https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=zi2e-6sWteU
Welcome everyone to Another Voices with Reveke, a special one. I’m starting a series with two people you’ve seen me in deep and wonderful conversation with and we often get into real dialogos. Ken Lowry and D.C. Schindler, David Schindler. Many of you know that I’m a great admirer of David’s work. I consider one of my important accomplishments is that we’ve become at least virtual friends and I hope to keep that relationship going and growing. And of course, Ken and I finally met for the first time in real life, three dimensionally at Chino and we got to spend some good time. We had at least one extended one-on-one discussion and Ken and I keep in touch regularly. I consider him a friend and it’s an honor to be his friend. And the three of us have been exploring some very powerful aspects of David’s work and part of that is to introduce, part of the reason for that is to introduce many of you to David’s work. I think David’s work should be more properly famous. I know he’s not seeking fame, but I think his work would be helpful to a great number of people, especially in what he calls the postmodern predicament, what I call the meaning crisis and so that is one of the reasons we’re doing this. Another reason we’re doing this is I am still continuing to learn from David and the selfish motive is it’s a wonderful opportunity to learn from somebody directly like this. I imagine if you could do that with Plato, oh, okay, I’ll spend an afternoon with Plato and just talk with him for a bit. That would probably pull my mind. I sometimes dream about that as a matter of fact. And then the other reason is that some of you know one of my longest and dearest friends and ongoing collaborator Dan Schiappi and I were writing a book called The Being of Rationality and the Rationality of Being and we’re doing a huge reading together of the psychology, the cognitive science and the philosophy around reason and rationality. And right now we’re going through some of Robert Brandom’s work, Reason in Philosophy, Spirit of Trust. I read a bit of Making It Explicit, but it’s just such a, Spirit of Trust is a tome too, it’s huge. Oh, and speaking of tomes, David, I bought this book on your recommendation and I’ve started reading it too. Oh, great. Yeah, so at some point we’ll do a series around his work too. There you go. Yeah. So back to Brandom. So Brandom is making use of Kant and Hegel, especially Hegel, to try and reformulate our understanding of what reason is and its relationship to other things that we typically don’t see it in relationship to. One is Geist, which you could think of as the spirit, the collective intelligence of distributed cognition, not just at current time, but historically. And we’ll get more into that mechanics. And of course, many of you know that Fourier Cogsci, my work in particular, is talking about that. And there’s of course empirical evidence that we work better when we’re geistlich, when we work in dialogical groups when we’re trying to reason than we do individually. The evidence for that is mounting and there’s formal mathematical proofs about that power. And that of course raises some important questions that Hegel raises. What’s the relationship between that historical sense of reason and freedom? Many people hear historicism, they hear determinism, lack of freedom, and Hegel and Kant, at least the interpretation I’m getting from Brandom and other people like Fornath and Pitchard is that, no, there’s an alternative sense of freedom and I think it’s one we need right now. And then those two things, reason and freedom, sorry, those three things, reason, freedom and geist are often and have historically by many people been related to God. Hegel talks a lot about God. He says he wants to create something that’s the perfect integration of religion and philosophy. And that was one of his explicit and repeated goals. He thinks he has a new interpretation of Christianity along with his new interpretation of reason and history and geist. And so I’ve heard him in multiple places and I hope this isn’t an insult of just reporting something being described as the Thomas Aquinas of Protestantism. So we want to bring out, is there a reconception of God at work here? Somebody whose work I respect, I’ve never met, and I haven’t read this book yet so I’m only referring to as a project, Hegel’s God, a counterfeit double question mark by a great thinker William Desmond, philosopher, theologian. So I want to also get, what’s the connection between this reconceptualization of freedom, this interlocking reconceptualization of freedom and reason and its reconfiguration into a relationship with geist? And then what does that triad have to do with God and Christianity? So just a small little discussion. We can probably wrap it up in like two, three minutes. We’re going to roll through a few comments and everybody, yeah, of course. So this is why this is going to be a series, which of course I’m loving. Getting to spend time with both of these men is really wonderful. So that’s what we’re going to do. And I’m going to give initially a sort of formulating prompt to you, David. Maybe we could start, because it’s the central topic of where, at least the writings I’ve seen, I’ve got two books by you, is Hegel and freedom. And you’ve been doing a lot about trying to recover a notion of freedom that you think has been lost in a way that’s been detrimental to our culture and our civilization. If, again, if there is anything we point to with the idea of Western civilization, I think a lot of these terms are becoming nebulous now. So can we start there? What is it that you think we can learn about freedom from Hegel? And you can refer to the whole tradition, Kant, Schelling, et cetera, but Hegel. Why is that important now today? No, thank you. That’s a really interesting question. Ultimately, for Hegel, reason, freedom, and geist are identical. They’re all different ways of seeing the same thing. That in itself is such an interesting point. Let me see how to get into this. Let me just make a basic point that I think about why Hegel is interesting, or one of the reasons that Hegel is interesting, and then I’ll connect this to his notion of freedom. But Hegel, it’s one of the reasons he’s ambiguous. He took the Christian revelation of God as Trinity to be one of the most important and significant advances in the history of consciousness. Yes. And in that sense, he’s very much a Christian thinker. But the reason it’s sort of ambiguous is he wanted to take this religious truth and appropriate it as a pure philosophical datum. So there’s a certain sense in which he’s very Christian. There’s a certain sense in which he’s the opposite of Christianity. And that battle will continue. How properly to understand him. Is there any faith in Hegel at all in the end and that kind of question? But I want to set that aside and just focus on- I just want to intervene for one clarification point. David is quite right to use that word consciousness that Hegel uses. It doesn’t mean what it is more specifically come to mean in current academic and public discourse. He’s not primarily meaning just your subjective feeling or experience. He’s meaning more something like a comprehensive orienting awareness that includes conceptuality, action that makes the world in some sense intelligible. Is that a fair enough rendition of consciousness for Hegel? It is. No, thank you. That’s excellent. I was trying to use a sort of generic term. In fact, for Hegel, consciousness itself needs to be interpreted as spirit ultimately. And that would be where we include all of those elements that you mentioned. Let me start with this in fact. The best definition of spirit for Hegel, geist, which can be interpreted or translated as mind, as much as spirit, the best definition comes in his early work, the phenomenology of spirit. And it’s a single sentence, which I think is outstanding. Spirit for him is the I, capital I, not this I. The I that is we and the we that is I. That’s