Is Reality Incomplete? Desmond and Vervaeke on Meaning and Being

32:56Guy Sengstock:So there, that was my quick...

33:27William Desmond:Yes, yes.

33:56William Desmond:what it means to be scientific. The mathematicization on the one hand gets rid of final causes and with the excision of final causes the sense of inherent value in the process of becoming simply vanishes from the picture and in order to, so that we can't live without some sense of purpose, some sense of worth, we ourselves seem to step into the breach and become the protectors of value. We become the originals of value in a valueless totality. And there's a certain sense in which for so many thinkers in modernity, their sense of relevance has been shaped by mutations in our sense of being as a whole that do find local and regional expressions here or there in this science and that science, in our common sense and so on.

34:52William Desmond:But philosophically, the kind of self-knowledge that kind of turns back on the originating sources out of which particular relevances emerge, that is not always a project that is undertaken. I think it's coming more to the foreknow in what we call post-modernity, that there are certain basic orientations and presuppositions that work in the modern world picture, that we've lived within them and we, in a certain sense, have taken them for granted as presuppositions of everything that we do. But in a certain sense, they are kind of suppositions about relevance in the first instance. Yes. You know, we might treat them as absolute presuppositions to use a phrase that Collingwood used back in the 1930s.

35:42William Desmond:But in fact, there are particular ways of looking at the world, but out of play, other different senses of relevance. Like, for instance, you mentioned fitting, fittingness. fittingness is of course a very loaded word aesthetic and ethical but also metaphysical that there's a kind of fittingness between the human mind and the intelligibility of things as they show themselves to us and that sense of a deep underlying fittingness as well as an orientation towards some final fittingness that's really taken out of the certainly the modern world picture into the 20th century. As a value of sternness, we create hypothetical theories.

36:36William Desmond:Theories are only hypotheses that we look for evidences in order to verify them or not. I think this could be a topic of discussion. the ancient sense of theoria

36:51Guy Sengstock:in the days of others

36:53William Desmond:has a kind of beholding character to it there's a receptivity the being as it shows itself there's a contemplative dimension to it it's not like a modern sense of a theory as a kind of projected possible understanding which we might then verify which evidence is we become the pilot in the cockpit so to say in the modern world picture, whereas I think in the older notion of theoria, we're already in receipt of something before we act in the world. And particular relevances come out of a kind of really primal openness in the human being to being as other, which is, I don't know if you want to call it relevance with a big R.

37:46William Desmond:because...

37:47Guy Sengstock:That's fine.

37:49William Desmond:I mean, you're not quite putting it that way yourself, but we are with what is other to us in a way that allows us to come to a more intimate understanding of it and ourselves. The togetherness in the between, so to say, is presupposed. Yep. Particular patterns that we develop in the between. And again, if I'm not mistaken, You are breaking open patterns of being in the between, particularly as they find expression in cognitive enterprises, and discovering that they are betweenings, in fact. They're not shuttlings between different dualistic opposites. Even a shuttling is a betweening.

38:37Guy Sengstock:Yeah.

38:37William Desmond:It's the betweening that freezes the two sides, so to say, whereas in something like a participatory knowing, the betweening is a dynamism in the terms that move between, but there's also a dynamism to the very middle space, which sustains and enables there. if you know what I mean like shuttling you have sort of biller balls or whatever going between it's strangely enough even the kind of the contracted picture supposes something like betweening just as you're showing there are unstated relevances at work in forms of knowledge that claim neutral objectivity, which is not influenced supposedly by relevances that we bring to bear in the between itself.

39:35Guy Sengstock:I agree with that. And I like the line of argument. I'm working with a colleague of mine, Diane Schiappe. We're actually talking about taking, we're trying to integrate relevance realization to Stegmaier's notion of orientation. And as you said, you get to this fundamental kind of orientation that discloses this primordial kind of fittedness, belonging togetherness. And if you try to deny this, what you get, you know, in some sort of maybe an anomalism or a Kantianism, you end up in a kind of profound performative contradiction in which you, in order to stop or regress into some sort of solipsism or absolute skepticism, you just pause it somewhere where an actual connection or a real relation exists, but you don't really acknowledge it.

40:30Guy Sengstock:And I find that a good reason to suspect that move. And to suspect, as you said, the hermeneutics of suspicion recurs from Freud and Marx and everything is a projection. And it's like, well, that presupposes. First of all, it presupposes a between, it presupposes a fittedness. It presupposes there's something there that will receive the projection and not let it just dissipate into nothingness, reflect it back to you in some way that is then intelligible to you. Yeah, I totally agree that that move.

