https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=I3IsAA6OOz0
Welcome everyone to another Voices with Raveki. I’m here with what I imagine is a familiar face to many of you, somebody of course that is integral to everything that I’m doing to try and address the meeting crisis. Dear deep friend and now the executive director of the Raveki Foundation, my beloved friend Christopher Mastropietro and we are here because we want to address an issue that’s been coming up a lot of people are asking us about, which to put it into a bit of a phrase, how are we doing all of this with an eye towards virtue and virtuosity? So how do virtue and virtuosity constrain and inspire us to aspire to do our very best work in addressing the meeting crisis, affording a Socratic way of life and walking the philosophical Silk Road. So welcome Chris, it’s great to have you here and again, I’ve just you have been just such a powerful presence and palpable improvement to the functioning and flourishing of the Raveki Foundation. Chris has just been doing by everybody’s measure both within and without Chris is just lifting the foundation up tremendously. So it’s just great to have you here and of course we’re doing so much work together, but you and I thought we should talk about this issue of virtue and virtuosity. Thank you, my friend. Yeah, and I should say, I mean, it’s a real team effort. We’re just getting started and it’s been just a handful of months so far really. And in some ways it feels like it’s gone by in a blink and at some ways it feels a lot longer because of the density and the depth of each day of that time. Like it’s very full, every day feels very full. And it’s this interesting period of it’s a very exploratory period where it’s like an organization searching out its identity and searching out a way of understanding itself and how it shows up and how it wants to comport with the very things that it’s trying to do. And I think the thing that’s on my mind most these days is just this, the ever present question of virtue. And I think so much of our work, I mean, you and I in deciding to have this talk, we were talking about the way that virtue is both a, it’s both a kind of, it’s the aspired object, if I can put it that way, of so much of our work, especially the pedagogical program, the dialectic and the dialogos and the other practices that take place around it. And so it occupies this sort of this center of attention in the work itself and not only in the conceptual framing of the work, but also in the practice of the work. But then, you know, the ever present risk of performative contradiction dogs us and dogs all organizations, right? Which is you want the way you do things to somehow map the things that you do. And you want those to actually happen with a coherence and an integrity. You don’t want to be at quits with yourself by saying one thing and doing another. And so the question of virtue and virtuosity is, it’s present at every level of this work right now. It’s present in the very subject matter of the work, in the theoretical focus, in hopefully, the attempted execution, and also in how the work is then scaled up and refined and developed and scaled and brought to different people. And so it’s just the it’s an evergreen question on my mind on every single level. And, you know, we just finished doing a 12 week intensive for dialectic and theologus was the first time doing that course. And we discovered so much about this practice in doing that. And I hoped that would be true. And it was. And one of the things that kept coming up, which always had to be it was always a bit of an aporetic question, why virtue? What is it? What is it such that we keep reaching for it? And what is it such that it deserves to occupy the center of attention for us in the now, but also for some of the roots and origins of the practice that you began by reverse engineering? And so I suppose it’s the question right now. It’s the question that finds its way into all other questions. How do we grow virtuously? How do we make sure that like relationships and and people and the things that are most real and most meaningful are actually always at the center of the work? While trying to also execute the work in all the practical ways that you have to execute anything if you’re an organization, and how do you make those things complement one another? One of the I was having this last thing I’ll say and then I’ll put it back to you, John, but I was having a conversation recently in which, you know, I thought of cars is finite and infinite games as being one way of framing this challenge, which is to say the the task of trying to hold this together, hold practice, hold theory, also hold incidentally, some sense of community, and have those things properly integrated is some nebulous combination of finite and infinite games. And you want to make sure that you’re not turning an infinite game into a finite game, and therefore circumscribing its life and energy and miscategorizing it. But you also want to do the opposite. You don’t want to turn a finite game into an infinite game either. And so knowing where to put these, it’s like a modal confusion, right? And knowing how to understand that moment to moment, person by person, I think is just the question that lingers on my mind. And so I’m so excited about everything that’s going on in the new year is going to bring, it’s going to bring a lot, it’s going to bring so many new projects and it’s going to, you know, we’re going to be able to gather ourselves together for the new year in ways that we haven’t been able to do because we’ve just been sort of searching out this integration and it’s beginning to gather and it’s really exciting. But with that comes this heavy responsibility for virtue and virtuosity. So that’s what’s on my mind. Well, that’s really good. Yeah, I know the Awakening to Meaning platform is going to have a lot of new additions to it. And so this question is becoming paramount. I mean, it’s the Socratic question, it’s the Platonic question. And they’re intertwined, the what is virtue and the why virtue. And I want to pick up first on something you just said that I thought was really good, which is something analogous to Brahms modal confusion making use of Kars’s notion of finite and infinite game. Just for those who might not be familiar, Kars made a distinction between finite games in which we know the rules and the rules are kept constant and that it makes sense to try to bring the game to some kind of completion or closure. So chess would be a classic finite game. It might be combinatorially explosive, but it’s still finite. An infinite game is one in which you are doing exactly the opposite. Part of the whole intent of the game is to keep the game going, keep it alive, but in a way that is never disjointed, no non sequiturs, no weird lacunas, no gappiness, it just flows. It has a jazz to it as a metaphor we like to use and Greg Thomas would like me saying that. So what this means is part of what you’re doing when you’re playing the game in order to keep playing the game is part of playing the game is how do you change the rules? And how do you change the rules in a way that everybody else recognizes and accepts? And of course this is Kars’s way of pointing to the game of how we make each other into people. And Hegel famously pointed out that what we’re doing is we make a game and we agree to the rules and within playing the game of how we recognize and make each other into people, we change the rules in how we