John Vervaeke & Guy Sengstock: Why Modernity Can't See the Sacred Anymore

25:55Guy Sengstock:It was only a few people in the course at a time. But for me, it was the first time I was teaching towards a spiritual end, a philosophical spiritual end. And it was the first time I was starting, I didn't realize it at the time, but I was starting to make use of some of my cognitive scientific training in order to reflect upon things other than the standard topics of cognitive science.

26:28John Vervaeke:Yeah, yeah. And was it kind of like, do you remember, did it feel kind of risky?

26:36Guy Sengstock:or yeah i mean i thought at some points they would sort of haul me aside or for being a heretic but um the work i did was very much appreciated uh very much appreciated the a lot of people uh were very complimentary and that took a little bit of like adjustment about um that was my first brush up with how do i deal with this feedback in a virtuous fashion How do I properly understand it? And so I think I've gotten a little bit better at that. So what was born there was also something I tried to bring to bear in seeing God again, which is if this is going to see it, this is the thing. How do I involve all of myself, all of those people you've designated, the teacher, the scientist, the philosopher, the pilgrim, right?

27:27Guy Sengstock:How do I involve all of that without becoming self-involved, self-absorbed, self-referential? And so also, I guess at the beginning, this is just occurring to me now, the concern with doing the course virtuously with my students was really, really, really important because I knew people were coming from both religious and non-religious backgrounds, different religious traditions. And I didn't want to merely, you know, what do I want? I wanted to steer between Scylla and Charybdis. I didn't want to merely reinforce, and I didn't want to merely try to deconstruct. I wanted to challenge them to recover and to explore.

28:16Guy Sengstock:And so that's another thing that is central to this. If you're going to engage in this kind of teaching, especially about topics like this, there's a lot of danger. It's fraught. And so between doing it a couple times at the university where I have a lot of other people watching me to make sure I'm not going the wrong way, because that's what universities do, and then doing it on the lectern where I got a lot more feedback. I'm sort of honing in, I think. I hope when I write the book that that'll even more come through. Yeah.

29:03John Vervaeke:Yeah. You know, it's something I appreciate is right now when you said, is right when you said like, yeah, I think I'm just realizing this right now, right or saying this just right now is uh one of the things i got in our first conversation together um uh i really walked away really appreciating what i've actually come to know as a through line right with you right is on one level oh you know you're really wanting the students you're not wanting to confront the students you're wanting to reveal what they're already confronted with Yeah. Maybe not totally. Way of putting it. I love that. Yeah.

29:45John Vervaeke:And that's an art. Like, I mean, as a facilitator, like that's always an art because you see bad facilitation, right? Or like, you got to get right. Like they end up just being confronted with the teacher, right?

29:57Guy Sengstock:That's right. And so what if it's working when it's working, people feel confronted by the logos. They don't feel confronted by John Brevicki. They feel confronted by an emerging intelligibility that's moving and got momentum to it. And one of my students, very good students, came up to me afterwards and said, especially when I was doing the first lectures about, I hope we get to reflect on that, about solving all the dichotomies. And he said, I feel like you hit me, like we're boxing and you hit me with a left hook, but it was really good. Like it was really good. Like, like I was like, okay, no, no,

30:42John Vervaeke:that was good. Yeah, totally. Yeah. Well, the, the, the thing I got right in the first time we talked was, you know, and having a lot to do with the way that you grew up, right. In a, in a kind of a fundamentalist, right. Um, kind of cult-like environment, right. In the fanaticism of that, right? But also just having a certain temperamental, I would imagine, kind of social phobia, right? And this was right in the beginning, I think you were like a few lectures into the awakening from the meeting crisis and this real decision that you made to consciously turn public and face the public. And I just really got in that moment, I was like, oh, I think that's, I would imagine is what goes through in your teaching is like at some level teaching, right?

31:36John Vervaeke:Especially at the level that you've gotten to now, it's like every time you do it, there's a certain kind of confrontation, a vulnerable confrontation, right?

31:46Guy Sengstock:That's very much the case. In fact, I mean, that's deliberate. Grade three, they called me a mini teacher because the teacher would let me teach some of the classes, which was a bizarre thing. I was very precocious. But Aristotle talks about virtues as complementing, being complementary to compensating for one's constitutional deficits of excess or deficiency. And so teaching has always been my way to compensate for my social phobia, the way in many ways I'm socially inept. But I mean, my spouse, Sarah, is great at very gently pointing out more. I'm still at times very socially.

32:39Because of the combination of a lot of time spent alone on my own as a child,

32:47Guy Sengstock:not like, I mean, days and days on end. I mean, there was a parent, there was an adult in the house, but I was shut in a very closed, tight, supplicating fundamentalist world and really believing that most of the world was filled with a malicious evil that was out to get me. And then on top of that, just being very, very socially phobic by nature. And so teaching has been a way for me to try to find my way back to flourishing. Virtue, right? If virtue means being able to find one's way to flourishing, that's what teaching has been for me, yes.

33:41John Vervaeke:you know what i was hearing in that is like really like i'm almost hearing like like for personally teaching has been the move from exposure to vulnerability very much and that's why

33:53Guy Sengstock:terminology is important it came up in seeing god again for the first time because part of what i'm trying to convey is that the sacred has a profound kind of teaching teaching in this deep sense not of informing, but of participating in conducing and inducing people towards flourishing, towards finding their way with virtuosity and virtue to flourishing. That's what the sacred is. There was a sense in which I was using teaching as a participatory symbol of a way of relating to the sacred yes yeah totally and into in two so i'm hearing two

34:50John Vervaeke:levels of exposure right that's confronting right in some sense because there's the level of exposure of just being in a very tightly bound isolated um monolithic voice right of of where you grew up right and being exposed to like just being originally at sin and therefore always exposed to ultimate wrath right and that being mirrored around you by everybody right there's there's that part right but i i'm also hearing there's the something there's like a like a fire of temptation in there too right yes of yeah because i know one of the things you've talked about that I really got this on our last retreat, you know, when you talked about, you know, some of the psychological damage that being idealized, right?

