and others and also just straight platonists like Bremen and others. It has to return and do a proper response to normalism. It has to be a post-nominalist neoplatonism that can embrace a dynamic understanding of the sacred and an embodied way of being. And that’s different enough from classical neoplatonism. We might create the ugly neologism of calling it neo-neoplatonism, but I don’t want to do that because that’s just stupid. Can I ask you real quick before we proceed, can you, for my viewers, give me the definition of normalism? So normalism is the idea that there are there’s variations on it. So it’s not quite a homogeneous group, but it’s generally the idea that there are no universals, that categories don’t really exist, that there are no real patterns to use a Peugeot way of talking. Although some normalists think there might be causal patterns, but that’s when you get the, so you get the so, you know, and so all that really exists, it’s all that really exists are raw individuals. It is to take to its extreme culmination, the intuition that what really exists are things, which is not necessarily material things, but all that really exists are things. And this is the stark opposite to Platonism, which takes that, to use Plato’s term, the forms, although we have to really go back and rethink what that means, the forms are not things and the primary difficulty we face is we try to think of the forms, those patterns that ground inference and ground reality, if you’re not anomalous, as not as things, which is a very hard way. So it requires a metanoia, it requires a kind of conversion in your thinking. I would put it to you that Persec is talking about a non-thingy thing with quality, right? And so he borders on paradox, because when you’re trying to talk about something that is not a thing in the language, in language that is very thingy in nature and orientation, you get into particular struggles. And what happens in the his anomalism got sort of tired, maybe, and I’m trying to be charitable here, with sort of the mystery and the paradox, and look, there’s just things. And so any patterns that exist are in the head, that sort of occam that come up. So things are only grouped by our naming of them, they form no real groups, no real patterns in reality. An aspect of that comes into Kant, where we can never know the thing in itself, right? Because we’re locked into the categories that the mind imposes on reality. Kant, of course, faces the terrific problem, which all normalism faces, but if we can’t directly know the patterns in the world, how do we directly know the patterns in the mind? And are the patterns in the mind themselves real? And of course, Kant was wrestling with this, because Hume came to the conclusions that the patterns in the mind are also not real, that there is no self and there is no memory around, you get absolute skepticism, right? So normalism tends to collapse increasingly into sort of miraculous coincidence. It’s just a coincidence that this and this and this, and that’s what Hume gets you to. There is no causation, it’s just an ongoing miraculous coincidence that A is followed by B, and that sort of thing. So that’s nominalism and kind of its offshoots. Kant isn’t properly called just anomalous, and Hume isn’t properly called just anomalous, but I’m trying to show how that comes into two exemplary figures of modernity and of the environment. Well, it does seem to be the undercurrent of science is everything is random. No, you see, that’s why I push back. I would say with Platonism and a lot of current Platonists like Bremen and Spencer and others, science actually depends on real patterns. Oh, but the nominalism itself, which gives us the idea that everything’s random, is that what you’re saying? No, I mean, you have to be really careful. No, no, I’m not being critical. I’m saying we have to be careful to make that pronouncement. Because you step back and notice that we, at one time we will say science says everything is random, and then another time we’ll say science says everything is completely deterministic, and those two contradict each other. And what we’re doing is we’re picking up on different aspects, different facets of science when we say those things. Science, I think, is ultimately not clear, and this is part of what’s going on in the philosophy of science, about what ultimately under what grounds it makes possible the practice of science. I happen to agree with many people that it’s platonic, that there’s real patterns in the world, that E equals MC squared is to say something true about reality that would be true even if there was no human beings. There are, of course, people, and I want to be clear that I don’t represent a consensus, but there are people within the philosophy of science that think, no, no, those patterns are just pragmatic. They’re just useful ways for us to think. And when you get that way, you start to shift towards anomalous orientation. But you can have somebody like Einstein, who’s very much platonic because he’s a spinazist, right? And God does not play dice with the universe and all that kind of thing. So you’re saying, well, I mean, I would think that if we’re talking about embodiment, then that means we have a certain manifestation in reality. And that’s it. That’s exactly the thing. And that’s the thing that, like the genius of phenomenology in Marleau-Ponty, right? Marleau-Ponty, like it’s like, this is up to, this is, he is the philosopher of participatory knowing, if I want to put it that way. Marleau-Ponty’s point is the body is our access to the world because of the nature it has. He has this, it’s a horrible term. It’s dehiscence, which is what it means is this, like, and you can do it when you’re, you can touch yourself, but you don’t even have to touch yourself. You can just do it in reflection. But if you touch yourself, it’s easier. I can, I can, my body can touch and be touched. It’s the only, that’s the only, right? Nothing else. You can touch the table, but you’re not being, right? But whenever I’m touching anything, I’m also being touched by it. And my body is touching and being touched. My body simultaneously folds into me and opens into the world. So my body is one among all the bodies, but it is also folds back to being uniquely me. And the body is actually the vehicle. The, the, the Neoplatonist had a wonderful term for this, akama. It’s the vehicle, the vehicle by which we participate in being. Yes. So the body, this is what I meant when I say, you know, Marta Ponti’s point about the world is only given to us in so far as we are in contact with it by being a body. We don’t have a body to say we have a body is a modal confusion, a Cartesian modal confusion. We are a body and a body is simultaneously a touching and a being touched. And that’s what contact is. Contact isn’t fusion and it isn’t representation. It’s touch, it’s touching while being touched. It’s a contact and a separation at the same time. And that’s the key. That notion of contact is at the core of the platonic idea of how we know. That makes sense because while Persig would say that, you know, having about like being a body, let’s just say, is biological quality is something that we, you know, you could look at it through the evolutionary lens, although that person would not, I don’t think he would allow that as an ex-escalantory theory. That would be, yeah, help you understand the biological level, but it wouldn’t explain a human being at all or their social patterns or anything like that. He would say that you have this basis of biology and that’s a level and we absolutely, you know, that is within us. It’s one of the three levels, the biological, the social and the intellectual that make up a human being. And that within that biological level is a certain way of, you know, operating in the world, in the physical world. And if you’re looking at something like Jonathan Pageau and he says, this is the nature of attention, then that is a universal thing because this is the nature of how our brain works in the world to engage with the world, to participate in the world. And it is in this hierarchical way, relevance realization, you know, what we’ve all talked about many times. So you’ve got that as a substrate and then it gets interpreted, you know, the, I think it’s important in Persig to note that the levels are emergent. They’re not linear. Something jumps off, like when when Pageau says, and I’m going to play a little clip later from this clip of Pageau, he says that things reach a top or a bottom and then that’s it. Then it has to jump off into something else, which I think kind of describes emergence in a scientific way. It does. And that’s what Greg Enriquez is trying to get with his. Greg has the idea of these orders and then there’s these cusp points. And then I’ve made this, I’ve made this claim to Greg and he’s responding to it. That’s a neoplatonic way of thinking of reality. Yeah, that’s what it seems like. And so then you get to this point where the social patterns are no longer, you know, they’re no longer just reflections of social, of biological, of- They take on properties of their own. Yeah. They take on