https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=HOIjuWYhJNQ
Welcome everyone to another Voices with Raveki. I’m really excited about this. Many of you know that I have mentioned and taught the work of Charles M. Stang, particularly his book The Divine Double, played an important role in a couple of episodes of Awakening from the Meeting Crisis. I went to the Symposium on Embodiment in Tuscany in July and Charles was there, which was to my great delight. We got to have several conversations and interact. I think it’s fair to say we’ve hit it off and we see a tremendous convergence between our work. Welcome Charles, it’s such a great pleasure to have you here. Tell us a little bit more about yourself and what your work is and how you and I met and how your work and mine resonate together. Great. Well, first of all, John, thank you so much for the invitation to be with you today and I do hope that this is just a continuation of the next installment in a long conversation we have. Let me echo that meeting you at that Symposium was a real highlight. This is very exciting to me as well. For those who are joining, let me just introduce myself briefly. My name is Charles Stang. I teach at Harvard Divinity School. I’ve been on the faculty here since 2008. My official title is Professor of Early Christian Thought. Sometimes at other universities that goes under the name of Patristics, study of the so-called Church Fathers. In my own work, I extend that quite a bit beyond the Church Fathers and I study the religion and philosophy in the ancient Mediterranean world and that kind of wide net is reflected in the book that John held up called Our Divine Devil, which was published in 2016. There it is again. So here at Harvard Divinity School, I teach a range of courses, mostly in the ancient world, but occasionally I indulge my interests in modern philosophy and thought and offer something more current such as two years ago I taught a seminar the whole year on Henri Corbin, the French thinker, and then I’ve come to know that John also has an interest in so we can circle back to that shared interest. About five years ago, I took on a new role here at the Divinity School and I’ve been directing what’s called the Center for the Study of World Religions, which is under the aegis of the Divinity School but is in part an intentional community and part a programming hub for the school, the university and beyond. That’s been a great joy, a great privilege to come out of the mine shaft of my own subfield interests and really try to host conversations in the wider study of religion but also conversations that cross the study of religion with adjacent fields like yours, John, like psychology and cognitive science. And in just this past, we’re in the second year of a new initiative at the center called Transcendence and Transformation and that initiative is really premised on the idea that the study of religion has really entirely lost its way but that it’s not attempting to some very important features of existence and that both students and literate public are eager to hear about having to do with transcending our accustomed states of mind being embodiment, consciousness and the kinds of transformation that that transcendence affords. So we’re really trying to dig into that and I can say more about that initiative and all the various parts of it if you wish but maybe in the interest of time I’ll move on to how you and I met, John, just to again reiterate what you’ve already said. You and I met at a symposium on the topic of embodiment, a huge topic of course, but it had a kind of a distinctive theme. It was really around theorizing and practicing the subtle body and the subtle body is this notion that beyond the kind of obvious physical and body that we have, there are other bodies and anatomies that interpenetrate this one and that we can engage, learn about, engage and that are also powerful tools for our transcendence and transformation and those are found in the East and the West in antiquity and modernity. They’re everywhere and that symposium where we met was a first attempt to map some of that out and there will be other attempts to map it out and I suspect you and I will be collaborating on that down the road. So I have only recently come to know of your work, John, and I’ve been pretty excited about it because there’s a number of points of connection even though I’m reading in a field that’s fairly alien to me. I don’t read in psychology and cognitive science regularly so I also have to get used to the, I gotta get used to the style so to speak, the style of thinking and the style of writing but thankfully you’re a very clear writer so I think I have been able to follow most of your arguments and I find them very much in alignment with my own arguments and I’ll just name you, you can come back to these another occasion but I’m very interested in your account of flow. I’m interested in both the idea of intuition and action cascades you mentioned in a few papers. I’m obvious, I’m not new to the, I’m new to the conversation about flow, not entirely new, I’ve read some of it but I’m quite interested in whether and how flow states should be considered in the broader archive of what we call mystical or ecstatic states, experiences. So that’s one topic. I’m really interested in your approach to wisdom and trying to take the ancient philosophical account of wisdom seriously but then translate it into a new idiom. I’m very interested in exploring your thoughts on wisdom further and then very specific thing that piques my interest is what you’ve written about the Mars rover and some of the amazing, shall we say, imaginal techniques used by the engineers and the scientists to direct that rover and achieve a kind of presence on Mars through the rover. That was really thrilling to read. So those are just a few things and maybe with that I’ll just pause and see where you want to begin the conversation. That’s fantastic. The papers that Charles referred to were written with my good friend and colleague Dan Schiappi. There’s three papers on the Mars rovers. I think I’d like to start with that point that I found pleasantly provocative where you were being very, very discreet and politic and polite about how the study of religion has lost its way. Well, I think that that is part of and to some degree symptomatic of the general meaning crisis which is the sort of de-homing and displacement of religion because that’s, I think, what secularism has done. I don’t think it has eradicated religion by any means. I think it’s just displaced it and like when some of my work you look at the nuns, the NONESs who have no, they’re by and large not sort of scientific materialistic atheists there. They describe themselves with this, maybe intentionally so, but nevertheless vague, I’m spiritual but not religious and what does this mean and that’s what I mean but it hasn’t gone away. It’s been displaced and de-homed and made very sort of individualistic and autodidactic and then the study of the, perhaps the academic study of religion is in some sense, you know, complicit with that or in resonance with it and you said that in that sense we have lost, I’m only paraphrasing you, it’s not verbatim, but something like we’ve lost some important dimensions of the religious endeavor, the religious experience that have to do with transcendence and transformation and so if we could zero in on that first because and the initiative is directed towards correcting that to some degree I understand. That’s right. So a little bit about what, what did, can you unpack a little bit about losing its way? Okay well I was trying to be politic but now