recognize and make each other into people and then we play that and so on and so forth. And that’s one of Hegel’s great insights that of course that means that what authority and responsibility and what reality mean are constantly shifting but not in some haphazard irrational fashion. And so I think it’s quite right to see that we are trying to discern when we’re playing a finite game and when we’re playing an infinite game there’s a finite game, there’s a finite game of getting an organization up to a place of sustainability and viability and then there’s the infinite game of our responsibility to the sacred, to ultimate reality, to the true, the good and the beautiful, which of course is dialogical and therefore constantly oriented towards ultimacy, infinity, emergence, emanation, creativity, all of that. I’m not getting confused about those and I think I would put it to you that that discernment is a nice place where virtuosity and virtue come together because there’s definitely a virtuosity, a finesse within skill for being able to track that and we’re not claiming we’re having that, we’re claiming we’re looking for it, we’re trying to get it, and then a recognition that there is a relationship to things that are in some sense orienting us towards ultimacy and therefore our virtues. So I think that was a really nice beginning. For me, and I’ll pick up on that theme, is I’m trying to understand how those two orientations, and this is an old, this is a perennial problem which is precisely why it’s platonic, is what is our relationship to the sacred, what is our relationship to the profane, how can we with virtue distinguish between them and how can we do that virtuosity so we’re not clumsy about it etc. We do it aptly and with aptitude and for me I’m trying to understand that in terms of my way in which this problem lands for me specifically and one reason why I helped to set up the Verveki Foundation is I’m trying to figure out how to properly be a vehicle and a voice for something that’s emerging which I think is, I think the sacred is trying to be born in a new way as a response to the meaning crisis and I don’t mean that sort of cryptically or metaphysically, there’s a lot more to unpack. I’m just speaking very symbolically right now and how can I be a voice and a vehicle without becoming, in the pejorative sense, a guru, without becoming many of those figures and this that I don’t want to be that have emerged and that this ramifies with two other problems that I know we’re circling around. One is how do we, if we do think the next Buddha is the Sangha, how can we be responsible to the distributed cognition of our audience without calling prey to audience capture which drives people into becoming these weird pastiches and parodies of themselves that makes, that drives somebody becoming a guru, a gurification and then that also relates to a problem I know you’re very concerned with which is people want community and we’re not in that we can’t be morally in the place of offering therapy on one hand or being a community on the other. This has to be, right, this has to be well like the Silk Road. It has to be, we can hopefully help, you know, lay down the Silk Road between communities so they can more properly afford and communicate and commune with each other but we are not here to either offer, to make a community or nor are we here to offer individual therapy and so that question is something we’re struggling with and I’ve said too much so I’ll now be quiet so you can. No, I mean you’ve named a whole bunch of the tensions of the moment and these are tensions that I feel really personally and that I feel around me and I can’t tell where my experience of them ends and the general proliferation of them begins. It’s all a blend to me and one of the tasks is to try and figure out how much of that becomes this projective and how much of that is real and to figure it out. I mean I where we, I find it’s true of me and I find it’s true of us as the foundation and I find it’s true of a lot of us who are, who have found ourselves here in this peculiar place, this very fecund place of tremendous, like there’s tremendous richness to it. It’s embarrassingly rich with formidable, interesting people who come forward from a variety of different places and have so much to give, with great appetites for meaningful things and you know standing in the center of that, I mean every corner of it is the center you know so I don’t mean we are at the center of it but I mean I mean I’m speaking to a sensation, a sensation of being immersed in it and the sensation of being immersed to it besets me with this concern of how to treat it and that means standing in the middle of tensions dialectically, right, which comes back to the core of our work which is to say you’re right we want to be, we want to help like the hunger for communities very powerful and it’s necessary and but community brings, it brings tremendous meaning and it brings tremendous danger as anything that is tremendously meaningful comes with deep implicit risk and so how do you afford community, encourage it, stoke it, provide some of the conditions for it but also not try to manage it or control it or own it because that brings in hierarchical structure and implications that frankly we have no business having and then the same thing right, how do you be receptive to all of the hands that reach in offering to assist, offering to help, wanting to be a part of something meaningful and how do you be both receptive and properly open, actively open, actively open-minded as you like to say but also to have a certain amount of sovereignty and agency and a sense of self-determination so that you know you can be clear-eyed about what it is that you’re doing and scope it properly because none of us can be all things to all people, it’s true of a person and it’s true of an organization, you can’t be everything you want to be, finite transcendence, right, you want us, you want your reach to exceed your grasp but you have to ultimately foreclose possibility in order to become a thing that is active and effective in the world, a person as for any other entity and so I think that this fascinating place that we’re in right now and that I find myself in is having to sail between those in every case and it’s a heck of a task, it’s fascinating and it’s beautiful and ultimately I think the thing that I come back to is that there’s something about the dialectical process, the dialectical dynamic of the things that we’re actually practicing and trying to refine in the pedagogy hopefully map onto the way that we can comport ourselves and my concern is for there to be a proper continuity with the practices that we’re trying to refine and teach, these Socratic practices that capture these tensions and that have us live in them and live them out rather than to try and bring them forcibly to conclusion and the way that we act in the world in all of the finite ways we need to be in the world and that there be a correspondence between them such that they’re not at quits with one another or at variance with one another and that people justly I think remain at the center of all of the people, you know a person for me is infinitely more real than an idea, right, the simplest person as it were if I can even say it that way is infinitely more real than the most complex and beautiful idea and there’s a way in which I can’t qualify that but there’s a way in which intuitively that’s true to me and people are at the center of this and the question of