https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=8zipHU0ilaU
Wow. All right. I’ve never gotten that before. Welcome everyone to the elusive eye the nature and function of the cell. We just were commenting on the zoom software seems to have had an update in which it’s more ominously present in a disturbingly Orwellian fashion, but we’ll we’ll ignore all of that and pretend we still have freedom. So, once again, I’d like to. If we ever did. I’d like to thank and welcome my two friends and colleagues on this dialogical argumentative journey exploring the self Christopher master Pietro and Greg and Lucas. And last time, Greg finished up his superlative integration of his material into the argument as it has progressed. But throughout all of my progression and then grades progression, Chris has been sowing the seeds of cricket guardian ironic doubt, and wanting to bring in the existential aspect. And so, Chris is now going to take center stage, he will progress the argument, and Greg and I will biologically rip around him. And this next series of sessions will bring to the for the existential questions, and we’ll start to foreground the three s’s self, as we try to unpack it spirits and soul, so take it away Chris. Thank you, sir. Okay, so. So I’m definitely going to be pretending that we still have freedom. We’re talking about here in the next hour. So what I’m going to do is, is, I’m going to. I’m going to focus on kicker go for what. Oh, that’s really the point of this today is to focus on the reason I’m focusing on kicker guard. There are a few reasons behind that and I feel like I need to qualify those first. The one is that I want to break our discussion of spirit, wide open and kick guy I think is probably best position to do that for one thing because he is a bit of a way station between a lot of the platonic and neoplatonic framing that we keep reintroducing into the discussion And I think that’s a very modern predicament that comes with existential enclosure and then defined him as sort of the proto existentialist. And I think this very confluent with the sort of detailed psychological account that Greg gave in the last couple of sessions, because And I don’t think you would begrudge that begrudge him that Greg, even though it’s a very prototypical version of what we now know as psychology. So, he has been ironically present in a lot of what we’ve been discussed some people think that his position that the subjective experience of the self sort of the arbiter of meaning makes him very individualistic, but I mean as the precursor to all of the existentialists all that really means I think is that he understood the problem of subjectivity. Much in the way that Descartes did but undertook it in a very different way, namely, not in his words what I am to know, but what I am to do in so far as a certain knowledge must proceed every action. And he synthesizes the problems of selfhood that a lot of the ancients introduced and embeds them in this existential enclosure and embeds them in the problem of personal freedom and the problem of will. Which he of course, as a Christian writer frames in the terms of sin and I’m going to be talking a little bit about that but you know I’ll mention it and then I’ll leave it implicit for a lot of the discussion. The problem is talking about kickers that there’s so much as there always is. And I’m going to have to make a few credits and disclaimers credits. In so far as my understanding of Kierkegaard is informed by by a lot of secondary scholarship people like Walter Lowry and Stephen Evans and Josiah Thompson. And, and by personal relationships namely Patrick Kelly a close friend of mine and my, my most consistent interlocutor when it comes to kicker so his influences in here somewhere as well so there’s a lot of content and a lot of volume. So I’m going to try and synthesize it as concisely as possible but that also will mean that there will be certain undue conflations and I’m going to have to allied certain things and do things that bona fide kicker guard scholars would probably find somewhat objectionable, but I’m going to do them anyway just in the service of conforming to the purpose of this discussion of ours. Okay, now that I’ve sufficiently cleared my conscience with all of that. You set the justification frame. To proceed. That’s right. That’s right. Delimiting my knowledge properly and delimiting my scope of action properly. Hopefully I’ll do him proud if not I’m, I’m sure, as a, as a good Christian he’ll forgive me, although by his own admission he wasn’t any such thing, but so the most important thing that I think about kicker guard for the purposes of our project here is that he understood to gesture to the title of the series the elusiveness of I, as very, very few people did. And this elusiveness that he caught into is essential to his concept of irony, which I think for a sort of a precursory understanding of care car has to come first. There are a lot of ways of understanding that concept and it’s very complex but one way of understanding it is that it’s meant to disentangle the Jamesian identity relation between I and me that we’ve talked about at length at this point, so that I can resign from the immediacy of that that relation and model it more reflectively. In other words, the concept of irony for your regard is to be conscious of not being identical with oneself, conscious of oneself as a relation, and therefore conscious of one’s capacity to become or to not become that relation in escalating orders of integrity and goodness. So, in other words, care guards irony opens an aspirational awareness, and that aspirational awareness is the consciousness of spirit, and the awakening of will, which are related. And for him the consciousness of spirit and will also potentiates the awareness of sin or despair, which is in effect the condition of not being oneself by not properly willing to be oneself. And of course he breaks that down further into different forms and if we have time about that if it ends up being, I think it’s very relevant but if it ends up being relevant to our deal logos. So, one way of thinking about irony is that it’s a first step to the cell to self realization as spirit. And therefore it’s sort of an essential step to the progression of despair, as a means of interrogating that realization. So, it’s not as interrogating the elusiveness of I for Kierkegaard, an interrogation that begins with the resignation of irony and and understanding the kind of stubborn non identity of the self to its objects in the world is essential to becoming oneself. Okay, so that’s one thing right irony as the really irony as the revelation of eyes elusiveness. The other thing is, you know, even though he’s certainly not his account is certainly not naturalistic or scientific. It is psychological, and the language and definitions by which he outlines the self are very very consistent and anticipate the theoretical language of this series in which the self is defined processually as process, right, all of that comes in Kierkegaard right he’s all of its ready made. So, you know, for now I’ll kind of rely on the astute listener and the two of you to the connections between his and your foregoing accounts and the earlier episodes, but at some point we’ll stop and have that discussion properly because even though I haven’t pulled them out completely. And so we’ll uncover them together but what I first want to do is talk about him on his own merit. And then to talk about the many many points of confluence and convergence that I know there to be. And then the third thing maybe before I launch in properly is that it’s really important to caveat that Kierkegaard is both a Socratic philosopher but also a Christian writer. Right, right. And for him, whether we hear like it or not, priority has to be given to the latter, because he ultimately gives priority to the latter. You know, Socrates we talked about this a lot, John right the idea that Socrates was Kierkegaard’s teacher, but he believes in Christ and he sees the model of the symbol of Christ as fulfilling the existential and normative imperative that is made conscious by the spirit of Socratic influence, which is the prototypical spirituality. Now, for Kierkegaard Socratic spirituality is insufficient because what we might know as like platonic anamnesis is blocked by sin, which is a kind of dispirited or dissenting will that refuses the ordainments of spirit. And so for Kierkegaard, Christ the Redeemer as a pattern has to become our criterion of relating to ourselves, and that relation happens before God. So despair for him is sin. And so I’m going to talk about that indirectly by talking about despair. But the important thing here is this, that for him self is both, to use our language a little bit more, self is both process path and goal state, right. The relational account of selfhood that he gives is both functional, but also spiritual. It’s ontological but it’s also normative, right. So for instance, you know, it would track very neatly and tidily along all three orders that you talk about in your series, John right the The nomological order, the narrative order, normative order. Kierkegaard’s notion of selfhood tracks all three orders and integrates them. Right. Okay. Because there is no distinction between the functional properties of selfhood as he conceives them dialectically and the normative imperative to become that self that one experiences functionally. So for