properties of their own and these properties are social patterns and they’re really important and they’re their own thing. And you can’t say, well, because the wolves were pack animals, that’s why we go to church, you know, and that’s what the evolutionary biologists often say things like that. And so that level, it seems, is being neglected in our modern way of seeing things. We tend to, because the third level is of course the intellectual level, which is where we can live, especially in the virtual world. We’re living in this- Yeah. This world of ideas. And that means that we become cut off from all these social patterns, these actual social patterns in the world, which is what, you know, Jonathan, Peugeot bemoans is you don’t have this community anymore. You don’t get in the church with people and, you know, you’re not doing these things in actuality. And of course COVID is making this worse. COVID is really, I mean, in a lot of ways, and there are some ways it’s making it better, but- In a lot of ways it’s making it worse. I agree with that. Yeah. Yeah. So, you have this biological basis that’s a universality of how we see, you know, how we have some things that just are going to be patterns because we can’t overcome our biology, because that’s a substrate, you know, of who we are. And within- So- With, oh, I’m sorry. I was just going to say, I mean, could I stop at this point? Because- Yeah. And I’m not accusing Persig of this, but this is a danger that people get into. They think of this as a ladder. No, I don’t think it’s a ladder as much as it is something that is not overcomeable. We are, you know, we are contained within these biological bodies and there are certain ways that they’re going to respond to the world that are universal. Yeah. But what I mean to say is, even at the height of our moving around in propositional space, we are still grounded and dependent on the biological processes of relevance realization and also the social processes of justification and perspectival alignment, et cetera, that stuff. So, I tend to think of it, what happens is more of a backgrounding and awareness, right? And of focusing, if that makes sense. So we pretend, and that’s an important word in a sense of bullshit, that we can just move around in the propositional without realizing that like our ability to move around in the propositional is ultimately grounded in the procedural, right? That’s what allows us to move around. And our ability to move between skills is grounded in the perspectival. And then our ability to move between different states, right, of consciousness is grounded in the participatory. That’s what I want to say. And I think ultimately the participatory is grounded in something that is not a way of knowing, but makes all ways of knowing possible. And we could perhaps get to that. So it’s a danger. And this is another sort of criticism I have of some of the neoplatonic tradition. And this is where I sort of push against Jonathan in some ways. We can reify this into a hierarchy and a hierarchy looks like a ladder. And a ladder is to misrepresent. And we can think of like the one, the great, the ultimate reality in neoplatonism is somehow up there, really, really up there, right? And that is a fundamental, that is to be, to use Wittgenstein’s model, that’s to be in the grip of a picture that is actually misrepresenting and preventing us from understanding what people like Platinus and Aregina are trying to talk about. I just wanted to intervene on that because like, I’m not saying you’re saying that or Perseker saying that, but I’m saying this is a perennial attendant danger of misrepresentation that has to constantly be addressed. So you’re, what you are saying is that, to rep me if I’m wrong, you’re saying that, yes, we’re grounded in the somebody’s beings and that’s going to give us some commonality. But the actual way that we interpret information isn’t the patterns themselves are not that delineated, that they are more of a process. That there’s more of a continuum, bottom up and top down. At, to quote Nietzsche, at the height of your spirituality, you’ll find the depths of your sexuality and vice versa and vice versa. It’s, there’s no leaving behind. That’s why I prefer the idea of acceptation. I don’t leave behind that my tongue can taste and move food around when I accept it for speech. I haven’t left that behind. That’s right. It’s still there. And in fact, there’s ways in which my speech is limited because I still need to use my tongue to speak and move food around. Right. Like it’s, you’ve got to see it as a much more interpenetrating understanding. Well, I think that, I think that’s where these levels does do make sense as to what you just said, because you’ve got your biological body with the, with the tongue that is shaped in this way. You have tasting it, which is biological quality, tasting food, your tongue speaking, which is then language is a social pattern and what it says is an idea. Exactly. Exactly. And notice how you, and notice when people are often speaking, they’re usually, sorry, when they’re thinking, they’re often sub vocalizing. They’re using, so like, you know, if you anesthetize this stuff, it makes it, or like, or something that’s maybe easier for people to understand. If you prevent people from gesturing by having them hold onto a pole, their ability to think and solve problems degrades. So the, right. Cause we’ve exacted our ability to act into pantomime and then we’ve exacted pantomime into gesture. And then we’ve exacted gesture into thought movements. And, but, but it’s not like I leave it behind. That’s why grabbing the pole affects the upper level. Yeah. So, and, and this is interesting. You said you and Transfigured talked about this. You said that in the moment you’re making decisions there, you know, and, and Persig would call them the quality event in like, is just in the moment is absolutely not in time. Really it, it, it, it acts, it kind of isn’t in time. Yeah. The, at least the, the spark and then you manifest it and that will be in time, but the spark itself is not the quality stimulus. And, but from that is all of history or all of everything. And the person would say your entire mythos is contained in that moment of quality. Yes. And so what it’s, it’s, and this is Whitehead’s point. It’s all of it comes to that point. And then it gives birth to something beyond itself. That’s right. Beyond itself. That’s exactly right. And Persig would absolutely say that. Right. And so every single time it’s beyond itself. So one way of understanding Neoplatonism is to try to deeply educate. And I don’t just mean give information. I mean, to transform consciousness and character, deeply educate people so that they can track that so that they can get to the depths of intelligibility of how we make sense and to understand reason. Look, this is, and this is a point that DC Schindler makes, like, like again, and this is where I differ with Persig, because I think he’s thinking of rationality in Cartesian terms, right? The Neoplatonic understanding of rationality is fundamentally different. Right. Fundamentally different. Like reason is inherently ecstatic, the ecstasis to stand beyond yourself. So let’s, let’s take it that at the core of reasoning is the ability to self-correct. That’s what we mean by rational. Well, that’s an inherently self-transcending action. Absolutely. Yeah. Now, what that means is that it’s not only that aspiration is rational, Agnes Kellard has made that case very strongly, but the reverse I’m arguing is also the case. Rationality is inherently, it’s not just that aspirational is rational. Rationality is inherently aspirational. Rationality is all rational. Think about it this way. I have, I have like propositional logic and I move into predicate logic and then I move from predicate logic to modal logic and I move from it. Right. The thing that’s moving me between the logics is much more what rationality is than the dwelling within any particular logic. Sure. Go ahead. Go ahead. I’m going to defend Persig a little bit on that point, because I think what he wanted was the reason. I think that we, what he thought reason was what is what you’re describing. That’s good. And I think what Persig was saying is the classic logic left brain reason being at the top of the hierarchy is the problem. Well, that I would agree with that. Because what you said about Australia is an exact is a perfect example of that. Yes. Yes, exactly. That’s exactly the point. The point is when you, when you. Levin has a distinction between totalization and infinity. And he points out that Plato was about infinity rather than totalization, right? Totalization is I have the complete system, right? I have the complete system where infinity says no reason will always be moving beyond. We only discover this is Hegel’s great point. We only discover the limit in thought when we have overcome it. And that’s, you know, the owl of Minerva only takes flight at dusk. It’s only when we move beyond the limits can we then we can correct the limitations that have held us back. That reason is fundamentally an act of self-transcendence to be properly