Silk Road Seminar: John Vervaeke with James Matthew Wilson and D.C. Schindler

33:19And I think that's what you're pointing to, David. There's an implicit sense. It's like they have the memory of what it's like to be in touch. And they've lost it. And they're trying to – but how do we get it back? How do we get it back? How do we get it? Yeah. Yes. Yes. That's what – that's what – Yeah, the way you framed it a few minutes ago, David, actually was a little bit striking, maybe even a little bit shocking, because you sort of say all these modern thinkers are beginning with the moment of crisis and therefore negation as the first movement. And one's tempted to say, why'd they do that?

33:57And the fact is there are too many answers. I mean, take your crisis. Yeah. And it's, you know, this is something that continues over the centuries. When I think of, I was talking about Alan Tate and John Crowe Ransom and Ivor Winters earlier, but when I look back on the early 20th century, I see all these incredible thinkers who are marvelous theorists of the modern. And I don't know if either of you have read Paul King's North's Machine book. I read it this last fall so I could – well, while you – sorry. While you guys were in Chicago, I was in Chicago interviewing him but at a different event.

34:39So I read that book and it's a pretty rudimentary study but it just goes through thinker after thinker after thinker. And all of these figures he mentions from Hannah Arendt to, of course, inevitably McIntyre and Taylor and then sort of Wendell Berry, but also outliers who I would not have thought of as great authorities of modern criticism. But nonetheless, there's a great pantheon that he sort of brings up. They all, you might say, they all have the goods that is on modernity. That is to say, they all have a prescient critique of the modern. And yes, there's a sense of if we can just address this, we can go either back to something prior or create a new synthesis, as many thinkers would say, or as T.S.

35:37Eliot would put it, to reascend to origins, to go forward by going in a certain sense back to what's resource month would be another formulation of that. But the problem is from the 15th century, especially, sorry, 16th century through these great early 20th century thinkers is the whole intellectual framework is always that of critique. And therefore, the crisis has to lead because they're uncertain how you would make something new. They just know quite perceptively what's gone wrong with the project over the centuries. Yeah, no, that's really interesting. It's like T.S. Eliot, you know, that we're defined by, the modern age is defined by what it's running away from or, you know, why it's running away.

36:32But without, so it's moving from something without a positive articulation of what that is. I mean, that to me is the interesting question. I mean, this is, you know, so one of the, you know, so you've got the modern age as positing a crisis and then responding to it. And then the late modern critics who are criticizing them. But that's, you know, you might say that they're still in then the modern mode of beginning with the criticism. So, you know, is it in fact the case that a kind of crisis was just the fact of the matter, that history had fallen into Christ, and so some solution had to be found, you know, or is, is, I mean, this is going to sound a little maybe too much like the hermeneutics of suspicion, but I think there's something to this, you know, is, was a crisis sort of invented in order to justify a kind of break?

37:30And that's what I find, I mean, and it doesn't have to be hermeneutics of suspicion in the sense that some devious thinkers wanted to try to, in a sneaky way, you know, break from tradition. I mean, I think that this is something all of us experience in, you know, psychologically speaking. I'm fascinated by the expression that one hears. I don't know if one still hears this. I'm always about, you know, a good six months behind any any trends, but people talk about the importance of touching grass, you know? And I mean, that's actually a really profound, I mean, first of all, it's absolutely true.

38:11I mean, when, when is the last time you've, you know, gone outside in the sunshine? We talked about this last time, you know, you touch grass and there is a certain sense, suddenly you actually feel like if you, if you're doing something real, I'm reminded of that the, there was some, someone who proposed horseback riding as a way of overcoming psychological disorders and anxieties and so forth. There's something about being in contact with a living being in this way. I mean, we were talking about some of these things last time, but I mean, to my mind, it's really interesting to think of how one can generate, you know, get a sense of a crisis that's fueled by a kind of imagination, a sort of a bad faith imagination, or perhaps not even bad faith, but a kind of a self-deluding imagination where you expand the size of problems that no longer have any sort of proportionate relation to reality.

39:16And then you're forced to take desperate measures to resolve them. I mean, I wonder if these fundamental shifts, you know, could be made more plausible in relation to something like this kind of a self-generated crisis, whether deliberate or not. You know, we're speaking in abstractions here. I mean, at a certain point, one would have to get more into the nitty gritty of the history. Well, let me say two things. I fear, I should rewatch our conversation last time for fear that I'm just repeating myself here. But to go to the natural two boogeymen, Hobbes and Descartes, in the age in which Hobbes is writing, Aristotle's ethics are, you might say, at an all-time high in popularity.

40:12I mean, it's the standard text of Renaissance humanism. They have no interest in metaphysics, but they think they can do ethics. And Aristotle shows the way. And it continues then with its influence on the Enlightenment thinkers where they just sentimentalize Aristotle and that's how you get the moral, sentimental ethics of virtue. So he's having an all, Aristotle's never had it so good. And then Hobbes comes along to say, it's precisely Aristotle I have to refute. And the case numero uno of what needs to be refuted is the telos towards goodness. And the reason, Hobbes tells us, is that it doesn't work.

41:01Like it might work for you. It might work for good people, but it won't work for everybody. The only thing that works for almost everybody is fear. And then you don't kill the people who aren't afraid. And then you've got 100 % compliance with fear. So you have an elimination of one kind of final causality in order to create a machine of politics, a true rationality that will work. But it has to be work rooted in proper fearfulness. And then his enemy basically comes to the same idea. With Descartes, I'm in 50-50 sympathy with John's account of Descartes here because on the one hand, he clearly emerges out of Montaigne, And it's really fruitful to think of Descartes and Pascal and Montaigne as in dialogue together.

41:54In fact, I'm going to I guess I just actually 100 percent agree with that, but with one sort of caveat. And that's and that's is that I just don't think the concern for certainty is as important, in fact, for Descartes as it is for him rhetorically. That rhetorically, it's important because he's trying to establish a new mode of reasoning. but that what he really wants to get to is the point where he can say, as he does, final causality is of no use for physics. And, you know, and then David's written about this in The Catholic City of Reason, the sort of false modesty move. Who am I to talk about ends?

42:31I can only talk about things, but, or I can only talk about my purposes. But there's Leon Brunsvig, the interpreter of Montaigne, Descartes, and Pascal, says late in his study of the three, he says that for descartes it's not ignorance of final causes it's that we ourselves will give the final cause to nature and so that so what is what is kind of two distinct moves a quest for power but also a reduction of reason also you see the interdependence of those two things if you reduce reason to a certain level then suddenly there's nothing standing in the way of a certain account of the good or a certain account of human power that previously was frustrated by the theory of natural ends uh yeah i i think i mean david they just gone through one of the bloodiest civil wars in history the religious wars yeah right um and that's scarring them dramatically and at the same time in all that confusion, you've got the rise of mathematical experimental science, which seems to be offering a way in which we can resolve what have seemed to be long-standing philosophical disputes.