him, they share an identity. And we’ve been talking so much about the function, and duly talking so much about the functionality of selfhood. But for him the functionality of selfhood is inseparable from its normative teleology that has to be espoused as a consequence of the orientation of will. Okay, so he brings those together he brings the orders essentially back together now some people may not want to follow him there. But for his account largely does that, I would argue. Right. And, you know, so one of the things that he does is he posits a current dynamic, which he would call the self and despair, and then a higher order target, which is a condition a condition of self and a form of self to which it relates teleologically, kind of like a divine double. And that is the distinction between the being and the becoming of self that the same conditions that to potentially eight, the condition of despair, the state of despair, are those conditions that have to resolve so that the self can, as it were, become itself. You know I really think of Kierkegaard as, as sort of a Christian existential Platonist. Insofar as the, and insofar as the ontological and the normative realities of self are not identical, the self is not itself, and therefore in despair. But, you know, so he says at one point. As much as it is itself, the self is necessary. And in as much as it has to become itself, the self is only a possibility. And the realization of that paradox is key to the resolution of self but a spirit for him, because, and the notion of being forever nailed to ourselves anticipates the symbolic importance of Christ, and his role in that resolution to make possible what is already necessary. Let me, if you’ll permit me, let me just back up a bit before we go any further. And because he has this, he has this very famous definition of self that has that a lot of people have have poured over and agonized over. And the thing is it’s really not all that difficult. So he writes, ironically, and he is sometimes deliberately obscurantist, and in this case he’s perhaps a bit obscurantist largely I think despite Hegel, or at least that’s one scholarly consensus is that he’s being obscurantist despite Hegel, and he’s doing so ironically and his critique of Hegel is maybe something, if time permitting we can get into later, but effectively the definition he gives is that the self is a relation, which relates to itself. Or that the self is a relation that relates itself to its own self by relating itself to another. It’s like, oh my god, what does that mean? Well it’s actually not really as complicated as it seems, right? So essentially, the self in situ is a synthesis of dialectically opponent elements in a tensive process of relation. And he tracks that tension along different axes finitude and infinitude for one possibility and necessity for another. And that that tensive process of relating is the condition of being a self, that is the self we are by necessity. Now the self becomes itself by resolving that relation, by relating it aspirationally, proleptically, to its own integral form that can compass those dialectical elements in unity. So the self for which those elements are one and share a paradoxical identity is the target self, almost a platonic target self, to which the spiritual despair aspires. Right? So those opponents, so he has this really helpful analogy where he describes those opponent elements in the synthesis as compared to vowels and consonants in a phrase. And in that phrase, the syntactic intelligibility that happens when those vowels and consonants combine into intelligible speech is as the ontological intelligibility of the self when it becomes intra-psychically coherent and harmonious. Right? So like the sentence, the self strives for the unity of its elements to be ontologically coherent in order to disappear. Just as the phrase disappears when it becomes something through which to see, through which to convey, through which to know. And that’s what we mean by transparency. Right? Because Kierkegaard has this sort of culminating insight that the self in order to become itself must ground itself transparently in the power that established it. And that transparency, I think that he’s referring to, is the ontological harmony that occurs when the self resolves that synthesis of dialectical opponent elements. And I say opponent elements to invoke opponent processing. And the mutual modeling implicit in a prominent process, which is already, I think, baked into Kierkegaard’s dialectical model. It is an opponent process that must relate itself to a higher order by mediating that relation to a power beyond itself. And of course, that ultimately resides in God for Kierkegaard, but we can take a little bit more time to get there. That’s another place some people might not want to follow us, but for Kierkegaard, it’s essential that we follow there, because that also hearkens back to some of the platonic and neoplatonic. Right, right. Okay. How are we so far? Do you want to respond to anything before I go on? Go ahead Greg. No, that’s fine. Go ahead. So I’m here. I’m also, yeah, I’m foreseeing the connections to the model we talked about here, emphasizing the Socratic aspirational dimension. I’m seeing similarities to both Jung and Tillich as well in this. Tillich’s, you know, the tension between the essential self and the existential self. And of course, Jung’s idea about the coincidence of opposites, which is of course drawn from sort of the Gnostic neoplatonic tradition. So there’s a lot of resonances there. I see that. So, the one question I have is There seems to be, and I think this is just another point of conflict, so I’m just going to throw it out there. There seems to be the existential model, and we’re taking Kierkegaard as our exemplar of the existential model. Although we’ve seen that, you know, that has theological, existential, and Tillich and, you know, psychological resonances in Jung. But we’re taking him as the exemplar. So the existential model of the self seems to draw together the meaning-making machinery and the self-identification and self-defining machinery as central functions of the self. Am I reading that correctly? I think so. And what’s interesting about this is we’re now facing, therefore, an important challenge, a hermeneutical challenge posed by Charles Taylor. Because Charles Taylor has argued that the degree to which we are self, and he’s deeply influenced by Heidegger, who is tremendously influenced by Kierkegaard. Right, so I’m not drawing in somebody from out of the back streets or anything like that. Right. So, I think we can resolve this, but I think we should we should explicate the problem. The problem is that as self-defining entities, we have a kind of ideographic history, and we use Sartre’s phrase, we are the beings, you know, we don’t have an essence. That’s what existentialism in fact says. We are the creatures that come without an essence, because our essence is to define our essence. Whether or not Sartre is interpreting Heidegger well, I think he isn’t, but we’ll leave that aside. So, the point that Taylor is making, I think Taylor’s point is well made, is the natural sciences can’t apply to self-defining entities, because they escape the kind of nomological generalizations that are key to the scientific endeavor. I’m not, this is not a reputation, it’s a challenge, and I, you know, a challenge extended in friendship, that to bridge between the existential model and the model that I argued for, and I think large parts of what Greg argued for, there’s a challenge there. That’s all I wanted to do. I wanted to bring out the challenge. If the self-identification, self-defining, meaning-making machinery is central, then, and I think there are ways of responding to this, but I want to put it out there, then, of course, and the whole Socratic project, like Moore argues, is one, the self is aspirationally self-defining, right? So, set it multiple ways, all converging on the point that there seems to be an epistemological, perhaps even an ontological divide, I think it’s in Taylor, even an ontological divide, between the kind of entities that can be studied by science and the self-defining kind of entities that are talked about within existential literature. So, just to put that out there. So, I’m hoping that there are, that the points of convergence will give us the language by which we can address that concern. Does that make sense? Yeah, it certainly made sense to me. How about you, Chris? It certainly makes sense. I mean, it makes sense insofar as it’s a very intelligible criticism or an intelligible question. I’m not sure that there’s anything that Kierkegaard will have to say specifically that will resolve his proto-existential thinking to a scientific account that Taylor might prefer or that you might prefer. I mean, that’s not fundamentally his project, because his project is not a naturalistic one, and that’s being very open and clear about that. Now, the fact that his project is not a naturalistic one, to me that’s fine. Again, to some that might mean that it’s not fit for purpose. But I would say there are responses to it, though. There are responses to it, and I can get into those, because it involves really the central concept of the absurd. And for Kierkegaard, the central concept of the absurd and the espousal of paradox, and the transcendence of the way that reason tends to delimit human capacity is precisely the way of confronting that