41:09William Desmond:Go ahead. You know, the notion of projection, it's amazing how that's a word that is almost taken for granted, all pervasiveness. Yes. We talk about our projects, you know, or we have our academic projects. If you go to cocktail parties, people say, what project are you working on? But it's beyond that, too. People talk about their hobbies as projects. They talk about even their children as projects. Life itself is a project. And it's never asked, actually. And again, this goes back, of course, to the theory of projection. I think probably you find in the philosophy of religion, Farback is a kind of projectionist.

41:51William Desmond:But I think there are actually seeds of it in Hegel and Kant. But nobody asks the question, how is projection itself at all possible? Even just taking it on the forms of projection, to be able to project means that you must be able to move in a middle space between now and what you want to do with it is to come. projection we just simply take it for granted that we have some power to project and that somehow there's some empty screen out there on which we project our gods or whatever but it's a kind of our basement picture of how we interact with things and we never I mean it's just taken for granted as a notion and hence we don't ask what makes it possible at all And of course, what makes it possible is something that isn't just a matter of projection.

42:46William Desmond:I mean, we have to be opened to what is beyond us first, to be able to project from ourselves towards that otherness. And this would be a kind of an opening to, again, rehabilitate a sense of between. It's not just a matter of projection. Projection is a possible betweening, but it's one that particularly stresses our power to shape. Right. What's the empty screen? But perhaps there are no empty screens. Maybe we already received something from that otherness that opens us. Maybe the game is much more complicated between us and what is other to us. Maybe the language of protection doesn't do justice to these modes of receptivity and contemplative participation in something greater than ourselves.

43:36William Desmond:There are so many questions that can be asked when one begins this. But again, as I said, just pay attention to how all pervasive the word political project, economic project, scientific project, children as our project, their wives as our project, you name it. You know, it's everywhere.

43:58Guy Sengstock:I actually talked about that in the series and then the book, Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, the projecting and the subjecting and the objecting. Right, and the transition too, of course. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The decking is a kind of a, it's a throwing.

44:17William Desmond:Yeah, exactly. Like a javelin, but it's, if you take the trans, you have closer, you know, subject is under the throwing, object is over against the throwing, inner subject, then there's a throwing there. but maybe there's something more than throwing or maybe we're thrown in a way that yeah yeah it's both it's not just that we're throwing ourselves beyond ourselves but we're you know I mean Heidegger talks about being thrown but he gives it a very kind of long beat connotation you know for instance we talk about being in the throes of love I've just remarked in one or two places, being in the throes of love means you're caught up in an ecstasy that takes you beyond yourself.

45:10William Desmond:That's right. It's a different way of being thrown. And that, I think, is an area of discussion, of course, that is very hard to formalize in terms of that kind of systematic determinacy that you're very well able to. You pin things down and, of course, people who don't want to see things, see them. Yeah, John's actually confronted.

45:37Guy Sengstock:Yes. I wanted to pick up on that because this notion of, you mentioned theoria, and that the original meaning theoria is, you know, to contemplate. but you know Ward and Nightingale have actually done some very good work showing that that when Plato takes it up he's actually transforming something and you can see an earlier usage in Plato and what they what they what they what in fact what Ward does very clearly and I think really convincingly in terms of exegesis is that the the original meaning that Plato was taking into the noetic meaning of theoria is pilgrimage. Where pilgrimage is like, it's like you're throwing yourself, but you're also in the throes of something.

46:33Guy Sengstock:It's very much this sense of, of course, you have to set yourself into, but like I've just come back from a very important pilgrimage that I undertook as part of my philosophical and spiritual development. And the thing about it is you get that sense of ecstasis. You throw yourself into a place, but there's a sense in which you're in the throes of the place. It takes place and it makes possible. And it's like what Taylor talks about, when people are locked into a particular in framing, You can't argue them because they just translate everything back into the framing. And you have to move them like a metanoetic passage over here and say, well, try living here and then look back and see the difference.

47:29Guy Sengstock:Pilgrimage does that. And that very profound sense that when you are engaging in this movement that engages, like as you said, an ecstasis. You're being called beyond yourself in ways that you cannot foresee and that you did not plan. I think what becomes apparent is the kind of thing you're talking about here. And that's – so for me, theory is explanation. Yes, deeper than that is theoria as noetic vision. But deeper than that is pilgrimage as a metanoetic passage.

48:11John Vervaeke:Isn't it – I'm hearing – I know that one – Did you – oh, quick. I wanted to check with you guys. that so it's the word relata right originally connotates to bear and i'm i'm hearing what are the things that are missing for me and a lot of the a lot of the things about projection is this notion of bearing right of it kind of has this say it again please guy you cut out for a sec what was the word you used you just kind of right like bearing right it doesn't really account for this kind of way in which you know this way in which you it's not like i throw it's more like i find myself already being thrown in some sets right there's a bearing and a patio involved in here some somewhere i'm sensing right yeah the we it's not that we throw ourselves but we find

49:02William Desmond:ourselves being thrown yes there was a kind of a patience to it there's a kind of passivity to it But it's not, you know, in modernity especially, we have a very often simple dualism between the active and the passive. And, you know, we don't do justice to a certain patience or receptivity on the one hand. And we become hyperactive on the other hand. And then because it's an activity that isn't rooted in something that is given to us at the outset, that it bears. I mean, an activity is a bearing towards the world. You know, if I could play around with the word there. a being in relation that is in one sense dynamic, but in another sense is kind of an instantiation of energy.

