https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=GKsLw3cqD50
Thank you for watching this YouTube and podcast series is by the verveky foundation Which in addition to supporting my work also offers courses practices workshops and other projects dedicated to responding to the meaning crisis If you would like to support this work, please consider joining our patreon You can find the link in the show notes Thank you kathryn. I was probably the best introduction i’ve ever received I assure you i’m very happy to be here and i’m very engaged with the material i’ll be presenting to you Okay, so let’s start why is Why beauty is deeply implicit in stoicism, especially in its commitment to rationality and virtue So han in his book saving beauty laments that we have reduced the beautiful to the smooth. This is what he calls it This is the pleasantly easily accessible and useful. So the way my phone is smooth The way meaning things are now smooth And this is convergent with his work in another book agony the agony of eros about how intimacy with mystery Which used to be in our erotic relationship? And this intimacy with Mystery which demands transformation and commitment from us Has been replaced by pornography That gives priority to easy access and use for pleasure So this is idea of the reduction of the beautiful as something that was initially a very transformative and Very demanding upon us To something that in fact puts very little demand on us whatsoever Now he’s no doubt correct how this reflects a consumerist greed in our culture And a culture oriented to quick and easy gratification to bottom line mentality Etc And his argument of course is convergent with the argument of other people just one among many examples arguments from current musicologists about the loss of complex Melody in popular music in favor of Super-salient, please remember that notion super salient beat and repetition So again, we have easy access and of course easy access makes sense When we are doing mass marketing within a mass society. I think all of this is completely coherent argument However, I believe that there is something more going on in this reduction of beauty to ease of access to pleasure and use I think something else is going on I propose that there is a deep suspicion about appearance in our culture There is a suspicion that appearances are misleading distorting distracting Untrustworthy and often being used for manipulation nefarious manipulation In my work with christopher mazupietro and philip misovic in In 2019 in a book entitled zombies in western culture a 21st century crisis in which we explained The emergence of the zombie mythology as a way of articulating The meaning crisis we noted the upsurge in the increasing prevalence and power of bullshit People are convinced there’s more and more bullshit and it is more and more powerful in our society Now the notion of bullshit i’m using i’m not trying to be vulgar I’m making explicit use of frankfurt’s technical arguments about bullshit in his seminal essay on bullshit So frankfurt distinguishes the liar From the bullshit artist the liar tries to manipulate your behavior by depending on your concern for the truth And getting you to believe something to be true. That is not true. That is the liar The liar is depending on your caring commitment to the truth The bullshit artist on the other hand is trying to get you indifferent to whether or not Some claim is true and rather to be caught up in the salience Of the claim so prototypical examples of this of course are an advertising in which you know You see the Commercial and there’s a beautiful person um in a bar And they’re surrounded by other beautiful people and notice my invocation of that we’ll come back to that And there’s an alcohol present and they’re all very happy and very healthy And you know, this isn’t true You know that this is not what you’re going to see if you go into a bar This is what you know This is not going to happen to you when you start drinking the alcohol and they know that you know That none of this is true And this is the important point. It doesn’t matter because it puts you into a state Where you don’t care whether or not it’s true and you just find the stimulus of the alcohol Super salient and therefore you are much more likely to buy the alcohol Which of course is why so much money is poured into advertising So advertising is prototypical bullshit. It works by getting you to not care about the truth at least some of the time And to instead be caught up in the salience Of what is being presented to you now? What’s interesting about this is the deep connection between bullshitting and self-deception and how they mutually reinforce each other You see although we use the metaphor you cannot really lie to yourself You cannot say to yourself I believe x but I I want to believe why because belief is not a direct voluntary action Belief is not something you do Pick a belief you’d like to have that everybody loves you. Okay, do it believe it Go There’s nothing to be done. You can imagine it you can hope for it. You can desire it. You can’t believe it That’s not how belief works But you can bullshit yourself because salience is actually affected by your attention If I say your left big toe it is now a salient to you And of course when things are salient now, they will tend to attract your attention in the future And so by paying attention to things you make them more salient, which is more likely to grab your attention And so you get a self-reinforcing cycle until you are drawn into particular patterns of behavior. So self-deception drives Sorry bullshit drives self-deception But of course the more self-deceived we are the more easy it is to bullshit us because the more easy it is to get us to be unconcerned with the truth because that of course is one of the deleterious functions of falling prey to Self-deception we get disconnected from a proper pursuit of the truth So we got this culture and with self-deception and bullshit are reinforcing each other and becoming more prevalent Now paul racour has argued or talked about what he calls a hermeneutics of suspicion and this was given to us by freud and nicha and marx as prototypical thinkers of this ilk In in for all of these thinkers we are they give us arguments to the effect that appearances mask Self-deception they mask a hidden motive a secret agenda Or a deceptive covert manipulation That’s why it’s a hermeneutics of suspicion. We’re suspicious of how things are appearing to us However, I would argue that it goes back to the combination of the copernican revolution and the protestant reformation so before the Copernican revolution we have the aristotelian notion of realness And it’s basically tested through three through rule through three rules right And it’s is my organ functioning properly Is the medium? clear Do other people after reflective discussion agree with me now we still live by this by the way We still use this to determine if what we’re seeing is real Now this is at the hallmark core of the aristotelian framework, but notice what happens With copernicus we all have well functioning eyesight. It’s a clear day We see the sun rise in the east pass overhead and set in the west. We all talk We all agree that that’s what we saw And we’re all wrong We have to remember how terrifying that is We’ve gotten so used to it. We and that it has it has so inseminated itself into us at an almost unconscious level But it expresses itself in a deep suspicion because if that’s If that if that can fail the test What else is failing the test? What else is passing all of our intuitive judgments about what is real and nevertheless? Turn out to be illusions the protestant reformation, of course Taught us that we cannot trust traditional