43:52That pairing seems awfully intoxicating to my mind. Now, is that what you mean, that they're imagining something? Go ahead. Yeah, no, I mean, I mean, in a certain sense, I would say that what I mean, it's kind of interesting. There are many ways to interpret that. I mean, it's not an accidental. Yeah. Coincidence there. I think you can see a certain connection. What would be the connection? That would be a kind of a fragmenting of the what had been up to that point, the Western tradition. Yes. Which which in a way had its home in, you know, the Catholic Church and the Catholic, you know, and Christendom as a kind of temporal cultural expression of this Christian tradition that had, you know, skirmishes here and there and breaks here and there.

44:50but on the whole, a kind of organic unity. And when that is, you know, when that fractures, then, you know, it seems to be the case that there's not an ultimate authority. And if there's not an ultimate authority, then one has to, one can't come to the truth through a sort of natural trust. In the authority. And so, so, so now there's a kind of a veil, an ultimate veil. And it seems to me, this is, this is, first of all, why you're going to have civil wars. I mean, the, the, the, the, the wars that have at some, at some level, a kind of an idea that you've got competing factions, you know, denominations of Christianity.

45:42I mean, that's already a function of a reconception of what Christianity is and what authority is that's behind that. And that then will already, in a way, lower the horizon. So, you know, with I mean, this is the thing with Hobbes and with Descartes and so forth. I mean, James, the way you were describing Hobbes, I mean, it really is sort of perfect. I remember one of the first times teaching this to undergraduates. And I presented it and I thought that there would be a certain, you know, automatic, the students would see what I was wanting to call into question. But the students were totally convinced by Hobbes.

46:23And they said, well, I mean, it does seem to be a better system. And I said, why? And they said, well, yeah, it will work better. And but here's the thing that is so fascinating is they don't realize that they're using the standard of what works better as the criterion by which to judge is already a kind of capitulation to Hobbes and kind of the, you know, prior to that. So so Plato in The Republic, you know, he says that, wait a minute, you can never measure truth by what works. It always has to go the other way around. The first question is not whether this is the most feasible system. The first question is whether it's true.

47:11And now that doesn't exclude the question of whether something is practically feasible, but that can't be the first question one raises. And the moment one does, it seems to me you're already in crisis mode. Because then what sets the horizon for all of your thinking and doing and your imagination is a problem that needs to be solved, as opposed to a simple acknowledgement, a contemplative, beholding, celebratory yes to reality. You see, it's a totally different move. So let's try and gather this because I do want to get back to, I mean, this is not irrelevant. I'm not trying to marginalize it in that way.

47:59I mean, I think this historical reflection on the origins of, and this is something James is actually pointing to later in the book, the mythos of modern reason is a very, and I don't know, I'm trying to get, like, I think, I'm sensing that there's, well, no, to my mind, what's coming out of this, that there is, there's a turn of the imagination, like you're saying, David, which reformulates our fundamental orientation to reality as problematic rather than receptive. But I take James's point, which I also, I'm in very strong agreement with. Yeah. But there's, there's also these historical forces.

48:43I mean, it's a kind of Hegelian argument. There's stuff happening within the history of philosophy that is constraining what is, you know, what can be imagined by people. Yes, right. And those two things are like, what I'm saying is, I don't know if we really have an exhaustive choice facing us here, or what we're talking about are multi dimensions of the same sort of pivot point. I just want to know if that's fair enough for now to go to proceed forward. Fair enough for me. Yeah. Okay. So that's good because I want to bring out a couple of things that come out of that that I think are like that I've talked a lot about.

49:23Like I want to talk about because I want to break up mythos into a couple of different components. One is the imagination because it's been invoked a lot here. And I think it's playing an important role. And then the other is story. And so image and story. And James, you use both sort of interchangeably when you're talking about mythos. So I don't think I'm imposing anything on you. You're using both. And I want to bring out a couple of sort of cognitive scientific points. So give me a moment here, both of you, and then put it on the table and see.

50:01Because one of the things that's been going on is a recovery of the imaginal as distinct from the imaginary. where the imaginary is we form pictures in our mind that are entertaining. Whereas the imaginal is when, my favorite example, a child puts on a little blanket and runs around saying, I'm Superman. They're not picturing something for entertainment. They're trying to take on the perspective and the identity of somebody so they can attain a developmental stage. They can move. They can acquire skills and a sense of what it is to be a virtuous human being. etc. And then the point that a lot of people have been making is that that imaginal aspect of our cognition is right.

50:48First of all, when we reduced it to the merely imaginary, we lost something. And by the way, this distinction, I think Courage has this distinction. So I think the romantics caught it at a time because the imaginal is actually integral to reason. So, for example, let's say reason, just a couple of quick examples. I can go on and on over all of this, but reason requires metacognition that I can go into a space and reflect on my cognition and come to know what I'm thinking. that inner space is entirely imaginal in nature. It's not a literal space. And yet it's not a merely, it's not a mere illusion because you get real knowledge because reason presupposes that that knowledge is accessible to you.

51:35You can know your own cognition in some way that is true and makes a difference. And it's completely imaginally dependent in a deep, deep way. The next one is pursuing long-term goals. There's a lot of more deep cognition about this, but let's just give you the experimental results because you two are both smart enough. You'll get the overall gist. You go into a bunch of academics. Here we are. And you get right. We're supposed to be the cream of the crop. And you give them undeniable arguments, overwhelming empirical evidence. You let them give all their challenges until there's silence because they acquiesce that they should start saving for retirement right now.

52:19Yep. Yep. You come back in six months and none of them are saving for retirement. Now you do the following. You say, well, you know, people are not properly connecting. Notice my language to their future self because their future self is old and ugly and retired and losing status. Right. So instead, what we'll do is every day, I want you to imagine your future self as a beloved family member that you've always taken care of. They reformulate the perspective and the identification. Then you come back in six months and you find two things. The people who do the imaginal act are saving for their retirement.

53:07and the more vividly they do it, the more they're saving for their retirement. Because, again, as I'm trying to say, it's not, the ways we deceive ourselves are not primarily just inferential fallacy. It's how we're construing things, what's salient, how we're identifying with them, our emotional responsivity to them. And if you don't address those things, you can't, for example, overcome what's called hyperbolic discounting, temporal discounting, right? I'm just those two examples, reflection and long term goals require the imaginal. They are indispensable. I could make a third point about Agnes Callard's point about aspiration to become more rational is an aspirational project.