the essence of what spirit is. So we tend to think of spirit either as some sort of phantom out there in abstraction, or in more classical philosophical terms, we think of spirit as just a dimension of the individual human being. We’ve got body, soul, and spirit. But for Hegel, spirit can’t be understood except as a kind of unity of conscious beings. It’s sort of inherently plural, you might say. It’s social. And once it comes to that, he begins to think of all of these fundamental human realities as expressions of that social reality that spirit is. So there’s no such thing as a single spirit. There’s only human beings together in a way form spirit. Each of them has a role to play in that, but that role is not self-contained. It depends on the others. I won’t go on too much longer. Can I ask you a couple of questions about just… Sure. So one is, and we did this before, I just want to say why one way I think this connects to what’s happening in cognitive science is the whole notion, which Dan Schiappi and I have published three papers on and I’ve published with Christopher Estepietro and had ongoing discussions with Jonathan Pangeo about, is this idea about the I that is we and the we that is I. That’s one of my favorite… I’ve underlined that so many times in Hegel and whenever I come across it in Brandem. Brandem cites it multiple times. And this idea of the deep interpenetration, we indwell where we extend into the collective intelligence of distributed cognition, but we also internalize it. Because we’ve internalized other people that we are met a cognitive and reflective beings that were capable of rationality in the reflective sense. That’s the first thing. And then the second is, I see its tension in Hegel between that, the Christianity and what I might call the Greek tradition. I mean, this notion of Geist is in many ways similar to the Neoplatonic notion of soul. There’s one big thing that’s unfolding and making the world intelligible in time. And each soul is a participant in it, but also an exemplar of it. And you can see also, I think, the profound influence of the Greek tradition also in his thinking. Absolutely. Yeah. No, in fact, I think, not to get into the scholarly stuff, but just a comment, there’s a strong tradition in English speaking interpreters of Hegel to interpret him as basically on Kantian terms. And to think of all of these things as simply expressions of the formal reality of reason. But I think the better way of interpreting him is precisely in terms of the Neoplatonic tradition that you mentioned. Wow, yes. I think that’s really crucial. But how would he be different? So I think that you’re absolutely right to connect him to the Neoplatonic sense of soul and that beautiful and mysterious interplay between the cosmic soul, the world soul, which is basically the soul of God, and each individual living creature. I mean, Neoplatonism is often criticized for absorbing the many into a featureless one. And I don’t think that that’s a proper criticism. I think it’s a far more mysterious relationship. But nevertheless, it’s interesting. Hegel was especially worried about that, absorbing everything into a featureless one. This was his famous criticism of Schelling, sort of a backhanded. They had been friends. And after this one comment in his Phenomenology of Spirit, they basically had very little interaction after that. But he characterized the absolute in Schelling as the night in which all cows are black. Yeah, that’s another one of my favorite. So I like that one. And I want to get the owl of Minerva only takes flight at dusk on a t-shirt. I really want that. I really want that. That’s funny. Hegel is known, and he really is a very difficult person to read, but he was also quite intuitive and funny. He actually had an amazing sense of humor. And I think that’s a crucial characteristic for a philosopher. If there’s no humor, you have to be suspicious. Heidegger has no humor. Yeah, I know. No. Nietzsche is filled with it. Anyway, but the thing that Hegel’s, where he differs from neo-Platonism, it seems to me there are two points on that with the soul. One is, and these two points are related. One is, it’s not simply mystical. For Hegel, this interaction between people in the relationship of recognition, each recognizes the reality of the other. Yes. That reciprocity is absolutely fundamental. You don’t get that in the world-soul relation, is clearly neo-Platonism. Good point. And then this second one is that Hegel takes history very seriously. Yes. So for neo-Platonism, this unity of spirit is found as you transcend the particularity of time and history, whereas Hegel wants to find it in our historical relationships. Yes. Yes. It’s actually in the world that we embody physically and temporally and so forth. And I think he’s right to be, you should read him along the lines of neo-Platonism, but I think it’s very clear, it’s very helpful to see that he adds this historical dimension, which I think is one of the things that’s most characteristic about him. So I’ll just, I know Ken wants to say something. I’ll just remark on that. One is that I, but I also wonder if the opposite comes true to some degree, that Hegel sort of loses touch with that vertical dimension, right? That is so central to neo-Platonism. I’m reading Stanley Rosen’s critique of Hegel and Heidegger in Nihilism, a philosophical essay. So at some point, and that will probably come up in what’s the relationship between Christ and God. And then the other one is brandom and that reciprocal recognition, right, is what ultimately is the ontological ground, the sustaining source of normativity for us, all normativity. And then that somehow relates to the fact that Geist isn’t just sort of a system of relations, it has a life of its own. It’s not reducible to the I or the we, but nevertheless, right, in conjunction with that, I should say, it has a life of its own. So just keep opening those things up. But I want Ken to have a chance to ask his question. Well, I just wanted to, I’ve thought a lot about Martin Buber and his I thou as a result of your work, John, and I’m wondering, that’s coming up for me a lot as you’re talking about this. I’m wondering how that, how he would situate here. Yeah. Yeah. No, it’s funny that you mentioned precisely that. I mean, if you notice the I that is we, the we that is I, what’s missing there? That’s the you. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I do think that that’s another way of characterizing. So, John, you’re exactly right about this danger of losing the transcendent. That’s the classic criticism of Hegel, and I think it’s a true criticism of Hegel. But another one is this, there’s something about the irreducibility of the one to the other in the I thou relationship, that you recognize not just that we’re perfectly one as a we, but that even in our being perfectly one as a we, we remain different from each other. In fact, that the fact that I’m not you is something that enriches me and something that in fact implies a kind of dependence on you that enhances my being. It’s not something that needs to be overcome. And Hegel seems to, even though it’s really interesting, he affirms that reciprocity like few people before him. For him, that’s sort of a stage in this intimacy where we finally become really identical, where we identify with this we, and that it seems to me that that face-to-face, the otherness of the face-to-face I thou falls away. And then there’s the I it. The objectivity of the non-human world and the contribution that that makes is something we also need to recall. Yeah. So the relation of Hegel to nature, I got a couple books on comparing Plato’s dialectic that takes nature deeply into account and Hegel’s dialectic that seems to subsume nature into history in some significant way. Yeah. Yeah. No, I think that’s really, you know, it’s people overlook, he, the philosophy of nature was a significant part of his his encyclopedia, his whole system of knowledge. But that’s probably gotten the least attention, his lectures on the