https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=OrXJ4CtYbmo
Hello everyone. I’m frequently humbled and touched, motivated and encouraged when people contact me by email or texting or commenting or they greet me on the street and tell me that my work has been transformative for them. If this has been the case for you and also if you want to share it with other people, please consider supporting my work by joining my Patreon community. All financial support goes to the Vervecki Foundation where my team and I are diligently working to create the science, the practices, the teaching and the communities. If you want to participate in my work and many of you ask me that how can I participate, how can I get involved, then this is the way to do it. The Vervecki Foundation is something that I’m creating with other people and I’m trying to create something as virtuously as I possibly can. No grifting, no setting myself up as a guru. I want to try and make something really work so that people can support, participate and find community by joining my Patreon. I hope you consider that this is a way in which you can make a difference and matter. Please consider joining my Patreon community at the link below. Thank you so very much for your time and attention. Welcome back everyone to another episode of Voices with Vervecki. I pause there because I was trying to keep track of all the things I’ve been doing. This is my third with David Schindler, D.C. Schindler and Ken Lowry. This is the second one on my channel. As many of you know, I’ve been looking forward to this conversation all day. I love talking to Ken and David. He’s been an intellectual hero of mine and so being able to talk in this really dialogical manner with them has been a great blessing. I’m going to just ask each one of you to briefly reintroduce yourself and then I’ll introduce the topic that we’re going to discuss. Maybe we’ll start with you, Ken. I’m Ken Lowry. I’ve had the honor of being in several conversations now with John. After our first conversation around a year ago, I started my own YouTube channel. That has been a wonderful adventure getting to meet all kinds of people and explore. Last time, I think John, you referred to me as a seeker and I find that very much apt to how I engage this space. I am here as a seeker and interested in where we go today. My name is David Schindler. I go by D.C. Schindler as a professional name. Originally, it was to distinguish myself from my father, who is a colleague of mine, but he passed away last November. I think I’ll stick with D.C. as a professional name. It’s easy to remember. I’m a professor of metaphysics and anthropology at the John Paul II Institute. I’m particularly interested in ultimate questions, sort of a generalist, ultimate questions about the meaning of being, specifically and especially in relation to the transcendental beauty, goodness, and truth, and then the anthropological correlates to those in love and freedom and reason. To think of all of those in relation to each other and to think of how they illuminate each other. That’s basically what I have spent my life on and expect to spend the rest of my life on and of course only scratch the surface of this endlessly interesting question. So this is amazing. So I was talking off camera with Ken and David about what you would talk about today and we’re sort of supposed to move into these three leaps, talking about the leap into reason, the leap into faith, and the leap into love. I think we will still end up talking about those, but I want to give us a little bit more tighter context, perhaps a deeper context. So I’m going to read David’s excellent essay, Giving Cause to Wonder, which is a chapter in this book that I highly recommend. If you’re interested in reason, you need to read The Capitalists of Reason. It’s one of the really important books on reason. And in there, David explores, I’ll move to the second part. David, you explore, you explore the notion of wonder and its deep relationship to notions of causation. And then you do a significant, let’s call it something like a rehabilitation of the notion of causation. And then you take it back into a neoplatonic context via Dionysus, the area archipelago, the area of the earth, area of the day. And then you’re doing that as the person who’s the foil for the essay is Heidegger, his understanding of wonder, and he’s rolling it into his more general notion of glasenheit and releasement and stepping away from causation and stepping away from willfulness. And then you, you argue basically there’s something deeply right in Heidegger, because that’s trying to get the relationship to God or ultimate reality or the one out of the, out of the, I don’t want to rely on technical terms here, but it’s ontic. And ontic means sort of within the spatial, temporal, causal network that we understand as the natural world, something like that. Beings. And Heidegger wants us to orient, famously wants us to orient towards being. That is not just the abstract quality shared by all beings or anything like that. It’s a deeper, profounder thing, the presencing, the lighting, the lighting and all these metaphors that he has. And so Heidegger makes the claim that if we’re really going to recover the capacity for wonder and related things like awe, that we need to give up trying to understand being in the same language, in the same language, the same concepts that we understand beings. And since cause, this is like a Kantian argument too, since cause relationship between beings, between things that are already in existence in space and time and having a specific relationship to each other, we can’t use cause to understand the relationship between beings and being. That would be a category mistake, which he typically calls ontotheology. And you want to say that Heidegger’s argument has some negative sides to it. And it’s also mistaken because it has a very limited notion of causation. We enrich our notion of causation, we can bring back a positive notion of wonder that is a kind of knowing because it puts us into a proper relation with the kind of causal relation that exists between beings and the grounded being. I tried to do a lot in a very short time. That’s amazingly succinct. Yeah, there’s a lot going on in that essay and you managed to tie together the basic themes succinctly. So yeah, that’s, and there’s a lot to explore and all that, obviously, that’s the kind of basic parameters. So I, which, how would you like to open this up? It’s good to hear that I got it right. It’s, and I don’t mean this derogatively, it’s a complex argument. It is, yeah. And so I wanted to, and I’m going through it very carefully and I wanted to make sure that I brocked it well. It’s the linchpin of the book. I think so. I’m glad to hear you say that because I felt everything is turning on this central argument. So I mean, there’s a couple things I want to talk to eventually. I want to talk to you about awe and wonder and reverence and the way I think Heidegger doesn’t adequately peel them apart and put them in relationship to each other. Before that, let’s take this because I mean, this is an argument, an argument that I have been influenced by the argument about ontotheology. I know you have a chapter in that specifically, but I haven’t read that. So let’s just play in this playing field if that’s possible. But whatever you want to say too, which is, you know, it’s, I’m going to try and be as neutral as possible. So I’ll say something like standard current theism pictures God as a supreme being as the greatest of things and is therefore inadequate for understanding what is truly ultimate, which is the ground of being or being in the Heideggerian sense, which is that which gives everything that’s presencing. It’s intelligibility and it’s presencing to intelligibility, etc. And so classical theism, no, sorry, we move the adjective, some people have said, well, classical theism is different. And that’s part of what I want to explore with you. Let’s say current common, we could even call it sort of standard North American theism sees God as the supreme being. And that is to make a profound category mistake that being, no matter how great a brand couldn’t be ultimate reality, couldn’t be the ground of the true, the good and the beautiful, etc. And therefore, it is a fundamental mistake that is ultimately