53:51And it's a proper part of rational to be rational is to aspire to being more rational. And that aspirational project can't be carried out inferentially because I don't know what my values are going to be. and I don't know how things are going to be to me until after I've undergone the transformation. So I have to engage in imaginal behavior in order to properly aspire. We've got empirical evidence. One of my students is a PhD thesis showing this, that people are able to pursue aspirational goals to agree to which they internalize a role model. That's an imaginal act. You have to internalize a role model.

54:33I'm giving you three examples. Aspiration, central to rationality. Long-term goal pursuit, central to rationality. And metacognitive reflection, central to rationality. All of them require the imaginal, indispensably, irremovably. So I just wanted to put that out there as trying to say, to my mind, that means if we're talking about logos or reason and we're not talking about the imaginal we are we're doing a blind spot we're we're pretending that we're not relying on the imaginal in order to do all of the quintessential actions that define being rational not only you pretend you're not depending on the imaginal but you may actually be putting much too much burden upon the imaginal because take everything you just said there and i don't mean you i mean we yeah yeah yeah uh take what take everything you just said and then simply connect that with the brunch vig's proposal that descartes whole project is that it's it's we ourselves who give the end to nature so you then have the following proposition that that your your rationality and indeed your flourishing depends upon this capacity to aspire to imagine to long-term plan and there is nothing in nature that directs that activity in any way whatsoever it's entirely up to you there was that lousy book uh all things shining years ago that you know that's, that was the big problem with that one was that they were trying, I actually really enjoyed that book, but Gary Wills tore it in two.

56:23I don't like the book. So yeah. Yeah. Okay. Well, I'm glad, I'm glad you don't like Gary Wills. I critique of it was so decisive that I thought, Whoa, that's I, you know, I should have been harsher on it in my review. I was pretty gentle. I said, well, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're on the trail of something, but I guess the Walker Percy side of me like that, but. But the whole problem there, which is a regurgitation of the whole problem of ethics for Santayana in the late 19th century and really going back, is how do you create imagined metaphysical structures to guide your imagination?

57:08You can't. You can try. But it fails. I just want to make sure I've got James and then I want to hear you. So, James, I hear you saying you're like, yeah, the imaginal is playing a role, but it's playing this really backgrounded role. And it's a backgrounded role that has also been sort of integrated with the notion of autonomy and projection. Did I get you correctly? Yeah. Maybe part of it, too, is that it's a new conflation of the imaginal and the imaginary. I mean the imaginal is just a total fiction you know that has no foundation in anything yeah anything real so it's a total projection or something but anyway I don't want to no no wait but that's a gem I want to I want no that's a good that's a good that that yeah we could bring those two together and saying so we could say functionally it is still the imaginal but they are understanding it reductively as the merely imaginary is that fair David yeah just subjectively projected yeah we're giving our ends to nature kind of a thing yeah that's good that's good so so that that's why santiana who's you know and so for for most people it's kind of a forgotten figure but i i try to keep him as a central player in my own thinking about these things because he's the one who self-consciously said that you know the cosmos of of of dante does not exist but if you would be civilized it had better come to exist in your mind yeah yeah and that's that's how you're to live yeah but that's so it's putting too much pressure i guess i like the the the reformulation so that the um the imaginals reduce to the imaginary but then the imaginary has to do the work of the imaginal yeah that's right that's right yeah yeah yeah i mean uh i think it'd be interesting to reflect on the relationship between the imaginal and beauty actually if we want oh Oh, good idea.

59:06You know, that there's something, you know, appearance-like. There's a creative sort of envisioning of what could be beyond what is. Yeah.

59:51in a sense, opens us up to, makes possible a disclosure of a depth of realness. And that's beauty in some sense, and it's authoritative for us. It guides us in some fashion. Yeah, I mean, just notice the example, one of the examples that you gave about, you know, we don't connect with the thought of ourselves as decrepit and old, and we don't want it. So there's nothing beautiful there. it's not attracting us and therefore it's not informing our acts it's not it's not just directing our souls to use yes yeah plato's notion of the you know psychogogia um uh but but when you think of it as a beloved family member there there's a kind of a beauty you're yeah yeah recognizing a certain beauty in it and it's drawing you forth that's good david that's very good that's a very stood observation well one one thing i would i would say too is kind of i mean just to put some of those those really beautiful examples that you were giving in a uh revelatory um uh examples in in a in terms of classical metaphysics i mean it seems to me this is one of the ways of saying that we are embodied reason you know yeah that that it's always going to be situated, it's always going to be in a kind of space that, you know, our body is in a physical space, quite literally, and our reason in a certain sense transcends space.

1:01:23And yet, you know, it's capable of grasping things that are independent of space and time in some respect. And yet we're not just reason on the one hand and body on the other that somehow happen to be together, we're actually an integrated whole. And so our, our reason in our bodies inform each other. And that means that, um, there's going to be something analogous to the trans, you know, there's going to be an analogous space that is open to the kind of transcendence of reason, but that's, that's the center of our thinking. It's, it's going to be, you know, I, I like to think, I mentioned this last time that the heart is becoming a kind of a new category for me.

1:02:06thinking about these sorts of things, but it'd be a way of, you know, that would be the imaginal. This is where you have a kind of space, you know, within which there's a, there's a certain horizon, um, uh, that, that guides, but doesn't constrict your, your thinking. And, and, uh, and it's, it's precisely for that reason is able to evoke a kind of erotic move. I mean, And this would be connecting it with beauty and love. And that's, I mean, that is, I mean, I was emphasizing the horizontal because we were talking cognitively, but like Ibn al-Arabi and Corban, the imaginal has the vertical dimension because it's precisely that realm of knowing and being that binds the sensual and the intellectual in the intellectual sense, right?

1:02:59in the intellect of sense together, like you're proposing. The imaginal is properly both vertical or ontological. It's the intersection. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. I mean, that's just really fascinating, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think that's right. That premise is underlying where our discussion started weeks ago, which is why do we need to talk about intellectual senses? Yep, yep, exactly. It's precisely because any merely horizontal account of the imagination with a vertical account of rationality flies in the face of the great insight that begins with the concept of the noose, which is that a fullness of knowledge will be a fullness of seeing.

1:03:47Yes. Yes. And in a fullness of seeing, really, it's not leaving the imagination behind. It's it's the it's in fact the archetype of what imagination is. That that are seeing with our senses and are seeing particular scenes with our mind, imagining possible futures and so on and so forth. All of that finds its its archetype and perfection in the act of of of staring into the truth of. I think that's right I think the spiritual senses and the imaginal are deeply interwoven James, I agree very much with that. Are you connecting this with mythos too then, John? Is that what you want to do? What I want to do, I want to I'm building an argument I've got that mythos so when I'm reading through the chapter when James is invoking the mythos logos, he constantly defers to both image and story And so I want to make a case for both of them and then ask how we bring them together within mythos.

