Exploring Jewish Neoplatonism: The Life and Philosophy of Solomon Ibn Gabirol

29:18Dr. John Vervaeke:become more and more sort of clear to me. and you can get this sort of by comparing neoplatonism and taoism or zen which is ultimate reality in terms of a kind of ultimacy that and and our the metaphor for that is up right we're oriented up and we're aspiring up and we're looking up but you also have another notion of all of ultimate reality which is primordiality that which that with that that that which grounds us and nourishes us. And of course, matter is related to mother, just the terms, I mean. And you see that in Taoism and the emphasis, even a prioritization of the divine or at least the sacred, whether or not the Taoist divine is, I'm not going to argue about that, but it's clearly sacred and ultimately real.

30:12Dr. John Vervaeke:And there's an emphasis on the potentiality, on receptivity, on being like water, right? And he seems to be, what I saw in Eregena is both the primordiality and the ultimacy of God were being held together rather than the traditional Neoplatonism, which was unidirectional, right? And it was like, oh, it's like this, it's almost like a magnet, right? And I see that in him. And through both of them, I see a Neoplatonism that is undermining a two worlds mythology profoundly, profoundly. Because you get a two worlds mythology by separating realness and goodness and everything all the way up here and negating it all the way down here.

31:00Dr. John Vervaeke:And that's how you get the profound. But if you hold this polarity of ultimacy and primordiality of actuality and potentiality, being equally real and equally homing the sacred, then the two worlds mythology is no longer viable. And that matters a lot to me. Because as you know, I think the two worlds mythology has often been a driving force for various forms of nihilism or utopianism or nostalgia, all of which have been very dangerous. Does any of that track for you or did I take us No, absolutely. I think that's tracking very well. I think that's really a very, very pundit point here, which is that when we do talk about this thing of Hule, which is there as the very aura surrounding the immediate primal reality, the essence of being itself, it's also the Hule which makes up our being.

31:59Our bodies are comprised of matter and spirit, right? Yes. And in that sense, there is the The ontological vertical gap that's created in some of these hierarchical, which then become these sort of two-world ontologies, is immediately collapsed because there's this immediacy of the divine essence, which emanates this al-unsar al-al, this prime matter or this grounding matter. I can't remember the term that Sarah Pesson wants to use instead. And the very matter -

32:29Dr. John Vervaeke:Elemental grounding principle. Yeah. The elemental grounding principle is also the elemental grounding principle of our flesh and bones, right? It's not a different elemental grounding principle. It's the same Hulet. There's that connectivity. And I think there's a really powerful direction there. And then to think of what is the relationship between that and form, not as two opposing hierarchical objects, right, where it's like, which is great and which is worse. There's this dance between them where potential is calling actual into being and vice versa. Years ago, I came across this line from Pierre de Chardon-Taylhart, the author of The Phenomenology of Man, very fascinating Jesuit paleontologist and philosopher.

33:15and he writes, and it just came to me as I was, you know, rereading Ibn Gabri on preparation for our discussion. Teilhard writes, son of man, bathe yourself in the ocean of matter, plunge into it where it's deepest and most violent, struggle in its currents and drink of its waters, for it cradled you long ago in your pre-conscious existence, and it is that ocean which will raise you up to God. I mean, these are Ibn Gabri and Piyadur Shedin, these are two thinkers as, you know distant you know maybe as as as we can find and yet this notion that there is a a real coal of of this of this primacy and this depth of this and there is a feminine aspect to it as well of this great yeah which which we which we dive into and we can in a sense as what what what i see people like like um tailheart doing is is is making a call to action right yeah based on this very abstract metaphysic in a way that lends itself to to to realize the immediacy of it um so bathe yourself in the ocean of matter is not just like let's think about hula out there somewhere but like you can actually enter into this this ever-present hula which is which is the divine substance of of our being that was beautifully said i i didn't make a connection

34:36Dr. John Vervaeke:to Deshadan. I made a connection to Whitehead because Whitehead, people frequently, to my mind at least, miss that he's done something really radical in that the Platonic forms are principles of potential. They're potential. They're not principles of actuality. And that's why he has to put them inside an actual agent or an actual mind, at least, of God. So God is actually like God's mind is made up of all of this eternal potential that he then has the job of actualizing into existence, which is a very, again, this inversion of this, a standard sort of neoplatonic model. Because I think White has the fundamental intuition that creativity requires both act and receptivity in order to properly make sense of what creativity actually is.