49:46William Desmond:Energy received often from sources of... Again, in my day I was a runner, a long distance runner, a middle distance runner, but the act of running itself is a very mysterious thing. It can't be reduced to merely voluntaristic. Why will it be so? Exactly. energies are released in our incarnate being that carry us and some of the best races i ran actually it was almost as if there were the gun goes off at the start and there i am at the finish and even though i'm absolutely lucid as running through the race and totally balanced and at home with myself uh it's as if almost as if i'm asleep you know strange paradox of being awakened and energized and yet in a strange way also the energy is running itself so to say through me i think that in the dualisms of modernity of passivity and activity they're they're not helpful really in getting it getting at more subtle things more relevant the more relevant things

50:51Guy Sengstock:in naming what's going on in our lives yeah and so william one of the things that um I do a lot of work on the connections between relevance, realization, and being in the flow state, which is the case. And I've been a Tai Chi player since 1991. And so, of course, you get into the flow state. And I often think of Taoism as the religion of flow. And when you're talking about running and you're talking about trying to overcome a simplistic dichotomy between activity and passivity into something more like spontaneity. This sounds extremely Taoist to me. Yeah, yeah.

51:33William Desmond:I actually, in one or two places, actually described my own overlap with a kind of Taoism. When I talk about God as Agapec, actually I talk about the Agapec as making a way by making way. Yeah, yeah. You see what I mean? Yeah, yeah. It's not just a kind of superimposition of a space, but it's by getting out of the way that the way actually allows us to be along the way. And again, I didn't know that Theoria was connected with pilgrimage. Yeah. I had always thought of Theoria. One of the sources certainly is apparently at the sacred festivals, the games in ancient Greece, in the different cities, delegates would be sent by one city to the other.

52:28William Desmond:Yeah. They weren't just sort of mere representatives. These were sacred delegates that went as witnesses to the game. They beheld the games. Yes. There was a kind of sacral character to the beholding. Again, in terms of Greek religion, the gods enjoy the beholding of the conquest, so to say. But there's a celebrating dimension in the beholding of the thing itself. But it's very much wound up, again, just as pilgrimage is very much wound up in sacred movement. Yeah, exactly. To a sacred place. Similarly, even in the pagan world, going to Delphi. We forget that Delphi was an oracle for well over a thousand years in the whole Greek world.

53:19William Desmond:And people came from all over with their traditions and their questions and so on and so on. But they had to travel to the place of sacred revelation. in order to... You couldn't just kind of tap your computer at home and kind of get an answer from the oracle. I guess you could do it now, but it's a different kind of oracle. But yeah, that notion of being on the way... I just published a book which has appeared in the last couple of weeks, actually. It's called Wayward and Homebound. And the subtitle is Irish betweenings, philosophical thought and writing, being wayward and homebound, the inseparability of the two, and notion certainly in the, it's very strong in the Irish, early Irish tradition of a peregrinatio, that you have to undertake a journey to, you know, to find divine truth, in fact.

54:20William Desmond:So going away was a way of actually going home. Even if you never went home, pure home, so to say, but It has a dimension of exit, potentially, but there's also being on the way in anticipation that there would be also a homecoming in the Peregrinatio, in the pilgrimage. Pilgrimage is, of course, the same, being on the way to the sacred places.

54:49Guy Sengstock:That's, again, really powerful work I'm doing on orientation is linking it to a lot of anthropological and cognitive scientific and philosophical phenomenological work on wayfaring. and another picture that might have us in our grip is we think that we run off of maps of the world but being able to make a map presupposes this other already more primordial fittedness that as you say allows us to be underway and on the way and find the way and this is wayfaring And a lot of people are talking about this now. And what's really interesting is that there's increasing evidence that even when we're in our most abstract propositional conceptual thought, we're actually making use of the very processes, the same processes we use when we're doing, you know, spatial temporal wayfaring and navigation.

55:59William Desmond:It's interesting, though, to remember that pilgrimage was certainly huge in medieval Europe. Yes. The Protestant Reformation, they wanted to shut down pilgrimages because they saw it as idolatrous. And they managed to do it. I mean, so many of the beautiful cathedrals in England are medieval cathedrals where people would make pilgrimage. But they shut down the pilgrimage. I have a feeling that this is the kind of desacralization of pilgrimage. It got taken into a secularized version of tourism. Instead of going on pilgrimage where tourists doing the Grand Tour of Europe, for instance, are. So we produce what I call counterfeit doubles of the pilgrim.

