https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=7-TcpdaySpw
So Socrates said in the Apologia when he was asked, this is his trial when he’s going to be put to death, he’s explaining why he didn’t run away because the Athenians said they were gonna kill him and they gave him plenty of warning and they didn’t wanna kill him, they wanted him to go away and he knew that and so did his friends and all of his friends were telling him to get the hell out of town and he went and had a conversation with his daemon, which is this spirit of intuition that you’re describing and his daemon said, you can’t run and he thought, well, what the hell do you mean? I can’t run, they want me to run and they’re gonna kill me but Socrates lays it out in the Apologia, he says, it was widely established in Athens and elsewhere that Socrates was a singular person and even the Delphic Oracle had said that and she said he was singular because he knew that he didn’t know, he was radically humble, radically ignorant but he said that one of the things that made him different was that he always listened to the voice of this daemon and that’s the same word as daemon but it means spirit fundamentally in that context, he always listened, that’s what made him different from other men. Now the question is, what is the nature of that guiding spirit? That’s right. Now your, well yeah, your objection is, well, why do we have to consider that God? And I would say, well, that is exactly the question and even what would it mean to consider it God is the question. Okay, so imagine, okay, so here’s a set of problems. Now, you have this intuition that guides you and you’re willing to abide by it but you have an integration problem like everyone does which is, well, you might be guided by beauty and you might be guided by truth and you might be guided by lust and you might be guided by envy and you might be guided by hunger and like there’s a lot of different animating principles that are going to be warring around you and if they’re not integrated into something that’s unified then they’re disintegrated and you’re gonna be pulled apart. Now, the other question you’re asking is, why does that have to be conceptualized as God? Okay, so to answer that question, we’d have to do something like a technical analysis of what it means to consider something God. So I would say, well, something has to be put in the highest place and the highest place is the place that takes predominance over all other places and so if you’re gonna be guided by the spirit of your intuition, then by necessity, at least at that moment, you put it in the highest place and that’s to elevate it to the peak of Mount Sinai, symbolically speaking. It’s to allow it to be the eye at the top of the pyramid through which you see. It’s both of those things and then I would say technically, and I learned this from Jung, is that regardless of what you call it, this animating spirit that you put in the highest place is functionally equivalent to God and we could look at the sophisticated religious thinkers, we know perfectly well that God is beyond both name and conceptualization. Just like physical exercise, daily spiritual exercise is critical to your wellbeing, especially in a world where attacks on faith and religion are happening all around us every day. 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Why does this thing have to be outside of me? It doesn’t. Right. So if this thing doesn’t have to be outside of me… But we’ll return to that. Let’s return to that. But let me, let me follow that logical sequence out. If this thing is not, doesn’t have to be outside of me, is it possible that this intuition is a part of me that is giving me additional information that consciously I’m not present to? Sure, sure. Well, and therefore the idea that we have a God to whom we have some sort of shared affiliation or some shared connection through him seems to me to be unnecessary. Okay, okay. So let’s delve into that a little bit because I think that’s a very germane question. Well, the first point of distinction is what exactly do you mean by inside of you, right? Because that’s a metaphor and it’s not obvious what it means. Do you mean inside the, the, what the, the meat of your brain? Do you mean in the neural connections? Like exactly what does inside mean? It means inside the psychological landscape, right? It means it’s produced by my body and brain, right? This is a product in the way that my thoughts are constructed by my brain and body to some extent. This is also a product of that just through a different communication system. Okay, so fine. So let’s take the biological route there. And let’s, that’s fine. Let’s just make it strictly biological then for the time being. So then you run into the problem of the intrinsic logos of the world. So let’s say that you are conferring with something that’s revealing itself within you that’s biologically predicated. Well, then you might say, well, that’s the wisdom of the world making itself manifest through the material realm. And that’s really what the Greeks believed. Like the Greek notion of logos was that there was an intrinsic order to the material world. And that if you, you allowed that order to make itself manifest within you, that that would provide you with the most appropriate possible guidance. And the idea of the Socratic Daemon is a reflection of the logos of the intrinsic structure of the world. And so the notion would be, well, if you’re in tune with the structure of the world as it reveals itself to you biologically, then you’re acting in harmony with being itself. I’m perfectly happy with that formulation. There was a Judeo-Christian logos idea that got overlaid on top of that when there was the, what would you call it, reconciliation between the Greek worldview and the Judeo-Christian worldview. And it adds an extra dimension to that. And you can tell me what you think about this. So in the Christian