cut off from being. And this is where Heidegger sort of rolls into the Nietzschean critique, that that ultimately leaves us in sort of a nihilistic frame. Now, I believe you want to answer that and you want to answer that squarely from within a tradition that I have been lately defending at length, which is the neoplatonic tradition. So how’s that for an initial setup? That’s a great setup. Yeah. And I mean, that’s, I mean, I think that the first thing that one needs to say is Heidegger is profoundly right about so much of this critique. And I think it’s one of the reasons for his enduring significance in spite of all the dalliance with Nazism and anti-Semitism and all those things are actually very important to understand him properly, even if they’re not the most immediate thing that one ought to attend to. One needs to try to understand what he’s saying first, but those things become very relevant. But he remains of interest to people because I think he speaks to this sense that we have of a kind of absence of any mystery, depth, a sense of the sacred, a sense of wonder, awe, this reverence, these various things that you mentioned, that they are marginalized in our culture, the sort of technocratic culture that we’re all familiar with. And so when Heidegger begins speaking about those things, it makes a strong impression for those who have ears to hear, as Heidegger might say. But the problem is that it seems to me he, his diagnosis misses the mark on some really fundamental things that require him to present his thought as an alternative to the Western tradition and the Christian tradition. And that, you know, one can talk about why that’s problematic in various ways. But one of the more immediate implications of his doing that is that it also requires us to, it forces us into a kind of an alienation from Western culture and Western civilization. So that in order to be, to enter into the profound depths of things, you have to basically abandon the world as we know it. It’s a little bit of an oversimplification, but there’s something to that. And this has something to do with his flight to the Black Forest and the cabin in the Black Forest and his interest, I think, in at least some dimensions of national socialism and so forth. But what I wanted to do in that essay is to try to show that one can embrace the critique that Heidegger makes of modern technological thinking. And rather than abandon Western thought, simply enter much more profoundly into Western thought and recognize that there are resources in this tradition that help us to recover the things that Heidegger wants to recover and ultimately, in a way, I think is more adequate than Heidegger’s own offering. So you sort of out Heidegger, Heidegger in one respect, and you remain within the Western tradition. You don’t have to invent a kind of a false mystical secondary reality to live what’s being proposed. Okay, this is excellent. Let me pick up on this, which is, I mean, part of it is, I think, there’s not only, I think, an incorrect reading of Christianity. I think you’re also making the argument there’s an incorrect reading of Plato and the neoplatonic tradition. Absolutely, and that’s crucially important. And those things go together, by the way. Yes, I’m not trying to separate them. Yeah, no, no, no, I didn’t mean that as a correction. I just wanted to point that out, yeah, for the audience here. Yeah. So, first of all, let’s, as you’ve been suggesting, let’s give Heidegger his due, is it? And I’m not making you a representative, I’m asking you to just comment as, you know, as a deep reflective thinker. Do you think that Heidegger’s critique does land on how many people understand God today? There’s no question about that. I mean, no question at all. Yeah, in fact, I mean, yeah, there’s, I think in Anglo-American thought, analytic philosophy, there’s, and even, you know, it’s interesting, even with very, you know, intelligent and well-educated critiques of certain aspects of a kind of Antique view of God, and, you know, kind of Antique view of God. I think there’s still, there still is at the root, and one can go way back on this, there still is at the root, this idea that God is just, in a way, the greatest being in the world. And one of the, one of the evidences of that is that, in fact, I had a long discussion with my students just this morning on this theme, we can’t help but think of God’s causal presence in competition with the natural realities of the world. That if God does something, you know, if things act on their own, that means that God is not acting, and if God is a causal agent, then that, you know, displaces natural agency, and that’s just, I mean, you can see why one would think that, you know, if you think of agents tend to interact. They limit each other, that’s Spinoza’s argument, right? Yeah, that’s right, that’s exactly right. Yeah, you know, Spinoza is an interesting figure in this score, but in any event, it’s a very difficult thing to think, I mean, you know, I don’t mean that as just a rhetorical throwaway line, it’s an extremely difficult thing to think transcendent causality. I mean, there’s a way in which by its very nature, it exceeds what we can think, but we can grasp it by analogy, but that requires a real sort of disciplining of thought and a kind of disposition of a way of life, ultimately, that opens one to see that, that’s not easy to come by. Okay, that’s beautiful. I think you’re right, I think that this requires real spiritual exercising before, I mean, yeah, you know, there’s Sunday’s stuff about, you know, dialogues, like the Promenades, or get up, like sort of winging us through this really powerful spiritual exercising, so we stop thinking about the forms as if they’re things. So, I mean, this is interesting, because this sort of hit me, may I just add to that? Yeah, this is why I do think Christianity really does need Neoplatonism, because this is a line of thought in Neoplatonism that’s really central. It may be in a way the central theme in Neoplatonic thought, I think we can make an argument for that, and, you know, that belonged to the Christian tradition up until, you know, the high Middle Ages, the late high Middle Ages, when Christianity and Neoplatonism were put in a kind of opposition to each other, and that’s where these problems really start to develop, but in any event, I was interrupting. No, no, no, no, that’s fine, I was just going to say, I mean, I’m really grateful for your work and for this conversation, because, I mean, even before I sort of took out, when I was younger, still within the religious framework, I got struck by something that is not exactly this, but is the precursor to this, so I’m watching the Ten Commandments, right, and you know, as well, usually when I was a kid, it was always playing on TV around, earlier, you go around Passover, stuff like that, watching it, and there’s the parting of the Red Sea, and everybody’s going, and all the people in the room are going, and then, and this is just because of the weirdness of my mind, but my mind thinks, but like in the causation of even the solar system, that’s just a minuscule event. And then I thought, what does that mean? What does that mean about this God? And I didn’t have any way to process it, so all I was left with was sort of anxiety, which is like, all right, and then, so that has sort of been haunting me, and that’s why I have been quite influenced by the Heideggerian ontopheological critique, because I think it lands very strongly against that sort of conception. Well, you know, I mean, the classical tradition, you know, when you wanted to find evidence of the presence of God, you would point to the order of the cosmos, and it’s interesting, there’s a certain strain of Christian, especially modern Christian thinking, that when you want to look for the presence of God, you look for a disruption of the order of the cosmos, you know, and I mean, think about the implication of that point, that God is present only when he’s interrupting nature. I mean, that means ontotheology, you know, I mean, you’re thinking as a being that’s sort of struggling with and fighting against the natural order, rather than being the principle of the whole thing. Right, right. Oh, that’s a great insight and connection, David. Thank you for that. Yeah, yeah, I mean, you know, Aquinas is really clear on this, you know, he says he can’t, I mean, there’s a basic way in which God can’t change the course of nature, in a certain respect, Aquinas says, and you think, well, wait a minute, is this some kind of natural fatalism? But the reason that his explanation for that is that it’s precisely because the course of nature is already an expression of his will. Yes, yeah. And so, in a way, it would be a sign of impotence to change, it would mean that his will is arbitrary and not the radical origin of the natural order. I mean, you know, the implications of that are just immense. So this really starts to shift things in a really important way. So now I want to take up what I think is behind Kant in some way, sorry, behind Heidegger in some way, which is Kant, Kant gives the famous kind of arguments that causation is something that is part of the grammar of the natural world. It’s part of the manifold that we impose on things in order to make sense of them. So trying to extend causation to something beyond the natural world makes no sense. Right, right. So, well, just if you want to just reply at that point, please. Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, so this is the thing about the critique of causality. So if you associate causality already with a kind of technological thinking, and then seek beyond it for some kind of redemption from that, a liberation, a genuine freedom from that, the problem is that you are again, I have a lot of sympathy for that. But think about the implication you end up then abandoning causality to technological thinking. You see, then the whole world that’s governed by causality, which is frankly, all of it in a certain respect, ends up being an expression of force and violence and so forth. It’s a very different thing if you say, well, let’s rather than associating causality with an imminent sort of thinking, and then finding an alternative radical, you know, sort of transcendent kind of thinking that the Lassenheit and so forth as an alternative, let’s rethink the meaning of causality. That actually integrates that openness to the transcendent. And then that allows us both to have this genuinely mystical in the proper sense of the term sense of transcendence, but that also affects our everyday life and the very natural meaning of things and their unfolding. And I think, I mean, there’s not world enough in time for these things, but if you can imagine scientists who embrace a richer, deeper notion of causality and how that would enrich what science means and our capacity to investigate the nature of an atom or something. I mean, these things just would become so gloriously fascinating and rich because they would all be a manifestation of being and of God ultimately. Well, that was beautiful. I mean, I’ve had interacting some of it, I get to interact directly with some scientists like Wolfgang Smith. It would be helpful to bring in a sort of metaphorical schema that he makes use of. He makes a distinction between horizontal and vertical conversation. And the argument, and I’m not going to repeat all the arguments because I’ve been releasing videos one last week on why we really have to bring back a vertical causation that is not just epistemic, but properly part of the structure of reality. And so part of it, like, tell me if this is putting words into your mouth or not, but I think what you’re saying is, you know, can’t presuppose that all we meant by causation is this horizontal relation where things are moving each other because he’s enmeshed within the Newtonian scientific Cartesian framework. And so, and that all we mean by cause is making something move, right? And then movement, of course, is dependent on space and time. It can’t be ultimate cause has to be locked within space and time. And then, and then, but then there’s this other notion of cause, which is not making move, but bringing forth. I’m trying to say everything I say can be can be assimilated into the movement thing because we’ve been doing it for four centuries. But the notion of vertical causation that I’ve been trying to articulate with the axis of emergence and emanation and the idea that there’s a causation that is not like about how things move each other, but how things are present such that they are intelligible to us. I’m trying to go ahead. Well, I mean, you know, one thing Wolfgang Smith is a profoundly interesting. But, you know, one thing I would like to ask him at some point, if I ever have the opportunity is, is if he sees if he sees an analogy. So this would be one of the implications of the argument I’m trying to make in that essay is that in addition to recognizing sort of an alternative causality to the normal scientific one to hold on to a connection between. Yes. So that even the horizontal causality will express something of the vertical causality, something of the, you know, something of that transcendence. And this would be here’s a sort of a concrete example of that. You know, in modern scientific, scientific. I don’t like that term for a variety of reasons I don’t want to get into now. But in the in the kind of conventional scientific view, you think of cause causation in terms of the imposition of force. Yes. You know, it’s one thing imposes a force that brings about some effect, a cause and effect. And so it’s it’s it’s essentially dynamic rather than saying, OK, no, instead of imposition of force, we need something more generous. Like, you know, bringing into being. I would I would say let’s do both on the one hand, yes, recognize the priority of vertical causality, which is this generous letting be opening up, allowing to emerge, giving rise to there’s all sorts of language. But then see that that’s also operating even when when one cue ball hits another cue, you know, one billiard ball hits another. It’s not simply force imposing. You know, it’s also there’s a kind of communication. Well, let me try. Let me try. Work. I make you so in my work, I make you so at least you’re a rare. Let’s do the two billiard balls. OK, why did the second billiard ball move? Well, the first one hit it. Well, why else did it move? Well, it moved because there were like the ground. The ground was flat that actually towards the balls rolling. Both balls have a particular shape that allows them to move. There’s only air that has insignificant, insufficient resistance to prevent them. Right. And so she talks about not causes between events, but constraints between conditions. And conditions are exactly the things that give. But the thing is they give like it’s it’s it’s the thing about there’s selective and enabling constraints. There’s constraints that give more possibilities, make things possible. And then there are constraints that limit those possibilities so you don’t get chaos. Right. To make them meaningful. Right. Make them meaningful, make them intelligible, make them make them predictable, make them be something that is communicable. And so one of the ways I try to think about what we’ve been talking about is to try to get people to step back and take their focus off a relationship between events and take a look at a relationship between conditions. And then when you talk about conditions, you go down, you can go down to quantum level probability, you can go up to relativistic like what are laws? Laws are statements of, you know, universal constraints on how things can happen. That’s how I would try and introduce the vertical dimension and show how it deeply woven with the horizontal dimension. That’s that’s exactly that’s exactly it. And think about there, you’re you’re you’re entering into the depth. See, you know, if causation is nothing but transmission of force, then there’s nothing to enter into with the mind. It’s all opaque. And all you can do is calculate and measure. Yes. You know, but once you once you introduce this other dimension, you realize it’s a much meaningful thing. You know, one thing to add to is that motion itself is a form. Yes, exactly. That’s being being communicated so that there’s a so that the the the the the being moved is acquire a kind of participation in a form as well. So all yeah, all those things. And now now the mind it’s not like you’re you know, people worry that you’re mystifying. And you know, when you add these dimensions, but that’s not necessarily you know, and you’re not excluding the measurable dimension, you know, so