35:32Dr. John Vervaeke:And for me, that again maps into Urero's work where you have the bottom-up causation and the top-down constraints, which is again an inversion of the classic sort of Neoplatonic model. And so there's something going on here to my mind, and he's prescient of it in a really important way. He's prescient. There's a realization, like I say, it's almost, notice what I'm doing, it's almost Taoist, which is no, the receptivity, the shaping of possibility is as real and necessary to existence as the actuality, the making things happen. And I find that really exciting and very interesting. I'm wondering what you mentioned that a moment ago, and I alluded to it too, with matter being related to mother.

36:26Dr. John Vervaeke:It sounds like we're at least touching on the idea, and maybe yang and yin are better than masculine and female, But he seems to be bringing a real feminine yin aspect into God that the West has had a really hard time acknowledging. Because there's something, it sees something deficient in receptivity.

36:55Dr. John Vervaeke:You're nodding, so please. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I want to, yes, I want to comment on that. I also want to add one more thinker, which I thought you might have mentioned, which is a friend and colleague of yours, Ian McGilchrist. Oh, yes. In his work, The Matter of Things. And I think in some ways, Ibn Gabriyel is, as you're saying, sort of a background-only sort of prophet for a lot of this direction that we're seeing in contemporary thinkers from Whitehead to McGilchrist and others. And I'll let you speak more because you're more acquainted with him as a colleague and interlocutor. Do you want to say a word about that relation before I return to that comment?

37:37Dr. John Vervaeke:Sure. Yeah. I mean, so Ian's idea is that the left hemisphere is basically in service of the, it should be in service of the right hemisphere because the left hemisphere is about dealing in terms of, well, basically well-defined problems. You can bring a formal system to bear on it. you can pursue consistency. I'll use some Godelian language because I actually think it's appropriate. The right hemisphere is not worried as much about consistency because it's pursuing completeness. It's not trying to build things up from the features. It's trying to get the gestalt. And it doesn't have the ruthless self-confidence of the left hemisphere.

38:21Dr. John Vervaeke:That's what Ian emphasizes. The left hemisphere, the right hemisphere is very open and flexible and to Ian's mind, much more receptive. And his point is we've had a domination of left hemispheric thinking and our culture has reinforced and prioritized the left hemisphere at the expense of the right hemisphere. even though in many ways the right hemisphere should have priority in functioning.

38:54Dr. John Vervaeke:And one way of mapping that onto these things is people who are more dominantly left hemispheric tend to be more masculine, prototypically male, but there's also versions of this that apply to people that are not sort of biologically male. And so when one hypothesis, I'm talking very cautiously here, please. But one hypothesis is when we sort of sensing masculinity, we might when we're sensing it in somebody's mindedness and not in their embodiedness, we're sensing a sort of a left hemispheric dominance or approach. Whereas when we're sensing something more feminine, even in somebody that might be biologically male, we're sensing a more right hemispheric presence.

39:40Dr. John Vervaeke:And then we've got the wrong ordering. We've got the emissary dominating the master as opposed to being in service. The left hemisphere should be in service of the right rather than the right in service of the left. And so we have to continue this and then turn it back to Zevi. We've tended to have a left hemispheric god and we've tended to be really antagonistic towards right hemispheric gods or goddesses. Oh no. And so that's the mapping I think Zevi was pointing to. I'll bring in one more person before I put it back to him, which is the work of William Desmond, somebody who's having just a tremendous influence on me.

40:21Dr. John Vervaeke:And he talks about these two essentials, the essential canatus, but even more below that is the essential passivity, the essential receptivity. And he's trying to get that back into our model of, our model's too weak of a word, our image. None of these work of God, but whatever. Go ahead, Seve. Right. Yeah. I think in terms of the question of the receptivity of matter and relationship to form, there's something very rich going on here. And for me, it's particularly enriched by, and I want to be careful with this, by my lens understanding of Jewish mysticism of Kabbalah. I want to be careful that I'm not reading Ibn Ghabbaro through the lens of Kabbalah.

41:07That would be a mistake. But refracted through my understanding of Kabbalah is perhaps the way that I'm wanting to understand this. Which is that for Ibn Ghabbaro, this thing, this potentiality, matter, hule, is this fundamental receptivity. And it's desiring to receive, we can say, from its partner, from form. And everything in existence is a product of the coupling, of the coming together of those two things. And they're brought together by this eros, by this desire. And the first thing which they produce and which is radical, of course, for Yvonne Gabriel, is intellect, is naus. And that relationship is very interesting in that in the Kabbalistic system, you have the two divine parents.