56:50William Desmond:Exactly.

56:51Guy Sengstock:In a kind of secular modality. I've been doing quite a bit of work because of the philosophical Silk Road on the philosophy of pilgrimage. And this is a distinction that is currently invoked a lot, the deep and important difference between pilgrimage that is wrapped up with wayfaring towards the sacred and tourism, which is based on the idea of consuming experiences.

57:19Guy Sengstock:So now that we're - Taking your stuff. Yeah, taking your selfie. That's it. Yeah. So there's two questions that I want to bring up, and they're connected. And we probably won't get through everything, but we're already going to talk a couple more times. So one is another form of resonance that I've alluded to many times is, you know, the stuff you talk about on godlessness and default atheism, which is also a default nihilism, I think. And you talk about that when you talk about return to zero as a practice. And that converges with a lot of work I've been doing around the idea that we're in a meaning crisis.

58:10Guy Sengstock:And the basic idea of the meaning crisis, I mean, it's a long argument. It's a book and it's a 50 hour, 50 episode, each episode an hour or more. But the basic idea is, of course, human beings perennially face problems of anguish and anxiety and alienation and absurdity. But they develop rituals, ecologies of practices for overcoming self-deception. They cultivate wisdom and enhanced connectedness. But we, for a variety of reasons, all the R's, the Renaissance, the Reformation. The Reformation not only shuts down pilgrimage, it shuts down the monasteries. So it sort of removes rituals. It removes wisdom institutions.

58:55Guy Sengstock:And then we get a framing, or I'll use Heidegger's term, an end framing with scientific technology that we do this thing where we reject the dichotomy between the supernatural and the natural. But in order to capture what was functioning in that dichotomy, I'm not saying we go back to that, but in order to capture that, what we do is we smuggle in all these other dichotomies that become unquestionable grammar for our cognition, subjective, objective, fact, value, meaning, measurement, all that stuff. right and then what that happens is as we said earlier that struck that what that does is it disconnects people from the between in a profound way they lose that sense and if you do work as i do on meaning in life that sense of the between the sensed presence of connectedness is what people are fundamentally talking about when they're talking about that they find their lives meaningful or not.

59:50Guy Sengstock:And then the idea is, and other things, other factors, like we have reduced all knowing to just propositional knowing. I won't go into it. The idea is that we basically created a framework in which we can't live. And in fact, in which we can't do science, I would argue even more deeply. And so we have a worldview in which there is no way in which we can be at home in it. We can dwell in it. This is a kind of cosmic domicile. And so we are bereft of role models, traditions, ecologies of practices, histories of wisdom and connection cultivation, and face the perennial problems naked and vulnerable, and we get overwhelmed in very powerful ways.

1:00:43Guy Sengstock:What do you think of that as a proposal?

1:00:46William Desmond:Well, Guy and I had a conversation there back in the summer. It was a day or two after you spoke to this nice young lady who was the kind of therapist of nihilist experiences. I can't remember her name now, but if I remember correctly, she was...

1:01:09John Vervaeke:Pardon me, Guy? It's the woman you had interviewed that used to be like a Mormon. Now she's... She's a Mormon, yeah. Oh, yeah.

1:01:17Guy Sengstock:Britt Hartley. Yes, Britt Hartley.

1:01:19William Desmond:Yes. But again, I hadn't known anything before talking to Guy about her, but it just struck me that her living in Mormonism was within a kind of a total block, so to say. And when that block cracked, there was nothing.

1:01:33Guy Sengstock:Yes.

1:01:34William Desmond:And so it was either that block or atheism, in fact. And I mean, I have suggested this in various places that the experience of nihilism can be profoundly despairing and even unto suicide, of course, in some instances. But it can also be that experience of reaching bottom. There's nowhere to go. So in one sense, you're denuded of false meanings, eventually false meanings. And it can actually be a place where there's a renewed interface with creation. This is one of the ways that I put it, that going down into the nothing can find, in fact, that there is a fertile nothing also that, in fact, sustains us even in the very depths of the abyss itself.

1:02:25William Desmond:People have talked about that. I know, for instance, alcoholics have talked about having to go down to the bottom. And then when there is no hope, that kind of strange race really reverses or at least offers the promise of a reversal. Now, again, there's nothing guaranteed about this. There's no technique of it in one sense. I think to run away from the nihilism of our times is to actually not see that nihilism can be like an opening of nothing, that it can be that space through which the energies of life begin to flow again. So it can be profoundly turned in that direction. But again, that's not the message that is open.