we’ll be more provocative. Yeah, yeah. So the truth of the matter is that I feel this is an issue that afflicts more than the study of religion, that this is a problem in the humanities writ large. So I’m going to start with the humanities and then I’ll speak about religion as a specific case of it. So I generally feel as if the humanities are suffering from an impoverished understanding of the human being, ironically. I think, I think the human is rather small and flat in most humanities. Let me make appeal to that adjective flat and talk about this late 19th century novel Flatland. Have you ever heard of Flatland, John? I’ve read it, I’ve read Flatland. Yeah, good. Okay, so you know very briefly for those who are listening who haven’t read it, it’s a satire and it’s an allegory of sorts and the main character is a square who literally, a square who lives in a two-dimensional universe and he has a dream of a sphere and he tries to make sense of this dream and tell other squares about this sphere. It doesn’t go well for him and he eventually is imprisoned and all talk about spheres is outlawed and he and the book Flatland is this memoir he writes from prison in hopes that someday squares will once again dream of spheres and seek them out and so it’s obviously an allegory about living in a kind of almost a kind of self-imposed limited dimension and a refusal to acknowledge the ways in which other dimensions might intersect with ours. So okay, now back to the humanities. I feel like the human, we’re in a place right now where the humanities to me often feel like Flatland’s humanities and I think that you know things like they’re really important things that are unpacked in the humanities like abuses of power, the ways in which power work and social political systems, race racism, but it feels to me often that these really important critical conversations in the humanities come at the cost of acknowledging the fuller and I would you know hazard to say sort of transcendent understanding of human, that the human has capacity to understand the world and and I would you know hazard to say sort of transcendent understanding of human, that the human has capacities that exceed our expectation and so these sorts of altered states to me are signs of that transcendent humanity breaking through into our Flatland. Now the study of religion I feel is a you know the study of religion is a newcomer onto the field of the humanities in universities. Obviously theology isn’t but the study of religion is very new and I think it suffers from something of an inferiority complex. It’s trying to fit in with the humanities and in order to fit in it’s sort of trying to mimic the other humanities and I think this has come at a great cost. I don’t think I think we have I think the humanities in general have been accomplices in their own obsolescence. I think we all know that humanities are kind of in a decline and I think that the study of religion is is a kind of case study in that because for me if there’s anything that we can meaningfully constellate under that category of religion, which is you know a contested western category under which we group all kinds of things, but if it has any meaning to me it’s a very expanded anthropology, ontology, and epistemology. This is this is an expansive understanding of what the human is, what are the world or worlds in which we are in which we are living, and how can we know those worlds, engage those worlds. So that is sort of the back a bit of the background to what I’m calling the transcendent the calling transcendence and transformation. And you know I think more specifically what we’re really looking to highlight are these traditions across the globe throughout history that insist that there are greater capacities in the human that can be named, acknowledged, pursued, and consequently not just individuals but groups, societies, and maybe even the more than human world can be transformed. So that’s what we’re trying to lean into. And that maybe humans aren’t always the only agents in this transformation. So we’ve been like just a very concrete example. We have a reading group right now here at the center focused on what we’re calling plant consciousness. So there’s an explosion of interest in this question of whether and how plants can be said to sense, think, communicate, and scientists, philosophers, and botanists are all well I shouldn’t say botanists, scientists, philosophers, and others are taking this question up from different angles. Right. Okay so what you just said and before that it sounds like you’re not only talking about a human capacity for transcendence and then some kind of profound change in consciousness, cognition, character, and transformation. What I mean is you’re invoking transformation in a profound sense not a trivial sense. So when you put those together it also sounds like there’s a complementary thesis that transcendence and transformation disclose truths, disclosed dimensions, levels, aspects of reality that are otherwise inaccessible to us without those transformations and transcendence. Is that correct? I mean that’s what’s going on in the invocation of flatland because the other people can’t, the other people can’t, the other squares, sorry other people, the other squares can’t get, their mindset can’t allow them to accommodate to the possibility of the third dimension in any important way. So it sounds to me then that although your criticism is located in the humanities to some degree it would maybe necessarily entail a critique of the standard version of the scientific worldview as well. That’s right. So the critique also extends into a deeper critique of the current version of the scientific worldview. Now I know you’re not anti-scientific. I know you involve with, you discuss with scientists but can you say a little bit more about this, this is of course, well both poles of these, both the anthropological and let’s call it the ontological are very very tricky because our culture kind of bifurcates around this. It either says you know completely the unchallenged scientific worldview even though it’s presently kind of incoherent and can’t actually ground the practice of science itself and all kinds of problems I point out but you get a kind of let’s say a reductionist interpretation of the findings of science or you get this flip and you get this decadent romantic where just every sort of woo idea is considered to be you know something that we should take up and that we should and all that matters is how you feel about it and other things like that and you rightly smiled around that and so because you’re and so for me in a lot of my work I you know I’m trying to steer between this skill and hrybdis. I’m wondering if you are also feeling that and any sense you have about how you’re navigating that. Yeah I feel it very acutely John and I can sort of, I’ll circle back to science in a minute but for the moment let me just tell you a little story that I think will illuminate this. Yeah. Which is I think it was maybe five six years ago seven years ago a kind of a question occurred to me that I couldn’t answer for myself like and that was this. I was deep in the study of the ancient world where I’m regularly taking very seriously people’s extraordinary experiences. Right. Experiences of encounters with the divine experiences of you know super normal capacities, encounters with other entities and as a historian, I mean I’m not really a historian but I work with historical materials but you know I work with these materials and I try and take them very seriously and not reduce these accounts to fancy or you know some other material conditions. So I