institutions. We cannot trust their sense of right and wrong We are thrown back upon Ultimately individual conscience now that may not have been luther’s original intent, but that’s not relevant to my argument right now What we end up with is we get the isolated individual trapped behind Sense experience where that sense experience is understood as the veil of appearance I was taught this repeatedly in my undergrad in philosophy As a central issue with which we had to contend the veil of appearance and an ongoing Anxiety And about skepticism and solipsism at the heart of what we were trying to do and of course The scientific revolution and the present reformation and this concern with skepticism and solipsism Come to particular fruition and con and the tremendous impact and he called it his copernican revolution He had on the intellectual and spiritual development of what we now call probably inaccurately the west In all of this appearances became unmoored from reality and from social structure But of course they are still nevertheless salient and compelling That is part of our inevitable embodied experience So notice what we have here we have Appearances that are unmoored from reality and social structure We are deeply suspicious of them yet. We find them still salient and compelling. This is super bullshit The culture as a whole is in a place where The appearances are disconnected from realness yet. They are still compelling and driving our behavior Now in order to protect ourselves I propose or i’m arguing from this we seek to tame and control appearances And make ourselves Invulnerable that to them being used to manipulate us. This is the great question Of course it has been put on methamphetamines by the advent of social media How would we tame appearances make them easily accessible back to the smooth And and make it so they do not claim or intend to claim or pretend to claim to pretend a deeper reality They are superficial and they glory in being superficial the smooth How do we seek to control them instead of being controlled by these appearances they will be completely manipulate Manipulated by us. They will be completely In control of us. They are solely for our use Back to the smooth Of course And this was what reflection and research show This is ultimate bullshit in our attempt To not fall prey to bullshit We actually fall deeper in it because this strategy of the smooth the smoothing of appearances Distracts us from the fact That the reduction of beauty to the smooth is precisely in service of mass marketing Manipulation as we all wear our logos that look the same Saying how individual and unique we really are So we have super bullshit being responded to by ultimate bullshit. This of course is a very difficult and problematic situation What this argument is intended to show is that the reduction of beauty carries with it considerable epistemological and Ethical loss and risk But We’re not trapped in the hermeneutics of suspicion There’s a point developed by marlo ponti extensively through his writings, but it ultimately goes back to a deep discussion by plato that Appears in many of his dialogues But i’ll use marlo ponti’s Presentation of it because it is clear And accessible Illusion is a comparative concept. It’s like tall or small It’s dependent on the experience the realization of reality I can only say this is an illusion if I can say because it is not this which is real It is a contrastive comparison in fact Technically it makes no sense to say all is illusion. That’s like saying everything is tall It doesn’t make any sense Typically what people mean is all is all of sense experience is illusion in comparison to some x that is taken to be The reality but there’s always a comparison So illusion is when appearances mislead us away from reality And they are dependent Illusions are dependent upon when appearances lead to reality Within acts of realization And I want you to hear both meanings of that word coming into an intelligible understanding and awareness and becoming real disclosed as real Now this is one of plato’s central proposals given this realization And this is another one of the principles of realization Beauty is when appearances disclose reality That is beauty proper We can realize in both senses of the word the world through beauty Because beauty is when appearances lead to And they have to be primary they have to be more real than illusions Now note here This requires us giving up a lot of the subjectivist and smooth notion of beauty that we have been given in a post-contian mass marketing world Beauty does not have to be pleasant It can be striking or haunting platinus Repeatedly makes reference to this possibility Rilke in some of his great poetry talks about how beauty is terror that Could kill us but deigns not to But it is always a moment of insight Seeing in to things seeing through illusion and in to reality and this of course is part of what patinas conveys in his Argument is about beauty and intellectual beauty the two in aodes There is a moment when you realize that what appeared As relevantly real The moment of insight you thought something was relevantly real and then you go aha What I what was salient to me was actually misleading It was wrong and notice the normativity in here I thought I I was apprehending her as Angry, but she’s actually notice the language. She’s actually afraid and therefore I should Adjust how i’m apprehending her and interacting with her Notice this realization has a normativity in a call to responsibility and action The aha moment carries with it a flash of salience as one sees Into reality there’s a lot of cognitive science around this and I won’t go into it You can look at my published work and my work in my on my published videos And I’m going to go into it in a little bit more detail Somehow one is more right In fact, we find insights so compelling in this way We tend to be biased We tend to judge reality in terms of whether or not they were produced in our judgments were produced in an insightful manner When sees into reality one is one is more right in both an epistemological and an ethical sense about reality When is correct and in right relationship We need to be very careful here Beauty is in the act of realization What may display what may be disclosed could be great evil One of my favorite paintings and I don’t use slides, so i’m not going to put up a slide I hope you’ve seen it. If you haven’t you could look at it later is picasso’s garnica Picasso’s garnica Which is a painting of the bombing by the fascists of a Town in spain during the spanish civil war, I believe in 1937 It is in many ways a horrifying painting Now picasso’s garnica is trying to cut through all the proper and bullshit Around war and come into a bring us into a full presence Of the full presence of the event Collingwood would talk about this in the work of art how it brings us It takes us out of a categorical way of thinking. This is one battle among no the actual Suchness of this event come into full presence of its full presencing There’s a reciprocal opening The whole of the self is the is involved in opening up to a deeper and deeper apprehension of the reality and there was a reciprocal opening Which of course is an instance of platonic anagoga What i’m saying is it is a beautiful disclosure of evil But this should not be confused With saying it portrays evil as beautiful it portrays evil as evil beautifully We love the painting We love the painting we treat it. We don’t destroy look. It’s evil before us destroy it. It’s evil We don’t destroy the painting We honor it. We hold it sacred. I believe it’s now being hung in the united nations It’s a sacred object We love the painting and in that therefore in some important way It is