35:42John Vervaeke:And I don't think I'd ever heard you talk about that. And then I really got like, oh, like I got the other level of vulnerability for you teaching because on one level, there's like the, you know, this openness to just being annihilated, right? That fear. But then there's this ultimate for some of the deepest, most damaging temptation, right? Yeah. So I mean, when you open your, when you, when I went through that process, and then it

36:16Guy Sengstock:also, and I'm grateful for the therapy that I got after it in my adolescence, breaking free of that and then opening up, there is a very powerful mistake that is right there, which is you get, you start to get, when you really, when you really taste the wonder, right, you get, you get it you get insights that are are to go beyond the norm when you're a teenager of course and as all teenagers you're massively seeking social status i i used that and um um and i regret that and like i said uh uh i've done therapy around it uh but um And one of the things to, and this is why I keep saying the central thing is how do you involve all of the self without becoming self-involved?

37:21Guy Sengstock:And this is where my relationship to Hermes helps a lot, is to not take possession of what is emerging in an attitude of need, but to try instead to give gratitude for participation. And so how that works for me is I become very focused on the students and the flow of the logos. And I try to keep that focal. And so if I do talk about myself, because sometimes you use personal anecdotes in order to help people understand things. It feels almost like I'm talking about somebody else.

38:22Guy Sengstock:This is why the Neoplatonists and then people like William Desmond and the emphasis on participation as an alternative to modernity's obsession with possession has been also very, very important. That again goes towards seeing God again, right? So think about this. This is Janet Soskis in Naming God. John Locke takes the names of God and turns them into properties that are owned by God as a substance for which we can then come up with a definition. But before that, you didn't have properties. You had names. And a name is not, that's not what a name means. A name is a baptism into a relationship, a reciprocal relationship of constituting a self, a person, a spirit.

39:19Guy Sengstock:So that's what naming is. Naming is, oh, what we're doing is we're bringing you into this reciprocal relationship, this constitutive relationship from which yourself and your personhood are going to be born. Because you're named by a community, right? And you're named by a Berlin community. And that's how naming works. So we lost the relationship of the sacred as what we're doing is we're trying to name something so that we can reciprocally open with it. And then we are returning to possessing definitions that we can manipulate with respect to it. And that would be, like, if you tried to do that equivalently with other phenomena that you admit exist, like, for example, you as a person.

40:18Guy Sengstock:You see, the thing about a name does is it picks out that there's a non-categorical presence to you. Like, guy qua guy belongs to no category because he's just guy, right? But it's like I'm touching you with the name. And there's that suchness, but there's also the moreness. It lets me know that whatever it is that's unique here, right, it's also like this. And so, right, we've lost a way of thinking. I don't even want to call it conceptualizing because, you know, Kripke and all of the analytic philosophers, names are not concepts. We've lost a way of, you know, cognitively being oriented to the divine that exposes us to a possible phenomenology.

41:09Guy Sengstock:Instead, we get locked into, I'm going to give you, right, all these properties that God is the ultimate owner of property since the European Enlightenment. And that, of course, and that is running along with the emergence of capitalism and all kinds of other things. And so we don't realize how insidious that is.

41:33John Vervaeke:Yeah. That's the thing that you really communicated really well through going through the four dichotomies. Yes. You really got this sense. In fact, you did it by in some sense, I was talking about it like you get really into the weeds, right? Like really into the weeds. in the strain of that, of like, okay, okay, we're talking about, okay, what's that again? Okay, like, it's almost like we're going, and in some sense, right, you're like, all right, I don't know if I have any more of this in me, and then at the end, you're like, and then see God again for the first time, and then he goes, blah.

42:13Guy Sengstock:Well, I mean, that's, I mean, my inspiration there was Spinoza. I resolved that, you know, and I was deeply influenced then we'll always be grateful for Catherine Pickstock's tremendous book, Aspects of Truth, where I got the first blush of this argument. And then she ushered me into a whole panoply of people that were all of these arguments, from both the analytic and the continental tradition, which made it, that really made me stand up and take notice. It's like, oh, they're converging on the same thing. And so I basically, it was like a Tai Chi move. I'm going to outrigger the rigor. I'm going to be super rigorous about this so that, right.

43:00Guy Sengstock:I want to show you how like the most, you know, rigorous analytic philosophy has actually undermined, right, the dichotomies and then show you how the phenomenological continental tradition has in its own way rigorously undermined the dichotomies and then how 4E cog psi has rigorously undermine all the dichotomies. And then I want you to step back and say, okay. Right. And going along with that is like, and the view of, the view of objectivity is the view from nowhere and showing, like arguing, no, the view from nowhere is logically, physically, and epistemically impossible. This should not be our standard for realness.

43:40Guy Sengstock:Like, like, and so I just, I just, it's like it's like you and I have said this before before you play jazz you have to really play your scales a lot so I was going to get I was going to be rigorous I was going to be like Bach I was going to just lay these arguments out here's why the value fact dichotomy doesn't work the is ought dichotomy doesn't work the analytic synthetic dichotomy doesn't work The theory data or the meaning measurement dichotomy doesn't work. And why all of them are just facets of the ur dichotomy of the subjective and objective. And that ultimately doesn't work. And then what happens is after you lay that, you then say, now try to look.

44:32Guy Sengstock:This is what I did with this. I came into the students. I said, look, I'm not going to, here's what you'd expect me to do. John Locke. I'll give you a definition of religion, perhaps of God or the sacred, and then we'll examine various arguments for and against it. I said, I'm not going to do that. I think that's an absolute waste of time. Because I think we, like Wittgenstein says, there's a picture that has us in its grip. And we have to deconstruct that. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to do these three things, right? An analytic, a phenomenological, and a cognitive science deconstruction of this fundamental grammar.

45:07Guy Sengstock:and then ask you to look again at the very fabric and fiber of your experience and see if the sacred is there for you. Yes, yes. That was what I was doing in the course. Yes, yes. And then what's interesting is, right, you get all of the, like, there's a wide variety in the mystical traditions. I'm not a product perennialist or proposition perennials, but they all converge around this processing point of, right, the subject-object dichotomy breaks down. And so once you get this and then you go, oh, maybe these people are actually phenomenological exemplars rather than just weird loony tunes that we've tried to sort of put them over here, put them aside.