particular problem. Well, the reason why I mentioned Taylor… I can get to that. That’s good. I want to. But the reason I mentioned Tillich is Tillich poses… he sort of moves to a… I don’t know what I’m trying to do with my hand here, but he proposes that the the the tonos between the essential and the existential is sort of the ultimate challenge for the self, where the essential is ultimately something that can be described in Aristotelian scientific terms, right? And then the existential, of course, is where we are now in our self defining blah blah blah. And so trying to… I saw Tillich, you know, within this tradition, but seeing the tension of this question as actually existentially relevant, or at least, sorry, that would be unfair, as spiritually relevant. Oh, I think that’s totally true. Absolutely. Absolutely. Okay. I mean, for me, this is the intersection between science and psychotherapy finds itself also in very much these terms. Oh, right. Yes. So because as the psychotherapist, you’re a psychological doctor concerned with cultivating wisdom and well-being in the real. So then that brings the existential concerns to bear, and the potentialities that you bring to bear to foster the alleviation of suffering with a patient then could be then shined on your own life and the own contingencies that you find yourself in, and the ontological feedback loop of defining yourself then becomes this issue. And then the intersection between the science of the descriptive essential forms that precede you and then do they then determine you and define you? And so where are you in relationship to this juxtaposed set of problems? And, you know, what happened to me is sort of, yeah, there’s the tree of knowledge and okay, that creates an essentialist map of forms, but there’s this thing called the coin and the garden and actually those are epistemological portals that play by subjective and collective mythopoetic narrative ethical frames and then they can be juxtaposed in relationship to being and becoming relative to, you know, frames of essence that actually afford a dialectical relationship. So I found that what you just said about Perp you are very energizing in many ways. I’m glad to hear it. I’m glad to hear it. Yeah. And then the confluences that you’ve both found I think are bang on, like through there. And I’ll just say for us here, the exciting, you know, what this is, is, you know, you have cognitive science, you know, the clinic and the existential concerns we do represent aspects of this polarity in particular kinds of ways and to find confluence between these points is to me sort of the great challenge of enlightenment 2.0 is to articulate and resolve some of the gaps that the enlightenment was really unable to do. It left us with broken, you know, dualistic kind of, well, you know, this the science is real and that’s what they are, but you can make up your life if you want and do the best you can and die with the most toys. And that’s actually not satisfactory. No, in fact, and that’s exactly right. And the whole I mean, for her, Kierkegaard, the whole the whole process of being ironic is precisely to disabuse the, the sort of count the sort of fraudulent idolatrous attachments to those reductive forms of me right right right obfuscate the self reflective capacity of I to recur on its own processing, right, because that’s one of the things that irony does is it. I mean, it taps into this platonic distinction between appearance of reality and this does apply to the self right so and you’re right john to say that that Kierkegaard’s intrasubjective process of becoming a self really by. It’s not essential that it run through the gauntlet of forms of despair but for him it often does run the gauntlet of forms of despair. There’s a lot of resemblances to Jung’s process of individuation, and it has an intrasubjective element, and that’s where the irony comes into practice because any proposition that could be used to frame the self normativity must become ironic because the self quasi spirit is unspeakable. Right so irony as understood by Kierkegaard is like the willful abstraction of the self from immediacy and confusion with any worldly object that spirit could confuse itself with. And so an ironic orientation is dedicated to the cultivation of spirit by realizing the non identity between the self as spirit, and the actuality of the self in despair defined by a worldly me and its worldly meanings. So basically sort of in terms that are a little bit more consistent with the ones that we’ve been using. Irony kind of runs a very purposeful and conscious fissure down the relation between I and me so that I can recur on itself and model its own modeling model the way in which it models its various me’s and by modeling that model, it intensifies the degree of self consciousness and allows itself to model itself with a graduating more conforming realism it’s basically an exercise in optimal gripping. So, I didn’t get too much into, sorry in the details of sort of all the symbolism, but the I quad is I raised to the fourth the square root of negative one and that is a pole, Lacan pulls on this thumb, but that by the way is a pole on imaginary real and complexification, and that actually pulls an irony in this, it’s precisely this particular way it’s a symbol, it symbolizes many different things but that’s one of the things that it actually symbolizes is the is the slippery recursiveness of being in this regard. I mean it’s beautiful that you, you, the way you’ve done to have her guard into the elusive this of the eye which is the, you know titular thing that we’ve got going on here. But, so I want to make sure I understand this. Because I don’t think you could regards claiming that the I can know itself directly, it can only know itself through the means no no indeed. Sorry, go on. So I just want to make well if I’m wrong, please, let me try and see, because my understanding of regard isn’t as developed as yours so I know that right away. That, like the I. I mean, so I can invoke James here, right, the I can’t know itself independently from the means, because the eye is, you know, that which observes and is never observed. So the only thing you can give the give content to itself through is through the means, but what I hear Kruggerd introducing that I don’t hear in James’s, but you have to have a level of irony at the level of identification, because although the I knows itself through the means, it is actually not found in the means, right, I can put it that way. Am I getting that correctly. Yes, you are precisely getting that correctly. And so it’s the, the, and so part, it’s actually part of the way he uses his pseudonymous entities is by creating a kind of negative presence of I in the various models of me. Yes, right. You can almost see a pseudonymous writings as sort of epistles to one another there’s something inter dialogic going on between those writings because what he’s doing is he’s migrating his perspectival participation if I can put it that way to various models of me, and in between them, he is, he is basically reproducing his eye in absentia. A negative space kind of ice negative space. You get a sense. So as you’re moving the seed of consciousness between into identification with the various narrative means in the movement, right, you get the sense of the eye, even though it’s not placed in any one of the narratives, the movement between the narratives is that is that a good way of putting it almost the imaginal space in which comes a relational network background. Yeah, that’s right. So it’s like he’s, he’s crossing perspectives and different fields of view against his own and against one another to survey himself from the vantage of different aspects and symptoms of disharmony, right different models of me to find the absence in different right. It’s like if you bet it’s very neoplatonic. Well what I mean is, you know, each one of the means is participating to the form of the eye, but right you can only you but you have to triangulate backwards to get a sense of what the eye is through the various instantiation in the means is. So that’s what’s going on to it feels like. Yes, I think that’s right. I think that’s right. He’s really, he’s really unpacking, like, a huge spiritual project for this machinery we’ve been talking about. Yeah, so if I may let me just barrel on a little bit because I have some things that can help to bind this together a little bit more right. So, okay. Okay, so let’s get back to sort of the series so he so kicker anticipates the dynamical machinery that you guys use right and describing when he describes the process of despair, more finely, and it’s normative and not merely descriptive as I said it’s like character logical really with the ontology is character logical. And, and so it’s an opponent process, I’m couching it in our language, just somewhat ironically by the way because it’s not a one to one identity, but I’m coaching it in our language ironically for now and then I’m going to move away but for our purposes right now. It’s like an opponent process of mutual modeling that models itself with I by appreciating self consciousness, ironically, by differentiating itself from the various means in which its present is ultimately absent. Right. And with that, and with the appreciation of its self consciousness comes the appreciation of will, as it ironically subtracts itself for me in order to turn attention on its own processing. So this