virtue can’t be separated from that somehow and yet there’s a great deal of dynamic energy here that is more than anyone can manage and so that remains the challenge I think. There’s a lot in there. It’s a bit aporetic sometimes isn’t it? Yeah it is and Kierkegaardian to invoke one of your features. I mean for me I’m persuaded that of Highland’s proposal, Drew Highland’s proposal that Plato was ultimately about sort of this meta virtue of keeping a creative tension, a tonus between our finitude and our transcendence, playing our finite games and playing our infinite games and keeping the proper tension because if we are only finite we fall prey to despair and servitude and if we’re only transcendent we fall prey to inflation and hubris but if we keep an optimal grip on both which is of course a virtuosity term, if we keep an optimal grip on that we can have an optimal existence and that virtue is exactly that. So I mean this is why we are having to, I’ll use a phrase from my childhood, we’re having to practice what we preach in the very attempt to do the preaching precisely because insofar as we want to keep people at the center and serve people well, we are facing these tensions that call for this virtue, this meta virtue, maybe this is what Safferson ultimately meant of keeping a tonus of finitude and transcendence. So we are constantly, how do we afford people’s aspirations and how do we all recognize and hold onto the fact of our finitude? One of the things we’re wrestling with is, and people who are of a stoic ilk will recognize this, is the dichotomy of control. So Epictetus started the Enchiriodon, the manual for living, the core, the central discernment and it falls right into this finitude and transcendence. Of all wisdom is really realizing what’s in your control and what’s not in your control and properly taking responsibility for that and also divesting oneself of what you can’t ultimately be responsible for. Right, right. Yeah, that’s right. And there’s a paradoxical way in which an action has to be somehow both have modest aspirations and also ultimate aspirations at the same time. Right? Well said. And that’s something that I’m finding a lot, that paradoxes seems to inhere in every activity that we’re undertaking. We’ve had to do a lot of thinking recently about like, okay, what is it that we are? What is it that we do? What is it that we can offer? And we’ve used all kinds of methods to do that. And so we’re going to be able to do that. All kinds of metaphors to try and capture the gist of what that could be. Right. I mean, one of the most fundamental ones we come back to, and this refers to Awakened to Meaning, the platform specifically, it’s as a dojo, right? A place where people can come learn some new capacities, learn some new skills, practice things that might affect even if it’s incremental and slight, some postural change in what they find available to them in their reflection and in their sociability on a day to day basis. And if that can affect even the slightest change or imbue even the slightest value for someone who comes in to do these practices, to me, I will have considered that to be a great success. And, you know, there’s a modesty to that, right? There’s a modesty to it because when someone steps across the threshold and comes into the dojo, we can’t tell that person what it is that they’re going to take from it. That ultimately is going to be up to them, right? What we can do is offer a set of tools and capacities, a set of resources that they can learn, that they can take with them and whose relevance will ultimately be determined in the way that those integrate naturally into their own lives and become properly and idiosyncratically married to whatever it is that is meaningful for them. And that modesty to me is really important because the modesty helps to avoid what you’ve called the pejorative side of the guru problem, which is that there’s a big difference between midwifery, which is our goal, to help to deliver the thing that is already within the person that they have come bearing. But need some practices, some tools, some form of careful confrontation to be able to draw out and draw forth. And indoctrination, which is to say, here are a set of principles or ideas that you should adopt that will show you what the truth is and tell you the nature of reality. And obviously, that’s not what we’re doing. And I’m always wary of how one risks bleeding, risks bleeding into the other, and how one is misapprehended for another. And so there’s this sense in which I feel less reaching for something that’s perhaps that exceeds that tiny, modest arena that I’ve just described. And yet maintaining with a certain amount of discipline and rigor, the modesty of that arena is also important, paradoxically, in order to afford anything greater that could possibly happen. And that’s a difficult thing to articulate. And the execution of that is even harder. But to me, that has been that maintaining that paradox, there’s back to the Kyrgyz Guardian again, and living out that paradox in some way, socratically in a Socratic form of irony has been essential to the beginnings of that project. And I’m going to remain, you know, going to remain, you know, open to being to being challenged on that model and that way of seeing things. But so far, that has been the most orienting frame that I’ve been able to come up with for how to both pursue what’s meaningful and remain ever present, ever presently wary of the risks that can sometimes happen when meaningful projects go awry. Anyway, how does that I have a few more questions for you, but what what? Tell me what you’re thinking. Well, I think that’s, as usual, very well said by you. Maybe let’s make it a little bit more specific, concrete. One of the things I’m wrestling with, and I know the foundation, you’re all wrestling with too. But sometimes it comes a little bit more directly on me, directly on me is how to recognize people as people need recognition, recognizing them, right? And this is Brandon’s notion of like, you know, how creative of personhood and real relationship that is, without accepting unhealthy projections. So part of what I’m trying to learn, and what I’m asking all of you to help me learn, and what we’re all trying to learn together is, when do we accept response? And this goes back to the dichotomy of control, right? When, when should we accept responsibility and be responsive? And when should we say, No, I we are not going to accept that projection. I understand that your hunger for meaning is leading you this way. And therefore, you want to make that projection, but we we we and you know, I won’t go into specific instance, there was one instance where in fact, you counseled me, john, scale it back, right? We are not responsible for that. We can’t be responsible for that somebody is projecting on to you. And you said, you know, and you, you were you were as always, you were very deft about it, but it was like, you know, they’re projecting on you, and you’re trying to be and you’re it’s triggering your compassion, but that can’t be who we are, because in the end, that will make us all vicious. And because we’ll be we’ll start to become idolatrous, megalomaniacal. Yeah. And, and so for me, the the the figure that’s been I wasn’t using the word modesty, but it would work. I’m thinking a lot of Marlowe in the Heart of Darkness, who can when he’s confronting the temptation for profound inflation, and, you know, just, you know, idolatrous projection, he decides deliberately