41:55And they're literally called mother and father, Abba and Emma, Chachma and Bina. And it is, in their case, it is keter, which is also desire, which is will, which scholars debate how much that language is directly influenced by Ibn Gabri 'l. so I'll kind of leave that as an open question mark with a wink, where it is will and desire which drives the first two great moments of intellect, which is the father and mother to come together and give birth to the next thing, which is the emotions in the Kabbalistic system. But in the sense here, there's also this coupling of form and matter, of receptivity and actuality of feminine and masculine into creating intellect.

42:43And then they couple again to create soul and then again to create celestial body and then again terrestrial body. And in all things, it's their coupling together that allows things to exist. Nothing exists without some sort of admixture because everything is hulaimorphe. It is both form and matter. It is both those things coming together. and there's a very interesting sort of point here in terms of how this desire this irada is the Arabic that he uses is both bringing together form and matter and mediating between the divine essence and this coupling of form and matter in that and Ibn Gabri 'l kind of goes back and forth and it's not super clear exactly on this but from my understanding um There's this mediating desire between form and matter that conjoins them.

43:41It is potential wanting to be actualized, desiring actualization, desiring form, the feminine desiring the masculine, to use that language. And then it's also desire which emerges them and emanates them from the essence. The essence also wants. and Sarah Peston makes this point that within the divine essence, there are kind of these two modes as a mode of passivity and a mode of activity. And this is the things that we see amongst many Neoplatonists and even beyond Neoplatonism of sort of this Deus Suspiconditus and Deus Revelatius of sort of a hidden God, a dark God and a God of light. And in some senses, there's this hiddenness, the darkness, which is potential and the light, which is form.

44:28and in that way there's a mediation happening through desire bringing form into existence and desire also sometimes in very evocative ways Ibn Gabbro will use synonyms for irada, for desire, for will he'll also call it wisdom or he'll also call it word yeah, low growth which is evocative both of the Islamic tradition of God who speaks who speaks being into existence of certainly the Jewish tradition where God speaks creation to existence and Jewish mysticism where language ontologically articulates reality into being. Divine speech brings reality constantly into being. And certainly also the Greek tradition.

45:13In some ways, he's bringing this all together. And the specific focus is that for him, Logos is responsible for emanating. And I wonder where this lands for you, John. Logos specifically is responsible for emanating um, form. Whereas, whereas the, the divine hiddenness, the essence, the passivity is responsible for, for, for the direct, and I'm using this word now, emanation or something drawing forth, bringing out of matter itself. And that relationship was really interesting to me in the way that the two of them are coming, are coming down or, or emerging, um, through those various channels.

45:51Um, and, and sort of what all of, all of this language is metaphor. And I think, I think the role that a responsible reader of Neoplatonism is, what does it mean to unpack these metaphors? And I'm curious to throw that back to you.

46:04Dr. John Vervaeke:Well, that's very opportune or appropriate. I'm preparing for a talk I'm going to give in Cambridge in September at the Logos Conference. I gave a talk earlier this year at the Theosis Conference. It's going to be one at the Logos Conference. Douglas Headley and Matthius are doing this amazing work together for Neoplatonism. Okay, so part of it is I want to start by noting what I said earlier. And now you've given a bit more explication or articulation. We can go back and perhaps recover it. Notice how the notion of self-organization will not be, you can't divide it into activity and passivity.

46:47Dr. John Vervaeke:A feedback cycle, is that active or receptive? It's like, well, it's both. And you can't separate it. And for me,

47:03Dr. John Vervaeke:I've got a huge argument for this paper, and I'm not going to try and do it now because that would just take us too far afield. But for me, the capacity to have regulated where you have selective constraints. Here I'm doing Alicia Araro and enabling constraints. Do evolution. Here's natural selection. Here's variation. And then you have a feedback cycle of organisms reproducing. And then the feedback cycle, you've got variation and competition, and the feedback cycle doesn't merely repeat. it evolves. So it is inherently creative. Now I see Logos as the virtual engine, right? That is, but this is where maybe it's pressing on things a little bit.

47:59Dr. John Vervaeke:Maybe it's not lining up with him because I see that as, right? Part of that is the virtual engine is the selective and enabling constraints. But when you look inside the feedback cycle, there's also bottom-up causation. So I think of Logos as, here's the virtual engine, the set of constraints, and what it's doing is it's regulating causal emergence so that it turns into feedback cycles in which receptivity and activity are indistinguishable. It functions by developing. It develops as functioning. It doesn't merely repeat. It evolves. Creativity and existence are bound up together inseparably.

