Silk Road Seminar - Jonathan Pageau

29:23Dr. John Vervaeke:Yeah. And that that Formula One car has a kind of goodness. But that goodness has to be related to something that is that's true about it. Right. And the affordance, the potentiality in which it exists, the affordances in which it exists. If I take a Formula One car and I put it on a construction site to pull a trailer or something, all of a sudden, everything breaks down. The relevance breaks down. The beauty of the car breaks down. The truth, everything kind of falls apart because of its lack of relevance. It's misapplication, you could say, in context. Yeah, and that goes towards a proposal that was implicit, but now you're calling me to make it explicit, but I sort of hinted at it.

30:12Dr. John Vervaeke:I think there are four transcendentals, right? I think that there is intelligibility, which has to do with the proper fittedness together of relevance realization and reality realization. how the car is realizing itself and what problems we're trying to solve have to fit together properly. And that's not what's happening in the instance of the Ferrari being used on the construction site. And so the thing I think I'm trying to get at is, right, we have tended, and this is, I think this is because of the substance ontology of late medieval scholasticism. Here's James Filler. we emphasize the relata the true the good and the beautiful even though they're relational but we didn't have we we sort of we keep as a background the relationships the living relationships between them and i think that's intelligibility i think there are four transcendentals and then the one is the the the non-place place and principle for all of that holds all of this and makes it work if you want to put it that way.

31:20Dr. John Vervaeke:So I think, and I did say this, I said because relevance realization is playing such a huge role in establishing these arguments, it needs to take on a transcendental status. And what relevance is, I'm going to use a religious word, but I think it's appropriate, is that there's an incarnational aspect to this, right to the relevance right because relevance in some ways is the way in which things come together in their in their proper place right it's like proportioning in the proper proportion yeah exactly and so and so what what i love about this and this is something that i've been harping on i think too is that once you see that you realize that goodness is not just a moral thing and it and Goodness is, I mean, it's downstream from this, but goodness is the, goodness in some ways is the way in which the truth and the possibility, the affordances come together in their proper place.

32:35and that appears as goodness. But you can identify that in things that have no moral bearing. It's good and bad in that sense. Like a good apple or a bad apple is not a moral question.

32:49Dr. John Vervaeke:Or a good screwdriver. Yeah, exactly. It's not a moral, it's not an ethical question at all. I'm sorry, I was punting on the fact that we actually use good apple and bad apple to talk about moral failings. Yeah, that's true. That's true, Jake. I don't know. I'll use that example. It's too close to ethics. so i would also say that if this argument is right um this is something that uh matthew wilson is uh talking about um that um beauty is not just a matter of taste like it was for haunt it can't be um if it's just a matter of taste which means subjective preference uh khan has a weird position because he says it's purely subjective, but it's universal.

33:31Dr. John Vervaeke:How he could possibly know this is just crazy. So let's put aside - No, I think that beauty is fittedness. Like it's the experience of fittedness. That's how you, I'm using your word. Well, that's what I'm doing. I'm saying when relevance realization, reality realization fit together, so you get the emergence and the emanation of intelligibility, bottom up and top down. That's beauty. Yeah. That's beauty. That's beauty. Yeah, and you can, I think that you can, you can, because one of the things I used to think, this is a while ago, I used to think that beauty was something like pattern, right?

34:06Beauty is pattern. Beauty is when you see that something is kind of has a type of symmetry in its relations. But then you're right. Like I saw you say no. And I'm like, later I started to realize that actually that's not how, that's not beauty. Beauty is when that pattern is properly fitted to its context. That's when you experience beauty. And so it actually, it has to be somewhat yielded. The pattern has to be somewhat, a little bit broken or a little bit made soft in order to apply itself to its particular. So when you see a woman that's too symmetrical, like it's actually frightening. It's actually like, it's shocking.

34:48But if there's a yielding, then that's when you experience beauty.

