https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=UNQawr0INFE
Welcome back everybody to another Voices with Verveki. This is the fourth in a series I’ve been doing with Johannes Niederhauser and Daniel Zaruba. And the overall arc of this is trying to bring Platonism and phenomenology back together again so as to deepen our understanding of intelligibility, its relationship to being in a way that is not abstract conceptual but is deeply existential. And so first of all, it’s great to see you gentlemen again and I’m looking forward to today a lot. Same, good to see you again John. Good to see you. It’s great to see you. Yes, it’s wonderful to have you here Daniel. So I had the great good pleasure of talking John Roussin yesterday. I’m not sure how the videos will come out. His video will probably come up before this one, but maybe not. And John has had a significant influence on me, his book Bearing Witness to Epiphany and the musicality of being just a deep impact on me and it’s come into these discussions. I’m currently reading his book on the Republic. I think it’s Money, Politics and Persuasion and he’s talking and the central topic is the logos and our ambivalent relationship to it. The thing that came out in the dialogue that’s pertinent to us right now is I described this project and I saw John’s project as the same that he’s trying to afford an integration but also a reciprocal reconstruction and a revivification of Platonism and phenomenology. And John was very happy with that description of his work and we explore it together and it became very clear that he didn’t he wasn’t interested in Platonism as a dialogue or a discourse about the otherworldly and he didn’t see that that’s what was actually going on. He said his favorite favorite book of all time is The Apology and you can see why that would be but he also said is and then he said but then he read the symposium and that was also that was also his favorite book of all time. And so what came clear with talking to John was that he was interested in this connection between right he said he would go out and read phenomenology and then he would come back and he would just see all of this in Plato and John’s a deep thinker and he’s a clear thinker and he’s an honest thinker and I think that should be he should be taken at his word and he saw he saw it especially in you know people’s in people’s love lives all the different loves they experience and how that puts them into a particular kind of ontological stance that’s important and he talks a lot about how this this is found within something he’s devoted a book to maturation and we and maturity is this word that’s both a descriptive word and the description of a and the referent to a virtue and he talked about maturation at the core of it and he actually did this at a talk in Utism in Toronto how that’s turning towards the real. Maturation is an increasing capacity that’s why you’re never finished and he saw Plato as talking about that and there’s deep connections between love and turning towards the real and deep ways in which that can go awry. So that has me all charged in both senses of the word with something I want to bring into our dialogue our dialogs which is we’ve talked a lot about the return of the forms and this integration in of Platonism and phenomenology and idetic deduction and dialectic into deal logos and we’ve talked about that with respect to right intelligibility and right the and the one in the mini as being inherently dialogical and therefore the deep conformity but what we haven’t talked about at least as foregrounded and as explicitly central was the thing that concerned I think Plato and Socrates and also Nishida and especially Nishitani was a word I have to invoke a word here that I’m unhappy with and that’s partial that is part of the problem right but what does this mean for the spirituality of the individual and what I mean by that is something beyond just the existential it includes but it is not identical with the the existential it has an aspirational dimension to it it has a dimension of transformation it has a dimension of the amelioration of suffering the affordance of flourishing it has the connotation of awakening from self-deception I’m trying to package these all into this nebulous and and fraught term spirituality what does all of this happen what is the spirituality that we should induce from everything we have been discussing so far that’s the problem the question I want to pose to us because I think if we do not address it we are not ultimately being just to the people we are discussing because I think their deepest concern was for such a spiritual realization so I’ve talked a lot and I’m going to shut up so that other people can be convinced of the fact that you both have voices and that I want to hear what you know take time too what’s your initial you know response framing go ahead Daniel I see you um there’s also one thing that you said right was that Platonism is not otherworldly and I think Nishitani is is quite good on that when he says well we are right the field what he calls the field of emptiness or shunyata that we are kind of like towards we are aspiring to is actually on a near side and not on a kind of transcendent far side and right for Nishitani it’s always about getting into a greater conformity and participation with the the real self-realization of reality for its own sake yes yes and and now right that the gap seems to me to now to be right when you say maturation is that which allows us to to participate with that yeah um how can we become spiritually spiritually mature how can we bear and endure the real in that in that sense how how can we how can we do that um and the first thing when I heard you talking was that it came to my mind was metanoia of course which is what we before we started the recording right which can both this can be achieved both by the leap of reason and by the leap of faith yes albeit they are different of kind in how metanoia is achieved but that’s that’s I think where like the the key of spirituality um lies in and and perhaps right because I think I think we need a dialectic of of of the leap of reason at the leap of faith because we can we can I think we can self-deceive us sometimes when we take a leap of faith and then we need this this um learned ignorance so it helps us to kind of like keep that keep that um self-deception in in check so to say um but then with the leap of reason it the danger is that we kind of like become again and in um enticed or enframed again by the by the the realm of just reason so that’s then the leap of faith is also kind of like dialectical counterpart to that but ultimately I think we need a kind of like mediation between those two um as kind of like a two-fold metanoia that might help us to achieve that kind of spiritual maturation that you were talking of so I’ll just quickly reply just to make sure I’m getting you and what was really landing and then I want to hear what johannes said