48:49Dr. John Vervaeke:That's my attempt to try and answer what you just said, using some cognitive scientific language that is becoming more and more pronounced in biology, cognitive science, and even in certain aspects of physics. The fact that it seems to be scale invariant, this is Michael Levin's work, you see these same principles and patterns at work, high-level cognition, biology, sub-cellular biology, down into chemistry and physics, and up beyond the individual into super collectives, that there's something that scale and variance like that points to a fun, I think it's good evidence to a fundamental ontological principle for reality as a whole.

49:38Dr. John Vervaeke:Why is it showing up so centrally and importantly at all of these different levels of analysis? So that's, and that is also my way of trying to bring into more current language, the emanation and the emergence idea. We're talking about the relationship between these different levels and how you get like the lower level is the power, which is a potential word, right? And the upper level is basically the constraining for what's below it and so forth. But each level is simultaneously a power and a law. It's a power of what's above it and a law that's below it. And that's pretty standard, actually, Neoplatonism.

50:27Dr. John Vervaeke:And it applies very well. But what he's doing, which I think is right, is he's saying, but that means just accept the consequences of that. The consequences of that is the bottom up from the primordiality is just as important. The return from the primordiality is just as sacred as the procession from the ultimacy. Did that track at all? Yeah, totally.

50:58Dr. John Vervaeke:This is something I'm really wrestling with a lot. So I'm glad somebody as soon as you could track that. Good. I want to tie that into, I think what you're doing, John, is really cutting edge and exciting and genuinely avant-garde in the direction. And I want to kind of tie that back into Ibn Gabri 'l's own language and sort of what he's doing in his work there, because I think it is an apt description of what's going on. You said earlier that Ibn Gabri 'l rewrites the book as a dialogue between a teacher and a student, which is interesting. And that dialogical element remains in the Latin translation and is lost in Ibn Afal-Aqqair is abbreviated Hebrew translation.

51:42So that's very interesting. And akin to Maimonides, who's writing teacher to student also in a way there. But whereas in the Maimonidean context, the student is having a crisis of faith, which prompts the epistle, namely the guide for perplexed Maimonides, in the case of Ibn And in Gaboral, the imagined student, presumably here, the question of the student is, what is the purpose of mankind? What are we here for? So it's a very pragmatic, almost an ethical question in a real sense. And in Gaboral's answer is that the purpose is to know who we are, what is our nature, and then accordingly, we will know how to live and we'll know our purpose.

52:28And in that, there's a sense, there's this combined sense of this knowledge which leads to action, to liberation, which is also very spinazistic. Yeah, very much. He writes, I'll just read a few lines from here, because I think this very much ties into what you're saying, less on the sort of onto metaphysical, but more so on the personal and human level, which is the language that Ibn Gabri 'l himself is moving back and forth between. So the student asks, what is the purpose of man or mankind? and the teacher answers the inclination of their soul to the high world in order that everyone might return to their like, to that which they are, to their Hueli, to their prime Hueli.

53:15And he writes this in very spazistic language. He says that if you should lift yourself up to the first universal matter and are illuminated by its shadow, illuminated by its shadow, right? Matter and form. You will then, rather form and matter. you will then see the most wondrous of wonders. Devote yourself to this and be filled with love for it. This amour d 'ye, right, intellectual. Since here lies the meaning for which the human soul exists and here lies too amazing delight and outermost happiness. And he talks about that in language of attaining immortality in that moment of what we can call hinosis or theosis.

53:52And there's a real sense in which, and he's playing into a very rich Jewish midrashic and later Kabbalistic and Zoharic concept in which the ultimate end of creation already pre-exists creation, which is the perfection of the human soul and here the human body as well in its return to the ultimate stage. There's this language, there's a very strange, and this might seem like a bit of a tangent for a second, but I promise it's related.

54:30Dr. John Vervaeke:You've suffered some of mine, so please go ahead. There's a beautiful, so in the book of Genesis, God says, Let us make mankind in our image. And all of the commentators, Jewish and otherwise, say, who is God? Why is God speaking the plural here? Who is God consulting with when God says, let us make mankind in our image? God is, for all of theology, the sole and single actor in all of creation. And we are created in solely God's image by solely God. And there are many beautiful answers posed within the Jewish tradition that God is speaking to heaven and earth, right? Let us make man can in our image, heaven and earth, matter and form, we can think of that.

55:08But there's a very beautiful Midrashic answer, which is that God is consulting with the souls of the righteous, right? And which then leads to a question, which is that if the purpose of creation is to have these redeemed souls, these righteous souls, and why is God engaging the act of creation at all if the object of God's desire is already present with whom God can consult. And the answer is a very beautiful one, which is that God is going through this process and consulting with that potentiality, which God desires in the hopes that, and I'll quote the Aramaic and then translate, to return the righteous in repentance, which means that there is the sense of perfection, which pre-exists all of reality.