1:04:49That's the argument I'm trying to work towards. So I want to turn to a story now because I'm going to give you another cognitive science proposal, just like I did, and we can play with it. So I want to propose that between mythos and logos is dialogos. And give me a moment for what I mean by that. So one of the great images given to us by modernity is monological computation. I'm talking to myself, like I'm doing a monologue in my head. And so we've got sort of two main branches of arguments. One is genealogical, and this is like the dialogical roots of deduction by Noves, and then the psychological work by Mercier and Sperber.

1:05:40And what all this points towards is that what we call reason, if what we mean by that is the overcoming of self-deception, the enhancement of, I'll try and keep it broad here, connectedness to realness, realization of some sense, right, is actually better carried out dialogically than monologically. So a couple of reasons why that's the case. And these are measurable. I mean, like metabolically measurable, not just met behaviorally measurable. We are bad at noticing our own biases. We're really poor at it. We're almost geniuses at noticing other people's biases. and and that could be that our i mean there's an evolutionary story around that but i i think the evidence we don't i believe the evolutionary story but i don't think you need to believe the evolutionary story in order to believe the evidence is what i'm saying it's like no no this clearly is the case we're inherently dialogical you take a standard experiment the waste and selection task the one that we've been using since 1966 robustly replicated, no replication crisis here.

1:06:47And, you know, with that, with the gems of society, you know, university, Ivy league, you know, people and only 10 % of it get it right. It's a simple task and it shows confirmation bias repeatedly, repeatedly. People only look for evidence that confirms their belief rather than that might just confirm it. And oh, no. Now you take the same exact same experiment, replace the one person with four people, no extra time, tell them that they have to work together to get the right answer. And the success rate goes from 10 % to 82%. And what you can show, if you take a look at the actual protocol, it's not the case that one person came up with the answer and then persuaded the others.

1:07:31It's the group that dialogically comes up with the answers, right? And so this is what I mean by what, and so I don't want to use the word dialogue because that has a current meaning. I'm trying to get this notion of dialogos, like a dialogical logos that is occurring between people as modeled in things like the platonic dialogues. And now here's the next point. How we do this, if we put it into dialogical, things that really matter that come up in the platonic corpus, perspective and character matter. Perspective and character matter. And a lot of third way Platonism shows that's integral to the dialogue, the dialogues.

1:08:18That's what the research shows too. And so what you have to ask yourself is, okay, how do we train human beings to be able to pick up on each other's mental states so they can assess perspective and character. And this is another really powerful cognitive scientific theoretical claim that has a lot of evidence for it. It's called the narrative practice hypothesis. The way, well, we used to have this, well, I just look at your behavior and I figure out what your desires are and then I calculate your beliefs. That's kind of bullshit, by the way. Because like if you said something untrue, how do I know you're lying?

1:09:01How do I know you're not being kind? How do I know you're not just tired? I need to know your character. I need to know the context. I need to know the situation. Anyway, Daniel Hudo's point is we've been doing, we do this with kids from the get-go. And we reduce, like I had to sit through the Teletubbies twice. We reduce narrative to this really, you know, Tinky Winky wants to go to the market. Po wants to come along. Tinky Winky says, okay, Po. Oh, Poe says, yeah. And you, ah, right? But we do this. And then, but Hudo's point is we don't stop doing it as adults. You go home and you tell your loved one about your day.

1:09:40What do you do? You tell a story. You turn on the news. What do you want to get? You don't want the facts. You want the story behind them. In fact, we have a terrific bias called the narrative bias. We think if we can tell a story, we've got the essence of what's going on in a situation. It's so powerful. And so what I'm trying to say is, this is the argument. We need narrative practice to get mind sight so that we can do that perspectival and character coordination that is needed for dialogos, that is actually at the core of what makes us capable of reliably overcoming self-deception and realizing what's the case.

1:10:20That's the argument. Yeah. I mean, this is, you mentioned Plato a number of times. I mean, I just couldn't help but think of Plato the whole way through.

1:10:35I mean, if I was following you correctly, you began by saying theologos in between mythos and logos. Right, right, right, right. Because at the end you were just talking about narrative practices. But it's interesting. I mean, so mythos is a tale, sort of telling a tale, like narrating a story. and it's interesting Plato I mean I think he wants he wants all three of these he wants mythos logos and the logos I believe so yes yeah and and they all have a proper place but there is something about um one of his complaints about the the sophists is that they would just give a speech a sort of a model they would tell a story and um uh they wouldn't allow questions so it was a very long story and Plato's always saying well wait a minute you know are we allowed to ask questions or not.

1:11:25And, and part of the critique there is that, that, you know, if you simply have a narrative, it's not going to, you're also not going to get quite get to the truth. You need the narrative in a way as a, as a foundation, you know, something to ask questions about. And then logos, if you think of it as this thinking something through, that's also required, but in between those, you need to have a discussion. And there is something about a narrative as telling a story and presenting the ideas. But when a person is able then to ask questions about it, and then you have to give an explanation, you're able to go into depth and deepen the sense.

1:12:08And precisely because it's more than one person, because mythos by itself is, in a way, one person giving a speech. and logos can be one person, but dialogos is it's by its very nature. It's good. That creates that sort of imaginally, uh, uh, gives you a sense of truth as having a kind of a reality of its own in between us, that it's not reducible to what either one of us want simply, but it, it comes to be from the interaction between us. And, you know, I, I have to say, I mean, I think we all have this experience, sometimes teaching, I'll have, you know, I'll have notes for a kind of a lecture.

1:12:50But if the students don't ask any questions, I always feel like it falls flat, and I'm not quite getting to the heart of it. And I want them to ask questions, because there's something I can't quite anticipate. And it's precisely an asking a question that allows me to see the very point that I was trying to make from a different perspective, that's revelatory for me and it's going to be revelatory for them. And then through this kind of conversation, this full-blooded reality in a way starts to emerge between us all. I think Theologos is really crucial for that.

1:13:29So to start with a crisis of modernity and then work back to what's good,

1:13:37These very subtle crises of modernity, so subtle that one may never notice them, is that we tend to think of stories as perhaps illustrative. You have an abstract principle, and then you say, for example, this happens, which is part of good rhetoric, is part of classical rhetoric. So it's not wrong. It's just incomplete. But then we have the other account of the child's tale. The tale told to creatures incapable of abstract reasoning, so you narrate for them as a rough and ready physicalized substitute for what you hope someday will become liberated reason. but those are and and that sorry that's also true it's it's it's not that that's false it's but that both of those accounts the illustrative and and the the the fabulous or the didactic tale they're both they're both mere species of just a broader interaction of the mythos with with the logos and so that was so in that was the exciting moment that that led to the vision of the soul getting written was actually it was hearing john milbank uh i think you were in the room too david at baylor university in 2006 i think yeah yeah yeah uh um and uh and he just referred back to marcel detien who who makes the proposal that uh that etymologically mythos and logos both are aboriginally in greek speech and that it's it's only plato's invention of myth mythology that distinguish that's that's how detien puts it that separates mythos from logos so that one becomes true speech and gets associated with rationality and accuracy etc and the other becomes false speech associated with with old women by the by the hearth with superstition and with and with um And with vicious tales of gods seducing goddesses and so on and so forth.