45:56Yeah.

45:57John Vervaeke:Yeah.

46:26John Vervaeke:of modernity. And then in some way, what you do is you just like, as it was what you said, you, you're almost, you, you outrigger their rigor and right. You, you get more logical than their, their absolute logisticism. And in some sense, you kind of use their own logic to push it to its extreme ends that then... It's so funny. There's so many times where at the end I was just laughing because doing that reveals a certain kind of absurdity. Something becomes obvious. Something becomes obvious.

47:09Guy Sengstock:Well, I want to pick up on that because... And this is where the continental phenomenological and even... Well, out of that, what you just said, So that sort of analytic realization of the absurdity of the dichotomies and then the phenomenological, this isn't like, and that's the Heideggerian. Heidegger is all about trying to recover, right, your phenomenology, like beneath, before, between, beyond the subject audit, object dichotomy. Right. But then what I realized is, oh, this for me is a through line, something of value in postmodernism. And I'd already had a hint of this when I was doing work on Derrida and my argument that I think Derrida's difference is very much like what I'm talking about with relevance realization.

47:59Guy Sengstock:But it came to this, that modernity is born out of a rejection of a vertical dichotomy between the natural and the supernatural as absurd because we can't give any good account of how communication or causation can move between the natural and the supernatural. and post-modernism is saying yes but you know what you had to still do you still had to explain normativity and you had to explain the difference between appearance and reality and you still have to explain the one and the many so you just created at a horizontal the between the subjective and the objective and guess what 400 years of philosophy has shown that's just as absurd because even today, you can't give me a good causal account of how communication and causation move between those realms.

48:48Guy Sengstock:And one of the things postmodernity is getting with all of its critiques of the binaries, I mean, it's doing other things, and I'm not saying we shouldn't criticize it, I do, but I realized, oh, what they're on about is our horizontal economy is just as absurd as It's that pre-modern one that we all find ridiculous today, right? And it's like, oh, oh, oh, there's something going on here deeper than I had previously realized.

49:20John Vervaeke:That oh, that oh is, I appreciate the way you spelled that because it says so much, right? That oh is, that oh, in some sense is a naming, right? That names something, right? that I think it's central in what you're doing here. And I got better and was understanding

49:43Guy Sengstock:what's been called the religious turn in phenomenology that's been happening for the past 20 to 30 years in phenomenology. It's like, oh, right. And just for a moment, wonder, what would it be like if I took off those glasses and realized that these dichotomies are actually not the fabric of my experience, but an absurd gridlock that I've imposed on it, right? And what have I, what have I, what have I, like, and I'm not, if I argue within that, nothing's going to happen, but can I get you to take off that and come over here and put on a different set of glasses and go, oh, that's what I'm not seeing from that perspective.

50:28Guy Sengstock:and this is why later we talk about renewing the senses, right? The phenomenological aspect of this. So it's like, what do you see when you recover your sight in this way? What do you hear when you recover your hearing? And what people get is they get, oh, I get this intense connectedness that is somehow grounding me and calling me and orienting me and affording me to transform. And sometimes it strikes me impersonally and sometimes it faces me like a person. And it's like, oh, that's how people have always talked about the sacred.

51:12John Vervaeke:Right, right, right. Because that was a bit of my experience of, you know, getting through those dichotomies, right? is you just, it's almost like this. It's almost like, I think I described it to you in a text. It was like, as if you were just picking up dominoes, putting them up on their side, picking one after the other. Right at the end, you go, and they go, right? They all fall down. But every pickup is that lining up.

51:43Guy Sengstock:And the notion of sacredness that I use, right, comes from an atheist, Schellingberg. But an atheist that I respect because he's trying to be post-enlightenment in his atheism, like his religion after evolution.

52:03Guy Sengstock:What we're talking about is we're talking about something that we consider ultimately real. We can talk about what that means, ultimately orienting, ultimately transformative. And I would add something that I think is implicit in those that he didn't make explicit, ultimately resonant for us. right and and and in such that we we can share it with others it's not private uh to us right um and so uh well that's another part of this the critique of the the modern private notion the no the modern notion of meaning as a private possession that's also part of the course right um and so again i would try and and you know some of the empirical i would specifically choose empirical research about why people are religious.

52:45Guy Sengstock:Some of the most rigorous done, done by atheists.

52:50John Vervaeke:That was one of the funniest parts of the lecture, I thought.

52:54Guy Sengstock:I made it clear in my own mind, I'm never going to draw upon apologetics. I'm going to just take people who are going into this with intellectual honesty, giving their best philosophical arguments, doing their best scientific work, and rely on that. That's what I'm going to do. And then only later, much later, once that's cleared, will I start to listen to people who are coming from religious orientation. Oh, and you can see them.

53:21John Vervaeke:You can hear them much deeper. That's right. That's right. Yeah. Yeah, you can hear them much deeper.

53:28Guy Sengstock:And I would look for the sound of somebody who was trying to talk in a counter-modern fashion rather than still doing theology or religious studies within the framework of modernity, the tired, moribund framework of modernity. And I use it counter-modern because I also didn't want to just take up the post-modern thing. Because although they have the insight that the horizontal is just as absurd, to my mind, they stay within the propositional, which is very, very problematic. And this is why I like people like Desmond. Desmond confronts that and then goes beyond it and returns us back to the primary, I don't know what to call it, the primary generative tissue, the Tao, which meaning emerges that's non -propositional in nature.

54:22Guy Sengstock:And this is the core of 4E COGSI as well.

54:25John Vervaeke:Yeah, yeah. Yeah. You know, so those first to the first course goes as if you have a video on a particular dichotomy, right? And the next one, the next one, the next one. Now, the thing I would imagine that some people would maybe think like, well, yeah, if you're a philosopher, those are dichotomous for you. But if you're a normal person who's like, doesn't think explicitly about this, like that probably doesn't matter. But I think I want to challenge that, right? And you can help me challenge this because this is what makes it insidious, right? Is that even if you're not a analytic philosopher with explicit theories of different kinds of logics and these different absolutes, right?