philosophy of nature. But I think one of the reasons is in the end, he goes through it as kind of an essential moment, but then he transcends it. And there’s a sense in which whatever was interesting about this engagement with the natural world is superseded by this engagement, the social engagement between conscious persons. And the natural world sort of fades away. And I think that’s also a danger, but it’s helpful to see that that’s a danger because it allows us actually to, I think, appropriate Hegel better when we can do it consciously of these failings or things that he neglects. So David, please continue. Yeah, with going on the, you know, Geist and how it grounds normativity, how it’s, you know, a little bit more about why does that constitute reason and what does that have to say about freedom? Yeah, thank you. That’s it. Yeah, I really, well, Ken, I don’t know. That’s perfect. Okay, okay. Hegel, I think, has one of the most interesting definitions of freedom in the history of thought. And it’s a very simple definition. It’s being at home with oneself in the other. Oh, wow. Yeah, beis ich sein im Anderen in German. Beis ich means like, schaß schlauch in French, feeling at home, being in one’s element, being in a place that’s familiar. So being at home with oneself in the other. So it’s not the tendency in a certain line of the classical tradition is to think of freedom always with a kind of opposition. In order to be free, I need to somehow be protected from the other. I need to be able to have an integrity in myself. I need to have a sense of identity. And the other always represents something of a threat. For Hegel, I can’t really ultimately be myself except in and through other people. The otherness of the world around me. And then finally, the vow that faces me and calls me to account. And here, the normative moment enters in. For Hegel, that’s crucial for me ever to really finally understand who I am myself. And that coming to this, I would want to call it love. That where one actually is affirmed in oneself in relation to the other, in and through the other, and the other is affirmed in oneself. I think that’s really a beautiful sense of the essence of freedom. And think about how different that is from freedom as the power to choose for freedom, individuality simply, or all these other candidates that you get from the tradition. David, Ken and I were both at the Chino conference, which was called The Quest for a Spiritual Home. And I gave a talk there on home and the cognitive science of home and why we seek home, how and why it matters to us, and this role of belonging. And so that definition resonates very strongly with me right now. Because I’ve been really reflecting on this question, what is it to be at home in the cosmos? And why do we need it so much? Could you say something about that? I would find that really illuminating. I’ll send you the link to the talk. But here’s the idea about trying to understand home. And what I did is I looked at the evolutionary provenance of how we got to home. And then the first one, which comes from the interaction, the very fruitful interaction between Boree cognitive science and biology. Biology is the most theoretically, philosophically interesting science right now. Most people are still focused on physics, although it hasn’t really done much for our fundamental ontology since the beginning of the 20th century. Biology is doing all this amazing stuff. But in biology, there’s the notion of niche construction. So the idea is you give up the Darwinian idea that it’s just the environment putting pressure on the organism and the organism is just a genetic response machine to the environment. The idea is organisms individually and also collectively shape their environment, which then shapes them so that they shape the environment. You get this loop that’s called a niche construction. And so niche construction gives you, and I’m going to do a sequence here, gives you a home range. It gives you an area of the world in which you as an organism belong, because the environment has been shaped to you and you’ve been shaped to it. Now, of course, human beings with culture speed that process up. We speed the process by which we shape the environment to us and us to the environment. And so that’s the home range. And within the home range, you then see the beginnings of, and what the home range does is it takes the world and turns it into pathways. Like you have courses that you can go through because you’ve got this range and you move along, not just the physical topography, but the topography of the niche construction. And so those two things get woven together. Once you have that, then you get the home base. Human beings started to do this thing where they would go out into separate groups and then they would return to a home base to coordinate butchering the animal, sharing food, making sure that everybody was taken care of. And what that does is that gives you, so if you think of the home range as giving you a horizon, the home base gives you your orienting point. So now you turn the paths into a map and you can make a cognitive map, which means you can coordinate other people, distributed labor, distributed cognition, and you can also explore places that aren’t on your paths because you can use the map to go to places that aren’t on your experiential path. So that opens up your cognitive grasp and the amount of coordinated distributed labor we could bring to bear on it. Once you have the home base, you start to get the collective sharing of the raising of children, the protection of children. You get the nursery and the hospital around the hearth, right? And the hearth, and the hearth, of course, because it becomes this center of transformation, healing, and education, it also becomes a center of cultural ritual transformation. And then the argument is each one of these functions is deeply woven into our evolutionary heritage, and they are all now interlocking for us, the home range, the home base, and then the hearth hospital, right? And that is woven who and what we are so profoundly into home that without a state of home, I don’t know if you’ve seen this book, Karen Allen’s book on the psychology of belonging, if you don’t have a sense of belonging, you are in deep trouble psychologically, physically, socially, morally. This is a fundamental orientation of your entire agent arena relationship. And I think that’s why home is so central to who we are as persons and how deeply connected it is to our, well, I’ll use the Hegelian term, how deeply connected it is in our participation in geist, but also in the way in which geist and nature are interwoven for us. So sorry, that’s a long talk collapse to do it. No, that is fantastic. I mean, so much of what you said just resonates with Hegel all over the place. But a couple of comments on that. I mean, this really is excellent. First of all, it’s interesting what you described there was actually the original meaning of the word ethos in Greek. I mean, it meant a kind of a dwelling that had a center and then would proceed out from the center and then return back to the center. And that created a kind of pattern of existence in which one felt at home. And that’s one of the essential human tasks. But the other comments I want to make, and I wonder what you would say about this, and it points to one of the questions I think you wanted to get to at least eventually, is the way that you laid it out there, you mentioned the kind of cultural ritual dimension as a kind of higher level expression of this. Let me propose an alternative and get your reaction. There’s a fascinating book, it’s called The Ancient City, that it’s a historical study on the origin of the city. And the argument is that the city begins with the hearth. And what is the hearth? It’s the fireplace, right? It’s the mantle. And in the ancient human cultures, there was always a kind of a tendency towards ancestor worship, the sense of belonging to not just to the people around, but being part of a longer tradition in which the