https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=lP-yd6ZKz2U
I wanted to first ask you guys how are you doing? How’s everything? How are you and your families and you know without anything personal just what’s going on over there in Toronto? So I’m doing well as all the people I love and care about including Chris and there’s no in-person classes at the University of Toronto so I’ve been switching everything over to virtual. The psychology department physically closed on Friday. I fully expect that the entire university will be physically closed as of Monday or Tuesday. I think they’re trying to keep it open as long as possible for libraries and whatnot but I expect that that’s going to end shortly because the Premier has asked us to go into pretty much lockdown. So rather than the university of course being a publicly funded university will follow what the Premier says so I fully expect that that will be it. When what’s going to happen I don’t know going forward. I’ve already received one email indicating that the courses I’m supposed to teach in May and June nothing official has been said but I should plan for them to be done totally virtually as well. So that’s what’s happening sort of professionally and personally what’s happening virtually is I’ve done a couple of talks with Jordan Hall around COVID-19 and issues around it around rationality and faith and then starting Monday I’m going to offer a live streaming free meditation course for people so that they will be able to come on and I’ll take them through like a 10 to 12 week meditation course. It’ll be mornings 9 30 Eastern Standard Time, 9 30 to 10. I’ll usually teach probably a new principle Monday and Thursdays and then in between we’ll also just meet regularly and sit together so that’s something I’m going to try and do to help people out. Peter Lindbergh and I are also putting together he’s trying to revise sort of a virtual stoa. We’ve got some of the most famous stoics, current stoics I mean it’s not like we resurrected anybody. No Seneca, Seneca won’t be there. Yeah so we’re going to be offering that for people as a place where they can go also to well try to cultivate some in-person stoicism to give them a way of dealing with some of the extra strains that this is putting on their lives. So that’s sort of where I’m at right now. So how about you Chris? Is there anything you want to add to that? No not really I’m also fine. Me and mine are fine so far. We’ve been very fortunate I think comparably here next to much of the rest of the world I think and because I’ve been off work for some months anyway so my day-to-day life hasn’t changed a whole lot. Although I’m learning that there’s a difference between elective solitude and solitude by ordinance. The activities on the ground aren’t all that different but the feeling is a little bit different. It’s not quite an ordinance yet here but it’s just shy of that. It’s like we haven’t been ordered to remain cloistered in our homes but everything is as John said everything’s more or less shuttered. So you really you don’t have a lot of options if you want to venture out anyway. But yeah I would say so far so good. So far so good. Yeah. How are you doing Andrew? Oh I just want to say something first Andrew. Chris and I were both talking just before you came into the room that we were actually very pleased with how our both our federal and provincial governments are handling this. We’re very happy about that. We think they’re doing an excellent job. That’s good to know. Yeah. About me personally well it’s very interesting because I’m an overworked underpaid teacher I would say. So in the past months I’ve been working crazily doing a lot of classes and also doing this kind of thing. So I’ve been overworked basically and a little bit burnt out. And so now I’m on total lockdown. We’ve been on total lockdown for about a week here in France. And luckily we moved last year to the edge of Paris so we have a little garden. So I’m feeling like I’m very lucky compared to a lot of my friends and colleagues who are stuck in little apartments in Paris. And they can’t leave without a piece of paper basically. You know they need to have a piece of paper to say I’m going to the store or I’m going for a jog or something like that. So it’s very extreme here and it seems we’re on the up curve so it’s just getting worse in terms of numbers. But so there’s this extreme contrast between how wonderful my life is right now. I’m here with my family and I’m working remotely like you John and I’m doing you know physical work every morning and I’m feeling much healthier than I have in a long time actually. And the grim picture outside and my neighbor who’s elderly and just had a stroke and it’s very odd. We can’t really, we’re not supposed to go and talk to her and usually we have a relationship. So there’s a very extreme contrast between me right now feeling like I’m living my life like I would want to be living my life really almost in retreat like a Buddhist retreat with my family and then the extreme situation outside. Yeah. Andrew, I just have, this is a practical curiosity but I’ve heard of, I’ve heard, I know this is true of Italy. I didn’t know that it was also true of France that you need some kind of, you need effectively a permission slip to go out and carry on your business. What does that mean? Like where do you get that? You find it on the internet and you have to print it out and it has to have a date on it. So we’ve had our groceries delivered so I haven’t even gone out and done that yet actually. But so I guess you can change the date each time you go out and you have to say why you’re going out. If you’re going out to walk the dog or go for a jog, you have to be six meters away from other people. Six meters. Something like that. Maybe I’ve got that wrong. I could have it wrong but you’re supposed to really keep a distance from everybody. I’m not allowed to go out with my family for a walk for example. I can go out alone. I could go for a jog and I could do exercise or go for a walk but yeah that’s it. But again I’m in a little village so I’m not in the heat of the thing which a lot of my friends in Paris are and I can kind of feel that from them that it’s very intense. I think being stuck in a small apartment would be pretty hard. So I read your paper today. Much too quickly. I’m going to reread it in more detail. Here it’s called Gnosis in the Second Person. Responding to the meaning crisis in the Socratic quest of authentic dialogue. So what struck me in the end is and please correct me if I’m wrong if I’ve misunderstood something because this is a big overview. So this is about dialogos right? And you outline sort of five dimensions of dialogos and one is the let’s say person to person which is the horizontal dimension of dialogos. Me talking to you. And then the vertical dimension which is about talking to being. About questioning yourself and about talking to being. About questioning yourself and your existence I guess. Or being itself. And then you talk about how that moves into something a third dimension which is related to the I maybe the I thou in some level that something is created out of this dialogue. Mm-hmm. Right? And then the fourth dimension is that moves into time. And then the fifth dimension is a kind of timelessness that results. And so I like this whole model. I think it’s very very beautiful and I wondered if you could just go into detail and flesh it out a bit. So I’ll start. Chris and I will probably tag team a lot because our thinking on this paper is deeply symbiotic I think. One thing is to perhaps it would be useful to keep a distinction in hand that we could refer to throughout which is dialogos is the process that’s being realized and dialectic is the psychotechnology that people can learn and practice in order to try and realize the process and try to cause it to be instantiated in a dialogue. And so part of what we’re trying to do in the paper is to figure out as you’ve mentioned the dimensions both phenomenological and functional of dialogos as a process. And we’re also starting to that of course has merit in its own right. We’re also doing that also because we’re trying to figure out from the phenomenology and the functionality what the psychotechnology should look like. What should dialectic look like? What are some of the features that should be put into practice? And the hope is the overall hope from the paper is if we can work back from the phenomenology and functionality of dialogos into sort of reverse engineering the dialectic. We can put that potentially into a deep dialogue and I choose that term intentionally a deep dialogue with what we see in the Socratic practice within the Platonic dialogues and the Neoplatonic traditions as a way of then putting all of that into dialogue with what’s happening right now with the emergence of both psychotechnologies like Guy Sandstock’s circling or you know, Ewan Roche’s empathy circling or Peter Lindbergh’s anti-debate. These new practices and their attempts to tap into the collective intelligence of distributed cognition. And so if we can reverse engineer dialectic, put it into contact with the historical scholarship of Platonic dialectic, take that whole thing and put it into dialogue with these emerging practices in which people are seeking to reformulate and revivify dialogue so that it can be a means by which people can cultivate wisdom in a deep sense. Then we think what we can do is help to bring philosophia, the cultivation of wisdom, into these emerging practices because I generally see, although I have great value and appreciation and I participate in these practices, I’m not just an outsider, I have great value and appreciation for things like circling and I’m in constant communication with Guy Sandstock and Guy actually sanctions this in a positive sense on what I’m about to say. I see these practices as largely lacking the integration with philosophy. The integration with philosophy. And that maybe means, can I interject a little bit? Lacking in thinking, lacking in Heidegger means by thinking, which is almost taboo in these kind of circles. We’re supposed to work on our feeling, somatic experiences and then on the other hand, there’s this divide between the somatic experience and intellectualization and extreme sort of empiricism on one hand and extreme sort of experience on the other. Am I getting it right? Very much. I think that’s right. I think there’s a Cartesian intellectualism that’s often the presentation of propositional argumentation or their sort of, like I call it the semantic romanticism, where somehow by sort of exploring our somatic states, we will accrue to the good life. That’s not to say that