Is Matter Alive? The Metaphysics of Divine Desire

31:59And it, and it, I'm not trying to say it's cleanly, you know, that the prose is a philosophy through Greek categories and the poetry is philosophy through Hebrew categories, but I was sensing a difference there. And I'm wondering if you feel that that at least has some plausibility to it. Dr. Justin Marchegiani Precisely, precisely. I think that when it comes to his philosophy, um, like his, um. Fons Vitae, it's known by a Latin term. The original Arabic and Hebrew, the Semitic, we're aware of them, but it's lost to the history of philosophy in some sense. Even the identity of the author, right?

32:44We don't know that he's a Jew until 1846, right? And that's very intentional because he's not citing earlier Jewish sources. So he's not coming across as, he's not doing the cultivation of wisdom through Jewish categories. And I would say, yes, that in his philosophical work, he, and this is kind of the cliffhanger here. I don't think, yes, he's a Jewish philosopher, but he's not a Jewish philosopher using Jewish categories of cultivation of wisdom. He's a Jewish philosopher using Greek categories of cultivation of wisdom, which is why he's lost to Jewish history in many ways. The part of him which remains part of Jewish history is his poetry.

33:25poetry is is heavily jewish yes in a properly and when i say jewish here uh i don't i don't mean bagels and locks i mean jewish in a in a deep relationship to the history of jewish textuality and the ways that jews have historically read our texts and continue to do so um and in that sense and even then he's not cleanly jewish there's a lot of arabic philosophic poetic influence that he's dealing with, of course. But in his poetry, and those poachies make their way into literature. We just commemorated just yesterday, Jewish High Holidays, and his poetry makes it into the liturgies of many synagogues around the world.

34:10And so in that sense, I think there is a distinction between his poetic and his philosophical, which in some ways maps onto the great, near later contemporary of his Maimonides, who also has a distinction between his great philosophical work of the Guide to the Perplexed, which is not Jewish in a hermeneutical sense, I would say, versus something like his major halachic work, which is an equal magnum opus in Jewish literature, maybe even more within Jewish communities, which is thoroughly Jewish in what he's doing and in the way that he's doing it. So I think that we see a thinker like Edmund Gabbard, who is a Jew thinking and writing Jewishly in one area and thinking and writing Greekly in another area.

34:59To complicate that a little, I think there is bleed between them. And a question that I wanted to lead up to and maybe pose to you is to think about what is Jewish then about his philosophy? Right. Well, so what was coming to mind as we were doing this and as I was listening to you was Catherine Pickstock's work on liturgy and philosophy and how philosophy in the West has lost its connection to liturgy. You see very similar arguments in the Eastern Orthodox tradition by Yanaris and Zuzilas, Zuzilas, I can't, I don't know how he pronounces his name, about, you know, the ecclesiastical liturgical setting.

35:52And only in that setting can you understand, you know, the cognition that is going on there, which as a 4e cog scientist, I take very, very seriously. And again, somebody who takes ritual ways of knowing as distinct and non-reducible to propositional ways of knowing very seriously. So I often use very broadly the term liturgy or theurgia to try and cover all of that. And then, of course, now I'm invoking, again, the relationship between philosophical discourse and theurgia in people like Iamblichus and Proclus, where you also see these two things at work. Uh, and, um, and I think there is something, uh, I think there, there is something, there's a long argument here, but, uh, I'm getting progressively, there's something personal.

36:47Now I don't mean an individual substance by the word personal. Um, the, the best quick snapshot is Huber's I thou, right? Uh, there's something personal there. You have to be in the I thou framing, that personal framing for liturgy to work, and therefore your heritage and your faith, meaning what is calling you from your depths to your heights, or to the heights, if you want to put it that way. What is calling from the, you know, another one of my favorite Psalms is deep calling to deep, right? That that is inherently, inextricably bound up with where you are orienting from, which I think for most people, even secular people, is deeply religious in nature.

37:37It is how we are religio, how we are bound. And so, while I might say that there, as a scientist, there are universal processes at work so that we can compare and dialogue between these, I think there's going to be something personal and in that sense, historically and culturally specific to the liturgical or theurgic aspect of this. But I definitely still think, and that's what I'm trying to say, that it is a profound way of, and in fact, this is where I really agree with her. This is a deeply profound way of cultivating wisdom. And in her part, you know, she makes reference to the fact that if you go back to Socrates, and this is Rafe Kelly's point, you know, the academy and the gymnasium and the, you know, the shrine, the glade are all together, right?