was doing this sort of what I thought was and I still think was rigorous and responsible treatment of these ancient testimonies but then I asked myself why do I not take any of the contemporary extraordinary experiences seriously. What is the principle by which I take something in the past seriously but I don’t take it in the present seriously and that you know opened the flood gates in a sense because of course our world is full of people and including ourselves we often have these experiences that we don’t know what to do with right. We don’t and we don’t permit ourselves to engage them with the same kind of rigor that we do our scholarly work. So I the flood gates open I thought okay I need to figure out how to sift through and discern and engage the contemporary and that there’s no I don’t have a I don’t have an easy how-to guide for that but it has involved a lot of and you dropped for a sec a lot of which a lot of listening. Yeah listening to people and suppressing the immediate urge to dismiss and sort of tearing with the uncomfortable and the weird I mean I haven’t gone as far as my good friend and colleague Jeff Kreipahl at Rice University. I mean Jeff has really made a career out of taking people’s extraordinary experiences in the present very seriously and trying to think about reality in and through those experiences. I’ve done a you know just a tiny version of that but what it means sorry to circle back what it means is I think although we miss stuff as Wu I think it’s incumbent upon us to figure out what what are the criteria by which we want to dismiss certain extraordinary claims and yet admit others. Okay in terms of science John I would say this I you know I’m not a historian of science nor philosopher of science obviously a person in this world who knows that we’re in a scientism you know we’re in there we are in a kind of a world of scientism it so it seems at least at least in in our quote-unquote elite culture and what I mean by that is science has the presumed authority to explain just about everything and but there I feel like there’s a tendency I feel as if the reigning scientism of the day is largely a kind of reductive materialism which says something like all phenomena can eventually be explained by appeal to material conditions but on the other hand within science’s own account of matter and material conditions there’s wild scaling speculation and plurality and they don’t all line up. So to me it feels like and then I find actually some of them I find some scientific writers they’re popular scientific writers but sort of thrilling because they’re telling us about the frontiers of thinking in science which are very imaginative very fun very curious but all those accounts don’t line up and so when somebody tells me that authority should rest in a reduction to science whatever science’s explanation is I think well which explanation and on what order of reality yes should I be deferring for authority it doesn’t seem at all clear it seems a sort of internal and internally incoherent scientism I suppose. Oh excellent I’m not going to repeat arguments that I’ve made and other people in other contexts other people and many of you have heard it many arguments as to why I think a reductive materialism which you’re equating with scientism which I think is fine to do why I think it’s incoherent why it’s a performative contradiction why it has all kinds of profound problems and I reject that but I like the move you made which was really interesting about the non-homogeneity I don’t know what to call it that’s not dismissive but like let’s say the romantic over here I’m trying to choose a neutral term but it that is some sense anti anti-science in some sense and then the non-homogeneity there and also the non-homogeneity in science I think first of all I wanted to note that I hadn’t put that out as an explicit thought and pairing them together is a really interesting thing to map on to the sort of skillet and caribdis problem because it’s not like skillet and caribdis are clearly marked for you right all right if I understand you correctly and so I have been trying to do work at a reciprocal reconstruction between spirituality maybe that’s the better term for over here I don’t know and science that now that I think about it I think it’s fair to say is very tries to appropriate that non-homogeneity because the non-homogeneity means that reciprocal reconstruction is actually possible if they were completely homogeneous and locked getting them to reconstruct each other in some sort of dialogical fashion would be very difficult but if they’re non-homogeneous and they’re already dynamically in flux then getting them to reciprocally reconstruct becomes a much more much more possible thing to do does it does that land with you absolutely yes yeah absolutely right and I hadn’t I hadn’t sort of put those two together but that’s very that’s very good so thank you for that yeah the reciprocal reconstruction is really afforded by the non-homogeneity of the two things the two poles that’s that’s really interesting so then and let’s take that you’re nodding and you said it landed let’s take that as granted then the issue is and we can take time on this because it’s not a question about science but it’s this issue is how does one be responsibly rational in this where I don’t mean rational to be logical I mean how does how do how do we deal with the perennial problems of self-deception within human observation cognition speculation etc. Right we can to some degree avail ourselves of some of the techniques from science for overcoming self-deception we can some degree avail ourselves from with some of the imaginal and transformative practices that take us out of the distortions of egocentrism or a flat ontology I yeah but I want to give the question to you I want I’ll open it up to you what what like you know what are your thoughts about what does it mean to be let’s say almost socratically or platonically rational as we as we attempt to do this you know steering or reciprocal reconstructed does the question make sense to you yes it does yes well or it makes sense to me and and in my the answer I’ll give will tell you whether I heard it right okay but um uh so I think a lot about this in the context of long-standing communities of practice afford or elicit extraordinary experiences so I’m thinking here this is no doubt partly due to my um training and background uh in the asticism uh christian monasticism although I would invite you because I know you work in in um work and practice in some eastern traditions to compliment this but there are in monastic practice has from its very beginnings in egypt in the fourth century occasioned in these men and women these monks and nuns extraordinary experiences extraordinary experiences of the angelic the demonic the divine and the more than human uh visions dreams precognition um all variety of things none of those experiences are simply taken literally and granted truth without being over generations sifted and scoured almost there is in these communities a sense that of course self-delusion is uh not only possible but is a persistent threat and in fact the delusion might not be even just coming from the self there might be other forces that are trying to delude you so obviously in in a christian framework that’s going to be um somewhat satan and his and his minions the demons uh but but I think the the the point I want to pull out of it and it’s a point actually beautifully made by Michael Murphy in the future of the body too is that these are communities that truly have developed practices and protocols for sifting through experiences and I know that