https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=29t5fK3lHI8
So welcome everybody. This is a super treat of a voices with Reveki and it’s also paired with Ken Lowry’s channel climbing on Mount Sophia. Is that right? And many of you know that Ken and I have had a really powerful ongoing. I think at times it becomes a genuine deal logo. So there’s a flow between us that takes on a life of its own and it’s been really powerful. But the other person here is somebody many of you have heard me speak of multiple times in multiple places. Somebody whose work has had a huge influence on me. It’s had a huge influence on me and one of my co-authors Dan Schiappi. We read week by week carefully playlist critique of impure reason together. Dan Schiappi and I, and of course, I’m talking about DC Schindler and it’s just a great pleasure to welcome you here. David, it’s a real honor to have a chance to talk to you, John and Ken. So thank you for the invitation. So I’m going to pass things first to Ken and and then he’ll pass things to David and then we’ll enter into hopefully discussion, which will hopefully engender genuine deal logos. Or try it. Trio logos, maybe. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, thank you. I’m super excited to be here. I’m as with most things on this journey so far for me in relation to you, John, and having this channel, kind of a chance following of a thought has led me to a particularly humbling kind of position where I get to be with two people who I have found to be genuine guides to the mountain of wisdom for me. And so this conversation came about because I was sitting reading Plato’s critique of impure reason and I had the idea of talking with John about some of the things that it was revealing to me. And I just decided I would try to take it a step further. And here we are. So I’m thrilled to be here with both of you. I kind of imagine us as being too kind of grizzled and well, well aware and careful mountain guides with maybe something of a kid who’s enamored with the mountain and with climbing and hoping to glean some insights along the way and maybe provide a bit of a foil for those of us who are to some degree more in the cave than others. So I’m very grateful to be here and very excited. Thank you. I’m grateful when you gave that description. I thought at first I was the kid with the two mountain climbers, seasoned mountain climbers, but I’m very grateful to be part of this. I’ve just recently discovered John’s work and have been very moved by it. This idea that the world is suffering from a crisis of meaning, I think, couldn’t be more true. And it’s been a conviction that I’ve had for as long as I can remember, back in high school even. But one gets the impression very often of struggling through some of those things in a kind of an isolated way, just in a dark corner doing one’s own work. So it’s been a great revelation to discover the things that you’ve been thinking about, John. Thank you very much, John. And they’ve resonated very much with me. And this is a fantastic opportunity to expand my circle of dialogue partners in a way that I’m just really thrilled about. So thank you very much. Ken, you were the one who arranged this initially and I’m grateful for the invitation. So thank you both. Well, David, I’d like to invite you out of the dark corner into what has named this little corner of the internet. There’s a growing community of people who share the concerns that you and I and Ken share. And we’re all in good faith dialogue and discussion and fellowship with each other. And I would like to invite you into that. There’s a lot of people that I think you would enjoy. I think you and Jonathan Pajot could have an amazing conversation, for example. But I’d like to take this opportunity to zero in on something that’s like really of a central concern of mine right now. And it’s part of responding to the mean crisis. And it’s something that Dan, Chiapi and I share. And when we were reading the book, which is you start Plato’s critique of impure reason by introducing this diagnostic term or something that’s wrong with the culture. And you talk about mythology, the haters of the logos. And in there, there’s a critique of sort of the modern understanding or the current understanding because it averses between modern and postmodern of reason and how it’s significantly truncated. And there’s a notion, and it’s in the title of your book, Plato’s critique of impure reason. So there’s obviously a deeper, richer, broader notion of reason that you’re trying to rehabilitate, revivify for us. I feel that I’m very much in that project. One of the ways, one of the diagnostics I’ve pronounced on the meaning crisis is that we’ve reduced reason to sort of a propositional tyranny and a purely communicative technique. And it’s completely instrumentalized. It has no inherent value. And therefore, we as the rational beings have no inherent value because of our reason is just instrumental. We become purely instrumental. And so that proposition, and we’ve lost these other kinds of knowing, procedural, perspectival, participatory, that were caught up in the vertical aspect of reason I call contemplative. And you and you are definitely playing with the vertical metaphor in Plato’s critique, the rise up, the going down, the rising up that that plays a big role. And so first of all, I want to give you a chance to say, is that landing with you? Am I getting it right? Is that resonating with you? Yes, I mean, fireworks are going off with every sentence you’re saying there. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I, you know, the original title of the book just before I sent it off to the publisher was The Crisis of Reason. And, and, and I thought that, you know, that this is, it’s a, it’s a, it’s a crisis of reason. I mean, in all, in, in, in various ways, actually, a crisis in reason and a crisis that reason is called to address. But one of the reasons I just, I’m just very excited about the way you were framing these things is, is it resonates with a conviction I’ve had for a very long time, which is, on the one hand, as you say, it’s very clear that we’ve got a reductive sense of reason that we, we’ve reduced reason to the conceptual, to the propositional, to the instrumental. It’s a, it’s a, it’s a, it’s a, it’s a formalistic instrument to connect A to B, but that’s as far as it goes. It’s, you know, and therefore becomes a mere servant of the desires and so forth. And that, that critique one hears with a certain regularity, but typically the response to that is, so we need to get beyond reason, we need to set reason aside and discover a different access to reality, something, you know, we need to, to, in a certain sense, undermine the claims of reason precisely to save our humanity in the ways that you’re talking about. Yeah, and that just has never seemed right to me. And it’s one of the reasons that Plato has been such a crucial sort of mentor, a mentor that’s, that’s, that’s a bit presumptuous, but… I’ll take it, take it, David. I think it’s… Just sort of an ideal, I mean that, that he has such a rich sense of reason and it’s reason that’s not defined in the first place. I mean, what we just described there is the sophisticated sense of reason that he, he is opposing philosophy to. And so, so it’s a way of cutting between the hyper rationalists and the irrationalists. Yes. And recognizing a kind of an integrative center that does justice to the whole complexity of human life in a way that is founded in reason and undergirded by this, this truth. So, Ken, I’ll just keep going but please like whenever you want to, I’d like, like, interrupt. Right. So, I take it then that you, like, first of all, perhaps, before I ask the question, I’m just gonna, here’s the preliminary thing. What would you, what would you say are the symptoms of mythology, where people are caught, and they’re vacillating purely, purely, you know, current sense of, you know, purely, you know, sort of technical logical instrumentality, or some kind of romantic irrationality, and they’re in there and I take it that mythology applies to both camps in some. Right. Absolutely. Okay, so what is, what are the, what would you say are the defining features of mythology? I mean, again, that’s a very astute comment about in both camps because on the one hand you think that the rationalists are the lovers of reason. But the but the problem is that the rationalists are have have reduced reason to something contemptible. Yes. So, so, and and and restricted it in a way that will always require them something irrational to give it a context. In the end, the the rationalists, the hyper rationalists and the irrationalists really don’t look that different. Right. As a matter of fact. So what are some of the symptoms, you know, that there are, there are so many. You know, one is this disinclination. So I think I call it a kind of intellectual impatience. But but but what I mean is this this this inclination to get to want to get to the heart of a matter. When you’re when you’re confronted with something, I think that we have so many examples of cultural habits and patterns of reacting immediately, usually with some sort of ideology, kind of automatic responses simply to meet some practical need or immediate desire. Rather than actually abiding with a reality and asking a question that that draws us into it and into the into the truth of it. And and and we’re disinclined because there’s something really sort of vulnerable about that you end up having it’s it’s essentially contemplative, as you say, you there’s a there is a kind of of of letting go. Heidegger’s got a lot of wonderful things about this. I’ve got, you know, mixed feelings about Heidegger. But I but as one should as one should. This this this sense of of letting something present itself and and present it in its in its essence. That that’s what we’re looking for. And that there’s there’s there’s there’s there’s very little in our culture that that encourages that kind of a disposition, you know, whether it be the I mean, you know, technology, social media politics. You know, the the the economic the system of economics. I mean, there’s so many things that create pressures that require efficiency and productivity and immediate to the bottom line. Get into the bottom line kind of thing. I took David, I wanted to ask you is and I think you’re right to invoke that vulnerability, but I wanted I want to I want to press on it a little bit, not press, not push back, but press on it with you. Right. So, like, part of it is and this is what gets lost when I would I would put to you when we lose the contemplative dimension is the sense that certain truths are will only be disclosed to us if we’re willing to undergo a significant personal transformation. Right. And then instead you have the Cartesian proposal that comes to fruition and Leibniz of a universal method as long as you use the method correctly. Then all prop all properties like all truth is available to you. And so I see there being I see it’s I’m asking you, I guess, is it not just the vulnerability, but also the demand for transformation that vulnerability exposes us to that is also being avoided in Yeah, yeah. Can I ask a question really quick, please. I just I just want to stay with you here. So what I’m seeing is there’s this way in which we’ve we’ve perceived kind of two groups of people down these paths who are like wandering around in this fog that is my thought myth, mythology, and something about the path where they diverge has to do with using understanding things as being instrumental, instead of being good in themselves. That’s something like the divergence point where they both go into the wrong and find themselves in this fog and then john you started to drill into it there. And there’s something about the reason that makes that turn so like we’re focusing on that point in the fork in the road, something about that turn is this unwillingness to be vulnerable, which also has some maybe fear or anxiety with transcendence. Or at least transformation but yes, both. Okay. Okay. Okay. That’s what I’m proposing to David. Yeah, okay. With him. I just want to make sure I’m with you. Well, I’d love to hear your further thoughts on this but I, you know that vulnerable vulnerability just as, as such as is sort of a negative stance and you can never begin with the negative, there’s got to be something that has called you forth for us. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, it’s interesting this is a, and this is something I’d love to think through further with with with both of you. And, you know, he uses the term conversion in fact, when he talks about what education is. And you think about his own experience or at least, you know, as, as the stories are told about him he was, you know, on track to be a very successful, a great man and poet. And, and there’s no doubt with his with his extraordinary talents, he would have been, but then he encounters Socrates. Yeah, and there was there was something about that that just instituted this radical change. That then lit up the world for him you have to imagine that in a very different way and I’m and I’m wondering, you know, is it is it possible to have this openness this disposition to things in a kind of discrete one by one basis or it does it have to be some kind of initial turning And that opens it up and I’m more inclined to say that but I have to say that’s that that was my own experience, but I don’t know if people come to it differently. Well, that was my own experience, I was brought up in a, in a, in a And then I encountered the figure of Socrates and it called to me it was a vocational. Right. Yeah. And that’s, that’s what I was leading to David I was leading to, I was, I was trying to get the sort of the call to transcendence the call to transformation. This is what this is what I was what I was talking about when I was trying to indicate the leap of reason. You know, you get somebody like Spinoza who is the most logical of all the philosophers you, but the book is entitled the ethics for a reason because you do all of this, but Spinoza says but you know in the end, it’s love. It’s a kind of love that draws you out of egocentrism right that calls you beyond your proclivities to self deception that is integral to this leap that we’re talking about here that that there are that there is a dimension of reason that is access to the truth that is only accessible to transformation and that transformation requires a kind of leap in it. And is that how does that sound for you? Yeah, well I love the expression leap of reason because it sort of gets at exactly the thing that I mentioned in the beginning that we think of faith is a leap because there’s no ground for it or something. And then read but reason you know takes very plotting steps you know and but that’s not in fact the case I think reason itself is is drawn forward in this in this way that that is there is there is a leap there is something I mean leap not in the sense of of having no not in the sense of being irrational obviously not being arbitrary or I’m just going to make an arbitrary decision to to jump. But your the word call is an excellent one there. And you know Dionysius the Areopagite another one of my hero whoever whoever he was. Whoever he was you know he draws attention to the kind of a play on words with talkallon and cullane you know beauty. Beauty is what calls us. It has a it has a kind of a character that that strikes us and moves us before we even can explain why we’re moved. So it moves us in a way that we feel like it’s not something happening to us in a purely passive sense. So we’re actively participating in it but but we’re but we’re not the one doing it. It’s we’re participating in something that we’re undergoing and that I think is really crucial to get the leap of reason right. Okay so I and I’m not going to I’m not drifting into psychologist here but one way I’ve been trying to think about this is that we have a rationality that has reduced itself to inference and has backed out the pivotal role of insight within. Okay that’s right. An insight is not like you don’t you don’t just passively receive an insight. You don’t do an insight. What you do is you participate. You’re called into an insight and as it called like it’s very much you’re being transformed because you’re transforming your framing right. And there’s this dialogical relationship between you and whatever the problem is in which they’re both unfold. You see what I’m doing with my hands I’m trying to count. That’s exactly it. Yeah. Right. And so in that for me that little moment and I don’t and again give me some liberty here. But that little moment of reciprocal opening that you get an insight. When that’s when that’s large and ongoing and profound between people that’s love that reciprocal opening between people right. And so I think there’s a there’s a deep continuity between if you’ll allow me that a cog site or the machinery of insight and the machinery of love in a very very sort of powerful way. Does that sort of does that sort of land for you as a proposal. Well absolutely and you know that that’s why I you know wrote that book that you mentioned on the critique of impure reason I was so struck by the fact that what what is appealing to reason for Plato is not truth in the first place it’s the good. Yes, yes, yes, yes. And then and truth is a function is part of that. I mean an inseparable part of that, but it’s it’s striking that reason would be ordered to the good. That’s not the way we normally think about things. But, I mean, to my mind that means that love and reason are really inseparable from each other. down together. So there’s two things I want to talk to you about that. One is the good. We’ll put that aside for a second. The second, and I don’t remember where you said it, maybe if it was in Love and Postmodern, the predicament or the castellicity of reason, you talk about something like, you do the three transcendentals and you talk about something like the primacy of the truth. Yeah, the primacy of the beauty, the ultimacy of truth, and the centrality of good. Centrality of the good, there you go. Right, right. So primacy of beauty, centrality of the good, and the ultimacy of truth. And that struck me, and the point you’re making is that they’re kind of all ultimate. You’re using superlative terms for each, but the superlative nature is different. So there are three different aspects of the same sort of calling, if I can put it that way, right? The call to the leap. So could you unpack that just a little bit, what you mean by that? Yeah, sure. No, I mean, you know, there’s something like the Trinitarian three-in-one kind of thing. And I wouldn’t absolutely insist, I think people can order the transcendentals. There’s a good argument for all different configurations, and I think that’s part of the mystery of the thing. I mean, but the point that I was making there is that it seems to me this is sort of how things work. You’re initially struck by the beauty of