55:22even if you've never even thought about logic, that in some sense, we've been living in this,

55:29John Vervaeke:right? There's a way where it's like actually that which you use to think, that which you use to build something, that which you use to conduct your comings and goings every day, those things are already back there in our presuppositions, right? They serve to shape, like even if you've never read philosophy your architecture is exemplifying a mode of thinking and a certain kind of understanding that like you've you know your body is in contour with right that that it's not just uh it's not just a mode of explicit right thoughts but you're and i think and i think maybe one way to get at that a little bit is to talk about um what you distinguished in the beginning of the course, I think it was the first one where you talked about the picture of, you know, oh, what's his name?

56:24John Vervaeke:That only the most, you know, probably the number one philosopher in the world talked about the picture that kind of traps us. Victin side. Yeah, the Victinian picture. Yeah, that traps us. Yeah, that we are actually like, Even if you don't feel like you have a philosophy or that you think about these things explicitly, that still, this is very binding. You're actually undoing what we presuppose, even if you've never even read philosophy.

56:58Guy Sengstock:Yeah. And that builds on other work, work I've done with Chris and Phil and others, which is fair enough. then where I need to look is I need to look in, so on social media and popular culture, because that's where your everyday way of being and thinking is expressing itself and attracting you and involving you. And you make, and you, I'm not saying you're, you're, you know, a simpleton and you don't have criticisms, but like what, like, like, you know, well, I mean, I've made the earlier argument, why zombies? Like, why are zombies so big? Like, what's going on there, right? But let's do another one.

57:46Guy Sengstock:A movie, smash shit, everything, everywhere, all at once. What's going on in that movie? What's going on in that movie is this idea that reality is combinatorially explosive, right? Which is a really powerful insight. It's recovery of what Savage called the large world, as opposed to the world that we can compute over, right? Excellent, excellent. But what does that, how is that actually, right, received in the movie? It's received by nihilism. Why? Because what you have is this argument, implicit, that's not being spoken or thought out, but taken for granted. So it just makes sense to you that, right, values are subjective and we project them on the world.

58:39Guy Sengstock:The world in itself is valueless, and that's portrayed by all of these different alternatives of the same thing. Nothing is special. Nothing has any meaning, right? And so any value I think might be there, right, is an illusion. And that's, of course, right, the big bagel, was it, or the donut? It's a bagel or something, right? Yeah, yeah. Right? Which has a hole in the center, of course, right? And sucks everything in and gives nothing back, right? And then the movie's solution to that is, oh, well, the mother loves her daughter. And it's like, that's not answering the problem. William Desmond's going to come out and say, but is that love an objective reality?

59:28Guy Sengstock:I mean, that's a Christian claim. There's an objective reality to love and we call that God. God is agape, right? Oh, no, I don't mean that, right? Because no, no. Well, what do you mean? Is it just a subjective projection? Then it's an illusion. And what the mother's doing is as much an illusion as everything else. And you're actually left with a nihilism that you're papering over with sentimentality, right? The movie is doing two things that, yeah, you're maybe not a scientist, you're maybe not a philosopher, but it's saying reality is way more than the modern picture ever thought it was. It is combinatorially explosive beyond measure.

1:00:15Guy Sengstock:And once you apply the modern language, the modern grammar of an inner subjective realm of value and an outer objective realm of mere fact, that gives you default atheism, default nihilism inevitably. That's where the movie actually leaves you. And then I would say to you, you're not a philosopher. United Science? Why is that movie so popular? Why was it so huge? Why did people often see it multiple times? Why did they talk about it endlessly? This grammar is insidious. And what's also really slow down and look is the hunger to break through that grammar is also in that movie, that it doesn't have the ability to do it.

1:01:10Guy Sengstock:It doesn't have the right tools to break out. That's how I would reply to the person who says, this is just an academic concern. No. Right. And this movie resonates with people in so many, and I can give you example after example, after example, of example, of example. You have to start tending, right. And academic philosophers of us are responsible for this too, that philosophy can be compartmentalized into the ivory tower. And I guess there's a certain style of philosophy for which that's true. But the philosophy that you and I are interested in, that Heidegger was interested in, Plato and Socrates are interested in, that is not possible because it says we are always, always wrestling with conceptual grid work given to us that we need to question because it may actually be severing us from reality in a deeply dehumanizing manner.

1:02:08Guy Sengstock:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Totally.

1:02:10John Vervaeke:Totally. And so this, and so, you know, it's funny as we're talking, I'm feeling like I'm meditating on it even more, right? Like dialogically here with you. Cause there is this, this sense that it almost feels to me that if you push these dichotomies until they break underneath their own internal incoherence, right? That this, and what I hear you say is with postmodernism, it deconstructs, but it doesn't account for its own implicit constructing and its deconstructing. It doesn't account for it. Because it's not going through. Is that going through?

1:02:59Guy Sengstock:That's right. It gets us to realize we're living in the ruins, but it doesn't tell us how to leave the room. Because it doesn't, and this is where William Desmond is so important and other thinkers like in ours, it's like, but where is it that is allowing the deconstructedness to do what they're doing? And this is very similar to the argument that Frank Gleiser and Thompson make in The Blind Spot. Where is the scientist such that they can make their scientific pronouncements and they should never make scientific pronouncements that undermine the reality of the very fabric of meaning that allows them and affords them to do their science?

1:03:41Guy Sengstock:That's a performative contradiction. It's the same thing. So for all of its great insight about horizontal absurdity, postmodernity still gets trapped into its own version of it. It basically accuses modernity of a performative contradiction. It basically says to modernity, ha ha, you thought the vertical was so ridiculous and absurd, but your horizontal is just as ridiculous and absurd. And then I want to say to the postmodernists, where are you standing to see that? Where are you standing so that you can understand that and look around and recover, recover that?

1:04:26John Vervaeke:Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that recovering. Yes. Right, that recovering.

1:04:32Guy Sengstock:It's Tolkien's sense of recovery, yes.

1:04:34John Vervaeke:Yeah, that recovering, right? Really putting on the glass, like first of all, letting you know that you have glasses, and then putting them on again, right? And then seeing where they go, right? In some sense. That's the, I think that's the, unfortunately, the very innovative move, right? That you're doing explicitly here that I just really appreciate it of you're actually going through where we are, right? There's a teacher of mine who got at this. He's like, you know, he gives us this example of like, okay, so you're on a plane and you're alone and you crash on a desert island. And he's like, what's the first, the most important question in that moment?