beautiful the act of viewing it is beautiful The act of viewing it is beautiful Not pleasing but beautiful Plato’s second great proposal about beauty is that beauty can Not must connect us to reality in a way that helps educate us in wisdom and virtue beauty affords self-transcendence Anagoga as I mentioned earlier This is echoed in the work of my friend dc schindler Especially in the catholicity of reason and love in the post-modern predicament when he talks about the three Transcendentals and remember they’re all convertible. They’re not identical, but they all inter-define and inter-penetrate each other The primacy of beauty the centrality of goodness and the ultimacy of truth The primacy of beauty beauty is how the otherwise abstract reality of the idos Which is often translated as the form in the forms in playdough first reaches into sense experience But how well idos actually means the look or aspect of something Remember that now think about when I ask you what is a bird well, you know, it’s feathers It has wings beak and it flies so I’ll punch a pile a bunch of feathers here put a beak Some wings and i’ll toss them in the air. They’re flying. That’s a bird, right? No, it’s a horrific mess Because what’s missing is the structural functional organization that makes it into a bird. It’s logos A notion that platinus will use that he properly gets from the stoics as kevin corrigan has argued The logos this idos But notice it’s a way of Looking at it where this but the seeing isn’t visual seeing at least primarily Because you have to understand that this structural functional organization is not just the Synchronic structural functional organization. It is diachronic. Look you actually don’t ever fully see an object You can’t fully see it And all of these different aspects all of these different looks are held together by something that is not any aspect at all But a through line a through line that is one with but not conceptually identical to that structural functional organization That’s what the idos of something is and beauty is when the idos is being disclosed in our awareness Of something now russon in his Really important book bearing witness to epiphany is trying to integrate phenomenology and play-doh back together And he talks about the musicality of intelligibility. He talks about the fact that when we’re making sense of things. There’s a rhythm That we need to pick up on There’s a rhythm these right there’s a rhythm going through this and there’s a melody all of the different instances are like notes They’re not identical, but they all belong together And there’s a harmony there’s an organizing unifying principle to it. This is the musicality of intelligibility and Intelligibility is our primary way of determining what realness is so realness and intelligibility and musicality are bound up together When we have an insight into the form we’re leaping When we have an insight into the form we’re leaping Into a gestalt not just the synchronic gestalt that’s in our mind, but the diachronic gestalt through the musicality of Intelligibility of our experience of a thing that this this leaping into the gestalt is what zwicki talks about in the experience of meaning So Notice what we’re saying here stoic notions of beauty are often and I don’t know her name and I wasn’t here for her earlier talk because as I said, i’m not feeling well I don’t know if it’s selkite or calcite Kelkite, I apologize for any mispronunciation Makes a good case for stoic beauty as sumitria Uh, not exactly the same as our notion current notions of symmetry better understood as proper proportioning another notion is Ratio which is at the heart of our word rationality because rationality is the putting of things into proper proportion Properly proportioning our attention and care and by doing this we cut through illusion and into reality When we properly proportion our attention and care so that we can track The through line Follow the idos then we cut through any possible illusion and appearances in the musicality of intelligibility Beautifully disclose an underlying reality This is why? Recipius can say only the beautiful is good Connecting to the real rational order of reality this is Onto normativity a term i’ve coined for the fact that people find the really real Inherently good and they will transform their lives their relationships even their identity to be in Closer communion and conformity to that really real And of course this lines up with the stoic proposal that the universe itself Has a logos and that logos is sacred And divine and we are to come into an ongoing Uh dare i’d say it musical joyful flowing with That logos Marcus Aurelius of course is aware of appearances disclosing reality and their relation to beauty He says we should remark the grace and fascination that there is even in the incidentals of nature’s process When a loaf of bread for instance is in the oven I know there’s been another talk on this cracks appear in it here and there and these flaws though not intended in the baking Have a rightness of their own And sharpen the appetite The cracks flaws breakings in a simple notion of symmetry and they’re unintended breaks in the surface structure Have a rightness about them Notice that language the rightness i’ve been talking about this all the way through a rightness that sharpens the appetite Isn’t that of course what beauty does The appearance of the cracks literally opens up the surface of the bread to the depths And this enhances our desire to come into contact with the bread Part two sorry quote two An angry look on the face is wholly against nature If it be assumed frequently beauty begins to perish and in the end is quenched beyond rekindling Why is an angry face against nature? Because it is a face that discloses passion and not the logos that is essential to our humanity A face too often angry can lose its beauty It no longer rightly discloses the core reality of human nature But let’s examine more closely This realization through beauty that I have been arguing for Scari in an important book an amazing book I would put it on beauty and being just Talks about how the experience of beauty prepares us for seeking truth and justice She gives the example of seeing a Beautiful tree and she goes through the phenomenology very carefully and she says the insight is something like I didn’t realize Trees could be like that And I want you to now i’m going to do something If you’ll allow me to use a self-referential adjective vervecian about this i’m going to put this into cognitive terms of sense making So I didn’t realize trees could be that like so we have all of our previous experiences of trees All the different instances all the categories and they’re converging on this new entity And it somehow Is disclosing the idos? The underlying reality of what trees really are I didn’t realize trees could be like it’s realized And what that does is that opens up? Possibilities for us new ways of seeing and relating to to trees in the future. So notice these movements. You’ve got a convergence To a Realization of form of idos that is right can be used In many different it can find and formulate and reformulate problems as we encounter trees in the future Now if you take a look at the work on making sense and explanation There’s a couple things that come and the work on plausibility a couple things come out this notion of convergence We like convergence of independent things Or why Well If my realization comes through just one Let’s let’s do sense experience comes through just one sense channel I see something but I can’t touch it or hear it or feel it Or feel it it might not be real it might just be a subjective illusion But if I can see it touch it Hear it In fact the more senses I can get The