https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=8-vNQhMCm_A
Welcome everybody to another voices with Reveke. You can probably already tell that I’m extremely enthusiastic about this episode. I get to talk to Claire Carlisle. Many of you have heard me praise this Spinoza’s religion as the best book I’ve read on Spinoza and I’ve read quite a few. And what an interesting story. I passed this book on to my son Jason and he read it and he became a devotee of Spinoza. He reads Spinoza every day and sort of practices. And so this book is profound and it’s important for addressing what I talk about when I talk about the meaning crisis in society today and how we are trying to in some sense reinterpret and re-understand religion and spirituality and meaning making, the cultivation of wisdom. And I can’t think of anybody better to talk to about that than Claire Carlisle. So welcome so much Claire. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself and I want to thank you for coming. Well, I mean, thank you so much. It’s so nice to know that you not only read the book but liked it and that your son read it as well. So thanks so much for inviting me to come on. Yes, I’m Claire. I’m a philosopher. I’m an academic. I work at King’s College London where I’ve been teaching for 10 or 11 years now teaching philosophy. I also like to write. I’ve written quite a few books. That one on Spinoza is my most recent book. And for a long time, I really wanted to write about Spinoza because I first learned about him and first read the ethics as an undergraduate in my first year, in my third year as a philosophy student. And I immediately just fell in love with Spinoza. But then I took, my studies just took this different path and I ended up doing a PhD on Kierkegaard, a 19th century thinker. And so sort of wandered off into the 19th century for quite a few years and was writing about him and other things, but specifically a lot of Kierkegaard. And then because academia is really specialized, I wondered whether I could dare to write a book on Spinoza because I felt that I hadn’t maybe spent long enough studying the 17th century. But anyway, I managed to do that in the end and it was just a joy to work on that book. I just loved reading Spinoza, thinking long and deeply about Spinoza and just being in his company, being in his intellectual company. So I’m very grateful that I got to write the book and it’s nice to have it out and other people reading it now. So, I mean, I think perhaps the, because I’m reading the earlier book on Kierkegaard, I think that gave you a particular way of getting into Spinoza that was interesting, because you emphasize, as the book says, Spinoza’s religion. And what’s funny about that for me is I’ve read a lot of books on Spinoza, some of very good, you know, de la Roca’s book and really excellent books. But for me, when I read the, I mean, as you did, I read it as an undergrad, you read it, you read an essay on it or write that. And I did another, I did a graduate course on Spinoza, same sort of thing, right? But then I decided, no, what I’m going to do is I’m going to sit down and I’m going to read the ethics religiously. And I mean that in sort of both senses of the word. I was going to read, like I was going to read a proposition and the proof every day and then reflect on it and work my way through it that way. And so when I did that, and then I’ve also taken up the practice of doing sort of Lectio Divina, this kind of transformative reading, because I was particularly interested in exactly what your book entitles, Spinoza’s religion. I was interested in the blessedness that he talks about and how is it being realized. And as I was reading the ethics, I started to realize something that you make a case for in the book. And it reminded me a lot of what had happened when I was reading Platinus. So when I was reading Platinus, so I’m trained both as an academic philosopher and a cognitive scientist, but I’ve also been doing meditation and Tai Chi Chuan and Vipassana and a lot of these transformative practices. I also do scientific work in them. I publish on mindfulness, etc. Anyways, I’m reading this and I came to this realization, oh, this is not just an argument. This is what Hado calls a spiritual exercise. The practice of really trying to engage in the ethics is not just the material and the propositions, but he’s actually training me to see the world in a certain way. And I went from concentrating on what you might call the adjectival aspects of Spinoza, the predicates of his propositions, to the adverbial. How can I see the world the way he’s seeing it? And then I had an experience that, and it was around the time I had gone back and I was reading some of the stuff about Skantia Intuitiva, where I had that moment, which is very similar to Prajna in the Buddhist tradition, where I was seeing how all of the argument was in each premise and how each premise was in all of the arguments. And that moment of how I saw the ethics was like, oh, and that’s how I can see the world. And the two became sort of interposed for me. It was like, oh, right? It’s that sense of that direct participation, that really sort of had a huge impact on me. And I thought, well, here’s Spinoza doing this right at the heart of the scientific revolution and the advent of the Cartesian framework. And I thought, this is really important and profound. And so then when I read your book and you read your book and then you unpacked that, how is this like? How is this very much a spiritual exercise? How is it transforming the way you’re seeing until you can have, as you said, a consciousness of participating in God? I was like, wow, this is really, really, really addressing something that I had been looking for. Sorry, that’s a long preamble, but I just wanted to give you a sense of how I came to your book. And so can you start to unpack that? Why focus on Spinoza’s religion? Well, I mean, I guess, I guess similarly to you in a way. I mean, yeah, not only had I written about Kierkegaard, he’s obviously very engaged with religion and thinking about the religious life and thinking about spirituality from a philosophical and theological perspective, but I personally was also exploring things like Vipassana. Like I did lots of Vipassana retreats in my twenties and early thirties, before I had a child. I did lots of meditation and yoga and those practices were really important to me and really just really opened my mind. So definitely. But actually, I think already when I first read him as a philosophy student, before I’d started exploring those practices, which happened more kind of into my twenties, probably after I left university mainly, I think I did get some of that sense of Spinoza, which was why I found it so exciting. And then along with that, Spinoza has this reputation for being an atheist. I’d hear, you know, I’d sometimes go to talks on Spinoza because I was interested in him, but I’d often hear people describe him in a way that seemed to me really alien or just not the Spinoza I thought I was reading. So they’d be seeing him as a very hard-nosed materialist, or they’d be giving very kind of dry and sort of conceptual talks, very analytic type talks. I mean, sometimes that work can be really illuminating, so I’m not trying to say that there’s nothing to be gained from doing it, but it just didn’t really feel so connected to the Spinoza that I really liked. And then I went to a meditation group in Manchester through my twenties and there was a teacher who sort of led that group, very elderly teacher who is no longer with us, sadly, but I was really fortunate to be part of that group for quite a few years. And he was a sort of non-dualist teacher. And often when, and he was also just a lovely person in whose presence it was just always very, very good to be. But I would just often think of Spinoza when I was in that group. And I think it did have that experiential element to it where things I was experiencing or ways of seeing the world that felt right to me really seemed to resonate with Spinoza. So I just wanted to write a book that conveyed that, well, not just that conveyed it, but to write a book that where I would have to really explore that and develop it fully for myself and really come to think it through, really understand it for myself, but also to convey that Spinoza to readers and to just sort of share some of those