so so those things have their place. It’s just that they become part of a much more concrete and and layered textured event and reality. So two things about that. There’s now a considerable movement, and maybe it will achieve consensus within physics. And of course, I’m not a physicist. So but as far as I can understand it, to argue that space and time are not fundamental, that they are in fact also emergent phenomena. So the very things that were the sort of basis for a lot of nominalist thought are now being folded into something which they so that is just that like what like like that that is a statement of the priority of vertical causation over horizontal causation, if anybody was going to make it right, space and time are emergent. Well, that means that causing things to move can’t be the ultimate, right? It can be the ultimate form of cause. There’s the other thing that you’re relying on at the heart of your physics. And then another related point is you mentioned measurement and part of Wolfgang’s argument is the measurement problem, which is the measuring device has to be at a different ontological level than the thing it measures, because it has to have a kind of part, it has to have a kind of constancy and permanence to it that the flux below doesn’t have you can’t measure quantum things at the quantum level, we need something that has a reality. This is his solution, which I think is the only viable solution to the measurement problem. So science is not only pointing right to this vertical cause, it’s presupposing it in every act of measurement. Yeah, I mean, there are several things to comment on there. I mean, just one very brief thing that I mean, and each one of these could open up into it. But just very briefly, I mean, one of the things that I appreciate that I’ve changed my thinking from Wolfgang Smith is his notion of what he makes a distinction between the physical and the corporeal. And yes, I don’t I don’t especially like that terminology for a but but but the very point that there’s there’s something normative about the human senses, and human perception in the meaning of things. I think that’s an absolutely fundamentally important point that needs to be recovered. Well, I’ve been making an argument along those lines convergent with his I’ve been making it before I met him. And then we talked and and then I’ve been trying to develop it. But the argument is basically the argument is, you know, any physics that is trying to claim that only the bottom level is real is requiring on scientists at a much higher level, right, reading instruments and making measurements and talking to each other and making claims that could be true. And like if that is all epiphenomenal and illusory, then it gives us no license for drawing conclusions about the bottom level. But there’s a there’s a sense in which reductionism actually really undermined itself when it tries to get its epistemology, it’s an ontology together. Yeah, no, and that’s I mean, in the end, that really is an incontrovertible argument. I mean, that that that that absolutely once you see it, you can’t you can’t deny it. It’s one of those. And, and, you know, before we start recording, I mentioned that I’d like to pursue at some point with you a conversation about the nature of perception and it being but let’s put that on the docket for a future. I would really love to hear from you about that. But the other thing that I wanted to comment on in terms of causality and vertical and horizontal, I find incredibly illuminating the contribution of Dionysius, whom you mentioned that foreground in this essay, one of the things that amazed me was how and, you know, in a way, this is a very other neo Platonist, but I find it so beautifully expressed by him and so succinctly and powerfully, the idea that the language of cause out, you know, this is why I sort of took him up in relation to Heidegger. The relation of causality is everywhere in Dionysius. I started circling it, you know, I pulled out the Greek and just found it every single page. He uses the language. I read that book, like I’ve read the book through multiple times and I do regular Alexio Divina on that book. So I really, I’m really trying to. Yes, you and I really are on the same page. I think that it’s one of the most extraordinary productions of the human spirit, I think, in history. But anyway, you know, what it’s, he uses the language of causality, but there’s none of it. It’s not, it’s not, it’s not, it’s not, it’s not of causality, but there’s none of it. It’s not in the least bit sort of technocratic. I mean, you know, talk about avoiding the ontotheology problem and, you know, this profound sense of thinking as thanking and reason and reverence and so forth. I mean, that’s just pervasive, but he doesn’t see that as up, as intention with the language of causality. I mean, to the contrary, for him, all causes ultimately come down to goodness and beauty. And so every single cause insofar as it’s causal at all is causal as an expression of goodness and beauty. And that means that, you know, that means that everything that happens in the cosmos is an expression of love. That’s what that means. Ultimately, you know, from the rock rolling down the hill to, you know, any sort of natural event. Let’s throw in on that because I don’t want people to just think that’s, you know, poetry on a hallmark card. There’s an argument being made there. Absolutely. So let’s, let’s, let’s slow it down. If you don’t mind, let’s open it up step by step. So the first is, you know, and you make this point and I think it’s bang on and it’s like, oh, right. Right. That, you know, Dionysus, and he, contrary to Heidegger, he seems to be well aware of the Heideggerian, sorry, of the Aristotelian causes. Right. Because he invokes. Unquestionably. Yeah. No, I mean, it’s right there. Unquestionably. Yeah. Okay. So, but then you make a really cool move, which is, but Dionysus, he’s, he’s almost like he’s looking through the four Aristotelian causes to their original, right? That they, like, if you were to say, so for everybody’s watching, Aristotle’s causes are not our notion of cause because our notion of cause is the, the, to, to transfer force and to make something move. And that’s it. So this is kind of a little bit of undergraduate thing, but it’s, it’s helpful to not think of the four causes, but rather thinking of them as the four B causes, right? Right. Like the things you would invoke to explain something and make it intelligible and understandable. But you also have to be pre-caught. You have to mean, you have to think that that means you’re discovering something about the nature of something too, when you’re explaining it. So all of that. So the cause there, of course, there’s the one that we have, we thought was a Aristotelian cause, which is the efficient, which is the moving things. But as we’ve already been talking, that’s probably a misreading because the, there’s a more original meaning that is more like bringing forth, which isn’t just making locomotion, trying to think of another name for, for that other cause. Then there’s material cause, which doesn’t mean the same thing as it does for us, because we think of matter as stuff, but in the ancient world, matter is potentiality. And it’s sort of, what’s, what was the potential that received the form? And that’s part of how you explain it. And so potentiality, real possibility, as you Raro talks about, because constraints don’t shape events, they shape possibility. I do this with my students, I’ll say, what do you believe in scientific laws? Where is it? Where’s it happening? Tuesdays, right? Where does it happen near Pluto? Like, oh, right. Okay. And so you’ve got the material cause and then you’ve got the formal cause, which is this structural functional organization that binds all the different aspects of a thing together so that no matter what we do, it can’t become unintelligible to us. It’s that through line that so no matter wherever we stop, we can find how all these aspects are sort of gluing together. It’s often, it’s often pointed to with metaphors of shape, but it’s not merely shape, right? The sort of structural functional organization that binds all the different so you actually never see the whole of anything in perception, yet you have a sense of its form. Right. And that’s the formal cause. And then