something, and that speaks to you before, that speaks to you in a way that gives you the ears to hear. Yes. It’s not that you’re addressing something and looking for a response. It’s calling to you. It elicits a response that already sets you in motion, and that’s then what enables you to actually deliberately respond. And so the beautiful there kind of gives way to the good, which is the striving after what has been revealed in a way that’s dramatic, that involves this dialogue, this interrelation. It can involve suffering. It will certainly involve suffering. That would be another question, whether any of this is possible without some kind of suffering is an interesting one. But eventually a commitment, the kind of devotion where you pledge yourself in a way, and the fruit of that is an insight or an understanding. And I love the word insight there. I mean, etymologically, it says it makes the point well. But you see these are all kind of, you might say, acts of a drama, the three acts of a drama in what it means to come to understand something. Okay, so that’s fantastic as a phenomenological presentation, right? And then what that speaks to, one way it spoke to me is this is the opposite of what we get in the, right, with the advent of the enlightenment, where we get the autonomy of these three domains from each other. And of course Habermas has made quite a bit about how that autonomy, right? It had benefits, of course, or else people wouldn’t have adopted it. But it’s had long-term significant costs in that it’s given this kind of deep fragmentation to our normativity, which ultimately leads to a fragmentation of the self in a profound way. Because the phenomenology, I think you just described is accurate. In our actual phenomenological experience, the three are deeply interwoven, and yet we have this official doctrine that pulls them apart. And so we are unhomed from our very own phenomenology of understanding. Yeah, yeah. Oh, I mean, yeah, sorry Ken, did you want to jump in there? No, I just, yes. Just to say yes. Yeah, I, no, that’s exactly right. And Kant is such a good sort of paradigm of this, that he isolates himself from, you know, part of the point of that description is to show that we are, we find ourselves involved in this before we realize it and before we can, you know, set the terms for it. Whereas Kant, you know, he wants to isolate the capacities and then determine their possibilities and then enter in, you know. And Hegel’s, you know, one-line critique of Kant, I think, is just, you know, ends the game. It’s that, you know, he doesn’t, he refuses to go into the water until he’s learned how to swim. Yeah, yeah. That’s exactly right. I, you know, that’s, and you see, there’s a fragmentation. You’re then, you end up being really detached from, not only from your relationships with others, but your yourself and your, the soul and body get fragmented there, reason and freedom. You know, you find yourself in this kind of no-man’s land or this, you know, view from nowhere called to then make judgments about the most central aspects of your identity, but you no longer have any grounds for, or standards to, you know, it’s kind of an arbitrary judgment. It’s a very, I mean, and it’s extraordinary to think how much this has infected and affected our cultural institutions and the way we are, even our universities. Totally. I wanted to propose something to you and see what you think about it. So, and you alluded to to Hegel’s view from nowhere, that objectivity. And what’s interesting, of course, is he says that that opens us up to the absurd because the view from nowhere can’t get the relevance of the view from somewhere, right? But then what I wanted to sort of get your thoughts on is, I think within the sort of flat land notion of reason, which is now a new flat land ontology that we’re sort of criticizing here, there is this crypto-contemplative dimension because there is this move to the view from nowhere, which is something like, right, but it’s not acknowledged, the contemplative dimension that actually grounds the notion of objectivity is completely backgrounded and put almost in a Doritian sense. It’s completely marginalized and we’re not allowed to invoke it, even though it ultimately legitimates the reduction of odd reason to the purely horizontal level. What do you think about that? I think that’s, I had never heard it put that way, but that really resonates to me. I think you’re exactly right. That gives it, that’s a very nice description. I think of it as kind of, it’s a false abstraction, but your way of putting it is, I think, I mean, it’s a false abstraction that we’re attracted to precisely because we’re meant, we’re meant to in a way transcend the immediacy of our relations. But this very interesting philosopher, Robert Spayman. I’ve got a book up here, but I haven’t read it yet. Okay, yeah, he’s great. He speaks of the need to recollect our nature in our transcendence and that there’s no genuine transcendence that isn’t also recollective. And I think that’s a crucial point because you realize, I mean, we are rational animals and in our, even in our most, our highest level intellectual behavior is the intellectual behavior of an animal. Yes. It’s, we are, I like to say we’re rational all the way down and we’re animal all the way up. Oh, that goes so much with a kind of ontology I’ve been proposing of, you know, based on my reading of Aregina, right, it’s emanation all the way down and emergence all the way up and they’re completely interpenetrating. Yeah, yeah. No, that’s right. So that even our move, our move to our, the vertical move is always in and through and in some sense with the horizontal. It’s not like a break. Yeah, it has to be. It has to be. It has to be. And I think what, like for me, what’s sparking right now is the connection to Drew Hyland’s work, Oh, yeah. the finitude and transcendence that Plato’s proposal is that we recognize the dual call, that we’re called, we’re called to remember our capacity for transcendence so that we don’t give into despair and servitude, but we’re also called to remember our finitude so that we don’t give into inflation and hubris and that what Plato is trying to do is to, it’s, we easily vacillate, but he’s trying to get us to, right, in that virtuous golden mean, right? Yeah. Yeah. And I don’t think people see that often enough in