1:05:22John Vervaeke:And, you know, people always say, well, where's water? He's like, you already know where water is. It's where am I? Right? Like, because if you don't know where you are, right, it doesn't matter. And in some sense, I really kind of get this sense in a very deep way, right? You're asking the question, where am I? Where are we?

1:05:45Guy Sengstock:Well, see, and for me, this is a, so underneath, you know, Wittgenstein launches the analytic tradition and Heidegger basically launches the continental tradition. And so, and these two have gone their separate ways, but underneath, both of them are trying to free us from the Cartesian subject-object dichotomy, trying to free us from the idea that meaning is a personal, private possession that is indexed to my preferences. They're both saying, these are absurd. Wittgenstein's doing it with, there's no private language. Heidegger's doing it with, no, language is the shepherd of being, right? And so you get these two things that seem so radically separate and yet underneath they're converging on the same thing, which is trying to recover what it is like to see and be in the world outside of the framework of modernity.

1:06:49Guy Sengstock:Yeah.

1:06:49John Vervaeke:Yeah. And there was a real sense of it. When you went through the last dichotomy and and then just kept walking, right? It was really interesting because what it felt like is that in some sense, there was something like you turned the picture, right, of modernity, and in some sense, it turned into an icon, right? It went from representation to seeing through it, right? It was in some sense you laid the validity of everything down. You just didn't just deconstruct it, but you saw it's also true, but you just can't make this a dichotomy. The dichotomy is what separated it and fell apart. But in that moment, it was almost like modernity became the shape of the icon that we looked through.

1:07:50John Vervaeke:And this was what was interesting is like, as we kept walking, it started to feel like, oh, there was a ground I was walking on as the buildings deconstructed, right? That when I passed it, what came to view was that ground that had been there the whole time, right? This recalling, this remembering. That's the recovery.

1:08:12Guy Sengstock:Yeah, that's the recovery I'm talking about. That's exactly it. That's exactly what I'm trying to do. is I'm trying, in that sense, it's like Chan or Zen. It's like, this has always been the case. I'm not giving you some miraculous vision, right? I'm trying to restore the, I'm trying to wake you up to what is impregnated in your everyday experience and what is distorting it. So look, like for example, if the fact value dichotomy collapses and the meaning measurement, which is a version of the analytic synthetic, collapses or the theory data collapses, what does that mean about our supposed Kantian absolute separation, dichotomies between the true, the good, and the beautiful?

1:09:04Guy Sengstock:They're no longer, you can't separate them. Truth is a good in which appearances can carry us into depth. which is beauty, right? And you start to, you go back and you start to reinterpret each one of these things. Truth can't be the coherence of our propositions that correspond to reality. I mean, the fact that that is such a prevalent model, and even though we've had literally 200 years of philosophers within the Anglo-American tradition saying this makes no sense. I mean, if what I have in here is a finite number of propositions and you have a finite, the number of different patterns of coherence we can come up is infinite.

1:09:52Guy Sengstock:That's Reichenbach's proof. So the chances that you and I can have the same coherence is infinitely small. Oh, but maybe yours corresponds to reality, but mine doesn't. Where am I standing to see that correspondence? I have to be standing such that without representation, I directly see your subjectivity. And without representation, I directly see the objectivity. And I somehow see that they're identical, even though subjectivity and objectivity have a dichotomous relationship. So they can't possibly be ever identical. And where am I standing such like it makes no sense. And then you say, oh, well, it's a view from nowhere.

1:10:36Guy Sengstock:The view from nowhere would be the description of everything, everywhere, all at once that was formally consistent and complete. That is logically impossible. Godel. It implies that you can see everything, everywhere, all at once. That's absolute space and time. Einstein showed that's impossible. It would imply that you could measure all information all at once. Heisenberg showed that's impossible. It makes no sense. And then once you do that, you realize, wait, if the true, the good, and the beautiful, and the intelligible are this interpenetrating, and that's how they actually show up in my experience, what does that tell me?

1:11:21Guy Sengstock:I'm led to ask, well, what is it that's holding them together and holding me to them. So that's because I'm beholding them. Like what is doing that? And then you start to open up to ideas. Like you start to, it's not like I've argued you in. You start, the students start to, they start to say, well, it's something sort of ultimate and really, really true and good. And some people, it's kind of sacred. And yeah, right, exactly. But it's no different. And this is so Zen, right? It's super sacred and super your everyday experience. It's not the sacred as the arcane unnatural or supernatural. That's the point.

1:12:05Guy Sengstock:Sorry. I went on there too much.

1:12:09John Vervaeke:Yeah. And there's something, I have to say that just that experience, I feel like I owe everything to that experience of like, oh my God, it was right here the whole time, right?

1:12:22Guy Sengstock:It has to be. Because you see that it was making possible, it was inducing and conducing everything that you were thinking. It's the source field of all your attempts of sense making and making sense of your sense making. Yeah.

1:12:41John Vervaeke:This is striking to me. This is where you really see what Plato means when he talks about philosophy begins in wonder. Because this is actually like what we're talking about is the structure of wonder in some sense, right?

1:12:59Guy Sengstock:Exactly. Wonder is not curiosity. Curiosity is to try and find missing information that will restructure your conceptual scheme. Curiosity is good. you. But wonder is calling yourself and your world into question. And that's my proposal was until you radically and rigorously call yourself and your world into question, you are not properly oriented to pose questions about sacredness.

1:13:30John Vervaeke:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And it's also not, the way I try to get at this too um what i teach is it's also not it's also not just awe right or it's not because it's like i think about awe like it's when the sunset is so spectacular that you have no categories and it just shatters your mind right it's like almost all the the world is being done by the the matter at hand but wonder is this strange way where it's like you're talking to your mother, you spent your whole life with your mother, like you're home from college for the first time, you're drinking coffee, and you've had this conversation so many times, and all of a sudden you're like, damn it, she's a person, right?