there’s the final cause, which is the one that I find most problematic, which is the idea that the reason for for which something is done, its purpose or its goal. So for where I find that problematic is I think that works wonderful for living things. I find that problematic for non-living things. And then I’ll just talk, I’ll just shut up in a sec. And then the idea is when Dionysus is invoking cause, he doesn’t want to talk at that level, right? He wants to, he’s pointing, like you said that in a couple different places, like, oh, wow, this is important. David’s repeating this, right? He’s pointing to, he’s pointing to the er, the er cause, if I can put it that way. So the sense that, so just everybody who’s watching the phenomenal, just go to your phenomenological sense right now, the sense of all of those somehow belonging together and right, and they belong together and they make sense of each other in an interdependent fashion. And realness is your sense of intelligibility in a very, very profound way, right? And so that’s what Dionysus is trying to point out, right? What is it that is, that is holding them all together? The good and the beautiful is his answer. So first of all, I just wanted to give that little bit of a tutorial for people who are here, just as, right? And then one more thing, if you put that into something, you also make it really clear is you’re saying, okay, well this, this, this, this, I don’t know, this, who’s this, this springing forth from this er causation, right? It’s like a giving, but it’s also simultaneously a receiving. Okay, now explain that and then we’ve got the next move to why love, because if we got, okay, we’ve got the, I hope this is working for a free, right? You’ve got the er causation and it’s springing forth, who’s this, the original meaning is springing forth. And this is like, this is an ultimate given, right? And, but that giving is simultaneously receiving. It’s not a giving and then a receiving. It’s right. So why that? What’s it? I know you make an argument. I want to hear you do it. What’s the argument for that? And then then we have, and this is why you’re saying love, because love is where we experience the interpenetration of intelligibility and realness and the springing forth that is simultaneously a giving and a receiving. That’s the move. Is that? Yeah, there’s a, there is a lot there. I hope I can do this in a way without drifting into abstraction. I’m hoping I can stay concrete with this, but the, the, the first, the, the first thing to say is, is it all turns on the affirmation of goodness as the, the nature of the first cause, the first principle, but, or cause. And one could give an argument for that, but I don’t want to try to throw too many arguments out at once, but, but recognizing that the original cause that, that from which all things proceed is good and generous generosity. It means that every effect, one of the implications of that point is that every effect is a, is a reception of goodness. It’s a response to goodness. It’s somehow a result of, of, of, of goodness and, and, and a response to it. And in the classical tradition, that’s the very definition of love. Yes. Yes. Is precisely the reception of goodness. So, here you have a cause as, as good and the effects are the receptivity to goodness, which is to say that the effects are love, are eros, the things that are, they are in so far as they desire the good, you might say. And, and now this, this, this, again, this sounds like a Hallmark card or, or, or a very sophisticated Hallmark card, maybe. But, but I mean, this is, this is the classical neoplatonic tradition. This has been worked out in detail, that the very nature of things, because they’re caused by the good is, is love, is, is, is eros. Now, what, what Dionysius does is he, he deepens that and he recognizes if, if it’s the case that the being of things is their reception of their cause, which is the reception of goodness, which is their love that they are, if that is, if, if that’s what they are, then what, what they are, what they, what they receive in receiving themselves is nothing other than the good. So, in, in, in receiving the good, as he says, they become good-like. Yes, yes, yes. Okay, so then, so now you have a whole chain of things. You have goodness as cause, you have eros as effect, but eros precisely is reception of goodness, and reception of goodness is now image of the good, being like the good. Now, what is, what is the nature of the good? To give. To give, yeah. And so now, so in so far as things receive themselves, they are, you might say, I mean, to put this in a somewhat simpler way, they’re receiving the very capacity and inclination to give themselves. Yes, yes, yes. And, and that, that, that means that, that reception and generosity are flip sides of the same coin at this deep, deep, deep level. Yes. Now, that means that the good that is pure generosity, if generosity and, and reception and receiving are flip sides of the same coin, that allows us to, to think of God as pure generosity, as also in a certain sense, pure reception, receptivity. So now what does that mean? That means, as Dionysius points out, this is, this is, I mean, this sounds very abstract, but once you, once, once you start to put the pieces together, you realize it just, it has to be, this really is the only way to really make sense of, of reality. That means when God causes the world, it’s not, it’s not in the form of an imposition of force. Yes. Not, it’s not a simple, sort of transitive action acting on. No. And that’s what Heidegger was most concerned about in Christianity was precisely. But to be fair to him, a lot of people have that sort of artisan image or understanding of God. Yeah, almost everybody. I mean, that’s, yeah, yeah. I mean, no, no, he’s not, he’s not, he’s not making this up. I mean, this is, this is omnipresent, but it’s not present in scripture. I mean, how, how does God cause, how does God cause grass on the, on the earth, vegetation on the earth? He doesn’t like magically put it on the earth. He calls it forth. God causes the vegetation by allowing the earth to produce it. You know, so, so you see in a way you could say that God’s causing the vegetation is His reception of the vegetation from the earth and that those, that’s how, that’s how God, and that’s the only way to think of causality as generous. So this reminds me, this point reminds me a lot of Regina. And your argument about the complete interpenetrivity, interpenetrivity of, right, of, from below and from. Yeah, yeah, and then the receptivity and the giving, right. And every, even the most, every moment of generation and generativity and generosity, and those are all related terms, right, has to have a corresponding moment. And I’m not using this in the time sense. I’m using it, closest is in phenomenology, has to have a moment of receptivity. And so in a Regina, you have this complete interpenetration of the emanation and the emergence. Like it’s not, it’s the polarity, it’s never the poles, right, it’s all the way through. That’s right, that’s right, that’s right. Yeah, yeah, and you’re right. I mean, just, I mean, then you realize, I mean, you know, to be is to receive is to give is to be again. And life is a deepening of these relationships of love. And what you want to say is then that every causal event in the cosmos, insofar as it’s productive at all. And if it weren’t productive, we wouldn’t use the language of causality. Insofar as it’s productive at all, it’s an expression of the original causal generosity at the root of things. Yeah, yeah. And that’s why you can then interpret, you know, Aristotle’s four, this is, you know, Dionysius and the Neoplatonic, I mean, Plotinus does this already in, I mean, but, you know, they really do bring together Plato and Aristotle, and you realize that each of the four causes can be interpreted as an expression of the or cause, which is the good. Yes. And these two figures come together then. You see, because I also, and I think this is an argument to be made here, but I’ll just express it intuitively. I also think of the good as the or cause, like this through line, right? Not the through line, but the continual keeping of the promise of the through line is the good of intelligibility. That intelligibility presupposes that the next aspect won’t fall off into carcophony