understood. Yeah. And I think that that’s that that makes sense, because also what you’re talking about is a pattern of cognition. Deeply. I’m deeply, what I’m saying is, so when we’re not trying to get a total picture, the totalization and Levadas’s point, of course, is that there’s a deep connection between totalization and totalitarianism. They go together like this. And that’s absolute reason, right? That’s reason taken to its limit in terms of let’s clear up all uncertainty. And the only way you’re going to do that is enforce it top down. Yeah. But that for me, that is actually a monster. That is not reason. That is to make a kind of propositional totality equivalent to all of reality. And this is always the project of ideology. And that is actually the greatest form of bullshit. That is something that is pretending to be reason and thereby misdirecting us. Yes. Let’s say if you extract out only the logic part of reason, you know, only the one, two, three going down the line, adding things up. Yeah. And you leave out all the value. This is what Perceq was saying. If you leave out value and you only take the categorization, the rational knife, then you end up with something like that. So yeah. Yeah, go ahead. Go ahead. I just was saying that many people think, you know, since the Enlightenment, you know, I mean, I’m sure this is not, you know, totality of what the Enlightenment thinking is. But since the Enlightenment reason has kind of winnowed down into this narrow, narrow rational life, he calls, and that’s where all the problems are. And this is what Perceq would say too, is that you’ve got all this fragmentation now. But the, yes, exactly. But the answer is not. And this is like, don’t be, don’t be off put by the title. You see Simblers’ profound book, The Catholicity of Reason, in which he tries to rearticulate. The Catholic meaning all inclusive, right? Acting towards the whole. And the whole, and he explicitly says the whole is not the totality. To the fundamental misunderstanding of the whole as a formalizable totality is the mistake that I’m trying to criticize, right? That’s the fundamental mistake, right? That, right? That I can, I can, what I can do is I can get, I can get a formal, meaning a structurally complete set of propositions that will, will grasp, be isomorphic to the whole. That is the fundamental arrogance and hubris and mistake that needs to be addressed. Look, if you take out of reason the love for what’s true, good, and beautiful, you don’t have reason anymore. That’s what a neoplatonist would say. If you take away value. Well, and, but you see, the problem, and I know you’ve talked about this, the problem, and we have to be careful when we say that to people who are listening, because value doesn’t mean what it means within the Enlightenment framework. Value means my stated preference about something. That’s not what value means. Value means that there’s a fun, I mean, this is what I understand in Persec, or how I see you using it. Value means a fundamental connectedness, right? That orients things in a profound way. It’s so that my love of truth is not something that I prefer. It is what makes it possible for me to think. So value isn’t when we’re going to use this word. It’s not at the level of our preferences. It’s at the primordial level of our grounding. It’s right. If I don’t have, right, if I’m not oriented towards the truth, I’m not oriented towards the good, if I’m not oriented towards the beautiful, I am not a cognitive agent. So for me, we’re just talking about sort of the transcendental aspects of relevance realization. If we don’t have those, you’re not a cognitive agent. Every time you select your attention, you’re loving the true, you’re loving the good, you’re loving the beautiful without fully unpacking it. Yeah. Well, I think he would say, you know, I would say that that kind of value or preference, you know, that could be parasitic processing. If you are valuing, if you aren’t oriented, because he has a, you know, there’s a, if you, if you’re coming at it, not through this openness to quality, and this is very different, this is where it gets very difficult to explain what he’s talking about. It’s kind of like the Zen not knowing, you know, it’s the, it’s kind of like the not knowing of, of some of these, some of these Christian mystics. If you’re not in that space, if you’re coming in it through ego, if you’re anxious, if you’re bored, if there’s all, there’s all this sub processes going on, then you might not connect with the highest good and that capability to see value, that valuing is going to be diverted to something lesser. I agree. I agree. I mean, this is also from the neoplatonic tradition. Although I think if David Hume said it, which as well, which is a very odd thing to come out of Hume’s mouth. We don’t actually, they’re not as streamlined as we’d like them to be. Nothing is. He said, I think, and this comes out of the neoplatonic tradition, we don’t actually pursue evil directly. We prefer a lesser good to a greater good. That’s how we fall into things, right? That makes a lot of sense. Yeah. So one way of understanding neoplatonism is to see it as basically a thousand year project of trying to unpack what Plato was saying through Socrates, with Socrates said, his wisdom consisted in him knowing that he did not know, which is not skepticism. He’s not him claiming he doesn’t know. That’s the easy mistaking of what Socrates is on about. So there’s a direct line, and I’m going to argue this when I do after Socrates, between Socrates saying, I know that I do not know, and Nicholas of Cusa talking about learned ignorance, or even better, learned ignorance, right? And you can see that in Erogena, it comes to a culmination in Nicholas of Cusa. And so for me, trying to get people to understand that we are always in the face of infinity, and we have to stop pretending that we have totality, is one of the clarion calls that I want to make, and I can make that well by making use of the neoplatonic heritage. That’s definitely something that has really interested me is, there’s something, you have these scientists, let’s just say they’re in this scientific space, where they feel like they’re absolutely objective. They feel like, and this is what Peugeot said in that, there’s a nice clip with all four of you talking about your conception of the meaning crisis in the Four Horsemen that Jonathan posted, and he said that, he said that that Jonathan posted, and he said that, and he heard you say this, and he really lit up, and then he restated it in his own words, which is, how can you think you’re standing outside of your experience and being objective? There’s no possibility for pure objectivity. Yeah, there’s, this is Thomas Nagel made that point in a very great book, The View from Nowhere. The idea that we can have a view from nowhere is a fundamental mistake, but the typical reaction to that is a fundamental mistake too. The typical reaction is a kind of perspectivalism in which all we have is an indefinite number of perspectives, and they’re all equally good, so you get a kind of complete relativism. That also is a mistake. To say that we’re not, yeah, just like, that view doesn’t include the capacity to take the view within itself, right? That’s what I meant about that, and this is Nagel’s point, right? That the attempt to do that doesn’t provide an ontology that actually grounds the practice, doesn’t give a place for the existence of science itself. Yeah, exactly. Right. So you’re saying that basically, let me put it in really basic terms, please. One of my besetting sins is I don’t put things in accessible enough terms, so please. Well, you’re working on a vocabulary that, you know, you’re working on vocabulary to really try to pinpoint these concepts down, and that’s so valuable, so, you know, we’d rather read the glossary, you know, we take it worth it reading the glossary. But what I think it must mean then is why would you even want to do science at all if you didn’t value the fruits of science? So there has to be a value, and I think this is probably the most basic way you could put it. There is some value in doing science. Let’s say you could parse it out and say, well, because we finally discovered that if you don’t, if you can step away from matter or material, then you can actually manipulate it and then you can live longer. So that’s a value. And I would say that that is… Yeah, but you can’t do science if that’s your value, right? If you try to do science that way, you get corrupted by funding, right? So when scientists are at their best, but I’m going to reinforce your point, when scientists are at their best, they’re doing it because they love the goodness and beauty of truth, right? And then when you say, well, tell me how the world is such that that makes sense to you, right? What is it about truth that’s inherently good and beautiful that draws you into the practice of science? And tell me how that sits within your worldview. That’s a way of putting it. Because if the scientist is drawn by anything other than that, the scientists will not engage in what is fundamental to science, which is the continual