there isn’t a lot of value in mindfulness and perception, you know, I hold to all of that, but I agree. What’s missing, and I think you put your finger on it well, in a lot of these kinds of situations is the I think you put your finger on it well, in a lot of these practices where we’re trying to communicate and even commune, if by that we mean that the connectedness and intimacy between people is also valued. What’s missing in a lot of these practices is, like I said, is, but how do they help us cultivate wisdom, both individually and collectively, in a way that’s seriously needed for addressing the meaning crisis. Now I’ll let Chris speak. Well, that was pretty comprehensive, John. The only thing I would add to it is that in order to affect the convergence between the more, the sort of the disquisitive dimension of it and what we might call the more characterological dimension of it is, that’s why we’ve invoked the Socratic exemplar. Hold on. Disquisitive. Your vocabulary always just knocks me off my feet. What is disquisitive, please? Disquisitive, meaning the process of disquisition, meaning sort of the explication, the discursion for the purpose of explication, radiosenation, that kind of thing. That sort of, yeah. So, I mean, the reason that Socrates is such a choice symbol or symbol for us is precisely because the Socratic dialogs combines the dramaturgical dimensions of, in the interactivity of the process, right? The actual felt somatization of the process, right? The dimension of it that’s played through and dramatized and enacted, and then the dimension of it that then regathers as a process of what we might call reasoning or rationing, right? Because Socrates is a symbol, he entreats us to both at once. He entreats us both to the discourse for the purpose of insight and discourse for the purpose of personal transformation. Those two are then bundled in the process of dialogos, right? Because you have what we call, or what right call, the sensibility transcendence between persons, the social disclosure that avails insights about one another, and then you have, in the interstices of that process, you have the ontological disclosure, the thing that seems to avail more of reality, and that they’re bundled together. And Socrates, because of the nature of the symbol, because of his countenance, he tends to provoke both of those states at once, because Socrates sort of stands, Socrates is both a personal and impersonal mystery, right? We don’t know who, that somehow, knowing who Socrates is, isn’t just knowing who Socrates is, it’s also knowing who we are. And knowing who we are isn’t just knowing who we are, it’s knowing what the world is writ large. And all of these things seem to constellate together in this cratic symbol, and that’s why he’s like the prism through which all of this then opens. So that’s why we’ve dropped him, I mean, it’s not exactly an ingenious move, Socrates has been this for a long, long time to many people. We’ve dropped him into the middle of this because he’s so he’s he’s an emissary and an exemplar for it at the same time. Right. So he’s a bridge. And he’s sort of a bridge between the personal and the impersonal going back and forth. And he also transcends both the personal and the impersonal. Well, he famously, he famously presents himself as a tipos not belonging to any category, and as Metaxu, somehow between the human and the divine. And so he he consciously, at least through in Plato’s dialogue, identifies with those two, those two, you know, by symbol on relationships, the binding together that he sort of sits between our normal categories of identity for human beings. And as I said, he sits between the human and the divine, and therefore he can bind both of those together. Rakowski in his really good book, Heidegger’s Platonism, talks about why Socrates in the dialogic form are actually inseparable. This goes back to Schliermacher and Schlegel from the presentation of what of Plato’s view of the cultivation of wisdom. And the basic idea is, and I think it actually comports a very well-converged with the argument that Chris and I are making, but trying to get dialogue activating and integrating all the four kinds of knowing in that what we see in the dialogue, you need three things. You need argumentation, obviously, in order to do, as Chris said, provoke those kinds of profound insight. It has to be a kind of an argumentation directed towards the affordance of a poria, right? That way you’re forced to step back and wonder in a profound way to call yourself into question. And think about Heidegger. We are the beings whose being is a poria is means a sort of a state of unknowing. Yeah, it’s like a night. Right. Yeah. Deep, deep perplexity. An epistemic precipice beyond which there’s nothing. Okay, so he pushes you a little bit towards the precipice. And then you stand back and you experience wonder and everything comes into question. And therefore you actually identify with what Heidegger would call Dasein. You identify with that aspect that seems to be central to human beings. How we are the beings whose beings are in question. And that gives us a privileged kind of access in our being, not in our not in our self or our personality, but beyond that. Not just in our propositional thoughts, but in that deeper kind of thing we were talking about earlier, the thinking. And so that of course is central, the argumentation. But you don’t have just a competition of arguments, right? In the dialogue. You also have a competition of ways of life. Zachary represents a way of life. He represents the unexamined life that is, right? Sorry, the examined life that is living in competition. So you’re not only having arguments and competition, you need to see ways of life in competition with each other. Can I continue your thought? I’ll make the third point and then you can choose how you wish to respond. And so Socrates exemplifies the competition between arguments that is supposed to induce wonder in the insight that Chris mentioned. He’s supposed to, you can’t do this with argumentation. You have to, in order to represent the competition between ways of life, you have to rely on drama. That’s the Dasein body. Yeah, you have to have that, right? So how are you going to get argument and drama together? You need dialogue. And then the next thing you need, right, is you need, Socrates represents aspiration. He represents our relationship to our sacred second self. He represents a call to transformation and transcendence, right? And that call to, and that’s another reason why it has to be symbolic for us, that call to self-transcendence, right? That has to be, you need a form of thinking that’s inherently woven with symbol. It has to both reach you where you are, but draw you beyond where you are. It has to do a deuce. It has to be the midwife for you. And so the dialogue is also the way in which you represent that aspirational relationship, right? It’s in the back and forth between you, the interlocutors and Socrates, that you can see the aspirational movement taking place. The fact that the dialogues are non-completable, they’re open-ended, they’re often emergent, is exactly required for representing what Plato is trying to talk about. So I’m trying to say there’s these three deep ways in which Socrates exemplifies the necessity of dialogue for the cultivation of wisdom. Okay. You were talking about the examined life and the unexamined life, okay? Yes. And so as you were saying that, what came to me right now is the event that we’re all experiencing, which seems to be in the background of all of our discussions, even if we’re talking about high abstract philosophical things. Oh, yeah. And so I want to somehow make a bridge to what’s going on in the world right now and the examined life and what that means in the face of this extraordinary thing that’s happening in the world, coronavirus or whatever, and also how this can help us in terms of this dialogus, in terms of making life more meaning through dialogus. How can we relate that to our actual experience right now? Do you have anything to say? Well, I do. I want to relate a quick story and it will directly concern Chris, and that way I can segue to Chris. Yeah. Because I want to hear what he wants to say. Because Chris and I have been talking about this at length and I want him to take over a little bit on this. But I had another meeting with an online virtual meeting with somebody who was interviewing me about the meeting crisis. And we were talking and we were talking at one point and I said, I want to be very careful with the language. And he picked up on that and he really liked that. And then I said, you know, and then I pointed to Chris and Chris’s gift, his great gift for being both capable of a precision of expression that is at the same time beautiful. And beauty is one of the ways in which we aspire, right? This is a platonic idea. And then, you know, I pointed to Chris about that because I was trying to say how that precision and beautification of thought is so needed. And he had this response of spontaneous and beautiful. He said, of course, I would, he said this literally, he said, I would rather die than not talk like that. And I’m using this example because it’s very pertinent to what we’re talking about right now. He’s in the middle of this crisis and he says to me, right, he says it very sincerely, I’d rather die than not be able to talk that way. And then I said to him, that’s you, I said, you know, you’ve said a lot, but that’s the Socratic moment for me. That’s where you get it, not in thought, but you get it in yourself. In your being. Right, that the unexamined life is not worth living. And there’s something about that. And, you know, and notice that the context, the language he used and the context in which Socrates offered that. Socrates was facing death. The person that I was talking to, he is, you know, he’s facing the situation you’re referring to, Andrew. And that comes out from him naturally and spontaneously. There, right, and so there is, obviously, you know, there’s a sense in which we’re jumping up and down Maslow’s hierarchy of needs right now. And people have to take care of their survival. But there’s a point at which, right, there’s a point at which people also need a meaning to a difficult, difficult situation. In fact, in the most difficult of situations, the most threatening of situations, they are willing to put mere survival at risk in order to try and maintain an examined and meaningful life. But as I said, Chris came readily to my mind about that deep connection, came readily to my lips about that deep connection between the capacity for making meaning and that ability to revivify and, you know, empower