Plato. They think of him as a dualist, but that’s just, I mean, once you, once you catch sight of that, you see that there’s a, it’s a thread that runs through everything. Everything. He’s doing everything. Right. And you wanted to say something. Well, I want to bring in the notion of faith here because that is just, that is coming back for me over and over again, as we’re talking about almost the two different sides. To me, it strikes me as almost like a posture of which side I’m on. Am I on the side of transcendence, looking back and trying to pull my phenomenology up? And that’s this almost kind of like hubristic shallow diseased kind of faith that is kind of what my notion of faith used to be as a young person of just presupposing this idea because I’m over here stuck in my propositions, trying to pull my participation in the world upward versus a real faith, which is flipped down where I’m in my phenomenology. I’m fully in my phenomenology, but I have faith in the good, right? Because of how I’ve seen it through the beautiful and this kind of, this kind of mapping on of these transcendentals onto my phenomenology can then almost like, I’ve been thinking about faith a lot in this way that I can’t get behind it anywhere. But if it’s underneath me and I’m surfing on the wave of it or something like that, it can drive me upward. And it’s not then that I don’t look at the transcendent kind of propositions. It’s just that I look from this side. Yeah, that gets very complex. Yeah, because you want to say it in some sense, you’re looking at them both, but that sounds a little too schizophrenic. A theme that has been imposing itself on my reflection the last couple years is this idea, I mean, with the vertical is both up and down at the same time. And I think that one of the ways maybe to look at this tension that you described very well, because I know what that experience that you’re talking about very well, one of the ways is to recognize that the movement upwards increasingly it’s evident to me that it coincides with a deeper entry into things. And so you find yourself actually both simultaneously freer and more attached to things. I think that that’s a kind of an experiential description of this simultaneity of transcendence and imminence that you you know your movement is not to abandon things but to deepen your relationship with them. And you discover that you deepen your relationship with them only if you’re also entering into this higher level of perspective and freedom and so forth. So it’s a very complex thing. But yeah, I don’t know how that strikes the two of you. I think it strikes me well. Did you want me to respond to Ken or did you want to respond directly to David first? The only thing I would say is I had my first child was born two weeks ago so I’m very aware currently of the move inward and outward at the same time kind of thing. Well that’s what I wanted to bring in because and I want to try and sort of slow down because it sounds like we need some fine grain stuff here. Yeah, yeah. What David described to me sounds equally like a description of love. The more I fall in love with my partner the more deeper levels of my psyche are disclosed to me. The outward and inward are completely interpenetrating and it’s also not singular. It’s like because I’m affording the same for her as she’s affording for me. Right and I can talk about those as two things but they’re one in a really powerful way. And so I tend to therefore think of faithfulness, sorry faith as faithfulness, the kind of attitude that because again I don’t think of love as an emotion. I think of love as an existential stance because love can make you happy, sad, angry, right? So and it’s even less a feeling because so it’s not an emotion, it’s an existential stance. And then what I take faithfulness to be is the act of deeply identifying with that love. So when I’m faithful to my partner I am saying this existential stance I’m deeply identifying with it. So it’s not even, it’s beyond a commitment, it’s who I am and who I’m becoming. It’s a deep level of identification. And so when I’m faithful to her I don’t claim to have arcane knowledge of her or I know all about her or anything. In fact that would kill the relationship if I dare take that stance. It’s instead, it’s like no, I have this, I’m in this existential stance of love and I profoundly identify with it. I’m faithful to it. That’s how I understand faith. I understand it as the faithfulness to the existential stance of love. How does that land? Oh that’s yeah, that’s excellent. Again all these things are just resonating. A couple of things that I would add to that that are to sort of compliment what you said and be interested in your reaction. I recall once, I was pretty sure I read this in Jean-Luc Marion but I’ve never been able to find it again so it could have been something else. But a description of falling in love where the author, whoever it was, said that when you fall in love the whole world sort of disappears. Everything else becomes meaningless and I thought you know what, that’s false. That’s not true. I agree. In fact it seems to me just the opposite. I’ve had experiences like that but that always tended to be very disordered kinds of not real love. But the experience of love you find that your, the very description that you gave about where you identify in some fundamental way with the other person, you find that the whole world gets more interesting. Yes. You know with this person other things and you find yourself actually freer and able to give things more attention precisely as the kind of fruit of this attachment to the person. And I think that that opens up and this is the second point, you know in a very natural way to the you know the God question. I find it fascinating that when people get married it’s apparently often the case that if they haven’t gone to church in a really long time in that when they’re preparing for marriage they start talking about you know going to church. And there’s a practical reason for that and that is you know they start thinking about well we’re going to raise a family and you know we need to think about what our kids and so forth. And I think that’s a very profound and true thing. But I also think that there’s something just naturally that the God question sort of naturally arises from this attachment to you know from