more i’m convinced. It’s real why? Now this is not an algorithm it can go wrong. But why because the more convergence I have the less likely it is The less probable it is that my realization has been produced by subjective illusion or bias So convergence gives us what resher In his 1976 book plausible reasoning calls trustworthiness the opposite of bullshit Gives us trustworthiness Of course, we know why we want idos we’ve already talked about that What what is it when a realization can suddenly be applied to what was previously many disparate domains And this is making use of the philosopher of science kitcher some of his work on stringency, but I will argue In fact, i’ll just have to claim i’ve got arguments elsewhere. This is what we mean when we say a scientific claim is elegant I’ve had an insight that can go to many otherwise diverse Four sequels mass times acceleration can be used to talk about planets balloons blue whales accelerating cars Wow, that’s elegant Ben milgram in his astonishing book on practical induction how we acquire new desires not new beliefs, but new desires Argues for a balance between our backward and forward commitments. What does that mean? If i’m going to promise a lot of elegant problem solving going forward I’m I I need to have a lot of convergence to my realization or claim If I have a lot of promise without much convergence I get the conspiracy theory the far-fetched claim if you only believe That the british royalty are lizard people look at everything that I can explain What’s the opposite where I have lots of trustworthy convergence, but no elegance no power that’s triviality Trivialities are not false. They are not worthy of your attention So notice what we have in plausibility in good sense making Notice all the aesthetic terms terms deeply associated with beauty. We have convergence a coming into oneness. We have the emergence Or the emanation of idos of form we have elegance and we have balance between them Plausibility is the beauty of good sense making and we are deeply attracted and moved by it now Plausibility isn’t probability and it isn’t certainty Plausibility is what you should take seriously What is a good proposal where you should look for the truth? Turning it around Beauty is sensory motor plausibility that can be taken up into cognitive plausible therefore beautiful sense making So So plausibility what you should take seriously what you should care about The reasonable promise that salience is tracking reality the opposite Of bullshit and of course socrates famously argued for a rationality of care. He knew ta erotica He knew what to care about he knew what he didn’t need He knew what mattered the unexamined life is not worth living and of course this lines up with other more recent work by frankfurt The importance of what we care about and reasons for love and my extensive Sorry, I don’t mean to be self-promotional. I just want to Indicate trustworthiness work on relevance realization You are different from computers because computers don’t care about the information they process You care about some information rather than other information and therefore you take care of it Because this is all part of you taking care of yourself and other people Lipton makes a very strong case in his book on inference to the best explanation for the primacy The primacy of plausibility. What do I mean by that? Well think about an experiment. I Have to come up with a hypothesis. Do I generate all possibly logically possible hypotheses? No, that is combinatorially vast I pick ones that are plausible When i’m designing my experience experiment, I have to worry about confounds possible alternative explanations all the logically possible Alternative explanations. No That is uncountably large only plausible Alternative explanations. What implications do I draw from my data all logically possible implications? No, those that are plausible plausibility is primary you it is before During and after all scientific investigation and labor Rationality depends on the orienting beauty of plausibility Rationality depends on the orienting beauty of plausibility Plausibility is good sense making grasping the significance of information. Well grasping the the significant of information well Caring about the information in the right way and that’s what we actually mean by understanding. Look knowledge is about evidence Understanding is about the relevance and significance about what you know Plausibility and understanding are mutually defining Here’s the connection good sense making is the beauty of plausibility That produces understanding that gives us the musicality of intelligibility which of course affords Good sense making that is the cycle that we are constantly running through It’s all a cycle of beauty Well, this language is not the language of just belief it is to be with And to run with this is participating in the beauty in the very way in which you are contemplating the highest or deepest way of life And that is to be with And to be with In the beauty in the very way in which you are contemplating the highest or deepest realities Beauty is primary because it reaches into our sense life and our sense making And prepares us for truth and affords us seeking it In this way beauty and i’ve already alluded to this beauty is anti-bullshit Beauty helps us discern through bullshit and tutor us how to care well What to take seriously what matters McGee and barber in 1999 this ability to see through illusion into what’s real is the hallmark of wisdom this is was taken up in the Consensus paper that I was a co-author on with many other people led by eager grossman in 2020 the science of wisdom in a polarized World knowns and unknowns this ability to see through illusion into reality is central to wisdom I propose to you that virtue requires discernment Knowing what to take seriously and what to care about with insight and deep understanding and when we have that we have wisdom In the symposium Plato proposes that virtue is a higher order of beauty We first noticed the beauty of the beautiful person Then we moved to beautiful institutions then to the beauty of virtue. How is virtue beautiful? Each virtue is a way to be wise in a particular situation Each virtue is a way to be wise in a particular situation There are some there are multiple competing interpretations of the socratic Proposal of the unity of the virtues, but I take this one to be the most plausible Each virtue is a way to be wise in a particular situation It is like to be wise in this situation is to be courageous to be wise in this situation is to be compassionate The virtue is a proper proportioning a ratio Of attention and care the rationality of attention and care So that one homes in on what is most relevantly real in that situation Think about the stoic emphasis on prosaash and prochiron. It’s all about tailoring us so we can do this Tutoring us and tailoring us Each virtue is how wisdom proportionally and properly therefore appears in a particular context Virtue is the beautiful appearance of wisdom Virtue is how wisdom proportionally appears in a particular context to best disclose The most relevant truth in that situation and how action is appropriate to it Virtue is the beauty of wisdom Virtue is the beauty of wisdom Think about all of the stoic practices premeditatio What hado calls objective seeing The view from above what are they all designed to do? They’re all designed to get you to pay attention To how the alteration of how you finding things salient can be More properly attuned to the underlying reality and that often we are confused Because we fuse inappropriate caring with the underlying reality But we can learn We can learn to have what we find salient what we take seriously Properly tutored