ideas. I mean, it’s not as if it’s, I just came back from a conference in Italy on Spinoza, on religion, which I helped to organise and bring together. And actually lots of leading Spinoza scholars are kind of to some extent with me on this. Like Michael Della Rocca, for example, he does see Spinoza as a religious or spiritual thinker. But the question is, well, religious in what way? What does this religion consist in? What do we mean to say that? Because it looks, it doesn’t really look like another religion that we might be familiar with. It doesn’t fit into any, to a box labelled Christianity or Judaism, which will be the two main contenders because Spinoza was Jewish and was brought up in a Jewish community. He then left that community and lived among, you know, sort of Christian friends and acquaintances in 17th century Holland. So he was in this Christian culture surrounded by Christian people. He had this Jewish background. So he’s kind of Judeo-Christian, but he doesn’t fit into either of those categories. And actually thinking about the question of Spinoza’s religion led me to see that we have to actually rethink the very concept of religion itself. If we’re going to figure out what we sort of do justice to that intuition that Spinoza is a religious thinker, we need to maybe stretch or change our concept of religion itself. So there’s two things I want to ask you about that. And you can answer whichever you want first. The first is the degree to which Spinoza might have more continuity with pre-Christian religions or at least parallel to the development of Christianity. I’m thinking in particular of Stoicism and Platonism. They both have an especially idea of participation in God. Oh yes, of course. The degree to which they are influencing him. And in that sense, Spinoza is maybe exacting something from the past and bringing it into the scientific framework. But also, to your second point, that it speaks to a kind of emerging pertinence. Spinoza is a great philosopher, who was always relevant. But I mean, sort of an emerging pertinence, because it seems that we are going through a period right now, and this is something I do some of my work on, where the very idea of religion is precisely under negotiation in the way in which Spinoza’s careful reflection could be exemplary for us. And I wonder what you think of those. Answer those in whichever order you prefer. Okay, well, I’ll start with the first one. So yes, as you say, I mean, he was definitely influenced by Stoicism. I mean, lots of early modern thinkers, like 16th and 17th century philosophers and theologians were reading Stoic texts. I guess they were kind of made more accessible during the Renaissance, and so they were just recovered and retrieved, and people were reading them, and often integrating them into Christianity, for example. Platonism had been absorbed into the Christian tradition in the medieval period. And actually, I mean, there’s some biblical scholars, New Testament scholars, who’ve argued that the writers of the gospels were themselves influenced by those philosophies, by Greek philosophy, by Stoicism, and by Platonism. I mean, that’s kind of contested. But I think what’s really interesting is the fact that we might think of something like Christianity as this particular tradition, and then there are these other alternatives outside it, but it’s always been a very eclectic and diverse kind of cultural mix. That diversity is sort of built into it, which makes it really ironic that institutions like the big churches try to exclude diverse, or as they would call, you know, heretical points of view. And this idea that there’s a sort of pure doctrine that’s only built on the scriptures, and then they would classify, and indeed did classify, I think, a like Spinoza as a heretic who just stands outside of that tradition. And that itself is a very kind of reified and sort of quite rigid way of thinking about what a religion is, but it’s like this one thing. I mean, I’m increasingly thinking that Christianity sort of isn’t even a thing. There’s all these mixtures of traditions. So to say that there is one tradition that we can just label as if it’s this monolithic thing. Yeah, and I also think that probably in all religious traditions as they’ve evolved, there’s this idea of, well, in my book on Spinoza, I call it being in God. Yes, yes. But we can call it a kind of, as you were saying, a participation in God, the idea that we either do always share or can come to share in God’s being or in God’s nature. So it’s this kind of panentheist tendency, the idea, this idea that things are in God and that there isn’t a separation between God and nature, between God and the world. And that’s sometimes regarded as a kind of distinctive and heretical position, but actually it’s just something you find in Judaism, you find it in Islam, you find it in Indian, different aspects of Indian religion and Christianity. There’s just this kind of panentheist impulse that you find. And so I’d be more inclined to align Spinoza with that kind of panentheist or impulse. There’s this interest in the idea of being in God, which kind of keeps cropping up in different traditions and maybe more or less kind of marginal, depending on your prevailing culture. But the thing about it is, one of the things that’s sort of difficult about it is that it’s very hard to make sense of that idea using a dualistic conceptual framework. I agree, I agree. And that the concepts and the languages that we apply to the world, we sort of live in a day-to-day basis, tends to be quite dualistic. And there’s, I’m here, you’re over there, I’m sitting at my desk, there are these objects, and the words that we use are about kind of managing to move between those objects. And what Spinoza is giving us in the ethics is an ontology that really cuts through all of that. But it can be quite difficult to articulate it using dualistic concepts and language. Before you get to the second question, because we’re merging, that brings up a couple things for me. One is, and you do emphasize this in the book, and you see this emphasis in the traditions you’re talking about, that this kind of recognition of being in God, of being in God’s presence, being in God, participating in God, is not a recognition that’s done primarily discursively, which is kind of paradoxical given that Spinoza seems to be like the epitome of discursive reasoning. But then it reminds me again of the Neoplatonic tradition, especially the later tradition, where you have all of this very strict argumentation and almost Zen-like, it’s supposed to propel you beyond that, right? It’s not beneath it, it’s sort of beyond. And so that leads me to, I mean, this is perhaps a little bit tendacious, but do you think it’s possible to understand Spinoza without having a set of transformative practices that give you that kind of transformation of consciousness? So I’ll give you a somewhat silly analogy. But wouldn’t that be like reading the Kama Sutra with and never having made love, and that you’re trying to understand it just propositionally? What do you think about that? Because that to me puts, your book has a little bit of a subversive threat to it, because it’s sort of challenging what you might call a purely academic reading of Spinoza, if I’m reading you correctly. And I may be reading into you, but I wanted to hear what you thought about that. Yeah, that’s an interesting question. I mean, I don’t know, I think I sort of want to hesitate. I mean, there are different kinds of knowing. Yes, very much. I talk about that. That’s something that Spinoza himself talks about. I mean, going back to this conference I’ve just been at, it was an academic conference, scholars were giving talks. And those talks were, almost all of them, really illuminating for me about some aspect of Spinoza’s thought, that I just hadn’t really grasped before. And I don’t know what, whether those scholars have some kind of transformative, have transformative experiences or practices that are kind of feeding their work on Spinoza. If they do, they weren’t discussing those at the conference. So I mean, I think that for Spinoza, it’s about that both rational thinking, and also the kind of thinking that he calls imagination, which is in a way a bit more like ordinary thinking. But we can think about what a young year will call active imagination, that kind of thinking. And he talks