the entirety of one’s psyche. Yeah, please speak to that, Chris, because I think that’s my experience of both of you guys, actually, and that’s why I want to talk to you. I think you both have that drive, that kind of almost monomania, which wouldn’t, couldn’t, couldn’t bear on some level to be living a life that wasn’t, that didn’t have authenticity, but also a kind of striving towards beauty at the same time. Sorry to keep talking. Chris, please say something. Yeah, well, I’m kind of hot at the collar. Thank you, John. I don’t, it’s, I don’t feel equal to those estimations, so maybe I’ll just glide over them. I’m touched by it. I just don’t know what to say to it. I think, so I think there are some interesting things happening that I’ve been noticing both personally and then impersonally. I was telling John that I had, I had a strange episode maybe a week ago or so where I felt, there’s really no other way to put it. I just sort of felt the gulf open up beneath me and the sense of futility. And I made, I made a misattribution, I think, at the time. I think what I think now was a misattribution of any number of personal failings or personal doubts. And I think what it actually was is it had something more to do with the supra-personal nature of what’s going on right now. But I was effectively enclosed by feelings of futility that were very paralytic, like a torpor, just something that I couldn’t move from. I remember when I went up three hours on a three-hour walk just to try and shake it off and didn’t manage to do it. And it just sort of lingered for a couple of days and then slowly over time it unwound enough for me to regain some mobility and to get back into activity. But I was puzzled by that because I never, I never, I’d never experienced something that I found such a difficult time sourcing that seemed so diffuse, whose locus was nowhere and everywhere at the same time. And the diffuseness of that feeling is precisely what marks this crisis. It’s a property of virulence in general. And because of that virulence is such an easy host for meaninglessness, just as the bios is host for a virus, right? It enacts the analogy of meaninglessness precisely because we can’t source it properly. And it reminds me of, I think it was Hegel who talks about the distinction between truth and certainty and that the scientism of the present has collapsed them together. And I think what may happen now, and potentially this is, you know, some kind of chirodic, you were talking about this, John, as a kind of chirodic opportunity, and perhaps it is, we might hope so, that with the ebbing of certainty comes a renewed interest in truth in a way that can, it can be effectively dissociate itself from what I think is ultimately an erroneous synonymity, right? They are not the same thing, fundamentally, they cannot be. And while that distinction might not completely disappear as a consequence of the crisis, at least there might be some tremors sort of laid to the foundations of that misconception. And if that happens, enough for us to take notice, it’s as though we’re reciting a familiar script, and we recite it like an epistrophe. We recite it over and over and over again, but then all of a sudden it’s like a caesura, there’s a pause in the script, a pause long enough for us to hear a moment of silence through it. It’s like a Socratic aporia. It’s like a Socratic aporia, and a repetitive aporia. And if we can get a foot across the threshold of the aporia and hold it in place long enough to listen, to listen into the silence, into the silence of the Socraria, then there might be something in behind and in between that silence that becomes something life-affirming and life-giving. I mean, you’re both, or are, or were at some point, Buddhists. I can’t help think of shunyata. Well, I’m thinking of groundlessness. That comes to mind. Just groundlessness, which is another sort of translation of shunyata. So I was thinking- Right. Right, right. But then the transmutation of that empty, vacuous nothingness into the shunyata, the thusness of the, you know, is that’s a transmutation that we’re not adequately educated and trained to know how to make. We don’t know how to alchemize our feeling of aimlessness, our feeling of vacuousness. We don’t know how to alchemically transform that into something that seems pregnant and electric. And it’s that kind of training that we need right now. And so, you know, those people who are equipped, and I’m not saying I’m one of them because I don’t feel at all like I am, but those people who are equipped to be able to step into the fissure that’s opened by that void, and then to present it properly to everyone and to reveal the affordances that it has the potential to seat us, like that’s what we need right now. And this could be, I mean, you know, all the doomsaying abound that we’re hearing, a lot of it’s justified, perhaps some of it’s not, but what it could be is it could be an opportunity for intervention, for a philosophic intervention. Like philosophy has to come out of its semi-retirement now and resume its old post on the frontier. And if it can do that, this might actually be an opportunity the likes of which we’ve ever seen in our lifetime. I don’t know. I mean, that could be revealed to be an exclamation in a few weeks when all of this settles down. Who knows? But that’s the way I feel at the moment. Well, I was just talking with my wife at dinner time, and we were talking about all of the institutions that are sort of becoming into question at this point. I mean, school, medicine, you know, government, the whole, all of the structures that we rely on, or that we don’t necessarily like, but that we work with unthinkingly, they’re not collapsing, but they’re all being put into question. Yeah, very much. All of them, which just is, it’s a remarkable moment in that sense. Another thing that’s being called into question is, and this is something that Kierkegaard said had to be put into question if we were going to wake up as existential beings, is common sense busyness, right? Living our lives according to the obviousness of common sense and the busyness of our day-to-day projects, right? And Kierkegaard said, you know, until you can wake up from that, and he was deeply influenced by Socratic aporia. He wrote his dissertation on Socrates and Socratic irony. Until you can wake up from that, then there’s a sense in which you can never come into an authentic kind of being. And so I think, Andrew, I would take your point, and I would deepen it by saying that the way it’s impacting on the minutiae of our life as well, not to dismiss, but to include, as well as the ways it’s impacting on sort of the overarching, you know, the gods of our, you know, the institutions of our society, I think it’s also important to note the way it’s impacting on the minutiae of our life, and therefore having the capacity to wake us up from common sense obviousness and the busyness and the things that seem to be undeniable that turn out to be actually quite deniable. Like shopping. Yeah, like shopping and like going to school and like going to work. The most basic things, right? Yeah. That, John, I have to, sorry for interjecting, but when you were talking about what Kierkegaard says about this, I’m reminded of an anecdote. I think it’s, I don’t know if it’s in his diapsamata or where it is, but it’s somewhere in his corpus of work that, and this is where the importance of good humorists, I think, come into effect at moments like this, that there’s a little anecdote where he says that, and this is a fictitious anecdote of his, but that, you know, he was going about his business on the streets of Copenhagen and he saw a man, he saw a man, a busy man of his affairs who was so preoccupied with his busyness that he had his head cast down, walking around, going about his errands, and he was run over by a carriage. And Kierkegaard said, I laughed, I laughed, I laughed, I laughed, I laughed because he was just so busy. And I mean, you know, he has a slightly invective sense of humor, perhaps, but I think the point in here is that certain absurdities of our everyday are now being revealed in contra right now, and it’s going to take some good humorists and ironists like him to be able to spot them and to represent them to us properly. I find myself laughing at myself for the things I take very seriously and putting them into question, you know. But also what gets revealed is the stuff that should always be taken seriously, like the things that people aren’t questioning are the things that they are retreating to, almost like the way you’re supposed to take refuge in the Sangha, the Buddha and the Dharma, right? They’re taking refuge in those practices and those people that give them, you know, these senses of connectedness to themselves, to each other, to reality. People are withdrawing into the citadel of whatever religio they’re capable of generating and maintaining. That’s clearly the case. The monastery is coming to everybody’s home or something. It’s like… It’s that, and it’s that, well, you know, you face the life of a cop, right? Because police have lives that are 90% boredom shot through with 10% terror. And so most of us are facing that right now. You know, many people are talking about, you know, they’re shut inside and they don’t know what they’re going to do with themselves. And on one hand, they’re facing this tremendous kind of boredom. But then, of course, every now and then they lift their eyes towards the window and they’re filled with a kind of terror. And the thing that modifies both of those, that enhances your capacity to find, well, meaning in the face of boredom, because boredom is sort of a mini meaning crisis, right? And the thing that allows you to confront terror with courage is precisely your capacity for cultivating meaningful relationships with yourself, with other people, and with the world. And so the people who I think are starting to sense this as not just a momentary disruption, because that’s not what it is. We should stop pretending that’s what it is. This is a long term thing we’re facing. And Jordan Hall and I talked about this in a couple of recent videos. This is not going to be the only pandemic. All of the conditions that caused this have not changed in the world. In fact, if anything, they’re going to keep increasing. We’re going to keep melting the permafrost. We’re going to keep cutting down the rainforest. We’re going to keep increasing our travel and our trade in accelerating rates. This is going to happen again, and it’s going to happen again. And so the people who are starting to realize that this could be something as game changing could, maybe not this time, but with increasing