sort of higher order self into which the relational process is becoming is as I’ve said it could be understood as a kind of theosis as a kind of form of optimal gripping. And think of how this relates to the self modeling of recursive relevance realization and self specification right I mean those comparisons are pretty low hanging fruit. So, and you could say that the elements of that synthets, the elements of that synthesis model right that dialectical elements contra one another like necessity and possibility finitude and infinitude model themselves by resignation, whereby each element finds in itself the dialectical absence of the other and that happens in the various forms of despair right the despair of necessity is that which lacks possibility, the despair of possibility is that which lacks necessity, and the increasingly conscious and willful I that models that relating synthesis, as it progressions through various privations and imbalances model those absences and thus oriented to the negative presence of its higher order unity that sort of for care cigar, correspondent to what you could call the day of subscundent is right right right right right right and. And because so despair for him as the sickness unto death is is a blessing because it’s because of its proleptic indexicality, which, meaning that that sin is a determinant of spirit, so the experience of despair the experience of absence in these various forms of self can be a process of self attunement right the gripping of oneself by the absence of those experiences when it’s most elusive. So, now I want to talk a little bit about this, this relation to another, because that that helps to address some of what you asked me to be till it can end, and some of Taylor’s criticisms, because for care cigar, there is, it is not the becoming of oneself is not a matter of of self constitution except as understood only with a except understood in a very qualified way. In fact, a kind of pure auto poesis is what he would call a despair of defiance this is incidentally is his critique of the stoics, which is that it’s a description of necessity that lacks possibility, because it’s attempting to to spite the necessity of being oneself by trying to author oneself as a complete autonomous auto poetic entity, which for him is actually just, it is the most graduated and the advanced form of despair because it is the most intensely conscious of itself as spirit, but ultimately is simply another form of despair, because for him. The possibility represent well it’s not simply represented it’s it’s it’s real, but the possibility of God’s possibility is precisely what allows the aspiration that helps to resolve that paradox of synthesis right that paradox of of of selfhood. So, the sort of higher order almost platonic form of selfhood that he talks about is the more concrete it’s the more actual because for him actuality is a synthesis of possibility and necessity and but and to overcome the disharmony right and again you can understand sort of the disk despair as a, as a kind of platonic disharmony right you can compare it to analogize it to a decadent republic, or, you know, an irascible tether of horses and a chariot right you could take any one of Plato’s metaphors, and you can very easily substitute it in to care guards despair, albeit without the Christian presence of sin, obviously they’re not identical, but platonic analogies of disharmony and disintegration fit very readily into care guards model of despair. And in order to begin to overcome the disharmony, we have to relate the modeling synthesis of self by relating it to another and and I would absolutely call that after tillic a kind of symbolic triangulation until it notes, you know, that can be an idolatrous business because we can, we can, we can displace selfhood can be idolatrously displaced by despairing over the earthly, a domain in which I is reducible to a certain me. So, for him, we can only harmonized by relating to by relating that opponent process by relating that model that synthesis of dialectical by relating it to one whose measure of knowing gathers us into conformity with that most optimal self. And in despair, we readily opt for lesser lesser measures right less than ultimate concerns as tillic would say. And so for kicker the process of becoming a self initiates and Socratic irony to loose from those lesser concerns, because the dial the Socratic ignorance realizes the self dialectical divisions and brings us to brings us to consciousness of the fact that we are not identical to ourselves and makes us aware of the elusiveness of I, and for him it terminates in the paradox of Christ because that pattern that I would call a symbol is a synthesis of those very dialectical elements that struggle to resolve right. And that’s that symbol resolves the stuff dialectically and what he calls faith right which is to unify the self by absurdly realizing all of its elements as one. And so the eye of spirit of synthesis of self conscious recursive modeling is only elusive in so far as it’s not properly related when its will is in despair not to be itself, or to be itself defiantly and autonomously, despite its own necessity. It is not elusive, however, for Kierkegaard in so far as it is the eye of another gathered listened and singularly related by its establishing power, this is a form of proleptic self modeling for him. And that’s what makes the self spiritual right and think of this in Augustine in terms right. Like, Paul and August Augustine I know me God that I may be fully known. So if we were to carry the same grammatical analogy that I used before, when the syntax of vowels and consonants are spoken to the highest order of listener. They turn transparent because they are known through the listener, and that relation and being so known becomes itself by resting transparently in that power with established it so think of how this like relates the notions of logos and theosis. And incidentally, someone who’s so frequently charged with being individualistic rely so intently upon a dialogic form of listener in order to be known as himself in both dialectical elements and therefore to become himself teleologically. Right. And that’s why the importance of that triangulation that relation to another is precisely that which resolves the self and allows it to graduate from despair, because for him, without that triangulating factor without that tertium quid. That’s not possible. The self cannot constitute itself without relating itself to that which to that which exceeds its capacities, and that by which its opponents are singularly noble. Right. Okay, I’ll stop there for now and I’m sure you have some responses to this responses to my response to your response. Okay, so here’s where I’m going and you know obviously whatever’s recently salient is accessible. So I’m coaching a doc student through dissertation right now and it’s on borderline personality disorder. And we’re looking at the fundamental threads about how to organize it. So the argument from the Univite theory is you can assimilate and integrate key insights and go across the various models which are now splayed across the field but then you can organize them and see how to put them in context and then we’re trying to organize what’s the fundamental sort of structure narrative that is the core of this entity especially sort of on a dimensional level when you call it the dimensional level you can think about this sort of like the dimension of personality functioning and borderline personality disorder. And this sort of like the dimension of personality functioning and borderline is sort of the old term is between psychosis and neurosis the borderline is individuals that can’t tolerate psychoanalytic treatment because they just decompensate. And this core element is this very strong splitting a very strong negative affective vulnerability reactivity that splits in the relational world I love you I hate you. I need to be fused with you I need to be removed from you. Okay, and crazy strong but fragmented identity strong in the sense of like it’s insistent and black and white in regards to it. And we talked then about the process by which these individuals through high neurotic temperament and difficult to soothe ways of being in a family system that And then it’s supposed to validate that and create a relational holding environment that’s secure where they feel known and valued with an electric emotional system that’s firing off that then creates desires that cannot be synthesized and generates then a And then it’s a process that attacks inside and between other individuals in vicious cycle destructive ways that leaves vacant and identity can weave together the being and becoming elements of self and then leaves them exhausted and in despair and a core sense of emptiness. So for me, what you just described in relationship to that has a lot of well the successful resolution of the self paradoxes can be found in well when it’s brutally broken. Okay, is what we mean by borderline personality. And I think that I was I emphasize in like psychiatry and clinical psychology that’s that makes me really excited about this articulation and why enlightenment 2.0 will require some sort of bridge between science and spirituality or existential philosophy and values is because in psychiatry and What you have is a cluster of symptoms. So there are nine categories that lead to borderline. What do you reference it against the absence