um I really like this idea of the dialectic between the leap of faith and of course kookegard is in mind here um but of course when you read the fragments and climacus johannes climacus uh he’s talking about uh the socrates and the religious hypothesis you quickly see that although they’re opposed they’re also interwoven and that’s exactly what you were saying and the because of course socrates has his demonium and all kinds of things are going on in socrates as well um so yeah I like the idea uh I don’t know if you quite said this but I heard you saying it so I know the difference between them that the that uh learned learned I I call it both learned and learned ignorance to try and pick up on the double meaning uh that available to us in that in that term learned and learned ignorance is exactly the horizon uh the of the leap of faith and the leap of reason and that being pivotal for spiritual maturation I like the way you put that together um one thing that comes out and then I’ll turn it over to you johannes is and I and I’m not trying to make this just a psychological question but I’m not also excluding psychology how does the real self-realization of the real help one to find the horizon and to dance the dialectic between the leap of reason and the leap of faith that’s that’s now you helped me get clearer on the question I want to ask how does coming into conformity to the real self-realization of reality for its own sake and we’ve discussed how that can be understood very platonically and very much uh in nishatani’s way and that those are convergent how does that actually afford empower demand challenge us to find the horizon of spiritual maturation and dance the dialectic between the leap of rate leap of reason and the leap of faith that’s the question that I now hear from you so first of all Daniel is that fair what I just did was great so now I’ll pass things to johannes all right thank you I have a just a brief uh comment in the original sense I hope of the word yeah which is I don’t know the etymology what’s the original sense of the word comment mentale means to think and come means with so to think with oh to think with and along rather than to well you know yeah I see that was a very fascinating talk but uh here’s everything that’s wrong with it um so I’ll keep it brief because I think I want to hear more from both of you first here the return of the forms came out of I think the second dialogue yes now to put to have a bit of a ridiculous uh slogan here sorry my camera’s back up um you one could say perhaps real platonism has never been tried so yes yeah the the the the you know the the schoolyard platonism of Nietzsche is is it I don’t even think that Nietzsche himself believed that I think that what Nietzsche criticized were platonists of his time who thought that there was actually a two world theory in play the the word for world in Greek is cosmos um which is a continuum it would make no sense to assume a world outside it which becomes apparent in Aristotle even clearer than perhaps in Plato yes I know that there is that there’s in that in Timaeus there’s mention of of the upbuild or so we could almost say a copy or so of of primordial images but they need not be residing somewhere entirely outside and I think the the when I say real platonism has never been tried maybe real platonic forms have been tried in the sense that we would have to turn to a close reading and I’m trying that again at the moment on my own of Plato’s Permanenties dialogue right um where perhaps what we learn which is basically about the one and the many yes yes the the the forms are here and they are participating so the methexis is the words of meta-echane to have and be with um which perhaps in some way also relates we could playfully assume with meta-noane so the question is always about the the meta and I think the meta I mean not the meta but the m-e-t-a that we tend to go beyond and maybe maybe I don’t know but maybe maybe there’s a but the maturation and maybe I’m going beyond what what is currently at stake but maybe to mature is to move away from say a representational way of looking at this um which is not one of thinking it through it’s easier to assume or to imagine two worlds and have the forms up here and ephemeral things down here then thinking through in and because that’s easier to in a way to to combine the abstract with the concrete and bring them together rather than trying to think through through language poetic language existentially also maybe in certain activities or actions or exercises etc how the concrete and the abstract come together so that because the concrete itself is not given concrete um is comes from congress to grow together right so it’s something that has grounds again not just given here’s that world and there’s that world um so in that sense that return the return of the forms is a could almost say perhaps a continuous return yes it’s not just a one’s you know here they are back back on the shelf all of them again oh they are behind those books oh i think yeah i think beauty is on offer at the moment uh so no it’s that return we we have to enact all the time and we have to enact it within we’ve alluded to this before but there’s no one moment of of complete enlightenment yes yes there’s no one moment of complete awakening um we can awaken to something and then return but you know return back into a bit of a we must return to forget and come back etc but that so that would be something i’ve i’ve been able to hear or maybe induce if that’s the right word so for now so let me just also do again to make sure i’ve heard this and then uh then i’ll offer something more and we can pick it up again um so i heard something really good in that uh johannes i heard well that i found really good uh sure so i should choose my language more carefully um that right there’s a deep so in the parmenides the you know the forms are here um and and sort of there there’s a connection between participation and especially in the greek the two metas the meta of participation and the meta of metanoia and i keep returning to it no pun intended to sandy’s book on the parmenides because he makes the following astonishing argument he says that you have to treat the parmenides at well in our language as a spiritual exercise and what it’s doing is it and it’s using socrates as an exemplar it’s trying to teach you a new way of seeing a new way of thinking and then once you and it’s a difficult you have to give birth to it it’s not just about shifting the propositions so it’s shifting the fundamental grammar of your cognition and your perception and then once you learn to think in this non-thingy way this is how he puts it then the theory of the forms becomes like obvious that that’s his claim and he claims that people have read it the wrong way they’ve been trying to without doing the transformation they’ve been trying to get the argument uh in the parmenides um and so this idea that there’s a deep connection between uh