spirit was sort of passed on, we’re participants, we share in the spirit that’s greater than we are. And that got expressed in the flame, the sacred fire that had its place in the home. And that sacred fire was, it’s really interesting in the ancient cultures, the key to a healthy home is to keep that fire burning. That was the father’s role was to ensure that that fire wouldn’t go out. And what was significant there? That’s where, I mean, you think about all of the normal activities of human life that take place, that this is where you get warm, this is where you cook, then this is where you do your religious sacrifices, this is where you collect the people to get you gather around it. So the social interaction occurs all around this fire, which is the place of transcendence. And when a city develops, it grows around a fire at the center. You think of the Vestal Virgins around the sacred fire in ancient Rome and so forth. So what is all this, just to bring this to a point, what is it that I’m proposing, that the religious dimension actually is arguably first. And the material and social and even survival of human beings is oriented always in relation to something that has a religious significant. The religion is not like a late development, but it’s actually an original, it’s an origin in human development. What would you- First of all, there’s many areas of overlap and areas of pushback. So I’ll start with the pushback and then we’ll work on the overlap. The sequence I gave is based on the archaeological evidence of the, so niches exist for non-human species. So niche construction is older. And then also, it looks like we’re gathering together at butcher sites plausibly before we have fire. And then fire comes later. I do think you’re right in two things. I think that fire, Matt Rossano in Supernatural Selection argues that gathering around the campfire, the circle, and we still have these circling practices. And by the way, we’re tapping into the campfire effects because we’re all looking at these other spaces lit, right? And we’re only paying attention to each other’s faces for the campfire effect. But he said, you would shift between, you had this, and then you also have looking at the fire, which is this constantly shifting thing. And we all know how hypnotic fire is. And then of course, you can also step back and then there’s the consuming darkness around you. And this, he said, actually starts to the first evolution of human beings starting to more deliberately and even ritualistically start to play, seriously play with their attention for no other reason that they could do it. He actually has an article, Did Meditating Make Us Human? Where he argues that that relationship to fire opens up and helps the development of attention and working memory. I think all of that is right. I think that sacredness actually pre-, so we used to think that human beings settle down into cities for economic reasons and then religion comes later. First of all, that’s false. Sacredness is way back at the Upper Paleolithic transition. We have the cave paintings, there’s music being played. Baring the dead. Baring the dead. Well, ceremonial bearing the dead. Neanderthals buried the dead, but it’s not clear that it was ceremonial for them or not. And the Neanderthals are always the good ones to compare us to because they have a lot of what we do, but they don’t seem to ever get religion. They even have the beginnings of art, but they don’t get to anything that’s like religion. But what I was going to say is Gopeky Tupley just destroyed that whole Marxist interpretation of how civilizations arose. People were not living there, they were gathering there. So the home base gets taken up into, as you said, a hearth. The place is a temple. It’s only function is sacred. And this is before people are living together in a permanent fashion that we thought was necessary for cities. So I agree with you that once we get to human beings, I think the hearth and fire and the ritualization of our consciousness are already woven and underway together. So that’s how I respond to that. How does that land for you? Yeah. Yeah. No, I mean, it raises a really interesting question about whether we interpret, what is the reference, so whether we interpret human beings in light of animals or we interpret animals in light of human beings. And that’s, and I mean, in a way you have to do both. Yes, exactly. But the order is an interesting question. It seems to me that the basic point is that it’s, I think it’s impossible for human beings to have any sort of a consciousness and language that doesn’t already have a kind of a sacred reference point. Yes. And it sounds to me, yeah, that you’re saying that as well. Is that, am I reading you right? Yeah, I think what I tried to say was, of course, there’s what I talk about as relevance realization at all of these levels and it’s becoming more and more recursive. And then you get into the Hegelian thing, it becomes reciprocally recognized and coordinated in when you get the home base. And then it gets taken up into, well, we can use that amazing machinery for navigating the vertical dimension, not just the horizontal. Once we get this capacity for mapping, we can start to map this domain of normativity. And I think there is something like an orienting origin, home sense at the core of that. And I think that if you get that, I think it’s hard to not talk about it in terms of the sacred. So yes, I agree with that. Yeah, Murkheh Eliade is so fascinating on this, the sacred and the profane and how you can’t have a community of any sort at all without something. If it’s not a fire, it’s going to be a pole that’s stuck into the ground. This becomes then the center of the cosmos. This is the belly button, as the ancient Greeks said, around which everything turns. Yeah. And why? Because you need something that has a kind of an absoluteness. And I think there’s a sort of a logical necessity. It’s simply not possible for us to have any awareness of the world without taking something as absolute. That’s inevitable. There has to be orientation. If you want to pick out something in the horizontal dimension that will serve as your origin of orientation, you need it to be intersected by the vertical dimension. That’s the only way of picking it out. Exactly. And this is why I do have this concern about whether or not we’ve lost the vertical in Hegel. I’m going to circle back. One of the things we got out of this then is that part where Hegel’s talking about home. He’s invoking this orientating sense of belonging, and it has a dimension of affording some relationship to the sacred. But then he also brings out the importance. Let me turn it around on Hegel’s behalf. Oh yes, yes, you’re talking about your capacity for transcendence, but you only get self-transcendence through other people and being able to indwell them and internalize them. And that’s being at home in the other. And I could see Hegel making that argument. Does that land for you? I mean, we know that from kids, right? Kids get their sense of self-transcendence by indwelling other people and then internalizing it. That’s how they get metacognition, that ability to reflect. Does that land for you as a proposal? Oh, it does. It does. Yeah. This is where Hegel’s famous sort of master-slave dialect emerges. And that already you see there’s an issue there. He thinks of it initially as a kind of competitive, polemical sort of relationship, a dialectical relationship where each is trying to dominate the other. But what’s interesting is for Hegel, the real moment comes, and this is, I don’t know that people have paid enough attention to this, but the real moment, the moment where spirit, properly speaking, emerges is with forgiveness. Yes. Yes. For him. And I mean, so there’s a kind of reconciliation and it’s a reconciliation in relation to a higher principle that now that the two, we’re no longer competing individuals, but we’re recognizing that there’s an order to which we both belong. And now we can properly be a we that allows this kind