such things exist in buddhist communities as well where there are also extraordinary visions and experiences had but there is also a cultivation of not so much I don’t want to say a distrust but a but a critical distance on one’s own experiences and the experiences of the others I think that kind of critical distance and that kind of sifting warrants the name rational in a way yes there’s a kind of rationality in that yes but I think we would we would do well to recover or at least we would do well to resource and retrieve and maybe reimagine for the communities that we’re in now which as you said are uh different than you know we’re not in these um we’re not in a position where these traditions are quite so cleanly defined one from another these spiritual but not religious uh folks kind of move in and out of each uh in and out of communities so how can we adapt that kind of rationale discernment to a new context excellent excellent which I think is part of the the challenge of responding to the meaning crisis what you just said um well I want to first of all I think it would be buttressing your point about the rationality uh that we have the power of a collective intelligence of distributed cognition both synchronically within a community and then diachronically across generations it’s very powerful and it’s doing this sifting very much so and then I would put to you that that sifting is not it may not look like rationality to us because of propositional tyranny because we have we have reduced knowing to propositional tyranny we’ve lost the procedural knowing we’ve lost the perspectival we’ve lost the participatory dimensions of rationality which probably are in fact I would argue as important and in some cases more important than propositional inferential rationality and so therefore both should we should acknowledge what you’ve said that this collective intelligence within distributed cognition greatly expanded like I said and and that that it’s also dealing with dimensions of rationality that that escape our kind of flatland understanding of rationality right now so we have to both acknowledge the the depth and the breadth of it but also the fact that it is opening up domains and dimensions of rationality that we are kind of blind to right now so I first want to put that out and see how that lands with you as a goal yeah so earlier when I was complaining about a sort of a diminished anthropology ontology and epistemology that to me is sort of afflicting the study of religion and the other humanities if I would just focus on that last one a kind of diminished epistemology what you’ve just said lands very lands very poignantly for me which is I feel as if as you’ve said there’s a kind of propositional tyranny that has has flattened rationality yes and what are the what so under the under the banner of an expanded epistemology how we know I would want to say I would want to include these efforts to expand rationality what are the modes of reasoning that we we might not as you said recognize anymore as reasoning yes are deeply deep forms of reasoning yes and what do they look I mean can we can we recover these and and and redeploy them meaningfully today yeah I for me I I think of that as a sapiential notion of rationality and and and and therefore it ties to the earlier claim that therefore there are ways of disclosing the world and in that sense knowing that require transformation and transcendence and that that like we have we have lost let me call it a contemplative axis of ratio and we reduced it to the computational that and then it has been further reduced as you said within the humanities to a kind of communicative thing and so we’ve got this reduction now for me when when you when you sort of I mean you start you’re going to start I think I would propose you’re going to start moving towards something like a virtue epistemology because virtues combine propositional beliefs with procedural skills with you know with perspectival you know states of consciousness states of mind with participatory character traits and that we understand that and the fact that virtue epistemology and virtue ethics are taking off right now I don’t think is a coincidence either I think is an attempt to try and get back to can we broaden our responsiveness to normativity to include beyond our propositional commitment to sort of logical coherence and empirical adequacy so I think that’s an important thing to note and then I want to but I want to now bring it back to engaging with it because for me like the thing that well like when I’m reading Plotinus I and I aspire to being like Plotinus as a writer and a thinker just like I aspire I aspire to being like Socrates as a person person those are my two big aspirational divine doubles we can perhaps comes back to that in a minute because I do want to make a connection between rationality and aspiration to and then get into the divine double but before I say I could say that like when I’m reading Plotinus it took me a while to realize this and then I was able to do the same thing with Spinoza who seems like the most computational of all philosophers but in fact he’s not he’s ultimately talking about love which is really and participation in God and I think Claire Carlisle’s book on Spinoza’s religion is a masterpiece about that just fantastic book but when I’m reading Plotinus it’s like I’m simultaneously getting an argument in the traditional sort of premises leading to a conclusion and I’m going through an imaginal spiritual exercise at the same time like and the text doesn’t feel cacophonous or disjointed and then I’m thinking that like that like I want to be I want to be able to take the stance that affords me having that kind of rationality do you know what I mean yeah right and so that to me it is something exemplary I think the whole neoplatonic tradition I mean of course there’s variations in it but there’s very often that concerted effort to make something simultaneously an argument and a spiritual exercise I think Proclus’ elements of theology is doing the same thing absolutely yeah in a deep way and then part of what I’m saying is that we have often and this is a way of extending Pyrhado we’ve often misread these ancient texts and especially Plato because what we do is we lift the argument out out of all of the spiritual exercise now thankfully third wave Platonism is now correcting that you know the work of Gonzales and Hyland and Kirkland and Ruchik and all of those people that I’m doing a lot of work with like I’m making use of their work but it’s like I’m trying to say there’s kind of this recursive insidious thing that the flatlanding actually prevents us it makes us misread the text that might exemplify for us the kind of rationality we need to get out of the flatland I know that was a long argument but do you know I get it yeah I get it yeah let me tell you a story when I was an undergrad here um I here at Harvard I was a philosophy major and one of the great philosophers in the department then was Hillary Putnam of course and I was sitting in on a class yeah and and Putnam told this story of um it was in the topic called I mean a class called topics and epistemology I think Putnam told the story of being a young professor and being at history of philosophy so he had to teach Plato and what did he do except he would do exactly what you describe he admitted this he said I extract an argument from dialogue I would render it into um you know propositional form I would try to you know essentially paraphrase it into the form I knew how to uh manipulate and many of the arguments were poor arguments was his yeah yeah yeah they don’t work and and he felt