https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=KgBkhJ3804I
a bigger transition as to how things are done. It’s very odd. Yeah, so it’s very, yeah, it’s hard to, it’s hard to, it’s hard to feel really that involved. It’s hard to feel, you know, invested. Do you feel the people kind of, do you feel like it’s hard to kind of keep, keep traction when you’re teaching? I have, like, I have a lot of students and I haven’t been able to connect with very many of them very directly. It’s mostly marketing and administration and assignments and then quick Zoom chats. And so, yeah, it all feels very, very odd. Hey, John. Hey, guys. How are you? Oh, there you are, John. Hey. My ear is quite bad today, but I want to keep trying to do this. Chris can tell you, Andrew, the weather here has been particularly bad. It’s still pretty much winter here still. Yeah, my mother lives in Ottawa and she told me that there was snow in the morning there. Yeah, yeah. It’s ridiculous, yeah. My ear is like, so I might at some point just sort of have to stabilize, but let’s do this anyways. I got to just keep doing what I can unless it’s completely debilitating. Oh, I hope you don’t burn yourself out, John. Okay, I took most of yesterday off. I just did one interview thing towards the end of the day. I had an attack while the interview was going on and I was trying to explain to them what was going on and they thought I was saying that the video feed was. Oh, speak to me. And then by the time they sort of checked thing, because it only lasted about 15 seconds, and so we just went on. So they were unfazed by it totally. But I’m gonna try and now forewarn any and everybody who’s involved in these public presentations that that might happen. And I’ll just need like a moment to just sort of stabilize and keep going. Eventually spring will get here and hopefully things will stabilize. Well, maybe we could just get started. And I was listening to your chat with Tyler Hallett the other day. Oh, yeah. Discord and I thought he was a very bright fellow and had a lot of interesting things to say. And it made me think, and something that I’ve been thinking about for a while that I thought might be a topic that you guys could speak on quite well since you know, Plato and Aristotle and the Greeks so well. And that is the idea of a soul. What is a soul? And how do we have a soul in this machine? And I’ve heard you talk and kind of redefine the notion of soul, John. And does that seem like a topic that might be of interest? Yeah, I am very interested in discussing that. I’m interested in discussing that in connection with Gnosis and dialectic very much, very much. So maybe I could start. I’ve been talking with Chris about this and trying to, I guess, it’s not right, cover, maybe it’s a combination. There’s a word I wanna use and it doesn’t exist in English. Kerry makes use of it in his book, Augustine’s Invention of the Inner Self, which of course is deeply relevant to what we’re gonna talk about. Now the thing about that is Kerry takes great pains to say that this is English. He wanted to use the Latin term inventio. Inventio. Yeah, and the publishers wouldn’t let him because, well, they’re publishers. And the reason he wanted to use the word inventio is that it hangs between our two words, invention and discovery. So this is where, for example, you could get around a lot of thorny problems in math by saying math is neither invented nor discovered, but it is inventio. So I’m very interested then, if you’ll allow me, reinventio. I want to reinventio the soul, if that makes any sense. And I wanna try and do something sort of the opposite of Descartes. So for really important historical reasons, especially to try and form an alliance between the Catholic Church and the Neo-Platonic magicians from the Renaissance, Descartes pretty much completely identified the soul with the self, and then he completely identified the self with the center of subjectivity, the place where the mind touches itself in consciousness. You know you’re conscious by being conscious. It’s pure participation. And as always with Descartes, when you’re deconstructing Descartes, you have to be really, really respectful. There’s really important insights there that should not be abandoned, but that confusion of soul to self to subjective center is something I would like to try and pull apart, well, nevertheless, keeping the connections. And so… So also the soul is connected in some way with this notion of the divine double, yes. Or the sacred second self, I think, as you’ve renamed that term. Yeah, that’s very much the case. I think there’s something in here that the term that the term soul is aspirational. But I would also like, like Moore does, Christopher Moore does with Socratic self-knowledge and reconfigures, reinventio perhaps, the self as something not possessed, but to which we have a perpetual aspirational relation that your true self is the virtuous self that you’re always aspiring to. Right, so the soul is not something we have. Something we do. It’s something we, it’s an activity and it’s something we aspire to become at the same time. So what I think it’s, what the soul, this is an idea I’m playing with, serious playing. I’ve been playing with Christopher. He’s one of my best person, one of the best people to play with, as you can imagine. This idea of… I just have this image of you guys in the playground with marbles or something. Yeah, yeah, great. A great playmate on a play date, yeah. Although I may have lost a few of my marbles. So… Yeah, and I’m trying to pick up on this notion that could resonate with neoplatonic ideas of the one within us, which I can perhaps get to. And then Buddhist ideas about the no self and the true self, especially in the work of Nishitani. And so what I’m sort of playing with is this idea that there’s two ways in which we participate in a kind of transcendence. One is to be coupled to, well, we’ll put it this way. The emergence of mind is wedded to the emergence of world. And I don’t mean the emergence of thought. I mean the way your mind has emerged developmentally. The emergence of mind and the emergence of the world is an increasingly complex and dynamic set of intelligible affordances for affinity and aspiration. So I’m gonna use the… What that does is that couples us to the inexhaustible, the moreness, not just quantitatively, but qualitatively. But there’s also that about us, which I wanna use a Buddhist term, which is our suchness. It is, if this direction is the direction of participation, the moreness, the movement into moreness, the suchness is the direction towards individuation. And the suchness is that about you that is resolutely non-categorical. It’s that which you love in a person in which you love their uniqueness. And I don’t like that term because it’s so bound up with narcissism. But when you pick up on the irreplaceable way in which that person is and continues to be, and you get a sense of, oh my gosh, right? That’s the suchness. Now the Buddhist claim that enlightenment is, you get suchness for everything. It’s a way of tailoring your cognition to the being mode in everything. And then what I’m playing with is this idea that the individuation, and this is right out of Tillich, and Chris will tell you that, this individuation participation dialectic between the moreness and the suchness, that activity is soul. Between the moreness and the suchness. Yeah. So you mean between some kind of, let’s say, excessive life and just the simple existence? The way in which the inexhaustible overflows the world and the way in which the inexhaustible in you overflows any categories in which I try to particularize you. But nevertheless, I’m pointing something individuated and instantiated in you that is not individuated and instantiated in anything else. So this is like trying to pick up on Indra’s net and other ideas. That you presence the moreness in your suchness and your suchness, that about you, which is not just, I want to use a distinction proclis, not just a passive possibility, but the pure potentiality, the power, potency and act of being able to assume a variety of identities, a variety of agent arena relationships, and also assume this in your own idiosyncratic historical development. Yeah, and I think we talked about that with Zach, that the soul is not a singular thing. No, no, no. It’s a multiplicity of potentials rather than. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so, yeah, the soul is that within you, well, sorry, one pole of the soul, sounds like Dr. Seuss, sorry, one pole of the soul is that which in you has this inexhaustible capacity to do relevance realization and refit itself in evolving fashion to the world. And then the participatory side, the resonant side, is the fact, and we experience it most in wonder and awe, that the world, right, the world discloses an inexhaustibleness that is always presencing through it. And the soul is when those, so what I’m trying to do, Chris probably sees this, by making use of Tillich’s individuation participation and talking about this affining relationship, this mutual, it’s not reflection, because the moreness comes into the suchness, and then the suchness, right, adds to the moreness of the world, right? It’s great when you can get this, the handle of this vocabulary, it’s very beautiful, yeah. And so, and then of course, this is deeply influenced with Whitehead, but I’ll say one more thing, and then I’ll let Chris talk about this. What I’m trying to do, and again, I mean this respectfully, is I’m trying to give, I guess, a non-theistic or secularized equivalent to what the soul’s main function was, which was to worship. The soul’s main function was to worship, and Descartes, of course, left that transformative affining to transcendence, right? He left that out when he collapsed the soul into the self, and then the self into the unchanging center of subjectivity. So I’m trying to reformulate, reinventio soul in a way that accepts and reappropriates in a respectful manner the soul’s main function, which is worship. Beautiful, yeah. And before Chris speaks, I wonder if the soul ever had a kind of fixed meaning, if all of these terms kind of, they have to be reinvented all the time, otherwise they become reified, and they no longer have any meaning. Well, the problem is, things can become reified in this way, Andrew. They can be embedded in a mythos that stagnates and dies, and that has not been replaced by any new emergent mythos that discloses new logos, right? And in that sense, they’re trapped within, and this is why Chris’s metaphor of the dying star is so appropriate, they’re trapped, they’re sort of stuck on the event horizon, if I turn his dying star into a black hole. Right, yeah. And so I think our notion of soul has been lost. Interestingly, in the performing arts, there’s a category of music, and you know this much better than I do, soul, in which there was an attempt to reinventio soul as a particular way of connecting through and to music. Yeah, well, exactly. I mean, you can distinguish between music that has a soul and music that doesn’t have a soul, I mean, if you have a very fine ear, and the music that has a soul, I think is connected with that inexhaustibility, and the music that doesn’t have a soul is just a formulaic repetition of something, you know? It might be very performative, it might be very salient, to use your term, or. Yep. And that relationship that I’m talking about of worship, that individuation, participation, tonos, a dynamic tension, creative tension, that’s very aspirational. You are participating in the sacred second self while you’re individuating the current self, and re-individuating it, and re-individuating it, tapping into its suchness, until you actually come to appreciate and become or come, asymptote towards the sacred second self. Beautiful. Christopher, I wanna hear from you, I wanna hear