55:54God in God's passive, essential perfection does not need anything from reality. That's a cornerstone of theology and Neoplatansm as well. But there's something in the process of potential being manifest and coming into being and being in that darkness and returning to the light, which returns to a greater unity, ironically an imperfect perfection, which is somehow more beautiful than a perfect perfection. And I think what I'm hearing you getting at, and what I'm hearing Ibn Gabri 'l getting at, is that there is this desire-driven manifestation of multiplicity, which is also part of the potentialities, is the potential for multiplicity.

56:44into being driven by the desire for it return to itself, but in a way that it now has gone through that procession. Exactly. And I wonder how that's fitting with your understanding.

56:59Dr. John Vervaeke:Well, I mean, for me, the analogies, which is completely legitimate, fountain of life, right? And notice what I said, analogies, but maybe also instantiations of a biological organism um uh you know think about it developing from the zygote it is simultaneously differentiating and integrating it is simultaneously uh because if it doesn't differentiate it will just everything is just in the genetic code it's all there um some people say um there's a lot of dispute now about that in biology but let i'm only going to go to with the standard model for the analogy although I'm critical of it. But the process of complexification is simultaneously a process of integration and differentiation.

57:50Dr. John Vervaeke:The cells differentiate, but they also self-organize, literally self-organize into organs and into systems. And what you get is you get a complex system that is always complexifying, which then makes it better capable of conforming to a reality that is inherently complexifying in nature. And what that gives is as something is complexifying, you get emergent functions. I can do things as a complex or multicellular thing that I couldn't do as a zygote. I could have a conversation with this wonderful person, Zevi Slavin, and I've noticed that Zevi is never having these conversations with zygotes, with fertilized eggs, because they haven't complexified and they don't have the emergent functions.

58:37Dr. John Vervaeke:Think about my hand. Because it is simultaneously highly differentiated and highly integrated, that is why it can do so many things without falling apart or fragmenting itself. It is because that's what complexity is. Complexity isn't just being complicated. Complexity is exactly, this can do many different things while also holding together well and maintaining itself together well. Now, that is a terrific enhancement of agency. But notice I can't cleanly separate out the differentiation. Again, I can't cleanly separate out the differentiation and the integration. They are completely interwoven together, and that's what gives my hand the actual power of creativity that it possesses.

59:29Dr. John Vervaeke:So for me, that's exactly right, what he's saying. And one way of understanding what I'm saying about him, and maybe he's saying it too, is that if we pay very careful attention to life and also mind, we actually get some profound insights into the fundamental nature of reality itself. And that is a deeply personal and meaningful thing to say, because if the warp and woof, the fabric, the grammar of my mind and of my body are of a piece with that of reality, then my chances of being connected to what is most real are now greatly, significantly increased. Yeah, I think there's an important point there, which is that for people like Edmund Gopperl and for basically all of the great philosophical mystics and certainly the new Platonic mystics, the thing which we are making inquiry into is both our individual being and the ground of being as such.

1:00:47Excellent. In one fell swoop. And the desire to understand that thing is precisely a desire to know who we really are so that we may be and live in alignment with who we are. And there is a paradox there, and many philosophers have pointed to it, where we're always fundamentally aware of that in our Hulé, in our potentiality, in our hiddenness, in our shadow. but it is about bringing that into being and that itself is the journey which we are undergoing that is the pilgrimage in which we undergo to inform our own potentiality to bring Morphe to our own Hulay to bring what is the Arabic term that he uses al-surah to al-unsar of our being and I think there's something very real here which is that it's not simply I think so many times when we look at the Neoplatonists from the outside, we lose them in thinking that they are just armchair metaphysicians, thinking about how many complex levels of mediation there are between the one and the many and how many stages.

1:02:03And I think really what they're trying to do is they're trying to create language and and narratives and images for the being which they are becoming. Oh, well said. Right? And I think when we read the Neoplatonists, and I so enjoyed both reading and listening to Sarah Pesson in preparation for this, which is that there's this real grappling with what do these terms actually point to? Yes. And what do they demand of us? And we get lost in these kind of cliche debates, emanation versus creation, will, no will. And thinking for a minute, what do these terms actually mean? And for me, John, what you're doing is you're grappling so deeply with what are these terms, what might they actually mean in a real contemporary cognitive sense, scientific sense, metaphysical sense, and in a way that pushes us towards being the type of being that we're aspiring to in these systems.