34:51Dr. John Vervaeke:Yeah. Have you ever seen that where they kind of face and they do the mirrors and you get two faces? and they're both like, ugh. The two sides of a face are, and one of the hypotheses is this has to do with hemispheric difference, and Ian Milgochrist would be happy. But I think that's right, and what I'm trying to get at is, like, that it's fitting this way, but it's also fitting this way. What you're talking about, to my notion, is a proper portioning between its for-itselfness and it's for for others right that's what the the pattern doesn't have a for itselfness it's not a pattern but if but like you said if it's not for others if it if it doesn't bear relationships of intelligibility to other other things if it's not soft to other things as you put it then you don't actually have beauty yeah yeah yeah and so you can think of it like uh when you see a building right that is beautiful usually for it to be truly beautiful it also has to be integrated into the landscape and into with the other buildings there has to be something that is communicating between between that's why some of modern architecture is so abhorrent is because it appears as a sore thumb too it's not just that it's not beautiful in itself but that it it's like it shocks you because it looks like this thing that is completely removed from its environment but when you see something that is both beautiful in itself like like you said for itself in the way it's like it's like a jewel yes but it's a jewel that is set you know into a exactly exactly yeah yeah yeah yeah that's exactly yeah and so the and the thing that i'm wondering about is this idea of the existence for for i'm not sure i totally understand the okay so yeah let me try Right, because there's an implicit argument behind that, and I'll lay out the argument.

36:53Dr. John Vervaeke:And the argument goes like this. The idea that there are things that are completely for themselves, substances, that's the definition of a substance. It's completely for itself. So you have James Filler comes in and says, okay, well, you can't get relations out of substance and their properties and their actions. I won't repeat that whole argument. You know that argument. So you can't get relations out of relata, right? but then i've made the argument to james but you also can't get the relata out of relations and what distinguishes one relation from another is the relata within it of course right and so this is this is and then i realized william this is william desmond's proposal and i talked about this in chicago for the communal nature of being that like the way you can't have a community without persons and persons without community is the way in which things are for themselves like a person, but for each other like a community.

37:53Dr. John Vervaeke:And so community is the, Desmond, I buy this argument, maybe you don't, but that community is the ultimate icon of being. Yeah, of course. I mean, I'm a Christian, so obviously I think that. It's like the icon of Rublev, you know, the icon of the Trinity. That's what it's calling us to see, right, is that the communion between the three people in the Trinity, but then also looking out towards us to kind of bring us into that communion. That's really how I see the icon of being. And then you get the Platonic Aristotelian, Neoplatonic proposal, which Matthew Wilson, which I built into the model, anagoga, theoria as the pilgrimage, the contemplative pilgrimage, in which what is being satisfied is our desire to be in deepest communion with what is most real.

38:56Dr. John Vervaeke:He calls it the hunger for reality, which I think is right. And the thing that, I mean, I don't know if this is the way that I tend to think about it. I take this from Dante in general. But in some ways, this idea, because when you said, you know, the being for itself, I had a little bit of a reaction. But there's a way in which the, tell me if you think this makes sense. There's a way in which this is going to sound paradoxical, but I think it's absolutely true. The way in which a being actually exists for others is what grounds it for itself. I think that's right. That's exactly right. And I think David's saying that, but he doesn't explicitly say that.

39:37Dr. John Vervaeke:I'm going to talk to him about it, but I think that's what Plato is saying, because everything is dialogical in nature. I'm not sure Aristotle's saying that, but I think Plato is. Okay. Yeah, because then you really get this beautiful image of kind of canonic community, right? Where in some ways you could say a father is a father because the father gives himself to his children. And it's in that giving and that kind of existing for others that the identity of father becomes something. Right. And so the screwdriver exists for all kinds of other things. And it's in that giving itself out to the other things that it that it shines as something that has any value in itself.

40:23But if it doesn't have any kinatus, it's just a dream of a screwdriver. if it doesn't no it has to no it has to it's almost like the the the desire obviously you know the desire to exist for these other purposes or to embed itself into this community of purposes

40:41Dr. John Vervaeke:is what makes it yeah i think you and i are saying the same thing i'm trying to see the complete interpenetration like between the transcendentals between canatus and community i'm trying to see them like i don't know that word canadius i don't know what oh sorry uh this is spinoza's terms canadius is that everything is he he sees wanting as the ultimate principle of reality so everything is wanting itself everything is like everything is he doesn't have dynamical system language but many people in biology are saying that's what he if he's around that's what he would use it's a way in which everything is like feeding back into itself, organizing itself for itself.