about intuition as well, which seems to be a kind of thinking that it’s difficult to cultivate in itself, but that it can kind of arise, perhaps alongside other kinds of thinking. So he talks about these different kinds of thinking. And I do think that he sees them all as taking people in a direction that, if we are going to talk about experience, transformative experience and practice, then maybe those kinds of understanding can help prepare the way for that. Or, I don’t know, I don’t know, it’s difficult to say, for me to say from my own experience, what the connection might be between any experiences I’ve had and reading Spinoza. I certainly feel this kind of resonance. So they’re sort of mutually illuminating in a way. So there might be an experience that I have had, and then Spinoza’s sort of categories and concepts might help me to make sense of that experience, or equally often. Often when I’m reading any philosophy, I’m often sort of, as I’m trying to make sense of it, trying to find a way for that text to fit my own experience somehow. I mean, that’s just, I’m not sure if that’s the way one is supposed to read philosophy, but it’s the way I tend to read it. And it’s the way I often try to go about understanding it, is thinking, oh yes, that kind of makes sense. I can relate to that in my own experience. And so, but that, I mean, what do you, I don’t know, what do you think? Well, thank you for asking me, because I mean, I agree with you. I certainly don’t, I’m not trying to censor in any way, prohibit people from doing academic sort of theoretical work on Spinoza. I think that’s important. But I mean, I don’t know if you’ve read Ellie Paul’s book, Transformative Experience, and I’ve had the pleasure of talking with Lori, and it lines up with a lot of the work that’s coming out of 4E Cognitive Science, the four kinds of knowing. I talk about four kinds of knowing and things like that. And one of the things that Lori makes clear in your book is you can’t sort of infer your way through transformative experiences, because you don’t know what it’s going to be like to be a parent. You don’t have that perspectival knowing, and you don’t know how your identity is going to be changed until it’s been changed. So you can’t, you don’t have the requisite information to run the inferences. You can make, so there’s something about a transformative experience that transcends the propositional grasp. And third wave, Platonism, Gonzales and others are making the same argument for Plato that this non-propositional, the noesis within the non-propositional, right? It’s actually central to the Platonic philosophy. So I tend to want to say something like this, which first of all, I agree with you that it’s not clear that all philosophy should be read the way you’re saying, but I would put it to you that I think all philosophy that’s like ancient philosophy, if Pierre Hedot is right, or at least modern versions that also seek a transformative change in the individual, like existentialism, have to be read the way you’re saying. I think, for example, if you try to, I mean, Heidegger said, don’t read, basically don’t read my philosophy if you’re not practicing phenomenology, you’re not going to get it. Right. And so I think there are, I think there are at least philosophers that should be read the way you are reading and the way I want to read. And I do think that Spinoza is an interesting case because I think he fits in both categories. So that’s why I wanted to ask you the question, because I think there’s one sense in which you can see him as epitomizing, you know, the logical mathematical spirit that’s going to come to dominate science. I mean, Heidegger is right. The difference between ancient Aristotelian science and modern science is math, right? The idea that math is how you do it. And Spinoza is like exemplifying that. And I think that’s a completely legitimate thing to study. But I think his discussion about blessedness, I don’t think you can just be informed into it. I think you have to be transformed in order to realize what he’s saying. And so for me, this is what is especially valuable about him, because he has the potential to bring those two worlds together. And this is a great divide in our current society, right? We have the scientific view and we have what you might call, for lack of a better term, the spiritual. And we put them as antagonistic or at least orthogonal. And in Spinoza, they’re sitting together like this. Sorry, that was a long answer, but I thought it was a good question. No, that’s great. Yeah, no, I think I do think that’s right. I mean, one of the concepts that I talk about in the book, in the first chapter is devotion. And I think that’s actually a concept that can also bring the spiritual and the more scientific together, because part of what devotion is, is just seeing value in something and responding to that value by just returning to it again and again, and bringing your time, your attention, your thoughts, making space and time for that in your life. And so that kind of devotion is exemplified in many things, but including in scientific and mathematical work, any kind of deep, sustained intellectual work requires that kind of devotion. And so that sort of devotional quality and that devotional character of philosophy, even a kind of philosophy that might seem sort of not very existentially oriented, but the person who just keeps going back, you know, to his or her study in the library and pursuing, you know, it has this quality of devotion. And I find that quite interesting to bring that into the foreground. And then of course, you know, in religious context, we think about devotional practices too, but to see devotion as really a sort of fundamental human thing, which is to do with our search for truth or our search for what is good. And the way, but the thing about devotion is it’s a kind of love for truth or for goodness or I was going to say. It’s never just a kind of feeling I have inside or some kind of abstract idea. It has to be expressed in the world. It’s sort of manifest in the way, the choices we make, the things we give our time and attention to. And it’s something I just, I find that really moving. Like I think it’s so moving that Spinoza was so devoted to building his philosophical system. You know, he basically organized his whole life around doing that by, you know, having a very modest life. He refused certain kinds of patronage. He didn’t want a job in a university. He didn’t want to be part of a church because he knew that those things that might give him a kind of worldly status actually would interfere with the task he set himself, which is to pursue his philosophical inquiries and to create this amazing, it’s like an artwork and a work of philosophy. Yes. And a great scientific. Yes. You know, it’s this incredible thing that itself is designed. I mean, I’m glad to hear you’ve been reading it in an electio divino fashion because that’s the way I think it was designed to be read and it’s the way it was read by Spinoza’s friends who were devoted to him. I mean, Spinoza was someone who inspired devotion in the people who knew him well and who sort of perceived his wisdom and really wanted to learn from him and to kind of be in his presence. And yeah, so I just I do think devotion is a really important concept for thinking about some of those questions. Well, let’s follow up on that because I think that’s very interesting. I was thinking when I read your passage, I was thinking of some of the stuff that Iris Murdoch talks about in The Sovereignty of the Good and about this directing of attending and the realising the love, love as recognising that something other than yourself is real and that you’re directing and the disciplining of attention. And I was thinking about that. So when you’re really devoted to something, I see Spinoza as doing two things, or at least when I’m reading Spinoza, I’m experiencing two things, two movements. One is and I’ll use Polania’s notion here, I find that I’m starting to indwell the text. I’m starting to indwell it, not just look at it. So it’s, you know, or Marlo Ponti talks about, you know, like the blind man’s king, you start to see the world through it, you’re indwelling it. But correspondingly, I also feel the Vygotskyan moment that I’m starting to internalise Spinoza. Spinoza becomes almost like a metacognitive voice within me. And