frequency, the probability of this happening is going to go up dramatically. We’re facing something like what the Black Plague did to Europe in the Middle Ages and how it completely altered the worldview, the sense of agency and arena that people had in a profound and irreversible manner. I think we’re facing that. Like I said, maybe not this pandemic, but I would predict within the next one. Well, this is maybe a minor pandemic. For one thing, young people are not dying. It’s absolutely terrible that elder people are dying, but I think in the Spanish flu, it killed more people than in World War I or something. Yeah. Imagine having that every five years. There’s another thing that’s been kind of interesting about this, interesting in a perverse way, but our relationship to time, which already has been affected in the way that Han talks about, right? The sort of the aimless whizzing of time, right? The effect that that has on our ontology is also changing as a consequence of this. So for instance, I find it incredible in the proper meaning of that term that a month ago or just over a month ago, I was traveling around and I was in Italy for maybe about 10 days and then I came back through a couple of its larger airports. More or less carefree, coronavirus had started at that point to permeate consciousness, but not in the way that it has now. And certainly there was no ordinance to self-isolate when I got back. That was just over a month ago. The world has changed utterly since then. And the fact that such change could be so comprehensive and so instantaneous. And every day, every day, it’s like there’s this deepening recurrence that makes the virus feel cyclical, almost purgatorial, right? Because for many of us, it’s dwelled in our consciousness for only a matter of weeks and already it’s starting to feel inexorable and interminable. We’ve been living with it for an eternity and yet it’s only been a few weeks. So the way that it lingers, the way that it rests on our consciousness seems not to track our typical experience of time. So I think our ontology of the passage of hours is also changing because of that too. And so that realization that you were talking about, John, of the transitory yielding to something indefinite, I think a lot of people haven’t quite crossed that threshold yet, but some people have. And I think that when a critical mass crosses that threshold, that terror is the thing of all of the systems, right? Economic, educational, health, et cetera, all of the systems that are affected by this. The one that I’m most apprehensive about is what happens when the critical mass starts to realize that this may yet be an indefinite state of affairs and that our relationship to the world, the physiognomy of the world, the countenance of the world is slowly slackening. It’s slowly starting to look crestfallen. And when that physiognomy completely goes slack and loses its confidence, that’s when that’s what I’m worried about. It’s like a judgment or something. It’s like the blast judgment. I’m sorry to bring that up, but I’m thinking of some people will be prepared in the sense they’re spiritually preparing themselves and they have been for a long time and other people will be just totally unprepared. I mean, some people, I guess there’s degrees of preparedness, but it almost feels like this apocalyptic biblical moment or something. But notice that, Andrew. Notice that. I think it’s, and Paul recently, I haven’t seen the video yet, Paul Van der Kley did one on whether or not this is a judgment of God. Oh, I just saw it. It’s fantastic. No, I don’t like that. It’s wonderful. It’s wonderful. No, no, it’s really good though. Paul does it so insightfully. Yeah. Well, he always does. That goes with the question. So what I wanted to say, Andrew, is notice how we’re starting to shift. Of course, all of the, and it should continue, by the way, all of the political, socioeconomic, and most importantly, the medical language is still rolling, but already the mythological language is struggling to come to the fore. And you invoked it spontaneously, Andrew. Paul’s already invoked it. It’s part of his job to invoke mythos. And I mean that as a compliment, not as any insult to Paul. Right? And one of my concerns, one of my concerns is, and I was talking to this about Chris, is that there’s a pattern that could potentially emerge in which this gives initially a spike in a sense of meaningfulness. And I was talking also with this, with Peter Lindbergh, because when you can invoke those terms seriously, imagine being, imagine three months ago trying to invoke judgment, God’s judgment, and the apocalypse, right? Seriously. And everybody would have, their eyes would have large, I mean, Chris and I have seen this, we’ve tried to talk to people about this, your eyes sort of glaze over and all your way. But notice how now you can say that, right? You know, with all sincerity, and you can expect, reasonably so, to be taken seriously. So that mythological language is coming out. Can I qualify it a little bit? Just be free to go, okay, please, finish what you’re saying. I’m sorry I interrupted you. Well, I don’t want to misattribute everything to you. But I just want to say that, you know, I think what’s happening for a lot of people is that, you know, the virus, right, it’s taken on the mythological, and I mean that in the sense I’m trying to articulate, the mythological role of like an Old Testament deity, especially the demonic, chaotic aspect. It’s out of the blue, unpredicted reality that will do what it will do. Remember God’s name, I will be what I will be, right? The unnameable thing that comes in, and it’s ubiquitous, like some sort of spirit, and you don’t know who has been taken by it and who hasn’t. And it seems to be falling as a judgment but you’re not sure what the judgment is, and it seems to be potentially ushering in a new age. I mean, this is a way of thinking that, you know, is strongly associated with like Old Testament deities. And the thing about that is, is the problem I see with that is that has a lot of potential danger associated with it as the mythological meaning we try to bring to bear on this. And so that’s why maybe I interjected too prematurely, and I apologize for that. But I think this is nevertheless an important point to bring up. Well, I want to say that I don’t think, I wasn’t suggesting that this is some kind of punishment of God or any of that nonsense. Like that’s grotesque to me as a way of thinking, right? What it feels like more is that some people are going to suffer meaninglessly, and other people are going to, you know, have a deeper experience of life after such an event. But why the term judgment then? Because, yeah, it just came to me when he was talking and I was thinking of the Old Testament and I was thinking of this, the final days and all this sort of stuff where some people make it into some people make it into the kingdom of heaven and other people don’t. So that’s more existential and I wouldn’t want to ascribe any kind of theism to that even. No, no, no, I wasn’t trying to do that. That’s why I was very careful to use the word myth. What I’m saying is that language came very naturally to you and what’s important is exactly the point you just made. You don’t hold to any of the metaphysics behind that language, but nevertheless those images that have been woven into our culture come spontaneously to mind. And I don’t think that’s happenstance, Andrew. I think that’s going to happen for a lot of people in a lot of ways, in a lot of circumstances. And that is risky because that’s the kind of thinking that can mobilize people in some pretty weird ways. Yeah, and so I think it’s sort of cults and cults and prophetic calls to cleansing and purity and purification. Is that language so far away from where we are now? It’s not that far away. No, no, it’s not because I mean already certain forms of social intimacy are already appropriate. So actually, no, purity codes abound right now and they may well persist in that direction. But I was going to say too, Andrew, that I think that the instinct to find a certain amount of reflexivity to see a reflection of ourselves born in the form of the virus, even if we’re not subscribing to the metaphysics behind divine judgment, if it’s done very carefully, the fact is that there is something about the virus that is going to pronounce and surface something that is already implicit in our experience of meaning. That’s the whole point of it being an analogic host for the meaning crisis is that it is surfacing as a cathonic force, bursting up from the unconscious, if you will. It is surfacing something that’s already present, that’s already present to us, that’s already implicitly present to us. Obviously, we have to be very careful about metaphysical attributions, but using the virus as a dialectic way of confronting our meaninglessness is where the pedagogical opportunity of this comes from. Not simply to wave it away to the random cruelty of nature, even if that’s what it is fundamentally, but rather to pay attention to what it reveals about the relationship of our ontology. That’s not a divine attribution necessarily, but it’s taking the emergence of it to be a symbolic affordance for communing with ourselves, individually and as a culture. I was listening to this rabbi speak about it. If you were an orthodox rabbi and you believe that everything that happened was God, you would think that this also is God, and that this is a divine thing that’s happening because the Messiah is coming. Therefore, you just have to keep living your life in celebration. It’s not that this is judgment and you’re being punished or anything like that. That was the feeling I got from him, as a person of faith, and how they see this. That doesn’t take away from any of the pain and the suffering and all that. I don’t know if I’m being very clear in what I’m trying to say. It’s almost the opposite of what John was saying about judgment. It’s not that people are being judged. It’s that reality is coming in. If you were religious, you would say divine reality is here. This is divine reality. I’m okay with using the word divine. Maybe you want to say sacred, but… Well, I want to respond to that because I think that’s exactly the issue. I think what I’m saying is we face a choice. I think the word you invoked is the word that Jordan Hall and I are talking a lot about, which is what does faith mean now? Is there a sense of faith that can put us into the kind of situation we’re in, where we’re not talking about faith as the attempt to bring about closure, the attempt to reestablish, and I’m using Chris’s sense of this word, certainty, but faith is… This is the fear I was trying to