of symptoms. Okay, you don’t reference it against optimal human self functioning. Some of the psycho dynamic people have tried to create there’s like a diagnostic psycho dynamic manual that says hey integrate the self model with others, and indeed there’s now continuum of functioning. And what does that mean. What does that mean. What does that mean. What does that mean. What does that mean. What does that mean. What does that mean. What does that mean. What does that mean. What does that mean. What does that mean. What does that mean. What does that mean. What does that mean. What does that mean. What does that mean. What does that mean. What does that mean. What does that mean. What does that mean. What does that mean. What does that mean. What does that mean. What does that mean. What does that mean. What does that mean. What does that mean. What does that mean. What does that mean. What does that mean. What does that mean. What does that mean. What does that mean. What does that mean. What does that mean. What does that mean. What does that mean. What does that mean. What does that mean. What does that mean. What does that mean. What does that mean. What does that mean. What does that mean. That’s a really convergent response. And I think that it is difficult. So I mean, one of the things that, that when it, at least when it comes to Kierkegaard model, that cannot be avoided if we’re to be generally, generally, And if we’re to take him genuinely, is that for him, the, well, there’s a reason for him that the presence and the graduation of despair is quite fundamental to the actualization of oneself, because for him, it actually has to be like stuff. And it’s not, it’s not some kind of reductive asceticism, but for him, the suffering of the self, the intrasyclic process of intensifying the awareness of will and for him intensifying the awareness of sin, right. The misappropriation of that will is essential to it. It is, it is what creates helps to create the requisite degree of consciousness required to actually be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to interoperably resolve the very condition, right, so for I mean he in that way he’s very Socratically challenging. And in fact he has a. And so for for a clinician I’m not like that might be. That’s a difficult thing I would imagine from a clinician’s perspective, perhaps to square with with clinical methodology, one has, one has become more more intensely in despair before one’s condition can be ameliorated but for him all that means is one must But for him, all that means is one must map himself more and more consciously and understand that wherever, understand where wherever me is, I is not, it begins with that, but then must proceed to map himself so thoroughly that the intensity of that self consciousness and its absence from the world becomes so acute that one becomes actually primed to be able to make that what he calls the bi-directional movement, right? The resignation away from the earthly, the abstraction away, and then what he calls the infinitization and then the refinitization, right? The recommitment to necessity. And for him that, which is a bi-directional movement, it happens at one from right where one is. But the conditions that prime that move, the conditions that prime one to be able to confront the paradox of their being is precisely to intensify their consciousness of that paradox up to the point where it must simply be espoused, right? And you can tell me how that, you know, like to him, he’s sort of outlining an existential process and it’s meant to be difficult because the passion required is actually requisite in order to attain to it. But I don’t know how that squares with clinical methodology. Well, I mean, you know, I think that first off, any path to wisdom enlightenment is going to be at least from a metamodern vantage point, it’s going to be an integrated pluralistic path, meaning there no one path to wisdom and enlightenment will be delineated. So Kierkegaard is delineating a particular path. And I believe then what he is speaking to though, some of the things that he’s speaking to in terms of awareness and challenge and core value and despair about not living up to that value is actually requisite for deep reflective growth. And so and I think that the psychotherapeutic community struggles enormously with making claims about what are those values and what justify them in relation because we basically back off into a postmodern relativist. Well, you say if you want to live happy and you can just convince yourself that you’re everything’s fine and think the secret thoughts of cognitive behavioral adjustment and then be happy, that’s okay. And you don’t need to look at your shadow or do anything along those lines. And then yeah, who’s to say? So I think there are massive complexifications in relationship to and that’s why we punt on the issue. That’s why there is no optimal functioning that everybody bows down to. It would carry a huge amount of power and seem to be basically as a religion. And that’s an issue at the same time to punt on it and leave it as a blank screen about what’s optimal functioning. That’s an abdication of responsibility also. So my plea is you better believe if you’re going to embark on this process, you have to engage these issues philosophically. And I think part of the issue is that we’ve had the wrong scientific ontology that makes Kierkegaard’s kind of narrative seem like totally alien. My whole point is actually it’s not nearly as alien. If we had the right model of self, the right model of the person primate dilemma, if we did things like believed in the concept of God and what it meant in terms of orienting, like the synthiest position, okay, and then get out of ontological claims and then look at the processes by which all the great philosophers and wisdom traditions have gone through human growth and extract out of that relative to modern knowledge, I see there’s a much, much more bridge building and integrated pluralism than has been afforded from the current state of the field. So it’s complicated, but there’s a lot of rich ground to be milked here that I can feel that in my gut and relationship to this narrative. Yeah, definitely. Did you want to make any response, John, before I go on? Yeah, I did. But I wanted to I wanted you guys to have the freedom. I thought what was happening there was really juicy and wonderful. I didn’t want to intervene at all. The bottom line is that what my so to me, I just am super excited about this trifecta here, precisely because the system, the overall meaning mental health, science, spirituality, conflation broke apart, got to come together for enlightenment 2.0. And this just speaks to it, that you can rattle off. I mean, I don’t know Kierkegaard very well. I know some of the existentialists are better than others. But you know, I’m not but to hear Kierkegaard be articulated in such a way that I was just describing borderline personality disorder, as essentially the antithesis of what Kierkegaard’s articulating for the growth of the self, that should be attended to in a particular way, because that suggests the kind of bridging that’s available to resolve the broken processes of our facts and our values, which which we disconnected in particular ways and never figured out a way to put together. And I think that’s at the heart of the meeting and mental health crisis myself. Yeah, I think that’s really well put. That’s really well put. And I think that the thing one of the things that’s made so difficult about it, and it’s it’s very no, it’s knowingly difficult, and it’s it’s socratic. I mean, one of the things that he sets out to do is to make life more difficult for people. He does that deliberately. He does that in philosophy, as he did in his personality. And the reason we have to learn that is look at Jonathan Hyatt and coddling the American mind, we figured out self esteem, we delivered self esteem to the populace, and then they internalize the idea that, oh, my God, everybody gets cupcakes and never critique a kid. I was told as a coach to never criticize, I had fifth graders never criticize any of your soccer players because they’ll be so injured. OK, how if we have to internalize a little bit of curiosity, maybe that’s probably not the best way to wisdom growth. Never criticize anybody because they will fall over. You basically create a meta message. I’m sorry. I’m just. That’s right. No, no, no. Well, we’re in complete agreement on this and you’re absolutely right. And so that then that becomes that becomes the response is to actually rough the surface of experience such that the traction with that experience becomes possible and reflective. Right. He has it’s funny, actually. John, it reminds me of the Hans critique in the Agony of Eros about the smoothness of beauty. It has a similar. Kierkegaard makes a similar comment. I know when he critiques this idea of Christendom as a sort of a universal inheritance that one attains to merely by cultural osmosis. And for him, that’s that’s a blasphemy because for him it is it is inauthentic unless it happens de novo, espoused by the will of an individual psyche as a sacrament, virtually as a sacrament. And the idea that you can sort of inherit yourself. By by by by by internalizing some some attribution, some model of me is is is precisely what deepens your your unconsciousness of having a self and puts you ever, ever more deeply into despair. Just put this in lay person