of social emergence of spirit. So you made a powerful connection there. So there’s a connection between freedom, which is this ability. So freedom is basically being at home in all this ways we’ve tried to enrich it in the other, and this affords self-transcendence. And that self-transcendence allows you and I to reciprocally and mutually recognize that we’re bound in geist and therefore we can forgive. So you just made a strong connection between freedom and forgiveness. And that is not something you typically hear people talking about when they talk about freedom. No, exactly. And it’s easy to overlook in Hegel, and I’m not even sure he was aware, but it is the moment where spirit appears. And when you think about it, you see it actually does make sense. I mean, what is forgiveness? It’s when you no longer absolutize yourself in relation to another. And think of this in this purely sort of imminent frame, but now I’m going to review both myself and the other in relation to a higher principle. And for Hegel, that’s the moment where you actually have a we. You can’t have a we without this common recognition of something to which we both belong, this sort of larger reality, this more encompassing and comprehensive reality. And that requires now a kind of surrender to it. It’s sort of, I’m giving up my perspective. I’m letting go in relation now to something that holds us in unity. And that’s kind of the, you might say the sort of metaphysical essence of what forgiveness is. Well, it would be the act of common unity, right? It would be that our common unity has, like you said, I’m no longer absolute. In fact, you’re no longer absolute, right? We are both bound to the source of our common unity, our community. Ken, you wanted to say something I could tell. Well, I was just going to pull it forward into our current historical moment, because this is, I mean, the whole conference in Chino is wrestling with the domicile of the meaning crisis, and this sense of a lack of belonging that we all feel so deeply. And domicile, is that, that’s the first time I’ve heard that word. That’s an awesome word. Domicile. Domicile. Just quickly, in the book Zombies, where we’re actually talking about zombies as a mythological expression of the meaning crisis, we made use, so, uh, uh, Brian Walsh wrote a thing on domicile. It’s a, it was a term coined by Porteous and Smith, two anthropologists, but Brian Walsh directly connected it to, like, loss of a worldview, domicile at that level, and we took domicile and used that extended sense. Buddy, sorry about this. I was, oh yeah, sorry, Ken, I didn’t want to interrupt, but that is just a fantastic word. That’s the first I’ve heard it. That, that’s, well, I, it’s just a funny story. I was thinking about this and I was going to lecture on it, and I was reading his article. I was on a train traveling into Toronto, and the guy sitting across from me said, do you like the article? And I said, I said, yeah. And he said, well, I wrote it. I’m Brian Walsh. And so we had a conversation about it. That’s amazing. Anyways, so, go ahead, Ken. Well, just that, you know, one of the books that’s affected me the most profoundly in the recent time has been David’s book, Freedom from Reality. And we’ve done a little bit of, we’re working on a series on it, on my channel, because I didn’t even realize that for me, whenever I invoked the term freedom, which is so often and almost ubiquitously understood as maybe our preeminent good in the modern world, I was in fact invoking the autonomous decrease of constraints as defined in a modern context. And I think like that definition of freedom takes us directly away from any sort of I-thou relationship, any I-we relationship, it necessarily undermines, directly rejects this home base. It directly rejects this connection to the vertical dimension that we find within a collective community around the fire. So I just like that view is so clear for me right here. Yeah, think about it. We, some, you know, even when we want to affirm the importance of community, we tend to define it as compromising our freedom, giving up our freedom in order to be with others. But notice what that implies. It implies that freedom in its essence is resistant to the other. It’s opposed to dependence and so forth. I mean, when people say something like, you know, marriage, for instance, you freely give up your freedom in marriage. And that’s what, and, you know, there’s something that’s a recipe for a marriage that’s not going to last. That’s why I’m laughing is your thing. It’s like, that marriage is doomed. Yeah, that’s right. I mean, think about it and think about it in different ways of saying this is precisely through freedom, you’re entering into a higher freedom by binding yourself. I mean, because, and notice this even includes, if we think of freedom as self-determination, what, what, you know, think of it, is it possible to imagine a more perfectly self-determining act than a permanent vow? Yeah. I mean, in a way that’s, that’s as free as it could possibly be, because you are in fact making a choice that determines the whole of your existence into, even beyond your existence, into the future with your progeny and, and, and gout, and, and gathering up the whole of your history with your, your, your, you know, not just your immediate family, but your family lines. I mean, that’s, that’s a perfectly self-determining act. And it, it, it, you know, it turns the meaning of self-determination on its head when you look at it in those terms, but I think it’s a far healthier and human way of thinking about, and, and, you know, Hegel helped me to see that, I have to say, even though, this is, this is great. He loses the transcendent part of it, but he, he, he really has a profound sense of, of the social, I think. So, so, I mean, I wonder if part of the pro, for me, you know, freedom as the maximization of political, economic, and action choice is horrific, because, right, that leads to combinatorial explosion, which is the loss of agency, the loss of intelligibility, the loss of any kind of normative, like, like, it’s like, no, that can’t, if that’s what freedom is, right, then, why would you want that? And, and, and the irony is that it, as you said, I mean, it, it absolutizes agency, and then the result is you lose all agency. Exactly. It’s, it’s, it’s, the very self-destructive, self-destructive. It destroys, yeah. So, what I’m saying is, there’s a profound self-deception in there, because it, it leads you to believe that you’re affirming agency while you’re actually profoundly undermining it. And so this is a self-deceptive, self-destructive act. It’s, it’s bullshit in the Frankfurtian sense in a very powerful way. And I wonder if, if, if, like, I, like, I wonder if we got too locked into the metaphor of enclosure as prison, and we fought, we forgot about enclosure as home. We forgot about, you know, when you’re sick, you want to be enclosed, you want to be in a hospital. When you’ve been out all day, you want to come into the hearths, right? You want a home where you can get resp and respite, you know, from the world. And like, I, I understand, you know, the North American, you know, the American, and also the English, you know, Civil War, they’re, they’re, they’re resisting the, they want to resist the monarch’s power of imprisonment and torture and death. But we, you know, I think that metaphor became too much ingrained in us and that we’ve lost a sense of exactly what we’re talking about here. You don’t, you don’t want to not belong. You do not want to not belong. No, it’s like, it’s like a plant saying, if, if, if only I could get these roots out of this soil, I could finally be happy and free, you know. Yes. Well, and to make an argument, to make an argument for the other side, one of the things I’ve been thinking about and reading about recently is the, the prevalence and scope of slavery across time. Yes. And, you know, that would, that is so pervasive across our history and so, you know, just unbelievably detrimental to the human spirit generally