1:03:06and that's a demanding call and one which for the Kabbalists and again I'm reading him refracted through the Kabbalists because that's the tradition which I was raised in there's a deep need and desire for integration between that universe which fragments itself into this dual unity of potential and actual. And learning how to find those within ourselves and to understand them and to bring them into a generative, desirous, balanced, harmonious relationship. In some way, you could read M. Ghabarol as a cosmic couples therapist. and he's trying to therapize, he's trying to heal the coupling between potential and action, between form and matter, between Hulé and Morphe itself within all of us and within the divine as well.

1:04:11And within the divine is the theological side, which may be betraying my Kabbalistic side. But I think that's precisely the work that you're engaging in here, John.

1:04:22Dr. John Vervaeke:Well, thank you. That is what I'm trying to do.

1:04:30Dr. John Vervaeke:I think the next point I make follows from these, but I may have to sort of do a little bit of filling in. Because as I keep trying to emphasize, right, with self-organizing things, autopoetic things, even with information itself, technical information theory, what is information? It's the ruling out of alternatives. What's an alternative? It's a possibility. What's ruling out? It's an action. Information is this inherently relational thing in which action and potentiality are deeply interwoven and interdefining at the very ground of the idea of that which makes it possible to make sense of reality.

1:05:12Dr. John Vervaeke:um and so i i'm gonna just keep hammering on that and and what i what i like about him is him doing it so beautifully um i'm doing it rather clumsily in comparison to him but what he's doing is he's getting us to challenge the fact that we wanted to cotimize this it seems natural to like and i'm not trying to be harsh on us but even the way we're doing it like we've got dichotomies and we're trying to get us out. And I think he's trying to do something greater, which is, no, no, no. Try to realize that the non-dichotomous is actually the way it is. And our impulse, I don't know what to call it, our cognitive impulse to dichotomize is what's getting in the way.

1:06:00Dr. John Vervaeke:Because I think that's very important. I can't go into it because taking off all the dichotomies that modernity has put us on, like the fact value, the subject object. I see him, which I've been trying to do and other people like William Desmond and others, I see him as a great ally in this because like I said, he's trying to get us to realize, no, no, if you pay really careful attention to mind and life and being, right, Right? It's not that dichotomy at all. Now that leads to the point I want to make, which is I see him, he's not going to say what I'm saying, but I'm seeing him as laying the ground for potentially saying this.

1:06:49Dr. John Vervaeke:Because I see Regina as laying the ground, but not wanting to say this, but sort of saying it. So as you know, there's a classic problem. It's a very classic problem. And it's where the metaphysics and the phenomenology or the cognition and the ontology start to get really blurred, which is what is the difference between the one which is unintelligible, right, and doesn't fit into any system and pure matter, which is unintelligible, non-categorical and doesn't fit into any system and is a no thing. and the one is a no thing. And quite rightly, I mean, and famously, Plotinus is like really wrestling with this.

1:07:35And the problem is you need in Plotinus for them to be radically opposite,

1:07:46Dr. John Vervaeke:but you can't seem to point to any phenomenological difference between them. anything in terms of thinkability or experienceability how we could experience it or think it that would distinguish the two of them from each other and this of course is a this is kind of the dark skeleton in the neoplatonic closet that's running through all a lot of neoplaton you see iambulchus trying to wrestle with it um and other people but i wonder if and again i'm not claiming he's saying this any more than I think Eregino is saying this, but is he actually saying, because John Verveke would say, there's ultimately, there's a, between the one, the ultimacy of the one and the primordiality of the Tao, there is actually the real one, God, if you want to put it that way.

1:08:37Dr. John Vervaeke:And if you start doing what we're talking about here, is there now any deep difference between the one and like uh i don't know what to call it the the elemental grounding principle or that from which the hulae that can be understood emerges like is there a difference um so that's that's very that i i remember i've emphasized he's not saying that i'm being provocative now i'm being provocative now yeah between between that and the al-unsar al-awal we can we can use his arabic although we're probably both mispronouncing because neither of us speak arabic that's right um you know it's interesting i i like you i'm a seeker of unity and uh and i'm and i'm i'm i'm i'm wanting to i have a large personal and philosophical impulse to demolish the dichotomies and to find how there's a fundamental unity to being.

1:09:53I think it's important to make a distinction between what we're wanting to read in Ibn Gabrile and what Ibn Gabrile himself might be saying and might be able to say and want to say.