like well what am I supposed to do what is it to teach the history of philosophy of all I’m teaching these set of lousy arguments and um and he was narrating this because you know he was quite advanced in age at that time he was he was it was a lament in a way it was a real lament he was because he had come to realize that the value of Plato was not in the extracted the extraction of the arguments that Plato of course knew at times that I don’t know the news is for everyone that argument that quote unquote faulty arguments that Socrates deploys but Socrates deploys some faulty arguments but that may be for pedagogical profound pedagogical purposes yes uh for those who are around him and or for the reader to know wait why is it that why is it that Socrates in the first book of the republic dismisses Thrasymachus with myth that’s fallacious Thrasymachus’s argument is not actually undone that’s an important thing to realize about what the drama of yes uh the republic is um so that’s just an example of that kind of what again what you call propositional tyranny hang out and there’s a immensely learned and in in some ways wise philosopher hillary putnam very late in life reflecting on the ways in which his own had done this interpretive violence for generations of students exactly exactly so that’s the Socratic example is well placed and because I think one of the arguments made by Gonzales and and all of these people is that Plato is putting an emphasis on transformation over propositional coherence and and that you have to see everything that’s going on the multi-dimensional thing and it’s very much like I said and for me you get something very similar in platinus because you’re reading argument but you’re doing this spiritual exercise at the same time and and they were crafting that you can see them crafting that across centuries trying to get better and better right so if you if we if we agree with that and right we put the transformative and the the the the participation in transcendence back into a proper place within rationality I think we get we bump into agnes callard’s work uh which is the work that I then uh sort of tried to map onto your divine double and go something like this she she follows on the work of L.A paul that when we’re actually going through transcendence or transformation uh we face the fact that we are symmetrically uh perspectively and uh participatorily ignorant now uh L.A paul gives a the famous thought experiment your friends come to you and offer that they can turn you they give you just indubitable evidence that they can turn you into a vampire should you do it and and the problem is although you have all kinds of propositional facts about vampires and although you have some maybe some skills maybe you lurk well in dark alleys or something uh um you you don’t know what it’s like in the nigelian sense you don’t know what it’s like you don’t have you can’t take the perspective landscaping salience landscaping of a vampire you don’t know what that’s like and and you don’t know who you’re going to be because your values and your virtues are going to be all altered by the transformation so you’re both perspectively and participatorily ignorant and then she says that ignorance means you can’t infer your way through it you can’t infer your way through it because you don’t you can’t assign the probabilities or the utilities because you’re ignorant and so she says so she says and and agnes keller agrees with her standard decision theoretic models of rationality come crashing down now you might then say well who cares vampires right and then she says but wait when you decide to have a child you’re facing exactly the same thing you don’t know what it’s like to be a parent until you’re one and your values and everything is going to change and and and then and then she gives you should you enter into a romantic relationship with this person same problem should you leave and move to another career same problem and then she sort of goes off uh she stops there and she just sort of problematizes now i have an argument that i’ve actually talked to lori about which is well i think human beings get around this with this notion of serious play that they engage in and that’s how you see even in intelligent mammalian development where where what you can do is you can get to this okay have a child this is what people do they get a dog right and then they take pictures with the dog and they give the dog toys and right so they get a taste of what it might be like all right they step into this liminal place of serious play what it’s like right and how it might change them but they’re not over committed and they can pull out if they want to right and so and you can see and you can see a lot of religion as that kind of important serious play therapy is definitely doing that we can come back to that in a minute but mechanism or process aside agnes callard then comes in and she makes a very powerful argument well what we do is a process of aspiration and she talks about proleptic rationality and so i’m going to make an argument she doesn’t quite make it as linearly straight as this but i don’t think it’s unfair it goes something like this part what’s constitutive of rationality is the aspiration to become more rational that’s a constitutive element of rational it’s because it is an inherently self-corrective process so if you remove the self-correction from rationality you’re no longer being rational and so you’re aspiring to be something that you’re currently not and then she said you start to bang into this problem that you can’t actually infer your this is great and you can’t actually infer your way into being more rational instead what you do is you have to bind yourself to a future self and and there’s empirical work so here’s how the argument goes aspiration is a constitutive feature of rationality but aspiration is not an inherently inferential process because it involves transformative experience it bumps up into these problems of perspectival and participatory ignorance because you’re not just trying to get new premises you’re trying to become a new person a rational person or a wise person and when you’re irrational or foolish that is a significant transformation so if aspiration is a part of rationality but aspiration is not inferential there must be a non-inferential domain to rationality that’s proper and then what comes out is exactly this aspirational project i’ll talk about it first abstractly and then i’ll give you a concrete instance of what i’m talking about she talks about the fact that when i when i’m aspiring i have my current self which is causing the future self but i have to allow the future self which isn’t really fully developed but i have to allow the future self to have a normative demand on me it’s this it’s it’s right it has to be able to challenge me beyond where i am now let me give you a concrete example of that because that might sound like this is weird human beings don’t do this okay so this is the work of Hirchfield and other people you go in to a university where you get the best of the academics who are supposed to be the most rational and they’re responsive to argument and evidence you give them compelling evidence and argument that they should start saving for their retirement right now you let them make any objections you you do this until they all agree i should start saving right now you come back in six months to find that none of them have started saving for life it’s because of hyperbolic discount now you do the following you get them to imagine their future self as a beloved family member that they love and have to take care of now you come