1:15:48And and so what what Détien's purpose in that distinction is effectively irrationalistic. He's a good French postmodern thinker, and he's simply trying to break down our scientific distinction and leave nothing in its place. But what was so suggestive in Milbank's lecture all those 20 years ago now, I guess, was the possibility of reuniting mythos and logos and allowing them to exist together. And there's a nice happy conclusion we can draw, which is that you're welcome to reunite them because you never were capable of separating them in the first place. that the whole realm of mythos is foundational to human reasoning.

1:16:34And it's really the terrain through which the reason walks. And I'm going to take this in a slightly – in the book, I go in one direction. I want to take it in a slightly different direction just based on something you guys were saying. And that's – David says that John's account of group reasoning is reminding you of Plato. And the most obvious example is the symposium where we have four supposedly inane speeches about the nature of love before Diatima solves it all. But a crucial element of each of the earlier speeches in love is retained and validated by Socrates and Diatima. And so there's a dialogos going on even among what sounds like pure mythos, mythos, mythos, mythos, or pure rhetoric, rhetoric, rhetoric.

1:17:24and but okay so then one last point here that the dialogos is something that happens between people but it also happens within the self which you were saying that that you're speaking to yourself and just to give one example of it classical christian practice such as in francis de sal or Ignatius of Loyola involves internal dialogue such that you address your own soul as a separate character. So you need to create this separation so that you're not just merely you. You're not just talking to yourself, you're talking with yourself. So you're engaged in dialect. And I think that's suggestive of the way the dialectical reasoning works in generally.

1:18:12Even when you're by yourself, you're dialoguing. You just do it better with other people, which is, so I got to say, I've been waiting to say this for years. The only time I've ever disagreed with David was when he gave a talk about the nature of philosophy at Villanova at the Ryan Center years and years ago, is that you have to want to spend a lot of time by yourself to be a philosopher. I said, well, philosophers may wind up spending a lot of time by themselves because nobody wants to be around them. But in fact, even when you're by yourself, you're not by yourself. Yeah. And so, but so here's, here's the bow I want to put on this.

1:18:50So much of what I've argued here and envision the soul and elsewhere, you know, really wants to restore a concept of, of nous of intellectus of the of the of the scene of the form of truth lest we murder to dissect being and lest we impoverish our own rational activity thinking it's confined to certain fixed terrain that is less exhaustive than the whole of being the whole of the real but i also think we need to revisit logos and recover a dialogos a conception of this narrative unfolding of thinking the way in which the very act of thinking is essentially dramatic and and carries us on a journey so that even the most interior solitary thought is is a kind of story i i want to i that's where i wanted to go james i wanted to propose that these two notions the imaginal and the dialogos, while not logically identical or conceptually identical, are completely interpenetrating.

1:19:57They're completely interpenetrating. That dialogos requires the imaginal, the imaginal is proper. Like the person is getting into a dialogical relationship with their future self. Right. And so, yeah, and I wanted, I get, and I, well, you sort of answered my, the question I was going to ask, which is, is that what you're, you're, you're trying to get at with this reconnection of logos to mythos because if we bring the imaginal and the dialogical and how they're interpenetrating back into logos that seems like we've reintegrated mythos with logos very well gentlemen we're gonna have to again pause we start we only abandon we haven't concluded first of all i think you're gonna have to come back one more time because we have this big pin about the reciprocal reduction of ontology and cognition that we need to return to as a theme.

1:20:57And we'll perhaps let David lead us off on that. But we now need to move to where we're going to take some questions and respond to any issues that might be arising in people's minds. So if you have any questions about that point, anybody who's thinking of posting a question, that one that David put, we're going to devote some time to that specifically. But the questions around these things we've been talking about here, the mythos of the emergence of the modern conception, the reduced and blind, self-blinded notion of reason, And then that led into, well, part of the way we might be able to revivify it and give sight back to it is bring logos and mythos together.

1:21:54And I was proposing that mythos involves this interpenetration of the imaginal and dialogos because dialogos is bound up with narrative and so forth. So if you could, along the way, questions around those main themes would be most appreciative. most appreciated I should say. So Ben do we have any questions waiting for us from the chat?

1:22:23I'll just let the people watching this video we're all being quiet right now and staring because Ben is talking and you can't hear him. So go ahead.

1:22:55That's fine.

1:23:10while ben's doing that i'm going to take the moment to thank both of you this was uh rich and wonderful it went off into places i didn't foresee which is most welcome um and um there was There was a few moments where I felt things were reconfigured and reconstruited in a way that I found very insightful, very, very provocative in the good sense of the word. So thank you for that. Yeah, that's the, I guess, the performative of a diologos. Yeah, very much. That is my performative criterion of diologos. Exactly that. Yes. Yeah. If I could say one thing, John, the attention to the different kinds of biases that you're talking about and what you're doing there, I find particularly interesting because I think if you read Jonathan Haidt's Righteous Mind or other books in that vein, it can be very tempting to just despair of the capacity for rationality that's not premotivated in one way or another.

1:24:16And of course, there are motivations, but to try to reforge a proper vision of the intellect that's nonetheless just to revert to Taylor one more time, that's not just totally porous. It's really is really or sorry, that is porous, but that's not totally so porous as to be waterlogged. is different. You know, I, I, I'd like to think more about, I mean, I, this thought struck me as John was talking and I wouldn't be in a position to think it through right now, but, um, it, uh, it seems to me that this idea that being biased is somehow at odds with being rational is something worth really thinking about.

1:24:58I, and one of the reasons I, I, you know, I was, I was reading, um, with my students this morning, Ferdinand Ulrich, who's now one of my favorite philosophers, but he was talking about the importance when a person speaks to you. It's not just that words, you know, external words are being imposed, you know, introduced into empty space in your brain, but that there's a kind of an internal word that comes from you that goes out to reach and rises up to be able to receive the word that's being spoken. And that internal word would be something like, and it seems to me that's really true. And, you know, there you realize there is something like a bias that's part of our embodiment that also kind of gives us orientation.