to practice a restraint that will hold him in his humanity, even as he confronts these trends and these transcendent realities and possibilities. And so that has really been very powerful. So what you just said landed very powerfully for me. I just want to say that we are we are trying to take this into even some of the practices we’re sort of virtually engineering, which is, you know, we have dialectic into the logos, which is part of a proper pedagogical program. And it’s kind of apophatic, it takes you from discursive reasoning into that, that noesis, that nonverbal insight gestalting leaping, that, that sense of reciprocal opening appreciation, the unspeakable, unspeakable relationship to what is good, and true and beautiful, but it’s unspeakable. It’s unspeakable, because it necessarily culminates, whether explicitly or not in a poria, because you’re getting into the territory that is by its nature unnameable. And so it’s like the ascent out of the cave, mythically speaking, going back to Plato. Yeah, it’s the ascent out of the cave. And what it what what happens is, people move from beliefs about virtue, and even definitions or propositions into coming into right relationship with the virtue in an open ended loving, the loving of wisdom. But we are now thinking, but Plato was very, very clear in the Republic, and DC Schindler does a fantastic job in his beautiful book, Plato’s Critique of Impure Reason, that the return, the descent, the coming back down into the depths of the cave is as much a part of the cultivation of wisdom, as much a part of the journey as the ascent out. And we are trying to together craft and work out and workshop and do a lot of things to eventually, we hope, offer a cataphatic practice, a practice that is designed to take those ineffable insights about virtue back down into how do we confront existential dilemmas. So and we make an important distinction already between a dilemma and a problem. And the idea is, how can you find a personal problem that concerns you, concerns all of you, but that can be shared with all of us, so we are all concerned with it. And part of the practice will be how can you move off of that personal problem into a shared existential dilemma, how can we reframe that, and then what virtues can we bring to bear on that. And then of course, you, the individual, will be responsible for taking that resolution in the sense of being more resolved and getting a clearer view back into your personal problem. We can’t do that for you. We’re not therapists, we’re not your friends, but we can do a practice that helps bring this back down into the depths of the cave. We’re calling that the Socratic search space, and that’s coming. And because I bring this up because we’re trying to emphasize this, yes, there is the upward towards the transcendent, but there is also the respondent return to the finite and getting those in a complementary relation is something we’re working on. Beautiful. Beautiful. Yeah. And I think that the coming back down into the finite, the return to the dianoya, as you say, is also the rightful return of responsibility for resolution and decision back to the individual, which is how it must be. Which is how it must be, right? It’s like, no, we’re not, these practices, nor the foundation that offers them nor any organization in any place at any time is the place that you go to for resolution and decision. It doesn’t work that way. And it’s so important that we understand that it doesn’t work that way, despite the temptations to project that hope. And I feel those temptations. And I think many of us do. You want to go to a place that can give you the answers you want, that can fulfill all of your aspirations, that can make good on all of the promises you’ve made to yourself, but have found so hard to keep. And if it were that easy, then we would all have figured it out by now. It’s not. But I think that I think I appreciate you mapping sort of doing the mythic mapping, because I think the mythic mapping is not only the thing that we want to trace over the pedagogical program, right? The philosophical fellowship to prime the dialectic into dialogos, which is that aporetic, open ended noesis and back through the Socratic search space, which hopefully when we gather it together properly will be have been that that dianoetic descent back into finitude back into the cave. But that descent back into the cave is also the descent back into the individual scope of responsibility. And I think that I think that the task I want us to be able to perform or the service, I think of it as service, you know, the service I want us to be able to perform when we’re at our best is a service of being an extension of the individual’s capacity to reflect by creating this communal container that a person can step into in order to welcome the kind of confrontation, the provocation, the space of contemplation to be able to have midwifed the very things that are most important and most real and need their attention. And it’s a and I in that way, I see it as a service like any other kind, always, always on its way back to the individual person. You know, we’ve also also used it. I’m Ryan. I really like Ryan’s analogy. Ryan Barton’s analogy of and it’s not a complete analogy, but no no analogy in this space is complete because we’re reaching for something that’s unnameable. But one of the analogies he used that I quite liked was sort of as a base camp, you know, each person has to undertake a climb that is uniquely their own. And I often think of Jung’s comment and his reflections when I think of this, which is, you know, his mission was to turn the Christian into more of a Christian, to turn the Jew into a Jew, to turn the Hindu into a Hindu, right? It’s the nature of the person and their relationship to the sacred that is trying to be midwifed here. It’s not the impressing of a certain way or a certain doctrine upon them. And the reason I kind of like the base camp analogy is because it’s a place you go to just help get outfitted, to get some gear, to get some tools, to get some instruction, to get some, you know, not only as a communal experience, because of course, these camps are communal experiences, but the communal experience of the base camp helps to resource the person in so that they can undertake their climb. And that sounds a bit dramatic, but I like the combination, the way that it combines the communal element, which is critical. The relational component between people is essential because the relations between people, the philia between people is what actually allows it to graduate the attention to Sophia. But ultimately, it comes back to that individuated dimension to be executed in the service of one’s life. So anyway, every metaphor we make about this isn’t perfect, but I like that one for that reason. No, no, it’s a good metaphor. I like it. And when you mentioned Jung and individuation, of course, the person who came to my mind is Tillich. And of course, Dourley has done some excellent work comparing Tillich and Jung and the Psychic Sacrament, I think is still a really important book for people to read. Tillich talked about this tone-offs, this creative tension between individuation and participation. And I was thinking about what we’re doing in the dialectic and the dialogos is we’re availing people, affording people, inviting people into an increasing depth and scope of participation. And then with the Socratic search space there, where then like we’re trying to encourage Tillich’s courage to be, we’re