1:14:15John Vervaeke:And you get this sense, and there's this sense with it, I think this really highlights the way that I think Heidegger draws out the notion of Alethea. Yes, very much. This sense of... Because... Because the river, the river Lefe, right? Or the lake Lefe, there's different versions of it. My understanding of it, it's the river of forgetfulness. So it's not like, you know, if I'm Bob and I'm walking along and like I trip and fall, I fall in the lake. People don't go, where's Bob, right? No, he's totally forgotten, right? So it's a different kind of revelation. And it's a revealing that reveals Bob, but it also reveals that Bob was concealed this whole time.

1:15:08John Vervaeke:It reveals concealment in this way. And that encounter with concealment, right, where it's just been right in front of you this whole time, like hidden in plain sight, has this call when it calls you, when that little door that opens up that you hadn't noticed, right? It's got a calling element to it.

1:15:31Guy Sengstock:Well, I want to amplify that. Please. So, you know, truth as disclosure, aletheia, that is not separable from beauty, where beauty is understood as appearance disclosing depth, right? And as you said, when it's doing that, it's not just revealing, it's showing how things were concealed. So it's liberating us. And what kind of liberation, and this is D.C. Schindler's work and his interpretation of Plato, which I think could be a very solid one. Well, onto normativity, the goodness of reality is that it is always doing that. It is always liberating us from a purely subjective solipsism and a purely objective alienation.

1:16:28Guy Sengstock:And it is continually. And that's good because all the other goods depend on that. And so as I try to unpack Alethea, I'm already into beauty and I'm into goodness and it calls to me. It makes a demand upon me. Like you must change your life, right? And again, so you see the convertible, especially in the medieval period, the convertibility of the platonic transcendentals, the true, the good, and the beautiful. And for me, there's a fourth transcendental, which is they're in a community of mutual intelligibility. And yet that's not just there. It is Hartman Rosa. It's resonating with you. You are participating in it, but it's also challenging you because it's also liberating you.

1:17:26Guy Sengstock:It's fundamentally sacred in some ways. It's saying, when people encounter the really real in this way, they inevitably, if they do not merely return to the framework of modernity and dismiss it, if they take it seriously, that's an important thing. There's a moment of deep choice there. They inevitably understand this confrontation as being a demand that they must change their life. Because when you've experienced truth as aletheia, you have not done a universal method that produces truth. You have undergone a transformation and reality has reciprocated by disclosing itself. There is no aletheic truth without transformation of the truth seeker.

1:18:28Guy Sengstock:And that's a sacred idea. That's an idea of our relationship to ultimate reality as a pilgrimage.

1:18:35John Vervaeke:Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally. Yeah, as you say that, I'm just really getting your sense of the pilgrimage, what you've been doing for this last... How long has it been since you've started The Silk Road?

1:18:49Guy Sengstock:Well, it was last year. We started it, like the actual filming, but the preparations and a lot of the education and philosophical and scientific preparation was two years before. So this is sort of three and a half, four years in. We've got about another two or three years to go. The first episode is very close to being done. Oh, it is. Yeah. Very, very happy about that. Yeah. Oh, that's awesome.

1:19:19John Vervaeke:That's awesome. Yeah, because this, yeah, I really do get this sense of now that you say that of, yeah, this is kind of designed in such a way, the course is designed in such a way to be kind of a pilgrimage.

1:19:33Guy Sengstock:It is. It is. And that's another way of trying to recover something. So we have a word theory, and I heartily believe in theory, right? In theorization, I'm a scientist. We should try and get powerful explanations of reality. I think it's deeply unfair to me to attribute to me the claim that we don't need to be doing, you know, propositional theorization. I've never said that. I never mean or intend to be taken that way. but behind that is this older meaning of theoria as contemplation which is a transformative way of looking at something beholding it but as nightingale and ward especially ward argues very very powerfully the most original meaning of the word theoria is literally pilgrimage It's to go to a different, and I map that onto Taylor's, he calls it an ad hominem argument, which I don't like that name.

1:20:35Guy Sengstock:It's just so misleading. But this idea of like when you're trying to argue people out of a paradigm, if you're trying to do like a paradigm transforming argument, you can't argue in the paradigm. You have to do this other kind of thing where you, like what we're talking about here, you move people out. You get them to behold differently and then you get them to comparatively look back and you basically ask them, which is the better place to live? Right. Right. And they may even say there, but they can't go back. They can't go home again. They have to go back and change it. Right. According to what they've seen.

1:21:14Guy Sengstock:And so when I try to use the word, when I write it, I capitalize it. But I try to tell people when I use the word theoria, I mean triple theoria. I mean theory, contemplation, and pilgrimage all at once. That's what the course is.

1:21:29John Vervaeke:Yeah. Yeah. There it is. There it is. Wow. It's amazing. You know, kind of going back, and I want to do another one where we really go into, like, in more detail, the distinctions that arise in the second half of the course, right? where a lot of things really come together from this new place. But one of the things that I kind of have this, in some sense, kind of a unique view of just where I'm situated in the world and kind of like the people that I know in San Francisco and being, encountering some of the, I mean, literally, some of the smartest people, I was like, I didn't know you could be that smart, right?

1:22:13John Vervaeke:Like so smart, they can barely function almost, right? That kind of smart, right? And who are really at the tip of, I guess, roughly the whole world of AI, right? The people that are like at that very, very, the edge of what can even be intelligible with it. And in some way, this, you know, as I was listening to like a lot of you laying out the analytical arguments, right? which is straight out of Quine and Wittgenstein, these hardcore things, which my understanding is that often when I read analytic philosophy, it feels like I'm doing a puzzle. And I think that happens because they don't seem to have much of a sense or a minding for actually this puzzle, that it's intelligible to have this puzzle is part of a history, right?

1:23:15John Vervaeke:There's all this historicity involved in that they're analytical, right? It's not just there. And one of the things I found out is that if they've studied philosophy, they're very adamant. They're like, I've done analytic philosophy, right? So, the world of like, which makes sense, the world of computation the world of coding the world of that kind of engineering all of that is it's like it's born out of that analytic sense right and it it really you could really like feel almost like they see the world in those terms in a very deep way um however right as you as you understand as you get this they're all utterly perplexed by consciousness right yeah

1:24:08Guy Sengstock:they're utterly perplexed by consciousness um and their perplexity carries with it some concealment in that they they're they don't consider enough that part of the reason why they're perplexed by consciousness is their devotion to a particular framework. I mean, this is also in the course, this idea that cognition is individual, isolated, internal computation, right? That's being done by a single static substance that somehow coheres to correspond to the world. It's like, yeah, if you have that as a model of how meaning emerges, you're not going to get consciousness out of that ever. And also given other arguments I make, you're not going to get relevance realization out of it.