1:25:46And then, you know, then the question, and I'm not saying that you were assuming this, John, because I know that you've got a very nuanced. Yeah, the biases reflect relevance realization. And that gives us orientation and gives us the ability to ignore the information we must ignore in order to be intelligent. Yes, totally. Yeah. And I mean, so, I mean, you know, the problem with the bias is when it closes in on itself or locks or something. But when it's when it's precisely the foothold into something, I mean, you want to you want a good, solid, you know, anticipatory sense of what you're going to find.

1:26:23Well, I mean, that's the words to, and I don't want to try and, but one point is, right, the very processes that make us adaptive, make us prone to self-deception. And so the idea that we'll become rational by eradicating bias is what you see in modernity as a project. That is grotesquely misformed from the beginning because it would be to eradicate relevance realization, which is absolutely needed for all of your cognition. So that was another point I wanted to get to. But anyways, we got to it in a random way. There we go. So let's be quiet. So Ben can give us a question.

1:27:08How can we expand our storytelling capacities? So that's it. I think that's a great question. How can we expand our storytelling capacities? I like it when people take the argument and turn it back into, okay, what is the practice? What is the practice? Yes. So what would both of you say to that? The answers are so old and speaking of crises of modernity, just so familiar that it's that it feel guilty even trying to reiterate them. But dependence on the passive states of the mass media is something that has to be combated, that you have to actually become active so that you are living a life that can be told as a story.

1:28:00And then you also have to one of the activities has to be the engaging in the telling of stories. Wallace Stevens says life consists of propositions about life. And that's that's closer to the truth than than even Stevens knew, I think. So creating, giving to the form of the life you're actually living, living occasions for storytelling and anecdotes and also the reading aloud of stories to others when you don't have something of your own to share are all part of that. I thought this is the direction our conversation was going to go. Actually, I have so much more to say about that, but I'm going to stop.

1:28:46I mean, I, it's usually one, one key thing. I mean, reading stories a lot, but just reading stories. I mean, let's start there. I, the, the nourishing, I love the idea of nourishing the imagination that, and that doesn't mean just reading stories, but reading stories that, that actually have a kind of imaginative depth. And, and I mean, I think all of us, most of us can recognize a story like that when we see it, It's not just sort of titillating, but somehow it enters into us. And, you know, I love that line, James, that you said, living, living, having a life that actually is an interesting story.

1:29:26One element of that, it seems to me, is acquiring sort of practices of, I mean, here's, you know, these moments of real silence and solitude. Here's the philosopher by himself a bit again. But there are moments where you actually do have to imagine, you know, you have to imaginatively embrace what is going on in your life and think about it as where you're coming from and where you're going. And so you begin to actually also see your life as a story that helps you to live it in a more kind of dramatic story like way, which then gives you more to talk about. So so what I I'm pretty sure this the following all occurred while I was writing the vision of the soul.

1:30:15I it's possible that in a late stage of revision, I may have snuck part of this into the book, but I'm pretty sure it all happened after the book. But so the you know, that last section of the book is trying to make this argument about reconnecting without collapsing mythos and logos, storytelling and reasoning. um and i think while i was writing the book uh there was surprise surprise a psychological study that said uh people who who uh who are identifiable as as as mentally healthy tend to think of their lives in terms of stories and people who are depressed tend to see it as one damn thing after another mere chronology and then i i know after i finished the book i met um one of christian Smith's colleagues, a sociologist who had done an entire study, a book-length study, about whether people thought of their lives as stories.

1:31:12What he found was that, and I mean this in several senses, a very depressing number of people did not. It was self-reinforcing. It was a depressing study because they were so depressed because they couldn't think of their lives as stories. Let me just contrast that with something I just learned. And I'm taking liberties. I'm going to say whose true story this is, but this is a true story. A friend of mine's father recently passed away and he had been through most of his 80 some years, a religious skeptic and late in life, but with a decade or so to go, he was stricken of his vision. So he was blinded.

1:31:51And in those years of blindness, two things happened. First, he began in a curious way to become religious. He had a court of saints to whom he was praying. So even if his culturally Catholic background, but even if he wasn't a faithful Catholic, that an imaginative or imaginal attentiveness to the saints began to creep into his life. And then again, in his visionless day, he he divided his life into six chapters and he divided his daily life into a section of his daily life into six one hour blocks where he meditated in gratitude upon one hour for one hour on each of the six chapters of his life.

1:32:47And this all happened after he was deprived of his vision, that this life opened up within him that was a storytelling life and an intellectual life and finally a life of gratitude and devotion. I mean, I think that, James, would dovetail with how I would answer the question. I think to improve storytelling is to improve some of the component processes we've talked about is going into it. I think you should do imaginal practices. David alluded to that. I think we know that they work. They make a difference. I think you should do dialogical practices. We do those with people. Dialectic and ideologos, Socratic search space, philosophical fellowship, shared Lectio Divina.

1:33:39These are all kinds of dialogical practices. They're frequently dialogical imaginal because you can't really separate the two. I think there's a lot to be said for bringing in embodiment, movement, role playing. Improv is great for improving your member. The cognitive is ultimately being foosies, birthed out of the sensory motor, right? and the embodied. Improv is very good for improving people's abilities to start doing this kind of thing. And so in addition to what David and James said, I would also argue that training in dialogical practices, imaginal practices, mindfulness practices, embodiment practices are a powerful way of improving those components that seem to go into good narrative cognition.

1:34:43Okay, let's take another question.

1:34:50Okay, Ben is promising us we're going to get a short but deep question here. Maybe it's just going to be the question why or something um are your thoughts your thoughts

1:35:06okay again you two um please um

1:35:15i mean yes and no i i mean there are different ways to read that one would be um a kind of a skeptical conspiracy theory sort of thing are our thoughts being planted in your mind and I I don't find that question so interesting but there is a you know um do our thoughts belong to us is a kind of an interesting uh thought um and I would say you know uh no actually I mean yes and no that uh thoughts I mean it's I think it's possible to to have an original idea about about something, but to the very nature, what I thought is, as opposed to a feeling or even just like a physiological process. I mean, I, you know, if there's a physiological process going inside of me, it's precisely not going on inside of you, right?

1:36:08It's, it's localized. It's going to be particularized and that mine, not yours. But I mean, with every word I'm speaking here, insofar as you're listening to it, if you're listening, you know, in one sense, these are words are coming out of my mouth, but you all are sort of co-speaking them with me as I'm saying them, if you're understanding them. And I, and I, and I think that's the nature of a, of a spiritual reality, like a thought that it's, it's by its very essence, shareable, if not always already shared in some, in some sense. I'm not a firm believer in intellectual property. You know, I know that that can get sort of tricky at a certain level, but I think it's it's it's the this is precisely where we are able in a fruitful way to transcend our particularity.