trying to encourage people into a profound individuation so that they can take up their individual responsibilities in their life. And of course, you want there to be an ongoing resonance between those. That was Tillich’s point. And Tillich’s saying something very, I think, convergent with Heinlein and therefore both ultimately probably to Plato is resist people who want to alleviate that tone-offs one direction or the other. People who want you to become an atomic individual consumer, or those who want you to submerge yourself in the group will of the class or the race or whichever pseudo religious ideology is going to drench the world in blood. And so- Or people who just want to hastily relieve your suffering, rather than to suffer with you in the ways in which it is appropriate and necessary to suffer. Well, this is one of the reasons why I like Whitehead’s God, and not only because Whitehead is doing the attempting to get beyond substance ontology and other things I’m going to be talking about a lot next year, and the convergence with the neoplatonic stuff, but because Whitehead properly understood God ultimately as a fellow sufferer, rather than as the impassive observer who keeps sort of telling us we should be better. And that’s a caricature. And I mean no insult. I’m just saying that there is something that is worthy of consideration in that idea. And to bring it back to your point, we should resist any idols of easy resolution. People that tell you are nothing but an animal and just to wallow in your bestiality, and I’m being provocative here on purpose, and those of you who tell you you are of course the chosen one or belong to the chosen group or the chosen X, and therefore you are a god on earth and you should not be suffering at all. I think all of these things are now becoming prevalent and powerful and they’re polarizing the society and ripping us apart. And one of the things the foundation stands for is something other than those two in a deep way. And as I’ve said, I think the left reminds us that we are finite creatures and we are subject to fate and we have to band together. The right reminds us of that we are not just animals. We are called to transcendence and to responsibility and virtue. And we need, as we’ve been arguing here, virtue is to hold both together. And the great vice of our time is all of the people who are severing those two and saying no it is one or the other and pursue this easy resolution, this simple way of being. And so I think, and the lack of virtue in that and the lack of virtuosity, the clumsiness, the simple mindedness of it. So we are trying to offer something that we think is actually more profoundly responsible to the human situation with respect to both its finitude and its transcendence. Yeah, well said. So that’s a good little bridge into something I wanted us to get back to, which is virtue. Let’s talk again about virtue for a moment because one of the things I’m hearing in what you’re saying, and we’ve had obviously these conversations before, but virtue appropriate to its nature is this is sort of inexhaustible tension that issues resolution and that I keep coming back to and it keeps mystifying me. And like I said, we just finished doing our inaugural intensive for dialectic and ideologos, which are going to be picking up again at the end of January and our next session. And I’m really excited about it. And one of the things that, one of the questions that keeps coming up in that course, and it keeps coming up in general around these practices is the question of why a virtue. Dialecting and ideologos as a sort of a contemplative vehicle is such that you could drop a whole host of things in the center of it, a concept, even things that are less savory like vices. There are all kinds of things that you could drop into the center of a dialectic in order to have it contemplated by a group. And in that sense, it can be purposed in different ways. And we haven’t reached the outer and upper limits of how exactly it can be purposed. And that’s one of the things we’re going to be trying to very carefully try and scope out and research and investigate in the new year is how this model, how this practice, how that structure can be adapted into different contexts, into different settings, into different kinds of people, so that it can be of service to different situations and ends, but always in that broader service of virtue and wisdom. And that’s a question that remains before us that we have yet to really investigate deeply, but which is certainly on our slate of projects for the new year. Okay. So, but then this question of virtue keeps coming up. Okay. If you can use, if you can purpose this practice for all kinds of things, why are we purposing it for the confrontation with virtue? And so, you know, one of the things I’m hearing in what you’ve just said is, well, there’s this thing about virtue, there’s this inherent paradox that has to be suffered about a virtue that is particularly evocative of the paradox of what it means to be a person in the first place, which is there are concrete ways of instantiating virtue that are relative to context and situation. And then there’s also this intuitive relationship to ultimacy about virtue, that it is a thing in itself, prevailing above us, in so many words, that exceeds any instance of it. And that’s why it’s properly platonic, right? So it’s the sort of universal reality that exceeds any instance in which it’s applied. And the instances in which it’s applied have to somehow participate with the sense of ultimacy and that your participation in participation in virtue has to somehow straddle the tension because virtues are uniquely suited to a particular moment. And you’ve talked a lot about how virtue being the beauty of wisdom in so far as it’s almost an aspectualization of wisdom itself, met to the needs of a situation. And so there’s this ultimate universal element dimension to it. There’s this finite constrained dimension to it. And espousing a relationship with virtue has something to do with managing the paradoxical tension between that specificity that comes opposite the face of a problem, concretely in the world, and maintaining attention with a sense of ultimacy so that you’re not simply arbitrarily and relatively active, right? That you’re somehow oriented to what is beyond the scope of that one situation. Okay. So there’s all of that at work in virtue. And then there’s one more little paradox, at least one more, probably several more, that is also at play specifically in the practice, which is that I have to be aware in the practice of two things simultaneously, not only be aware, but I have to actually act out two things simultaneously. And this is the really tough thing for people, really tough thing. It takes a long time to do it. And even then, which is when I propose about a virtue, I propose that courage is X. I’m speaking forth a really sincere belief that courage is X, what I propose. And I have to somehow make manifest that belief. And the more authentically spoken that belief is, the more it evokes something real in my relationship. And the more effective it will be as fodder for the practice. But at the same time, I also have to be aware in my speaking that courage is X, that courage is not X. Courage is infinitely more than X. So there is an is and is not tension that is centered to the nature of dialectic itself, which has to be present in the practice. And so people who are entering into the practice, and this is what makes it properly