back in six months and you have two findings they’ve started saving and secondly and this is how it overlaps with the imaginal the more they were able to vividly imagine that and enact that connection the more they are saving yeah and i and i think and this is what i was proposing to you that that imaginal relation between the current self and the future self that affords aspiration which is essentially which is essential i should say to being rational in this extended sense we’re talking about i think it maps very well onto your notion of the divine double well okay well um so john this is the second time you’ve given me a kind of a version of this and so i i have um i’ve sat with it and i like it a lot i’m going to ask you some questions in turn or i want to i want to i want to here’s what i want to do i want to let the ancient world view press push back just a little bit on the on the modern one yep yep yep so here’s what i’m thinking um i mean i i love this idea of the future self and the way in which the future self can secure or um make a claim on the present self in ways that when we stay imminently uh in the present with the present self and and its capacities for um uh inferential reasoning it can’t it can’t affect profound transformation but but one of the things that is curious to me of course about the ancient world insofar as i’m going to generalize about these traditions of the divine double is that the the future self this double to which we are aspiring is not of course a fictive or imaginative one it’s much more real yes yes yes and in fact i they they would never say i present self am causing that future so yes yes it’s actually the future self that’s causing me right um in some way and uh and so there’s there so i just want to i want to flag the the anthology and yeah there’s differences and the and the and the causality and i also i i i push back in part not just to just not just to be a to insist on historical difference but i actually feel as if um that that ancient account might match certain people’s experiences of their quote-unquote future self better than um a modern psychological account like oh imagine your future self yeah some people feel like their future self is actually very real and is in touch with them and guiding them yep um okay the other thing i wanted to say hold on it was about oh yeah uh the imaginal yes yes um i mean this is a huge topic and and it one it’s one way into your your your rover yeah yeah um but but we’ve talked about the fact that you know we have the shared vocabulary of the imaginal which i in my case comes out of um en recourbant uh and although there’s also another genealogy of the term to back to frederick meyers a psychologist from the 19th century but but let’s just leave aside the questions of genealogy and and take up the con that concept of the imaginal um as something that is not um it is not imaginative in the sense of or or imaginary imaginary thank you that’s the word i was looking for it’s not imaginary it’s a form of imagination that actually perceives yep a reality that’s right it’s imagination for the sake of perception yes yes it’s a form of perception and it is um involved perhaps in the creation of that which it’s perceiving but it is also perceiving that thing yes that’s right um and so what i’m really curious about is this is maybe even another form of rationality maybe we would want to include this under the under the broadest possible category of rationality this is this is a genuine question i don’t know the answer to this can we think about in imaginal exercises um where we are as a kind of rationality as a sort of yeah thinking with um a reality not yet entirely seen um and and again it’s all it’s a scene with its subject to discipline and correction especially if you’re doing it in conversation with others if your imaginal exercises exercises are communal in some way but there’s you know as you said that can be synchronic you and your friends can be doing a kind of imaginal reasoning it can also be diachronic in the sense of i’m involved in a tradition that has done these sorts of imaginal exercises where are where how does that how do the sages in that tradition handle this as a form of rationality and what are the checks and balances on that two beautiful points and so i’m going to ask you to keep track of both because i want to start with the second because i think it’ll afford me a good answer to the first okay or good response not answer good response um so i definitely think there is a rationality of of the imaginal and i do think that is what ritual is this is a proposal and i’ve been working on this all this year um i’m going to be actually teaching a course on relevance rationality and ritual and so i’m following the line of work there’s a great anthology called thinking through ritual double playing on the sense of through um right to the end of but by means of um right right um and there’s great work in there by shill uh shillbrick and others and then i’m talking about the seminal article by jennings i think it’s 1982 ritual knowing then a really excellent book um i can’t remember the title right now by williams and boyd where they take up jennings and then um they offer not not they they offer a correction like an amendment and then shillbrick takes it all up and so here’s the here’s the basic proposal i’ll just quickly try to do the three step of the of the historical argument um so jennings says there’s a kind of knowing in ritual that is irreducible to drama or to myth or and to our other ways and so he he proposes that and you’ll see why i love this because of the relevance realization stuff he says that what we’re doing in ritual is we’re engaging i’ll allow me some of my language we’re engaging in a kind of serious play because what we’re trying to do is find a fittedness to reality and it could be to aspects of reality that we don’t we might not normally feel well fitted to but we’re trying to find a fittedness to that and here’s where the rationality comes in there’s a normativity to that which is how broadly and how deeply both out into the world and into my psyche does the skills and the states of mind and the traits of character exercised in the ritual transfer this is called this is the problem of transfer appropriate processing let me give you a really concrete example i can get into a wickedly good flow get flow state within a video game and it tends not to transfer to my life it doesn’t i’m not saying that’s the case for all video games i’m talking for ones you know in fact the who video game addiction because what happens is people get into the flow state in the game and it can’t transfer into their real life and so they get anti-flow in their life which is depression and then the depression drives them into the game and then the game drives the depression and you get this reciprocal narrowing in their lives they get addiction right that’s how it works but when i’m doing tai chi chuan i get into a flow state and i get reports from other people reliably that give me evidence that it is transferring broadly to many domains of my life i’m exercising it right now and percolates through levels of my psyche and in that sense it’s much more rational than what’s going on in the video game i’m not talking about aesthetics i’m talking about the fact that what it does is it gives me ratio religio it gives me this proper proportioning of my ability to connect to reality and enhances it educates it develops it okay that’s jennings now the thing is williams and boyd said that’s right but that’s only one half because what there’s the there’s one direction the ritual helps me fit the world but