so that salience tracks us into what is real not just in our thoughts but in our whole Sensibility our whole sense making our whole comportment our whole existential orientation And stance towards reality This of course is the cultivation of virtue And wisdom All of these practices they may disclose things that are very unpleasant the premeditatio Doesn’t disclose something. Oh death the fatality of all things. I could lose my loved one tonight It’s not a pleasant experience But what does it do Well some research on this shows is that when you do something like this it releases people from mortality salience If you just trigger people about their mortality They will get very close-minded very rigid very defensive of their worldview But if you move it into a reflective practice In which you imagine that you’re dying And all the people are around you and then you ask yourself what really Matters here in this most real of real moments and people don’t say their possessions or their power They say their relationship and because the people they care about are there they become open and flexible and loving This is a beautiful practice even though what is disclosed is not something that we like Or prefer or find smooth in fact We are doing our damnedest in our culture to try and smooth over the reality of fatality The fact that at any moment reality can smash in to your most narratively cherished projects and our ultimate mortality We try our best Bullshit around us But the stoic practices can open us up They can be beautiful practices that lead us into a deeper ability To be connected to reality. What would that be a connection to reality that has rational apprehension? Plausible sense making and by the way, you see here that rationality does not reduce to cartesian logic I’m talking more about overcoming self-deception Appropriately Proportioning your attention and care to the world. What would that be that sense of? Connectedness to reality that is fundamentally good That is not pleasant or pleasurable That I put it to you and I think Levine is right about this or Levine that is joy Joy Something the stoics actually talk very frequently about and of course we’ve reduced it think about what we’ve done even to the word Enjoyment we’ve reduced it to a synonym for experiencing pleasure But moments of great joy Can be very unpleasant They can be beyond pleasure they can be other than pleasure One way in which we can get a notion of joy Is some of the current work I do which is the flow experience But that has been talked about by chick sent my the flow experience is when you’re doing jazz or martial arts or rock climbing You get this tremendous that narrative nanny Super ego thing in your head How am I doing? What do people think of me? How’s my hair with my shirt? Okay How am I doing what’s my status now am I am I safe is there anything interesting for me? What am I getting out of it all of that falls silent because you are so deeply connected and there’s a there’s a reciprocal opening an Anagoga the world is super salient to you and you are committing more and more of yourself to it But you’re not being bullshit exactly the opposite you’re being led into an intimate Causal efficacy and connectedness to the world because error Really matters in the flow state You’re at one Although you may be exerting tremendous metabolic energy you feel graceful It feels magical People seek out this experience. They will reliably tell you it is not It is not pleasure. Think about rock climbing. It is absurd You climb up the rock climbing It is absurd You climb up this rock surface. You’re hurting yourself You’re putting yourself at risk of injury. You’re exhausting yourself only once you get to the top to come back down It sounds like a greek mythological torture in hades People do it because it gets them into the flow state they have i’ve argued with leo ferraro and anahara bennett that what’s happening is an ongoing insight cascade Like you’re constantly getting more and more insight into what’s going on and it’s calling deeper and deeper into you You’re getting this anagogic at one minute. It’s a deep state of joy. It is not Pleasure and it can be very painful in a lot of ways what you’re doing in that state Sparring is painful Rock climbing is painful And yet people do this it is an optimal experience It is the best experiences many people say it’s the best experience they have and it is where they are at their best And it is a universal you find it across cultures linguistic groups socioeconomic status gender identification continental dwelling etc people describe this experience in In the in similarity at the level of detail. This is a universal it discloses something essential about our functionality we are Made for joy, which is not pleasure. We are made for this deep One-ment and it is a profound experience for us because it gives us an intimate deep connection to a reality that is disclosing itself as overwhelmingly Beautiful there’s an ongoing sense of super salience, but not deception a super salience that is making us love What is happening falling in love with us? There’s ongoing disclosure and discovery and we’re tapping into the inexhaustible intelligibility of reality Seneca even when painted into a corner it is possible to leap into the sky The disciplining of attention and caring cutting through self-deception in rational virtuous realization Potentially putting us into a profound flow with nature Another stoic theme is a deep enactment of beauty That is how beauty is implicit in all of stoicism Thank you very much for your time and attention John thank you so much everyone a round of applause in the chat for John Vervecki John’s gonna linger with us for a while, but I’m also aware John that you’re not feeling your best So we’ll maybe take a couple of questions and see how we go. Are you okay with that? Let’s yeah Let’s say 15 20 minutes. I think I can I think I’ve got enough cortisol and adrenaline and enough in enough flow That I can hang on for a bit longer. Yeah I want to say wow John that was elegant You mentioned that wow elegance that exclamation of wow is that an exclamation of awe and is all the experience that might be a sign of Beauty plausibility Etc. Do we how do we feel that? How do we recognize that? Oz tricky, uh, I think wonder Oz tricky, uh, I think wonder and wonder flow are definitely um experiences of plausibility and intelligibility Oz a little bit different. Um We thought it would just be That sort of just more but we’re running some experiments to show There if all was just that Like what’s happening in the flow state you would expect people to demonstrate very Increased measures of cognitive flexibility. Well after you induce the awe state in them And we’re not finding that now one of two things might be the case Awe is really ephemeral And that’s a real possibility. So take that seriously Secondly, even if the awe state is Persisting long enough that it should be impacting cognition And this this the second proposal is my favorite because for the completely biased reason that it lines up with my argument There’s probably an intervening thing that is needed The awe what awe does is it’s one of the few positive experiences of the shrinking of the self and if that Launches you into the training of epistemic humility of reverence then that would probably predict many of the Traditional predictions of how awe improves people So this is very much an experimental work and a theoretical debate work in progress So that’s the best answer I could give you right now I think um, did you say with a marcus iridius quote? It’s not um To dwell on or dwell with beauty the stars dwell on the beauty of that’s the translation I have so Is that an intellectual relationship? Is there an