apathetic, I think, have to somehow be aware of that tension. They have to live out the tension. And insofar as they can sort of suffer the paradox of that, the practice is properly platonic and Socratic, as opposed to perhaps something more Aristotelian, which is, no, there is some substance that is the virtue, that is the thing I have to come to know in a final way. So anyway, I’m just gonna throw all that at you. And I want to see what you do with that. Well, first of all, I mean, that the first part, I mean, I think that that’s what I was trying to get at. But you articulated it really well, about how I think there’s this master virtue of the tonus between finitude and transcendence. And that’s what every virtue is doing. The Greeks, of course, have two words, even for wisdom, there’s Sophia, which is the orientation towards that, you know, the transcendent and from nises, but yes, how do I bring it to bear so it is really optimally gripping this situation? And how do I keep those two, right? How do I bring my principles into practice, both senses of the word practice, training, but also, you know, like practicing medicine, practicing law, right? How do I bring principles into practice? But how do I make sure that my practices are being constrained and directed by my principles? And so I think that is the key thing. And I think, right, that that is, I like the way you articulated it, that’s the proper realization of the paradox that is at the existential center of being a human being. And we have to be, and I’m really using this very, I want to really almost put it in neon light, being, we’re being true to our humanity. This is Marlow. We’re being true to our humanity. And so virtue in this way is not about being saying true things about virtues, it’s about being profoundly true to our humanity in this deep way you’ve just articulated. And so that we move truly through the world and through our lives again, you know, when we’re true to someone or to something. And so I’m bringing out all these things, you see, because a virtue isn’t just about beliefs. Beliefs are part of a virtue. You have to, you know, I have to have true beliefs about honesty. You know, I write, you know, not lying and, you know, trying to say things that are true, etc. I have to have true beliefs. But a virtue is also my skill. I have to have skills, virtuosity. I have to have the right perspective taking states of mind, states of consciousness, I have to have the right traits of character. And see, I think that’s why relationship, I think that’s why relationship, I’m sorry, I just want, I think that’s why a relationship is a better way of describing it. Because a relation, my relationship to a virtue invokes all the it invokes all for all for peace. It invokes all the things that you describe, right? As any relationship does, any relationship comes with its own propositions, procedures, perspectives, and mode of participation in the way that you’ve described. Yes, if you mean by relationship, some existential reality and not merely a logical relation, Correct, correct. which are why you’re using the word relation. I mean, existential relation. I agree with that. Yes. And yeah, so what it’s doing is it’s properly aligning the four to give us that inner peace that we also seek as a meta desire. And by aligning them, we are truer to our humanity and truer to reality. John Roussin, I just started his excellent book on adult life, that maturation is facing reality, right? And notice the word facing, right? Right. And then Plato said, you know, if you get those two working together alignment, and contact with reality, you get the well you get the ascent. And as we’re now saying, the descent, right, you get what human happiness in its most profound way. This is why, why virtue. And notice also, one more thing I want to resonate with it was pregnant and what you said, when we properly do that, when we properly home ourselves and hone ourselves within the finitude and transcendence, we get and here’s now we’ll I will do a little bit of redemption of Aristotle, although I agree with your previous criticism, right, we get the virtual engineering of our developmental pathway. Aristotle is right in that we are prone to self deceptive, self destructive behavior and often two ways, an excess and a deficit. And what we’re trying to do is right, create character traits that are constraints that push us away from cowardice, but push us away from foolhardiness. And we’re trying to get that so we can get a way in which we are true to our humanity while being true to reality in a deep and we mature. And I think maturation is another term for this meta virtue. It’s perfect. I love that. It just it there’s a there’s a beautiful simplicity to this idea of being true to our humanity. And it would out of context sound trite, but in in context, it doesn’t in context, it situates this finite infinite trend, this tension perfectly. And it just I mean, it reminds me of that sort of what it means to have that Heideggerian brush with the fact of your mortality, the fact of the imminence of death. And of course, that invokes the Socratic, the Socratic adage of philosophy being a preparation for death and maturity is awful. Sorry, what did I say? You said philosophy, all of all of philosophy, I just wanted to put the all of philosophy is a preparation for death. And maturity and maturation is kind of a it’s a it’s a it’s a it’s a humble but perfect way of just summing up what that what that looks like, ideally. And that it’s funny, you know, I’m just it occurs to me that of all the dialectics, all the dialectics, I think I’ve done at this point, I don’t know, I’ve ever done one on maturity. Boy, wouldn’t that be a good one? I’ve been in one. You’ve been in one on maturity. Yeah. And so for me, this is the way of enacting. And as you said, when you’re trying to do this, you’re trying to hold this and this is the second point you made that I wanted to get back to, like this, we’re trying to be between, you know, the first person, you know, involvement, right? Of, you know, when you’re speaking the definition, but you’re realizing, no, there are there are perspectives and things to be found beyond your perspective. And yeah, you really enacting the we talk about this. In fact, we talk about in these practices that you should be paying attention for when the virtue is showing up beyond everybody’s propositions. And people are starting to exemplify it, especially in their gestures and their tone and their body language. And you can read their state of consciousness. But when we’re doing all of this with respect to maturity, I think, and what we’re talking about here is, I think we’re enacting in that sense of in practice, as the child is to the adult, the adult is to the sage. Yeah, absolutely. It’s funny, as you as you bring up the, you know, you’re sort of implicitly in bringing up all of the embodied dimensions of the practice, as you speak, and it sort of reminds me of that’s another thing I can’t I just I just can’t wait to do more of which is most of the way that we’re doing this is virtual. And I’ve been astonished at how effective even the virtual version of it is it’s more effective than you know, if you had asked me three years ago, four years ago, how effective this would have been on a screen, I would have been really skeptical, but experience has borne it out. It really is quite incredible. And I’m, I’m tremendously grateful for it just because of how much more accessible it has been able to be as a