articulate with the potential mythological resurgence of a demonic deity, the deities that will promise us certainty and closure and purity and protection. I take that as a very serious threat. I think one of the responsibilities I feel now, and I’ve been privileged to work with Jordan with that and also with Chris, but two videos with Jordan, is well, there’s an alternative way of understanding faith that doesn’t mean that seeking foreclosure and completeness and purity and perfection, but instead is about a kind of… It’s a cultivated sense of being that gives you a continuity of contact with things as they unfold so that you can evolve with them and you have a sense of the course of that so that you are sensitive to kairos and you can participate in it with effective agency. That sense of faith rather than a, if you’ll allow me this word, a worship-based sense of faith, which is what I was trying. I’m trying to pull these two things apart. I’m not trying to deny anybody their worship. You know that I don’t do, but what I’m trying to say is for those of us who don’t find any kind of nostalgic return, a viable option, and I would really, really hope we don’t turn back to a demonic deity answer, then we do need to re-articulate. We need to bring up into dialogue and into dialectic the kind of faith that we started this discussion with, the faith that Socrates has when he says the unexamined life is not worth living. How does he get that? That’s not certainty in the way that two plus two equals four. It’s not certainty, but he’s lived his life. There’s been continuity of contact with an unfolding disclosure of being that has vouchsafed to him what a meaningful life is, and he’s sensitized himself and acquired that taste deeper and deeper. That’s the kind of faith I want to try and bring out, the kind of faith that is immeasurably enmeshed with dialogos. That’s why I brought up that whole concern that I had, is that I don’t want any of that mythology that tends to try to totalize and shut down and bring about the closure and the completeness and the purity and the perfection. We need to resist that temptation, and I’m going to use that biblical sounding word deliberately, the way we can resist it is not just by trying to hold it off. We have to beautify and fall in love with, if you’ll allow me, Socratic faith as a contrast to that demonic faith. Socratic faith and demonic faith. I think, John, that there’s also a way in which the Socratic faith, the disposition of Socratic faith can carefully, and perhaps not collectively, but maybe on a person-to-person basis, the Socratic faith can be applied as an attitude, an interrogative attitude, to foster dialogue with the motifs, with the demonic motifs, that tend to instinctively surface at times like this. That’s a really good point. That’s an excellent point. There’s no stopping the profusion of those kinds of motifs. They’re baked so thoroughly into us at this point that we’re not going to be able to wave them away or turn resolutely away from them and ignore them, but we are going to have to find a way to bring them into our dialogue to enfold them into the dialectical process. I’m thinking very much in a Jungian, careful, calibrated Jungian descent into the contents of the impersonal unconscious. That’s exactly what the whole process is about. I see you, motif, and I raise you. Well, that’s what I was worried about with just staying in this existential mode of angst and that kind of thing. We have to dive into these, I don’t know, into the symbolic world on some level. That takes a kind of faith as well, right? Yeah, it does. We need to know how to turn the Old Testament demon back into a Socratic daemon. Socrates had his daemon. I think Chris’s correction of my point is completely correct. Wonderful. It’s like the dialectic, that’s the pure dialectic that he’s expressing here, that we can’t get stuck on this one mode, right? Apologies, I interrupted you again. It’s about how about I have one I get excited. No, we’re all interrupting each other. It’s fine. I just wanted to totally acknowledge, I think what Chris just did there was not only correct, I think as you pointed out Andrew, I think very astutely, it exemplifies the very thing we’re trying to bring to the fore. Chris is right. I think there’s a way of addressing my concern, but like I say, in a process of conversion and transformation rather than a simple process of exclusion, I was falling prey to the very thing I was criticizing. I was trying to create a code and keeping something at bay, which is exactly the wrong thing to do. Well, we can think of a non-theistic mode of looking at the last judgment story or any of the old stories in the testament. They’re not there to be understood in some absolute, as you say, enclosed sort of way, right? They’re there to be worked at and looked at as a piece of sort of as a transparent window into reality of some kind. Am I making sense? The trick is to keep them to, I mean, to keep enough of the demonic within the demonic so that it can challenge us and shake us up. Because if we need to get into a place where we are open to being surprised and shaken up, because that’s what we’re now facing going forward in my estimation. I think that’s what we’re facing. If we try to domesticate this with the demonic, that’s my concern. But I like Chris’s idea that entering into a kind of Jungian dialectic with it so that we can transform it into the Socratic daemonic, I think that’s a brilliant insight, Chris. I think that’s excellent. I personally love the idea of bringing Jung and Socrates together, because Socrates on his own feels very dry to me. And Jung is so rich phenomenologically. They make a wonderful marriage of heaven and hell. Well, Chris and I are going to be working on a paper on that, actually, probably like Monday, right? Yeah. Great. Chris, you wanted to say something? Top of mind for us. No, I was just gonna say I like the way that you’ve pinned it to a catchphrase, John, to turn the daemonic to the daemonic. I like that as a nice pithy turn of phrase. Yeah, well, thank you. So I was trying to get a turn of phrase that captured the turn of your insight. One thing that’s been very interesting for me to see in this process, it’s funny, I’m normally not much of a news junkie, but of course, I’ve probably like most of the rest of the world, I’ve become one in these last days. And sorry, in the most recent days, I don’t mean these last days to pretend. That’s quite a slip in the end times in the last days. Maybe that was a Freudian slip. I hope it wasn’t. But one thing that’s been really interesting, and I mean, we’ve talked ad nauseam by now about what the diminishment of our wisdom institutions has done in the longer term for our culture. But one thing that we’re really seeing right now, I find it fascinating. You know, every day when the politicians come out of their sanctum, and have to address the public, and they’re forced into a position of having to give platitudes and having to give reassurance, and aside from just the practical and logistical messages that they have to issue, they’re also foist with the demand of bringing calm and bringing perspective. Now, it’s one thing to bring calm to say, you know, folks, we’re doing the best we can, we’ve got it under control. But you can see them struggling. And I actually have sympathy for them in this respect, because fundamentally, it’s in excess of their role. It’s beyond their office, or at least it ought to be, arguably. It’s beyond their office to bring perspective, to bring philosophic perspective to what’s going on. But because we don’t, I mean, obviously, for those beholden to a certain faith and worship, you know, they round on their clergy, etc. But for those, for now, a sizable, I mean, majority in the West, maybe minority in the world, but still a sizable minority in the world, who don’t have those offices to turn to, we’re rounding on our politicians to give us that perspective. And they obviously don’t have it. That’s not to say individuals among them can’t be insightful. I’m sure they can. But as an office, they just that’s not the office they hold. And I think what we’re starting to see right now is we’re starting to see that the gap, the vacuum, the absence of the wisdom institutions is particularly pronounced at a time like this. Yeah, yeah. You mean the separation of church and state is showing up as being sort of schizophrenic on some level? Yeah. Well, the church part is, in some ways, absent altogether. I mean, they’re not, they’re not. But for many of us, you know, our first instinct is not, in fact, to look to church leaders for perspective. And we obviously look to our politicians to give us the practical information we need to know our business. But between those two things, there is still a fundamental chasm within which we have only ourselves to rely on. But this is again where the context, and this is why you have to have to be the dialogues with the drama and the context. Socrates, right, we have to remember that when we’re reading these dialogues, where are they set? They’re set, Athens is literally under siege. People are walled in. They’re locked down. The city is under siege. The Pelopetesian War is going. There has been a massive plague. Pericles has died, right? You know, there’s all that stuff is often the context surrounding, right, both the dramatic context in which the dialogues are set and the historical context in which Plato writes them and they’re originally presented. Socrates is very much, he’s not foreign to the situation we are talking about. He is birthed out of it. He is there in a situation as, you know, as challenging, as threatening as we are in. And that’s why he’s again, the practice that he’s doing within that context, that is not happenstance. That is not happenstance. And again, you know, and he’s trying to steer his way between, you know, various, you know, political skill and caribdis as Athens careens around trying to find a political solution to what many people are now saying was ultimately, you know, a cultural and, you know, a meeting crisis for ancient Athens. And he’s supposed to exemplify who we are supposed to be. Yes. Moment is what you’re saying. Yes. And it’s supposed to be Socrates or that’s what we’re supposed to be doing. We’re supposed to choose the life, the meaningful life, the life worth living. Because the choice really, Andrew, I mean, and that’s what came out when I was talking to Ethos this morning, right? The choice really, I mean, initially, initially, first, you know, Maslow’s hierarchy. Yes, I get it. Initially, the choice is live, don’t die. Yeah. But that is not a sustaining choice. The choice is ultimately, are you are you living? Is