embodied relationship? I think I think I think the stoics and I uh, I mean I’m going to speak anachronistically. I’m going to use some of my language for them I think the stoics are very concerned with Perspectival and participatory knowing they are not just concerned with propositional knowing and this comes out of course in their continual refrain That philosophical discourse is not the same thing As the proper love of wisdom because love involves what you care about what you find salient How you’re noticing and oriented in the world and how you are committing and binding your identity to something And I think dwelling therefore should be understood as pointing towards that perspectival and participatory knowing Okay, I have one more quick question from me and i’m going to jump into the chat because we’ve got some questions Um, could you just clarify? how to recognize Triviality versus plausibility Sure so plausibility is when you have a balance between The convergence many different things give converge to this realization And the elegance there’s right so lots of convergence to lots of elegance and lots of you know um Instanciation of an idos, right? But there has to be a balance between them When you have a lot of convergence, but not much elegance Then you have a triviality buses an example like buses stop at stoplights Okay, huh? Yeah, you know, you’ve got a lot of converging evidence for that You’ve probably seen it happen multiple times many people will agree with you lots of independent collaboration You don’t take that as a great scientific insight buses stop at stoplights. Yeah, and and notice what you want to say here And what follows from that? What comes from that? Where’s the elegance? Well, there is no elegance and that’s what makes it trivial That’s why the person who spouts triviality is a bore. They’re not lying But they don’t say anything that has consequence for us Okay. Well, thank you. That was really clear. All right, i’m going to jump into the chat um Something that dave murray said it’s not a question, but it’s just a an experience and Yeah, i’m gonna i’m gonna start with that. So he said met a guy Um, just like this at a biker. This is at the beginning when you were talking about harry frankfurt and bullshit Um met a guy just like this at a biker bar a couple of weeks back Slung all kinds of bullshit wanted me to believe him He got very upset when I would not agree haven’t been able to stop thinking of that encounter since Not sure I handled it. Well felt like I should have clapped along but not to agree in Felt I should have clapped along but not to agree internally All right. So any Comments for dave on that interaction. Thanks dave for that Yeah Dave that’s I mean, that’s a really tricky situation, especially if it’s a stranger and so you don’t have much sense about what you can expect from the person You know, is there actually you know an implicit possibility? Of an escalation potentially into violence or harm and so I understand, you know There’s care to be taken here and there’s a there’s a cost benefit analysis like it’s you know Is it going to cost you much to challenge this person? If if please hear the if if it does come to be the case that there might be a good reason to challenge This is where I think Learning socratic practice is really important. This is what I do in a lot of work I do around dialectic and ideologos. Socrates was very good at drawing people Into the depths of their bullshit only to have it fall apart in their hands So that they would experience a poria now that in itself is a dangerous thing to do And of course, we all know what they did to socrates But the thing is because a poria gives you a choice point you can either retrench even more deeply and that Right. That is a real possibility or You can do the following You can open up you can experience wonder Which is to open oneself up to call one’s world and oneself into question in a beautiful way Um in a wonderful way And so I would again please hear all the caveats I put before it But there are times when people are bullshitting Perhaps a relationship is at risk And somebody is bullshitting This can often happen in couples therapy the therapist often needs to use techniques largely socratic in nature To try and get the person into a place where they are willing to Disidentify from being a bullshit artist in an important way See the problem as I said with bullshitting and we all know this the problem if you bullshit a lot is you start to believe Your own bullshit. You don’t really believe your bullshit you fall prey to it And so getting people to break out of that cycle it can be very challenging but that might be an instance where Doing posing a socratic challenge to bullshit might be Really necessary or at least highly Um indispensable and needful at the time Don you said we don’t we can’t believe our bullshit. Um, but we repeat we We say bullshit enough that it just becomes more salient and therefore right and then we engage in action Which causes us to have certain beliefs so it’s it’s right technically we don’t believe our bullshit our bullshit leads us into Being locked into what we find salient and then our our actions are what cause our bullshit We can’t sorry cause our beliefs. We don’t we can’t act a belief But our actions actually cause our beliefs and so in that way bullshit channels our actions and then those cause our beliefs, you know and and and Pascal and I don’t mean to say he was promising bullshit But pascal was aware of this when he gave pascal’s wager he didn’t want he said very clearly I don’t think it will convince you of god’s existence What I notice how this is a really sneaky plausibility argument What it should do is take make you take seriously going into church and lighting a candle Because he knew if he started to do these things Then things would become salient to you and then the beliefs would start to accrue even though he could not give you any argument for them Yeah Yeah, and and that’s what marcus relius is doing quite a bit He’s kind of always piecing through things that that veil of appearance when you said that i’m thinking of that piecing through That veil to get to The reality of the food on our plate the wine in the bottle, etc Um, let me move on to another question um Uh mark mark trumple says, uh, what is the relationship between beauty and confirmation bias? So That’s a very tricky one and there’s a sense in which some more empirical research is needed at a couple of lynch points um I think confirmation bias is a kind of pornography And in fact, I think you can even talk about confirmation porn and in that sense it’s Given my argument in my use of han it is antithetical to beauty which should startle us And wake us up and make us ask questions Uh and prepare us for truth that we do not yet have and so in that sense beauty as i’ve argued for it here Which of course is not our everyday notion of beauty. I’ve taken great care to darla to distinguish that right beauty in The sense i’ve been arguing here would be the opposite of confirmation bias, which is a kind of cognitive pornography Yeah, now you have to be careful about this because you can’t like this is what I cannot tell you Don’t ever engage in confirmation bias Because that would mean I would rob you of Heuristics that you need because what these heuristics when they’re adaptive what they do is they help you in Situations ignore a lot of irrelevant information focus in on the relevant information the problem is For every instant and this is a formal proof the no free lunch the theorem for every instance where that heuristic helps you It there’s another instance where it equally harms you and so you have to get good at Ameliorating this and seeing the bias or seeing the heuristic