you some. Oh, I add to that. Riff on some of that stuff. Is there possibly to be added to that? Well, I guess, yeah. Unsurprisingly, what I say is just gonna be a recapitulation of what John just said. Chris, Chris, come on. But. You’re the excess humility. Hang on, no, no, no, no, no. Bullshit, come on. I wasn’t courting contradiction by saying that at all. I’m just trying to say that that was pretty comprehensive. I mean, okay, maybe I’ll try and put it, I’ll try and put it, what you did, John, I’ll try and maybe put it pitfully. To me, if I had to distill it down as a working definition, I would say that the soul, what I understand soul to be is like the transitive property of the self that relates it to its own moreness. I always come back to thinking of soul as a relational aspect, which helps to dislodge the notion that it’s something fixed, an entity fixed within time and space, right? If it’s fundamental nature is as a relational nature, both expressive and impressive, then its function in a very sort of kick-guardian way, its function is as a relation to be cultivated. It’s as a relation as the sort of a, it’s sort of like, it is the intermediary aspect in the orchestra of self that bridges between the suchness of its current composition to the moreness of the yet unheard melody, right? It’s the transitivity to me is the property of the soul that most alludes its definition. And that also explains its sort of multivocality and its equivocal definitions, right? Because if its nature is as a dynamical form of relation, then it’s no wonder that we keep trying to foist definitions on it that it continually bucks and eludes. So I think that the, as, yeah, when I think of the soul, the best place to start for me is to understand the soul as the expression of the existential and ontological relation that we have with the aspect of self that is to be disclosed with the moreness of the world. That’s perhaps why, well, I was thinking when John was mentioning the soul music and how soul music, if music has soul, I mean, we’re not talking about the particular genre of soul music, but just soulful music in general, it creates a kind of silence. It stops you in your track. But there is kind of a forward movement at the same time. You feel like you’re moving and you’re still. Because it’s always a double disclosure. Or it’s a double, what I should say is, like the soul is your power of faith. It’s the power to, it’s the enacted power of wedding, like the emergence of maha into the emergence of world, like I’m saying, the suchness to the moreness. And so I guess what I need to say is that it’s always enacted in faith, but that faith that I’m trying to talk about, that ability to continually realize religio. Can you define what you mean by faith, John? What your working definition of faith is? Well, that’s what, so I’m really picking up on the ath, right? So that what faith is, is faith is, right? That continuity of contact, that ongoing affordance of affinity that makes us, that’s what I’m trying to say, that’s what I’m trying to say. That confidence of affinity that makes us conform more and more to what we think of, and what we realize better, realize as real or more real. So that, like I said, what happens is there, and these are truths that are only tracked. We can only trace the inexhaustible through our own trajectory of transformation. So that’s the emergence, the developmental emergence of mind as the capacity for intelligibility. And when that is wedded to the way in which the world is constantly disclosing itself to us. And then the two poles of that is, there’s a disclosure of what the moreness than the world can be, and then there is, and it’s like two sides of the same tongue, but there’s also a demand put on me to aspire, to tap into the resources of my suchness, what is often called in Buddhism, your original mind, your pure mind, so that I find that potential to trace the trajectory of trans-framing in a transjective manner. So I can more and more maintain continuity of contact. I think it’s entirely appropriate that the definitions of faith and soul be understood determinously. Because it’s almost as though faith is the described activity of the soul. And so it’s really, I think it’s impossible to think of them as independent dynamics. I think one is somehow a property of the other. So that the cultivation of soul manifests in faith and the cultivation of faith manifests in soul. I think it’s appropriate to understand them consistent in that manner. I would say that soul is the term for a power, and faith is a term for the virtue that cultivates that power towards excellence, the enacted virtue. So faith is related to virtue. That’s not something I wanted to ask you about today also was this word virtue, because in Peter Lindbergh’s blog, there was a big discussion about virtue. And he was saying something like, he made some kind of comment like, he says he loves virtue more than he could love even a woman or his wife. Or if you have that kind of virtue, that’s what virtue means. So that seems to be related to faith as well. Yeah, I mean, so let me try something that’s close and related. And that may help. So I think of reverence, and here I’m following Woodruff, because he explicitly argues that reverence isn’t a feeling or an experience, it’s a virtue. He’s a little bit less clear about what the virtue is, but his examples and the allusions to the Platonic tradition make clear what the virtue is. And this is the other aspect of faith that I’m trying to get at. Sorry, reverence is the virtue that puts you into right relationship to awe. Right, so that you are both excellently receptive and excellently, that’s the disclosure, and excellently responsive, that’s the demand to the experience of awe. So that you can tap into the fundamental depths of its transformative offering. And so reverence is that virtue. Faith is the more encompassing virtue, like I said, that alludes back to the notion of worship, where we are trying to get into a comprehensive right relationship to the unfolding of transjectivity, the mutual unfolding of the individuation of suchness and the participation and moreness. And there’s something about faith that means that we’re not there yet, we haven’t arrived. Yeah, it’s an incomplete. We’re incomplete. I’m trying to, and I mean, Thomas Applianus did this, right? And trying to make this notion of faith, and Chris says it’s coterminous, inter-defining with soul, trying to make the notion of faith back into a virtue rather than an act of willful assertion, willful identification. What you’re doing is you’re trying to, I think the best way of understanding virtue is a virtual engine. You’re trying to create a sense of constraints within, between, and without that will help get you best disposed reliably to right relationship with the presencing of what’s most real. Yeah, yeah. And you’re becoming, I mean, faith in some ways, you becoming proleptically conversant with the organization of your relationship with the world, your relationship with, the relations that govern and concenter your disposition before, let’s say, reality as such. I see faith as a kind of continuity between the state of those relations in situ and the possibility of transposing or transfiguring those relations in order to accommodate greater levels of intelligibility. There’s something, like, there’s a vertical continuity that you step into when your relation becomes disposed with faith, right? It’s like you’re stepping into the Heraklite current, as it were, right? You’re stepping into train with something that’s going to disclose that the possibility of reorganizing your relations such that you become more optimally disposed to accommodating the world. So here’s a way of thinking, what Chris said that I think would help to make it concrete. Think about how you’re faithful to your partner, your wife. That’s a virtue, right? And it’s not captured. We can talk about this, it goes back to why your self-knowledge is captured with assertion. You gave me a good thought too. Pardon me? Oh, I just had a good thought when you said, I didn’t mean to interrupt. When you say being faithful to your wife, that’s an activity, right? Yes, that’s an activity. Whereas if you look inside your mind, maybe you’re not always faithful. We’re not always faithful, right? In our hearts and minds, but it’s what we do. So it just gave me that thought. It is, it is. And notice how it’s inter-defined with love too. Like we make a sacrifice on some level. We might have an attraction to other people or something like that. But we make a sacrifice and we decide to delimit ourselves to that relationship, which actually makes our horizon larger. Yes, exactly. And that was the point I wanna make. Your faithfulness to your partner isn’t about any sense of closure or the fact that she can be captured by a set of beliefs. So when you, the virtue of faithfulness is to have, of course you have sentences you utter, but it’s also, a virtue also requires skills. It requires a sensibility for perspective, paddle knowing, right? And it requires a kind of self thing for the participatory knowing. Virtues, they link all the knowings together such that what’s happening is, as you said, you’re constantly affording your wife’s moreness, right? And how, but always, always in recognition of her suchness. She’s not an abstract principle to you. So you are affording her- She’s not your property or possession or any of those things. That’s right. Otherwise, if you have that kind of relationship, it’s a relationship without faith, isn’t it? It is, but there’s definitely that she’s not, so she’s not categorical, she has suchness, but she’s also a doorway to the moreness of the world, right? She’s also not just an abstract principle. She’s neither just an abstract principle or just a simple concrete thing. She is a person, which is not either an abstract principle nor a concrete thing, but something beyond them, something that Corban would talk about as ultimately imaginal. So what I’m trying to say is your relationship of faithfulness in love to your wife is a, it’s sort of, it’s soulful anagogy. You are affording her souling and she is affording your souling. And that’s what the faithfulness is. And I mean, and so in Vedanta, you get this taken up into the central claim. The Atman is Brahman, thou art that, right? So that the mystery of transcendence and the mystery of imminence, the soul of the reality and the soul of the person are ultimately a find, interaffordant, interpenetrating, co-creating. Beautiful, yeah. I was thinking about, go ahead, Christophe. I was just gonna say, it also means that implicit within the faithful relationship is the capacity for inexhaustible reinventio. Yeah, of course. In the way that you just find it, John, right? Because there’s something about a faithful relationship that is necessarily unpredictable. I think about the womb with a view expression. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That it always has, the gnosis of the relationship always has a view to beyond the relationship. And so it’s just, I mean, it’s reliable enough to be, as to avoid absurdity, right? Because when a relationship becomes so unpredictable, then it verges into absurdity. Exactly, exactly. But it is not so predictable as to become. That’s another kind of absurdity, right? That’s right, yeah, yeah. Predictable, total predictableness is absurd and just as subtle chaos is, yeah. Exactly. That’s the virtual engineering. Yeah, that’s right, that’s the virtual engineering, right? So you’re trying to steer between those. So there’s something, so the property of faith in a relationship is that which keeps its poesis ongoing and replenishing, right? So that when you turn to the relationship, that’s why faithful relationships are a font for existential renewal in some respect, right? Because you find yourself recovered and recollected anew in a faithful relationship, precisely because it intermediates the moreness of the world as well as the moreness of yourself. And so the capacity for self-poesis, for the auto-poetic evolutionary quality to a faithful relationship is precisely that what makes it a font of inexhaustibility. Yes, and notice how as you are participating in the other, right, and like Chris said, you are also internalizing the other. You individuate your suchness through your capacity to internalize other people. Yes, and this is what dialogus is. I mean, this is what dialogus does, right? This is the sacramental property of dialogus, is precisely that by the revelation of thou, you are so revealed. And in your revelation, thou is more revealed, and then the cycling that takes place as a consequence of that opens the perspective of the dialogus to the sort of something like the ontological vertex that is available now available by virtue of, in virtue, I should say, in virtue, I love that expression because I think it says it all, in virtue of that faith. In virtue of that, hmm. There’s something else that I was thinking about is that is the erotic aspect. I was just gonna do that. And that’s what, and in these conversations, often we’re a bunch of men talking, it seems to be. There are women involved as well, and I hope more and more women get involved, and then there’s this invocation of the feminine which happens, and then that seems to bring the conversation, and soul the conversation, if I could say so. And I know in Hebrew, I remember that the soul is feminine or the Holy Spirit is feminine. In other languages, it’s masculine, but I don’t know if it’s inappropriate to, I mean, I think that way all the time in terms of masculine, feminine polarities, but people seem to get offended when you talk about it. Well, I prefer the Taoist polarities of yin and yang because they are more comprehensive, they’re not limited to biological creatures, and then they also dispose us towards not getting overly politicized about something important that we need to talk about. I was gonna bring up that connection because the moreness into suchness, and when it sort of affines our individuation to participation and we get that appropriate tonos, that right relationship, I think that’s really the experience of beauty. I wanna bring beauty in Han’s book on saving beauty and Scarry’s book on beauty, I think are really, really important recent works on beauty. Because what beauty is, is beauty is exactly, like Scarry says, you come upon a beautiful tree, and there’s two things. You say, geez, I didn’t realize trees could be like that. There’s the moreness. But then you realize that this tree is somehow in the experience of beauty, unique and different from all the other trees. So the tree has a soul in a sense. Yeah, the tree has a soul in a sense, not in any animism. I think animism is for us an inaccessible mythos that symbolize that correctly. But yeah, I think in that sense, it’s a kind of animation where animation also means to set things into motion. So I think beauty is exactly that experience. It’s like most of the time we’re doing relevance realization because the goal is to produce relevance. But sometimes the relevance realization machinery is in the service of realization. It’s in the service of disclosing the moreness to touchness of everything. It’s in service of beautifying the world. And that’s a kind of flip, right? Where what I’m trying to do is actually put myself, and this is like the worship and the reverence, I’m trying to put my relevance realization machinery in service. It’s not subjectively oriented. I’m putting it in service transjectively through the disclosure in beauty of, you know, how all of the universe had to have existed the way it did for this cup to be the way it is and to be here now the way it is and have all of the properties that it has that you cannot possibly grasp right here, right now. And so this is, and this again, this is a notion of beauty, not of consumption. Consumption is the most primitive form of conformity. I become one with something by consuming it. Plato talks about when you experience beauty, the conformity, he says you wanna give birth in beauty. The response, right? Part of the right relationship as Chris said is poesis. I wanna create, I wanna do more to afford, right? More and more beauty in the world. Yeah, it’s like beauty is like the, it’s like the physiognomy of the world’s moreness. It’s how the moreness presents to us, right? The countenance of the moreness is precisely what strikes us as beauty. So Chris, I’m gonna give you a word for this that I think you’d like. I’m gonna give it to you and see why I wanna play it. I think in this self it’s an interface where what we’re doing is we can face the world and we give it a way of facing us. Yes, that’s good, yeah. Also picking up on the technological sense of interface as that which affines and conforms two things together so they can mutually function together. I thought you might wanna play with that. Yeah, I will play with that. Well, I think it’s, it’s also, there’s something in sort of a tongue and cheek way, it’s also appropriate to this exact circumstance because what we’re doing right now is interfacing. And, so go ahead, Andrew. Well, I’m just gonna say that the interface being beauty, but there’s also an ugliness to the idea of interface as well. It’s like you need to have this technological barrier between us or something like that. That’s just a feeling I got when I heard the word. Yeah, exactly that. And so we’ve gotta get out. I mean, I wanna bring back the face with an interface. This is why I brought up Tyler in the beginning because he was talking about this technological platform and then I had two feelings about that. I had one feeling about, yay, great, Lowe, be creative. And then I had other feeling of like getting completely consumed by this machine that is just devouring all our creative, Yep, yep, yep. acts and potentials. I think that’s right. But I think the technology is what it is in the sense, I’m sorry, that sounds trivializing. What I mean is it is a power that has not been coupled to virtue. There is nothing in virtue to pick up on Chris in which yet that we have decided how we’re gonna actualize the potential of this. You wouldn’t want it to be a vert, you wouldn’t want a machine to have virtue either. In a sense that has to be a uniquely. Well, I don’t know about that. I mean, I actually would argue the other way. I think as we try to give them intelligence, we better be giving them virtues of rationality and wisdom. But that’s another argument. I think what Tyler was trying to point out is what’s happening on the Discord servers is a particularly powerful way in which people are appropriating the interface medium in order to do interfacing the way I’m talking about it right now. And in order to try and create the communitas and the distributed cognition for the reculturation of our world, stealing the culture from the way it is now frozen in sort of more abundant normativities and more abundant structures and reculturate. That’s what he’s basically arguing for. That’s what I’m trying to get at. There’s a way in which we could appropriate in virtue the potential of this medium so that we can reculture in a really powerful way and recognize and reculture and recognize in an interdependent fashion. And so the people that attend these, I’m sorry, this will actually circle back around. The people that attend these Discord services are there in good faith. They’re there in good faith and there’s a faithfulness. They don’t have an ulterior motive. They’re just doing it for itself. Because they want to stay wedded to what’s emerging. They have a sense of da’at. They have a sense of finding themselves and finding the world in the dialogos and the emerging community around it. And so they want, they love the beauty of that and they are seduced in the proper sense of the word by the erotic aspect of it. They are seduced into wanting to maintain continuity of contact with it. So there’s this, when you say seduction, there’s this incredible darkness and danger at the same time. That’s what I don’t want to forget about that. No, no, no. We’re talking about beauty. Yeah, there is. There is. Go ahead, Chris. I think phylaea, so I think in some sense phylaea, so taking the model of these dialogo, I think is appropriate. Because I think what the presence of phylaea does is it essentially creates a matrix for the cultivation of eros, right? And for the transmutation of eros into something like an agapic form of poesis. So eros, of course, can be creative or consumptive depending on its particular valence. But I think one of the functions of the dialogic practice insofar as it trains and tutors phylaea is that it becomes a kind of, it becomes a way of performing the beauty of the erotic impulse in a way that it changes, it transforms it. And I think that the role of phylaea as a kind of intermediary between the powerful emergence of the erotic impulse and the possibility of its becoming another forms I think is central. I think that’s why dialogos is folk role. And I think that’s why they cultivate the interpersonal, what we might call, what we have called the horizontal dimension of dialogos, which is to say the interpersonal dimension of dialogos, the kind of thing that guy cultivates in circling. It’s such a fundamental starting point because what it seems to do is it seems to bound the arena of play in such a way that the eros becomes a peritelec exercise that can then be molded and shaped and creatively directed to become the birth and beauty, to become anagogically reproductive. And agotic when it wants to give birth. And it makes me think of the campfire again. You said there’s a circle. Of course. So there’s something really, really central then about, and I think this will come out, as we work to refine this more and more, I think it’s gonna become really essential to understand how this is sequenced and to understand what the proper conditions are in order for this to happen reliably. But I think that’s why there’s something about cordoning off the interpersonal arena in such a way then that it becomes a proper symbolic body for the transmutation of eros. Because you’re right, Andrew, it can be profoundly destructive and it can feed and dilate every narcissistic impulse we can possibly have. And so it’s a very, very careful game that we have to play to make sure that doesn’t happen. Well, when you were talking, I was reminded of my own tradition of practices of psychotechnologies, which is tantra and tantric Buddhism. And of course, tantric Buddhism is not about removing those kind of darknesses or those kind of passions or those kind of, it’s not about doing away with them. It’s always about transmutation or transformation. Exactly, exactly. So, I mean, let’s remember, we are talking, and it’s appropriate that we are, we’re talking about soul and faith, but we’re also talking love and beauty. We’re also talking about virtue. And that’s why the virtues that are cultivated to ameliorate and help us perhaps grow out of self-deceptive behavior is bound up in this. Rationality, and Andrew, you know that I have a much broader view of this. Yes, yes, yeah. So I think reason, rationality, and ultimately, the interpenetration of the intellectual virtues like reason and the ethical virtues like courage, right? They come together in that superlative virtue, which is wisdom. People have to be cultivating wisdom. So dialogos, this is the point that, well, I don’t mean to make it sound like Guy is not responsive. He has been immensely responsive to it. But to bring back the sapiential aspiration, to bring back the cultivation of wisdom into these dialogic practices, that’s one of the core things of dialectic, right? Is to have the deep interpenetration of the recognition and remembering and realization