consequence. Having said that, I was reminded a couple weeks back, we know we did a little drop in event, Taylor, who is our director of practice and education, along with Ethan, our director of partnerships and community development and Kasha as well, who’s, you know, been a one of our facilitators and just finished doing the course with us. All sort of hosted a drop in event in Toronto for dialectic and a D logos. And, you know, it was like, it was like rediscovering it again for me. And one of the things that and it, you know, and I knew I knew this already, but it’s incredible how in that deeper Heideggerian sense of forgetfulness, you know, you something can be something can be concealed from you, even though it is factually known to you, which is how much, which is, which is how much texture this thing takes on when it is done between bodies in a room. And there was something particularly effective in that case about Taylor did such a great job with the design that we were sitting on the floor as we did it. And so there’s this, there’s a this, this visceral sense of presence to the whole thing. And the folks in the room, several of them, at least had never heard of the practice before and ever encountered it before and came in and just with a little bit of a little bit of nudging, and those three facilitators did a great job of this just with a little bit of gentle tutoring, were able to get into the practice. And I was astonished at how effective it was, you know, and how quickly it was. And I think it was just a reminder for me. And I needed that reminder more than I, you know, more than I wanted to admit at the time, just how much that how much bodies in a room add to what it is that we’re doing and how much what we’re doing. I mean, you like to say often that it’s, it’s not what is being spoken, it’s what’s being conveyed, that is at the center of the practice and doing the practice well involves being reaching for the conveyance, rather than the speech, but using the speech to try and midwife the conveyance. And I was reminded of how much more bountiful that becomes, when you can just be in a space with people and use that proximity as a way of just pulling these things out. And there’s so much more ready to hand. And so one of the things that’s on my mind is, I mean, I can’t wait to, for us to develop the Socratic search base and have the pedagogical program completed, in a sense. And once it’s completed, and we have a home for it here at the foundation, we’re going to be able to continue to refine it and tighten it and make it better and better. But also then be able to take it into real space more and more often, hopefully, and get to see what happens because I was just I was I was so invigorated by that experience. And it was so simple and modest. That’s the thing. So relatively modest in its framing. And yet, that’s the thing that’s something about that Socratic irony is so important. Yeah, so we’re very much. Yeah, we’re trying to figure out how we could make more of those drop in events happen. And like I said, this is why we’re not trying to make a community we’re trying to make a well, I keep using the metaphor for as a shameless way of advertising the coming series, but as a Silk Road between communities, a through line, you know, having these practices being done in situ, in person, I think is important. We are also trying to figure out and this is coming down the pipe, how to get even in the virtual space, the body more into this, how to get embodiment being represented on the awakening to meaning platform. And we’re working with people on that because of this issue. So we’re trying to address it from both sides, get people already thinking more than thinking inhabiting their bodies, even when they’re in virtual versions of the practice, but also trying to afford doing it literally embodied embedded in the in person. And how can we make that happen? How can we make that work? We don’t want to be sort of a traveling band. We kind of try and figure out how to make this actually work. But I think it’s very important that we talk about like we’re doing right now, the things we’re aspiring to and what we’re hoping to try and bring about. I think that’s a proper part of this. I’m very excited about for the year that’s coming. There’s so much happening and there’s so much. We like you said, we recently had the members of the executive of the Verbeke Foundation come to Toronto and into my beautiful partner’s beautiful house and we got to get together. I was just, Ryan just asked me this recently on a conversation and I told him I was just so impressed by the professionalism and the competence and the commitment and the enthusiasm and the creativity people were bringing to this. I mean, it was just beyond anything I had. It’s like you said, I propositionally had expected it, but it’s like Ivan Illich, Tolstoy, he always knew he was going to die the way you know, two plus two equals four. But then one day you do, he’s going to die. It was like, oh well, I always knew these people were great and then it was like, wow. It’s just so encouraging. For me, it’s very much a candle in many ways, a darkening world. I’m very grateful for that. I’m very grateful for you. I’m grateful for Ryan for making this work and for all the work that Taylor’s doing and Ethan’s doing and other people like Robert and Robert and Eric and up higher. Oh my gosh, Ben and the board. Ben’s right here behind this making this happen, this magic. So yeah, all of these people and like you said earlier, how many of them come into this with a genuine investment? You know, I don’t even want to say interest. Interest is too weak a word, but an investment and like they see, they’re more than see, they apprehend and they’re committed to value of what’s happening here. And of course that circles us right back around. We have to know, we have to know how do we properly receive that without consuming it in an egocentric or a merely self-promotional fashion. And so we, of course we’ve circled back around again. Yeah, it’s just, I think it’s just, I think my sense and I agree with that. It’s an incredible, it’s incredibly formidable team and it’s a team of good hearted people. It’s all well to have a formidable people, but it’s a singular luxury to have formidable people who also have good hearts and to genuinely care and to, you know, we, and we all, we’re all sort of, I think we’re all suffering the responsibility. Obviously we all have a different piece of it, but we also have a collective version of it, which is like, how do we do this well? How do we do it carefully? How do we be true to the ambition to be of real service and at the same time to take our time and to take the proper care and to seize this opportunity in a way that is of most value for people. And I think we’re all feeling both the excitement and also the heaviness of that. And we’re all trying to bear it together. But yeah, the whole team, I mean, you know, Taylor and Ethan and Eric and Leslie, who’s just come on to join us and Ryan, who helped to pull all of this together. And there’s so many people, there’s so many people, but it’s, I have a lot of faith in the team and I have a lot of faith in, I have faith in the process as well, you know, that the very process of the dialectic, which is, you know, there’s a proposal, there’s midwifery of a proposal, you know, there’s scribing, there’s vibing, there’s a new proposal, the proposal iterates, the proposal builds. This is how we’re trying to work. It’s not just the practice