it a good life you’re living? Right? Is it a life worth living? I, this is somewhat personal, but I decided and I’ve chosen and I’ve committed to it. I don’t if it comes to a point where I have to sort of start violating the fundamental principles by which I live in order to merely survive, I rather and I mean this, I would rather die. I do not, my own survival is not as valuable to me as the principles that I inherited from Socrates. The unexamined life? Yeah, exactly. Yep. Yep. I think at some point, people, well, sorry, I’m speaking, I’m overgeneralizing from my case out of hope, maybe misborn hope. But I suspect that many people will come to where they might need to consider that to certain degrees. Right. And if I can come back to the judgment again, if you’ll forgive me, the judgment is, is maybe you’ll live, maybe you’ll die. But the judgment is really being able to say to yourself that you’ve had a life worth living. Yes. So it’s not, it’s not an imposed judgment of some helpless person who doesn’t have any say in what’s going on. It’s, it’s okay. Did I have judging, am I gonna, you judge it, we judge ourselves, right? We, we are judging ourselves. The final judgment is, is, is, is really, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s from Dasein. It’s from the depths of Dasein. We are the being whose being is in question. Okay. Yeah. And we ultimately have to, we, and we ultimately have to live that question as deeply as possible. And, and the way you live a question is by turning it into a quest. You have to, yes. You have to, you have to be open, right? A quest is an open journey towards continual revelation, right? And, and I just, I think that what’s going to happen once the, the endurance aspect of it, once the emergency aspect of this is a little bit more backgrounded and the endurance aspect comes out, we have to go to, have to endure for a long time. I think this question about the resiliency of our, of the meaning of our lives is going to become more pronounced as Chris keeps saying. And I think that’s, I think that’s the judgment that you might put your finger on. And the word endure means in French, it means to make hard, right? Yeah. You’re something so there’s a point where we can’t be made hard, right? One level we need to be made, you know, strong, but not hard. Yeah. Yes. Well, that’s, I mean, yeah, that’s what the Stoics are trying to get at, right? Like I’ve been meeting, I’ve been rereading some of Aurelius’ meditations and you were saying at the beginning of this conversation, John, that what’s going to happen increasingly as people are going to retreat to those relations that constitute them in most instinctively. And at one point, at one point Marcus Aurelius effectively enumerates the sort of, he enumerates them almost as a Trinity of relations that ground our sense of being, right? One is to the vessel that envelops us. The second is to the sort of the divine cause, the source of all that befalls all beings. And then the third is to those that live alongside us. And when I think about that, that’s a very comprehending Trinity of relations that we can use as a way of refocusing ourselves from a ground that is fundamentally deeper than the one that we’re used to treading on. And you’re, you know, the point of living within the question of being and questing after it is I think precisely what you meant, John, by the definition of faith that you’re talking about. It’s not closure. It’s not the closing. It’s precisely the opening. It’s the opening of our self. It’s the opening of the question that constitutes our being. Yes. It’s the finite, continually longing for the infinite. For the infinite as Schlegel said. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. And so the point is it’s the ongoing receptivity to the emergence. Jordan, Hall and I were both using the surfing and sailing metaphors, right, where you’re trying to step outside of kind of a passive empiricism or an overly active romanticism. You can’t, faith can’t be in the imposition of your will. I’m just going to make things happen. And faith can’t be sort of the passive waiting for the miracle that’s going to come and rescue you. Faith is like what the skilled sailor has. It’s the ability to receive and adjust and evolve and ride the edge of the wave and the storm, you know, as Andy Clark’s book has it, you know, surfing the wave of uncertainty as we keep going forward. That’s the kind of faith I’m talking about. Which is wisdom. And the recurring realization that we are ever and always beyond ourselves. And that reality is ever and always beyond the predicaments that confine us to the present. Yes. What did you want to say, Andrew? I was saying that your definition of faith is the same thing as your definition of wisdom. Faith is wisdom in that sense. Yeah, I think so. Because faith is because it’s always responding to reality and not shutting down. And yet being flexible enough to be knocked over in your sailboat and get up again. And if, if, yeah, I would say if wisdom is connecting you to the depths of your beings and the depths of being so that you are empowered, that empoweredness from the connectedness to the depth, that’s the empowerment that we, I think we seek from faith. It is to have our participatory knowing so plugged in to how things are unfolding that we can participate as fully as possible. Yeah. That’s kind of also why understanding, that’s good, understanding it in the sense that you just meant it, John, understand that’s why power and empowerment, unfortunately tainted, though the word now is politicized, so the word now is partaking of a something like an exponent power, I think for me is a much handier way of understanding something like platonic form for that very reason. Yeah, yeah, totally, totally. I guess, Andrew, another way of bridging between the meanings of faith and wisdom is that the notion of reverence, which is the ability to, you know, to, to sense the relevance of that which is beyond you appropriately, to be appropriately fitted to that which transcends your egocentric framework, and give it a kind, what Iris Murdoch calls a justice of attention, that you give it appropriate attention, you give it the attention it deserves to the degree it deserves it. Knowing how to do that is a profound kind of virtue. Woodruff in fact argues that reverence is a missing virtue for us, so I would sort of put these together as overlapping and woven with reverence and faith. When you say, when you say reverence, what comes to my mind is worship, and you’re rejecting this idea of worship, and I think reverence is not quite enough because if you’re revering something, you’re still at a distance from it. If you’re worshiping something, or if you find something divine, if you’re, something is sacred, you’re still at a distance from it. If something is divine, you know, then if something, if it’s something you worship, then you’re, then you fall into it. Well, so that’s just my, no, no, I like that, but I want to challenge you, because I think the appropriate, the way I want to say that is that, you know, the Socratic figure is actually supposed to be the symbol on, the sage is supposed to be that which, I mean, that through which we connect those, we cross that distance. We don’t collapse it, we bridge it, right? And that’s a different thing. And what I mean by reverence, I take your point well, and I’m not trying to invoke worship. We shouldn’t worship Socrates. I think that would be ridiculous, and you’d find it horrifying. But we worship kind of, we worship, I used to worship Leonard Cohen, for example, or, you know, or my gay friend Alexander, I worship Bette Midler and say, she was divine. You see what I’m saying? I’m trying to say that, I’m trying to say that there’s, yeah, you’re right, we’re both right in a way. Like, you’re right to say, yes, we need this sort of bridge. But I think the bridge collapses at a certain point, when we’re fully involved in. Well, I think we should internalize the sage, but we should never be satisfied. And that’s what I’m trying to get with the sense of being, feeling like you realize the relevance of something, right? But that doesn’t mean you have conquered it or consumed it. Like, we should internalize, I mean, finally, the quote comes to mind, which is really good, although it presents it in a negative way, is Nietzsche’s quote about Socrates. He said, I hate Socrates, he’s so close to me, I’m always fighting him. Now, that’s not worship, but that’s reverence, man. Socrates is so close to him, he’s always fighting him. Socrates is this deeply, deeply internalized, challenging figure. And that’s what I’m thinking of, right? Okay. So what I think when I’m talking about reverence, I’m not, I’m talking not about worship, I’m talking about that connectedness exemplified in the sage, through the sage to something beyond the sage, that is always going to be acknowledged to be inexhaustible and beyond me. What I’m asking is the possibility of bringing together intimacy and openness, like you should have with, I imagine somebody that is your beloved, right? They are close to you, but you cannot enclose them. There’s a difference there, right? And that’s what I’m trying to get. I’m trying to get that we have simultaneously the, with acknowledgement of how reality withdraws and is beyond us, but we can nevertheless come into an intimate flowing contact with it. So that’s what I’m trying to get at with the notion of faith and rep and reverence. I’m, yeah, I’m really not trying to articulate a kind of worship or even a putting off at a distance, but I don’t also want an over-familiarization. We need to keep the sage and reality ultimately mysterious and a tip-off for us. It’s like a fire. If you get too close to it, you get burned or something. Right. And so you got it. You got to get the Goldilocks zone where you’re intimate, but the fire can still burn and can still threaten you and say, I mean, and this is why, Greek myth always pairs the hero myth with the hubris myth for all the myths of the hero facing the challenge, right? There’s the hubris myth of don’t fly too close to the sun, right? Or don’t, you know, don’t try and ride the chariot of the sun or don’t compete with Athena for being the greatest weaver. You have all of these, right, hubris because the point is, yes, you know, we should come into close contact with the gods, but, you know, and even Plato said this, you know, to try and expect to live there all the time is a ridiculous concern. And so that’s what I’m trying to get at with the notion of reverence. That’s why there’s an Eros. There’s always the tinge of Eros implicit in that reverence. Precisely because Eros lacks acquisition. Well, but you