of self-deception coupled to the participation in the overflow that’s afforded by dialectic. They are, your point, Andrew, actually says one of the things I’ve been arguing for. Philosophia is not just circling. It’s not just interpersonal intimacy. And that intimacy shifts onto intelligibility. It’s not just the way that we think. It’s self and is governed by normativity of overcoming self-deception. Yeah, the interpersonal intimacy is a symbol on. It’s not for itself. Yeah, exactly. It’s put for, it’s a symbol on that is put for as a bridge into the service of the kind of self-transcendence that you’re describing. And then when it’s a symbol on for the purpose of cultivating the faith of proleptic rationality, right? In Kallert’s sense of the term. And it’s symbolized by union, right? Some kind of union. Etc. symbology, it’s always, it’s an image, it’s about sexual union, right? Of the dynamic process and the, you know, it’s almost, it’s, what are they, wisdom and compassion or rationality and energy or something like that. All of those, it’s a wedding. It’s drawing the two together. And also the picks up on this phenomenological experience of quasi divine revelation that we have in the throes of intimate disclosure. I mean, that’s the thing, right? That’s what marks intimate relationships of any variety, platonic or non-platonic, right? Is that there’s something about the relationship that, there’s something about the reflective capacity of that relationship to provide endless novelty in the form of your own understanding of yourself and in the form of your understanding of the other person, right? The sensibility transcendence of it is such that it is endlessly, infinitely discoverable, right? There’s a property of it that is infinitely discoverable. And so then that property becomes host, I think, to the kind of infinite discoverability that happens in the anagoga. Maybe home is better than host, right? And it’s always- Yeah, well, that’s, but I like going beyond itself because it picks up on the sacramental valence of the exercise. But I think home is also appropriate. It’s both, really. Well, that’s good. That’s good, I like that. That’s really good. So, I mean, again, to pick up on the worship, all of this is to get back into sort of a liturgical relationship. It’s amazing how religious these discussions are becoming, right? Oh, yeah. Despite the, even though we’re the religion, we’re speaking of the religion that is not the religion, more deeply religious almost the more we get into all these things. And we find that all these notions like faith and the worship and transcendence are, are really what it’s all about, right? But we also find virtue and we also find wisdom. We also find rationality. That’s why I almost always affix Socratic to faith, Socratic faith. Because that’s what’s so amazing about Socrates is the way he weds himself, right, to the other. And that’s as commented on in the dialogues because he’s a tipos. He has a suchness about him that allows him to reform himself to anybody he’s with, right, and he’s a sort of midwife to them. He helps them give birth, but he also has this faith in the logos. He is willing to follow the argument. And this is why it also requires the virtue of courage. He’s willing to follow the argument wherever it goes. Yeah. And it seems it always goes. I was reading Socrates this morning because of you guys. I have, for the first time I’m reading him directly. Of course I’ve read him through other people and the last part of the chapter was, he comes up to all these pseudo conclusions about things and then suddenly he says, well, we don’t know actually what we’re talking about here. At the very end of the chapter, I thought there’s a humor there that I didn’t know. There is. There is. It’s so important. He trapped this person into thinking he had this grandiose understanding of something, but really the whole point was that once you’ve understood something, you don’t know anything anymore. You’re at the beginning again. This gets taken up in the neoplatonic practice. So the neoplatonic universe is one in which there’s the absolute pure oneness of the one and then things emanate. They proceed out to all the various multiplicitous instantiation and then everything returns. This is not a temporal process. This is what’s happening in ontology. And the idea in dialectic is you’re supposed to do that same thing. You’re supposed to project all of your thoughts, all of the variations you have, and then notice all the differences and then recollect and say, yes, but that’s just a projection. And then when you recollect back and try and step back to what’s deeper and what’s affording all of the variations, that’s when you realize, oh, well, I don’t really know it. And then you gather, this is how you practice dialectic. You gather it back in and then you again project it out so that you externalize it. You can become aware of it. And then you see all the variations and then you pull it back in. And you don’t stop. You just keep going back and forth because you’re trying to get into conformity with how reality is unfolding in that constant procession and return. And what’s really cool for me is that’s exactly the main motion in artificial intelligence deep learning. You take some data and you can compress out what’s underneath them all, the one, and then you run variations from that, see what sticks, gather it back in, right? Vary it out, project it out, recollect it in, project it out, recollect it in. And that’s how these networks evolve their capacity to pick up on complex patterns in the world. That’s what gives them their intelligence. Right, right. And then I guess too then that that neoplatonic process, that in that neoplatonic process, beauty is really the kind of hypostatic emissary, right? That signals the realism of that process and allows you to track and follow it more, perhaps more reliably. It allows you not to be stuck in your tracks somewhere. Yeah. It’s like it seduces you forward all the time. So that you’re not, you know, you don’t fall asleep by the side of the road or. I think beauty is the mark of knowing by loving. Right, right. Yeah. I think that’s its point. And I mean, originally, of course, the identification was, you know, purely sexually, but of course, what Chris has been describing repeatedly to great effect is what we’re really doing is we’re exacting that and we’re using, because we’re not just biological creatures, we’re cultural creatures. And we have to perpetually, we have to resacralize the culture. Cultus is, you know, ultimately, right? The place of worship and cultivation to where you participate in something growing with a life of its own, right? All of this, we have to resacralize, right? As we’re reculturing, we’re also simultaneously resacralizing all of those aspects of ourselves that are properly designated as cultural and not just biological. And the central thing for this are these related terms, person, self, and soul. Those are all, ultimately, I’m not reducing them to, in a Durkheimian fashion, to being nearly culturally constructed or anything like that, but they are places, well, they are the primary poles through which we interface with culture and also afford the culture interfacing with the reality in which it is always embedded and upon which it always depends. Yeah. Well put, John. Yes, and Andrew, you’re right. This is all, in some sense, in service of the religion that’s not a religion. Yes. And trying, I have taken very seriously the loving criticisms made by Paul Van de Klay, Mary Cohen, and Jonathan Pagel. I’ve taken them to heart. I’ve noticed something, and I’m really, I’m really trying to flag it and celebrate it, that when I listen to other people’s criticisms and take them to heart, and what I can often do is I can start to internalize them into new ways of thinking, new paths of research. Jonathan criticized me in that, I was talking about as if it’s all individual mystical practices, and so this is why I got so involved with the distributed cognition. It led into the whole project of dialectic. Communitas. Yeah, communitas. And then Paul talks repeatedly of the scalability problem, both developmentally and across various hierarchies of competence and power, and I take that very seriously as well, as trying to say, okay, how can we reinventio all of these polarities, all these tonuses of individuation and participation, so that we can make them accessible and scalable? Yeah, it’s interesting. I was talking to this very, in Paris, in France, very well-known meditation teacher, Buddhist meditation teacher the other day, and I was talking to him about Buddhism, and my sense that Buddhism in the West has sort of gone awry on some level, and I said, what is the use of Buddhism? And he said, I don’t know. Maybe it doesn’t have any use. Maybe it’s, but it’s just, I just love these practices and this kind of thing, and he said his own teacher, Chogam Trimple, was trying to look for something kind of beyond Buddhism, something that would be larger and would not be that would, he would make a meditation available to people rather than have it being some kind of special esoteric technique or something like, something that’s really available to people. Who cares if you’re a Buddhist or a Christian or whatever on some level? I mean, who cares? I mean. I’ve been playing because I’ve been doing, going back to Nishatani in the Kyoto School, and I had an excellent conversation with Jared Morningstar. What a great name, by the way, Jared Morningstar, about Nishatani, because for me, he’s a primary example of an epochal philosopher bridging between East and West, reconceiving religion, religion and nothingness. I will recommend this book, Till I Die, is one of the top five books. I would put it on the shelf beside Playboy. I just ordered it, actually, because. Yeah, and then there’s some good books to order in conjunction with it. You should definitely order these two if you get a chance, Andrew. There’s the Kyoto School by Robert E. Carter, taught in Canada, by the way, at Trent University. Oh, really? There’s this new one, The Religious Philosophy of Nishatani Keji. So I’ve been really, really playing around with this idea and something like Zen Neoplatonism, because the two would constantly undermine each other, because Zen was trying to undermine itself all the time. And Zen, you would say there’s something called the stink of Zen, and that’s when you become too religious. And Neoplatonism was always, always trying to do the same thing. And if we could somehow integrate them together, like I say, because if you’ll allow me to play with the wedding metaphor, they’re not gonna sleep easily together in the same bed, but I expect that would be actually really, really, a really good creative tension that would keep, well, perhaps keep a kind of criticality for longer before everything eventually solidifies, right? But maybe keep the fire of criticality burning a little bit longer. Oh, yeah. What I wanted to say about my discussion with this person also was that he mentioned that, he said each period that we live in has this denial, denial of love, he called it. And he would say that in the religious era, right, when people were highly religious, you would burn somebody at the stake or something like that. And that was the denial of love, right? Somebody who wasn’t a Christian, you’d burn them at the stake, or if somebody wasn’t a Buddhist, they were a heretic, and all that sort of thing. And he says, but our denial, he’s written a lot about our cultural denial today as this commodification of everything, where, and this pseudo happiness search for, and he was talking about how meditation is usually taught as being this panacea to make somebody, to make you calm, and that sort of thing. And that actually the spirit of it, it should be more in that spirit of all these, I’m rambling here, but all these