attempt to overcome self-deception. Science is a family of methods for overcoming self-deception in our attempt to understand the world. Science isn’t its propositions. So you’re talking about, would you say then that the original science in the Western tradition, which is ancient Greek, is that what they would say? That’s what Stansky meant, right? And you can see it. You can see somebody in the middle of the Enlightenment, somebody that people must read more. Spinoza trying to recover that sense of science and integrate it with the emerging sense of experimental mathematical science that was happening in the Enlightenment. And Spinoza is trying to say, we don’t have to set these against each other. We can actually deeply interweave them. Read Carlisle’s book, Spinoza’s Religion. And if I could recommend one book on Spinoza, it’s a recent book and it’s brilliant. It’s brilliant. And that’s what you can see Spinoza saying. He’s saying, that ancient sciencia and modern experimental mathematical science don’t have to go their separate ways. They can actually be deeply, deeply interwoven together. And that is a culmination, by the way, in an attempt to bring the Neo-Platonic tradition, probably via Maimonides and via Kabbalah and other things. It’s hard to tell with Spinoza, but it’s coming into Spinoza in that fashion. And not to be pretentious, but that’s what I see my project as being. Trying to do exactly that. Get the older sciencia and the modern, in the archetypal sense of modern, mathematical experimental science interwoven together again. So that would mean, and that’s, I think that’s a great project. I mean, more than that. I think that that is a necessary project if we’re going to allow science to do what it’s supposed to do instead of going off the directions that we see it going off in. Like you said, funding, or like you said, corruption, or like you said, politicization is what we’re seeing now. And so if you’re doing that, that is again, a reorientation of science in the same way that maybe Neo-Platonism can reorient us, you know, this Neo-Platonist tradition, all manner of human endeavor, being at the substrate of it. So to go off of that, I was thinking that, let’s just say, let’s just say you’ve got this Neo-Platonic God. Sorry, that’s just a fun sentence. That’s just a fun sentence. It sounds like we bumped into him at a bar. So that’s what you’ve been for the past 2000 years. Boy, we sure needed you. Where have you been? Okay, so you have the want. And the thing about the difference, I think, from with the one and with our modern thinking oriented around a more, let’s just say, dogmatic understanding of Christianity or even other formal religions which have this implication in it somehow, and that there is something to be found, maybe not even, well, let’s just say in science, perhaps coming from more formal religions, ultimately there’s a materialism that doesn’t exist in Neo-Platonism in the sense that this God is ineffable. It is a principle. It is not something that has any manifestation whatsoever. It’s just something we can only infer from its attributes, which means that there is a need for a more formal religion. And so I think that’s the which means that there is, I mean, this is just my understanding, which means that for a scientifically oriented person, a person who believes that somehow the philosopher’s stone can be found, let’s say, somehow believes that the answer to all our problems is in more messing around with the material, messing around with matter, that unknowing, that inability, that they would have to, able to orient under a greater good, under this ontology, they would have to embrace not knowing. And that’s something that many scientists, many scientifically minded and many materialistically minded people are not willing to do. Yes, but I want to talk about this really deeply. I think you’re at the right place, but I want to unpack it a lot. Because describing it as not knowing is, there’s an ignorance of privation, and then there is a learned ignorance that is superlative. There’s, and Platinus, in fact, makes the distinction between a not knowing that is a falling away from being a privation, a lack, right? And not knowing that is a super abundance. And so I prefer to actually use the two different terms, not knowing is just ignorance, learned ignorance is what is that encounter of the super abundance of being. Can I read something from Caribbean that I think describes what you’re saying? Okay, this is on page 139. In the sheer dread of holding to nothingness, this is the classic boundary which marks true negative theology from the kind of negation, which is concerned solely with the intellectual negation of metaphysical concepts. The way to attain to unity with the good or to see the vision of the good is to simply let go of all other things. And that includes knowing the way Platinus goes beyond knowing, rather than negating knowing, you’re going beyond knowing. And then he says, and this is Platinus, our way then takes us beyond knowing, there may be no wandering from unity, knowing and noble must all be left aside every object of knowledge, even the highest we must pass by for all that is good is later than this, and derives from this as from the sun, all the light of day. Yes. So the principle of the sun and the illumination of the sun. Well, let’s pick that up. Right. Okay. And then he says the soul and then he says something like, I’m sorry, I just want to quickly throw this in so I don’t forget it. He says you have to become a certain kind of person, you know, and then the soul can do nothing but must content itself with waiting. One must not chase after the good, says Platinus, but wait quietly until it appears. Right. And that’s the receptivity that’s so central. But Platinus also says something, and this is, and this gets towards something that’s showing up in it, I would say in this corner of the internet. Okay, you can’t know the one, you can only be it. And that’s not the same thing as just being ignorant in the normal meaning of the word. So, right, what’s at the core of the platonic notion of knowing? It’s ultimately participatory knowing. It’s knowing by the union of love, right? I love, right, I love being. That’s the love of truth, the love of goodness, the love of beauty, that I am, there’s a way in which I can love being and I am united to it in love. And that, so this is why the metaphor that’s used, and it’s picked up and celebrated and developed by Christian Platonism, is the idea of marriage or a profound kind of love between individuals. So, when you, think about when you, when you really love someone deeply. There’s the receptivity you were pointing to a minute ago. I allow them to indwell me, but they also, this is the reciprocal opening, I also, I find in them a welcoming receptivity that allows me to participate, right, in them, to indwell them. And then that is, that unfolds, that opens up, that has a life of its own that is not bound to just my egocentric concerns. Is that okay? Did that work? So, but that’s our relationship. Altinus’s point is that’s our, and what happens is there’s a kind of unity within me, a unity within, but it’s not a total, it’s not a totality, it’s not a closed unity. That’s the thing, it’s an infinite unity, which sounds like a contradiction. There’s an ongoing unification of me or complexification, as I like to put it, and of the other person and of us together. Does that, and in that, I’m disclosing the one. Yeah, yeah, it makes total sense, because it’s a conjugate, there’s a conjugate nature in this, like this is, there is, it’s like a process, and this is very much like a person, it’s a process that even though you can see the two parts, can’t be separated. That’s right, and then what, so Platonus said though, as he said, as long as you fall apart, as he said, as long as you fall, as long as you are still in the realm of knowing and the known, you’re still not the one, because the one is what ultimately makes the unity between the known and the knower and the known possible, and so you can’t know it, you can’t think it, you can only be it, but that’s not the same thing as me not knowing how much tin is being produced in South Africa. It’s not the same kind of phenomena at all. We’re talking about the fact that, and so it’s, that we get to, this is not a kind of knowing, this is a way of dwelling, to use Heidegger’s term, this is a paradoxical play, where I can say to my beloved, I won’t use your name, but right, I simultaneously know her better than anyone else, and I simultaneously don’t know her better than anyone else. Both of those are better. Do you see what I’m trying to get at? Yeah, and that’s when, that’s the place, right, where we realize, not think, we realize the one, and that means to try and talk about it as any kind of thing that we can get some kind of coherent totality around it, is to fundamentally misrepresent it, but that is not to say that it is only reached in thought. Like, it, I have to, like, when I love her, I don’t love her just in thought, I love her with all of my being, right, that, so it, the de-unification of me reaches to the molecules of