1:37:02James. Yeah, that's gosh, David speaks truly that there are several ways in which you could interpret that question uh uh all of which are important even when they're not necessarily the most interesting you know are we are we are we Girardian creatures of imitation etc that's for some people that's the most fascinating aspect of of of this and or of of your of our modes of thinking to me it's less compelling um but that you know the the core deliverance of the of the wisdom tradition and Plato unsurprisingly is this, the, is the, the great, the great master here is that, well, to put it briefly in the, in the, in the faith, is it the theotatus he's talking about, how do we know what is, what is knowledge and the premise, if I'm recalling that dialogue properly, the premise that never gets questioned over the course of the entire dialogue is that truth is a possession that it's in you.

1:38:03And then the dialogue ends. And of course it continues. because it's part of the trilogy of dialogues but to to sort of to make a long story short you have to just hop to um the allegory of the cave and the divided line in the republic to realize oh the reason that they taught us that elsewhere ends in a an an operaia in a in a contradiction that they can't insolvable contradiction is because the starting premise that was never questioned was false that truth is not a possession that truth is something at whose feet you stand uh if you're lucky gazing up in awe um and that goes back to to one other thing that i i thought we might talk about earlier i didn't get a chance to mention it which is which means that one of the problems with the overburdening of the imaginal where you think you that either there is no meaning or meaning has to be generated by you so that your thoughts really are your thoughts, you are projecting onto the world everything that counts as meaningful in reality.

1:39:10And it's not a property of the real, but a property of your psyche. That's a folly in two ways. One, because it misunderstands, well, it's an impoverishment of the real, it misunderstands how human psychology works. but also it's it it seems to make impossible just what in fact we experienced from the very beginning and this is going back to something i said about the beginning of aristotle's metaphysics in the last uh the last conversation which is that we are aboriginally ecstatic creatures that is to say we're only we only first act in the world because of being initially drawn out of ourselves by the world coming at us.

1:39:59And so if you, if you refuse that starting position, there's, there's nothing good that can follow from it because it's so fundamental to our being. So in this sense, our thoughts are not our thoughts because our thoughts are only our thoughts because they were already delivered to us from being. And so we should give up trying to possess our thoughts, but rather to give ourselves a way through our thinking. These are both excellent answers. How I would weave with those is I would say, I think both James and David are saying this too, that I'm not really interested, like our thoughts implanted in you or stuff like that.

1:40:46But the issue, I have been a staunch critic of the idea that meaning is a personal, private, possession that is determined by our preferences and validated by our pleasures or something like that that has become very commonplace in the meaning and life literature this is what meaning is um i'm not this is even below or before talking about semantic meaning um and i think what you're both saying that i agree with is uh meaning is bound up with two things inexorably it's bound up with community uh it's bound it has to be shareable and shapeable by others and it's bound up with truth which means it has a transjective relationship with realness that's what i hear james saying uh the world is is also participating in the creation of whatever meaning we are are participating in this is a central tenet of 4e cogs i and i think insofar as your thoughts are meaningful entities.

1:41:45Is that even the right noun? I'm not sure. They are not yours because the meaning of them is bound to community and truth. And those are not possessions of yours in any strong or meaningful sense. Now, this doesn't eradicate the fact that you have individual rights. It doesn't eradicate the fact that you have individual dignity. I believe either David or James would argue for that. I know them. I know James from his work. I know David extensively. They wouldn't be arguing for that. So we're answering the very specific question that's being answered here, that there is something important to be said about meaning, truth, and community that we are not properly saying anymore.

1:42:35And I think both of them, and I wanted to chime in, are trying to say, no, let's get away from the Lockean model that we're inside a closed cabinet getting postcards from the world that we're shuffling on a table in front of us, hoping to somehow figure out what the world looks like. We've got to give up that picture. It's a Wittgensteinian picture. It's like, what time is it on the sun? You can picture a man looking at a watch, but it makes no sense. It just makes no sense in its fundamental grammar. Alright, let's take one more question, and then we'll move towards wrapping it up.

1:43:18then is promising something a little different how does humor relate to logos oh this is a good one this is a good one i love this one oh there's so much to say on this one let's hope it's funny

1:43:36i once uh published an essay called explaining the modernist joke so when you explain a joke You ruined it. But the that the great the great story you can tell on on this question is is is the transition from Nietzsche and the great poet W.B. Yeats to his generation later or two generation later successor, W.H. Auden. because Nietzsche in the birth of tragedy articulates a concept of tragedy that that Yeats famously embraces which is and Yeats even puts it more poetically than Nietzsche go figure but it's just that that that in comedy says Yeats we're encountering the idiosyncratic idiosyncrasies of fools so you're never more individuated than when you're the butt of a joke Whereas in tragedy, the passions of suffering break down the barriers of the individual and we flow into that great sort of molten surging of formlessness that Nietzsche describes in The Birth of Tragedy.

1:44:40W.H. Auden, you know, discovered something else, which was that that, in fact, we're only really in community when we laugh together. And that it's and that it's in that it's a society's participation in a kind of gleefulness, including an irreverent gleefulness that that enables us to. To recognize the truth about ourselves and to speak truly about about the world more generally. And so he articulates this in his Oxford introduction to the Oxford book of light verse. Go figure that he would take on that. And then and then also what to my for my money is his greatest poem, which is a poem, a light verse called Letter to Lord Byron, where he says that writing begins in writing to amuse your friends.

1:45:26and that the one thing a writer cannot do, in contradistinction from the plumber who just needs pipes or the horseshoe maker who just needs iron and an anvil, the writer needs a society precisely because otherwise, well, he would look foolish without them, the cowardly doom and I says. He has nothing to talk about. So it's in the amusing ourselves together, in laughing together that Auden actually discovered the meaning of his life. And in fact, that that discovery of humor led to his conversion to Christianity, which is a different sort of story to tell. But but it's anyhow, comedy is at the center of human community.

1:46:11I like Woody Allen's definition of comedy. Comedy equals tragedy plus time. But I was once invited to a kind of a faculty study group that was concerned with improving the intellectual life on a particular campus. And the concern was that there wasn't, that students were just studying to get the grades. They only cared about things insofar as these things are going to be on a test. they weren't talking about books outside of class and so forth. And, um, and the, the, the beginning of the conversation was, we went around the room and each person had to say, you know, what do you take to be a sign?

1:46:55Give us an example of, you know, the most serious sign of a lack of intellectual life. I was a bit cheeky. My, when my turn came, I said, um, um, I think the biggest sign of a lack of intellectual life is that there aren't any pranks, um, school pranks. And the thing is, I actually meant that seriously. And why is that? Now, I mean, it seems to me that, you know, you put the nail on the head when the students are learning insofar as they want to get a good grade on the test, insofar as they want to do something, you know, insofar, insofar, insofar. It's always geared towards an extrinsic end. And there is something ultimately irrational about that when each thing is sort of depending on something beyond itself to have any value.