this experience of love. And I think in any really genuine experience of love that that question emerges. Well I want to respond to that because so you know there’s the three big predictors in psychology. One is measures of general intelligence and people don’t like to hear that but like if I have that measure I can predict a lot about you. The second one are the big five personality and I just published a paper with Gary Hovannesean integrating that with my stuff on relevance realization which I want to talk to you about at some point. But the other one is attachment, your attachment style because you know it’s really strongly predictive of how your romantic life and even your friendships will go. And one of the things that some of the authors of the theory, not the first generation but sort of second generation, emphasize is they challenge the notion we have something sick about dependence. There’s something pathological. You don’t want to be codependent. You don’t want to be dependent. And here’s the Kantian term, you never want to lose your autonomy in your relationship. And the people from the attachment literature say that is absolutely ridiculous. We actually find the fulfillment on our agency when we are in a proper relationship of dependence with somebody else. They call it the dependency paradox because it so challenges our individualistic autonomous sort of normativity. What I most should be is autonomous and completely self-sufficient because that is how I will most guarantee my agency. And then what they say is no, no, no. The way you most is to be securely attached. Now if you’re pathologically attached it messes up. But if you’re securely attached it actually opens up your agency in profound ways. That’s the psychological research. And I think it supports your point about how your world is actually opened up when you can enter into. And of course they’re talking primarily about romantic relationship. I hate that we call it that because it sounds like the romantics got love right, which I don’t think they did. But although there’s profound insights in romanticism. But they’re talking, I’ll use the Greek terms, I think they’re properly talking about Eros, Phileas, and Agape. That only in that, and this coincides with Frankfurt’s work. You’re probably aware of it, like Reasons for Love that Harry Frankfurt argues about that. If you don’t have love, then you can’t, if you don’t have that connectedness and that willingness like Iris Murdoch said to acknowledge that something other than yourself is real, her definition of love, then you can’t be rational. You ultimately can’t be rational. And then if you can’t be rational, your agency is fundamentally undermined. Sorry, that was a lot, but I wanted to- No, and the irony is the one who insists on autonomy is going to be the one in codependent relationship. Yes, exactly. That’s the flip side of that point. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. There’s something here of like the instrumentality of love, right? Looking at love as being, I’m almost seeing love as being like an engine that’s pulling us into relationship with a thing. But if we’re loving for our own sake or how the thing relates to us or how my partner relates to me, then somehow if I go beyond that and love them for who they really are, it opens up the God question, it sounds like. Yeah. Well, I mean, I think it does. I mean, first of all, I mean, I’ll invoke Fromm’s distinction, which goes back before Fromm, and he admits this, right? Between the having mode and the being mode. And both are legitimate. And this is the thing people have to hear. They constantly mishear Fromm. If you don’t have water, if you don’t have oxygen, you don’t have food, you don’t have shelter, you’re dead. The having mode, the reason why we are attracted to the having mode is because it deals with some of our most urgent and pressing needs. And to deny that, which I think is one of the great failures of Gnosticism, is a significant error. But we don’t like, you can notice that even the language, you have sex, but you are in love. Yeah. Right? Right. Right. And I think there’s a fundamental difference there. And so we’re not solving a problem. And I find this temptation, right, because I’m a scientist. I find this temptation in my relationship with my kids and with my partner to recategorize what’s happening as a problem that needs to be solved. Right? Right? Now, there are problems that need to be solved. I’m not. Yeah. Yeah. If you think of the other person as a problem to be solved, you have killed the relationship. It’s doomed. It’s doomed. It’s doomed. You have to be right. You’re not trying to solve a. You’re not trying to solve a problem. You’re trying to be in right relationship to a mystery. Right. Well, that’s yeah, that’s it, you know, comes back to the question. If you think of reason as an instrument, a problem solving instrument. Yes. And you couple that. I mean, so that’s a basic point. But you couple that with the idea that the truth, the fact that reason defines our humanity, what you get is a fundamental relationship to the world as a problem. Yeah, that’s right. Right. Right. Right. If you think of if you think of reason instead in these contemplative terms as in fact, you know, right relationship that coming to enter into the truth of the other, something like that, and to honor the truth of the other, then that affects not just your thinking, but affects every aspect of your existence, because it all of human existence is founded on a certain conception of reason. Yes, I agree. I agree wholeheartedly. So we keep weaving the leap of love, the leap of reason and leap of faith together. And let’s just keep doing that. But you both brought up a question and I want to be responsible to it and responsive to it. Right. And so I take it that there is a calling to right relationship to sort of the the ground of being ultimate reality, which is properly understood as a mystery, because the source of intelligibility can’t itself be intelligible, etc. I won’t rehearse all the neoplatonic arguments that I think are I think are well placed. Now, am I right to say that you see the interweaving, I’m posing this as a question, the interweaving of the leap of love, the leap of reason and the leap of faith, as we’ve described that interweaving coming to sort of a culmination in getting into