formulation particularly, Christ is the logos. That’s a different idea than the logos or the logic of the world. But the idea there is that forthright confrontation with the catastrophe of existence will reveal the logos of existence to you. And so that’s why those ideas could be overlaid. So imagine that you’re gonna consult your intuition, right? But here’s the precondition. And you tell me if you think this is right or wrong. You have to admit that you have a problem first. So you basically have to admit that you’ve missed the mark and that you’re somewhat lost. So that’s a humility and it’s an opening up to revelation. That’s an attitude, a psychological attitude. Now, and that’s a self-sacrificial attitude because if you’re gonna learn something from the revelation, part of you is gonna have to go, the part of you that’s wrong. So you have to bring the psychological animating spirit to bear, which is humility and openness to correction. And then the voice of intuition will make itself manifest from let’s say below. And so that’s the way you bring the psychological element of the logos and the material element together. And so, and those have to be united as well, or you’re in a state of disunion. So, well, so that’s how I would respond to that. Well, what I’m learning from this conversation is I’m a Greek philosopher, Jordan. Yeah, well, that’s a very good thing to note. Like, look, I went and talked to Richard Dawkins about these sorts of things, you know. And Dawkins, I was trying to pin him down so he would talk to me. And it took quite a bit of negotiating back and forth, you know, because he’s a skeptical guy and he didn’t trust me. And he kept writing me these kind of dismissive emails. He’d say, I don’t know why you wanna talk to me. I don’t really understand anything you’re saying. And but then eventually he said, but I think maybe it has something to do with this. And he sent me this paper, which I had read three decades earlier, one of his papers. I learned a lot from Dawkins. Like, I think Dawkins is a genuine scientist. And in that paper, he made the claim that every organism has to be a microcosm of its environment. So he said, for example, that if you were an alien and someone gave you a duck, you know, an earth duck, earth duck, that’s an awkward phrase. But you get the point, a duck from earth. That you could infer all sorts of things about the earth’s environment by taking the duck apart. The density of the atmosphere, the fact that it was oxygenated, the amount of gravity that was characteristic of the surface, the presence of water, the relative preponderance of elements in the natural environment. The structure of the environment is built into the organism. And there’s an ancient medieval idea, it’s even older than that, that the human being is a microcosm and reflects the macrocosm. And that’s exactly the case that Dawkins was making. And I thought, you do know why I wanna talk to you, because that’s exactly why I wanted to talk to you. And so, following that logic, you could say, well, there’s a reflection of the cosmic order within you. And that reflection is there because you have adapted to the world. You are adapted to the world in the deepest parts of you, in the deepest recesses of you. And if you consult with that microcosmic embodiment, then it will reveal intuitions that will move you forward. But those intuitions, this is where I think the crucial difference in the approach we’re both taking at the moment reveals itself. See, you’re thinking about that as something that’s personal. And it is personal in sense that it speaks to you personally, but it’s impersonal in that that thing is there whether you’re here or not. It’s no different than the Socratic Daemon. And it’s no different than the voice of intuition that speaks to other people. Or at least it has important commonalities. What’s the evidence for the claim that it’s there whether I’m here or not? Well, because other people have spoken of the same thing. Now, I’m not saying there isn’t an element of it that’s unique to you. There is. No, my point is this. There’s an element that’s unique to you. Just because I have a hat and you have a hat doesn’t mean that the hat is something that we share in common that’s given to us from above. We can all have our own hat. Okay, I would say hat’s the wrong metaphor because it’s purely a cultural construct. And so your metaphor falls prey to the inadequacy of a postmodern viewpoint. Let’s think of a different example. All right, you have to. Different example. You have your own too. Anger. Okay, fine. Anger. Let’s use anger. Yes. Okay, so then we might say, well, what sort of being is anger? And it’s definitely the case that you get angry in your own way. But it’s also the case that if you get angry, everyone can tell that you’re angry. And part of the reason they can tell is because they get angry enough like you to understand what the hell’s possessing you. Fine. And so this is part of the collective unconscious problem. That’s another way of thinking about it. Or part of the problem that we share universal biologically predicated motivational and emotional structures. There’s an element of it that is idiosyncratic and that’s unique to you. And religiously speaking, that would be the personal nature of your relationship with God, which isn’t trivial. But then there’s a universality of it, right? Because if your intuitions, for example, were so idiosyncratic that no one else had all experienced them, you could not communicate with anyone else. You certainly couldn’t live with other people, right? You’d be so far a field from the norm. And this does happen to people, by the way, who are absolute creative geniuses from time to time. But most of the time, that voice that’s speaking to you speaks in a voice that’s similar to the manner in which the voice speaks to other people. Which is also why I think we have something like a universality of conscience.