participation and meta noia i heard that i heard that and i think that’s really profound i can say that um that’s part of the intent of these two practices like i i’ve been talking about in the relationship between them the idetic adduction practice and the dialectic and the dialogous practice is exactly that so i want what i want to ask you johannes is if you’re happy with um i got i get i get this from ursula good enough uh great name by the way uh i believe that’s her name uh and she she’s been working very hard on a kind of deep what she calls sort of a deep secular spirituality um and uh and she makes the distinction uh between transcendence beyond and transcendence into and i mentioned this i think before we started the recording and i’m hearing that as really like it’s a bit of a slogan but you introduced the slogan too platonism never has never been tried so uh like is this a good is this at least a helpful way of naming the distinction right there’s a transcendence which we’ve understood and it goes into the etymology transcendence is beyond uh but she talks about this a sense of transcendence into and i hear that in what you’re saying um it does that land for you as a way of trying to articulate i want it i want just some quick term a term so we can quickly point to a distinction that i heard woven through everything you said yeah i haven’t read uh that particular book but you’ll find similar passages in hegel science of logic on the bad and good infinite um whereas in a certain way the bad infinite is an attempt to or portrays an attempt to go to transcend um or in in the image of of of a christian heaven uh is hegel’s example that’s that’s an example of a bad infinite of a transcendence that goes beyond instead of the possibility say of of heaven on earth um and did this so i think in heidegger is similar i’ve heard i’ve seen other people speak of an an imminent transcendence or so in that regard yes and there was something else you mentioned before briefly the unthingy was that did i hear you right yeah a non a non-thingy way of thinking right yeah well in a more technical term it’s it’s it’s the attempt is to avoid ratification yes whereas of course and not very briefly to come back um to to hegel not to refer to authority you have to be careful uh but to to show what what we can learn from his science of logic namely that there’s always an interplay between the understanding which wants to fight for hegel which wants to hold on to something and corroborate whereas reason has the task to let go so we need to some degree reify um but then we need to be able to let go as well and that could be for example is more you know a way of articulating the relationship between the forms and the real or in what sense the forms are real without reifying again back to a unimagined transcendent world yes so that’s fantastic um and then so what i want to do is i want to take uh that what you just said is great and it it it jams well in the good sense of like jazz uh with what i want to want to want to say now because i want to propose transforming transcendence into into transcendence through where we’re playing we’re double playing on the word through meaning going beyond while remaining within because that’s what the word through says and also by means of by means of uh because if you think about it um i overemphasized i didn’t pick up enough on what russon would call the musicality of idetic deduction and and what you what you what i heard you doing from hegel uh was exactly that and i think what i’m going to say will help get will help bring back in the leap of faith and the leap of reason um and daniel’s proposal which i think is a gem we got to keep too that’s something about the the horizon right it right uh spiritual maturity is where the horizon of where those two interpenetrate i think that’s really profound so an idetic deduction the idea is you’re opening up the multi-s sexuality and you’re finding the through line and and that’s correct in a sense but i want to pick up on the rhythm that johannes just designated in hegel which is when you’re doing idetic deduction you do like you’re you’re you’re understanding in the sense of you’re realizing right you’re you’re grasping right you’re doing right you’re you’re playing with the reification machinery that’s what i’m trying to get at look at this aspect look at this aspect look at this aspect and they somehow go together and so you’re you’re bouncing between the scene aspects that constantly unpack the form into right into aspects into things into profiles or to put it exactly as johanna said into moments of grasping every aspect is a moment of grasp i grasp it as i grasp it as i grasp it as i grasp it up and that’s the understanding that’s the moment of understanding but the but of course the opening up of the multi-s sexuality also empowers the through line the throughness which is a trend an imminent transcendence it’s a throughness which is a beyond within when i go through something i’m going beyond within it right and so i’m doing this and then that’s the moment of reason that’s the moment of letting go that’s the moment of letting go now for me here’s the leap of reason and the leap of faith in this to a degree and and gai sensrock is looming over us right now uh which it in something that gai continually points to which is as i’m doing this it’s almost like an accordion of idetic deduction and i i i reify in such a way that the reification is called into question so that i move forward which affords more of this reification that deconstructs itself as reification and i’m doing this accordion movement of you know reifying and i would call it aspectualizing and reifying and then de-rayifying de-aspectualizing and moving on right as i’m getting that leap of reason there’s the leap of faith in that something has always been coming towards me while i was doing that that i don’t i don’t discover it as completely ex nihilo de novo i in fact realize it as having always somehow been present and affording and that that’s the leap if i could and the hair acolytes is going to jump for joy uh you know the way out and the way in are the same way as i’m going out through the idetic deduction and this is part of the dialectic the diologos i’m i’m realizing that it was always there somehow affording it and this reminds me of tinabe and metanoetics and how he talks about you know about you know properly getting into right relationship with diriki self power and taruki other power and getting though and metanoetics is to properly have those interpenetrating so that’s what what i wanted to do with this and then let’s just go free form now uh who wants to talk and who wants to respond i was just i was just reminded of your term reinventio when you said just before right we don’t we rediscover it but we also kind of like reinvented in that sense yeah yes yes not as a kind of like crea ex nihilo but in this sense you just explained it but just as anecdote when chan and i were on stage in