so, because I’m thinking about the fact that devotion often results in people saying things like St Paul, it is not I who live, who Christ lives within me. Well, I was just thinking, you know, you’re exactly that, like you are in it, and it is in you, is what you described. So what I’m saying is that there’s a deep connection, therefore, between this act of devotion with these two moments, and then the disclosure of the participatory ontology, because you’re in it, it’s in you. And then that gives you, you know, an enacted model of what the ontology is like. Is that making sense? Yes, definitely. Yes. And I thought, is that part? So I was brought up in a fundamentalist Christianity that I left because of the way it sort of traumatised me. And so, like you, in some ways, although you didn’t have that kind of background, you mentioned that in one of your emails, right? I’ve been interested in both the functionality and the dysfunctionality of religion, and how that could be taken up into our current attempts to renegotiate what religion could mean for us. The faster growing demographic is the nuns. The NONES is no official religion, yet they don’t typically describe themselves as atheists, they describe themselves as spiritual but not religious. In fact, everybody describes themselves as spiritual but not religious, which I think is just saying they’re trying to renegotiate. We’re in this renegotiation phase. So what I’m trying to bring it around to is, you know, this notion of devotion and the fact that it can give you this ontological sense, without necessarily binding you into a particular creed. Do you think that’s a central thing that’s attracting you to Spinoza? It’s one of the things that’s attracting me. It’s like, I’m getting, like, what I’m sort of resisting is the spiritual but not religious could just mean you’re autodidactically cludging a bunch of things together that make you feel good. And you might write that kind of, and I want to, no, I don’t want that. I want something deep and transformative that requires something like the integrity. One of the things that attracts me to Spinoza is his personal integrity, right? And I want that depth. And can we get that depth without having, you know, the traditional structures that Spinoza rejected and many people are rejecting? Sorry, it took me a while to get to the question, but I feel like that’s one of the things that your book resonated in me. It was sort of answering, look, there’s a depth, a real depth that’s possible here, a real deep realization transformation, but it can stand outside of these traditions. It can be in discussion with them, but it can stand outside of them. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, it’s a long-term project, isn’t it? Yes. You know, and the nice thing about Spinoza, I mean, certainly in my own case, I guess it was 25 years ago that I started studying Spinoza and encountering him for the first time. And that’s quite a long, not that I’ve been, you know, intensely reading the ethics for all that time, but I had that first encounter and it stayed with me. And I had enough of an understanding of it to kind of have a sense of what it was and so that other things could seem to resonate with it or fit into it. And then obviously at different times, yeah, turning to it and studying it quite intensely. And obviously to write a book about something is itself a really sustained kind of work. Well, a certain kind of book, a book like this. I mean, there are lots of books that are written that don’t do that, but I know what you mean. I know what you mean. Yeah. So I guess just, so I guess it’s perhaps analogous to a marriage, you know, a sort of religious affiliation. I mean, because there’s a version of being spiritual, but not religious, where you just sort of dabble in different things. And so it’s like, you know, you might be a serial monogamous or you might just kind of be very fluid and, you know, whatever. And I’m not sort of making a judgment about that as a lifestyle choice, but I mean, the word religio, I think one of the meanings is to bind. Yes, very much. So to be sort of to tie yourself to something and to, I mean, that can have very negative connotations of being in bondage to this thing that’s, you know, just some kind of delusion or it’s being brainwashed or whatever. So obviously the idea of a bondage can be negative, but also this idea that, you know, a bit like a marriage where, you know, you live within that, you live within that world that you’ve sort of stepped into and kind of committed, you’ve committed to it. And so, and it’s not like I ever did that consciously with Spinoza. It’s not like I was like, this is my religion. I’m going to follow this path. But the fact is that it has been a long-term relationship now and it’s not really gone away. It’s proved itself to be quite a sustaining and sustained thing. And it’s actually, I mean, this connects with what you were saying just now. It’s actually a philosophy that I’ve been able to combine with different religious engagements over the years. Like, you know, my sort of yoga practice, is it really important to me? I’ve got a kind of Catholic strand to my religious life. I’ve done these Buddhist meditation retreats. And I don’t see any of those things as kind of necessarily superficial, but they’re not, but nor are they just some kind of conventional religious label where I can say, I am this and I believe this. I find it, I’ve always found it quite difficult to be very kind of certain and sure of those things. Because often it’s like, well, how do I know the fundamental nature of reality? I have a kind of provisional sense mixed with hope and desire of what I would like it to be and what sometimes it does seem to be. But who knows? So much is mysterious. So is Spinoza acting like kind of a through line for you, that someone that helps you sort of move between all of these and give you some kind of continuity between them, these various domains you pointed to? I guess so, yeah. I mean, I guess in my own funny way, I can kind of, there’s a sort of coherence of Spinozaism that other things can kind of fit into. I mean, that said, it’s no substitutes for say yoga practice, which is to do with being in the body, moving the body, working with the breath. You don’t get that from sitting and reading any book or walking. So, in the Christian tradition, there’s just this amazing tradition of art and architecture that I just, I was just in Italy for the Spinoza Conference, but I went to Florence and went to San Marco, this convent with all these beautiful Far Angelico frescoes on the walls and just this beautiful, beautiful arts. And I have a real connection with Mary. And so that’s really important to me as well. You don’t get that from reading Spinoza. I don’t get a kind of feminine archetype. So, yeah. So I think it’s, I wouldn’t want to say that, well, obviously everyone is different, aren’t they, in terms of what they’re drawn to. And the question is like, how much can you sort of trust what you’re drawn to? And when do you have to think, okay, I need to impose some kind of consistency or I need to join a group that’s going to affirm my identity and make my place in the world a bit clearer? I don’t know. Yeah. Well, I mean, I think there’s like Spinoza and Platinus, the Neoplatonic tradition and Stoicism was taken up into Neoplatonism. I sometimes describe it like a courtyard. It disposes the furniture of my thinking so that I can interact with a Buddhist practice and a Taoist practice. And so that’s what I meant when I was trying to get like this through line, this spiritual commons where people can meet in good faith dialogue or different parts of me can meet in good faith dialogue about this sort of thing. I’m reading in conjunction with reading your book on Kierkegaard, I’m reading Howland’s book on Socrates and Kierkegaard and the way and you can see how he’s using Socrates in that man. And I don’t mean an exploitative sense of using, he’s like really invested, he cares deeply about Socrates and that sort of thing. So what that leads me to, and we really, I think we’ve done, I’m glad we did this, we can circle back now to sort of the second question that I posed to you a while ago. I mean you talk about, and I really agree with, sort of renegotiating, perhaps in tandem, at least that’s what it seems like in your book, religion, God and nature. And that