or chaos, right? That no matter how we unpack reality, right, intelligibility just unpacks with it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And then that means that part of thinking is trusting in this way and being open to the discovery. I mean, and that’s the thing, you know, and here we get to wonder. Yes. But this is why you already need to know in some respect in order to be properly surprised by what’s new. Yes. Yes. And so there’s a kind of, you know, Heraclitus had said this, you know, at the origin of philosophy that unless you expect the unexpected, you won’t be surprised by it. You won’t notice it. And that has a lot to do with beauty. Beauty is something that is in some way unexpected, but nevertheless immediately disposes its intelligibility. It’s sort of surprising. Like, sorry, he talks about this in her book on beauty. You see the beautiful tree. I didn’t realize trees could be like that, but it doesn’t mean that it shatters all your understanding. It somehow weaves back and then reconstitutes your understanding of trees. Right. It’s this. It’s this. It’s this. Who’s the author? Who’s the author? Oh, Ellen Starry. She has a book. Here it is. Wow. That’s convenient, eh? Here it is. It’s called On Beauty and Being Just. Ellen Starry. Wow. Yeah. Okay. Again, one of these little thin books that’s a gem. And that idea, you know, that beauty isn’t horrifying, incommensurable in something that is just unintelligible. It unfolds and yet it gathers everything that has led up to that moment, but not in an inferential way. It’s this weird insight we capitulate. You know, and this is why Plato was so invested with this metaphor of anamnesis. It’s somehow like, well, it’s like we’re simultaneously discovering and remembering at the same time. Right. Yeah. And I mean, it’s hard to, in one respect, it’s hard to figure out what that could possibly mean. It seems like a paradox and the contradiction even. But in another respect, we have experiences of it all the time. Yes. I mean, and intuitively you can kind of, you sort of see that it makes perfect sense. People say, I mean, so when we do the, for example, when we do the circling into the Deologos workshops, people say this reliably. I discovered a kind of intimacy I didn’t know existed that I’ve always been looking for. And they don’t realize the paradox of what they’re saying. Yeah. Right. Right. Right. Yeah. And that’s, and it is, I mean, and the fact of the matter is if you, if you neglect either side of that, that it really is a discovery. So there really is an encounter with something new. Yes. But it’s not new in a kind of banal empirical sense. It actually is, is a novelty that you recognize was always present. It was already there. And both sides of that, however much intention they are, that they need to be preserved for the whole experience. I think, I think that means that wonder is deeply bound up with insight because that’s, that’s the machinery of insight, right? Insight is always inventio. You see the aspect that discloses something that was always there, but it’s absolutely novel to you because you get the flash of insight. So let’s hold onto that. That’s wonder. But before we get into wonder, like I want to just, because it was a passage when I was reading Dynesis that I just stopped when I was doing Lexio on it too. It just reverberated and I made notes and I was thinking about how could, how could we turn this into a practice? But he talks about, and then you did a translation of it in your book, which is like a much more literal and therefore, thankfully, a much better translation. But it’s this idea, and this is where I want to get back to the, that weaving of the horizontal and vertical. It’s about, right? It’s about, about once you have this model, because he talks about, Dynesis talks about, you know, the love we have that draws us upward, right? The love for which transcends us. And then the horizontal love of that which accompanies us, right? And then the downward love, right? That which, and what’s interesting, and I think you make a very good point, and I think this is one of the great gifts of Christian neoplatism, is it takes the emphasis off just the ascent as being the only thing that is the arc of realization in both senses of the word. But no, it’s actually this, this, this, that’s actually love, and all of those dimensions matter. I just wanted to, again, because we were talking about weaving the vertical and the horizontal together. Yeah, yeah, no, and that’s, and it does all that without attenuating the, the ascent of Eros. I mean, so, yes, you have these, but, but it’s, I mean, it’s this, you know, and the question arises, that’s very clear and explicit in, in Dionysius. And so you wonder, well, is this the Christian difference that, that has the incarnational entry into the, the, the world and into the flesh and into the finite and so forth. But you realize once you, once you, once you see it in Dionysius, you go back and you see, well, wait a minute, this is already, in a way, in Plato, and it’s already Platinus. I mean, in a way, it’s a novelty, but it’s a novelty that, that brings out something that was already present, you know, just to recapitulate that theme. It’s, it’s, that, that dimension is pretty striking. That is generous, and I think fair of you to say, there’s a temptation amongst Christians to always make Christian Neoplatonism a sort of, you know, a one-up or something like that over the tradition. And I agree with you. I, I tend to think that, but I’m influenced by you, so I’m biased. I mean, it is critique of impure reason. I think Plato was very careful to try and counterbalance the up and down. Yeah. Yeah. So time. Yeah, and again, it’s one of those things, it’s, on the surface, it doesn’t seem like he is, but, but, but then you get these weird notes that don’t make sense, but once you actually accept that as the, the interpretive key, then, then suddenly all these otherwise odd notes just fall right into place. Yeah. I mean, I think, I think Plato, I mean, I think Platinus has it, but I think he is skewed because of his understanding of the bottom as evil, apparently evil. Yeah. Yeah. Very problematic. That complicates things. Yeah, it complicates things. So, but I’m wondering, I’m, I, now, can we bring it, can we bring it into the phenomenology and this will start to layer, layer it with, with wondering. So there’s a, I mean, there’s a, there’s a, there’s a transcendence up. That’s very, like, that’s even what the word going up over the mountain kind of thing. Right. Right. But Ursul Goodenough has talked about a transcendence into, which to me, very much like this. Yeah. And other people, they don’t use the word transcendence, but they’re trying to do something that has almost an axiological, as much axiological input. They talk about grounding, grounded things. And so I’m trying to, I’m trying to get people to see, but wait, we’re not just talking abstract. You have these movements, you have these movements of spirit, right? You know, you know what this feels like, but I think Ursul Goodenough, like when you really sink, transcend into something, yeah, there’s that. And then, and then there’s that other sense of, no, there’s, you want to almost say a transcendence downward, right? But that sounds weird. But I’m trying to say, I’m trying to get, I’m trying to get people to remember in the deep sense of Sati, remember that, no, no, you know what we’re talking about. You know what these, what these feel like. Yeah. No, I mean, that’s, that’s, one could get very concrete, you know, there’s, there’s a kind of an ecstatic sense of being lifted out of yourself. But I mean, it’s also the case in doing a task, you know, I remember having a conversation because I was sort of really kind of tortured by some of these questions when I was in graduate school and I spoke to my mentor, Eric Pearl, who’s very much my mentor in graduate school. He’s extraordinary. The Ophanie is one of the best books. When people say recommend an introduction to neo-Platonism, I say, eat a close The Ophanie. That’s exactly, I do the same. But I have to say, hearing it in class is, reading it is not the same thing. There’s a really nice, anyway, I asked him once about that, you know, and, and, you know, he basically, he made some comment about, he’s never so the most, the most philosophical act