london yes a month ago and who knows it will be out at some point that dialogue which has to figure out when and where and how and who um but uh there was someone at the end who asked the question who said but aren’t you just reinventing the wheel the wheel and i was about to say yes of course but we have to we have to it’s there’s a okay where’s my good of course he’s right um good good has a thing it’s not that well known anymore he has a collection of maxims and reflections yes the very first maxim is everything that is intelligent or relevant because you say has already been thought one must only try to think it once more that’s yes yes it sounds very banal almost right but it’s but when it’s this even heidegger has to concede that fact at some point at the end of his life he says in a Freiburg talk there’s nothing new under the sun no there isn’t but with with the need to reinvent to to bring to the fore to let it come out and come in to in veneer let it come in as well that’s always there or else there’s no there would be we wouldn’t be in need to mature to come back to that notion yes yes you would be ready made at birth yes yes yes and and i like that the the notion of maturation oh i hadn’t thought about this but just it’s occurring to me now then and you called it out in me the notion of maturation brings this out like when you’re maturing you’re growing into what you always were in a very real sense right yes um right uh so maturation is to bring is to bring out i mean we could use a risotillion language and it’s a little bit um too a little bit strained around the edges of you know actualizing the potential but we have to hear potential much more um in the in the kyoto school sense uh of being equally real um yeah but yeah yeah that i got i have i have i picked up my copy of good to complete works or at least essential writing so i’ve got it i’ve got it well when i realized that like i said many people keep saying to me well are you just doing good with your your identity deduction like they seem to be speaking sincerely to me so i want to try and go back and do that but i want to pick up on this i want to pick up i want to hear what daniel has to say about like we’re getting this i think we’re starting to craft what how we could articulate the spirituality of what we’ve been talking about here sure so my i i really wanted to um go a little bit back to the pomenades dialogue yeah sure right because um it seems to me right that the important point also in tana bass is this is this is this um why he thinks that an absolute critique of reason is necessary because we need something to overcome the the um the antinomies of reason because reason and this is even true in an existential cell sense we find ourselves always in those in those paradoxicalities tana bay for example talks about the quenic structure of reality yes for example right that we are for example life life see the death death see the life we are living while we are dying or we are dying while we are living um and for example right frownness and projection or projecting frownness in this heideggerian sense this is just another example um so for him a kind of letting go of reason itself and that in conjunction with faith was something that reason itself had to undergo through but this was something that that was not taken radical enough in can’t itself or in hegel for that matter um now now what then happens is and then i think we can come back to this question that you were asking um where’s the challenge with the the spiritual maturation i think it’s it’s exactly in that aporetic locus because there we are confronted with with nihility and this is this whole project with nishitani we have to kind of like train in that space of nihility that kind of like undermines all our our verifications and our our propositions at the first place such that we can cultivate let’s say this no thingy character or this no thingy um what do you say the the cognitive grammar so to say that was proposed in in the in this interpretation of the parmenides dialogue that however is then that that makes us mature because a confrontation with nihility is always painful and anxiety inducing in the first place it also confronts us with the with the nihility of the self that there is no kind of like um um nothing we can cling to when it comes to ourselves but if we get a taste of this and we kind of like become um accustomed to that then we can um we can sort of say discover this this transcendence or this through line within ourselves and there i think then the spiritual practices of of nishitani and neoplatonism dialectic um become really crucial for this kind of new kind of spirituality that we’re talking about i just wanted to emphasize this element of death and resurrection because i think when people today talk about spirituality it’s more like we become more ourselves we discover our true self that is all great but it’s more about than really this this confrontation also with with with death in ourselves with the nullity in ourselves and i think that’s that’s an important aspect that we kind of like learn how to how that we learn to hold ourselves in that place of of of aporia and of paradox that’s even in the central edition when we talk about koans that’s yes yes and in the in in jesus’s use of parable is is comparable no pun intended um um i i want to pick up on that because i think that’s really and i want to sort of slow one point like slow down and zoom in on that this one point um you know of course socrates famously said that all the philosophy is a preparation for death um but i want to think of something analogous and overlapping so it’s not just a strict analogy and it’s an analogy but also overlaps and this is what happens in therapy and give me a sec because i want to i want to talk about this because i think the moment when the antinomies are we seen as paradox that’s the moment i want to zero in on that’s the pivotal moment for me um and that has to do with the phenomena you confront or at least i would argue you often confronted therapy which is aspect disguise and think about how aspect disguise how you you will you will actually disclose you’ll disclose aspect disguise if you do idetic induction so what’s aspect disguise aspect disguise is somebody i’ll use my my trap my my state my standard example somebody comes in and says you know i really need help getting into so much conflict with you know with friends and family well why what’s uh you know it’s hard to admit but um i’m stubborn i’m a really stubborn person and you know it’s just it’s destroying so many of my relationships you know and then you go off on it you talk about other stuff and you come around and you’re in this other place where they’re talking right and they’re not focused on that you say tell me something just off the cuff tell me something you really like about yourself you’ll say well i’m really perseverant i keep going no matter what other people say and they don’t realize that the