1:03:12William Desmond:Like, for instance, in European countries now, the kind of upsurge of euthanasia is astonishing. I think it's very bad in Canada also. The state itself is colluding with people who are in despair and telling them that, okay, they don't feel that they have any reason to live. Okay, there is one way out. They're really not killing themselves. they're actually gloating in the killing of these. There was a young woman in Belgium, just only 26, and physically there was nothing wrong with her, but she was in profound depression, and she was allowed to get assisted suicide there just very recently. But I find something profoundly, it's something terrible about this as a development in Western societies.

1:04:05William Desmond:It doesn't actually face into the true meaning of nothingness or nothingness. I mean, we come from nothing, we return to nothing. We hope we've come from a good source, which many people name God. We hope that in some sense we're going home, there's some sense of the divine. But along the way, whether at the beginning or the end, the passage to being nothing is part of the total journey, so to say. You know, it's strange that it's in the very middle of life now that the nihilism of Western society is visiting this on people who, from the biological point of view, are healthy animals. They're healthy animals.

1:04:50William Desmond:And yes, because meaning has not been found or given or offered in their lives. They don't want to continue. It's profoundly sad, really. I think that's one of the reasons why people like us have to keep thinking about these things. It might seem ineffectual, but if we don't think about these things and try and communicate something of a deeper affirming of life, we're in even worse shape.

1:05:27Guy Sengstock:I, uh, sorry for that. No, no, no, no, no. You have not, you have not said anything that I have not said multiple times in public and in recording. I wanted to ask you, I mean, I was just teaching on that passage, um, where you talk about the angel of death and then you talk about the light. Um, and, um, and Dunn's in his book talks about, you know, return to zero as a kind of practice. I strongly recommend to people, don't take this up as your first practice or anything like that. No, no. I mean, you don't go out looking. You're not going to go out looking for the angel of death. No, no, no, no.

1:06:06Guy Sengstock:But what you're doing in there, you talk about, you get there and you get to this. And then as you said, you realize, yeah, but there's nevertheless, something is still, you know, something is casting the shadow over me. It's because I long for truth and long for meaning and have a sense of what it should be like. And you talk about this, right, that you find this and that becomes very clear to you that the very thing that is sort of the normative standards, that's not quite the right word, but just let me have it for now. The normative standards that have led you to nihilism, right, are the things that nihilism is actually trying to deny in some way.

1:06:50Guy Sengstock:But, you know, but if there is no true good and beautiful, as you say, the experience of nihilism wouldn't be possible if nihilism were true. I underlined that.

1:07:00William Desmond:Yeah, I thought that. If nihilism is true, there is no truth, and hence nihilism is untrue. Yeah. Yeah.

1:07:06Guy Sengstock:And then what that reminded me of was the work of Nishitani in two books, The Self-Overcoming of Nihilism, and then his masterpiece, Religion and Nothingness, and the Zen practice of the Great Doubt. Have you ever thought about comparisons between what you talk about when you talk about Return to Zero and the Zen practice of Great Doubt?

1:07:30William Desmond:Well, I think that the person of the Kyoto school that I came to know more was Tanabi.

1:07:38Guy Sengstock:Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

1:07:40William Desmond:Tanabi. I can see that. Yeah. Well, again, I was interested in the other thinkers, but I did feel...

1:07:47John Vervaeke:Tanabi is the pure land? Is he the pure land Buddhist guy? Tanabi?

1:07:51William Desmond:Pure land Buddhism, yes. Philosophy is metanoetics. Philosophy is metanoetics, exactly. It might be because of the Western...with Nishitani and Nishida, there's a very strong influence of Nietzsche and I think Heidegger also. Yes. And there's a certain sense in which their version of Buddhism is very mediated, actually, by the themes of Nihilism that come from Nietzsche and post-Nietzschean thinking. And I felt that there wasn't, to be honest with you, they had taken on board the kind of anti-Christian rhetoric that particularly comes out of Nietzsche. And anti-Plato. And anti-Plato, yes, Rachel.

1:08:34William Desmond:Yeah, and I just wasn't... It's not that I was dismissing them, but given some sense of what entered into their way of thinking, and this has been kind of confirmed to me by many of the people who were involved in Eastern philosophy here in the West, it went to drift towards either Nishitani or Nishida. They almost seemed to studiously avoid Tanabi. and I found Tanabe very interesting because I acted in it actually I came across philosophy as metanoetics found it in a book tour just to pick it up it looked very interesting the notion of metanoetics of course is very resonant with certain you know metanoia yeah metanoia is often translated as repentance and so on but it's also it's a noetics it's a I play around with the word meta as meaning both in the midst of things and also as above.

1:09:37William Desmond:There's a document to the word meta. So metanoetics is also kind of what Plato talks about as the periagoge of the soul, the turning around of the soul in the right direction. I found the man very, you know, post-World War II where he was in some ways confessing the sins of Japanese fascism and said that we have to begin again. And I find that theme of a second birth to thought. I talk about it in Being in the Between, the rebirth of thought beyond the permanent science and beyond self-determining knowing and so on, a rebirth of metaphysical astonishment. And just to finish that thought, I had a student in Leuven whose name was, what's his name, he wrote his dissertation on Tanabe.