my body, if I can put it that way, right, and so it’s not an abstraction, this, and this keeps hitting me like this, I was reading in a letter by Spinoza, and he says it, and this is how you can tell when you’re in the presence of a brilliant mind, because they’ll say things like, oh yeah, and you go, what? Right, and he said, he said, God does not have abstract thoughts. Everything is the most intimate it can be. We have to remember that we move up in abstraction that has to dissolve back into the most profound kind of intimacy. That is the state at which we dwell the one. We cannot know it. I think when a lot of people are trying to talk about a fifth P, right, well, you know, the prophetic or the parabolic or the poetic, right, all those, right, and what they’re trying to do, and I think they’re making a category mistake, they’re trying to put something else in the set of knowings. What they’re actually, I think, trying to get at is that within each kind of knowing, there is this self-transcending unification, there is this self-transcending dynamical coupling to things, you know this with Persic, right, within each, so I can transcend the propositional and the procedural and the procedural and the perspectival and the perspectival and the participatory, but the participatory, right, which is this act of knowing by loving doesn’t ground in a deeper kind or other kind of knowing. It grounds in that horizon between knowing and not knowing in which self-transcendence occurs. It’s paradoxical not knowing, right, that’s why I call it paradoxical dwelling, and in that sense, and this is a paradoxical way of putting it, it’s both a fifth P and not a fifth P, right, and trying to get it inside the box is, I think, a fundamental mistake, and I think, and so the Neoplatonists say, you know, you take, you get, you go down into the depths of knowing by loving, you know, mutually indwelling, right, that, you know, coupled, right, that coupling to reality, and then you realize you can’t know, you become the one, and that’s a paradoxical dwelling, and that’s why, and that’s the Caravine book, right, the way of saying, the cataphatic and the way of not saying, apophatic, have to be put together in what she calls the hypophatic, right, the hyperphatic, right, exactly, that’s it, exactly, did any of that make any sense? No, it makes a lot of sense, especially because I’ve read that section, you know, I’ve read the other section. I’m just going to make a relationship with with Perseg real quick, and then can we, maybe we want to go into that section a little bit? Sure, sure. So I think that, I think that the reason that I like so much that what you’re saying, what you know, what you’re saying about Neoplatonism, what Jonathan is saying about these, you know, ever revivifying patterns always, which is the, I think very similar. If you’re saying one thing, yeah, the place that is no place in which the patterns revivify themselves, that’s the one. Yes, yes, yes, it is outside of time, it’s outside of space, it’s outside of, it’s also inside of time and inside of space, right, it is that which holds transcendence and imminence, time and eternity and time together. Well, it has to manifest in time and space somehow, it has to, you know, the actual, let’s just say in Perseg terms, the actual quality event when you detect this one, when you are, when you become the one in that quality moment, in that quality event, that stimulus is outside of time and space, it manifests in time and space, as let’s just say, would you say the soul? As far as what we mean by the soul is our capacity to be a unified being in relationship to the unity of being. Yes, that’s what I mean by soul. Yeah, so it is, this is, our soul is the animating spirit, let’s just say, is this the spirit of the one that we become. Yeah, I mean, I can’t disagree with you on any principle, I try to separate soul and spirit, soul is that, you know, the unification of me that resonates with the universe, right, whereas spirit is the self-transcendence that’s inherent in that. Sure, so let’s say soul is that which animates all of reality, through this quality stimulus, through this manifestation of the one. Yes, yeah, but the point, see the point I keep wanting to make is that language, which sounds all mystical, that language is in the very guts of the intelligibility that is presupposed in the living practice of science, so thinking of it is over there, woo woo, and that’s why, and you know, we got to avoid sort of romantic interpretations of neoplatonism, because we have to say no, no, remember, we want to bring the schiancia and the science deeply, show how they’re deeply interwoven together. We want to, so all must, so the grand unified theory isn’t some kind of getting to the bottom of the quarks, grand unified theory is us seeing the one in all. Yeah, in which getting to the bottom of the quarks is a proper dimension of that, but also reaching to the heights of relativity and also plumbing the depths of phenomenology. All of the, this is what, this was Whitehead’s great proposal, like that what we have to do is, right, we want, again, not a totality, but we want to, we want to extasis towards the whole, because that is, that is both, that is both the archaic, the grounding beginning and the tea loss, that towards which it aspires. It’s the archaic and the tea loss of reason. Right, that makes sense. So, so in terms of quantum physics, I’ve been thinking. That’s almost as good as, so, so it seems to me that there’s, now you said this in, this, you might have said this, you said this in Transfigured, I also saw that, I just saw that great conversation you had with Paul and Theor. Yeah, and, and Paul. John and the two Pauls. I said the most Christian situation you could possibly get. It seems, and in the video with Transfigured, you said that physics has not had a new idea or something like that, or it’s really been stagnant for 40 years. Yeah, theoretical physics, right? So it seems to me, though, that there’s something wrong with quantum. And this is just me. So I’m just going to throw a lot of people would agree with you from David Beaumont, right, that there’s something wrong. Many people have come to the conclusion that the Copenhagen interpretation, which is that there is no ontological interpretation, there’s an only an epistemological interpretation that that, that that conclusion ultimately can’t work because your epistemology has to ground out in an ontology. There are of course multiple proposals. And that makes sense. Yes, and I think that’s fundamentally right. Because the smallest thing we’ve ever seen is a proton. Yes. And that, and that is the limit of our intelligibility of matter. And yet it seems like quantum is trying to make an argument that there are smaller and smaller particles. And I would say that if you’re trying to address science in terms of this, in terms of, you know, within, within the Platonism, it seems to me, and, and within Peugeot’s modality, there is a limit to what you can know. So maybe that’s the limit of what we can know of matter. And what is underneath that isn’t, you know, we’re trying to make matter out of something that isn’t matter. But that is so difficult for us to wrap our minds around, because we feel like everything has to be a particle. And I think there’s a big problem in that. Yeah, there is. And this is where the science and the science can come together. Right. So what we’re in both going up and going down, we reach, we reach the limits of thinking of reality in a thingly fashion. Exactly. And what happens is we’re trying to pass outside of the modern, and I mean, the enlightenment, and then its progression notion of matter as a thing or a substance as a thingy, as the stuff of things into the ancient notion of matter, which is the real possibility that is shaped by right by, by form, right? That’s that’s the ancient view. And what happens when you drop to the quantum is this is why you start talking about probability relations and probability way collapsing and all of this, which is completely metaphysical in the proper sense of the word, because it’s passing beyond if we understand, and I’m saying maybe we don’t, if we understand physics as bound into stuff thing mentality, then we drop below it in the quantum, we also reach above it in the relativistic, the curvature of space and time, what the heck does that mean? And we try to think of it as stuff thing, and Einstein keeps telling us you can’t. Here’s, here’s what I, I, not just me, but other people are saying, especially the current attempts, the neoplatonic attempts to understand the neoplatonic whiteheadian attempts to understand the relationship between quantum mechanics and relativity. The reason why we can’t reconcile them is that they are beyond thingly ways of thinking, and yet we’re trying to reconcile them within thingly ways of thinking, right? And like, think about what it takes. What does your ontology have to be if you think that there are mathematical realities at the bottom that are somehow, you know, outside of location, all of the properties of a thing, they’re not local, they’re all this, and it like, the