38:36The liturgical, the athletic, and the dialogical are like this. And so just as I think that Greek religious orientation bleeds into the philosophical discourse and we just take it for granted as the conceptual categories, I think even Gavarol's religious orientation is inextricable from the liturgical theurgic that is in a proper partnership. with reflective philosophical discourse? Sorry, another long answer, but these are really deep questions you're asking me. No, that's a wonderful meditation there. But what I'm hearing you saying, if I can rip you back, is that the interjection of something which is deeply personal and using that in a depth meaning of the term into one's thinking is what brings with it a degree of religiosity and liturgy and theology and poetry perhaps even.

39:49And in doing so, one is bringing the particularism of their own personhood and their own culture and their own people into their thinking. And when the Greeks are doing philosophy, although we have in the past understood them to be sort of armchair distant thinkers, we now have a much better conception where these are fundamentally religious people engaged in highly personal, deeply personal engagements with the nature of reality and thinking about it. And then when someone like Ibn Gabaral is doing that, he's also bringing himself into it. I think it's interesting. I think that as a Neoplatonist and as a philosophical Neoplatonist in the, let's say, in the Hadawian sense, where this is deeply practiced, deeply experienced, deeply participated, and not just theorized in a thin meaning, modern meaning of that word.

40:56that he is engaging with the fullness there. And to me, the question that's kind of coming up is, is that fullness of engagement for someone like Ibn Gabriol, and when we read his words and try to intuit what is going on, is it a fullness of his humanity, of that that he is human that he's bringing into the text? or is it also that he is a Jew that he's bringing into the text, into his philosophical text? Because I have no doubt that he's engaging with it deeply and fully as a human. But the question is, is he also by doing so engaging with it deeply as a Jew as he is clearly in his poetry? Yes.

41:41So let's, sorry, I'm limited to largely Western terms. I think the people that are trying to do that, we had a historical example, right? Existentialism, in which the personal and the fully human is supposed to play a pivotal role in how one does one's philosophical reflection and generates one's philosophical arguments. You get Heidegger and you get it, I'm thinking people like Gabriel Marcel and people like that. And so is that all that's going on? So to be anachronistic, and I explained that I am, but is it just the case that he's a Jewish guy, happens to be Jewish, And he's doing existential philosophy in which his liturgical practices are, you know, helping him to call forth his humanity.

42:34Or is there something about his Jewish relationship to other people and to God that is playing a pivotal role? And I think, well, I'm not saying he's not an existentialist. I think that would be a mistake. I mean, I can read him and resonate with him so much because of that existential overlap. But I do think also he has a relationship to the sacred, to the divine, that is inseparable from the imaginal orientation that allows him not just to think about it, but to participate in that. And I think that relationship to ultimacy that reverberates back into sort of the depths of our soul, our primordial presuppositions, I don't think that can be established philosophically, even existentially.

43:38I think it is that upon which philosophy, even the existential form of philosophy, has to be pronounced. And therefore, I would say there still is some aspect of his work that I would expect to be properly, ultimately, Jewish. Just like when I'm reading Dogen, in the end, the Buddhism matters, right? I mean, it's Zen, and you can put a lot. And can't you be a Zen Neoplatonist? Yes, possibly. But the Buddhism matters in Dogen in a deep way. And so that's what, I mean, I'm talking about, you know, something, we're starting to get into areas of faith here. And where I don't even use that word to mean believing things without evidence.

44:26I mean what calls us from our depths, what calls us towards what we experience as most real, that allows us to calibrate reality according to that, and that allows us to deepen our experiences of voluntary necessity, of reason, love, beauty, resonance. That's what I mean by faith. And I don't think that faith is ever abstract. It can't be by its very nature. So in addition to him being a great human being, I think there, I'm arguing that I would expect there to be, and I'm not trying to prejudge what I've seen, I would expect there to be nevertheless, there's a Jewish, there's an irremovable Jewish component, just like there's an irremovable Buddhist component from Dogen, right?