we’re like, Spinoza can help us, guide us in that renegotiation process. And to me that was one of the most powerful messages of the book and a lot of what we’ve been talking about sort of leads right into that space. So I mean, I don’t know how to phrase, I don’t want to ask the question, how is Spinoza relevant today? That’s just right, but I’m trying to get like, in what way do you see Spinoza as scaffolding us, almost in a Vygotskyan sense, so that we get guidance in how to renegotiate these three things, religion, God and nature. And what are the pitfalls he’s helping us to avoid, and what are the potential gems that he’s helping us to orient towards? I know that’s a big question, but you wrote a book, so right. Yeah, well I mean he certainly, I mean to state some obvious things, he certainly has a critique of a certain kind of dogmatic institutional sort of religion that is really based on some combination of orthodoxy and orthopraxy, where it’s like, this is what you have to believe and this is what you have to practice. Yes. I mean I think this idea of what we should do, I think that’s really important in ethical life, that that should, in terms of we should not be harming each other, and so do’s and don’ts make sense to me, I should be faithful to my husband, I should look after my children, these are things that are kind of non-negotiable, but when it comes to kind of I should go to church and I should or I should believe this doctrine, on those kinds of shoulds, I think Spinoza is, he’s resisting those kinds of dogmatisms, while arguing that the ethical virtues of what he calls justice and loving kindness are absolutely fundamental and yeah, like non-negotiable, and it’s just really difficult to disagree with that, with those values of justice and loving kindness. What about, you think there are shoulds around the intellectual love of God? I mean I agree with you, he’s rejecting a lot of the standard shoulds, he’s definitely rejecting a lot of the sort of anthropomorphic ideas of God and things like that, and shoulds based on that, but I also, I mean like Spinoza is not just sort of like do what you want, right, so there’s we talked about, there’s a devotion and that means a discipline of following, so like what, like sorry, I just want to try and pull this apart. Yeah, so I think should is not the right word to use in terms of the intellectual love of God, because Spinoza’s teaching on that is that that is something that just necessarily and naturally arises when you have a certain kind of understanding, so to say that you should do it, it’s like you’re, it’s either there or it’s not basically, you know, and it’s, it is or it isn’t going to be manifest at any given time, I don’t think it’s something that you are kind of. So this is exactly the key thing I want to drill in on with you a little bit, like there’s definitely, like I agree with you, it’s the ethical should isn’t the right thing here. I’m reminded of Frankfurt where he talks about love as a voluntary necessity, right, and it’s something like that, what I’m getting is this voluntary necessity, which combines things that we normally again see as opposite to each other, and yet, so you use the analogy of your faithfulness to your partner, and that’s a different, like I don’t feel that my faithfulness to my partner is any, like Frankfurt’s work is very helpful for that, I don’t feel that it’s something I should do, right, I don’t do it out of any moral obligation, but nevertheless it is a necessity for, it is a kind of religio, a kind of binding that is nevertheless something that requires tremendous integrity and discipline on my part, I won’t cheat on her, I won’t do, like all this stuff becomes, like what Frankfurt talks, like all these things become unthinkable to me, right, it’s not that, I mean, not unthinkable, I mean, I can run the propositions through my head, like for example, I have to give the example, I live with my son Jason because he’s just completing his training for teachers college, and he was going to school in Toronto, and I think, you know, kicking my son out is unthinkable to me, I can imagine it, I can form the images, I can run the implications, my apartment will be so much cleaner, I’ll have so much more money, right, and all this sort of stuff, but that does, but I can’t ever get to that kind of participatory knowing where I can identify with and plug into that way of shaping how I’m bound to the world, you know what I, when I’m trying to get to here? Yeah, completely, no, I agree, it is, I mean, this is a kind of necessity that I’m really interested in making sense of, because it’s so, it’s not a logical necessity, it’s not a causal necessity, it’s not the kind of moral necessity that Kant was talking about when he talks about obey the law, or maybe it was, I don’t know, maybe that’s what he had in mind, but it doesn’t, I mean, yeah, it doesn’t seem to be quite that either, it’s more like a spiritual necessity, yes, yes, yes, I mean, I mean, the concept of a voluntary necessity is tricky for Spinoza, because, just because he denies the will, and so any kind of idea of sort of something that’s voluntary or chosen is, of course, we may have certainly experienced it as, we do experience things as choices, don’t we, but yeah, but yeah, it’s this kind of spiritual necessity, that’s right, and I find it puzzling, you know, as a philosopher, you know, I don’t have an account of it, and I don’t know if that’s because I just haven’t thought hard enough about it, I mean, I haven’t thought that hard about it, I’ve just sort of wondered at the idea of it, and yeah, so I don’t know if it’s just that if I thought hard enough about it, I could provide an account, or whether it’s the sort of thing that doesn’t really have an explanation or an account. Well, I don’t know, what do you think? Yeah, it’s been a pivot point of my work, and it’s been weird, and it’s got weird resonances with Spinoza, I did, I mean, a cognitive scientist in AI, and you know, the project coming up with artificial general intelligence, and there’s been this whole computational model about trying to get the logical manipulations of propositions to ultimately create general intelligence, and by many people’s accounts, mine included, that project has failed because there’s, the core of intelligence seems to be this attentional capacity to zero in on relevant information and ignore irrelevant information. This is the thing that’s, it’s, your brain is so good at it, but just think about it abstractly, under the eye of eternity for a second, think of all the things you could be paying attention to, all the different things you could be drawing from in memory, all the ways you could combine them in memory, all the different thoughts, all the different possible actions, you could be moving your finger, like, and yet you zero in on what’s obvious and relevant, and your religio, you’re bound to the situation, and you’re bound by that normativity of relevance, and it just seems obvious to you. Think about how obviousness has that kind of aspect where you’re just drawn in, and for me, and think about how powerful it is when you get a phenomenological awareness of when that relevancy judgment is suddenly changing, like when you get the aha moment, and you realize, oh, I thought this was important, but it turns out this way of thinking about it, giving insight to artificial intelligence has been really, really difficult. It’s an intentional thing about how things are relevant and important, and it’s necessary, at least in this way, if you aren’t practicing this, if you aren’t doing this weird thing where you sort of project salience and then bind yourself into it, you’re not going to be a cognitive agent. That’s what I’ve argued in my published scientific work. That is the core of being a cognitive agent, and so if you do not, and that process, because it’s an inherently self-correcting process, like insight, one of the things it has to be intrinsically interested in is itself. You have to care about this in a profound way, and so I think what we find in these religio, these bindings, is we see moments where we grasp, and I think this is where Murdoch’s work has been helpful to me, we grasp the constitutive necessity of this for our cognitive agency. Devotion is something that we go from seeing through our relevance realization to actually realizing, wow, look at how I can bind