see, the thing about Eros is, I mean, and this is, it’s a mixture, right? It’s both a lack and a revelation. And Plato made it for, you know, in the symposium with Socrates and Eros, how Eros combines both of those aspects together. Eros wants us to draw something into intimacy, but Eros should also remind us of that which we always lack and always will lack. Right, right. Yeah, exactly. So I guess that’s what I’m saying. I think that the Eros, like, I understand the difference between respect and reverence as being that very difference, that one contains within it the disposition of Eros and one fundamentally does not. Yes, I think that’s exactly what I was trying to put my finger on. As long as we don’t take just the current meaning of Eros. No, no, no, of course not. Of course not. Yeah. Yeah. Isn’t there a place also for worship, though? I’m still, I’m holding on to this thing because, I don’t know, you if you’re, you worship, let’s say, maybe you don’t worship the person themselves or the, you worship what they represent, or you worship the divine double, or you worship the… I don’t know. I guess it depends what you mean by that word. I mean, I’ve already articulated that I think, uh, philosophia is, and this is a Socratic maxim, is bound up with the combination of a deep knowing of yourself and wonder in which yourself is called into question. So you’re both coming, you’re engaged on the project, and those are, of course, inseparably bound up together. You can’t deeply come to know yourself, and knowing yourself is always, always Socratically knowing the depths of the world that you belong to. You can’t know yourself deeply unless you’re also capable of calling it deeply into question. And so wonder and awe, I think, are inseparable from this project. I mean, I think Plato, in fact, is part of the way you can understand his whole philosophical project is to engage in dialectics so that we afford theologos, and theologos will deepen wonder into awe. And then awe is for its own sake, because awe is that state where we’re getting sort of the depths of ourselves and the depths of reality resonating with each other in a really powerful and, and, and, and it’s moving of its own accord. It’s not at the direction of our egocentric projects or desires. So I think if you mean by worship, a seeking out of practices that induce awe, that that’s fine. I don’t have any problem, but maybe that’s not what you mean by worship. And so I don’t see worship is what draws you out of your egocentricity towards awe, and then you can leave behind the worship once you’ve arrived at the awe. But it’s a stage. It’s a, it’s a, it could be. And that’s very Buddhist. And so, and I’m trying to remain open to this. I see I’m even crossing my arms instinctively because I brought up, I was brought up as a fundamentalist Christian, and worship doesn’t mean what we’re talking about right now at all. It means a kind of fruitless, and I mean that deeply, a fruitless kind of self-sacrificing towards a God who seems to be nothing but a consummate narcissist who needs endless praise and devotion while telling us that we should never ever be self-centered. We should be like him. But what he seems to need more than anything else is constant praise, adoration, and worship and being put at number one, no matter what’s happening at all costs and all endeavors. And I mean, and I know you see, and I feel privileged to have experienced this in a negative sense of privilege, because if that, that I saw no good come out of that in people’s lives. And it definitely hurt and traumatized me in powerful ways. And if that’s what you mean by worship, then I, yeah, I, I don’t think that’s what I mean by worship. Right. What I’m asking you to consider, Andrew, is that many people do mean that by worship. Many people do. True. I agree with you. Yeah. I take your point. I’m sensing a lot of congruence between what you’re both saying. I think that there’s a bit of a terminological tension, but I think fundamentally what I’m getting from you, Andrew, is that what you’re talking about, what you’re meaning by, correct me if I’m wrong. I think what you’re meaning by worship is the particular kind of relationship that the person has with the symbol. And saying that the particular relationship that the person has with the symbol is precisely what transfigures the entire ritual into some of the features that John is describing, the wonder and the awe. And so you’re talking about it in terms of this, the intrapersonal connection between the individual and the symbol that they’re attending to, as opposed to the processual opening that’s evoked as a consequence of that relationship. Fundamentally, they cannot collapse into the same praxis. And that’s why I think fundamentally what the two of you are talking about is, if not exactly the same, at least continuous. I think you’re right. I think that’s a good way of putting it. And maybe we could distinguish it this way. There’s an idolatrous sense of worship and that there is an iconic, not in Perseus’ sense. In the Corbyn sense. I was thinking about iconism, like how you would worship an icon. If you were a Christian, orthodox person, you would worship this icon as being a symbol of the divine. Yeah, and that’s exactly what I meant by the sage. It brings you close, but also beckons you beyond. It brings you close, but never allows you to enclose. And if that’s what you mean by worship, and I think Chris is right, Andrew, I think he’s pointing to the convergence is exactly right, then I think that is a central part of what we’re talking about when we’re talking about Socratic faith and what’s happening. When dialogos emerges, there’s a deep reverence. It can be awe inspiring, and it may even become symbolic in that worshipful way you’re talking about. But what it shouldn’t be, and I think it’s what’s clear Plato continually undermines and what I had the inductive of from my own experiences, it should never become idolatrous worship at all. I also feel, yeah, I think that’s well said, John. I also feel compelled to notice that for some, even though your particular experience of ritual adoration, the ritual adoration of Christ was idolatrous in the way that it was forced on you, for many Christians, I can’t count myself among them, but for many Christians, and I trust this implicitly because I know some of them very, very thoughtfully, for some Christians, the adoration is an iconic adoration in the way that we’ve just described. I envy them that, but many of them have that experience very genuinely. Yeah, Mary Cohen is a good example. When I have the opposite experience to John, I grew up without religion of any kind. I’m still very, very attracted to the esoteric aspects of religion, which lead into mystery and not into this. I’m kind of critical about the clinical Buddhist aspect of Buddhism, which doesn’t have worship, which is very, let’s say, dry and pseudo-scientific and psychological. I’m also attracted to the Orthodox tradition because there’s this passionate aspect to it, but I can definitely see how that can go dark and can be demonic and the opposite of wisdom of any kind. See what’s happening here. See how, I mean, look at what’s happening between the three of us. The Deo Logos, the third factor is emerging. None of us could have got here on our own. It’s leading us in a way I’m finding like things are being disclosed in a powerful way, and we’re seeing how we’re inevitably being led into the depths of religio and its deep relationship, although not its identity, with religion as we’re trying to grapple with the situation that’s confronting us. I think this is exactly what Chris and I are talking about. Yeah, and I love how what I find, I agree, John, and I think that one way, I think Corbin puts it this way, correct me if I’m wrong, John, you know better than I do, but I think that one of the ways in which he phrases the relationship of the individual to the divine angel is that we are subjects of the verb that is the divine angel. And I think that in the throws of Deo Logoi like this, I feel subject to a verb from without in very much that way. And you know, and notice how your gesture was automatically… Yeah, I feel like I’m being lifted up. Yes, yeah. And I’ve been doing this too, like that I’m being lifted up. This is the point though, Andrew, that you mentioned. Notice how the horizontal is enmeshed inexorably with the vertical. With the vertical. Now the two are just deeply interwoven and on all we can analytically talk about them as distinct dimensions. Notice how phenomenologically and functionally they are so interwoven together. Yes, and then our relationship then to add the another dimension to that, that our relationship with our relationship right now with the passage of time also changes when we’re deeply immersed in this. Yep, and then also to add the next, this conversation, notice how much I’ve been alluding to other conversations and Andrew, you and I have had conversations and Andrew, you and Chris have had conversations. So that’s where this particular moment of dialectic is sitting in this network of all these other conversations that have this kind of meta-dialogue going on between them because they’re all informing and constraining each other right here right now. And then this dialogue will go into that network of constraints on further conversations. Right, right. Like they’re all within the neoplatonic circle, right? They’re all, yeah. I thought of Indra’s net, but that’s perfect. No, I mean, Putsang’s notion of Indra’s net is totally correct because if you read the depths of Plotinus, he independently comes to this exact same metaphor that each form reflects all the other forms and they mutually reflect each other. So I’m not familiar with this. Can you bring this in a fractal way, you mean? What’s the analogy? Which one? The net? Oh, the net is, Indra’s net is a Buddhist scholar. He proposed the idea that each thing, sorry, the word isn’t quite right, right? But each one, every- A whole on, you could say. Do you know this word, whole on? Each part contains the whole or something like that reflects the whole- It’s holographic in that each, the individuality of each is just how it determinately reflects all the others. So each one is, right, so this jewel is just the reflection of all the other jewels, right? Oh, okay, okay. So it’s like Whitehead’s notion of every moment is the entire collapse of the universe. So the entire universe is collapsing to that moment, but that moment is included in the collapse towards this moment. And so everything is mutually- The Tohen, yeah. Yeah, yeah. And Plotinus clearly, explicitly articulates that also of how the forms are related to each other within