45:19Or there's an irremovable Islamic component from Rumi to some degree, or Suravardi. Suravardi is so Neoplatonic, but there's still the conception of God there. That's the wrong word. That's not the right word. The imaginal participation in God. Think of Ibn al-Arabi. All of these things, I think they're irremovable. I think they're irremovable. I think we should stop trying, I mean, this is part of the philosophical Silk Road, we should stop trying to deny people their religious home, but we should encourage them to cultivate a secure attachment in the psychological sense so they can enter into deep philia, deep dialogos with other traditions.

46:05And you're exemplifying that. You seem very securely, and I mean that in the positive psychological sense, securely attached to your Judaism as your home. And yet, like secure attachment in the romantic field, it actually empowers you to enter into deep friendships. You're exercising it right now with me, with people who aren't Jewish. And that's, to me, what I'm trying to advocate for. That, to me, is what, that's what calls to me in the philosophical Silk Road. Can we give up the project of trying to de-home people, help them be homed while still saying that doesn't preclude you? In fact, it empowers you to enter into deep philia with other people who are in other homes.

46:54100%, Sean. I'm in full agreement there. And that's kind of you to say that you see that reflected in my being and in my work. And I strive for that. I think that one of the, either the lies or the failures of modernity and a product downstream of the Enlightenment and of the Jewish Enlightenment movement that followed in relationship to the general European Enlightenment and modernity, which is the Haskellah movement, was this either lie or failed apprehension that the way to achieve some sort of universal brotherhood was by eradicating distinctions and that the Jew becomes a meaningful, accepted part of, let's say, German society by becoming a fully German person and to the absence of their Jewishness.

47:51and we have a very clear record historically of where that led to. It didn't make the Jews any more loved by the Germans. That did not work. And that does not work because we do not enter into meaningful relationships of philia and logos with another by abstracting and removing that which makes us from those conversations or else we are not showing up to that conversation. We precisely show up in the depth of our particularity, individuality, and from there, we learn to love each other in our distinctions and differences. I think that it's such an important question, both theoretically and practically, historically and contemporaneously, when it comes to someone like Ibn Gabirol.

48:33I think it's worth opening up that question wider. You're touching on the question of the possibility of a Zen Neoplatonist made me think of this category that we use very commonly, which is the Jewish Neoplatonists. And Ibn Gabriol is a shining, you know, prime example of that, along with people like Isaac Israeli. And I would include someone like a middle Platonist, the Jewish middle Platonist, Philo of Alexandria, who is so right to be in comparison with someone like Ibn Gabriol, where the question of, So what is it that they are doing Jewish in their Greek orientation to the cultivation, in their religious Grecan orientation to the cultivation of wisdom as Jews, right?

49:19So Philo, his Hebrew name is Yedidya, beloved of God, which is maybe where it gets translated into something like Philo. But so what is someone like Yedidja Hakoyin of Alexander or someone like Ibn Gabri doing in their particularity, in their individuality that is making them, that is bringing that depth of their particularity, of their instantiation in their own cultures into this broader human global project? And I think the direction that I would venture to suggest, and this is why I made sure that we mentioned this at the very beginning, is in the emphasis on this concept of alirada, of divine desire, let's call it.

50:07This erotic will which motivates all of reality into being. I think that if we are to investigate his great philosophical innovations, of which we, following many other scholars, have reduced maybe slightly unfairly down to two, which is his notion of divine desire and matter.

50:32what he does with matter suddenly has ripples in Jewish history and goes on to shape the Kabbalistic world and the Hasidic world, which makes this question a challenging one. Because when we ask, so what if his ideas are Jewish? We look downstream from him at Jewish ideas and then look back at him and be like, oh, those are... And the reason that those are Jewish ideas is because of Ibn Gabriel. So Kabbalistic notions of an overflowing infinity, which then returns back to itself in the apropathic. These ideas, we think of course, these are core concepts of Jewish philosophical mysticism, thanks to Ben Gavriel.

51:06Yeah, yeah, exactly. So it's a challenging work. We need to step action to Jewish thought upstream from him to ask this question properly. And I think that the notion of divine agency, divine desire, terms which become also very, very important in the Kabbalistic movement, directly following him of Ratzon and Tainug, of divine will, divine pleasure, which are rooted in the Kabbalistic hypostasis of Kessar, of the superconscious within the divine Godhead, to use some academic terminology there. I think there's something deeply Jewish there. And I think that scholars have generally pointed out that there's a desire amongst the Jewish Platonists, and I'm using that term to include the middle and Neoplatonists, to reconcile the Hebrew Bible, the Tanakh, with the Greek thinkers, with Plato and Aristotle.