in context Thanks john, i’m just noting the questions in the chat and I see one from stacy. Um stacy says would you say the smoothing? That’s in quotations the smoothing of reality has created a society that generally has a disdain for denial of the necessarily complex or Do we have a yearning at an individual level that can? Supercede the superficiality created the superficially created smoothing So I think the answer to the first question is yes, and I think that’s hans argument So it’s more his argument in mind that the smoothing locks us into a Superficial simplicity instead of a challenging elegance Um About the second point I think of course we’re no one swings free of cultural influence But we know there are individual differences And we know that one of the things in which there are individual differences Is need for cognition This is how much do you need to go out and find problems rather than just waiting to react to problems that are given to you By circumstance or other people do you seek out? Problems and challenges that have not been given to you by reality or by circumstance And by the way need for cognition is predictive of rationality Your intelligence is only weakly predictive of rationality And if you want to see about that go look at a whole bunch of other work that i’ve done and work by stanovich and A whole bunch of other people so many individuals have a kind of constitutional resistance to the dumbification the stupefication That is happening And what they do is they seek to complexify their cognition because they have a high need for cognition Now that is probably in some sense perennially true, but it is also more pertinently true right now because as i’ve indicated we have the technological and social acceleration Of the strategies of smoothing Yeah Thanks, john people that have high need for cognition And seek rationality need to seek each other out and find community of mutual support So obvious reference to the group here. Yeah That’s what we’re trying to do here. I’m going to take two more questions from the chat everyone and one question from my co-host Um, and hopefully that’s going to be good john Uh, lennard says What to do in cases in which authentic natural salient beauty is indeed misleading Do you recommend specific contemplative practices to recover from self-deception stemming from being blinded by beauty? So, um, it’s you have to be I understand the question and I i’m not being dismissive of it But Typically what we mean is let’s say for example, a woman is naturally very beautiful to a A heterosexual man just as a prototypical example from literature. I’m not giving it any moral priority at all um, and we say but that beauty was actually deceptive because she was evil Or manipulative or a liar and all the horrible tropes and I know there’s sexism bound up with this but That has been a protocol to prototypical instance of it now you have to be very careful, but because what the natural sexual beauty discloses is actually something like There’s good reason to believe symmetry In the modern sense of the person’s appearance and healthiness of their appearance and those are both indicators Of sorry, I don’t mean to sound crude but this is sexual attraction. We’re talking about those are both indicators of good capacity for sexual reproduction And so in that sense there was no deception now what we Can do is we can fall prey to the halo effect Which is conclude that because the person is naturally attractive that they are also morally virtuous now that thing The halo effect you should definitely engage in contemplative practices to get to more reliably Challenge the halo effect is very very dangerous now You can see why it evolved because halo effects people that are attractive will largely marshal social influence And if they marshal social influence, right you better think well of them because social power, etc So we can understand why it’s It’s an evolutionary adaptation, but nevertheless right If if if we could all learn To more successfully challenge the halo effect and retail it retailer Our salience radar it would do us all very well And by the way, it helps the people who live by the halo effect because eventually it goes away And I know people like this And then they’re really bereft. They’re really bereft I had I noticed I was Like many of us I had been unsuccessful in the people that I had entered into a romantic relationship with So this next time I decided to do something pretty stoic, I think Not to praise myself, but I decided i’m going to challenge my default automatic attractiveness radar what Grabs my attention and women the type that I like and i’m going to go off type And so I met somebody I’m now with One of the best people i’ve met in my life And I fell in love with her soul first Because of that and then i’ve only come to realize Not only through my own eyes, but the eyes of others that she’s actually a physically very attractive woman And this has been the best for me That it could possibly be so If we’re being really careful about what we’re pressing on here something like the halo effect Yes Yes, I think it’s good to challenge the halo effect I don’t think that’s a particular problem with beauty. I think it’s a particular problem with our judgments about how We are leaping from and this is inappropriate leaping Right. There’s good leaping and badly thing leaping from The disclosure of some underlying reality a kind of Capacity for sexual reproduction to making conclusions about people’s moral character. That’s where we need to pause and to challenge Hugely helpful answer john and thank you For your question. Okay, one more question from the chat and then one more question after that and we’re done. So Gion has a good little question for you john. Could you share methods to question myself? If I am bullshitting or not So Um, the first thing to do is to adopt a practice of active open-mindedness Learn about various cognitive biases and then first and you’ll find this very easy and pleasurable identify cognitive biases in other people In newspaper articles or videos or in other people and you’ll be really good at it Now I want you to remember this you’ll be really good at it We are really good at detecting cognitive bias in other people And then try and apply that to yourself and you’ll find that’s really hard and you’re not very good at it That’s because the cartesian monological model of how reason works is dramatically wrong Reason works socratically. It works dialogically. I’m good at identifying your bias You’re good at identifying mine. And so what we need to do is regularly engage in Socratic dialogue dialogos with each other And and and so we get more and more capable of doing that and then eventually You will start to more and more internalize that into an internal dialogue. Remember what antistinny said he learned to converse with himself from socrates right And eventually you will internalize that ability to take other people’s perspective on your own perspective and then You will start on your own To be able to do active open-mindedness Oh, that’s brilliant. John again. I I just want to bring up marcus radius He I I noticed that sometimes he does this little dialogic thing He asks a question then answer it answers it and it’s thoughts to himself, right? The meditation is A dialogical exercise dialogical exercise to put through Yeah, yeah, thanks. That’s a great question. John. Thank you. All right, i’m going to invite my co-host Phil yan of to the stage to ask the final question john over to you phil All right John, thank you for being here today Thank you for hanging out with us and sharing your thinking with us and letting us ask you questions It’s just been a real gift. I’m going to tell you I can’t wait to go