right relationship with what is most real. Is that what does that land? Yes, absolutely. Yeah, no. And it’s interesting, because that that in a way is a way of formulating the point that I was just trying to make. And I think we’re all we’re all making. Yeah. And, you know, then the question is, why is that the case? Why is what exactly is what? This would be an interesting question. So what is it that distinguishes reason and love? What defines each of them against the other distinguishes? I mean, not against in the oppositional sense, but just in terms of. Well, since since mine might be the courses, let me let me make a first attempt, because here’s what comes up for me, just as you say that, is that maybe it’s something like. Because reasons almost presuppose some kind of interpersonal to me, like if I’m giving reasons now, now there is a whole thing going on inside, but if I’m giving reasons, there’s there’s a conversation happening. So but love. Love can fundamentally go beyond that in some way. So maybe it’s like reason is what manifests in a space where love is properly operational. OK. So the difference being that love is something like the this the the the interpersonal the the the founding principle of interpersonal relationality. And then within that, we feel called to justify and explain our behavior to each other, right, which is part of what’s called the justification hypothesis of Greg and Rickus, something similar and Mercer and Sperber and their enigma of reason. Is am I getting you correctly, Ken? Is that? Yeah. And and just all of the mapping, all the all the collective collective mapping that we build off that point. And could we. Go ahead. No, sorry. Just you. Just that that that maybe the collective map that we build off of that could also be called reason, maybe properly. Yeah, that that sort of addresses in part the point. I was wondering if if reason has this contemplative dimension, then it would seem to to require more than giving justifications or explanations or or elucidations or something. There’s something. But but but then it gets very difficult if you if you highlight the contemplative dimension of reason, it’s hard to see how it’s different from love, you know, which is a kind of an affirmation of the other. I might try again. Yeah. So what I want to propose is not to set them only analytically distinct. I’m not I’m not talking about kind of causal distinctiveness, but sorry, this will take me a bit. This is a big question. And it’s one I think about a lot. So I think both of you know, I do a lot of work on this central this what I think is the core of our cognitive agency, which is our capacity for relevance realization. Yeah. Right. And how that’s not cold calculation. It means we care about this information. We don’t care about that. And that’s because we’re caring for ourselves and for each other. And so the three the three kinds of care are bound up. So there there is that central thing. Now, relevance realization works in terms of opponent processing. I’ll just give you quick two examples. And I want to do a cognitive and an affective example, just just to make it clear. One is your attention. Right. So what you have is you have to to two systems, the default mode and the the default is making your mind wander right now, away. Right. And I’m not insulted by that. Right. Our minds wander away. And most of the possibilities for thought get killed off. And we but we don’t kill them off. We bring a few back like select and we select them with the task focus. And then we open up and we and this is how we sort of constantly evolve our attention, what Marlo Ponte calls our optimal grip on the world. Arousal works the same way you have the sympathetic you have your autonomic nervous system. Right. And the sympathetic system is biased to seeing everything as a threat or an opportunity and raise your level of arousal. And your your parasympathetic system is biased to see everything as safety. And so you can relax and recuperate and they’re like this and they’re constantly pulling and pushing on each other. And so you’re constantly evolving your arousal. So what I’m trying to point out is this opponent processing. Now within within relevance realization, you can see these two poles. And one is an inferential pole. And it probably has to do with more sort of left hemispheric. But it likes to work step by step. And it works in terms of right. What we’re doing is we’re trying to maintain a security of our hold on the truth. And so the security of the hold on the truth is sort of its normativity. Right. And then you have something else that says no, no, no, I have to leap. Right. And this is the insight part of it. Now what you can find is that these two are actually in opponent processing. So I know this because of different kinds of practices. So in mindfulness, you shut off the inferential machinery so that the insight machinery is afforded. This is why it’s even called Vipassana, insight meditation. Right. But there’s another thing you do because when you when this is good, you call it insight. But when it makes you leap to conclusions, you leap into a conclusion, which you don’t want to do. Right. And so you have what’s called active open mindedness, what you practice in science, for example, we you’re trying to shut this off quite a bit so that you get the security. And the point is you don’t want to do either one of these. You don’t want to maximize. You want to constantly trade between them. Yeah. And so I would put it to you that when we’re trading this way, it’s more like love. And when we’re trading this way, it’s more like reason. But actually, the phenomena is reason love that’s within the opponent processing. That’s what I would propose. I like that. I’d have to think about. I mean, those are very new concepts for me. So I’d have to I’d have to reflect on it. But I but I very much like the idea that reason love aren’t like two separate faculties that that that you might want to try to coordinate. But, you know, they’re they’re they’re two dimensions of this of the soul. I like to use the language of the soul. I don’t know how that suits you all. But they’re two dimensions that and that doesn’t reduce them to each other. And I like no, I like I like your your I mean, the way you put it was more like a polarity of a kind of reciprocal sort of fruitful polarity. And yeah, which which seems right to me. I have this is a different kind of thing. But I’ve I’ve thought in terms of reason being more of the the movement of of the world in sort of an interiorization and love as a as a movement of the self into the world. Somehow those two things happen simultaneously. But, you know, something like that would be interesting. So I’d have to, you know, fine tune that and see how it corresponds. I get this intimation that it could be connected to. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That strikes me very much like Jonathan Pagel’s The Making of Bread in as the symbol in the Bible of the intaking of the world and and then and it becoming something more real as a meeting point between heaven and earth. Yeah, well, I think the opponent processing facilitates the symbol on the ability to connect domains that would otherwise be disconnected from each other. Yeah, that the reason love thing is what allows us to to do you and me. It’s what allows to do the inner and the outer as allows to do the up down and and Heraclitus is right. The way up and the way down are the same way. Right. And also the the diagonal of I could put it that way. The reason love also also symbol on the horizontal and the vertical together as well. Yeah, yeah. I like that very much. I think the I think that the notion of the symbol on is going to be one of the most important ones in the in the coming years. I have a very strong sense that that’s that’s going to be a notion that gathers a lot of energies from a lot of minds together. That’s what Jonathan fittingly interrupted David. That’s what Jonathan Joe’s work is doing right now. Yeah, yeah. On the symbolic world and symbolism happens and the deep the deep notions, you know, he has very because he’s Eastern Orthodox. He has a notion of profound neoplatonic participation as his understanding of epistemology and ontology and then his notions of symbolism are directly placed within that and try to like really make it phenomenologically accessible to people. No, it’s exciting. I mean, when I learned of your work, I eventually stumbled onto his name too. And and I and I’m hope to to to learn more about him. He seems very interesting and very much kind of along these lines. Yeah, I wrote a book about that that involved the notion of symbol on that that kind of opened things up for me in the in the what I found really intriguing is the the the the pair, the couplet of symbol on and you know, the etymological opposite of the symbol on is is the diabolon. Oh, I didn’t know that. The diabolical is the is exactly the the that’s very interesting. The opposite of the symbol. And originally what the diabol what that meant was to tear asunder, put things at odds, break apart fragmentation. Right. Whereas this symbolic is the joining together and joining together always in a kind of a fruitful way. I mean, not just like two parts coming together, but David, you know, what’s the book in which you talk about the symbol on? It’s called the Freedom from Reality. Oh, OK. And the subtitle of that, it’s it’s kind of a provocative and I think it might communicate the wrong thing to certain people. But it makes more sense when you see it in terms of this etymology. But the subtitle is the diabolical character of modern liberty. Right. Right. And the argument there is that the way we think of freedom in the modern world sets everything it both presupposes and reinforces all sorts of patterns of fragmentation. Oh, I got to get this book. This sounds amazing. Gentlemen, I like to keep the voices with Hervéki at about an hour and 15 minutes is what we’re hitting. And we hit a little pause. And so what I would like to do is I’d like I would like both of you to come back and we continue this. And I’d like to take up the profound reflections, David, you’ve had both in the The Critique of Impure Reason and Love and the Postmodern Predictum and the Catholicity of Reason about the good. Right. We’re talking about the ontological or even even the trans ontological good and what that means. I have some ideas around it and some interpretations of your interpretations. And I’d like to play with that with you, because I think we’ve everything we’ve done is sort of pointed us towards entering into that discussion. But I think that discussion, I don’t want it to be rushed as we get crunched for time. I would like to start another big like an hour and 15 minute discussion around just the good if that would be OK with both of you. Very OK. More than OK. This is I’m enjoying this and would love to get to know your thoughts better. So. Great. I’m just thrilled to be here. Yeah. All right. So I’m going to do what I typically do, even though this is being shared between my channel and hence I like to give the people who are guests on my channel the final word. It doesn’t have to be summative or cumulative. It can be provocative or inspirational. But I’d like to give people a couple of minutes just to say what their final how about can we do you first because you’re also cohost and then we’ll we’ll end with David. Yeah, well, for me, I am just grateful to be here. It’s a great pleasure to get to experience in real time some beautiful mapping of the mountain. And so thank you both. Thank you. And again, thanks, Ken, for first inviting me into this conversation. I to reiterate something I said the beginning, I think the the the there are all sorts of crises going on in the world, but I really do think that the fundamental crisis is the crisis of meaning. And I don’t think that it gets the proper attention. So it’s it really is heartening to me, encouraging to know that these conversations are opening up that seek to reflect on this and do what we were saying in the beginning, try to get to the heart of the matter rather than simply bouncing off and outdoing each other with insights or one liners or but but genuinely working together to try to uncover something that’s that’s one of the that’s a deep affirmation of what it means to be human. So I grateful for that. So thank you. Thank you both. Thank you both. It’s been a great pleasure again to talk with you, Ken, and to to meet with you and to get a taste of your very delicious mind, David. I really, really enjoy this and I’m looking forward to our next conversation together. We’ll set it up for hopefully very soon. Sounds great. Thanks.