stubbornness and the perseverance are two different aspects of the same phenomenon and the reason why they can’t get better is because they want to let go of the stubbornness while holding on to the perseverance right and and and what you have to do is you have to do something very analogous to idetic induction you have to get them to right see these as two different aspects of the same through life first of all it’s the example making sense and this is a key thing one of the challenges we face right in this sort of deep fundamental moment is the kairos between antinomy which is the right the negative aspect of this and paradox which is a positive aspect of it and the reason why i’m talking about this i want to talk about this very carefully is i see kirkogard really wrestling with this because he sees socrates as sort of bringing reason to the point of antinomy but some but but that but then right christianity takes it over positively as the paradox that’s transformative but he’s and you can see that he’s trying to find you know it’s like the michaelangelo he’s trying to find where the fingers are close enough so the spark leaps between those because he realizes that socrates project is not the skeptical project it’s it’s somehow a transformative project and so right we’re i think part of what we’re wrestling with is how do we sorry this sounds so super meta that people are going to accuse me of just wanting to be a philosopher going meta on the meta but we have this aspect this guy’s relationship between antinomy and paradox and how how let me try this way how can we acquiesce in the paradox be called by the paradox without simply ignoring our antipathy towards the antinomy so let me get and let me bring this back to like the the point that johannes said all right you know it’s it’s you know we it’s we’re we’re rediscovering reinventio well think about how that can that we can get something that looks very similar to that it is that’s exactly the opposite of everything we’re talking about so synclatica is a very clear lewis has this wonderful short story called travel is so broadening and these americans are traveling around and they’re they keep saying travel is so broadening and what they do is just keep they just keep seeing every place as another instance of the small american town that they grew up in they’re not being broadened at all they’re just repeating that this is i forget the name of their little town this is their little town this is their and and you get wow and you get they’re not they keep invoking travel is so broadening when in fact that nothing like that’s happening right and that looks like that that had that’s creepily similar to right i i i i’m i just keep rediscovering the same fundamental truth so i’m trying to get at right for me this is the crux right this is the crux you know how do we how do we hold together because that for me is the maturity how do we hold together the the the the simultaneous reality of the superlative of the paradox and the condemnation of the antinomy what makes the antinomy so hard is they appear to us this is con’s point they wouldn’t bite us if they weren’t contradictions and at the core of of the conforming aspect of reason is the avoidance of contradiction right so we’re trying to so reason can only see the antinomies as dead ends because you’re always supposed to avoid contradiction right you don’t go deeper into a dead end that’s the exact definition of finality and that’s the definition of fanaticism and foolishness that’s the travel is so broadening they go deeper and deeper into the dead end so should i i don’t know please i’m out of words okay okay maybe i need okay maybe first i need to know more on what your stance is then if that’s even the right word regarding antinomy is it to be resolved or is it just to be withstood is it to be are they to be recognized are they to be solved are they to be reconciled are they to be taken as the apollonian and the dianysian somewhat they go together but they will always fight in some way and if it’s a momentary balance between them it can be beautiful but it can also be killed what’s so i mean i’m really pressing con here like con’s point of course is it shows us the inherent self-limitation of reason yes but i’m gonna even push on the term the right the anti-nomos the loss of law and i think the law that is being lost there is the law of the law of no contradiction right that’s what’s being lost there and so the question is like i see it as we’re trying and there’s a deep analogy with with with jesus right in his parables right where he’s trying to pass beyond the law but doesn’t mean destroy the law right he’s trying to somehow right agape is somehow going through and beyond but not leaving the right the law and so that’s what i’m trying to that’s what i’m trying to wrestle with i’m trying to i guess if i had to put a movement metaphor on it you’re honest and again i’m playing i want to know how to transcend through the antinomies such that i i want to articulate it because i i know i i believe i’ve done it at times but i want to articulate it what does it mean to pass through the antinomies to transcend through them such that right they are realized as superlative there’s something right superlative is disclosed and tanabi of course is putting his finger on it the life the life and death the life and or death right the civ we can’t that civ doesn’t translate well as you both know into english that’s why the best translations are just the hyphenations life death life death so right and then when we try to talk about it we we invoke paradox but and here’s here’s the point i take to be of people like kirkagard and nishatani and echard right the parrot when we speak it we speak it as paradox but we don’t experience it paradoxically because the paradox just sounds like the antinomy but what but so what we do is we basically if you’ll allow me to to to to be a little bit oversimplistic we speak the antinomy and then we say but it’s so much more and then we label that with the term paradox right that that’s i don’t know if that answers your question but that’s that’s the most honest resonant response that came from me i just have to yeah i it did help i just have to be careful not to go off on into hagel now yeah that’s why i won’t but there’s a reason why after khan hagel goes into the mode of attempting pre-subpositionless yeah thought so suspending with all so-called laws of thinking one of them being the principle of the law of non-contradiction yes inherited from aristotelian metaphysics and not logic by the way right but what’s maybe very briefly to come back to as you know the first critique begins with a statement saying that we are the human reason is it has this peculiar fate of being addressed by questions it cannot hope to answer yes and what is striking to me coming um after reading heidegger said heidegger says this about the history of being that we are addressed by being and it’s given epochs in a different way and