that he experiences, you know, changing his baby’s diaper. You know, and I mean, you think about there, talk about, you know, I mean, in a way, it seems like the opposite, and, you know, he was being provocative and saying it, but what he meant was, you know, there’s a sense in which you really are brought out of yourself in a profoundly concrete way that anchors and renders concrete the ecstatic transcendence that can, you know, without such a grounding can actually become a kind of self-deluded, I’m transcending myself, but what I’m really doing is looking at my belly button, you know, and being happy inside myself, kind of oblivious to the world. And that’s, of course, an illusion. Yeah. Yeah, spiritual bypassing. Yeah, I mean, so for me, you know, Daoism is about this transcending into feel to it, in the form, and I feel like I’m reciprocally opening with the world, and we’re in partnership together. It has this, and if anybody says, well, that’s not as profound as this, I would just say, no, I don’t think so. I’ve also had, you know, this kind of mystical experience, but I’ve also had this kind of, Daoism is very good, profoundly good at, so, you know, like, sink to the depths in a profound way. Can I just connect all this also with the experience of beauty? I find you really do get all of these dimensions in the experience of beauty. Well, you know, I was marveling at that the other day, that, you know, when you experience something beautiful, does it bring you out of yourself into the thing, or does it send you into your own depths? And I realized the answer is yes. Yes, yes. I get that. I get this. I get this deep reciprocal opening, but I also get, I get a, I don’t know, it’s like, well, it’s a wonders, how did this emerge? How could this have come? And then I also get often an ecstatic thing is, well, what is, like, in you, like, in the right, and I’m really trying to get on it, play on this, what does this signify? What is this, what is this a living image of? What, like, what is this plug into beyond itself? Yeah. You know, like, like, like in the symposium, right? Yeah, yeah, right, right, right. Yeah, well, that’s a tough question. I don’t know, I get all of them, typically, in, in, like, in a very, like, in, when I can count a profound beauty. What’s really interesting is, when that beauty is in a person, because all of those dimensions, because, and phenomenologically, you can pick it up, and I don’t mean anything graphic or distorting about it, but, you know, if it’s a, for example, I find my partner beautiful, of course, like, this reaches down into my embodiment in a profound, and, but, right, then there’s also, there’s a disclosure of her mystery, which is horizontal, but then there’s an also, she is one of my profoundest icons, I don’t want to say, not as icon of what I mean when I’m trying to talk about beauty per se. Yeah, no, and you know, that, I mean, that’s the thing, you know, the difference between responding to beauty of a person in a purely bodily way, I mean, we know what that is like. And then the, a real, you know, that’s, that’s, as one of my students, undergraduate students, explained that that’s the difference between saying that someone is beautiful, and saying that that person is hot. Yeah, but, but what’s odd is that you wouldn’t say then, thinking, experiencing the person is beautiful, in a way, neglects the body. No, quite the contrary, I mean, that’s the thing that’s extraordinary is actually, it’s simultaneously much more, you know, you’d say, well, is it a spiritual experience? Or is it a bodily experience? And you just can’t, you can’t distinguish them, they become so deeply interesting. I would say it’s simultaneously a spiritual experience, and an embodied experience. And I’m trying to hear this in a Hegelian manner. It’s also a social experience of reciprocal recognition, that is a profoundly important thing to a grounding of rationality of normativity, like all of that is in play. Once Yeah, right. And that’s why that’s why I think it’s important to see beauty as, you know, I think it’s the most comprehensive of all these dimensions. And that the experience of beauty, therefore, sort of opens up the context in within which then you have your distinct acts of intellect, it will. I just realized, I don’t have my power up our and we’re going to lose. I’m just gonna pause for one sec. So sorry for that little glitch. We’re back. And I think this is a very good opportunity for me. I mean, the problem is, I’ve been talking to David, I’ve been talking to you about your essay. And so that’s been sort of back and forth trying to, but and I don’t, I definitely don’t want to suddenly start a can in the headlights or anything like that. But I would like to open things up. I mean, a general question like, is what might this kind of I think this is we’re getting into genuine deal logos, I feel like the conversations taking on a life of its own insights are sparking back and forth. But what would this kind of the logos mean to a seeker, as you describe yourself? Um, I, it’s so difficult to put into words, the kind of thing that I experienced over the last hour listening to this, right? Because it felt as if I was moving through this space, you know, as you were both speaking these kinds of, you know, I don’t like to use the word machine, but it’s like this, these, these, like living things, right, would come together and play in a way that I’ve had many times before, but like the continual emphasis on the grounding into embodiment was really, I felt I felt it really profoundly because as I was listening, I was trying to do that. I was trying to do all of it as it was happening. And, and that I think the key moment for me where that I felt like, oh, okay, here’s where I can really hold on to it was this trusting to the through line of intelligibility, right, trust and trusting that it will continue to lay itself out to me, even though it’s almost like it was happening. It’s happening so, so fast and I don’t have the context to hold it all. Right. So it’s like, I see the things come up and then I see them go by and I have to let them go, but to trust that it’s going to keep, it’s going to keep going in a way that is, that is, um, that is not some kind of flight. That is not some kind of flight. That’s one of the helpful things about the organic metaphor is that, you know, a mechanical thing, it’s either there or gone, you know, um, uh, but, but when you, when you begin to think of thinking in terms of a richer sense of causality and relationship and involve trust and love and these kinds of things in organic metaphors, you realize, um, uh, you can come to a certain insight that you yourself are not fully capable of articulating, but it’s there and it stays with you and it takes, and over time begins to unfold. I have that experience very frequently, um, uh, that, that, uh, thoughts that have been there in this kind of, in the back of my mind will, will just suddenly unfold a new dimension, um, uh, of, of their own, you know, sort of on their own, from their own resources in a way. It’s, it’s, uh, it’s, it’s, it gives, I think even that just gives you a special insight into the nature of the human spirit. Um, I think that’s well said. And for me, I’ve been arguing that that, that, that spirit we find in the guts of our insight and intuition and, and inference, right, is, uh, it, it, it, I think it shares the same grammar with reality. Yeah. I mean, I, and that sounds like a hallmark card too, but I have lots of talks out there where I have confidence and very careful scientific and philosophical argument. Can I wanted to also get your feedback because what you just said was tremendously helpful. Um, uh, first of all, I heard what you’re saying and you’re able to something, but also constantly bringing this into the phenomenology and getting ways in which you can imagineally enact it seem to be helpful in a way. So that you’re nodding vigorously. So that’s good to know. And then I wanted to know, so like, there’s one sense in which this whole thing has been, um, a proper appreciation and reply to Heidegger’s critique of auto theology about God is the greatest thing. Did you find that? Cause I, cause I’m not just asking to drop, to draw something, because when you were doing that, you were moving around quite a bit. And I was at times quite, what was happening for you when we were talking about that? I think that kind of ontic view of God as the greatest thing is something that I’ve struggled with a lot. Um, because like, as, as you both referred to it’s, it’s so pervasive. Um, and, and it was, um, fundamental to me for a long time. And then there’s, there’s been different points at which I’m more or less feel as I’m floating as I try to let that go. But I find that, I’m more torn apart if I tried to hold onto it. And so, um, over the, you know, over the past, while that kind of, that has been distanced for me a little bit conceptually, but trying to find how to bring it down and not have the, the attempt to engage with the ground of being as just kind of being this, right? Right. Trying to bring it down into all of, into the horizontal is, um, it’s harder. It’s harder. Yeah. And, and so I think making those really kind of explicit ties, I mean, a lot of it, I just listened to your talk on leveling up, um, from, uh, Greg and Rick has conference. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And that was really helpful for me in the background to kind of get this sense of how, like we’re talking about to kind of superimpose, you know, this grammar of intelligibility, um, correspondence between the mind and reality. I, I think there was just a lot of that happening for me in a way that, and well, it was so perfect that you, the, uh, Eric Pearl’s, um, quip of the most philosophical thing he does is change his baby’s diaper, you know, cause, cause, cause for me, I’m in this place where I have, you know, I have my first child and I’m playing with her and I, and I’m, I’m like, well, specifically, I want to go and read your book, freedom from reality, right? I want to go and read that book. And, but here I am playing with my daughter and, and you know, I’m like, freedom from reality, right? I want to go and read that book. And, but here I am playing with my daughter and, and it’s this continual, right? Like there’s a time and there’s a place. Yeah. Yeah. And so, and so, yeah, I, I don’t know if that, if that does justice, but it’s good. It’s very good. I like, I, I, you were very generous when you said like, you want me here. And I said, yes, I really do want to hear. And it may have seemed like I didn’t mean that really, that conversation was just rolling in, but, and, and, and I don’t want you to be, I don’t want you to be the audience. I’m hoping you’ll be more like the Greek chorus. Much more. And that, cause I want to know how and why this will land with people that are like you intelligent, good faith seekers. You’re climbing Mount Sophia, as you put it. And I want to make sure, and I, and I sent from David that he does too, that what we’re doing when we do this stuff, that’s conceptual philosophical, I don’t know what word to put on it. It doesn’t sound that candid, but anyways, when we’re doing that is I don’t want it to lose and Plato didn’t want it to lose. And Dionysus doesn’t want it to lose touch with the transformation of individual and collective life. I think that for me that you like, so I hope you feel that my questions are welcoming you into this conversation in a valuable way. Cause that’s how I’m, that’s how I’m appreciating it. Yeah. No, I’d like to echo that. And, and, and also, you know, that the, that, that the speculations are meant to, to, I mean, in a way that, you know, that there it’s precisely the point of it is to enter more deeply into reality, not to, not to find some sort of escape. But, you know, the other, the other thing is that, that, that for me is very important is to recognize that, that, you know, these criticisms of onto theology and, and, and respect for what, what Heidegger does, that doesn’t imply that an abandonment of, of faith, you know, I think for, for a lot of people that seeking means in order to be a real seeker, it means you have to let God go. And, you know, that, that actually might be a moment at some point, but, but it’s not the case that adhering to God means you can’t be a seeker. Or, or, or vice versa, that, that in fact, I mean, to the contrary, and that’s, that’s, you know, Augustine had some line about that, that, you know, the, the, the, the more we understand about God, the more we realize how much, you know, it’s, it’s the standard thing that you realize there’s, there’s infinitely more, you’re, you’re increasingly aware of how far you are away from it and how, how infinite the, the depths of what there is still to understand, it never comes to an end. Yeah, I found that to be so true. And, but it’s the trusting to that through line, I think that is, that is what’s allowed that to be true for me is that, like, I think one of the turning points for me was realizing that all truth is God’s truth. But to go back to what you were saying, John, and first of all, thank you very much. That’s, that’s, that’s kind of you. And, you know, I, I think there’s something about the posture that you’re both doing this with, that there’s never a question as to whether or not you’re wanting to go more deeply into reality. Like I’ve never, I’ve never questioned as a, as in both of your work, I’ve never questioned whether or not this is actually going to make me better at my, at my day-to-day job of, of, of, of, of, of, of, caring for patients or at my, you know, at the, at the moment of caring for my child, right? It’s, it’s the desire to go read the book. It’s actually the book itself that turns me back to not go read the book. And, and so I think that is so deeply affirming because I think for so long, part of what makes me who I am is who my parents were. And my parents had a tremendous commitment to follow what they thought was the good. And, but, but they didn’t have resource that took them to a place that was actually helpful. And so I think, I think so many of us have been yearning for and looking for something that we can sink our teeth into that will actually, you know, take us into the depths of reality, but in a way that, you know, we can actually still live our lives. We can still have jobs that are, that are just kind of doing normal things and raise families, but still have something meaningful. That’s not just kind of hand wavy. That’s really fundamentally important to me. Yeah. No, thank you for that, Ken. That, that really was inspiring for me. Yeah, I, because of my natural social phobia, I am very easily tempted to become a clinic. And, and then I’ve been portrayed with kind of spiritual bypass and that’s also, I think, ultimately vicious. So one of the reasons why I’ve been trying to reach out and make connections both ways to similar minded thinkers like David and to similarly seeking people like you, Ken, is precisely because I think making that connection is what, in fact, part of what I’m going to argue is it’s even more urgent now than it was even five weeks ago and now in a place. I think these machines, and I won’t talk about that right now, but I’m going to do that in the essay, the video essay, but I think this is maybe one of the greatest pyros that humanity is going to face. That is my study conclusion about this. I think both the people who are making the prophecies of doom and the people who are promising unending utopia are off in the form of these, as they usually are. But I don’t think this is, I think this is very, very significant. This is going to represent a challenge to us in a really profound way. And so I think one of the best things we can offer is a way of bringing the profundity of, and Socrates would have wanted this, of bringing the profundity of Platonic tradition into the rigor. We have to. The urgency for that is extreme now. That’s what I think. Well, I’m actually going to need to go here. But that was such a great final statement there. And again, inspiring. I just, I think this is an important work and I think it’s a great way to bring the depth of the work that we’re doing. I just, I think this is an important work and the world’s, yeah, well, I don’t want to, we’re grateful for what you’re doing, John. Well, I’m grateful for your work and I’m grateful for our friendship, all of you, linking this and making this happen and affording it, being in the right context. So I’m just going to end by saying thank you both very much. And of course, we’re all going to talk again. That is what I’m saying. Very good. Very good. Thank you.