52:03And that's one frame to understand people like Philo and people like Ibn Gabbro. And one of the important things to do in that context is to return agency to a God who, in the first verses of Genesis, seemingly voluntarily creates the world ex Nilo. And the Neocladonists do not have as much of a, to speak broadly, as much as a volunteeristic notion of a divine agent who creates ex Nilo. And that's been sort of a, if you ask a general historian of philosophy, what is it that makes these ideas Jewish? They'll point to that notion of divine agency, which the historian will tell you is their attempt to reconcile Genesis, which is a Jewish document later inherited by much of the world, but originally Jewish document with the Greek philosophical tradition.

52:54I want to push that note. And I see there's a lot of truth to that. And I've repeated that to students in 101 Jewish philosophy classes. I want to push that a step further here based on your prompting, which is...

53:14How did I want to articulate this?

53:21There's a distinction made between the philosophy of Spinoza, who we both love, and the philosophy or the thought of the Bassemtav, the founder of the Sivic movement, who I consider myself a spiritual student and disciple of. where, and this is a distinction which is made by Madem Buber, the great Jewish philosopher, who was influenced by both Spinoza and the Balshamtov and sits downstream fruitfully in both of them. And he says that Spinoza has a God to which one cannot pray. One cannot enter into a deep relationship of intimacy with Spinoza's divine. The Balshamtov's God is a God that one can pray to a god that one can love and be loved by in return um and and and i don't want to strawman spinoza spinoza has a complex notion of of divine love which is self-divine love and human love but um to create a slight caricature for purposes of of illustration um the balshamtev who's a near contemporary of spinoza and whose metaphysics are in many ways parallel to spinoza has has an agency and I'm trying to move away from agency, right?

54:37Voluntas in a Latin and Greek sense. I'm trying to move to the sense that there is a person with whom one can be in love and be in deep existential spiritual relationship with. And God is not a what, but a who. And I think that what someone like Ibn Gabriel is getting to in his deep interrelationship with the notion of desire in the divine, and also the notion of matter where the matter of his being is sloced in that ocean of the divine matter, the throne of God. I think that might be where I may push that academic historical account of the Jewishness of people like Ibn Gabriela a step further.

55:17That's excellent. That's very powerful. It reminds me of the way Yunaris is making use of Heidegger's critique of the God of philosophers is not one that you would pray to or dance a ritual around or anything like that. And then Yoniaris is deeply critical of any merely anthropomorphic or individualized substance. Zizoulias calls it individualized and individualizing substance, and these are very pejorative notions. But I think that's right. Sorry, I keep qualifying this because we have been trained since the Enlightenment to think of hypostasis and person as an individualized anthropomorphic substance, and that is deeply not appropriate for what we're trying to talk about here.

56:12In fact, one of the things that's going on, I think, when we confront somebody like Ibn Gabaral is we're on this tonos, this creative tension between the impersonal and the impersonal, because both are leaving something out. The impersonal protects God from being anthropomorphic, from being a thing, from being just the biggest thing in the system of things, Heidegger's critique, but it also leaves out this way in which we feel that ultimacy faces us and calls us and that our voluntary necessity, our love and our reason bind us so that we participate. And that seems like the kind of relationships we have with persons and not with abstract principles.

56:58And so, you know, there's that. And I find that tonos is reverberating also powerfully with the one and the many, the perennial problem that they're all facing. How is God one and the ultimate ground of being, and yet being is clearly many? And I find that those two are deeply interwoven, and I think he's doing something very, very powerful about that, that I think could be very helpful to people who are perhaps not from a Jewish tradition, but would also help them to recognize that there's an aspect of that. I want to be really careful here, and so I'm asking for your friendship here. But just like there's an aspect of a person that we can't finally get our concepts on, There's an aspect of his Jewishness that somebody who's not belonging to that community can't get their hands on and has to be properly respected if you think that the shareable philosophical arguments point to the centrality of this personal relation.