respond to it um and the way in which then khan should really take this a bit in a weird direction perhaps the way in which khan is addressed in his epoch is that he realizes that reason itself has gone mad he doesn’t say this i say that uh with the dogmatic metaphysicians before him it doesn’t anyone who’s listening there’s no it it doesn’t let’s just say there was a time before khan where thinkers like leibniz and others names don’t matter here in that context perhaps but made up things of the mind like the monad etc which have no experiential content yes on the other hand you had figures and thinkers like john loch who fantasized about spiritual matter or david hugham who was the most extreme who said that all would there’s no regularity yes there’s nothing we can trust so night to maybe make this more you know graspable what what i’m trying to say nihilism has just crept in skepticism is another word for nihilism at least to fichte and khan and others so um what perhaps no but what perhaps he he has to answer is that peculiar thing about um reason that it runs into antinomies but then because of all of his presuppositions he cannot begin to the way he thinks doesn’t allow for him to solve any of it because he doesn’t think in a way that there’s a passing through them there’s a recognition of them um but there’s no as you put it no passing through the antinomies there’s a in a sense that something else could be disclosed from within going through them rather than just the inherent dialectic of reason because it’s again one side it may be coming back to denny i don’t know i have to think about this more but maybe coming back to that there is already something that is there and addressing us which he actually does say funnily enough at the beginning of the book yes but then doesn’t follow through with this and the paradox i just very you know artistically perhaps just look at the word doxa is opinion is appearance the semblance shining it it can keep us in a the paradoxical state i don’t know is perhaps so antinomies is the loss of law but the paradox is a loss of um or well yeah it is a loss even of what appears to us so it’s a loss of sense the loss of meaning comes with it so i don’t know these would just be just some initial remarks on this i don’t know if that well i mean you’re pointing towards the death that conch was not really to go through yeah well and and nothingness there’s this moment in the critique where he categorizes the nothing yeah but even the nothing gets a table of categories right it’s ens ens razziones and and nihil negativo and a few others um but precisely that is so i think um but precisely that is so i think this is why the kyoto school is so open than to heidegger because he takes the nothing serious daniel yes he does and even even before that or at the same time actually um so nishida in i think it was 1925 or so he he he he um publishes his basho essay and there he he comes up with this basho of absolute no thingness which kind of um is very similar some scholars have identified this great similarity to the clearing in in heidegger kind of yeah something that that’s like the cut right something that clears itself but doesn’t refer to any any being in that sense so it’s really ontologically different and and he called this the the place basho’s place of of absolute no thingness and then tanab and and nishitani later didn’t want to adopt that language and and take tukten really shunyata again from the mahayana buddhist tradition to label what he what he specifically meant um i just want to interject the clearing and heidegger i think very very clearly pun intended comes from eckhart right where you you have to you have to make the clearing within yeah right in order for the son of god to be born within you right um and so i want to i want to point out that the clearing also has neoplatonic heritage to it as well um i think what i wanted to say just before right the example that came to my mind is one that you john were often using with proleptic rationality yes when you have two parents and they decide if they want to have a child yes it’ll never be able to figure out with with means of of of reason of reasoning about it if they really can have a child or should have a child or should have not a child but they have to kind of like make the leap of transcendence the leap of faith so to say yes such and and have a child and then they they will know if if they should have gotten a child or not um there is this a necessity of transformation and so to say and there we have a death of reason as well in that example such that then after this so to say transformative arc then we we can we can um yeah we can appreciate maybe the antinomical structure that that’s um let’s say we were in before that but now right it has been resolved and and reality has has come to a to a right potential right the potential has been actualized and that’s that’s then where um reality realizes itself maybe in that example oh that’s very helpful that’s very good and then that allows me to bridge back so two points um thomas nagel makes it very clear in his article the absurd that absurdity is not produced by reasoning it’s produced by a clash of perspectives right and and we will always in this and then to link to what you just said we will always experience the clash of percept perspectives excuse me when we’re engaged in such transformative movements right so and that’s part of what la paul’s talking about um so i think that that brings it there that’s the crucial moment um and and part of the prolific rationality then is and then you can see why this also goes back to the spirituality and this was the heart of my talk at cambridge uh the the role that the imaginal plays um in affording the transformations of rationality that are actually integral to rationality where what i mean so ritual is that which brings the imaginal into serious play and it’s the serious play with the imaginal such that the affordances the affordance of transformation that is integral to the maturation of rationality are actually enacted so we get ritual the way it is deeply presupposed within rationality as being the where we can seriously play with the imaginal in order to properly mature our rationality that’s the that’s what’s coming out to me as the kind of spirituality that we’re talking about here and i find that it requires the kind of discernment of the therapist how do we how do we discern the difference that makes a difference the difference that is affording the real self-realization of reality for its own sake between the serious play of the imaginal in the ritual in the way i’m using the word ritual and the way freud denigrated the term where the ritual is synonymous with the neurotic so there’s an aspect disguise relationship potentially there or maybe there isn’t maybe there’s a needed discernment of distinction how what is the relevant difference and you can’t describe it teleologically right you of course you can what i saw i’m not