techniques like impermanence that people use, they’ve turned into this sort of description of reality that’s very obvious and stupid, and you just use these phrases. But I think the dialogus would, you always have to keep the soul and intelligence of something. I think so. I mean, I think Han has been the best for talking about our incapacity for love now, our denial for love, in the way in which we have turned everything into consumption and commodified everything. And he also has talked about a correlated thing, and this allows us to circle back because of the way love and beauty are bound together. He has this wonderful chapter where he talks about the aesthetics of the smooth. Yeah, you were mentioning that, right? Yeah, that we want this, we want, we have re-identified, but his point is we have misidentified beauty with making things as smooth as possible, visually, cognitively, interpersonally. And his point is that what we are doing then is this grand act of narcissism. It’s what we’re basically saying is, I don’t want anything to disturb me or disrupt me. And this comes back to your point that meditation, when I’m teaching them my meditation classes, I’m doing them, I don’t know if you know that, Andrew, I’m doing them. Yeah, I did, I did know that. I’ve already burdened, otherwise I’d love to come, but. No, no, no, that wasn’t, I wasn’t trying to help you. No, no. I repeatedly tell my students that meditation is not a vacation, it’s an education. It should disturb you. And if you’re having unpleasant, disturbing feelings, good. Good, right? The people that come in and all they wanna do and they wanna talk about how they feel wonderful, it is appropriate at times to celebrate wonder and connectedness and presence. But you should also have periods where there is demand and challenge on you. Yeah, and I guess you also have to go into the underworld. That’s what this guy was telling me today about, the poet has to go into the underworld and look at the dark aspects of your world and of yourself and all that. And that’s also part of meditation, which. But you see that the Gnostic and Jungian metaphors are ultimately wed to that neoplatonic practice that I was talking about. Because what do you do? Well, how do you really journey into the underworld? Well, you try to notice how you’re projecting your shadow. Here’s the projection and all the way. And you, I mean, you really can’t introspectively get at your shadow. And the point is that I’m taking shadow not just in the middle. But it’s too hard to look at, you mean? It’s, you’re not. No, no, because you have to get to a place where, I wanna play with Nietzsche’s thing, you can’t jump over your own shadow, right? It is immersed in the very activity that of you’re looking at your shadow. It’s enmeshed. It’s like this, let me give, it’s deeply like this. You are so wise with other people. You can give your friend amazingly good advice. But trying to do that for yourself is almost impossible. In fact, that’s a homework of wisdom where people can successfully do that. And what you have to do, and this is why, and this is Moore’s point about self-knowledge requires distributed cognition. And Spurber’s point, rationality requires distributed cognition. Because only in you, like reflecting back on me, my projections, and if we can move that from being an unconscious process of co-identification to an explicit one, like in therapy, only then can I recover from my projections what has been otherwise inaccessible to me. That’s how I can integrate, which means individuate, with the shadow. The shadow is the disruptive things that I have to project out so I can see them, the way, like how literacy makes your thoughts available to you. And then I can from that gather back in and gather in that criticality. And that’s what actually individuates me and moves me forward. I mean, and this is what Jung thought, I mean, dreams are a little bit weird because dreams are sort of alternatives to your ego mind. But it’s very, I mean, this is one of the things when you’re reading Socrates. Socrates spends a lot of time putting people into a porio because he wants to disabuse them of all these incorrect yet intuitively obvious ways of how we get self-knowledge. Well, I just introspect, bullshit. You will not get a lot of, most of yourself will not be found, right? Oh, well, what I do is just the things I’d like or choose. No, that’s bullshit too, right? Well, the things that I sort of assent to, well, no, that’s not enough because I don’t know what you’re committed to, but the true normativity of you is until I see you having to interact with things that disturb you and disrupt you. I mean, I think Moore’s book is brilliant about this. It just bringing out that there is so much a porio in Socrates because he’s trying to get people to give up our feigned and fallacious sense of expertise about our own self-knowledge. This is what we also lost with the notion of a soul. If you go back into the Christian tradition, the soul was deeper. It was that part of you, it was the God-given part of you, right? It was that part of you that transcended your self-awareness because it was that part of you that is striving for relationship to what is ultimate, God. So, I mean, Socrates’ process of a porio is to humiliate in the old meaning of the term, to people’s pretended expertise, which is a kind of arrogance, right? About their own self-knowledge because it has to be found in dialectic. I mean, this is now, the convergence of this ancient argument that self-knowledge is only available in dialectic and this new modern argument by people like Sperber and my good friend, Greg Henriques, that reason was designed by evolution to work within distributed cognition, not just inside people’s heads. That’s very clear, yeah. So if you have a confirmation bias and I have a confirmation bias, but they aren’t the same confirmation bias, you know what we’ll do? We will come in with our confirmation biases and if we come in good faith, right? You and I will disrupt each other. Yeah. We will disturb each other out of it in ways we can’t do with our own cognition. Now, I’m not saying you can’t do things like journaling and cultivating act of open-mindedness. You have to do those. You have to do those too. But there’s a place that you and I can get to in dialectic that we cannot get to on our own. Yeah, yeah. There’s a place of self-knowledge that we can get to in dialectic that we cannot get to on our own. Because we have to disclose who we are before another person, right? We have to externalize it and we have to give up ownership over what we’re saying and doing and let other people appropriate it and transform it before our very eyes. This is the thing that you face when you realize the performative aspect of your cognition. It is always going to get away from you. I used to carry this slogan. I don’t like to start very much. I used to carry the slogan around and use it sort of very one-sidedly. But he said, you never complete a book. You only abandon it. And the one meaning of that is you can’t bring things to closure. But now I realize there’s a bigger thing because as I start to put stuff out into the world, I realize what that abandonment is. Those things are gonna take on a life of their own within distributed cognition and they’re gonna get to places that I could never have gotten to with them. I’m thinking again of this whole thing of Moses not getting to the promised land, right? This is our lives. We build this whole thing. And in some sense, we have to deal with the kind of disappointment of where we will lead to. We have to give up our project and offer it to others in a sense. Part of what we need to do is to shift. And this is my deep, you know that I love the Platonic tradition deeply, but this is my deep critique of what goes wrong in the Platonic tradition, which is the conjoining of sacredness with perfection and where perfection is a coming to rest. Later Christian, Neoplatonic Christians replaced this with epic thesis that we are in permanent self-transcendence, that God is the field that affords a permanent self-transcendence. And the vision of God is not to see God in rest, but to more and more see the way God sees. So there’s no final resting point or nirvana or enlightenment or here I’m home now. It’s more like continual. Well, is there a final resting point in your relationship with your spouse? Do you now say, I’m done, I’ve completed love? We don’t complete any virtues. We don’t complete virtues. And thinking that they even complete us is incorrect. Your love for your wife, your faithfulness to her, those are incompletable projects. They’re what, John Kars, John Kars wrote this brilliant book, The Religious Case About Belief, and then he, there’s finite and infinite games. Virtues are infinite games. They’re games that are not meant to end like a good conversation, like a good dialogos. And virtues are always infinite games. That’s one of Plato’s great insights. That’s why we can never be completely virtuous. Only the gods are capable of that infinity. So that’s why I can’t be completely virtuous. Well, but, but, but. I don’t mean to make a joke. That’s wonderful. Yeah. That’s fine. That’s very good. Well, it also makes me think that our beauty is in our imperfection, which is kind of, it’s a terror and it’s a relief at the same time. Well, that’s what Rilke said, right? That every beauty is an angel that’s just slightly failing to kill us, right? And, you know, in the, in the Asiatic, there’s Asiatic aesthetics of, you know, of Wabe that, you know, and this brings us back. Broken cup or something. Yeah, the broken cup, because what does the crack do? It reminds us being mode of the suchness of this, right? But at the same time, it’s exposing us to how everything, right, it’s tapping into the inexhaustible-ness. Because what happens when I catch the suchness because of the crack, the cup is beautified and the more-ness of reality speaks through. It’s like Leonard Cohen’s line. There’s a crack in everything. There’s a crack in everything, yeah. Yeah, so the light can shine in. And also in the Japanese aesthetics, they say that it’s like a woman or a man who’s just beyond that prime. They consider that to be beauty. Not something in its prime perfection of life, but if somebody has gone just beyond the prime. So that it contains life and death within it. It’s not this false promise of perfection. Yes, excellent. That’s exactly right. I think that’s a beautiful thing you just said. And so notice how we can’t talk about these things without all of these nodal terms coming up. Beauty, love, wisdom, faith, soul, right? I think there’s a particularly beautiful analogy to be made about the role of, analogically, the role of silence. So one of the things, if I can sort of use this metaphorically at least at first, one of the things that happens in a disclosing dialogue is that the silence by which you are heard deepens and appreciates the meaning of what is spoken. Now the silence in the margins of any given utterance is always infinitely greater and more engulfing than the speech that’s proffered into it. So there’s a way in which that the silence is infinitely appreciative of sound, but sound also contains the presence of that silence, right? As though between the notes of music, as though between the syllables of speech. And so one of the things that happens, I think when a relationship becomes loving and faithful in all of the ways in which we’ve just defined it, the silence of the relationship becomes more and more pregnant. So you become accustomed to speaking into the silence of the listening ear, knowing that whatever is spoken into that silence appreciates by virtue of the fact that it was spoken into that particular form of attentive silence. And then when that relationship becomes more and more knowing, its particular auditing silence becomes something that