1:10:30William Desmond:He was from Japan. And he knew nothing about Tanabe. I gave him metanoetics, Phosphorus metanoetics. And he wrote his dissertation on metanoetics and metmectology, a study on Tanabe and Desmond. It was published there by Bloomfrey there about 2017 or 18.

1:10:55Guy Sengstock:I want to get this book.

1:11:01He's teaching in Edinburgh now, teaching mostly.

1:11:08William Desmond:He discovered Japanese philosophy by coming to the West. And so I think that Zen Buddhism, again, I'm an amateur in understanding these things by comparison with the adepts in the East, but the whole meaning of being nothing, nothingness, is a very deep issue. And I do think myself that the sense of nothing and the sense of too much, the strange union of being a nothing, not like the Hegelian one, but there's a kind of paradoxical conjunction of a kind of a too muchness and almost nothing.

1:11:59Guy Sengstock:yeah um but it that's what i get by the way when i do the practice like when i actually i do the practice of return to zero i get i get a nothing but it's it's but it's also like uh take this as a metaphor please a hyperbolic metaphor i there's a but it's a nothing that is also the pressure of the inexhaustibility uh that of intelligibility that's also like there's this tremendous moreness that is just like... Right, yeah. Yeah. I wanted to... I want... Oh, I just want... Go ahead.

1:12:34William Desmond:The name of that guy is Kashi Morisato, the guy who wrote that book.

1:12:42Guy Sengstock:If you could maybe email me that name, then I can track it down. That'd be great. Well, let's do that, yeah. Thank you. William, I mean, this is one of Tanabe's criticisms of Nishita Nishitani is that they rely too much on Jiriki and not enough antariki, which jariki is self-power and other power. And that sounds not identical, but at least convergent with some of the stuff you say about the essential canadas. Right, it was always so, yeah. The canadas ascendi and the passio ascendi. And that also lines up to, I think, tell me if there's lining with some of your critique of Hegel and the dialectical mode, because it is that fully self-powered way of trying to reconcile all of the opposites, so to speak.

1:13:33William Desmond:Yeah, it's very, very cognate of the critique of Hegel, actually, because I mean, I was once treated as a wonder-pinned among the Hegelians. But then when I began to raise certain questions, which were there really from the start, but I was trying to give Hegel a run for his money in a positive sense. But there's a recurrent logic in Hegel, which is essentially that true thought is only free when it's self-determining. Yeah. It's a very modern picture of thinking as self-determining. There is in Hegel an acknowledgement of otherness, and the Hegelians are right to point that out. But it's the betweening of self and other that then gets taken up into a more inclusive pattern of self-determination.

1:14:20William Desmond:I mean, I more recently think of Hegel as a philosopher of the between, but it's how he configures the between as always oriented towards the self-determination of a whole that closes in on itself. So there's not in Kanabi's sense the other power that, so to say, balances self-power in a between where a different dialogue between them becomes possible. it's not just the self-power overpowering other power and then creating a i mean that's that's essentially a kind of a definition of either totalitarianism or fascism where self-power over powers all other power and it's just a greater self-power of the of of the german people of the japanese people or whatever yeah there was definitely that danger so it's it's it's It's very much along the same lines as the...

1:15:15William Desmond:Denabhi's earlier work actually was... He did work on Kant and Hegel also. So he was very influenced by German idealism also, you know. So that's another strange Western influence on the author too.

1:15:29Guy Sengstock:Very much, very much. I wanted to point out to you that critique and your work consonant with a significant form of self-critique on my part that actually led to the philosophical Silk Road, which I had proposed a religion that's not a religion, that what needs to happen is we need to recover a sense of the sacred of profound meaning of ultimate realness. That was the meaning crisis. But what we needed to do was we needed, and I wasn't using this language, although I will use this language now. I thought, well, what I can do is we can set up an engineering project and we can engineer the sacred into existence.

1:16:20Guy Sengstock:And then of course, I had a very good friend, Bishop Maximus, who critique that. And then I was reading your work. And then this kind of idea, especially, you know, like you said, from Tanabe, but also from Taoism, I came to realize that insofar as I'm trying to manufacture the sacred, I'm actually thwarting it, preventing it. Because if it doesn't have other power, if it doesn't have a life of its own that can challenge me, then it won't have, and this is DC Schindler's work, it won't have the otherness that, like the thing about reality, it is other than me, but it has a for itselfness, but also a for me.