1:47:42What is logos directed to? It's directed to truth. And what is truth? I mean, truth is intrinsically true. When you see that something is true, it doesn't have to be justified by something outside of itself. So that a genuine sense of logos has a recognition of reason for its own sake. And one of the expressions of being reasoning for its own sake and having this kind of contemplative is to have a celebratory sense of truth, which is always to have a kind of a playful attitude towards truth. I mean, this is why Plato said that the the greatest the proper disposition towards what's greatest is a playful seriousness or a serious serious playfulness, that those things are integrated.

1:48:30I mean, I actually believe this. If you encounter a thinker that has no sense of humor, be beware. uh uh um and i you know i don't know if you've ever listened to heidegger speak but that is a voice that does not really even though i have great admiration there's not much humor in in heidegger or playfulness i mean unless i'm missing something um and i don't think that that's accidental um which isn't to say that you know the more jokes a philosopher tells the the better a philosopher they are but if there isn't but um it seems to me that humor and love i mean to answer the the question very simply humor and logos go together because they're because um their sense uh they're rooted in a sense of reality that is good true and beautiful in itself and of itself one one real quick thing that the tripartite structure of every good joke is syllogistic yeah there you go you have a you have an instance you repeat the instance to to say here's a law being established and then you defy the law and it makes you laugh there you go so so i think i i I want to build on both what you said and give sort of a cognitive scientific answer.

1:49:39This is something I do work on. I recently saw a video. There's a chimp behind a glass and there's a human being on the other side. And the human being does a very simple sort of making something disappear. And the chimp falls back just laughing and laughing and laughing. And so it's not fair to say it's uniquely human. I think that we have to be fair to the chimp. So there's something going on there. And one of the things that seems to be going on with a magic trick, and a lot of people are saying this, very similar to what's going on in insight. You're in one perspective and you have to switch to another perspective.

1:50:18And that second perspective transforms how you're looking at the world in some deep way when you have those aha moments. Those are obviously very important. But I think the capacity for that kind of that species of insight that resolves potential perspectival clash is crucial. Monty Python made this very famous. You take people to the edge of absurdity, which is what that's what perspectival clash is, perspectival incoherence. And then you alleviate it with like with humor. and I think this goes towards the point you are making, David, that I think as we pursue the truth and if the logos is dialogos and not just logos, there's a perpetual danger, and Plato's very aware of this, I would say, a perspectival clash, which can render the whole enterprise looking as if it's absurd.

1:51:12And of course, that was frequently a criticism that was made of Socrates and his students. Perhaps Aristophanes is a clear example. But I think that humor gets us to do that serious play with the potential of perspectival clash that we resolve with insight, because that's absolutely necessary for the perspectival coherence and connectedness that is needed for the dialogical pursuit of truth. I don't think we could pursue truth together if we couldn't be humorous with each other. Because we often, and you see this in good teams, right? As perspectival clash builds, people will result to humor, which will often lead to an insight that alleviates the tension, as we call it, and allows the group to keep going forward and make progress towards what they're doing.

1:52:05So I think humor is absolutely indispensable. I tend to take David's recommendation maybe a little bit stronger than he does. I tend to avoid not only philosophers who don't have a sense of humor. I tend to avoid scriptures that don't have a sense of humor. And they vary. There are some scriptures. By that, I mean forms of literature that are trying to induce a wisdom that connects us towards ultimate reality. Zen is particularly filled with humor, for example. and Taoism is. And I don't see any humor, for example, in Marxism at all. And I think that is very problematic. So I take David's advice maybe even a little bit more seriously than he does.

1:53:00Now, one of the things that's always bothered me about the Bible is an apparent lack of humor, But I've been told that that's because I'm reading it in English. And that's actually preventing me from seeing all the tremendous wordplay going on in both the Old and the New Testaments. And so I want to retract that criticism that I've made in the past. Unfortunately, I don't know Hebrew or Greek. So I'm just I'm just going I'm trusting people who are trustworthy on this. But I do think it's right. I think if there's no humor, whatever you're doing in your pursuit of truth is going to bang up against a deep threat of absurdity, perspectival clash.

1:53:49And I think that's one of the problems of modernity is we're losing a kind of ability to resolve perspectival clash humorously. Everybody is getting prickly and defensive about their particular perspectives. And I think that undermines us having shared meaning or truth in an important way. I love your comment on Marx there. I'm thinking, is it in the 18th premiere where Marx speaks of history repeating itself as farce? And he says that as if it were a bad thing.

1:54:25Yeah, I don't know, David, you would know better than I. I mean, there, you know, there seems to be humor in Hegel, you know, Schelling's philosophy is actually a lot funnier than people realize. Yeah, that's what I was thinking. But the funny, I mean, Kierkegaard might be a contender, but Plato was the funniest philosopher. I mean, yeah, Plato's very funny. Yeah, I mean, he's extraordinary. Greater hippies made me laugh aloud last summer.

1:54:57Yeah, Nietzsche once said that life without music would be a mistake, but I think life without humor would be a mistake. as well. I would not, if you said, I'll give you wealth and power and fame, but no humor, I don't want that life at all. That is not a good life. My friends, we have come to the end of our wonderful time together. I've invited you back probably a little bit later in the calendar year, but I want to come back and the three of us, maybe a little bit off of the focus on James's book but James I definitely want you here because I want to zero in on that pin that David gave us about the reciprocal reduction of cognition and ontology because I think one of the things that neoplatonism promises is the reciprocal opening between cognition and ontology and that reciprocal reduction is a kind of reciprocal narrowing and speaking psychologically reciprocal narrowing is addiction.

1:55:56We get into an addictive state of mind, which I think is very, very dangerous. So that's my framing for how we'll introduce the next one. About this one, again, thank you both. David said so wonderfully this was a genuine dialogos. It went in ways and generated insights that could not foresee or plan. James, I'm glad we got to get to the second half of your book because you provoked all of this, right? This wonderful proposal of the reunion that could never actually be truly lost between mythos and logos. So I wanted to thank you for that and the way you spoke so eloquently to it throughout. I want to give each one of you, as I always do, the last word.

1:56:47This time we'll start with James and then we'll end with David. Oh, I have no last word. That was what you just said was great. It was a pleasure to be with you both. And and I just it's as I got to say a little bit last time, John, it was just I remember listening to you talk about narrative and just thinking this is this is what people need to hear. And I'm so glad I got to actually walk down that that road of discussion with you a little bit. So thank you. Thank you, David. Yeah, I very briefly just want to say that everything that I said, I was just kidding. and I'll let you short that one out

1:57:28thank you everyone