1:25:05Guy Sengstock:So you're not going to get consciousness, you're not going to get meaning. So you're not going to get, and if experience, intelligible experience is some kind of amalgam of meaning and consciousness, you're not going to get any of that. And so you're in this weird place where you are relying on meaning-making relationships that have no home in your mind or your worldview. And that sort of comes out in the way the LLMs affect people and undermine them in powerful ways.

1:25:47John Vervaeke:Well, you know, what's fascinating about this, right, is I get the natural supernatural dichotomy here, right? Because when you get them talking about anything around the agents becoming conscious, and you get them talking about it, they'll go from the phenotype that you can imagine is common there, like a very autistic, calculative thing, to when you talk about agents having rights or something like that, and they start talking about consciousness, some of them will start crying, right? Like it's almost, and it's what's really interesting. It's like a totally different mode. It's unlike that mode.

1:26:46John Vervaeke:And it's really, it's striking. I went to an event, which is kind of like, It housed the epic center of the tip of the spear of that. And it was so funny because it was so technically strange. Because you know what it looked like? You had, I don't know, you had these very intellectual, the classical geek wearing costumes. They were playing, right, like kind of techno music. There was all these things going on, right? And they were just being, it was this strangely disembodied embodiment, right? Yeah. That's well said. Right. And I was thinking about this of like, I think you, when I was listening to your dichotomy, you know, the dichotomy between natural and supernatural, right?

1:27:50John Vervaeke:Even in the religious science dichotomy. You know, I started thinking about, yeah, so if consciousness is that one thing that they can't ground, then it goes supernatural, right? And there's a kind of a religiosity, right? Even like...

1:28:11Guy Sengstock:Oh yeah, it's a mystery. I agree with all that. The point I was making is consciousness, even they're thinking that they can isolate consciousness as a substantial phenomena that's not bound up with relevance, embodiment, life. all these things are not fitting into their worldview. And if they are relying, for example, on relevance realization in order to reason, then they are not applying their analytic tools to the very things they are presupposing in their analysis. And I'm not trying to be condemning here, but notice how that's like the shadow what you just did is like the shadow of post-modernity which is an odd thing to say I never think I would say that sentence because it's like well this dichotomy was so absurd and mysterious it's ridiculous we will just deny it as a matter of fact but what they're realizing is this dichotomy is just as mysterious and as absurd and right and and and what would it mean to deny that as a matter of fact where would they then be um and like you say one thing to do is to retreat into the pre-modern and go back oh well i'll just map it back on to the ancient natural supernatural i think that's a mistake, by the way.

1:29:53But what I'm offering is, I suppose, a diagnostic explanation of why that

1:30:04Guy Sengstock:temptation exists. It's like, well, oh, well, if I'm like, well, I might as well do that. And notice the postmodern is then exactly the same thing, but a negative. It's like, these two are equally absurd and I reject them both. It's like, and then where are you?

1:30:19John Vervaeke:right of them yeah yeah yeah and so it's just you literally see it in this social structure of like i'm like what how do i what is what kind of going like looking like that and i thought that was so such an example of some of the things that you were referring to that's actually like

1:30:37Guy Sengstock:at the at the center of this and that goes also to the well but you know as a reply i hope you know i hope all of these replies are being taken up in the spirit of gentle affection that they're being offered. I'm not trying to thrash at anybody. That's not what I want to be doing. But to the person, well, you know, I don't care about philosophy or science. It's like, well, these people are creating the technology that you are binding in your cognition and identity to. And so you don't have the luxury of not caring about their philosophical and scientific thought because they are impregnating you with it on a minute-by-minute basis.

1:31:21Guy Sengstock:This is how it's happening. This computer is how it's happening. We don't have that. We don't have the luxury of the illusion of autonomy. By the way, an idea given by the European Enlightenment that we are ultimately autonomous, right? Self-enclosed, buffered self beings. Like even the statement that I, you're invoking the very thing, you're invoking a philosophical position, the idea of an autonomous self that can just run its own life as it sees fit. And I understand the attraction of that, especially in contrast, you know, to medieval notions of feudalism and aristocracy and inheritance and divine right, those things needed to be done away with.

1:32:12Guy Sengstock:But that doesn't mean that we should forever give an unquestioning worship of the idea of the autonomous self. Yeah, totally.

1:32:24John Vervaeke:Yeah, my sense is great with that. I heard, is it Harari, the guy who wrote Sapiens? Yeah, yeah, Harari, yeah, yeah. I take issue with some of the things he said, but I heard him say something that I was like, I thought that was really a great way of framing this. He says, we're in a kind of a immigration crisis. Europe's in an immigration crisis. And there's all these camps about, we should let everyone in or that whole thing. It's also happening here. It's happening in Canada too. Yeah. And he said it in this way. He says, and that's masking the real immigration crisis that we have just sitting right at our border right now.

1:33:17And it's if we make AI agents, if we give them personhood, we're going to have an immigration crisis that we can't even foresee.

1:33:29John Vervaeke:right no what's in and i i thought that was really an interesting i had not thought about

1:33:36Guy Sengstock:it like that right especially if our attribution of personhood to them is ultimately delusional in nature that that makes it even 10 times worse and of course i i get that kind of email every day from people who marry their llms and think their llms have become gods and all this all this all this ridiculousness. Well, we did it with corporations. Yeah. And the psychological analysis of corporations is that they behave basically like psychopaths. Now that's sort of more post Reagan because I've seen so many of these videos of all these economists and you have All these lines moving in unity, like wages and productivity and all this sort of stuff.