1:17:04Guy Sengstock:I want to talk to you about this, because you get this, I think, in the communal nature of being, right? And I need both of those. If it was completely self-enclosed, like a Kantian thing on itself, I can't come into relationship to it. And if it was completely for me, it would disappear into my subjectivity. And so the sacred, if it's going to be real, has to have that. And I realized that then what I have to do is I have to do something like pilgrimage in order to put myself into the possibility of a right relationship for its advent. I can't manufacture it. Right.

1:17:39William Desmond:The pilgrimage is a purgation of the porosity. It's been clogged up by idols and hopefully on the way these begin to dissolve and you become more free of them. But the titles of one of my books is the following, The Intimate Strangeness of Being. Yeah. I think it's called metaphysics after dialectic. This notion of an intimate strangeness. Exactly. The doubleness that you're talking about, there's an intimacy between us and being, but there's also a strangeness. because the intimacy qualifies to strangeness. It's not simply estranging. If it was just strangeness to occur, then we would just be alienated creatures in the universe.

1:18:28William Desmond:But there's an intimacy. The intimacy is also qualified by the strangeness and hence that sense of mystery that I think will always be our companion as long as we live. But how we address the sense of mysterious, how we go on pilgrimage into the mysterious is itself. It's a journey into intimacy and into spangeness at the same time. The two sides are twins.

1:18:57Guy Sengstock:Good guy. I want to hear what you say. Go, go guy.

1:19:01John Vervaeke:This sense of the realness of the sacred of this thing, as you were saying, the thing that you can't produce, right? You find yourself in the presence of and in between the presence of. there's this kind of quality of realness to it but i've also noticed it seems to have this quality of demand right like at some level it there's a it demands in one level it it's ineffable yet it demands it it demands language it demands the attempt at language there's this kind of there's a there's a quality of drawing you out but also demanding something of you. And I think where I think I have, I've witnessed a certain kind of like almost case study of witnessing a friend of mine's life and this brings us back to Zen and the Eastern notion that you were speaking about William.

1:20:02John Vervaeke:So, this friend of mine is, he's He's quite gifted spiritually. And he said, I think when he was 17 is when he started running a Zen center in Minnesota for a number of years. You know, he's like really a lot of people have recognized something really gifted about him as both a teacher and a practitioner. and when I, ever since I've known him, all he wears is a Zen gear. But then, and I've known him for a long time and I go and visit him often in Texas. And when I land in Texas, right, one of the times I went into his apartment and all of a sudden I see these Platonic books lying around. And then we spend the next couple of years talking about Plato, right?

1:20:58John Vervaeke:And then I go away and then I come back again. And then there's like these Christian Neoplatonist books around. Now, he's still wearing his Zen garb, right? And then the last time I was there, quite literally, he had a stack like on his, like a couple of stacks on his table of the official, I don't know, books by the Catholic Church, the roman catholic church the manuals and like the official things like stacked up everywhere and in encyclicals yes and he and then yeah totally like in it's in some sense the way i think i've heard him describe it when i've i've asked him about this right is i'm like what's going on with this like you're wearing your zen garb but like you seem to be as he calls himself like the ultimate Jesus freak.

1:21:55John Vervaeke:And he's like, well, it's kind of like this. When I look at Buddhism, and I've gone deep into the senyata or emptiness, he's like, I can really get a strong account of emergence there, but I can't find emanation. In fact, emanation is suspect there, right? It's like in some sense. But there's something kind of a, this is what I mean, like there's something that demanded him, right? Of going into the emptiness that started to, you know, demand this other level to acknowledge this other level, right? He's like, you go to Buddhism, there's no, you know, there's no hermionetics, right? There's no, there's none of these other like West, these things that the West has really, really worked out.

1:22:47John Vervaeke:And so, I find like he's almost an example of this sense of being totally devoted into that emptiness, right? Into that nothing. And it hit him drawing him out and all these other things, right? Going on at the same time. And I just thought that was, that would be like something I'm witnessing and a personal friend of mine, right? Who's pretty well known for this. that I think really is drawing in on much of what you're both saying.

1:23:20Guy Sengstock:This is why I've been proposing Zen, Zen Neoplatonism. Yeah, actually. And I don't know if I would go with demand. I think Stephen J. Smith has got a better way of talk that lines up with other stuff. He talks about appeal and attitude. Things appeal to us. And they call to us. And he's doing like what William does. One of the things I like about you, William, is I call it your symphonic sense. You're not equivocal. You'll invoke multiple senses of a term simultaneously, and they form kind of like a symphony, which I think is a very important part of doing philosophy well. And so he's doing the same thing with appeal.