terms. So at this meeting and I say, listen, I’m a clinical psychologist in my house. We cultivate emotional calluses, which is like, you know, you feel shit and you work through, you know, just like, oh, my God, I can’t feel anything. You feel some shame. We don’t run away from shame or guilt or injury. That’s just part of the process of growth. And so anyway, the Kierkegaard, obviously, and I knew he would, is an existentialist. But but it’s frustrating to me, very frustrating to have access to this wisdom and to be disconnected from it. I want to know why. We get disconnected from these things. Well, it’s supremely inconvenient. Right. I mean, because by by by the normative account he gives, I mean, most of us fall short of it. And and that’s very inconvenient. That’s a very inconvenient thing to reckon with. And so it begins there. Right. The first the first step for him is the awareness that, oh, I am not a self, which means I’m I’m not myself, which means I’m now not a self at all. And becoming myself is not something that happens automatically or something that happens by virtue of the natural course of my experience. No, it happens in virtue of a will that is tutored by Socratic irony and that begins to map itself with increasing degrees of self-consciousness as it realizes the non identity between itself and its various forms in the world. But but by reflecting upon those various forms and taking seriously and humorously the the phenomenal. Recoil of those experiences and various guises, we can slowly begin to find the absent presence of of ourselves in that negative relation to its whole and begin to tease it out. But it’s a it’s a that accessional process is very gradual and it’s very, very painstaking, very painstaking for him. So I’d like to. Respond in a way that I think picks up on what you’ve been saying, Chris, and I hope I think it also picks up on what you’ve been saying, Greg. Let me try and I think in sort of the classical undergraduate definition of existentialism, Kierkegaard is not an existentialist. Here’s what I mean by that. Here’s what I mean by that, because Kierkegaard is not proposing that we are self-defining beings. He is proposing that we are inherently self-transcending beings. He replaces the operation of self-definition is replaced by the operation of self-transcendence. And then that that brings back our old friend Galen Strossen, because Galen Strossen proposed the paradox. You know where I’m going with this now, the paradox of self-transcendence, which he uses the language of self-creation, but it’s the same thing. It’s the same thing. He says, because if the self does it and it just then there’s no transcendence, it’s just more it’s just extension. And if something other than it, right, if there’s something other outside of it and tell it could there’s something similar, something outside, then it’s like the self. It’s like it’s heteronomous. It’s something called side smashing. And so therefore, there’s no way for self-transcendence or self-creation to occur, because if there’s transcendence, it wasn’t done by the self. But if it’s not done by the self, then it’s not self-transcendence. His point is you can’t get self and transcendence together. It’s inherently paradoxical. Now, Agnes Callard brings that up and she says, well, actually, human beings are doing this all the time. And the reason I want to put that right there and then the reason why I want to emphasize this is because I think to tie it back into some functional machinery, that any act of self-correction actually, especially if the self-correction is overcoming self-perception, but not necessarily, but especially is an act of self-transcendence. I cannot correct myself unless I can in some sense transcend the framing in which the mistake was made. So self-correction, adaptivity itself is what I’m arguing presupposes self-transcendence and then self-transcendence is inherently paradoxical given strassin. Is that OK as an argument so far? I think it’s very much in alignment. Now, Agnes Callard comes in and says, no, no, but we do this all the time. And of course, L.A. Paul is the same thing. We’re doing this all the time and we do it through the process of aspiration or what L.A. Paul calls transformed experience, right, where we actually like Agnes Callard gives the example of you want to you want to appreciate classical music. You don’t currently like it, but you want to like it, but you don’t. Right. And so you have to change your perspectival and participatory knowing and you can’t know what that’s going to be like. So you can’t just infer or deduce your way to it. All that stuff. And for those of you who are interested, I’ve got discussions about all of this and many other videos. And one of the things I propose that in that that proleptic rationality here first, just something where I would maybe push back a little bit on Kierkegaard, because Kierkegaard identifies this with a kind of absurdity. And Agnes Callard argues for it as a kind of rationality. Here’s Callard’s argument. If I am proposing to you that you should become more rational, I’m actually proposing to you self transcendence. Inherently, especially if rationality means that kind of in deep self-correction, it can’t be an irrational thing to do. The proposal for you to become more rational can’t itself be an irrational act or rationality becomes performatively self-contradictory. That’s what she means by proleptic rationality. The aspiration of rationality has to itself be a rational act or rationality disappears from the radar completely. Now, the thing is, it’s not deductive or influential rationality. And so this is where I get much more platonic than Kierkegaardian perhaps. I think the way we do that, taking it from developmental psych, is we do serious play. That’s how we do that. That’s how we do self-creation. We enact symbols imaginably, use Corbin’s phrase, right? Instead of having a child, I get a pet. And the pet is like a child, but also not like a child. So I don’t have the same moral obligation, but I assume some of the pain in practical. And the whole notion of enacting serious play. And I think there’s a possibility for rationally enacting serious play. So the thing I’m wondering is, I think Kierkegaard’s right in that self-transcendence presupposes an affordance of transcendence. There has to be something about reality that affords that self-transcendence. And that affordance has to also afford us the serious play where we enact the… Like whenever a child is play acting, they are simultaneously themselves and not themselves. And that is how they actually engage in that self-transcendence. And of course, Kierkegaard is seriously playing all through his work. So I’m not invoking something for him to prove. So what I’m saying is, is it so much that we need… No, maybe I’m trying to open up to the pluralism that Greg is invoking. Like, do we need a particular symbol or do we need just the affordance of serious symbolic play that will now allow us to overcome the paradox of self-transcendence? Yeah. Well, so I mean, as to that last point, Kierkegaard would say, no, that would be insufficient. What he would need is the symbol that… I mean, Kierkegaard is writing in… Kierkegaard, as I said, he’s a Christian writer. And so for him, the paradox of Christ is the symbol by which we resolve our synthesis. Right. Now, if I can intervene one sec, but there’s a Tertullian thing going on, Kierkegaard, which is I believe it precisely because it’s absurd. And I’m saying, is that necessary given an argument I’ve just given over here from a bunch of other people would say, it’s not absurd at all. Right. But I think… Sorry, sorry, John. I think the argument from Callard… See, the argument… So when you say that, when you put the positive argument from Callard as a criticism to Kierkegaard, I think, well, maybe. But the fact is that we would need to qualify some terminology. And we have to realize that when Kierkegaard was critiquing the over-reliance on reason, he was critiquing Hegel and he was critiquing the Enlightenment and he was critiquing reason delimited in a particular definition and context. In fact, I would say that the idea of attaining to the absurd is much more like the divine madness that hails from the Greeks, specifically hails from Plato. So I don’t particularly think that Kierkegaard’s affinity with absurdity and the paradoxical as the means of resolving oneself to oneself. I don’t see that as… I actually don’t think there’s a contradiction there. I don’t think it’s anti-Socratic or anti-Platonic. I simply think that Callard’s definition of rationality that you’ve appropriated is… exceeds the definitions that he was being critical of and responding to. Now, maybe that would be my first response to that. I don’t know whether or not that’s… Some people might dispute that. But I would say that the whole point of Callard’s proleptic rationality is precisely to harken back to a more Socratic definition of the term. And that’s precisely the definition that Kierkegaard is hailing from when he talks about using IREMs in service of the absurd. So it might be that the contradiction is in fact not a contradiction. I’m not sure. The reason I’m doing this… Sorry, I’m not trying to be anti-Christian here. You know me. That’s not my project. My project is… I want to… Because I don’t want to bind it to an idiosyncratic absurdity of Christianity because the deep continuity of the illots. Because I still want to