myself to something and how it discloses the world and transforms me. A lot of my work has been trying to bring, and it sounds bizarre, as I would say to you just on the street, trying to bring all of this development out of the work on artificial intelligence and about how crucial relevance realization is to our agency, and then how much we like to do serious play. We like to play with music. We like to play with our salience landscaping for its own sake, and poetry. We like to play with finding new patterns of relevance between words, and we do it for its own sake. What I’m suggesting to you is I think that this necessity is one that we have to love that religio, largely maybe unconsciously, but maybe at times we need to help the self-correction or we accentuate it in religion by celebrating it, by doing it for its own sake. That would strike us as inherently both interesting and necessary because I would argue it’s constitutive of our cognitive agency. This is what most of my published academic publication is about trying to bring those two together. In a weird way, you can see Spinoza. Spinoza is maybe in one sense the most computational philosopher, at least the ethics. It looks like a computer program, but on the other hand, it throws you out of that and you become aware of the spiritual necessity that you and I are talking about. I don’t know if that made any sense. I’m trying to summarize two and a half decades of my work to you in like three minutes, but there’s a lot of stuff I’ve got online about that argument, but that’s how I’m trying to get at that. Why is this religio, this sense of being connected so important? We know from psychology that sense of connectedness, independent of moral judgment, independent of sort of subjective well-being, that matters to people, that mattering, that connectedness is the core thing for meaning in life. We know that meaning in life is so central to mental health, social well-being, etc. I’m trying to sort of make a convergence argument here. I don’t know if that works. I guess it’s partly what Heidegger is getting at when he talks about care and concern of being sort of fundamental. Very much so. Very much so. And the existence of a human being. Yeah, well, Heidegger and Marla Ponti are sort of the godfathers of the third generation cog-sci. Or ecog-sci. This idea of the connectedness and care, but not just, I mean, you know, in Heidegger, care isn’t just like an affect. It’s this profound, like you said, profound binding that’s so central to cognitive agency. I’m reading Oegskoll’s book right now, Four Way Into What is it? Human and Animal Worlds, and he talks about the different ways different animals are bound to their environment, the different salience landscapes that they live within, and how though, and that binding is like, it’s interesting because it puts a little bit, not completely, to lie to Nagels, what’s it like to be a bat? When you read Oegskoll’s book, you sort of get what it’s like to be a fly, and you sort of get what it’s like to be an earthworm, and the way it brings that about is really, really powerful. And so I think there’s something about that agent arena binding the way we, like Heidegger, we’re worlding, which isn’t just the planet, it’s again, and all organisms are doing this to some degree. I think it’s fundamental in a deep way. I don’t know if that tracks with you, but I’m trying to gesture you towards something. Yeah, yeah, definitely. I mean, I guess one thing we’ve not talked about much yet, and this I think is really important when we’re thinking about a modern religion, and what it is that people are expressing when they say, oh, I’m spiritual, but not religious. And I think exactly what you just said is obviously not just super important, but kind of indispensable condition for even thinking about these things, or even for the question about religion to even make sense at all. This is just so fundamental, but I think it’s also like emotion and feeling are really important. And that’s what’s so great about Spinoza is that he has this whole theory of emotions in the ethics, which I personally find extremely helpful and instructive. I mean, I’ve normally got some kind of emotional turbulence going on all the time. And if I’m reading the ethics, I find that it really speaks, often speaks very directly to that. Yes, yes. It’s therapeutic, because it will help me to understand this experience of sadness right now, or this experience of anger, or this experience of envy, or whatever it might be. And so, yeah, so he has this whole account of emotion. I mean, he’s very kind of, in a way, he’s like some of the stoic philosophers. He sees one of our big problems as sort of anxiety and agitation and these sort of violent fluctuating emotions. And of course, we’re all so familiar with, and he’s sort of trying to find ways of living kind of a more peaceful and a sort of calmer life. But at the same time, he’s not about suppressing emotion or just sort of putting it to one side, because he’s not a dualistic thinker, and because the mind and the body are always, you know, they’re expressions of the same reality and of the same experience. There’s always that affective dimension. There’s always the feeling. I like the word feeling, because it evokes the immediacy of sensation, but it’s also words that we use to describe emotion. And I think that when people talk about spiritual, but not religious, there’s some, they’re talking at some level about how they feel, how they feel about the world. And it’s also just the fact that one of the reasons why religion, particularly communal religion, can be so important is just to help us kind of understand suffering and to understand what we experience. I mean, a close friend of mine died just a couple of weeks ago, and she was very young. She was 42. And I was supposed to be preparing this paper for a Spinoza conference, and I couldn’t really do it. But it’s just thinking about, so instead of preparing the paper, I was reflecting on sadness and reflecting about what Spinoza says about sadness, which often seems to be quite negative, which is where often other, like, a yoga practice or looking at Farangelico’s paintings, there are times when that might be what’s needed rather than, and or, you know, reading the ethics. So I don’t know, I just think that it’s often at those moments where we experience sadness, and we’re not really aware of it. And I just think that it’s, and it’s often at those moments where we experience a loss, or we try to make sense of an experience of loss. And when these spiritual questions arise, you know, and we’re ultimately conscious of our own mortality, that’s one of the elements of sadness that we feel when we lose somebody else. It’s also a sense of our own fragility and our own attachments to the world and the people we love and all of that. So I think all of that is part of religion. Yes, I agree. I mean, one of the things about for e-cognitive science, first of all, embodiment. So who knows that mind and body totally integrated. And then, you know, cognition is not cold calculation. It’s always, it’s always, it’s always, because you are, you are, we even use the metaphor of paying attention, right? You are committing your very precious, very limited cognitive resources and biological, like whenever you’re doing any sizing up of any situation, you’re running a bit of a risk, you’re right. And so there’s, like, if you try, and I think, you know, DeMazio’s work on this, and you know, DeMazio is a fan of his Descartes era, right? You get people who can do all of the logical calculations, but that part of the brain is disconnected from the affect. And you can sort of cripple them by saying, well, before you write this IQ test, in which you’re going to do really well, do you want to write it in red ink or blue ink? And then they are, right? So yeah, I think for me, Spinoza, about the embodiment and about the interweaving of affect and what we used to call cognition, what we’re understanding is, right, our fear that we’re going to produce sort of, you know, cold, emotionless AI, I think is largely a misplaced fear. Right. So I think all of that is very consonant. But I’m wondering, like, you like the word feeling. I tend to not like the word feeling. Not because I don’t want to talk about, but because most people think of feeling as an internal event of sensation. When I’ve talked to them, what