you can internalize more and more, right, which I think is in many ways what Augustine’s project was with his confessions, right? He’s speaking into the silence, into a vow of silence that is infinitely knowing and infinitely knowable. And so is hearing himself heard in the property of that silence. And so it’s like the relationship, so it goes going back to your relation to the tension between such and more, for instance, that there’s a way in which the tension between such and more can be analogized by the relationship between sound and silence. And that the more encompassing of silence that the sound becomes, the more the logos of it deepens, deepens, deepens, and appreciates. And so to me, I think that that’s a way of understanding both the dynamic of the comprehending relationship as a symbolon for poetic love and its self-transcendence, but also then its capacity to be interiorized as a way of performing the dialectic interiorly. Because I agree, John, I mean, there’s a way in which we cannot self-introspect reliably to the degree that we can do so in a distributed fashion. But then when the distributed dynamic becomes interiorized, it does become a way, obviously, internalizing the sage, as you often say. It becomes a way of cultivating that practice within the confines of your inner life. But I think that has everything to do with, it’s not as though you’re just importing a dialogue and then running it on. That the thing that you’re internalizing is not the speech made by the other person. It’s the particular comprehending ear of silence that they lend to your speech and thereby pronounce its moreness. I wanna riff on that, because that was beautiful. And music, I felt, two thoughts came to me and that was music and clairvoyance. There’s a kind of clairvoyance that happens between two people and musicians when they’re playing together. Go ahead, John. Well, I wanna play, I wanna invoke both senses of the term articulation, which is to speak, but also to break things into their parts. And what Chris has just made me realize, which he often does, is the way in which the silence is internalized into the articulation of our intelligibility. And that the way a chorea are those moments, it depends. You have to have cultivated the correct receptivity. But a chorea is those moments of silence in which you appreciate the moreness that is beyond you. And it demands a transformation for you. And so what I’m suggesting is one of the things we do in dialectic is we learn to seek those choreas that articulate our intelligibility in just the way Chris articulate, or just the way you articulate. I’m reminded of Antisthenes when asked, because he didn’t write the volumes that played a road. He asked, what did he learn from Socrates? And he said something. And he said, well, I learned how to converse with myself. And everybody was kind of like, what? What he meant was just what Chris said. He’d spent so much time living with Socrates, mimetically, that he had internalized that Socratic process. And he was capable now, after only practicing it years in dialectic, of doing it himself. So dialectic is not just a social behavior. It’s also, it’s something you do, you speak with God in a sense. Or that’s what you learn how to do. You learn how to speak with divine nature. And that’s when you’re the most, that’s when you’re- Arguably, that’s if the process has a key line. If there’s a fruition, that’s it. Yeah. The epic cases. I mean, the Neo-Platonists, it’s all, I think, very implicit in Plato. But the Neo-Platonists bring out those two dimensions very clearly. In fact, they go a little too far. They tend to emphasize, if you’ll allow me, the vertical ontological aspect of dialectic within the discourse with one’s own soul. And that’s how Plato, by the way, defined dialectic, discourse with your soul. They tended to emphasize this. That’s because they lived in a school and it was so taken for granted that the ontological, right? Intrapersonal was embedded into an existential interpersonal. Both are always there. Mutually informing and transforming each other. Chris- And that’s something that Socrates, I mean, alongside the socialized dialogues in Plato, Socrates, I mean, I think that’s what’s represented by those moments of reverie that Socrates famously has when he pauses for hours at a time to listen to his daemon, right? That’s the interiorized exaptation of the socialized dialectic in the epictasis form that you’ve just described. Yeah, Socrates makes it clear that the examination of others, the Socratic examination of others, is always, for reasons we’ve already articulated, always, always also a self-examination. And Socrates, I forget which dialogue it is, but he says, you know, after I’m done talking with you, I always remember that there’s a man waiting for me at home that I have to talk to. And that’s his own soul. Yeah. Yeah. And then it kind of feeds back too, though, doesn’t it? Because for, like, the dialectic that Socrates carries on with his daemon also is what indicates the kairos of the socialized dialogues. Oh, totally, totally, yeah. And the point of his entry into those dialogues, right? He’s guided all the while by his inward dialectic. And I think that’s precisely what tutors him to guide the socialized dialectic as effectively as he does, right? So there’s like, there are two concentric circles running on one another. Yeah, I think- Throughout the entire corpus. I think that internal dialectic, you know, transforms the mind into, so it’s able to achieve a state in process that is in deep conformity with the states in process of distributed cognition and ultimately of the environment. I think dialectic is ultimate because it is an act of love. It’s ultimately about transforming to yourself so you have more and more have the perspicacious capacity to enter into conformity with the logos and then through the logos into conformity with ontos, with being. That’s how you get ontological. You, you know, you get into affinity with the logos, conformity with it, and then through the logos, you get into affinity with ontos, with being. I was just thinking as you were speaking that this is very high conceptual stuff, but also it’s very simple at the same time, you know? Totally, totally. It’s a conversation you’re having with your wife or your children or when, you know, you go for a walk and you look at a tree. Exactly. It’s not all this complexity of concepts. It’s just being attuned to reality, right? Being attuned to reality. Yes, that’s scalability. That’s the thing that Paul keeps looking for. And there’s a scalability of discourse that is scale. Well, that’s exactly it. You know, as soon as we are persons, we are in discourse because we become persons through discourse, right? And so, yes, this is very, in some sense, it can reach up or reach down whichever metaphor you want into the very foundations of your fundamental framing of reality and how you’re being framed to reality and by reality, right? All of that, it can reach to that, as you said, this very high conceptual stuff, but it is practicable in the most, and I don’t want this to sound like an insult, in the most mundane discourse that you can engage in. This is what I mean about it being scalable because every disc, like nobody has to be an expert in neoplatonic philosophy to have found themselves in a conversation that takes on a life of its own and takes all of the participants to places they couldn’t get to on their own. Everybody knows that. Everybody has the capacity to practice that. All we are trying to do is articulate this more and more and more theoretically, but also with practicable consequences so we can afford its enhancement, its acceptation, because of our current situation and because of the emerging potential of these media and these new communities of practice. We have to somehow accept ancient dialectic into the current, into these current new communities of practice and this new medium of communication. So it’s an end-soaling process. Yes. Back to the word, back to soul again. And that’s a big part of making, no, that’s the wrong verb, exactly the wrong verb. That’s a big part of affording somebody becoming a person. Right, that end-soaling process. And what’s really interesting is- Yeah, so a soul, just, sorry, a soul’s not something we have that we’re born with. A soul is something we become in soul through time. I like, in fact, making it a verb the way you have and a verb that picks up on connections to embodiment and enactment. Yeah. Yeah, I think it is. And so, I mean, this is, again, this is a way of trying to reinventio some of the practices of theurgy in the ancient world where they were sort of practicing sort of animating things. And we look at that and we go, that’s weird magic. And I don’t doubt that there was degraded forms of it in which it’s weird magic, but there were also really powerful forms of it because, you know, Procus, for example, says that internal theurgy is way more important than external theurgy. And what it was is about this process, right, like you said, of ensouling things, of reanimating them, setting them back into their proper motion. Psyche is wind blowing. It’s a self-moving thing. When we can deeply remember Sati, how everything is suke, everything is self-moving, how the logos is not just a set, but a continual gathering and unfolding, like that reanimation so that we’re constantly remembering the moreness into the suchness. That was also a big part of this whole set of ritual practices that we dimly understand called theurgia in the ancient world. So you’re supposed to always be practicing theoria, you know, contemplation, meditation, reflection, and theurgia. And then that was also ultimately supposed to lead to theosis. You’re gonna become more and more godlike by doing it. Yeah, I thought of the reanimating the Death Star again. That image came back to me again. Well, the zombie is, the zombie is the horror of what reanimation looks like when it cannot be properly housed within a worldview. It’s horrific reanimation, right? Reanimation is the wrong word, I guess, yeah. Insuling, I like my word, insul. So that’s a way of thinking about it is the zombie is a resurrection without any insolment. Uh-huh, sure. Yeah, and I just had this other thought that occurred to me as we were talking about the Death Star. And in popular culture, you wanna destroy the Death Star, right? But you don’t destroy the Death Star. You wanna integrate the shadow. You want to insol the world, right? With all of its darkness and machines and find a soul in the reality of what we’re living at this time. I mean, part of it, I mean, the difficulty with darkness is, it stands for many things as a term. Because there’s a way in which the darkness is to the light as the silence is to the sound. So there’s that sense of darkness. The Kiaroskara. The holy darkness. Yeah. Well, yeah, yeah. And so, yeah, I mean, there’s a sense in which a lot of what we might think of darkness is just the otherness of things and their capacity to disturb us and disrupt us. Now we can either resist that and harden against it, or we can, like Rilke was saying, we can get an adaptive relationship to it so that it starts to disclose itself as beautiful. And beautiful doesn’t mean comfortable. Doesn’t mean smooth. I like that point in The Lord of the Rings where Galadriel is considering taking the one ring and she said, I will be beautiful like the sea. Or what is it? Oh, I’m terrible and all men will fear me. And you go, whoa. And that’s the sense of beauty that Rilke is talking about. So I’m trying to get, Andrew, that the beauty that I’m talking about is not the smoothness. It is exactly that kind. It has awe within it. And there’s a sense in which- It’s not this false luminosity or love and light, which actually is a very dark thing because it’s a denial of the other half of life. This was part of the transformation of the Lucifer metaphor, the light bearer. And the idea became, and this goes so much with bullshitting, is that Lucifer bears the light that misdirects your salience and makes you not seek the good. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Chris, you were gonna say something. Chris, say something, please. I was just- It’s always a pleasure to hear you talk, so. No, no, no. Well, I was just gonna say that, yeah, I mean, the idea of beauty as something that necessarily destroys and recreates yourself, that the roughness of beauty and also the roughness of love is that you cannot encounter it without being so changed. And if you can encounter it without being so changed, then it is less than the fullness of its nature. It is less than the fullness of love if you can encounter it without also being transformed by it. So there has to be a crack in everything, you know? There has to be, like, one of the things about Leonard Cohen is his voice became more beautiful when he lost his voice, you know, and same with a lot of singers who have these broken voices. Somehow they’re more powerful when they’ve been broken. Some aren’t, though, because they represent- Some aren’t, sure. Yeah, that prime. But they still have, even the ones that are very pure or whatever, still have an unusual, strange quality to them. Oh, yeah. They’re not, they’re not, they’re surprising in some way, right? Yeah. I was going to say that Neil Platon is picking up on what Chris just said, really understand the process, and this is like, so, of giving birth, and Socratic is the midwife, and they talk a lot about the strain and pain of labor that goes into giving birth, and that if you try to give birth, and think about how a concept is ultimately based on conceive, right? If you try to give birth without the pain of labor, you will have a stillborn entity, which, right? That’s profound, yeah. But it’s also hopeful because- Yeah. Yeah, it’s also a hopeful thing because you can’t avoid the pain of birth, right? It’s nothing, something that nobody can- Can avoid. It’s very destructive. Pain indicates, pain is the real indication of the real potential of real death. That’s what pain is. It is your mortality taking you by the throat. But let’s remember that before medicine, right? Before modern medicine, in a quarter of births, there was a death of the mother of the child or the mother and the child. Yeah. That’s always a very dangerous thing in the ancient world. That’s why midwives are so important because, right? They help to mitigate our mortality so that we can give birth. That’s what dialectic is. Which is what inflects the process with its share of danger, which I think is something that’s not adequately appreciated about this process, about the dialect, about philosophy in general. Because we’re too comfortable. Is that it’s dangerous. And the association of wisdom with danger, I think is not intuitive for a lot of people. I don’t know that it would have been intuitive to me either before undertaking it. But every instance of it risks a form of dispossession that is utterly, utterly destructive. And that is, I think, necessarily so, just as love is, just as love does. And so I think that its darkness has to be properly manifest in order for its sapiential promise to be fulfilled. That’s why it’s the dark night of the soul. Yeah. Yeah, and I thought of this notion of sacrifice as well. There was, that was one thing I wanted to talk to you guys about is the notion of sacrifice and the scapegoat. Because I’ve been thinking a lot about that having read René Girard and… The one I saw, Satan Follows Lightning. Yeah. And maybe that’s a whole other big topic that you can’t get into right now. But anyway, what you said, Chris struck me as quite profound. But notice what we’ve done, because we’ve enacted it. We start with this notion of soul. And notice how we’ve done all the procession. We’ve projected it out, right, into all of these variations, almost like the projection of sound in music, right? But we’re also periodically, we keep circling back and gathering back. And we’re trying to find what is the thread running? What is the symptomatic thread that runs through all these projections? And thereby I can retrace back to their originating source. Because we haven’t disclosed it fully. Of course we haven’t. But we’ve enacted the very process I’m talking about. We cycle it, we project out, we gather back in, and we’re constantly doing this. And we’ve just done it. All over soul. Now, have we come up with a definition of it? I don’t think we have a definition of it. But are we now in a more right relationship with the reality that is referred to by soul? I think so. I think so too, yeah. So I think that just the notion becomes more evocative. It doesn’t take any final form or structure, or certainly not any kind of certainty attached to it. No, it’s like we come within range of knowing by the light of that, which we cannot define. Yeah, I think these things are always epistatic for us. We’re always, right? We’re always, we get a trajectory sense of them in our constant trajectory towards them. That’s wonderful. But notice what you have to give up. You have to give up the having mode. The having mode is about completable goals. I can drink until I am done. But becoming wise, right? There’s no done-ness. It’s final, I’m complete. In fact, that’s a sure sign that somebody isn’t wise, right? And having something to say has to be given up as well in a sense. Yes. I notice sort of a silence overtaking me and then the compulsion to speak. The two move, right? I mean, right now I’m tending to speak a lot because I’m very much caught up in trying to voice what I’m trying to follow. There’s a vocation for me. I’m being called, right? And I’m trying to give voice to this calling, this sense of being called. And I feel a particular urgency of how it’s impregnating me and impressing upon me, but also the urgency of the need of the situation we’re in, both the meaning crisis and the particular way it’s being accelerated by the COVID crisis. But I appreciate what you’re saying, Andrew. I think. I didn’t mean that as a criticism or to suggest that you were speaking too much. I’m just saying it’s almost like there’s a compulsion to speak and you have to stop yourself and say, why am I speaking? What is the, am I adding anything to this conversation or am I just speaking for the sake of speaking? But I feel that you’re being animated by something beyond that. So I never questioned that in what you were saying. Yeah, I just wanna reassure, I guess I was trying to offer reassurance that I am trying to cultivate a sense where I am receptive to being struck by people, by insight, connection, criticism and commentary that they give, such that I will take it to heart if I have good plausible reason to believe it was given in good faith. That’s a standard, that’s a virtue I’m trying to cultivate. And multiple times in this conversation, you’ve seen me, I’m struck by what either one of you have said something and it’s like, oh wow. Yeah, yeah, me too. And well, and also Chris has been much quieter in this conversation and part of me is like wanting you to speak more because you have such a way with words. On the other hand, I think there’s a dignity at other times in just being present in the conversation and that adds something to the conversation as much as words would add to the conversation. I think so, yeah, because I mean. I was just gonna say, Chris listens better than anybody than I know, he really does. Thank you, John. No, come on Chris. I mean, that’s not just as a compliment of a friendship. You listen in this deeply responsive and receptive way, right, and you take it to heart, like I’ve been saying. And you come point to when you come back after the silence. I mean, that’s why you spoke of this, right? Because you come back out of the silence, right? And you speak in virtue of it and you speak in. Right, yeah, or try to, yeah, yeah, well exactly. No, thank you for saying it that way. I think because to me identifying with the rhythm of the dialogos doesn’t always mean being its voice, right? Because the listening ear is, to me, like the dialogos, the dialogos takes the various dialogists and collapses them into an entity so that the listening voice and the, sorry, the speaking voice and the listening ear collapse into unity. And so the unity of the listening ear and the speaking voice is such that partaking of the rhythm of the conversation can simply be that, can simply be being its form of silence, being its form of listening silence. And you’re right, and I have this, I share your feeling, Andrew, of wanting to make sure that anytime the speech is offered, that it is offered in, that it’s tuned to the rhythm of the dialog so that it contributes to the evolution of the melody and it doesn’t interrupt it. Or if it does interrupt it, it interrupts it in order to pivot it meaningfully and not gratuitously. So I like, that’s so important to me. The economy of dialogos is really, really important to me. Beautiful. And because I think it’s something that has to be finessed and it’s something you can get better at and you can get more fluent in. So I think it’s just that, reticence is not fear or trepidation most of the time. It’s just waiting for the chirotic opportunity where the voice becomes an essential part of the dialogic evolution and therein dignifies itself. I got this powerful image out of this and I don’t know if you were attending it. This notion of the way the Greek chorus bears witness. Because in dialectic, all the people that are not speaking are basically the Greek chorus bearing witness in a reflective fashion and always poised to disturb what the speaker has done or they’re meant to call the speaker out in both meanings of that word. They’re meant to- They’re here now and they’re here and they’re with us in a sense. Yes, exactly, exactly. Right. I’m playing on this notion of calling out when you call somebody out and that means you’re trying to draw them, but you’re also calling them in to giving an account of themselves and being responsible. Like I’m calling you out. And so, I mean, that’s how I understand the function of the Greek chorus. And what I was hearing when Chris was, I just got this image when he was talking about all the people participating, for example, in a dialectic, that what’s happening is momentarily this person is the speaker in the Greek and then all the other people are the Greek chorus bearing witness. And people often, it’s telling that we don’t understand the dramatic function of the Greek chorus anymore. So Chris, was I correct in picking up on that illusion? Ah, yeah, yeah, no, I think so. I think so. Because I think the chorus does, I mean, there’s a reason that the traditional function of the Greek chorus is in part a wordless, well, they’re not always wordless. Sometimes they speak, but when they don’t speak, they are a wordless expression of the dramatic irony that knows the circumstances of the plot beyond its own knowing. So, right, you listen for like, the Greek chorus hears everything that is not said as opposed to everything that is said. And so they, again, they represent the form of proleptic knowing that sees the meta meaning of the narrative beyond the meaning that the characters are living out. Right, right. So the representation of that presence in a dialogue, I think is very important because it hears and sees everything that is yet unsaid, that is yet unspoken, that has not yet been shown forth. And so the presence of that person shows forth the dialogos to patterns that it has not yet espoused, just as the Greek chorus, with their eye to dramatic irony, can see the meta meaningfulness of the narrative that is not available to the characters that are being born out through it. That’s amazing. Yeah. And it gives me a slight insight into why, why we’re doing this as well, because