say that the chimp has a self. Right. And the chimp can’t be possibly doing all of this. But I think the chimp can be engaging. They do. They engage in symbolic play. They go through development. They take into account, as Greg indicated, their mammals. They have attachment relationships. They have social relationships. Right. And they deeply… They mourn the loss of others. So selves matter to them in the way we’ve talked about. And so I don’t want… I don’t… Like, I’m worried about us getting such a rarefied sense of this that we can’t connect it back to the machinery of organisms that I think are properly… To which we properly attribute a self. That’s the concern. It’s the back of my mind. I’m not trying to be anti-Christian. I’m trying to say, I want to try and make this as rationally explicable as possible so that I can reestablish the deep continuity because I have in the thing, and I think Greg agrees with me, and I think in other places you agree with me on this too. So I hope I’m not being imposing that, you know, establishing that deep continuity is a fundamental way of overcoming the Enlightenment gap and really addressing the meeting crisis right now. So this concern is not just scientific. It’s an existential concern. Does that make sense is what I’m trying to… What my worry is, what my concern is? Yeah. Now, I think part for me, one of the things that I would say is, and maybe I would wonder how… What is his metaph… What’s Kierkegaard’s metaphysical and ontological commitment to Christianity though, right? Because if he’s ontologically committed to Christianity in a particular way, a dual world vision of Christianity, then his assertion about the kinds of self operative structures that are going to be anchored to a different ontological model than we’re operating from, right? Is that fair? Yeah, I think that’s fair. And it may be that we have to… Or, you know, it may be that the naturalistic account that you’re reaching for has to depart from him at a certain crucial juncture. And that’s fine. That in and of itself doesn’t bother me at all. I mean, so for me, I would just say that he’s an unbelievably perceptive individual who’s affording his opportunity, understands the complexification that’s associated with, OK, what kind of Christian reality is out there? There are massive limits on the human knowledge in relation. He’s… Then he’s embedded in the real world in a particular way and making sense. And for me, what I would say is, I mean, I have this concept like this elephant sun god. There is a lot of… And John, you talked about this in one of your recent… There’s a lot of archetypal structures associated with the light, OK, that we are being drawn to and then we can draw on his, you know, without making ontological commitments or without denying them. You can simply say there’s a concept of God that he’s being guided towards. And if he’s being guided towards a concept of God that we can then connect to naturalism and show the relational selves that he’s playing themselves out have actually they’re grounded, a primate relational world, then we’ve actually made that connection. Although Kierkegaard himself would obviously have to be introduced to all of the architectural arguments to then decide what it is that would make sense because he wouldn’t have access to them in his day. But am I making that… I think that’s… Thank you, Greg. But I also want to hold on the other hand, I think there’s this important argument about, you know, I want to put… I’ll just do a Heidi Garian thing and put the two together. You know, there’s a Socratic symbolic self and symbol in the Telekian sense of the word that affords the serious play, the transformative experience, all the other affords, let’s say a symbol that affords genuine self transcendence. Right. And so a strong sense of a symbol, not just an ornament or a metaphorical thing. Right. And so I think Kierkegaard’s onto something. What I’m trying to do, I’m not trying to get a reduction. I want to understand how that function can nevertheless be rendered continuous with, you know, the kind of symbolic play, even a bit of the proto-religiousness that you see in chimps where they dance in the rain. Like, what the heck are they doing when they do that kind of stuff? Right. And things like that. Like, I think so because I’m worried, but like I said, my concern is this is going to get so rarefied that, you know, we’d end up saying, I think, potently ridiculous things like, you know, five year olds don’t have a self or something like that, which would be like, I think, a crazy claim to make. And I think. Well, he would say five year olds are not yet selves. He would say that five year olds do not yet have a self. They have a self, but they are not have not become the self they are. Right. I mean, there’s a certain degree in which that would be consistent for him. Right. You wouldn’t say a five year old that they had become themselves. But he wouldn’t say they were lacking a self either. He wouldn’t say that it would be perfectly morally acceptable to kill them. And I’m putting aside the teleological suspension of the ethical right now. Right. Oh, why put that aside, John? No, I think that’s fair. And I think you’re right, John. Absent the Abrahamic, the Abrahamic exceptions, he would not certainly sanction the killing of a five year old. What I mean is that even if the five year old, the five year old is has innately those preconditions, the synthesis that I described of those dialectical elements that constitutes selfhood. However, without the without the actualization of that synthesis, right, without the being of oneself, without the becoming of oneself. So you invoke this earlier. He very much sees he sees us as individuals like the divine doubles of the third century Mediterranean. That’s how I that’s how I see him. Some people might dispute that, but I’m there with you. I understand I under enemy, you know, we could we could side long into discussions of I.F.S. and those kinds of things in which in which I think would be could in some ways be quite confluent with him. I see that, too, John, I see him his version of selfhood as very much a divisional version of selfhood. And that’s consonant because I proposed the divine double or the sacred second self as the primary enacted imaginal symbol by which we aspire. Right. And if you wanted to, if you wanted to to to to to sort of trace him out without making his ontological commitments, you could apply that to his understanding of Christ as the pattern whose assumption resolves the paradox of selfhood and its dialectical elements. Right. You could understand for him. I mean, there is a certain sense in which he has a divine revelation, understanding of Christ. Right. The end, the ingress of the eternal into the temporal, that is Christ for him. And there’s no getting away from that if you want to follow him. And I want to be just to him about that. But if you if you wanted to dilute that slightly and weaken it and apply it, if if you so desire to a more naturalistic framework, what you could say is that there’s the quenic or parabolic qualities in which Christ embodies the paradox of selfhood, that it is the embodiment of that quenic function and pattern that brings about that resolution and graduates the self from despair. Right. And in terms of God, you know, if if the word if if if folks want to take exception to the use of the term, you could understand it to be something like the the the auto the poesis of the self. I shouldn’t use the term poesis because he has for him. He wouldn’t use that term. But the the the self must be inspired by the presence of intelligibility that exceeds the order of the distant conflicting elements. Or if I were to put it another way, I might say in faith, the will becomes directed to the highest order of intelligibility that the conditions of its synthesis make available to it. And this becomes its spiritual aspiration to selfhood and the reconciliation of the ontological necessity with the normative possibility. But then he’s being unfair to the stoics, right, because they are internalizing the sage who is a figure that precisely fulfills that definition. And insofar as the sage is always a regulative ideal and never an achieved ideal, this the stoics are not actually the Knights of Infinite Resignation. Yeah, that’s interesting. I think that there are I think there are versions of stoicism that could resist his critique. I would I would certainly grant that. I do think, though, that, again, his critique of stoicism is, again, hailing from his Christianity, because for Kierkegaard, in God, all things are possible. And the possibility of God is is essential to the God of the actual. And so for stoics, for stoics, because for him, the stoics are spiting the necessity of their faith, realism by creating a kind of autonomous form of selfhood. And for him, they are eschewing the fact that for God, all things are possible. And so his critique of the stoics is a critique of their fatalism. I see, I see. It’s a critique of their fatalism because they’re they’re they’re resigning from the necessity. But for him, it’s a way of spiting the necessity and creating a kind of self authorial, autonomous form of size that for him is a form of despair. I think this is converted with the neoplatonic critique, right? The neoplatonic critique is that the stoics ultimately need an actual. An actual guarantor, guarantor of the possibility of self-transcendence. That’s it, that