41:24Dr. John Vervaeke:And he said, and he does something really quite interesting with that. He says, that's the essence of a thing. He replaces Aristotle's necessary and sufficient conditions definition with no, it's this dynamical, you know, feedback onto itself, making of itself. That is actually the essence of the thing. Now, I think what ends up happening, though, is all those things are still modes of God. So the canatus is interwoven with communing. I mean, I'm not saying Spinoza is perfect, but that's how it works. Yeah, because I would tend to think that the oneness of something is given to it by its participation in higher realities.

42:12And so it's actually like a revelation. That's why I like this image. It's a name. It's like, it's the way in which you name your children, right? So your child is born, you name your child, you would give the child its identity from above and its connection to you is the foundation of its wanting, if you want to use that term. And then it does become something real in itself, but it's always dependent on its participation in this hierarchy.

42:42Dr. John Vervaeke:I agree. And I think, I guess what I want to, how does this land free? I think you're participating up, but you're also participating down. You don't, you don't, yeah, good. You don't just name your kid anything. You try and respond to what the kid is emerging from, what you see in the kid's biology, what you see in your own ancestry. So you're also, you're also, you're also being called from like, I keep doing the verse from the Psalms, deep calls to deep. like you're yeah yeah the good is trying to get you to what's what's the deepest and what's the highest and how can you get them resonating with each other yeah i know i think that's true that the image that i like to i use for this is the is the is i mean is the image of the of when christ dies on the cross two things happen so he dies and so this image that we have in the orthodox church is that he goes down into hell right goes down into hades but then he also rips the veil of the temple and so there's this simultaneous movement which is when you set the sacrifice the idea of sacrifice like the in the yom kippur sacrifice in scripture there are two sacrifices like one is given up to god to purify and then one is is cast out to go to the ends of the world basically right and so you have these two movements where on the one hand you give down right so you you give down to the things that constitute you or the things that are outside of you but uh but you also have to give up into your participation into higher being so think of a business like a corporate hierarchy right a corporate hierarchy is a good way of a simple way of understanding it you have a certain position on the one day when when you owe your role to your boss, right?

44:33And you have to give account for the people that work under you to that boss. And he, you know, he will, or her like, we'll keep going up the ladder, but then in order to be able to do that, you have to empty yourself to your own team. You have to kind of give yourself and yield to the team in order to gather them up into this purpose, right? So there's this double, there's always this double everything that exists always has this double movement well

45:02Dr. John Vervaeke:i didn't use the corporate model um i know that i know people are like oh no but i mean i could use any model it doesn't matter no no no i'm not telling you not to use your model i'm just going to tell you what mine was mine was um i mean this is where my taoist background and practice and elizabeth ofield uh she said you know deep roots and broad branches and i was thinking oh a tree right and this is the daoist thing too you know it roots deeply into the ground from which there are nutrients it branches to open itself up to the sunlight and then within that you've got the goodness of its self-organization of its being an auto poetic living thing that's that's the model in my mind sort of the tree the tree of the world the tree of life is the model that i have in my mind uh yeah that's i think that's fine that is that that's completely fine and so you get water from below yeah you get you get a light from above right you're connecting heaven and earth in that in that kind of primordial way so i mean it sounds like this is is is landing and and that's good because uh i mean his basic argument is that um he's arguing that we have to recover he calls it the intellectual vision of the soul i don't like that he's fighting a losing battle like i fought with the losing battle for rationality i now talk about reasonableness because yeah i'll give you all the arguments why rationality is not logicality people go yes yes yes but you have to be like it's about being logical right it's like that was a waste of time and the same thing with intellectual people are yeah he means by intellectual is noetic exactly because that's what it is it's It's noetic.

46:43Dr. John Vervaeke:And go to the Greek rather than to the Latin. And that's what you... Yeah, so the idea here is, right, is, you know, he's trying to argue for the noetic vision as that wherein humans find their greatest flourishment. And, of course, he's building on that that doesn't mean you sit around meditating all the time. That's not what that means. You should do some, but that's not what that means. He's talking about, he's using a language, and here's where he coordinates with win and the renewing of the senses and faith in place. He's talking about the fundamental orientation that grounds and then horizons your framing of reality so you belong, right?