we’re not just doing this for ourselves or for some egocentric reason, even though it might appear that, like putting videos on YouTube, because there is this chorus around us. There is this multiplicity of voices that we are responsible to or that are, I don’t know if I’ve articulated that. No, I think that’s exactly right. That’s the weird symbol on of this medium, Andrew. I mean, think about, well, think about Socrates. He doesn’t wanna write anything down because he thought the permanence of text would choke off the life of logos, right? Plato, of course, then ironically, especially in a dramatically ironic sense, went ahead to write all these dramas. But what we are doing is we are doing the, we are in souling speech here in dialogos. And it has that effervescent, but ephemeral quality of conversation, but it’s also being made permanent by recording. We are joining together. It’s also a performance of some kind. It absolutely is. Like it’s not just we’re talking to each other. No, no. I mean, it kind of seems that way. But it’s gonna be taken up and have a life of itself beyond us. Normally when conversation ended, the only life it had was in the memory of the participants. Now, like text, it will have a life of its own independent of our authorship. And that means we are bridging between the two things that Plato saw as oppositional. We are getting the permanency of text, but we’re getting the living breath of dialogue. And we’re getting theater because we need theater. I mean, this is what’s missing in our culture is real theater. And I think that is almost what’s compelling us to talk like this and appropriate that Christophe would use these theatrical metaphors because all of the life is a stage. Yeah. All the world’s a stage. It also, I think fits the dialogic process with its share of danger. We were talking before about the fact that in order to be changed by something, you have to risk dispossession and you have to risk, there has to be something deleterious about it. And I think that the public nature of it actually fits it with that quality because there is, or I don’t know if you guys feel it, I still feel it every time I do one of these things. I feel a sense, a very pregnant sense of risk. I feel a very pregnant sense of danger. And to me, that’s essential. That’s essential. I think Sylvester said something very, very eloquent about this too in terms of that the public nature is what actually allows for the, is what, the public nature of these dialogues is precisely what opens them to the possibility of dynamic quality because you have to, you’re walking on the knife edge. And so, and I think there’s some kind of, there’s some kind of artful balance or equilibration that some dialogues strike better than others depending on the amount of awareness that the dialogue accommodates of the witnessing presence of the chorus that sees it from without. And every dialogue is a little different. How each dialogue accommodates that presence is a little bit different. Some seem to kind of carry on almost heedless of it. Some are so hyper aware of it that they become so fraught with their foreknowing sense of risk that they become almost inhibited by it. But there’s something down the middle of those two. And when that catches properly, I think that the fear of exposure risked by the perspective that sees this from without is part of what helps to ensoul it with its possibility. Because perhaps if you make yourself vulnerable as well, and if with three are sincerity, you also become the potential object for ridicule or the potential scapegoat. Totally, totally. But that’s the virtue again. The virtue is what steers you between the vices of deficiency and the vices of excess. And I’m thinking here that part of what the chorus does, I mean, the chorus, so the hero is on center stage the way the hero archetype is on center stage right now in a lot of these discourse. And I keep trying to remind people that the heroic myth always needs to be counterbalanced with the hubris myths. And I think that the chorus often speaks the voice of the warning of hubris to counterbalance. That’s definitely what’s happening in the tragedies to counterbalance the heroism of the hero. And you’re supposed to, right? The hero, especially in the tragedy, ultimately is defeated. But right, and this is sort of more of a Nietzschean interpretation than Aristotelian. But the point is that the person who’s partaking in the drama, watching the drama, actually gets steered between hubris and an overblown heroism. So they’re not a coward because they admire the beauty of the hero, but they remember the mortality because the chorus speaks of hubris and we witness its effects. So I think there’s something important about the way we have this invisible chorus around us right now, because it really helps us cultivate a virtue in which, like a kind of courage, where we’re not hypervigilant and therefore terrorized into timidity, or we are just overblown and just speaking in some reckless and heedless fashion. So the word that came to me is the chorus keeps you humble, humility, but also not… Well, it encourages you. There’s some part, if you’re part of a chorus, you’re part of a grand story at the same time. So there’s this humility and there’s this, I don’t know, dramatic, grandiose… You’re right, yes. Excitement about life or… What it does, I think, is actually, it’s a higher order of relevance. It represents a higher order of relevance that then is gifted to the dialogue. Very much, very much. I was gonna say that in addition to the humiliation of the hero, the chorus also honors the hero. It’s right, the chorus will often bespeak some of the virtues of the hero. I just wanna say this because I don’t wanna portray the chorus as just something that’s humiliating the hero. The chorus also honors the hero. The chorus will often remind us of elements of the hero’s path that have rendered him heroic in important ways. So I just wanted to nuance that a bit, Andrew. The chorus is doing that presentation of hubris, but it’s also bound up with a recognition, an honoring of the hero. So I’m trying to make it, what I’m trying to say, here, this is what I wanna say. The relationship between the hero and the chorus is not adversarial, it’s opponent processing. It’s a process that’s, it’s supposed to be a self-correcting process. I wonder if it’s something like the relationship between the individual instrumentalist and the conductor of the orchestra, something like that. I mean, a really good book on all of this, how important this is, is this book. Bearing Witness to Epiphany, Person’s Things and the Nature of Erotic Life, and he doesn’t mean sexual eroticism. This is John Roussin’s book. He’s also works in Canada, at least he did when he wrote this book. And this whole notion of bearing witness to epiphany, which is bringing together so much of what we’ve said, and how it’s so central a process, bearing witness in this right way, is one of the deep ways in which we enculturate people and in which we turn them into persons. So maybe the chorus is a person who’s generating function. I think Chris is right. It’s an overarching, a higher order relevance realization that is contributing to the cultivation of personhood. Yeah, very much. And it reminds us, it reminds us what is essential, what matters, what is alive, and what is who-be-us, and what is false, what is good faith and what is bad faith. Precisely, precisely, because it creates, because it creates the bridge of continuity between the frame, and it’s a transforming device, right? It is the continuity between what is enclosed within the frame, in this case, the narrative within this metaphor, and what is beyond the frame of the narrative. So, and you’re precisely right. That, the most apt description of that continuity is precisely the relation of faith. Yeah, that’s exactly right. That’s good. And then you get, oh, and then I think what that does to invoke both of your sort of familiarity with Catholicism, that’s what tradition was supposed to be. Tradition was your faithfulness to the chorus that precedes, that is beyond you and pronounces upon you continuously. Yeah, precisely. Like the host or something of, hmm. Precisely. Well, I mean, in the liturgy, you always invoke the host. The host, yeah. Of all the people, not only all the people that are present visibly, you invoke all the invisible people that are present, all the salients, I’d say all the saints are made salient. All the angels and saints. All the angels and saints. Yeah. The heavenly host. Absolutely. And also, so you come back to being in a cosmos again. Yeah, you get to face it. A wandering, fragmented person, and then you find yourself situated in a mandala or a cosmos or in a world again to use Heidegger’s. Yeah, I think so. I think so. Yes. I’ve always been struck, Spinoza has this notion of, we can find what he calls the face of the universe, which is this sort of gestalting thing that allows us to enter into right relationship with it. And so, yeah, I think it’s doing exactly that. We’re back to the interfacing notion again. Tradition is a powerful way in which we interface with the universe and make it, as you said, make it cosmic for us, as opposed to just an empty set of stuff thrown together. Not an empty set. I’m gonna say a purely logical, I didn’t mean an empty set. I mean a purely logical, a purely formal set, as opposed to a logos. The difference between a set- A death star, sorry. Yeah, yeah. The difference between a set is you can put any things into it and they’re just bound together by the formal grouping. But the logos is things are grouped together so that they come to belong together. And thereby, they’re belonging to each other is how they can include you and you can participate. Their belonging to each other is precisely how you can belong to them. I should get going, guys. Back to the- The world as it is. The world as it is, exactly. Hmm. Do you have anything else to say, Christopher, before we end this? Nope, I’ll let that be the final word. Okay. Well, thank you so much. That was amazing. Thank you, Andrew. Thank you, Andrew. Again, for convening us and yeah, it’s great. So we talked about the soul this time. That was the word I threw in at the beginning and maybe if we do it again sometime, I wonder what’s next. I like this, Andrew. Actually, I like this idea of taking a pregnant topic and then throwing it in. And we do that thing I talked about. We open it up and then we recollect it and open it up and recollect it as opposed to just forming the circle. But actually centering the circle upon a chosen topic and do philosophy on it. I think that’s an excellent thing we do. What I really like actually is this three people. I find it’s much more interesting for me in these kind of conversations. If there’s three people here, it seems to be such a much more dynamic energy than just one person against another person. So that’s one thing I really love is this trio. I’m doing that with other people as well. Well, you have the intimate chorus then. Yeah, because the chorus is present when we’re three for some reason. Yep, exactly. We’re more like we’re on a stage. There’s more than just two people. Again, we’re actually on a real stage when there’s three. The chorus is here. Because the symbol of the third factor can emerge more apparently when there’s three people. Right, the third factor. It’s a way of creating a locus for the third factor to emerge very much. Right, and if there’s a fourth person, somehow one person has kind of left out a little bit of the conversation. Not always, but if it’s five, it’s just too many. So three seems beautiful. Anyway, I’ll let you go. Thank you so much, guys. That was just mind blowing as always, and even more so this time. Well, thank you, Andrew. And again, thank you, Chris. Always wonderful to be in your presence. Thanks, guys. Likewise. Bye-bye.