weirdness of it. And of course, the big mistake people make is they think that quantum weirdness can be used to explain all the weirdnesses that they want. Exactly. It’s like cultural relativism in a way. It’s misused. Yeah, it’s exactly the wrong response. So, you know, quantum mechanics is weird, and consciousness is weird. So, oh, right, right. And like, that’s not, that’s not, that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about the fact that we are, if you’ll allow me, we’re bumping up against the neoplatonic horizons at the bottom and at the top of our ontology. Yes, yes. And maybe, like someone scientifically minded would find that very hard to accept. And I think that that’s where you would have to have a transformation of consciousness in the sciences in order to better, you know, to better, and I think this is what you’re saying. Yes. And John Spencer, in his book, The Eternal Law, when he talks about what was happening at the beginning of the 20th century, he talks about how all of these figures are deeply influenced by sort of this family of neoplatonism, spinosism, and Vedanta that are all doing the same kind of non-duality and bringing up, you know, emergence and emanation, and they’re all philosophically, you know, educated and often in a, it’s, you know, I still know that Oppenheimer quotes the Bhagavad Gita when they set the atomic bomb off, right? It’s like, these people are living it, like it’s deeply within them, right? And they’re closer to it than we are, because, you know, if you’re going to say, if you’re going to say metaphysically that the one is beyond, you know, beyond us, that is the one is not conceptualizable, let’s say, then they are close, but at one, but there is the attribute of the one which is manifestation, and you could say that that is the original division of heaven and earth. To have manifestation, you have to have some kind of interaction. I agree. The one is, go ahead. I’m sorry, can I just show you a quick graphic? I’m going to try to share the screen, oops. So, my friend Paul is doing some work trying to integrate, you know, because Peugeot’s brother, you know, Mathieu, that he’s got a, that book is really great when it comes to the graphics. So, you know, it’s really, let me. Notice you’re epitomizing something I want to say. The one is beyond conception, but it is perpetually making new conceptualizations possible. The one is beyond conception. Yes, of course. Yes. But those are equally true ways of speaking about the one. So, you’re talking about, let’s see, we’ve got this right here. Notice I’m saying something both about our minds and reality. There’s something about our minds and reality such that there’s always new conceptualization that is true, is always possible for us. It’s always possible for reality too. Wait, say that one more time. New conceptualization. So, the one is not just beyond conception, that, right, that could lock you into just thinking of it as privation. The one is also the super abundance. It is that which always makes new conceptualization possible. But that possibility, that real possibility is not just in our minds, it’s in reality. We open up a new thing of mathematics and it discloses parts of reality that we were unaware of before. That’s the one. Yes, yes, that makes sense. So, in this graphic, he’s put the dynamic value. Here’s the, you know, here’s the neoplatonous one. Yeah. Now, it’s principle, it’s quality in per se. You know, the medium, if you’re looking at it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s monism, which is what you’re talking about, Vedanta and everything, exists. So, this is the word interaction. So, in order for this to manifest at all, there has to be an interaction. There has to be some kind of disruption of the one. Yes, this is the deep problem in neoplatonism. Exactly. And this is the analog in per se. So, you have the quality event, which is being, you know, which is this coming into your, you know, coming to you, you know, the soul, whatever you, you know, however you want to conceptualize it. And then you make an analog of it. Right. So, let’s stop there because this is, I don’t know what the influence is there, but if it isn’t, then it got to him some other way. This is out of Aquinas, right? Aquinas is on here. I’m not sure. I think he was putting together, I think a lot of this is Paul’s intuition from looking at neoplatonism and looking at Jonathan Pagel and through the lens of person because my friend is an expert in person. But that, but what I’m saying that that notion got is there’s a huge move on by like Clark and Morello and others to see Aquinas not as primarily an Aristotelian, but to see Aquinas as a neoplatonist who uses Aristotle. So the analog of the pagan analog of Aquinas is not Aristotle, it’s Plotinus. So this is, this is what’s happening right now. And this is also in the work of V.C. Schindler. So that, yeah, the relationship between, I’ll use your language, the manifestation and quality is one of analog. The problem with that is, the problem with that is then we, what we’ll do is we’ll take vertical analogy and we will assimilate it to horizontal analogy, right? So horizontal analogy is when I map between one domain and another. Sam is a pig, right? You know, human beings can be wolves, you know, just standard kind of, we’re doing this. But what Aquinas means is that the relationship between them is one, like I said, of contact. It’s one of conformity, but not identity, right? That, and so he’s used, this sounds paradoxical, he’s using the word analogy analogously. Yeah. Right? He said, like the way analogy gets you to see one thing in terms of another, you can see the one in terms of the manifest and you can see the manifest in terms of the one. But that’s not this. That’s not like, I know what a pig is, I know what a human being is and I’m not, right? The big mistake is to reduce the vertical, right? Trans analogy, if I can put it that way, to the analogy. Does that make sense? Well, I think what he’s saying is you’re getting rid of the value in between. I mean, you’re getting rid, you’re just saying that this is, it becomes conceptual when you remove the relationship and there has to be that relationship. It is, but, right, the thing here is that this is something that, in which I can sort of grasp both poles. Yeah. Right. But if you’ll allow me an analogy, whenever I’m grasping this pole, it’s to realize the invisibility of that one. Right. And when I’m trying to grasp this one, I can’t because it’s kind of invisible. I only grasp it in so far as it’s manifesting. It’s to, when I stand at the horizon of my intelligibility, I’m at a place of visibility and invisibility. Oh, sorry, I’m really struggling here. No, these are very difficult because I think the whole problem is, you know, this is, I mean, even if you go through the whole book, this is the problem. You’re trying to talk about something you can’t talk about. That’s what I meant. What I do is continually make verbal analogies to it. Right. And so the analogy I meant where I know her better than anyone else and I don’t know her better than anyone else. That’s what I’m trying to get at. Right. Right. So it’s in an analogy, we get a relationship between two knowables in the way Aquinas is using it. We get a relationship between the knowable and the unknowable. And that is not an analogy as the way we typically understand analogy. Does that work at all? That makes sense with my notion of principle and attribute. Like the principle, let’s just say the platonic, the platonic, the new, the platinus is one. That’s a principle. Yes. And you can, and we’re only going to know it in attribute in and out, you know, but, but so that’s the only way we’re ever going to know an attribute. You would like the cleanest attribute you can get. Okay. Let me push on that. The forms are the principles. The one is the principle of those principles, which is not itself any kind of principle. That’s right. So the one isn’t a principle. It’s the space that makes principles and the relationship between principles and the relationship between the principles and the attributes possible. It’s that whole space, if I can put it that way, but it’s no kind of space at all. I’m using space. Yeah, it’s not. Yeah. Right. Right. Right. Yeah. See, so we, we get it, but Aquinas’s notion of analogy is much closer to what our notion of paradox than it is to our everyday notion of analogy, if I could put it that way. And that’s another, and if we’re talking about the problem of, of going in this route for someone who is enlightenment minded, materialistically minded, well, however you want to say it, not only do you have to accept this beyond knowing, but you have to accept paradox. And those are two things that are anathema to this classic narrow, to the rational knife, but they’re not anathema to science, right? The science you’re talking about, but the science as practiced in the minds of many scientists who are against any kind of religion. They, they, yes. Although, yeah. But that, I want to be careful. I want to, I want to compare the best scientists to the best, to the, to the best religionists. I