that I, I’ve, I’ve been wondering that maybe, you know, that, that view of what it meant to be human as, as rising up from the level of, of those who had felt so enclosed, especially with the advent of the printing press and the ability to read and, and, and that proliferation, you know, we focus so much on that because we needed to reject that. And, and, and, you know, we’ve come quite a long ways, I think, although there’s plenty of work to do. Yeah. But like maybe, maybe now is the time where we need to recognize that, well, okay, that served a purpose because yeah, slavery and enclosure of the other is, is, is the inverse of, of having an I-Thou relationship. Like it is, chattel slavery is a pure I-It. Yes. Yeah. Toward the other. And so I just wonder if, if, if that maybe has been our, like, like, our domicide has in some sense been our penance, our domicide of the meeting crisis is our penance for our, our enslavement of each other. But, but the answer, and I love that you brought this out earlier, David, but like, like the real answer is not rejection and vilification of the other, but it’s in fact forgiveness, which is a much more, which is a different thing. And much more profound. Yeah. I mean, I think that this is a common pattern that, that you react to a problem and then, and, and I mean, the, the irony is then insofar as you’re reacting simply to a problem, that problem is setting the horizon for the meaning of things. So even when you’re rejecting it, you’re still within the horizon that it’s set. Yes. And, and, and that’s a perennial temptation. Yep. Yep. So, you know, slavery is clearly an evil, but we can’t define freedom as the rejection of enclosure. You know, the moment we allow slavery to define the terms of freedom, and then we, we, you know, simply want to flip it over and choose the other side, we’re going to, we’re going to get locked into slavery at a deeper level. We don’t, we don’t escape it. So that, and, you know, and that’s really interesting. I’m glad that you referred again to, to forgiveness there. I mean, think about that. Forgiveness is precisely transcending this tit for tat, that sort of quid pro quo sort of revenge cycle of, of, of relations. So we’re moving, yeah, we’re moving into something. First of all, I think what you said, Ken, is exactly right. I think part of why we’ve done this is we’ve done the overcompensation bias, which people do. And you’re right, David, that’s, that’s a thing. But what I’m noting is, you know, we’re talking about freedom, and we’re linking it, I think, really profoundly and provocatively in a good way to forgiveness. And then that has some, the way we’re, we’re, we’re, we’re meant, we keep alluding to the role that the transcendent must have in, in this, and what’s the relationship between the vertical and the horizontal. But I also want to note that we are now touching on the other thing I want to touch on before we go to God, which is we’re talking about profound self-deception. We’re talking about profound mis-framing. We’re talking about the, we’re talking about losing the ability to transcend oneself through others while remaining at home. Now this, this is starting to talk like the language you see in the Socratic, Platonic notion of rationality, where rationality isn’t the monologue, you know, use of computation in order to empower one’s dominance. Rationality is, you know, I think, well, Drew Hyland’s had a huge significance on it. Rationality is about continually binding you to the polarity between your finitude and your transcendence, right? And you, you forgive other people because, right, we are both bound by fate and we are all finite. But yet you call people to responsibility because we are not just animals, we are called to transcendence. If you do just transcendence, we can go, give, we can fall prey to hubris. If you just do finitude, we fall prey to servitude and to, right, and a kind of despair. And, you know, and this is one of my criticisms of my colleague, Jordan Peterson, is he talks a lot about the hero myth, yes, but he never talks about the hubris myths that were designed to counterbalance all the hero myths, right? And so what I’m saying is, right, there’s this deeper sense of what rationality is, which is I’m, I’m religio, I am bound, constitutively bound to both my finitude and my transcendence, and that binds me deeply to you and you to me, and that our notion of rationality should it be in that sense profoundly dialogical and profoundly within, you know, a framework of learned ignorance. I’m never going to grok it all. And then that brings up, like, of course, Hegel’s saying a lot that sounds like that, right, and that’s what’s really interesting and random. But I’m also aware of the Kierkegaardian critique, right, which is, do we, do we, do, like, what is it when you get to the place where you identify with absolute geist? Like, is that, is that a completion? Is that, have you? Right, and I know there’s controversy around that in Hegel, but I just, I just wanted to introduce, I’m not saying that’s a definitive, I’m just saying people of great thought have worried about that in Hegel, so it’s not inappropriate to bring it up. But what I’m saying is, I can now start to see the connection to a much more comprehensive notion of ratio, which is this proper proportion, you know, logos, accounting for and being accountable to, like, that’s coming out in all of that. Is that landing also for you, David? Oh, completely. Yeah, no, you know, this, this, the, the, I mean, human beings are paradoxical creatures. Kierkegaard has such a wonderful, wonderful sense of that. But, you know, we are, we are embodied spirit. I mean, that, that says everything. I, I, I say to my students, this philosophical anthropology class, I begin by saying human beings are mystics and hobbits. We’re both mystics. You know, in one sense, we can’t be human without this yearning for the infinite. Yes. And nothing less than the infinite will satisfy us. In another respect, if it were only that, we would be obliterated. There’s, we also have a profound need to have, you know, to sit by a fire in a small cozy room with a cup of tea and, and, and things that, that we’re familiar with, you know, and, and both of those are essential to our humanity. And, and, and I think that it’s precisely this dialogical relationship, as you said, that, that both brings that brings it home. Yes, quite literal. And, and, you know, helps us to understand it and also to fulfill it and experience it. You know, when we’re with another person, we feel that we’re, we’re, we’re taken out of ourselves into something larger. So we have that experience of, of transcendence and, and people, people, especially those who love us can bring things out of us that we had no idea were there. So they, they, they, they elevate us, but there’s also a sense in which they don’t elevate us into this nameless infinite, you know, we also become quite, and sometimes very painfully aware of our limitations. But those limitations aren’t simply evil and they’re not simply constraints, they’re, they defied us as well. And so that there’s this, this constant interplay of transcendence and, and, you know, the transcendent and the finite, as you say, I, that, that, that is absolutely at the, at the, at the core of this now. Yeah. With, with Hegel, I, I, um, I don’t know where you’d like to go with that, but I, I do think that, that, uh, for, for, for Hegel, the only, the only way that we really get to resolve the paradox is ultimately in the, in the concept, in the idea. Well, it’s kind of an intellectual achievement and that, that drove Kierkegaard mad. Yeah, and I disagree with that. And Dan and I both, Dan Schiappa and I both think this is Hegel, like Kant, is still bound completely within the propositional, like he, the non-propositional is, which carries most of the heavy lifting for our sense of belonging. This is why this is a very important critique of Hegel. If this sense of home and belonging and connectedness and reciprocal recognition, you know, and all