there’s also they said but there’s an also another way in which rituals are used by people rituals can be masterpieces that people try to fit themselves too as a way of affording the transfer so i’m trying to get both of the dimensions you talked about both i’m i’m sort of projecting onto the the imaginal space created in the ritual but there’s also oh no no i’m also being there’s a demand a calling placed upon me to transform myself into conformity to it and so you’re getting both directions and this is what schulbrich is bringing in and i think that notion especially if we broaden rationality beyond the propositional and even beyond the procedural into the perspectival and the participatory right there is ritual rationality in that there are better and worse ways in which you can engage in imaginal serious play and you can evaluate them in terms of breadth depth and and then finally efficacy broadly deeply and your relevance realization your ability to be wise in situations you get a lot of cross contextual power about that both within the psyche and within the world that’s a that’s a proposal first and so before i continue my argument how does that how does that yes no i mean i’m fascinated to follow you on this because i’ve never thought to connect ritual with this so um so i don’t want to slow you down so yeah yeah go ahead yeah for me ritual is the rationality of the imaginal that’s the proposal i’m basically making to you um and that the again john ritual is the rationale rationale of the imaginal okay i just want to write that down okay no i don’t want to slow you down because i think you were you were you were going to uh another place with that yeah because i want to answer your first question uh i do get it that right and so i’m not i don’t want to do a reductive thing i want to do a bridging of horizons and gadimers between the modern and the ancient um yes i do think that they they they experience their future self as more real and uh i i do find that a place where what i’m arguing for doesn’t map but perhaps i can move a little bit more towards it which is to say that if both of these dimensions of the ritual are in place there’s a world disclosing aspect that puts a demand on you that’s real that is not just that’s real like you like the think about how this works in therapy you don’t automatically leap to the person but the possibility right of who you could be becomes more real to you as you first get aspects of the world disclosed to you that make that realizable for you it affords and so well i can’t go all the way uh because of the commitments i’m making to a current understanding of cognition um i would say that maybe i can move halfway and say yes i think that it’s not if it’s truly imaginal the future self is not just in the future the future self is in this moment of world disclosure right now that makes me take that for that step forward and so that is the reality of the future self but it is not fully realized uh for me but there’s nevertheless there’s some dimension of that has a purchase on me of disclosure of reality that can that is the home of my future self and is here right now calling me towards it that’s my attempt to meet you halfway okay brilliant can i try i’m going to try to put that or put that insight that claim into dialogue with korban if i can right right okay yeah yeah so um so we’ve been talking about future and present self future self and i’ll hold off on korban for just a moment from the perspective of the ancient materials i think probably a better model would be to say there is some double some self that exists um that transcends both your present and your future self yes that is somehow most secure securing the selfhood of both the present and the future self and also perhaps and this depends on the on the text tradition figure impelling the self forward from the present to the future self okay so that maybe we’re dealing with more than just two we’re dealing with three now korban has a really interesting take on this because he’s trying to marshal both the neo-platonic but especially the um the uh the largely the kind of persian Islamic tradition persians yeah yeah yeah um and their heavy theorization of the angel yes yes yes um so may and but he says this really interesting thing at one point so you know usually you’d sort of think oh okay the if if you’re if there’s an angel that would be that kind of double character right that sort of like secures you and guides you yeah but he says i can’t remember what book it is but he says actually says look what i mean by angel is actually angel names the ecstatic transformation of a self into its next proximate self right so in that case the angel is angel is both somehow like up there but also what the angel really is is names the function of a being’s ecstasy and transformation so he says you can activate the angelic function of your being and maybe you can activate the angelic function of other beings and so that felt to me like you what you were saying excellent excellent you can see i’m just bursting because i think that is so i think that that is so perceptive uh and pertinent because i wanted to say that that one of the things that was lacking in what i had previously just said to you is it sounded like i was proposing just the horizontal narrative but i’m also talking about world disclosure in the vertical right normative right and so and so one way in which the future self can and and the future world can show up in the current self is by those kinds of ecstatic experiences where you experience you experience yourself beyond yourself still within yourself which is part of the paradox of self-transcendence itself like according to right and and and and so if you write and if you add to that the idea that the relationship between the world and me is not one of mere representation but co-instanciation that the grammar the fundamental grammar of intelligibility this is a neo-platonic claim and the grammar of reality are they they co-participate they right they co-instantiate but not but they co-instantiate in a coupled coordinated manner then the vertical and the horizontal are also resonating with each other right so you’re not only the world the world is the future world is disclosing itself and presenting itself to me like phenomenologically allowing me to take a step forward but the the the the future self if you’ll allow me um is also appearing as the sacred self it’s also vertically representing capacities of self-transcendence that are already in play and available to me right now but nevertheless are are also still ongoing and unfolding and i think i’m agreeing with you when i say that right yeah no i mean because one more point because corban corban and this is what how i think i think how he how i understand him in a way that’s constant what you said right the imaginal is not just this way the imaginal is also without which bridges between the sensible and the purely intelligible it’s that vertical dimension right it makes the sensible uh more intelligible and it makes the purely intent purely intelligible more more more phenomenologically present it’s doing that this mutual disclosure thing and so that’s what i mean about um and for me that’s that’s the that’s the moment where you can’t really distinguish between the present self and the future self when that resonance is starting to happen all right because i mean because when you try and this is i think the other side of la paul when you try to talk about self-transcendence this is strassen’s point in a purely inferential propositional relation or even tense relation temporal tense you get into paradox because this is strassen if