47:35Dr. John Vervaeke:So you fit to what's most real. That's what he's talking about to my mind. That's what the noetic vision is. And I think we all have, therefore, a noetic vision. The thing is, is it explicit and dialogically, like, do we put it into dialogical reflection or correction, or is it implicit and largely insidiously given to us by our culture? And for many people, this is his point. It's the latter rather than the former. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think that that's probably true. And also, but there is in some ways, there is an issue with that, which is that it's not a, you can't have, there are certain frames that are more true than others.

48:18Like there's certain frames that actually yield more reality than others. And if you, if you have the wrong frame, then the fruits, let's say, well, it might take a while. It might take centuries, but the fruits start to play out. And then at some point you, you end up in a sterile, sterile world, you know?

48:34Dr. John Vervaeke:Yeah, and he's basically, and he uses the language, so this isn't an imposition. He thinks the fruits of modernity are the meaning crisis. And he talks about many of the things that you and I have talked about repeatedly as the symptoms of this and the way it's unfolding. And I think this is the best way, really, and you've talked about this before, like this is the best way to understand sin. uh it's to understand it as orientation yes as misorientation or or or error in orientation and then what what because it's especially sent like a personally sin one of the problems of things that happen that it captures you right it's like it has super say it has a lot of salience and then it orients you in the wrong in the wrong or slightly off let's say the path that you should have.

49:30And then as you move down that path and the fruits start to show, right? And what is it? St. Paul says that the wages of sin is death, that things start to break down and there's a breakdown of goodness, truth, and beauty along that path. And then you have to repent, right? You have to read your news, right? You have to metanoia in order to be able to, you know, to find the right frame, to find the right frame for your action. And so in that way, sin is more than just like you do bad things. It's mostly the most important part of sin is the way in which it frames your perception and your direction in going in a direction that will basically bring you into a collapse of the transcendentals.

50:18Exactly.

50:20Dr. John Vervaeke:Sin has an ontological significance in a way in which The modern notion of an immoral action doesn't have it. And then this, you provided a brilliant bridge to another person I want to bring into this who is actually behind it all. And I'm doing a lot of work on for the course, of course, is Iris Murdoch. And the centrality and the priority she gives to attention before action, before inference, you have to be, and she says, attending and orienting to what is real. is really hard, is really, really hard. And she's influenced by Simone Weil on this. But I'm reading a really good book right now.

51:04Dr. John Vervaeke:Can't remember the author, I apologize. The Ethics of Attention. But she's playing with this, like, I'm trying to get to this deeper notion. And this is Murdoch's sovereignty of the good. But the idea that what we're trying to get to is a place where we freely acknowledge the sovereignty of the good because of the way our attention is properly oriented and framing. Yeah. And I think that, you know, if you think of some of the, I mean, one of the images that comes to mind is the story of Jonah. You know, when Jonah is down in the fish, right? He's at the bottom of the world. He's dead, for all intents and purposes.

51:52And then it says that he remembers. Yes. He remembers the holy place. He remembers the sacred place. And then he calls. He basically calls to God and he says, I long. I remember your holy place. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so there's this idea. And you see that in this image of the ladder of divine ascent, which you might have seen, like this image of monks going up a ladder.

52:17Dr. John Vervaeke:Yeah, I read his name, the guy who came up with Flexio Divina. Yeah, St. John the Ladder. I mean, I don't know if that's what you... No, it's somebody else, but go ahead. Anyways, go ahead. So basically, you have this idea in some ways that, and it's actually, it gives you a lot of hope because it makes you realize that anywhere that you are, like if you remember, right, and you reorient, then you, even though you might be in a difficult situation, that you, there is, there's a path out, like there's a path towards, and any place in the, because the cosmos is made this way, like anywhere that you are, you can remember, right?