prohibiting it but it’s not helpful in this discussion to describe it well the the the ritual that is good is the one that affords rationality and the one that’s bad is the one that doesn’t yes but right we’re in the we’re in the space of the antinomy we’re in the space of lawlessness what are we using in order to discern because spirituality i would propose to you is ultimately about the right the artistry the virtuosity and virtue of discernment right discerning the spirits is one of the original meanings of spirituality and i think that’s appropriate here how do we discern the difference in the liminal antinomous place between neurotic ritual and sapiential ritual for me that is the pressing central practicable i don’t want to say practical because that word doesn’t mean what i want to say the the that’s the central practical ball question of spirituality the discerning of the spirits and i’m not trying to make it precise as given this argument where we got to how do we discern between the neurotic ritual and the sapiential ritual while we are within the liminal zone so that’s an easy question right we can just toss off an answer but i think giving a deeply responsive and responsible and john russon and i talked about the relationship between you have to develop deep responsiveness before deep responsibility becomes possible but developing a deep responsive and responsible answer not a completion not a conclusion but a response a responsible response to play on the terms to my question i think is at the heart of what i want to understand as the current project of spirituality so first of all thank you for this dialogos because we i think i we’re getting we’re zeroing in on the question that i want to ask that that’s it’s it’s really great and i appreciate what you just did in the last minute so it’s again right how can we how can we turn away let’s say from our antipathy of the antinomies to the superlative of the paradox and how can we do that responsibly that’s what right yeah yeah my initial response would be right that’s that we kind of we need techniques such that we can learn to hold ourselves in that that hyphenated space yes that severs space in that in between space um in this middle space in this middle ground as well yeah and such that we kind of like we get we get a glimpse of the first of all we get a glimpse a kind of like an aspirational glimpse thoughts we can look at from let’s say the superlative notion right but we also have a kind of of care or so or um we we learn to endure kind of like that that’s that’s what we don’t want to look at the kind of like place that we have antipathy towards right right a kind of place where we kind of like juggle and dance in between those two but where we kind of like slowly but steadily get an appreciation for this this aspirational aspect of spirituality without um kind of like dismissing the other side of the through line because if we would do that we would bypass it and then the project wouldn’t be wouldn’t be of any of any help so it’s it’s a constant moving in between that that space am i understanding you rightly you are you are and then i want to ask back are you are you sort of alluding to the possibility of something analogous to stereoscopic vision where right where you get the two and you there’s a there’s a reciprocal appreciation of the two that actually affords seeing through them that’s exactly that the the the seeing through of stereoscopic vision is exactly the transcendence through that i’m talking about that stereoscopic vision that transcendence through am i hearing you correctly yeah yeah that’s also by the way that’s right what nishitani kind of argues for yes in his text so we johannes and myself read his essay science and zen and he really argues for a stereoscopic vision because what what he calls the field of life or this teleological direction yes upward direction and then the field of death of science so to say because that they really belong to one so that that to one reality that has this kind of like stereoscopic nature to it yes yes which goes back to the dialogue the dialectical nature of reality we were talking about exactly okay keep going keep going yeah no and then i see right i think you argued this in this paper with chris um on on dialectic into dialogo yes yes the new platonic practices and dialectic into dialogos can help us to kind of like um slowly right to have an appreciation both for the for the nothingness and to know thingness so to say yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah to hold ourselves in this yeah between space between yeah yeah yeah and it seems to me that the permanity’s dialogue kind of like puts us in the same in between space between the one and the many or the man yes yes yes oh wow wow that’s really good that’s really good so i’m thinking here now of mac entire and he talks about you can’t and you can even see this in aerosol you can’t talk about a virtue as if it appears de novo it has to it emerges out of a field in which you know um where there’s a domain in which various kinds of expertise are possible um like virtue doesn’t just emanate top down from conceptual heaven it’ll also emerges bottom up from practice and so i’m also starting to hear right right in what you just said right the possibility of responsibility in that right when when we’re in the space of no law that’s actually a criticality space that’s a kairos that’s a space in which right right we’re allowing the emergence of self-organization this is what we do in insight we destroy the frame we throw ourselves into the the the self-organization of the dynamics of cognition and we entrust ourselves to the fact that that will engender or emerge a new gestalt a new way right um and so what what what i’m hearing you say is mackintyre says that ultimately you know virtue you can’t you you don’t get virtue and then the emergence of practice you don’t get practice in the emergence of virtue you get the co-emergence of practice and virtue and so if we have practices that start to order us in a new way then we will be responsible to them as we start to realize is as we start to realize the virtues the virtue is now possible to us that were not possible before um and weirdly this sounds like nichi’s transvaluation of all values i’m just doing the trans the transvirtuation of all of all virtues or something that’s such a horrible term i don’t use it again but right am i am i picking up on something here i’m picking up on the fact that we we may be premature in trying to articulate this theoretically what we need to do is to move into practices that are our distributed cognition recognize recognize as being appropriate to this area right and then only after the practices take root can we bear to look at the fruit uh you know in terms of a discourse of the virtues because when i’m talking about responsibility i’m at i’m asking for the set of virtues i’m sorry i’m really at the edge of my thinking here i’m really trying to but i’m trying to