58:17I tried to say that as balanced as I possibly could. I hope that landed well for you. Yeah, no, you're always, John, filled with care and sensitivity, right? And that's not why my brow is far. I'm trying to think through your argument here and deepen my thinking along with it. The question that's coming up to me is, does the particularity of the other, which we are here celebrating and highlighting as paradoxically essential to a universal human project of the cultivation of wisdom and a love of wisdom. Does the particularistic aspect of that preclude or definitionally preclude access from someone who does not belong to that particularistic identity, who is other in that.

59:24Is that necessarily the case? No, I did speak of a very... That's a great... I want to be clear that I'm talking about a very limited kind of restriction on access. I'm not saying that there isn't a lot that can't be shared. I just want... No, go ahead. I just want to make clear. But that's what I'm trying to point that there's... I think there's an ear removal, just like, I don't know if you, I can't remember, do you have a romantic partner? Are you single right now? I can't remember where you're at right now. I'm not supposed to ask that question. I was just going to say, whoever you're in relationship, I am bound to life for Sarah.

1:00:01And there's a lot that, let's say you were in a relationship, you and I could share and we could be, we could help each other. We could bring wisdom to each other. We could be deep friends, but there's something about my relationship to Sarah you cannot get access to because of the nature of the relationship I have with her. That's what I'm, so I'm not trying to say that it's an absolute unknowability to you, but there could be deep friendship between you and I as we compare and dialogue about our respective relationships. We could deepen each other's relationships. We could move each other into greater wisdom in our loving of our partners.

1:00:40But that doesn't mean that you could have full access to what I have with Sarah or what you have with your beloved. That's the analogy I'm trying to use. No, that's very rich. And I want to move along those lines with you. There's a beautiful expression from a teacher of mine who's now passed, Zalman Shaktur Shalomi, Rabbi Zalman, as he's known affectionately, and he is a great trailblazer in the type of contemporary Jewish perennialism that I'm embarked on. He referred to this as spiritual voyeurism, that by watching the devotional piety of other practitioners that were not of his own people, that were not Jews, he was moved to greater levels of intimacy in his relationship with God.

1:01:32Spiritual voyeurism is the term that he used. There's a similar and maybe controversial term in the New Testament that Paul uses that part of the mission of the ministry of Jesus, which is to Jewish community, which Paul then brings to a wider audience. So Paul's understanding of what Jesus was doing for the Jews, which he now has to wrap his head around theologically as he expands the project of Jesus is to provoke the Jew to jealousy, which is a term that's being read in many different ways, sometimes disastrously, but on a very generous reading, it is that through seeing the deep philia of another religious practitioner, we can be moved to greater levels.

1:02:13And we have a concept in Judaism of kinatzafrin, of the jealousy of scribes that move us to greater wisdom in that sense. And jealousy, it's a poor translation. So if that term is objectable, then let it be objectable. I don't have a better term for what kina is in that sense.

1:02:38But yeah, so in that sense, I'm in deep agreement with you that there is something that we do on a philosophical silk road of wisdom that we come to be moved to greater degrees of wisdom and love through being touched and inspired by the other. And I think you're saying something very profound there, John, which is that while we are moved by the relationship of the other, that is not our relationship. That's right. That's right. Right. That is not our relationship. And this brings us to an interesting paradox, which is worth fleshing out and thinking about out loud, which is that as conceptualized, certainly within Jewish mysticism, the relationship that the Jew has to God is a profoundly unique relationship, which is not the same relationship that the Christian, the Muslim, the Buddhist, the Hindu has to God.

1:03:38But Judaism, including Jewish mysticism, even in its most isolated and at times historically xenophobic articulations, does not deny the non-Jew of a profound relationship with the divine. But it is not the same relationship that the Jew has with the divine. I'm trying to explain this as a Gentile to other people who view the Jewish claim because of the fraught times we're in as somehow an arrogant claim. And I was trying to say, no, no, it's not arrogant. I was trying to use these kinds of metaphors to explain it. So I'm just praising you for bringing this up. I think this is a very pertinent issue.

1:04:15And I'm glad that somebody with your care and nuance can be speaking to it. Yeah. So let's really get into it. Let's unpack this. I think that the paradox here is that the claim that these traditions are making, and they're not making these claims for anyone else. They're saying these internally in their own language, in their own terms, is that is that there are multiple and perhaps infinite ways to relate to that which is all of being. And the way in which that relationship happens is unique for one people and another people. The paradox here, though, is that the same philosophical mystic will tell you that that...