this perspectival, identity, participation, like all of the non-propositional is not, all right, it, it, yeah, it, it, it, it, you can see that Hegel is pointing to it and relying on it, but he’s not incorporating it within his, within his theory. And another way of putting it is, is for him, you know, he, he, he sees love as revealing something profound about this inter-, the unity of diff-, different, you know, beings, you know, persons. They, they experience unity in, in, in their difference in love. And he says that’s really profound. But for him, that’s just a, that’s a kind of physicalist material, revelation of something that actually gets fulfilled in reason. So love has to be transcended and now it reaches its perfection reason. Well, let’s go the other way around. Let’s say that, you know, reed then gives you an intimation of something that’s actually realized in love. And for me, that’s part of that inversion that you just mentioned and the comparison, like, Neoplatonism, especially Christian Neoplatonism does it the way you just recommend it, you know, and it’s clearly in Plato, you know, the Dianaea, right, right. And then, you know, and then the Eros takes us into Noesis and possibly into Henosis. That’s why the good is the highest principle and not news. Yes. Not intellect as it is for Aristotle. I mean, that was Plotinus’s criticism of, of, of Aristotle. And, and, you know, some people want, it’s, it remains a question of whether Plotinus had some, I mean, clearly he’s interpreting Plato, but there’s, there, there remains this un-, I think ultimately unresolvable question of whether he had some experience of Christianity. I mean, he would have been, that would have been present in his milieu and it may have informed the sense of what the good is, but, but we can never know that. We can’t know. I mean, it’s, it’s reasonable to raise the hypothesis. He clearly has knowledge of the Gnostics and an intimate knowledge. He criticizes them, or calling them his friends. And so the, and we know that, you know, these communities, the Neoplatonic, the Gnostic, the Hermetic, right, and early Christianity, they’re all swimming around in each other’s waters. So yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s, I mean, it’s certainly the case that the, the, you know, the later, Porphy of course knows about Christianity directly. Right. And not so happy about it. No. Yeah. And, and this, and, you know, the question doesn’t need to be resolved in fact. No. I mean, you know, the point for Plataeus is once you see, you see that it actually makes sense, the, the, the primacy of, of, of, of the good. And, you know, he even interprets good, whereas for Aristotle, intellect is, and this is, Hegel says he actually presents Aristotle at this, he has this passage from Metaphysics, Book 12, Chapter 7, has the pinnacle of his entire system. He just quotes Aristotle. It’s, it’s, and it’s not one of the numbered slots in the system. It sort of sums, it transcends the number. It’s not a part of the system. It summarizes the whole, but it’s where, it’s where Aristotle thinks of the pure actuality of God as thought thinking itself. And, and Plataeus was critical of that. Yes. That, that’s not sufficiently transcendent. It’s, it’s, the good is the higher principle. Yes. And if anything, we, we think of the good as a love, loving love. Yes. He actually uses that and he says, you know, this is too meta- Yeah, yeah, I know, that’s beautiful. But he actually, he actually uses that language. It’s quite extraordinary. Because with love, loving, love, there doesn’t have to be the subject audit, object dichotomy in the thought thinking itself, which I think there’s something profound about that. So let me, let me, let me then go. So we’ve got, we’ve got, we’ve got, we’ve got a bunch of things nicely starting to talk to each other, freedom, forgiveness, homing, and reason. And, and then it’s bound to, right? It’s bound to, right? Something that the I that is we, that is I, right? Yeah. So, so, and many of these things, and you’re bringing it out, David, you know, all of this is an orientation to the good, which is, you know, there are particip- Brandon makes the case that when Hegel says Geist, he means our, our participation in normativity. We are not just animals motivated by desires. We are agents who undertake commitment because we recognize normativity. And, and then I want to get a sense of how do these two things relate it? Geist as normative. Sure. They, they, the, the, Brandon makes it clear that that’s where normativity comes from. And whether or not you think that’s accurate of Hegel. So that’s one scholastic question. And then after the scholastic question, do you agree with it? Do you disagree with it? And then secondly, how is that related to the fact, and it seems to be bound up with, here’s a weird idea from a weird, with gone through a, probably a deformation through a vervecchian lens, right? So we’ve been invoking love and also light, reason, intelligibility, right? Recognition. These are all, you know, intelligibility terms. But it seems to me that in addition to light and love, there’s life. And so let me, let me just say why, for me, what makes a living thing different from non-living things is that living things generate norms that they bind themselves to. And they’re not doing that as an act of choice. They’re doing that as a, they’re as a constitutive function of their being. That, like, if you don’t do that, if you’re not taking care of yourself, right, then you’re, right, you’re not a, you’re not a living thing. Now, and here’s the next, as soon as I start to take care of myself, I have to care about some information rather than others. And so relevance realization begins. And as soon as I’m doing that with other people, I have to care about others, right? So life and love, I’m not saying caramecium or, you know, but you know what I’m saying? There’s precursors there in an important way. And I think of, I think of reason is that which binds autopoiesis on one domain. So we’re not just, we’re finite, but we’re autopoetically finite, which is really important. It binds autopoiesis to accountability on the other side. That’s what ratio, that’s what Logos does. And I’m wondering if, this is torturous, I know. So this is just at the very edge of my thinking. So I’m sorry, I haven’t had a chance to get it in a nice clean argument. But the idea is, is there, like, is there something like there’s an autopoiesis to Geist? Geist is a, it takes, it cares for itself, it develops itself, it recognizes, it’s autopoetic, it generates norms that it binds itself to. And therefore, right, we have a profound responsibility to it because we participate in that life. And that is why it has a normative authority for us. I’m trying to make an argument here. I don’t know if, maybe that’s wildly askew, but I’m trying to get that, like, seems to me life that, you know, broadly construed, just like we’re broadly construing light and love, is playing a huge role in why Geist has normative status. And I wonder what you think about that. Oh, I mean, I think that’s very insightful into what Hegel’s all about. I mean, it’s interesting that you’ve been bringing up life. I just came from a workshop a few weeks ago, a week at Durham Cathedral with some theologians and philosophers to talk about biology, metaphysics and theology. So, and the sense was that this is the next big thing that really needs to be reflected on. But in any event, what you described of generating a norm, the sort of self-generating, I mean, you know, the classical term for that is teleology. I mean, that’s what theology actually meant. But teleology as it has understood intrinsically rather than extrinsically, not that things are used for a purpose, but that things are their own purpose. And for a thing to be an end for itself, it requires also a sense of passing through relations to the other so that there’s a sense of needing to go out into the world in order to care for oneself. I mean, I like how you use that language. And that’s