articulate something here about the prior that there’s a an auto epistemological priority to getting viable practice in here that people that are that are collective intelligence because what else do we have other than that uh reliably says to us this this comports you to and through this liminal period and only when the practices are there that are reliably engendering this stereoscopic vision do we try to then reflective reflect upon the virtues that might be growing therein that’s what i’m hearing coming out of this is that is that viable does that land with the two of you or or have i gone have i gone astray okay do you want to respond johannes i i think i think i think this was was right right there’s a deep reciprocal relationship and the more we deepen our practice then the more we can identically deuce also let’s say the virtue yes and then we come back to the practice and then then we we we kind of like um then we disclose something more so this this this ongoing inexhaustible transformation so this transforming of transformation that we then are are doing i think in this in this um in this aspirational project that is ultimately um inexhaustible i think i think you you you i think you said that very well actually um was that what was the what was the point of what that you were asking about well i mean i i’m saying like we increasingly prac we we we do practices both individual and collective yeah for engendering the stereoscopic vision of nothingness and nothingness the rejection of the antinomy and the approach of the superlative paradox right and we’re and we’re trying to get that and other than getting a lot of people to practice and to dialogue with each other about the practice i don’t think the question i posed can be we can bring much language to it right now because um it’s only when we’re doing a lot of this that we open up as you said a possible field of idetic adduction so that we can start to articulate um how we can do these practices responsibly right um and so i mean we’re kind of like where aerosol was before he drew from the practices of argumentation throughout logic right you you have to have a lot of that going you have to a lot a lot of has to happen to dialogue before aerostata can make the logic possible right um i mean i won’t go into the deeper ideas behind that um but i think we’re i think we’re sort of at the stage of the pre-socratic with respect to the question i asked and we’re trying to move into the platonic and i’m asking a question that’s sort of almost Aristotelian in nature and i feel like what’s come out of it for me is a kind of a kind of a kind of impatient uh prematurity lack of maturation on my part right i’m not saying we shouldn’t have done the discussion i think the discussion has been powerful uh but perhaps part of the spirituality of discernment that i’m talking about is also the patience to let things grow for grow so they can be properly disclosed car popper famously people forget what popper popper said falsification well popper also said don’t fall so don’t try and falsify an immature hypothesis right you have to let it grow you have to it has to be bold and growing and then you try and falsify it then you bring uh because if you don’t let it mature you’re actually working in something that’s vague to you in a profound way that’s that’s what i’m getting to i’m getting to a kind of humility hopefully uh around this we may just be in a weird way analogous to the early greeks anyways yes yeah where we are on some level of course we can play around with Aristotle and Plato or Aquinas etc etc and we have everything at hand and this is also the strange time in which we are where we can go as oh this and then that and it’s all up on the shelf somehow how that even is possible to me is mind-blowing but what i mean by that is i’m not saying that there’s a circular history and then everything repeats at some point but that there are things that run in parallel yes and sometimes we are well we are speaking here on a channel that you know became known for the meaning crisis lecture series right so i would be uh i would i wouldn’t be wrong to assume that the host and maybe also the listeners are subtly aware of a certain crisis yes that’s happening and that crisis however i would say is not very young it’s now in its second or third century yes the word crisis is being thrown around um and in it but it it nothing is coming to creases means decision yes yes but no decision is being formed there’s nothing is seemingly decided as one crisis after another it is you know we’ve got politics through crisis now uh for for specific reasons and i think those analogous in the sense that while we have all this wealth but perhaps also baggage of our well history of ideas let’s say your theories at the same time we don’t need to presuppose a law of non-contradiction necessarily just because it has grown into that we can try and think again in such a way that to us or we can refer to as the forums or so but to us the phenomena begin to appear as meaningful again yes and once that occurs and this is maybe also why you practice is so important um because then it’s real it ties you to something that’s real and that that we can you know almost grasp and touch etc then we can come back to an original in that sense perhaps perhaps then we can come back to an original rereading refinding of those yes ex of old so that again they become our own and are not just abstract theories one after another that just lead to more confusion but we try to this you know there’s so much talk about philosophy as a way of life yes um but the but then we have to suspend with almost everything yes i think and come back to an original mode of seeing the world and once that scene begins then i think we can begin to go back and see what what is well what speaks to us not what we need but what we need in a profound sense yes what speaks to us after the initial opening up to that if that i think that’s beautiful i think that that’s a way of at least and i don’t mean this a pre-liminal right on the right on the threshold that’s a preliminary way of talking about uh how we can be responsible in the liminal space is it opening like you know some of the things we’ve talked about are is are these are we getting reciprocal opening are we get are we getting amelioration and alleviation from the meaning crisis are we getting a renewal of the sources of meaning within our lives i think these are all important criteria that we should hold on to as and and and and i want to get i want to get the precipice notion of preliminary in the word preliminary there i think that’s exactly right i think we have to bring it to a close but um i think we should keep going and all right we’ll have we have another dialogue on johannes’s channel um and and keep this flowing um i think we need at least one more of these that’s what i feel um but i agree very good yes so thank you very much gentlemen thank you thank you jesus thank you john thank you jan