do you mean by feeling? They’ll talk about something happening in their body. Obviously, that’s part of it. But what I find missing is what’s often emphasized in, you know, in phenomenological work. What’s missing is orientation, salience, not only how, right, how the world is grabbing you, right, and all of that. Now, if you mean feeling in that way, and I think Spinoza does, at least that’s what D’Amazio argues, then I get it. And I want to make sure that that’s how I’m understanding you, because like one of the problems with the word feeling is it’s been overly subjectivized and relativized. Well, yeah, from a Spinoza’s point of view, we’re not distinct, discrete entities. We’re constantly, not just receptive, but being changed by everything we encounter constantly. And so, I mean, what might be my feeling might not be separate from your feeling. Now, if I’m talking to you, so, I mean, it’s empathy. Yes. You know, you’re with people and being with people and in situations and in places. There’s a sort of constant kind of flow of feeling, I think. Right. That’s very responsive and receptive. I mean, that’s why it’s a bit like a sense. Yeah, I was going to say I prefer the word sense. Yeah, OK. But it’s like a kind of, I would say it’s like a sense in that it’s sort of about a kind of receptiveness to the world. But I think it’s also, feeling is also something that can be shared and exchanged between beings. Well, that’s what it’s going to propose, because sense has that sense of receptivity, but it also has a sense of making sense. It has also the disclosure of intelligibility that’s also part of that. So that’s so if we’re sort of back on the same page, what does all of like if we reorient, if we’re understanding religion in terms of this sense of spiritual necessity and cultivating it and sharing it with each other, what does that tell us about how we should re-understand God? You know, I had to ask you this at some point. So because that’s the like and God and nature. And you make a very good point. And I think one of the one of the many gems in your book is you say people read that and they read it reductively. They read they read God reduced to a standard everyday notion of nature. And that’s not what Spinoza is doing. He’s doing a reciprocal reconstruction of both. Right. And so, yeah, given that sense of religion that we’ve been sort of disclosing together, in what way, what is it oriented us to? Well, we say God or nature, like what is it oriented us to? And again, I get it. I’m not I’m not I’m not supposing that you have certainty or you’ve got the answer. I just want to enter into dialogue with you about it. Yeah, yeah. Well, I think one way of thinking about what God means for Spinoza is our well, we’ve talked about being in God as really our what our existence is, as everything is in God and that being in, it’s to do with some dependence and intelligibility and kind of like a kind of grounding, I guess you could call it. But I mean, this is what one of the things that’s I think really important about Michael Dellarocca’s work on Spinoza is he’s absolutely committed to the intelligibility of being. Yes. And that, I think, is what God gives for Spinoza. Yes. So substance is the concepts that he uses when he starts to talk about God at the beginning of the ethics. And he immediately just kind of makes his ontological divisions in a very different way to someone like Descartes, who would see the world as full of finite substances and would see minds and bodies as separate substances. And Spinoza is like, No, there’s only one substance. And that is God. And this is an infinite eternal substance. Everything else that exists is not substances, we are modes of this substance. So there’s already this non duality built into the absolute fundamentals of his metaphysics. But what it is to be substance is to be for Spinoza is to be the cause of itself and also to be conceived through itself. And they conceived through itself is this affirmation of this is the very first definition of the ethics, I think, is the cause of itself is what’s conceived through itself. So that means this fundamental intelligibility. And that’s what we are participating in when we are in God. It’s power, it’s being and it’s intelligibility. Yeah, yeah, I’ve described it as an inexhaustible source of intelligibility. But it’s also it’s also when I say it’s power, I mean, for Spinoza, part of what that means is, is that it’s expressive. I mean, so there are two verbs, I mean, there are more than two verbs, but two of the verbs that are really important for Spinoza are participation, which we’ve already talked about. And that has this whole platonic lineage, very important concept in, in sort of neoplatonic philosophy and theology. So participation is one of those verbs that, you know, we participate in the divine nature. That’s the verb that he uses to describe being God. But he also talks about the fact that we are expressions of God, and that God is this expressive reality. So it doesn’t, it’s not static. No, no, no. Expresses itself in infinitely many ways. Yes. There’s this kind of plenitude and diversity, that even though God is one and simple, like it can’t be split up into parts. Yes, yes. Can’t be divided into parts, not composed to parts. It’s simple, which is a traditional doctrine of God, that God is divine simplicity. But it’s also somehow at the same time, infinitely diversifying and expressive, but not in the way that that diversity goes outside of God, but that that is always in God, that expression is, sort of stays in God. It doesn’t get thrown outside of the divine nature. Yeah. And in the book, you make connections to neoplatonic Christians like Nicholas of Cusa, wrestling with that sort of paradox, the one in the mini, and it’s not static, but it’s also, it’s also eternal and yes. So I mean, and Delarocca makes the, you know, he makes a case independently from the book on Spinoza for the, like, he makes an argument for the principle of sufficient reason. Yeah, that’s his big thing. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Which, which I, and you see, you see Descartes wrestling with it, and he gets, he gets his circular argument for the existence of God, because he needs something to guarantee that the intelligibility of the clear and distinct ideas actually, you know, attaches to reality in some fashion. Whereas for Spinoza, and I think, Delarocca, I don’t, I don’t, I, and this is where I guess I’m more of a Platonist. For me, the good in Plato is precisely that, that the perpetually kept promise that intelligibility and being will be wed together, that as you, as you, as you pursue the depths of intelligibility, you’ll actually pursue the depths of reality. There’s that wedding together. For me, and maybe this is what, what Delarocca was getting at in his article about the principle, because it, it, it, it does sort of fit with something. It’s, it’s more like that the good or God is, again, it’s the spiritual necessity for us, right? Right. What I mean is, I think any argument that attempts to establish it actually just fundamentally presupposes it. Any argument I would give you to try and say, you know, intelligibility and being, I think it ultimately profoundly presupposes it, but that doesn’t mean we stand aside of it as just sort of an abstract thing. We, we, we see, it seems to be like the way we fall in love with another person, right? We seem to be able to fall in love with reality. And that seems to be right, the way in which that we find that we are always, always within the presupposition of the conformity of intelligibility and being. So that, that’s, that’s how I, that’s where I see as a fundamental religious core in Spinoza. Also in Plato, that that’s not something I can argue for, but it’s not just an, it’s not just an abstract presupposition. It’s a profoundly existential presupposition that grounds our lives in a deep way. What do you think about that as a proposal? Yeah. I mean, do you think that faith is needed to kind of keep, do you need that? Do you feel that kind of faith? I think you need to have a kind of faith in that because it’s not, it’s not sort of empirically or rationally, but how could it be? Yeah. Yeah. Right. That’s what I, and you, like I said, you can’t run any experience. It’s like you, it’s analogous. I only mean, there’s like an analogy. I can’t run any, I can’t run