1:10:02Dr. John Vervaeke:And I did emphasize that. Yeah, totally. As you correctly said, I remember having a conversation with a professor of Neoplatonism living in Israel, Shalom Tzaddik, who's written on these Jewish Neoplatonists, some magnificent works, and he was adamant that for all the Jewish Neoplatonists, even the most mystical and the most unitive, there's always a gap, there's always a distance between the one, as such, between God and anything, even the Al-Unsar al-Al, and for him, the New Platonists are very adamant about that, and I think that's true. The way that I've seen people like Sarah Pesson write about this, which for me is helpful.

1:10:48Also, I think in my desire to conflate something like Al-Unsar al-Al with the one is also me being stuck in a dualistic way of thinking where they're either two different things or they're united and as someone who wants unity I want to see them being united and for me I'm noticing that even that desire is a dualistic attempt and I think the way that Sarah Pess and others have helped me think is that the Al-Unsar Al-Awl is analogous to the unknown essence of God. The hiddenness. The hiddenness, exactly. The same way that God's hidden essence proceeds and grounds the activity of God in things like shining, like desire, like later wisdom and the word, which itself is analogous, so too does the prime Hulé preempt and allowed the potentiality of manifestation of being to come into being so that it can become more and more informed.

1:12:06And I think of thinking of them as analogous to one another allows me to maintain something which I've gravitated more and more to, which is that in the apophasis of the Neoplatonists, the divine is a mystery, right? And certainly for us as well, the al-unsar al-al is mysterious as well. But there's an ultimate mystery, which is synonymous with the divine. And all we can do is analogize to it. We cannot give it any... propositions or any characteristics or any characters we cannot ascribe to it, any of those things which we can and will ascribe to things that emerge from it. And even to say that things emerge from it is ready to say too much.

1:13:02And I'm more comfortable these days with allowing the divine to remain a mystery and allowing us to reach into that mystery by way of analogy, but not by way of identification or of labeling. And I think the work that he does with things like the word, the language that speaks forth from that is further deepening into that analogy where the same way that in verbal speech, we have voice itself, which is this potentiality for anything to be spoken. We have actual sounds, which is the forms of things, the shape that it takes. And then we have the meaning of the word, which is kind of the universal form of something which is now intelligible.

1:13:43We have the logos imparted in that. I think the very way that Ibn McGovern is using language as a metaphor, so he's saying that language itself is a metaphor for this thing, which is reality. So do not take my words as reality, take them as metaphors. And I think his work of being a poet and philosopher, the poet is the one who, through his poesis, is creating these imaginal worlds. and he's doing these magnificent huge reconstructions of of all of judaism in his in his magnificent epic poems and i think that philosophically he's asking us to see himself as as leaning into a a play of language which is analogizing as opposed to identifying i think

1:14:25Dr. John Vervaeke:that's right um uh and i like you you went to a point that i wanted to make which is you know when you're doing when you're trying to understand these two aspects of being the phenomenon the shining forth of intelligibility and the mysterious that which withdraws perpetually and and and their the horizon between them which gives us a sense of inexhaustibility the fountain and and so for me that that uh you know

1:14:59Dr. John Vervaeke:So Whitehead talks about, you know, that God isn't just the supreme actor. God is also the supreme sufferer. God can receive better than anything else, as well as act better than anything else. And I'm not saying that Gaboral is saying that, but I'm saying it's adjacent to what he's saying, as perhaps that. And for me, that seems to be a more, granted, everything you said about this language being, I like Desmond's term, hyperbolic thrown above. It's hyperbolic language. This hyperbolic language, and bring it back in a non-pejorative sense. It's all hyperbolic, but that doesn't mean it's just mere hyperbole.

1:15:49Dr. John Vervaeke:Um, but given that, that hyperbole resonates more with the phenomenology of both my everyday experience and my most ecstatic experience. Um, and well, that's what I find so powerful in him. He's giving a language that resonates with that while also undermining the disastrous dichotomies of modernity while also undermining the two worlds mythology that in some sense was burst by the axial revolutions and all the problems associated with that. And I think that's just tremendously powerful. Now that leaves us with a couple things we still have to talk about. And so I'm going to forestall them till our next two, which is one you brought up and you wanted to address and I want to give it priority, which is, we've talked quite a bit about the Greek and Neoplatonic and quite a bit about the Arabic, but you're issuing one that I wanted you to bring to the table, which is, yeah, but how can we see his Judaism and his being Jewish, like showing up in his philosophy and his poetry.

1:17:04Dr. John Vervaeke:And then the second one is a topic that I think you just did some beautiful setting up for and what you just said, which is the relationship between philosophy and poetry. Because he's enacting a deep interpenetration of the two that, of course, is very similar in some ways to Heidegger. And I think that's very interesting. So those are the two themes I would like to continue to explore with you. In what way should we see him as, or should we see him, or is this the right framing, as a Jewish philosopher? What does that mean? Above and beyond him being clearly Neoplatonic, clearly being influenced by the Andalusian, you know, Islamic matrix that he's growing up in.