1:24:07Guy Sengstock:Things appeal to us and they're appealing. But we also, you can appeal to the Supreme Court, right? And all that. He's trying to pick up on that sense. And I like that better because it carries more, again, the compelling but not compulsive um um the demand uh didn't like like to use your word like the demand of the sacred isn't the demand of the of the addict that the the addict is facing the person addicted to something it's more like the lover this is plato's analogy and love is again that compelling but not compulsive that voluntary necessity that's that's that's what i i recommend that book by the way it's

1:24:53William Desmond:really good book yeah and i i i like the word woo when yeah yeah yeah yeah when you woo or when you are wooed yeah there's a space of freedom between the lover and the beloved yeah but it's an intimately qualified space and the true wooing has a kind of pull to it which is not tyrannical even though again it's it's all it's it's true that we do have experiences of being in love which have a kind of almost tyrannical character because we're taken so much out of ourselves or gone beyond ourselves. But wooing has, you can't formalize it also, of course. You know, there's no geometry of wooing. It's a kind of subtle finesse.

1:25:39William Desmond:Always. But also in wooing, I think, a weighting on the response of the other. So that's perhaps that element of appeal. I wonder if your friend, your Zen dresser, is he looking for a kind of vertical dimension? It would be interesting to ask about horizontal dimensions and vertical dimensions and how that can fit. Western modernity is very anti-verticality. Oh, totally. But in fact, I think our lives are shaped by vertical axes as well as horizontal.

1:26:20John Vervaeke:Yeah.

1:26:21William Desmond:But I'm just kind of wondering if there's a flattening nihilism, which is so horizontal that it really doesn't lift us up.

1:26:29John Vervaeke:Yeah.

1:26:29William Desmond:We go down and even the notion of going down disappears if you actually get rid of the vertical dimension.

1:26:36Guy Sengstock:Yeah. I think there's a strain of Zen, maybe even there isn't homogeneous Zen any more than there's homogeneous Buddhism or homogeneous Christianity. But I'll say there's a strain in which the nihilism to my ear and, you know, and I do a lot of practices. I'm kind of proto Zen. I do a lot of Buddhist meditative practices. I do Taoist practices. That's how you get Zen. You put Buddhism and Taoism together. But there's a strain of Zen that understands the move to nothingness as a kind of reductionism to my ear. And I think the verticality – it's funny. Again, before I met your work, William, a guy can attest to this.

1:27:22Guy Sengstock:I was talking about the horizontal and vertical dimensions, especially with respect to nihilism. And, of course, I did on nihilism. And I'm going to use that because I'm the host and I have to now do that. I'm going to say that I want to talk about the vertical and the horizontal. I want to talk about the sacred. I want to talk about God, idols, and counterfeits of God in our next discussion. How does that sound for the two of you? Sounds great. Sounds great to me. So first of all, I want to thank William. this went beyond expectations. I hope you enjoyed it. I found a lot of resonance between our work that I think is fruitful.

1:28:05Guy Sengstock:I wanted to... Oh, go ahead. Me too.

1:28:07William Desmond:I mean, if it is of any help, maybe we could maybe choose some text of yours that I could look at more closely in advance for some of our discussions in the future also.

1:28:20Guy Sengstock:Sure.

1:28:20William Desmond:You know, instead of just kind of shooting in the vacuum. So to say not quite, but it sometimes is actually very helpful for discussion of an anchoring text, only a short text. Sure.

1:28:34Guy Sengstock:I think that's very... I will find such a text and we'll bring it in. Guy, I wanted to thank you and also apologize. I tended to monopolize the conversation and you were very, very patient about that. And you had sort of, you'd implicitly sort of allowed that in the way you framed it. I wanted to thank you for that. Hopefully, I'll make more space for you. But I wanted to try and get a lot of ground covered initially so that we can then slow down on the next two. Yeah. Because we'll have laid sort of some common ground. Yeah. So I now want to give each one of you, we'll start with you, Guy, and then we'll end with William.

1:29:23Guy Sengstock:I always give my interlocutors the last word before I stop the recording. So, Guy, you first.

1:29:30John Vervaeke:Between.

1:29:38William Desmond:So, William. I'd say betweening.

1:29:47William Desmond:Just as I like to, you know, make nouns into verbs. Between can be a bit kind of substantive, but betweening brings in the dynamism both of a receptive and an active sort. But also the word wording. I like the word wording as a verb. So wording the between, this is a way I sometimes talk, but even wording the betweening. I have been mocked by some people who claim that in my decades of thinking about between, I'm doubting the word betweening as a great advance. And they're finding a way to make me humble, which of course I am in any case. But so the betweening actually makes everything much more supple.

1:30:42It brings that flow that you're talking about into the process of being in relation, of relating, of relativity.

1:30:52William Desmond:And I think that that's very, very, very important.

1:30:56Guy Sengstock:Well, I agree with you. I think this is where philosophy is porous with poesis. Poetry doesn't just mean ornamenting our language, but trying to make new ways of wording that can make new sense for us. So thank you both. And I look forward to our next time together.

1:31:16William Desmond:Thank you very much. Thank you. Bye now.