thing. That’s it. That’s it. And for Kierkegaard, the guarantor is God that for God, all things are possible. And I see. Well, I mean, what’s what this is telling to me and this is good, is that there is an important dimension that needs to be integrated, that is missing from the model as I’ve currently argued it. And I think there’s a bridging that’s afforded by what Greg does in the clinical dimension. But this idea of the sapiential. Symbolic dimension of the self needs to be further theoretically integrated. My concern is whether or not the ontology of that is. I mean, but I think it is because I do work elsewhere trying to integrate relevance, realization with the enacted sapiential symbolic dimension. But I think that I think this is a good point. I think this is a good critical point that and maybe maybe when we start playing around seriously, playing around with spirit and soul, we can work that dimension in. Yeah, because there’s. Go ahead, Greg. I’ve said too much. Well, no, I’m just I mean, the recursive reflex and that that Kierkegaard is asking for right is that for me that we’re now into the culture person self domain and the culture person self domain builds an entire layer around the primate self domain. So we layered a lot of the architecture. Our primary focus was getting the cognitive science architecture of the primate self, knowing what we would layer a justifying person self on top of that. But when we talk about Kierkegaard’s connection to God and what it is that he’s actually trying to do, he’s definitely sitting in the self recursive narrating sense making space that is not available to a five year old, but would be available to a fully socialized person reflecting on their reality in a particular way. Right. But Greg, right. Regardless, criticism of Christendom is precisely that it’s like it’s insufficient. The cultural the cultural level of personhood is still insufficient. If I understand correctly. So, yes, yes, he would say that there’s there’s some there’s another move that has to be made. I think that’s what he’s arguing for. It doesn’t and it doesn’t mean he thinks culture has no role or no. No, no, I’m not claiming that at all. I’m not claiming. Yeah, no, I know. I know. I just want to make that clear, like again, because it’s a charge that is made of him sometimes and it’s not a just charge. It’s just that it’s just that one’s relation to culture is best espoused ironically. And it’s the ironic relation. It’s in the ironic relation to culture that the individual begins to properly orient their subjective experience to the transcendent function. So like so like like Tillich, God is that trends cultural basis for culture. Right. Right. That that God is that that ground of meaning and being that makes culture possible. It’s something like that. Right. I think that’s true. I don’t know how many pages Kierkegaard and I certainly haven’t read them all, so I shouldn’t presume I’m not sure how many pages Kierkegaard devoted to to understanding that that relationship. But I don’t I don’t I wouldn’t preclude it. I wouldn’t. My argument is that he’s presupposing it thoroughly throughout his criticism of Christendom. He has to be. He has to be. Yeah, I think that’s right. And Heidegger takes that over and gives a secular version in his criticism of dust man and inauthenticity. Right. People that are satisfied to get their normativity of their self just from their cultural worldview. From the universal. Yeah. Because for him, the universal ultimately has is part of what has to be transcended in the transition from the ethical to the religious. Right. That’s for him. That’s part of the that’s part of the teleological journey that the self makes in its. And it’s in its and its realization. So is this fair? Kierkegaard would probably be happy with a lot of the machinery we have here, but he would nevertheless say it’s ultimately insufficient. Yes. And I think your point about I like the term guarantor that you used, even though it sounds slightly legalistic, but I know exactly what you mean meant by that. And I think that that is a way of understanding it, that for him. And that’s why for him, it has to have its its corma day. It’s before God. And, you know, that that’s not as simplistic as it sounds for him. What it means is that there is a presence of transcendent intelligibility that must be even by its absence, must be present in order for that transcendent move to be made in faith. So so the idea of perhaps. The sacredness is picking up on the inexhaustible sound of intelligibility for reality. I mean, that would work for Kierkegaard, I think, wouldn’t it not? Because that would be such a guarantor. It would work for my version of Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard like. Yeah. So, yeah, because this is making me think of some of the conversations I’ve been having with Bernardo Kastrup and also with Greg about, you know, that this revalorization and reformulation of the self. Yeah, you know, there’s there’s the functional and then there’s the clinical and even the cultural. But then finally, there’s an ontological thing that has to be brought into. And I think we should maybe wrap it up for today. But I want to suggest that when we start talking about notions of soul, we’re talking about the self in its, you know, we talked about how the self has a very sort of plastic boundary, but the self in relationship to its grounding, its ontological grounding, and then spirit is the self in its relationship to self transcendence. And those are what we’re touching on here. So I think we could pick those we could pick those two topics up next time. And I know Greg, you know, because I’ve talked to him on his channel, his podcast about, you know, trying to rework the fundamental ontology. And what I think you’re saying here is that there’s a piece, there’s an ontological piece of the self that is a symbolic in that strong sense of the word, ontological dimension of the self that needs to be brought into this model of the self. I appreciate that. I think that’s a very well made point. Yeah, I think that the the idea, I think relating spirit to self transcendence is right, because I think that at least so perhaps is the last thing I’ll say for Kierkegaard, the self cannot be except in reference to what is superordinate to its being. That is what makes it spirit. Right. It’s it’s it’s the correspondence to the eternal. I didn’t say the immortal, but the eternal correspondence to the eternal is what it is. Is what makes it spirit. Well, and the eternal is the actual grounding of permanent possibility. It’s the inexhaustible. This would be right. Yeah. So, yeah, I think I think that’s a good Greg. I’ll give you a moment in a second. Just want to say, let’s try and maybe draw it around to this point, because I think it’s a nice transition for the next session we’ll have together. Amen. Yeah, no, this is exactly I mean, certainly the my own journey towards this, the self, we can then say, oh, hey, there’s an architecture we can describe this for me. The soul really, you know, sort of again, sort of that coin representation. This is I am an embodied self in my unique grounded being. And that that that is a good description of my soul. OK, so the unique, ideographic position in the world. And then my soul seeks certain kinds of things in a liminal double space that wants to transcend. There’s a felt sense of the soul. And there’s a felt sense of orienting toward the ultimate good, the you, you know, the ultimate concern, the light over and over again of what would then be a recognition of my egoic position. And then the sort of dark, depth side, the exact same and then be like, that’s your installment. And that’s my unique participation in the world, my own struggles emotionally. And then what ultimately is the transcendent good? And can I align myself with that? And I certainly heard Kierkegaard’s your brilliant narrative or Kierkegaard basically that, wow, I can really I can jive with that. That speaks to my challenge of the coin to the garden. The garden is what wisdom is for me. So I’m a naturalist. So I don’t then, you know, but the concept of God is situated in that regard. And then my embodied unique, ideographic, subjective struggles with potential and sin can be placed in that relation. That’s fantastic. That’s great. And the notion of sin as despair and also of missing the mark because they do come together and also of self-deception like Duca. They’re all all a clinical pathology, a pathology. And so that’ll also get us in perhaps to, you know, wrapping the issue of the self, the problematic of the self back into the problematic of the meaning crisis at large because Kierkegaard, of course, has a lot to teach us in that regard. So, Chris, that was beautiful. I mean, that’s very energizing, tonically beautiful and fantastic and critical in the good sense of the word and deeply appreciated, genuine dialogue and dialogous around this. Coherently grounding from the Aristotelian perspective. Thank you, Jens. Thanks for making space for it. Yeah, so helping along. Oh, well, very much. So we’ll pick up and let’s find let’s focus on, you know, self, spirit and soul and the meaning crisis, because all three of those have been put in jeopardy by the meaning crisis, I think is a fair enough thing to say. And you’re both nodding. So I think that’s the place where we’ll go next. So thank you, gentlemen. Thank you so much. Thank you, Chris. Thank you. Thank you.