built into the Aristotelian notion of what nature is, is an intrinsic principle of motion and rest. Yes. Like going out and coming back. That’s the heart of nature to heart of life. Now, the one thing that I would say here about your, I think you’re absolutely right to describe Hegel in those terms. That’s the essence of what spirit is, is that it generates its other and then it reconciles the otherness. It reconciles itself to that. But this is exactly where the ambiguity comes from. It seems to me that for Hegel, it has to be self-generated. There’s this sense in which the self ultimately becomes the absolute, the kind of origin. And think about how different it is if you were to say that autopoiesis is possible only because something outside and beyond myself is soliciting my response. That I’m both being called, I’m generating a norm, but that norm is also being given to me by the other and solicited from me by the other. That I think has a much more, yeah, the transcendence is much more present in that second way of describing it. So let me try something. And I’m hearing it in some of my own thinking terms, but I’m open to correction on it. But I’m hearing you say, for all of what Hegel’s doing, it’s ultimately an agentic notion. And he’s forgetting, right? It’s only an agentic understanding of Geist and not also the arena, right? Like to be at home requires something other than you, right? That you will, right? You’re welcomed into a home. You don’t simply generate a home, but you’re welcomed into it. Right. Yeah. Right. So the right, and then yeah, this is, I mean, this goes back to the thing that I keep hammering on that intelligibility has to be co- created by the world and us, or it’s not intelligibility. It’s either isolation or projection. Right? And when you have isolation and projection, those are the two ways in which belonging is lost. You lose the polarity in the poles, right? You get polarization rather than polarity. Does that land for you as a way of trying to process it? Yeah. Yeah. And I would say, I mean, that’s the difference between an orthodox conception of the Trinity, I would say, and a Hegelian conception of the Trinity. That an orthodox conception, not that one can put it in a quick nutshell, but at least recognizes that in God, there’s three persons that are irreducible to each other in the perfect unity. And what are the ways of interpreting that? And this is the way that I follow the theologian, Hunter, from Balthazar, is that the Holy Spirit represents, there’s a kind of eternal surprise in God. It’s where God is even greater than God, in God. Yeah. Yeah. And that being surprised by the other is not, there’s something perfect about that. And if it really is a perfection and not simply an imperfection that needs to be resolved and overcome, but it’s an essential and permanent perfection, that must also be the case in God in some fundamental way. And if you can see that, and again, paradox is abound, but I think if you can see that, all of these other dimensions start to take on a new light. I think to put it in a, the co-creation aspect can be sustained all the way to the end. It’s always going to be a co, and it’s not going to be a co for a time that resolves into a self-creation or something. Which is, I think Hegel’s, always Hegel’s danger. So the inner-teleology has to be balanced with an outer co-creation kind of thing. Is that? Yeah. A solicitation from the other. Yes. The other awakens me, the other sort of surprises me. The other can’t be absurd to me. And the other also has to afford my approaching them in some fashion. Is that what you mean by solicitation? Like you don’t necessarily. And in fact, I think that more and more I’m realizing that this is the essence of beauty. Ah, okay. So here’s what I want to do then. It surprises us in a way that just totally makes sense. And we can bring in here something you’ve also discussed, we’ve discussed about, you know, I think I keep probing this question that Plato keeps probing. Like what ultimately is responsible for the turning, right? What turns people? And Plato keeps probing for that. But I think when he talks about being seduced into philosophy and beauty, I think he gets that. And then there’s something inherently aspirational. Yeah. And so I’d like to talk about, I’d like to end for now. And what I’d like to talk about next time is I want to begin by comparing this version of the Trinity to what you said. Hegel thinks the Trinity is very important. What’s his interpretation of it? And how do both of them tap into this constellation, right? This configuration, better term, this configuration we’ve been talking about, freedom, forgiveness, home, mutual reciprocity, right? Reason, responsibility, and all, right? I think we’re all agreeing we’re learning a lot from Hegel, but there’s criticisms emerging. And I wonder if we could then bring them to a point by comparing his understanding of the Trinity with the understanding you’ve proposed, David. And that would give us some back and forth. And that would allow us to also explore the questions about God and Geist. And then also the questions about God, Geist, and freedom, reason, love, belonging, home. And art. And art and beauty. Yeah. I mean, for Hegel, the three absolutes are art, religion, and philosophy. And the question is whether art and religion finally just disappear into philosophy or whether they’re… Yeah. That’s… All these are… You can’t separate. All these questions are connected to each other. Yeah. And part of Nietzsche’s critique of Hegel is these aren’t getting subsumed, right? And Nietzsche wants to re-prioritize it, often at the expense of other things. So how is that for a proposal for what we do next time? This was great. This was, I think, a great opening salvo. And I think I think people can see, if you really care about reason, if you really care about forgiveness, if you really care about belonging, if you really care about freedom, this is something that can be a tremendously powerful playground that we can use to explore and explicate stuff that’s implicit or intuitive, elucidate it, challenge it, refine it, improve it. So first of all, I want to thank both David and Ken. And I want to get… I’ll now shut up other than to end it when we’re all done. And I just want to give David and Ken, in that order, please, like a final brief word. It doesn’t have to be summative or anything. It can just be, what’s with you now? And how are you looking forward to our next time together? I just want to say a word of gratitude. First to Ken for initiating all of these things. And then I think what you’re doing, Ken and John, you’re bringing kind of a depth to this medium that I stayed away from because I was afraid that it was the death of thought. And I’m coming to see that that doesn’t have to be the case. And I really mean this quite sincerely, gratitude that you’re raising such profound themes in this medium and making them accessible to people. I just want to express my gratitude for that, both of you. Yeah, likewise. I’m very grateful to be here. It’s very helpful for me personally. And also, I think that… I mean, I alluded to it. And I think in our moment, this is precisely the space where it’s dark to most people in the sense that it’s not even a reflective thing that comes to mind in the question of what is freedom, what is rationality, what is love. And so I think this was really profound and I’m grateful to be here. So thank you everyone who’s watching this for your time and attention. There’s just so much more coming. And again, this was really wonderful, David and Ken. And I look forward really, really eagerly to our next time together. Take care, my friends. Me too. Thank you for watching. This YouTube and podcast series is by the Verveke Foundation, which in addition to supporting my work, also offers courses, practices, workshops, and other projects dedicated to responding to the meaning crisis. If you would like to support this work, please consider joining our Patreon. You can find the link in the show notes.