that we’re trying to offer and refine, but it’s also the way in which we’re actually trying to work and make decisions and whatnot. And so, you know, there’s a lot that’s happened really quickly. There’s so much that’s going to happen in the new year. Maybe I should just quickly speak to that. I didn’t, you know, I don’t want this conversation, I wanted us to be dialoguing, not sort of doing a prospectus for the foundation necessarily. But I mean, we’re going to have all kinds of new courses on Awakened to Meaning. There’s going to be a continuation of the dialectic, but there’s also going to be philosophical fellowship eventually, the Socratic search base. Eventually, there’s going to be some authentic relating. There’s going to be sort of a pedagogical suite that’s going to hopefully January or February or so going to be starting up on the platform. And, you know, there’s going to be a new sort of Patreon structure that’s I think going to be much more participatory and interesting and dynamic. And there’s just going to be more of, there are going to be more ways of participating and more ways of channeling all of this energy into meaningful projects. And meanwhile, forays outside of just this budding in-house academy, which is to say taking these practices and trying to apply to scale them and adapt them to different contexts outside of our virtual walls to see where they might be of the most service. And obviously, there’s your Silk Road series coming up. And that’s going to be coming up in 2025. But there’s going to be a long road, no pun intended, of preparation. And hopefully, we’ll have some events and some, there’s going to be a lot of stuff in store leading up to that, I think that’s going to help to serve as a proper prelude to that. That’s going to be a huge project for us all. But I’m really excited about that. And we’re obviously just going to be trying to support you. It’s your project. We’re just kind of going to try and midway fit with you and be in service to you as you undertake it. But that’s going to be, boy, when I think about that project, I just, that gets me giddy. That gets me giddy. That is, that project, well, it’s already having a huge impact on me. And I don’t mean that just sort of theoretically. It’s having an impact on me, existentially, psychologically, spiritually. I I feel already called into some sort of, not just preparation, but this, I don’t know what it is. I can’t, I don’t have a word for it. Anything I say will sound pretentious, but I’m all, I can feel that something is calling me and moving me to like orienting to this in a profound way and opening myself up and trying to become ready for it. Sorry, all this word, all these languages are either pretentious or inaccurate. But yeah, I, this, well, I’ve been, and I don’t mean anything back religious at all by this, but I continually now been referring to this as a pilgrimage for me. And I want as much of how this will change me to be as much of what, how it’s conveying what it’s about than anything I’m saying. And yeah, next year will be the beginnings of the planning and the work and this will go on. And yeah, that’s in the works. And I’ll leave it at that. I just want people to know that in many ways, this may be my life’s work, culmination in some important ways. I don’t know, but it, I do know that it is calling to me the way very few things have called to me this profoundly and this deeply. And so I’m very, very grateful for the foundation in its support and its guidance. And it’s helping me to walk the razor’s edge on this. This could easily become very self-indulgent and megalomaniacal. It could easily also just degenerate into the merely pedantic or argumentative. And I want to avoid both of those because I think what is, what is needed is to try and exemplify and call people to a deep response to what is happening right now. And so, but that also is apropos of what we’re talking about, virtue and virtuosity, trying to bring that to bear. And I think the, you know, the pilgrimage is the right way to put it. I think it is because it’s not just an argument, it’s an existential confrontation. And the best way, yes, you often say, and I think you’re right, which is that, you know, you have to ultimately model and participate in the very thing of which you’re going to be, you know, the very thing of which you speak, of which you teach. And provoking that confrontation for yourself and as much as anybody else is absolutely necessary in order to gather together in its, in full, the meaning of this project. And so, I see it also as a culmination, but it’s a culmination also because it’s scaling, you know, it’s scaling into the procedural, into the perspectival being yours undertaking the pilgrimage into the participatory, which is to say, the very texture and topography of the pilgrimage itself, right? This is now, this is now something to live out. And I think part of living it out is to, to properly sort of submerge all of the propositional, which is to say, you’re going to have a very long form complex argument, as you always do, similar to awakening, similar to after Socrates, but in this case, that propositional content will be submerged in a context that gives it its pragmatic gravity. And that is why I think it has to be a pilgrimage. And I think you being willing to undertake it that way is right. It’s just right. And it’s properly culminating. And yeah, I just, I’m tremendously excited for it, you know, and, and I think it’s, I think it’s a courageous thing for you to do as well, you know, it’s a very, because it’s a, it’s a very, very visceral project. It’s not an academic project, it’s a philosophical project in the original and proper sense of the term. And it’s time we separated those. It’s time we made this distinction. This is not an exercise in scholarship. This is an exercise in phileas of. Well, and now you can see why the figure of Marlow is so strong for me. Yeah, let’s hope you have a better time than Marlow. I’m not, I’m not, I’m not going, I’m not going with you if that’s, if that’s, if that’s where we’re going. No, no, but there, but there is something properly, until it sends encouraging about being open to the fact that there is going to be some aspect of, I suspect of horror in this to some degree. And I am, and I think that’s part of why this preparation is resounding in me. You know, I, I, I did this, something like this before I went on Rafe’s return of the source. And I said, like every day, he took us, he took us so with so much virtuosity and virtue to the horizon of horror. And I knew I was going to get hurt. And I knew I was going to be, there’s things I was, I was going to be afraid to do and nevertheless did them. And I feel like that I was doing that kind of thing in mind and hearts and guts before I went on return to the source, but I’m doing that again, but even more so. And I’m grateful to Rafe, by the way, for that, because that was a, he, that whole experience tutored me in how to properly orient to what I expect is coming in this. So. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Well, my friend, good place to close. So thank you very much. And all of you who are watching this, we, we both wish you the best for this upcoming year. And we hope that the Viveki Foundation and our work and accompany you into this new year in a way that demonstrates both virtue and virtuosity. Happy new year. Thank you for watching this YouTube and podcast series is by the Viveki 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.