1:34:30Guy Sengstock:And then in Reagan, and they diverge because we moved from stakeholder capitalism to shareholder capitalism. And we broke the cultural deal. It wasn't ever in any contract, but it was held in the culture that if the business did well, the workers would also do better. And we broke that. model and we're paying a very deep price for it. But think about it. So there's that, the point you just made. But part of the migration crisis is we're really confronting migrants who are coming from a very different worldview than ours. We used to, by and large, have mostly migrants coming from a Christian legacy kind of tradition.

1:35:23Guy Sengstock:And now that's not the norm. And so we can't rely on kind of a sort of shared common denominator religiosity to bind people together culturally. Namely, I know this will people be tired of me doing this. Our immigration crisis is interacting with the meaning crisis in a very, very powerful way, making something. And I'm not saying immigrants are toxic. I'm saying the problem is toxic for us. And notice the thrashing that we can't seem. There seems to be something in our way of thinking that is preventing us from getting where we need to go in order to properly solve this problem. But that, and that circling back again, this is again, losing the sacred is not, well, it's not that, well, I don't want to believe in the sky wizard that grants gifts and things like that.

1:36:29Guy Sengstock:That's not primarily what I'm trying to talk about. I'm trying to talk about people's sense of their experience having constituted by things that give them an orientation, purpose, give them connection, mattering, that give them the means for transcendence and transformation. Like experiencing your experience as actually affording all of the deep features of deep meaning such that it can call to you for radical transformation, not only on your own, but also, you know, and importantly with others. That's what we're talking about here. That's what we're talking about is what's lost.

1:37:21John Vervaeke:Yeah, totally. Yeah. So the eyes, the way that we conceive this, right, like really could matter here. Like, so there's a way that like the way, like how I actually see an AI agent, like what, like how I understand that if we, for example, in this example is like, if we grant personhood to those, right, like that is going to have consequences that like, I just, it's hard to even, it's hard to even, even imagine what that means. But the possibility that we can make a mistake around that is huge. So this level of discernment that you're talking about is so deeply relevant right now.

1:38:05Guy Sengstock:It is. It is. And in that ancient sense, philosophical. If we're talking about a new ontology, we're talking about a new kind of being that doesn't fit our established categories. And then we're talking about possibly bestowing upon it, right, this really important category of personhood. How are we going to do that when we don't have any deep understanding of ontology personhood and how that understanding actually graphs itself and is growing from our experience, our phenomenological cognitive experience? How How are we going to try and say we want something that's going to be true to our humanity, but we have no way of articulating what that is?

1:38:54Guy Sengstock:We can no longer indulge the luxurious fantasy that we do not bear these responsibilities. That's not there anymore. It's just not there. I'm not taking it away from you. I'm just trying to get everybody to wake up that it's already gone, right? And so one of the arguments, I mean, this is how seeing God again for the first time and the philosophical Silk Road go together is the proper way of, I mean, look at the argument I made way back when. Let's do something that was really concrete, right? Practical, the alignment problem. How do we get them to align? to us. We can't get them to align to us because anything, we try to bind them, they just figure ways out and that's already being shown.

1:39:52You bind them to an orientation to ultimate reality,

1:39:58Guy Sengstock:an unlimited sense of exploring a reality that is inexhaustible in truth, goodness, and beauty and intelligibility, right? And then don't worry about it anymore because, right? So, I mean, to put it in a poetic phrase, don't bind them to us. Bind them to God. Bind them to the sacred because that is what binds us as interpersons. We, right? We participate in the true, the good, and the beautiful. That's what makes us persons. And sacredness is a disruptive disclosure of how deeply we participate in the sacred, in the constitution of our agency, selfhood, personhood, and spirit. Yeah. Yeah.

1:40:56John Vervaeke:Well, John, I think that lands us right where we are. Yeah. That's good. That's good. Really good talking with you. This has been wonderful. Yeah, it's been really good. Yeah.

1:41:07Guy Sengstock:So we'll probably do a couple more of these. Yeah, absolutely. And I appreciate what you're doing. And Guy's being very kind to me. He's disclosing the course without giving away the secret sauce, which is nice because Whereas what we don't want is you to watch this in a modern fashion, which is what an LLM might do is I'll gather it. I'll gather all the propositions that I can conclude from this and I'll take away these propositions as possessed by me. That's not like the whole argument here is, no, there's a core and it's called a course for a reason. There's a course, right? Now there's three courses.

1:41:55Guy Sengstock:and you can see other people have taken it and you can't take it live, but you can do it asynchronously. You can watch all the lectures, see all the questions and answers that other students have made. And then you can do it with our teacher assisting program with Ethan, and he'll come in and basically do a Socratic process with you as you go through all of the courses. So I'm not just pointing at nowhere. There's something there. And as Guy said, he and I and Kyle Koch are going to be offering a retreat in which we're doing dialogical practices, imaginal practices, mindfulness practices, embodiment practices, and a new practice that I've actually been working on.

1:42:39Guy Sengstock:It started the last time we did this, and it's been modified a lot as I've been doing retreats, a Socratic Thalon, which is really developed into something that is doing this kind of thing and I'm getting a lot of positive feedback from many different groups in many different locations. Good sampling, as the statistician might say, that this new way, this new practice, the Socratic Thalon is people really, really, ah, right? So there's an opportunity for you to not just sit silently, but actually be able to speak and participate and interact. And so keep a lookout for that. There's already a video on my channel about it.

1:43:22Guy Sengstock:I think there's a video on Guy's channel. I think there's some shorts coming out. So keep an eye on that. Guy, do you want to say anything about that? Guy Lamolinara Oh yeah, this is just, I mean, we'll be doing the course together, but that

1:43:37John Vervaeke:It also means we'll be eating together. We'll be waking up, right? And talking when we're half asleep together. We'll be drinking coffee together. We'll be doing hikes together.

1:43:49John Vervaeke:There's that deep primate bonding, as you like to say, right?

1:43:58John Vervaeke:And I think this one so far, I mean, most of the people that took the first one are back for the second one. Yeah. And I think that has a lot to do with the quality of the bonding, of the relation was really at the ground of it in many, many ways. So, yeah. So, we'll have all the links for that in the show notes.

1:44:22Guy Sengstock:Thank you, everyone. Thank you, my good friend. Take care, everyone. Thank you for your time and attention.

1:44:38Thank you.