any, run any experiment to you that shows you that you should practice science because any experiment presupposes, right? Science presupposes the intelligibility of being in order to run experiment. If, if you didn’t have the presupposition that being is fundamentally intelligible, experimentation does not make any sense to you, right? It does not make any sense at all. So I think it’s a kind of faith. I don’t think it’s the kind of faith that, you know, is sort of, I don’t know, you know, that has become popular today. The notion of faith is, you know, asserting propositions without good evidence or something like that. But I think it’s more like, like what we’re talking about. It’s this, it’s this spiritual necessity of religio. We are bound to reality. Our intelligibility is bound to reality and to a depth of it, right? That we always only find ourselves in and there’s no place we can get outside of it and say, here’s my argument that will bound or justify. So if you mean faith in that sense of a kind of profound faithfulness that I always find myself within, yes, then I would say faith in that sense. And does that faith never waver? The faith wavers in the way faithfulness wavers. I mean, if I ever, if I was ever to think that if I was ever to say to my partner, if I was ever to say to you, I figured you out, I got you. There’s no more mystery left. You’re not going to, you can’t really surprise me. I like that’s it. The relationship’s over, right? But the, so there’s a faithfulness that is a binding to an ongoing self-correction and self-transcendence. I constantly grow in how I indwell her and how I afford her to indwell me. And it takes me in ways that I can’t foresee. It’s very much like that I was talking about the transformative experience of LA Paul. I can’t infer my way in. It doesn’t mean that I don’t step back and make inferences, but are there going to be stresses and strains as within that relationship? Of course. Of course. I mean, I mean your faith in the intelligibility of being. I mean, are there moments where you think, oh gosh, is this just how I would like it to be? But how do I, how do I know that there’s a correlation between, you know, what I would like to see and what I might be imposing on my, my vision and my interpretation and what really truly is. So what do I do with that? And this is maybe a Kyrgyzstan move or maybe a synthesis of a Kyrgyzstan and Nietzschean. And it’s very much Nishitani in religion and nothingness, right? Is you don’t stop the great doubt. You have, if you’re going to do it, be faithful to the great doubt, take it all the way down into the, okay, if I follow that, I get into an absolute kind of solipsistic, skeptic nihilism. And then, and it’s like, and so what? I also can’t provide any argument that that is the case. And so I’m faced with a kind of, it’s almost pragmatic, but like in a very deep sense, sort of the best of James, right? It’s like, well, I mean, either one of those are in some sense, propositionally equivalent, but which one of them is viable and livable. And then obvious. And if that’s what you’re asking me, it’s like, yeah. And I say to people, I can’t offer you any argument other than I don’t think you can live for more than like a 10 minutes in that kind of place. And so what Nishitani says is what happens is if you go and it’s like the Zen Koan taken to the memory, it’s like swallowing the red hot ball of iron. You’re supposed to let it burn to the depths. And I’ve done this more than one occasion as a spiritual practice. And you take it down and you get to that point. And it just does this sort of inversion. The emptiness go, and it’s an aspect shift, like what Wittgenstein talks about the duck rabbit. It’s the same thing, but it goes from being utterly negative to being utterly positive. It goes from being this vast, this emptiness in a purely negative, private sense to the inexhaustible source of all intelligibility from which all of this intelligibility springs. And that aspect shift is something you don’t argue, you just undergo. That’s what I do. So I don’t know. What I’m saying is I don’t think I can offer you an argument. And I’d be very suspicious of anybody who did. What I can say is there are practices that are recommended, largely in the Buddhist tradition, but also in some aspects of Neo-Platonism, where you go down the dark night of the soul, when you take it to the steps, and it bottoms out in a way that you can’t foresee and you can’t make ahead of time. And this is Nishitani’s critique of Nietzsche. He thinks that Nietzsche just didn’t go deep enough. Nietzsche was getting to it. When he says, if you look long enough into the abyss, it begins to stare back into you. Nietzsche is starting to get it. And then Nishitani said, Nietzsche needed to go deeper. You needed to go into the great, though. Yeah, interesting. Well, yeah. And like I said, I don’t expect to have convinced you because that’s not what I was expecting. No, no. It’s not that I’m sceptical. I’m just curious. I mean, I suppose I’m partly thinking that faith is an important concept for Kehiel. So it will be interesting when you’ve, I know you’re reading Kehiel. So it’ll be interesting to, you know, as that develops, find out more about how that might fit in. Well, what I can say is that transformative experience, both poles, that transformative experience at the bottom, and also the transformative experience of profound sense, mystical experience of oneness, those two poles together are somehow one for me. And they are like a magnet that energizes my faith, if you want to put it that way. Interesting. Well, I think two poles being not necessarily one thing, but just kind of coinciding is exactly Kehiel’s experience of the religious life. I mean, that’s the sort of paradox or contradiction that he just felt kind of, I don’t know, compelled to live in, basically. But it’s often the two extremes at once. And Kooza’s doing it too. And I read Kooza regularly also doing Kooza, you know. And he doesn’t just talk about the coincidence of opposites, right? He takes you through all of these practices. And so it goes from being an intellectual to being like, you really are sort of consumed by the paradox in a way that’s very analogous to, I think, what’s going on in Kierkegaard. So it’s interesting that Kierkegaard comes back in the depths of our discussions about Spinoza. I want to be cognizant of your time, Claire. We’re approaching an hour and a half, and that’s what you agreed to give me. And I just hope you found this enjoyable and valuable. I certainly did. This was a wonderful conversation. And I wanted to thank you. And I always give the people who come on my show sort of the opportunity for the last word. So is there anything you’d like to say? No, I’ve enjoyed talking to you too. Really interesting. It’ll be fun to talk about Kierkegaard another time. Well, I invite you back then if you’d like to come back. And we can talk about Kierkegaard. Yeah. Yeah. Kierkegaard and Spinoza are very strange thinkers to put together because people sometimes ask me about that because they’re so different. But I haven’t totally figured out, you know, is this a Kierkegaardian Spinoza? But they’re really interesting figures to think with. Absolutely. If I could recommend, I think it’s one of the top five books I’ve read in my life. I’ve read it twice. I’ve studied it. I’ve read it with other people. I recommend Nishatani’s Religion and Nothingness. I think it’s masterpiece. And I think you are well disposed to read it. And I think it might give a little bit of different vocabulary and theoretical space you can move around as you are wrestling with Spinoza and Kierkegaard. Oh, yeah. Thank you. Thanks for the recommendation. I don’t know this book. He’s part of the Kyoto School. And what’s interesting is the Kyoto School is trying to bridge between Western and Eastern philosophy at a level of spiritual depth, not just like theoretically, very much. Cool. Well, it’s really been very nice to talk to you, John. It’s nice to meet you. Nice to talk to you and nice to meet you. And I hope you will talk again. I’m very open to talking to you about Kierkegaard. And perhaps if you read Nishatani, you’ll want to talk to me. Yeah, I will. Yes. Okay. One final plug for the book, Spinoza’s Religion. Once again, best book I’ve ever read on religion. Highly recommend it. Thank you so much, Claire. Thanks, John.