i just extrapolate from my current self then there’s no transcendence it’s just right but if something other than me introduces the requisite novelty for self-transcendence then it’s other than me and so i can have self or i can have transcendence but i can never have self-transcendence now rick rippetti and i are working out a response to that but do you see how that’s what i’m trying to get past i’m trying to say there’s a way in which the imaginal is trying to break out of that straight jacket yes yes absolutely and i think one of the ways it’s trying to do that is by asking us to think about the so so is it strawson is that who yes galen strawson yeah oh galen strawson right okay um straw i don’t know this argument but i’m just trying to repeat it um that the that there’s it’s either self or other but this tradition has a i think a richer spectrum of views about what constitutes self and others exactly that argument only works if you see the self as a moment a monadic substance exactly see the self as a dialogical dynamic then the argument falls away but that’s exactly what i think you and i are trying to articulate here and like i say i can’t get myself completely into that ancient world view but i’m trying to you know manipulate and massage what i have at my disposal to get closer to it that’s that’s what i’ve been trying to excavate from the ancient materials is that that idea that the the double which is itself a name that constellates all these different yeah sort of local terms to to get at this is there is a there’s a kind of i mean corban says it that like it’s it’s a dialogical relationship of self to self yes in which the transformation of self to of one self to another self to another self is what you could essentially call the angelic function of that being exactly yeah so it’s just it’s really thrilling actually jaunt it to um and i’m just going to step back and say you know i noticed this stuff in the ancient materials i’ve tried to constellate it make sense of it from within each of the traditions then i tried to step back from it and and say okay what does this really mean uh what what what does what work can this reconstructed view do and i i turned to corban as a as a kind of ally and uh because he too is tracking this in a different archive yes and and that’s been he having him as a kind of fellow traveler and and not just a fellow traveler his real guide has helped me but what’s thrilling about this conversation with you is it’s probably the most developed version of it’s the most developed instance i have experienced of um someone in the present trying to think with this tradition yes um i get a i’ve gotten a lot of emails since i wrote the book i mean not that many people read this book let’s be honest but the for the more people should read this book read this well people should know i think this book is really important because i think we are on the cusp uh i mean i talk about this in the current series that i’m going to be releasing soon after socrates we are really what’s happening in psychotherapy what’s happening in cognitive science we’re really about to deeply and profoundly challenge the monadic monophysic monological self that’s coming and this book is important about that because it tells us it tells us with good historical argument and evidence that that cartesian model is not necessary it is a historically contingent phenomena it is not part of the inherent ontological structure and i think that is really important sorry for interrupting you but i wanted that i wanted to really emphasize the point no you don’t no apologies necessary you’re praising my book i’m very grateful for but but but um and so first of all thank you john that’s very that’s very gratifying to hear you say that about about the book um i i have been surprised because i know how few number of copies the book has sold i am aware of that but on the other hand it shocks me the number of people i’ve heard from and the number of people i have heard from who have written me because something in that ancient account resonates with the experience they’ve had okay now the experience they have may be closed in different language um and it may have a different slightly different phenomenology that’s perfectly appropriate all those ancient texts and traditions also had you know text they had different textures to them but what’s remarkable to me is it has given some people um a framework and a vocabulary for understanding profound encounters and transformations in their life and um what i think is exciting about what you’re saying is look there’s a way of almost taking that and scaling it and putting it into dialogue with a number of other fields that could provide not just a kind of um a framework or a mirror in which someone would say and not to dis this is hugely important when someone says ah that happened to someone else that that acknowledges my experience i i feel i i feel i can hold that experience differently but what you’re talking about is look can we can we acknowledge and and and move forward with this as a theory and a practice like are there ways yes this can be um enacted um and and do you see what i mean on the one hand totally framework can just yeah so that’s very thrilling to me so i just want to say again i’m i’m deeply grateful for you for for engaging the book on that level um and and it promises a kind of rubber hitting the road something like i like oh that’s really interesting um because i’ve loved hearing from these folks but it feels kind of you know anecdotal and fairly limited um whereas i do feel like this structure and it’s not a structure i invented it’s not even a structure i discovered plenty of people have noticed it before yeah but but it does tell us i think something deep about ourselves um and i wish it were i wish i it’s a it’s a much deeper truth than some kind of watered down day cart that we’re all we you know we get through our water supply yeah yeah that night’s pun water down water supply that’s very good i like that that’s excellent charles this is obviously just the beginning we’re gonna i invite you to come back multiple times i would love to ongoing uh discussion i i think just to not overburden the the the viewers uh we draw it to a close for today because we did sort of get to an end of uh sort of an argumentative move an argumentative theoretical move but i always like to give my guests um the final word um it doesn’t have to be summative or cumulative it could just be you know provocative but what what final sort of thing would you like to leave uh with the viewers well one thing we didn’t get to talk about and this we we have to talk about in the future conversation john is what are we such that we can imaginatively inhabit a rover on mars yes what are we exactly yeah yeah that that such that that works i mean if that if those reports and your analysis along with your colleague is right as i suspect it is because i think it resonates because i think it resonates with a lot of other reports that points to something it like some capacities that um we need to we need to integrate so i would just say the provocative thing is you know just again like what are the capacities that that are are are revealing themselves that are disclosing themselves and how can we responsibly and rigorously be sit with sift those uh capacities those experiences and then how can we think about reality and our place in it with those that would be my invitation for another conversation excellent excellent thank you so much charles thank you john it’s been wonderful well you and i are going to keep talking we’re going to keep working together that goes saying yes amen