1:05:05I don't know what the term, that the divine, the sacred, that thing to which and with which we are relating is actually not different than that thing which the Christian, the Muslim, the Eastern. But this is what I meant. This is what I meant, how what we're doing is we're instantiating a emotionally in the sense of affective and cognitively pregnant version of the problem of the one and the many. It's not just an abstract problem. When we're on the philosophical Silk Road, we're not just confronting it like in metaphysics and ontology, we're confronting it because that's exactly it. Somehow there's this paradox.

1:05:46They are one, but many. And like I say, for me, that is bound up with this other one we're talking about, which is the tonus between the personal and the impersonal. That's why I'm increasingly seeing these two as inseparably bound together. And we have to, I'm proposing that we should properly recognize that. Yes. Yeah. And I think laying that paradox onto these broader paradoxes of the one of the many, of the personal and the impersonal divine is appropriate. I don't know if it solves the paradox by saying, oh, the thing to which we relate is the personal, the thing to which everyone else can, which we are all collectively relating is the impersonal.

1:06:26I think that might be too simplistic of a way out of the paradox. And I don't know if the goal is to extricate ourselves from the paradox either. And I think the philosophical mystics want to stay in that tension. I'll just finish with this one last thought here. My knowledge might be lacking, but there's only one major philosophical mystic that I can think of, at least within the Abrahamic context, who explicitly moves beyond his own particularity. And that's Rumi, who has at many points controversial statements where he says, at this point of relationship with the beloved, I am no longer Muslim.

1:07:08I am no longer a Christian. I am no longer a Jew. And I know that scholars continue to sort of question how those texts are to be understood and contextualized and translated. But that's an anomaly amongst philosophical mysticism with philosophers who have all of his metaphysic and maybe even more, but don't say that same statement, which is fascinating. I think that's right. My proposal about bringing these paradoxes into alignment was not to say that that's going to bring about some resolution. It was to encourage people to sort of stereoscopically look at both. Right. To first of all, once you see a really pertinent and pressing existentially pertinent and pressing problem of the one and the many that we're talking about here of people like each of us.

1:08:02Right. We belong personally to one of the many, but somehow they're all one. Then that might make you a little bit more receptive to the more abstract version of the problem of the one in the many and why people are wrestling with it. Because it's not just an abstract thing. It has to do with something deep about how we encounter reality and specifically how we encounter the reality of other persons who come from other homes. um and but i think the reverse is also the case the possibility of saying well maybe those what look like arcane philosophical reflections in plotinus could actually give us some way of improving how we try to cultivate friendship across people's religious home and bring about genuine uh dialogos and genuine philia but that yeah i was not i was not proposing any that mapping would bring about some kind of resolution.

1:08:59In fact, I was trying to do the opposite. I was trying to sort of promote this reciprocal stereoscopic vision that would happen. That's what's happening for me, and I'm sharing it. When I'm trying to reflect on the philosophical Silk Road, it's like, because what I tried to do, and I bumped up against what we're talking about here. And I confronted it with a lot of honesty, I hope, which is I committed myself to being very vulnerable and really learning something new so I could love this person and their tradition in a way that I had not yet before. And that opens you up to this problem, like how far, How far can you go on that, which I think is a noble goal, without eradicating the very thing that makes talking deeply to this other person so rich and vibrant?

1:09:57So that's why I'm bringing it up. Yeah, no, I'm in full appreciation of that. And I think that's right to say. I think that understanding how these questions, which are the perennial questions that accompany the philosophical mystics on their own journeys through life, are questions that are real and existential and deep in many ways. And I think this is one great example. I love that last thing that you just said, that in the process of your own embarking on a philosophical Silk Road, something that you've been engaged with, with your body physically, geographically, something that I've been engaged with in heart and mind, that the precisely the endeavor to drink the wisdom, to taste the wisdom of the other is curtailed by the, if we believed that we could fully uh fully taste and fully apprehend the the flavor of the relationship of the other with the ultimate then there would be that would actually undermine the process of engaging with the other because that would that would effectively eradicate the otherness of the other right um exactly and and then they have no way to afford your self-transcendence They would only be a mirror to your self-reliance.