don’t, I don’t like asymmetrical comparisons, right? Right. I agree with you. But the, but the thing is, if you’re talking about a meaning crisis and you’re talking about people embedded in this particular way of thinking, and I’m not, you know, I agree with you. I would agree with you. And I would use Thomas Kuhn’s distinction here. I think what he would call, what, what, what is, what, what’s normal science right now is very much what you’re talking about. Yeah. But normal science is, is what people use to determine what is reality, which is, and that’s problematic. And you don’t, and that’s it, you know, because, because actually the, the, the crisis of not being able to reconcile quantum and relativity means we are not in Kuhnian terms, we are, we’re pretending that we’re in normal science when we’re actually on the cusp of revolutionary science. And so there’s a sense in which, and I, I, I, I don’t disagree with you. I see this in, you know, in, in, right, you know, I work in a scientific community and there’s all these presuppositions that are not, are not challenged except for the fact that the framework that grounds those presuppositions is it’s itself without a stable set of presuppositions, right? And so the whole presupposition network is unstable in a way that’s not acknowledged. And okay, so I said too much. Go ahead. Okay. So you’re kind of saying that this instability itself is, can be a good thing if we, if we use it right. If you, we use this opportunity of instability to re, you know, to revivify, you would say science, science from the original, from the source, which is within this Neoplaton space, then this is an opportunity that you’re trying to take and hopefully, you know. It’s a reciprocal reconstruction, right? We use the Neoplatonic framework to revivify and like science reintegrate it with Schiancia, but we also use the cutting edge of the science. So biology, I think is doing revolutionary science right now in contrast to physics, right? And we use that to revivify and restructure. It’s reciprocal reconstruction between Neoplatonism and revolutionary science. If I wanted to put it in a nutshell, that’s what I would say. But you’re also talking about, you’re also talking about one of these essential patterns, which is the eminence and the transcendence at once. Yeah. I mean, wouldn’t you say, okay, let’s talk. All right. Yeah. But let’s go to love again. Yeah. Okay. So knowing by loving and notice that when I love, my self-knowledge and the knowledge of the other are inseparable from each other. As I love my partner, I know myself in ways I couldn’t possibly know myself, right? But also I know the knowledge of oneself and the knowledge of the other become inseparably intertwined. That’s the coupling. But notice that love simultaneously comes to me, I fall in love, but it also bubbles up and wells up within you. Yeah. Eminence and emergence are interwoven in this deepest coupling to reality. And when we truly know we are truly in love with being and we will feel, feel is not the right verb. It’s too simplistic. It’s too romantic. We will realize the deep interpenetration of the emergence and the emanation. Yes, that’s it. That is a way of trying to talk in a new way about transcendence and imminence. Exactly. But that’s what I mean when I was talking to the two Pauls. I wanted to go back to these four L’s. I want to go back. I call it talking about God before we’re talking about God. I want to talk as deeply as possible and as wonder, wonder, wonder filled as possible about love, light, logos and light. The three identity, the four identity claims made about God, light, logos and what life, life, love, logos and light. Go back to them, go back like, like, you know, return to them in a profound phenomenological, neo platonic, like exploring the intelligibility, go back and use them as vertical analogies, not horizontal analogies to talk, right? To try and talk again, talk towards God, if I could put it that way, because that’s what dialogus is. Dialogus is all of this that we’ve been talking about. It’s that practice. Yeah. Okay, so let’s, why don’t we talk about God? So let me, let me play this real quick clip because it’s just, this is Jonathan Peugeot’s, but two minutes, is that okay? I’ll listen to Jonathan at any time. I’ll listen to all of you anytime, but. Jonathan, I keep saying it. Jonathan represents an attempt to rebirth Christian neo-platonism in a way that is radical beyond many people’s, I think, appreciation. Well, that’s why I want to play this because I mean, this is where he says it. It’s just really cool. So let’s just get it out there and then talk about God. Okay. Hopefully the sound’s going to be good. I’m going to end up, you know, replacing the clip when I post this, but hopefully this one’s good enough for you. I think that, I think that has confused me over the years that I would love to ask you about is, God is, would God kind of be like an abstract set of values or would God be a person? So, okay. So the way that Christians understand it is that God is a communion of persons. Right. Right. So that’s what the idea of the Trinity is, right? And so the idea, so the best way to understand that God is the infinite source of everything, right? That’s the first thing to understand. That’s what God is. And the second thing to understand is that anything you say about God is always wrong. Everything you say about God is always a compromise. Okay. This is something that’s completely orthodox. Like this is not, it’s not some new age stuff. This is really what the Church Fathers taught is that God’s, God’s being or God’s essence or God’s beyond being is not actually a being, it’s beyond being, is something that you can’t talk about. Okay. But nonetheless, is the source of everything, right? The infinite source of everything, which is beyond everything. And so it manifests, it reveals itself to us as a communion of persons, as this communion of love between beings. And they’re not beings in the, like I always say, like if you think that when I say use the word being, it’s like the same thing as your car or as an apple, then stop. Then God doesn’t exist. I just, I’m totally fine in saying God doesn’t exist. For you existing just means the things you can see and touch and quantify. But let’s say God is beyond that level. And so that is how God reveals itself as a communion of love. And you could say that in Christianity, the infinite itself and the expression of the infinite and the manner in which the infinite expresses itself in the world is all part of God. And so that’s what God is, let’s say, to you because knowing that even that is the compromise in language. And so you can imagine that all of reality leads up to a point where it stops. So think about any identity, right? And so it’s like an apple, right? I can describe all the elements of the apple, but I mean, no matter how many elements I describe, at some point I… So let’s see, sorry. That’s Jonathan at his best. That’s for sure. Yes, I just love that. It’s a five minute clip. That’s really, really remarkable. I think it resonates with everything we’ve been saying. Yeah, to me that sounds like the neoplatonic one. It is. And so Jonathan is, I’ll come back and qualify that in a second. Jonathan is Eastern Orthodox. Eastern Orthodoxy is neoplatonic Christianity through and through. Jonathan isn’t just a neoplatonist because you know how you could, Thomas Burton talked about how you could be not only a Zen Buddhist, you could be a Zen Catholic, right? So you can be a neoplatonic Christian and you can be a neoplatonic Muslim. And that’s what I believe Sufism is. You could be a neoplatonic Buddhist. And then that’s maybe kind of what I’m trying to do in some fashion. But I think you can properly and deeply be a neoplatonic Christian in which the dialogos between neoplatonism and the other, Christianity for example, exemplifies the heart of both. It somehow brings out, it actualizes the potential in neoplatonism that pure Greek neoplatonism couldn’t achieve on its own. Just like when you and I are in dialogue in dialogos, we both get to a place we couldn’t get to on. So Christianity and neoplatonism entered into dialogos with each other and they both got to a place they couldn’t get to on their own. And Jonathan, I think Fairley sees his version of Christianity as the legacy of exactly that dialogos. But the Sufis would say, yes, but we did the same thing with Islam because they talk about platonism, neoplatonism, right? And we got to a place we couldn’t get to, right? And that’s what Sufism is. And I think there’s, I just bought a book trying to, what’s it called? Oh, it’s by a guy by the name of Plant. And he’s basically comparing Dionysian neoplatonism with Shin Buddhism. They’re trying to do this. People are now, and Kyoto’s holding it to some degree, trying to get neoplatonism and Buddhism to do the dialogos together. I think that we should be doing that as much as we can, but we should put in a fourth, neoplatonism and science, dialogosing together. And then we should get all the dialogos to dialogos together. Sorry, that’s the- I think that’s right. But that’s what we’re