Noose. Oh, that’s cool. What a beautifully woven metaphor. Well, what’s cool for me is I think it’s sort of this holographic deep learning, because what it is, it’s this holographic multi-dimensional compression and variation function. Everything is compressing and then everything is varying, but it’s not just sort of like in a neural network, it’s one compression, one variation. Everything is compressing and varying for everything else. And so reality is like this amazing, amazing holographic deep learning network. Yeah. Right. Well, I was also thinking about, to be just slightly more prosaic, about Zach. When we talked with Zach, he said that this was a jam and there were three of us. And I started off having dyad, like conversations with John and then conversation, and now it’s become a triad. It’s become like the Jimi Hendrix experience or something, where I’m being the drummer and I’m a bit wild and John is sort of keeping us together and very passionate and Chris is maybe the bass player or whatever. It seems like a kind of musicality. And that’s also what you’re talking about when you talk about it. Totally. That’s Chris’s metaphor. Chris brought that metaphor to the chapter we wrote. He played with the musicality and the, well, Chris, you talk about it, the in concert metaphor that you made throughout the chapter we just wrote. Yeah. Yeah. Which is ironic because in my tactile life, I’m not at all very musical. But it seemed to me that there was no more perfect analogy to play into the process because the idea of being able to, I mean, because it’s both concentrated and distributed at the same time, because a melody can recur and because a melody can transform and a melody can be present in all kinds of different ways. Yeah. It’s just the most perfect. Go ahead, John. Well, I just wanted to add to the metaphor now, Andrew, your metaphor. You know, in jamming, you have to pick up on it. You have to pick up on it, right? You have to get, you have to get, pick up on it and get caught up in it. Right? And if you try and hold on to it too long, you destroy it. And this is back again to this, the sense of faith, you know, you’re getting picked up on it. You have the continuity of contact. You can continue to play the serious play. And that’s again, the Socratic faith. So we could actually add that to the, to your metaphor, Chris. I’ve also noticed that it starts off much more intellectual or more prosaic and a bit awkward and in many directions. And then we build towards this kind of epiphany. It seems to happen in all these kinds of conversations. At least ones I’ve been having, we build towards this, we build up towards, you know, an insight, an ecstatic insight of some kind. Yep. And I think that’s the third factor that we were talking about. That third factor where it takes on a life of its own. And it, instead of you pushing the conversation forward, it takes on a life of its own and everybody is drawn up together forward in it. That’s the third factor. It’s the spirit of the conversation. It’s the geist. Yes. Yeah. You’re taught, you’re spoken by the conversations, the transjective, the transjective sensation. Exactly. This is why the Iologos and dialectic are so central, not only to, you know, the ongoing issue of the meeting crisis, but in turn for giving people the place and the presence and the, and the, and the interlocutors to cultivate the kinds of responses we need right now in the face of what we’re facing. Again, Socrates was in Athens during the plague and while it was literally under siege. So we all have to be Socrates. Yeah. Well, yeah, in a way. Anyway, but we all else, we, only in a way. I’m sorry. That felt very banal actually. A banal statement. It felt like a, no, no, no. I’m sorry. I wasn’t. Cheesy banal advertising jingo or something. Well, yeah, I don’t want it to become trivialized, but I want, I would want to say we all have to become Socrates, but also in the way in which we all have to become Siddhartha and we all have to become Lao Tse. And perhaps if it’s not too sacrilegious, given my previous invective, we all also have to become Jesus. Maybe we have to recover Socratic wisdom and faith. We have to recover Jesus’s agape. We have to recover Lao Tse’s flow. We have to recover, you know, Siddhartha’s capacity for profound transformative insight. We need all of these now. We need all of these. And if our, you know, if our musings about this stand outside of literalism, which of course they do, then, then I don’t think it’s, I don’t think we’re blaspheming to say that, that we have to, I don’t think, I don’t think it’s a trivial statement, Andrew, to say that we have to be Socrates, because the way that Socrates is Socrates, I trust you’ll both take this in the, in the intended meaning. Even Socrates is not Socrates. Yes, yes, that’s right. So in a way, that’s, that’s precisely right. We have to be Socrates in the way that Socrates is and is not Socrates, precisely because Socrates is never beyond himself. I hope that’s not, I hope that’s not you reckoning, but. But Ptole said that himself. He said, what’s in the seventh letter, he said, you know, I’ve given you a Socrates more beautiful. Yeah, yeah, that’s right. But the historical Socrates, because he was much more concerned to represent what Socrates lived for than what Socrates was historically, you know, again, instead of pursuing this, the historical certainty of Socrates, Plato was much more interested in getting us to confront the truth of Socrates. Or the essence. The form of Socrates, as it were. Yeah. There we go, Andrew. The essence, the form and the truth of Socrates. Yes. And we have to, and I was also thinking about the meaning of, you know, Carl Jung talks about imitation of Christ is not imitating Christ’s life, but it is becoming more truly, not ourselves, but our, I guess, our divine double, if I can keep using that, bringing that, that was my last question. And that keeps coming up at the end of these conversations as well. This notion of the divine double, which we talked about with Zach as well. And the divine double being our potential and our plurality. And it’s enacted. I mean, it’s symbolically already active in how it calls us forth from our current self. Yes. And I think the, I mean, part of what I want to work on with Chris is I think there’s a deep connection between wisdom, this sense of faith, Socratic faith, and being in the correct kind of connectedness and identity with your sacred second self. Which also is more or less, which is very convergent with the idea of being in the right relation to your whole self in the Jungian sense of self, right? To find the midpoint of personality that Jung talks about, to be in relation with yourself such that it’s reciprocal and equilibrated. And transparent. And I might say translucent, distanced, in just the right way that you are not susceptible to pathologies of inflation and over identification or godlikeness, but that you are positioned in proportion to your psychic potential properly. And I think that’s very much, if not, I don’t want to make an argument from exact identity here, but I think the convergence is pretty unmistakable. Yeah, I would agree with that. I would agree with that. I should get going soon. So this feels like we’ve also come to a culmination point in the conversation. Yeah. What do you think? Does anybody else want to say anything? I don’t want to foreclose, but like I said, I’m already sort of half an hour past where I said I would. Yeah, well, I wouldn’t end this. I would never end this. It’s such a great pleasure for me and I appreciate it so much. But there has to be an end somewhere. It’s one of the only things I like from Sartre. He said you never, well, he talked about books. He said you never finish them. You just abandon them. And I don’t think we have to finish these conversations. We just abandon them because we have other things we have to take care of. The conversation will continue in some manner. Well, that’s part of what we were talking about towards the end. It has to. Yeah. It’s moving forward into whatever it will become. And I also, there was one point in the conversation where I felt this is so fucking important. I just wish one person out there could hear it. I don’t even remember what the point was, but there’s something really, really important in this conversation. I mean, there’s a lot of things that are really, really important, but even just getting a little, little piece of that meaning could change everything. Does that make any sense? Am I being too dramatic here? No, no, no. I think that’s perfectly appropriate. One thing you can do to help that is, as you’ve done before, and I’ve been slowly uploading, I was going to upload our second conversation this weekend, but I thought the conversations with Jordan Hall were more, you know, were more appropriate given their subject matter. But you can send me the files from this conversation. I’ll upload it onto my channel and promote it as well. Of course. Yeah. I’d love to talk to you again, Christopher, sometime. Likewise, Andrew. Anytime. I’m enjoying it immensely. Thank you. And thank you for having the wherewithal to actually bring us together and to organize it. I feel like I’m indebted to the initiative that you’ve shown in all of this and the delicacy and just the good taste and good sense that you’ve shown in all of this. You’re so important to all of this, Andrew, and I’m really grateful for you. I’m grateful now to have to know you, and I’m grateful for all that you’re doing. Thank you. Thank you so much. That means a lot to me that you would say that. And I think you guys are doing the deep scholarship and, you know, hopefully I’m helping to communicate some of your ideas and get them out there. And I think they will be meaningful to people. And that’s my hope and wish. I wanted to also thank Chris for the work that he’s doing with Guy, Guy Sendstock, reading through the chapter and then trying to exemplify Dio Logos by going through the platonic dialogues. I think that’s just an invaluable resource. And I’m just very, very grateful that it’s being done. So thank you, Chris, for that. Your influence lies at the heart of all of my dialogic predilections. So there’s no none of this without you, John. You know that’s true. Well, I’m looking forward to diving into that. And I think I get my news from you guys. You guys are like the news rather than the other news that’s going on. This is like the real news. So thanks a lot and be well and take care and good health to you and your families and all that. You too, Andrew. Be well and be safe and talk to you soon. You and all the ones you love. Yeah. Thank you so much, guys. Have a good one. Okay. Take care. Bye-bye.