1:11:26That's all they would be. Correct. Correct. Yeah. It would be a philosophical, sorry, it would be a solipsistic silk road, not a philosophical silk road. And there's something very profound about that articulation, that as we dance with people who come from homes other than ours, how do we create the care and respect to allow them to remain other and to allow them to remain beyond our understanding while we allow them to deeply impregnate and inspire our own understandings? Well, I mean, again, not a resolution, but an affordance is to try and build, you know, a language, a vocabulary, a grammar that's drawn from the liturgical, the theurgic, as well as the philosophical, reflective, that is shareable, that does not trespass upon the personal vocabulary, if you allow me to extend that metaphor into the non-propositional, right?

1:12:36That's what I see the project as being. and you know and we're doing it here you and i are doing it we're we're trying to how can we how can like notice we're you know we're reaching into analogy and metaphor we're bouncing between philosophers and bouncing between philosophy and religion as we try to find you know shareable language that does not trespass on our home but allows us to move comfortably in the philosophical i don't mean existential sense it should disrupt us but it allows us to move smoothly i suppose This is what I want to say. Without hostility. That's what I'm trying to say. Move without, you know, prejudicial hostility into the commons.

1:13:15It's an attempt to recover the commons in a deep way that, you know, is essential to a community of different homes. And so that's how I answered your question. That is not the same thing as a Hegelian project of here's the system that will fold all the differences into an ultimate totalitarian identity. I do not think that is possible and I am deeply suspicious and I advocate strongly against anybody who proposes something like that because that has been disastrous historically as well as just being philosophically profoundly flawed. So that's how I answer. It's like you take up the task of creating new language.

1:14:02And that's going to be my segue to our third episode, which is the relationship between, that's exemplified in Ibn Gabriel, between philosophy and poiesis, where I'm going to go back and almost in a Heideggerian fashion, poiesis says the making, the creating of new terms, a new grammar, new ways, and prophecy, not in the prediction, but in the reception of something from a greater, a sense of a greater reality that brings new language for us. So the two ways in which Logos transcends itself in poetry and in prophecy, and how that interacts with philosophy, and how we can maybe use Ibn Gaberal as a reference point for our third discussion.

1:14:54How does that sound to you? That sounds delicious, John. I'm looking forward to it. And I just want to second what you said there. And I think that our conversation here is exemplary and performative in a positive sense of that, where we are reaching into his language and we're struggling with trying to hold on to his Hebrew and Arabic terms and trying to still have conversation because you don't speak Hebrew, I don't speak Arabic. And trying to, that process itself that we're doing of finding common language. I always thought about my own project as well as creating a universal language of philosophical mysticism that does not replace or eradicate the particularity of language, but provides a common language, as you were saying, that allows us to see that in our commonality, we actually share a deep divine identity that Epigabra adjusts us towards.

1:15:48Yeah, and thank you for that, because we do have historical precedents, analogs. You have Sanskrit. You have Akkadian, of all things, in the Mesopotamian world. You have Latin. You have Greek. You have examples of transnational, the transnational, transcultural languages that were used in order to afford the kind of thing we're talking about. So I think this is also a perennial pattern that human beings have engaged in. And it's been just wonderful to do it with you as always. And as always, I'm going to give you the last word on our conversation for today. Very generous, John. Yeah, the example which comes to mind, although, has always been the example of the language created, invented by the...

1:16:46Polish Jewish ophthalmologist Ludwig Zamenhof, which is Esperanto. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. And with greater or less degrees of success, the motivation behind him creating the language was because of the amount of devastation and violence he saw in his own lifetime. And he's understanding that we as humans need to be able to communicate with one another. And he devotes his life to try and create a project of peace that would afford communication without eradicating. And his notion was not that we all stop speaking French, Italian, Hebrew, Arabic, Spanish, and speak instead Esperanto, but that in addition to our individuality, we learn a common language.

1:17:26And I think that so exemplifies the work that you've been doing here, John. I like that. I might adopt that. I like the idea of a philosophical Esperanto that is a way to speak of the philosophical Silk Road. That's actually really, I love that. And, you know, and thank you for reminding about that and reminding me of, you know, the motivation and the goal of Esperanto. It wasn't just some sort of hobby. That's really interesting. Thank you so much, my friend. You're very welcome. Well, we're going to talk again. Take care. Thank you for your friendship and thank you for bringing me on this journey together.

1:18:04Thank you so much.

1:18:11Thank you.