watch this again I’m glad we’re recording this so I can come back and revisit this And i’m sorry that you’re feeling poorly, but i’ll make one last question one last question Um, I look forward to your question phil. I really enjoyed our conversation earlier. So Thank you And I did too and so i’m gonna uh, you know We’ve been talking about beauty and stoicism and it’s a I feel it’s a romantic notion and you’ve got lots of thinking And we had to put all those pieces together But I want I would love to hear you reflect a little more upon A statement I heard you make in another Interview where you said that you know stoicism was kind of a gray area and what you were saying was Maybe it was a religion And I was trying to get to the thought of what is your thinking in was stoicism a philosophy I mean they see themselves as the heirs to Aristotle right or is it a religion or is it somewhere in the middle or were they Bullshitting themselves about what they were really doing This is wonderful, um So I mean this is a question other people have wrestled with i’ve looked at I haven’t read it thoroughly So I I don’t want to claim competence in it Um, you know entire phd thesis around this question Um, and it goes around what’s called the demarcation problem in the social sciences about religion We don’t know what we’re we have by the way before we go see religion We have the same problem with science the demarcation problem also exists for science That’s it’s very hard to say that’s a science and that’s not so the demarcation problem for religion is well What’s a religious going to a sports stadium? Where you go on a specific time with a whole bunch of other people and you cheer and you yell And you eat together and you chant and you’re rooting for these people that are doing something that in no way changes the real world Is that a religious action? Yes, and that’s the right answer the right answer is me Is buddhism a religion? Well, it could be a philosophy, but it’s not right. It’s not a philosophy in modern academic sense of philosophy But it’s it’s a love of wisdom, right? and so I think stoicism is I I often use um the the The phrase the hyphenated phrase it’s a religious philosophy or a philosophical religion Because I think trying to come down hard On a demarcation it has practices it has rituals It has community it has a sacred dimension that you are supposed to come into a participatory relationship with That transforms you profoundly I think this is a reason why stoicism was taken up and becomes a proper part of neoplatonism Which has found a home in many religious traditions, right? Of course, there’s neoplatonism within christianity within islam within judaism And of course, uh, there are is there’s really weird historical Integrations between something like neoplatonism and vedanta and buddhism and so this amazing capacity uh to enter into reciprocal reconstruction with other religions and religious philosophies it tends to Um Make the religions more philosophically deep and tends to make the philosophies more religiously transformative And so I think you know, I think I think you have aristotelian science and neoplatonism. I think you have platonic spirituality that spends that sense of anagogy That I talked about And there’s the mystical um, and then stoicism, I think it gives you a lot of practices that I think are crucial i’d be more Happy saying that neoplatonism Is a religion, but I also think it is more properly described as a Philosophical religion or a religious philosophy What’s interesting I wasn’t looking for a definitive answer from you I wanted to hear your thinking on this because I think it is exactly That demarcation problem and part of it is too and i’ve heard you comment on some other things is that you know There is a hunger for some binding of ourselves to some other Philosophical tradition which is the thing that you talk about a lot and I think that’s kind of what we’re seeing here Yes, there is and and I think this whole uh, if it’s not presumptuous But I think you’re at least affording this phil. I think this whole conference is around the sense of religio To be deeply connected to something that is profoundly and transformatively and beautifully real That helps us find the centrality of goodness and the ultimacy of truth from the primacy of beauty to use d.c shindler Now the one thing that I think Is interesting and the problem is the history gets a little bit hard here Is Is there a place was there a place for the mystical mystical experience that is clearly? Explicitly present in neoplatonism you see it in platinus without question And of course, it’s controversial around whether or not the mystical that sense of you know a profound At one mit with reality Um is actually something that stoics report on I don’t know. I think that part of the history is perhaps lost to us maybe it gets uh submerged under Uh the emerging christianity maybe gets submerged when it’s taken into neoplatonism. I don’t know. I don’t know um I do think that Flow with nature, especially if it has connections to what I talk about as flow I think it’s on a continuum with more proper transformative and mystical experiences So do you do and I apologize, but i’m going to get one more question. I want more answer out of you That’s fine think those you know the the xenos flow and And I can’t say the guy’s name Yeah, jack, I you every time you see it. I think I should record that so I can say it but But those two uses of flow. Do you think those are similar enough to have that conversation? Yeah, I do actually because I mean the We tend to over focus on prototypical instances of flow that come out in athletic performance or martial arts or rock climbing But it also comes out in jazz And it also comes out when you’re doing dialectic into the logos and practice And we’re following the logos the way socrates says you follow the wind that to my mind Is an ongoing practice of insight improvisation Requestioning reopening up an ongoing sense of discovery and wonder and that seems to me to be very much A flow state error matters socrates will catch you out. You have to be very clear. There’s immediate feedback These are all the conditions that create flow. I think being in socrates presence Uh, if it was taken up correctly, which is always the existential choice in the face of socrates could induce a flow state in people Don is following the wind the same of sort of stream of consciousness Thinking journaling writing following the logos following the wind Uh, what do you mean by following the wind? Oh, I just thought I thought I thought you said following the wind No following the logos like like we like like a wind right like a wind Yeah, it blows and it comes from another direction that we have to reorient So socrates talks about following the logos as if we’re following a wind Yeah And of course I just thought it just reminded me of kind of a stream of consciousness type following of our thoughts in that way No, I don’t think see flow is typically different from associational Like like that associational right thing Because it requires it flow really cares a lot and there’s a lot more I could have put in my talk We flow really cares and is afforded by a concern for intelligibility If things start to be not make might not make sense for you. You immediately fall out of flow If you start to make a lot of mistakes, you’re immediately out of flow That’s the thing that will snap you out of flow like nothing else Yeah All right. I think we also have a t-shirt when you’re feeling well I want to bring you back for more questions about this particular set of things But thank you so much for your time today. This has been thanks. Wonderful. I think we have a t-shirt Phrase beauty is anti-bullshit john vervecki