1:17:57Dr. John Vervaeke:But, and is there something more? Because you've probably read more or seen more of her than I have, but I don't see the Jewish element playing a big part in what I've read so far. and I'm worried that there's a lacuna there. So that's how I'll leave that. And then the other one is this poetry and philosophy because this has become increased and I would like to bring in a third P that I think is also running around implicit and it gets mentioned a couple places, which is prophecy, not as horizontal telling of the future, but as trying to, I'll use some of the technical language from statistics, trying to get the large world, right?

1:18:40Dr. John Vervaeke:which is full of surprises, into our small world, which is full of consistencies. And prophecy is often the smashing down of that, to try and remind us in a profound way of how reality always exceeds our attempts to grasp it. And I think poetry and prophecy are doing this, and philosophy is trying to mediate between. I'm proposing to you that philosophy is mediating between poetry as poesis and prophecy not as horizontal foretelling, but as vertical like ingression, to use a Whiteheadian term, of a higher level impressing itself in, making a difference to a lower level and waking people up to that as they need to be woken up.

1:19:35Dr. John Vervaeke:So those are the two topics I propose we address, but I want to give you the last word on this, our current discussion. First, I want to thank you. This has been really rich and exciting. I want to thank you in particular because I often, not so much these days, especially after the philosophical Silk Road, but there's often a bit of loneliness and your enthusiasm with how you took Ibn Gabriol up. And I could tell that he's really lighting things up for you too. I wanted to thank you for sharing that. And also for the many kind words you said about my work. I just wanted to take this moment to reciprocate.

1:20:15Dr. John Vervaeke:And you know how much high regard I have for the work you're doing. And very much the way you're trying to make this a living tradition for people. And not just historical curiosity. So my thanks. Yes. and what any any remember we're not done the series but any parting words for this episode that yeah totally sure well firstly your reciprocation of that gratitude it's um the you're making the journey of the alone to the alone less lonely excellent excellent oh wow that's like a tombstone line that's great so so the the appreciation and friendship um is is mutual um and and thank you for that uh genuinely i um yeah there's there's a lot of directions the the direction of of prophecy is actually a very rich one in the jewish and the louisian tradition specifically in reconceptualizing prophecy as as getting into contact with the the agent and active intellects um and so there's what to that's a theme which brings things together beautifully.

1:21:24I want to maybe end, I mean, there's so much to say. I want to end with, maybe appropriately, with, you know, you began by saying some of his dates, perhaps when he was born, and it's about less clear when he died. There's some legends also about how he died, right? Yes. And there's two kind of prime legends that circulate, and the fact that they're legends almost make them more apt for exploration. and I wanted to just end with a thought on one of them. So the one legend is that he was trampled to death by a horseman, which is a terrible way to go. The other legend is that he was put to death, he was killed by a rival poet who was jealous of his poetic capacities.

1:22:08And I mean, death and assassination, he loses one of his great patrons to a political assassination, so it's not unheard of. And the legend is that after he's assassinated by this competing poet, we imagine poets to be kind of docile. Oh, yeah. And here we have poets murdering each other. To dispose of Ipagabril's body, his holy combination of form and matter in his person, he buries him under a fig tree is the legend. And then in the next, in the preceding weeks, the tree begins to blossom in tremendous ways with fruit that were more fragrant and more sweet than they ever had been in the past.

1:22:49And people were curious about what was going on. And in the process of their curiosity, they exhume the body and they find that he was killed and they find the murderer and he's brought to justice. And so it's a very kind of this very rich, you know, but I'm not interested in that. as a historical sort of cause of death kind of exploration. But I am interested in what that means poetically for us, metaphorically, in that in Ibn Gabbal's death and occultation, he was being lost to the Jewish tradition for hundreds of years. He's been buried somewhere. He's been lost. Oh, yes. But there is the potential for something sweet and beautiful and fruitful.

1:23:33Oh, beautiful, Seve. And I think that... Oh, yes. I think that the kind of work that we're doing here and many people that are engaging with his thought is precisely that of taking the energy that he put into the earth and bringing forth something beautiful from it that will continue to give forth fruit and seeds, hopefully for many generations to come.

1:23:54Dr. John Vervaeke:That's fantastic. That's fantastic. Thank you so much, my friend. And we will be talking again soon. Looking forward to it. Me too.

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