saying. Neoplatonism is a neoplatonism. We’re saying, neoplatonism, a framework of neoplatonism, same way as saying, don’t look at like Persig saying, no, not subject to object metaphysics. Put on a new pair of lenses through metaphysics quality. We’re saying put on a new pair of lenses for everything through neoplatonism. But also allow the other to restructure neoplatonism, to reshape my glasses. Yeah. Right. It’s got to be a communing kind of thing. It’s got to be an updating. You can’t go back and you can’t have static and you can’t have it be too- the sins for Persig are too static and too dynamic. So I strongly reject nostalgic neoplatonism. Yeah. No, I get it. And it doesn’t make any sense anyway. It’s not going to work. We know that because it’s totally out of context. People think differently. Our entire consciousness is different. It’s just never going to work. You can only update. Yes. So this is also, I mean, but this goes to the heart of neoplatonism itself, which is contra the Cartesian claim is there are truths that I will only realize when I myself undergo profound transformation, not just at the level of my propositions, not just at the level of my procedures, but at the level of my perspectives and of my participation. A complete integrated transformation will only give me access to these cutting edge truths. Yeah. And that’s what Plotinus was saying. You’ve got to get yourself right first before you can wait for God. Exactly. And notice that that receptivity is a paradox. It stands underneath passivity and activity. It’s neither willing, right? It’s beyond willing in both sets. Like we use willing to mean passive receptivity. I’m willing to go. And we also use willing like I will that that will be right. And this receptivity is beyond both of those. It’s beyond activity and passivity. Yeah. Yeah. No, that makes sense. And I think that this would work in science because you don’t. I think the thing is that this is Neoplatonism for John is manifesting in Christ. It’s manifesting in community, but that doesn’t mean that manifesting in science means that you have to be an Orthodox Christian. You don’t. You don’t have to be a Jew who doesn’t follow Christ. The Christ manifests in orthodoxy in this way. It’s in a social way. Let’s say it’s manifesting in science, maybe more in it’s not going to manifest in the same way. No, just like evolution doesn’t create the same beings everywhere. Right. So evolution manifests all over the place, but that doesn’t mean it makes the same thing, but it is the same process everywhere. That’s one of my strongest analogies. And that’s of course how relevance realization works. A hundred percent. It’s how quality works. Notice evolution does not license relativism, right? It says, no, no, there’s a universal intelligibility. There’s a universal process that makes this plurality understandable and possible. Right. So it’s between relativism and absolutism. This is again, right? The pragmatists, what was good about the pragmatists, especially with James, is the attempt to really, really grok what evolution means to how we should think about knowing and being in reality. Yeah, no, definitely makes sense. So let’s move on. This is wonderful. I only have about 10 more minutes though. I know. And that’s why I wanted to move on to this before you left. So you said that your Regina really speaks to you and his conception of God really speaks to you. So let me read this real quick and let’s just finish up with this. This is 306. The whole focus of your- She just mentioned that she actually wrote a book on Regina. That’s how I got to that point. Yeah, no, it’s her thing. And you can see her on YouTube. She’s wonderful. You can tell she’s got soul, let’s just say. The whole focus of Regina’s thought can be stated in terms of the problematic, I think this is what you were just saying, of how the divine essence, incomprehensible in itself, can be comprehended, spoken of in its manifestation in creation, how God is understood to be both transcendent and imminent, similar and different, hidden and revealed. And then he says, nothing is more hidden than it. Nothing is more hidden than it, nothing more present, difficult as to where it is, more difficult as to where it is not. An ineffable light ever present to the intellectual eyes of all and known to no intellect as to what it is, diffused through all things to infinity. It is made both of things in all things and nothing in nothing. Very paradoxical, but very profound. Yes, exactly. And to get to the place where the paradox does not strike you as nonsense, but as supersense, that’s the neoplatonic practice. That is the way of life. You have to have a way of life that turns the paradox from nonsense into supersense. Right. Into total intelligibility to complete intelligibility, would you say that? Yes. Or from total intelligibility to infinite intelligibility perhaps. Or to at least make it intelligible at all, you could say. Like for this paradox, to overcome this paradox, the paradox itself has to be intelligible. Yes. Not through resolution of the paradox, but through acceptance of paradox itself. It’s to grasp the paradox at the, Gail and Strauss have made this very clear. Rationality, I’m arguing, is inherently self-transcending. You only realize the limit by transcending it. Right. And that’s properly aspirational. That is also deeply paradoxical. Look, like self-creation. Well, if the self just makes it, then it’s not, right? It’s not creation. It’s just development. And if something radically new is introduced, then it’s creation, but it’s not the self, because now the self has been made other than itself. Yet somehow we do that. You’ve done that. You are somehow identical to the girl you were when you were 10 years old. Right? There is that aspirational identity at the core of rationality itself. Rationality, and I don’t mean this in a new agey, romantic, you know, thing. Rationality is inherently paradoxical in the aspirational sense, because at the core of rationality is self-transcendence and that that self-transcendence reveals something fundamental about reality. Yeah. And those things reveal, those fundamental things revealed about reality in themselves are infinite. There’s no end to this. The self-transcendence is built into them. Right? The creation is God’s giving of himself, and that he gives to things, right? This weird, that they have an innate, they have their own existence, but they are still from his existence, but they have their own. It’s the way you give yourself to another person in the most profoundest act of love. When I’m truly loving her, I am giving of myself in a way that affords her autonomy, which sounds like a paradox. Yeah. But if you try to do anything else in love, you will crush it as you try to grasp onto it. Right? And this is exactly, that love and reason are indiscernible from each other, that kind of love and reason. That’s the central claim of neoplatonism. And I would say that if you pay attention to the practice and existence of science, that’s exactly what you find at the heart of science. Wow. And it’s being done well when it’s not corrupted. Yeah. So, neoplatonism can help us overcome the corruption in all manner. It can help us to overcome the corruption and it can help us to find a connection between my loving of my kids and the loving of my partners and the loving of being that is at the core of science. That makes sense. Without becoming a romantic and love is a feeling. Love is not a feeling. Love is not an emotion. Love is. Love is a way of being. Love is a way of being. And in that way of being, we are, would you say then that that love is evidence that the one exists? If, yeah, if by the word evidence, I don’t mean a relationship between states of affairs and thoughts in my mind, because that’s the horizontal thingy kind of, yeah, yeah, it’s, yeah, if you’ll allow me to qualify what you mean by evidence. Yes. For me, the fact that I find love at the pinnacle and at the primordial ground of my greatest and most daily projects is the best evidence I have for the one. Well, John, I want to say thank you so much. I want to do this again with you, this is amazing. Yeah, thank you. You’ve really clarified, you know, and I understand, yeah, I’m really much more, I understand where you’re going with this much better and it’s really, it’s the project for the age, I think. Well, thank you for saying that. I hope so. I mean, it’s not just me, there’s lots of people. Well, we’re in this corner kind of all trying to do it, you know. I think so. And I think it clarifies what we’re trying to do, I think in a lot of ways. I hope it helps to clarify. I think other people will also clarify things. I think that, yeah, I think this corner of the internet is, I think there’s something happening, something in the air. And so I won’t say goodbye. I want to, I’m going to say till I see you again, because I see you again. I hope I have happened again and have a happy holiday. You too. And until next time. Okay. Take good care. Okay, John. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Thank you for watching. 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