52:58And you have this image, right, of people hitting rock bottom, like that's the example, like they've just gone so far in their sin that there's nothing left, all the fruits have withered, like everything is dead because the bad fruit is yielded a thousandfold, right? And all they have left to do is remember, right? And re-attend. I think that it gives a lot of possibility to connect it to

53:30Dr. John Vervaeke:to our experience so my favorite version of that um i find the jonah version powerful because moby dick is an important book for me uh but uh lord of the rings when they're in mordor and i can't remember who it is i got to look it up and and they're in the withered place and then they've gone far far right and they're and they're they're slowly dying and photos especially dying and they're sort of hunkered down and the clouds part for a brief moment and i believe it's sam sees the stars and then he realizes there's a whole domain that is untouched by all of this and although it doesn't solve any of his problems it gives him a radical hope because he realizes that the evil that he's confronting for all of its power is not comprehensive it can't consume all of reality there is something beyond um and that that reorients him and of course he he's able he's enabled to keep going in a powerful way yeah that's what i think that that's what the the sacred and of course they didn't put that scene in the movies but there you go but yeah i i think that in some ways that is what the sacred we talk you know you talk about this kind of resurgence of the sacred that is what the the sacred does it is ultimately a a an orientation and a memory of orientation or participation in orientation um you know and it it plays that role very practically you know in in sacred places or sacred objects sacred sacred sacred things where they act as these these nodes yes you know like uh and and they act and when you're not there they act as memory and orientation right so what what the sacred are like so dan chappie and i we've already submitted it and uh our paper uh we're in the process of revising it about how orientation is primordial to reasoning um you know because kant kant hits that place of the critique where he goes but wait before i propositionally i can't distinguish my left hand from my right hand anything i say about my left hand and i and but i have to order it before i do any reasoning any sort of ah and then he just and then he does what like well it's just a feeling and that more than a feeling yeah yeah but that that whole notion uh right uh of orientation and the thing is orienting allows you to wayfair wayfair is sort of what's beneath navigation and narration and negotiation.

56:11Dr. John Vervaeke:Like it's sort of, it's the ur from which those three, we separate them because that's what we do. But when people are naturally sort of moving about in their environment, those three are interwoven. You can do it with like the Polynesian wayfarers who were sailing across the ocean and stuff like that. They're not using maps the way we do. The reason I'm saying this is when you're oriented and you're affording wayfaring, you're picking up places of residence environments places where right there is like this and this is heartment rosa your ability to do things and the uncontrollability of the world are nicely synced so you're getting assimilation and accommodation happening perfectly and those moments those places of resonance we find beautiful we find them true and good that's why all we like you turn the corner heart met rosa and there's an unexpected beautiful snowfall and you what do you what do we do we just pause and behold because that's all you want to do and what i'm saying is you get you get like reference points those points of reference those points of resonance serve as reference points for how you can start to make your way how you can wayfair and i'm thinking at a more abstract level yeah that's what the sacred is at the level of, you know, our, not just this physical path, but the course of our life, the history of our community, then the sacred are these points of resonance that act as reference points.

57:45Dr. John Vervaeke:So our orientation can transform into wayfaring. So we know how to, how to make our way. This is why pilgrimage, of course, as you know, has become so central to my thinking. Yeah. And yeah, I think, I think that, I think that that's, and it lays itself out Usually it lays itself out in terms of time and it also lays itself out in space, let's say in a human experience. And also levels of construal levels, too. Yeah. And there's and then, yeah, then what it does is it patterns. Right. So you see that you experience the truth of something through its beauty, you know, and its goodness, because it's like let's say let's take.

58:26I mean, it's like the United States, for example. Right. So there are these market orienting events in the story of the United States that connect you, right, that make you remember and make you connected to the origin. But then it also lays itself out in space where you have a capital, you have places. And then that creates a sense that this is something that exists, like this is something that has a being.

58:54Dr. John Vervaeke:And this is what a lot of people like Ingold and Wynn and others, this is how space is converted into place. Yeah. And we have personal relationship to places. We have impersonal relationships to – because we give places proper names, our relationship to them. Wynn argues the closest analogy we have is friendship. Like the way we are befriended and we befriend a place. um and so i think and that's what wayfaring does it it turns it turns spaces into place because you literally need to know where to place yourself so that you can stand so that you can take a stance that allows you to understand how to go forward right i'm sorry i'm doing this very physically no no i think it's really important and it has to like i think it also playing it out in different iterations because obviously we talk about these lofty things but it goes right down into the primordial that's the point it does it goes right down into the guts of your agency and so you can you can apply it let's say you apply it to something like uh okay let's apply it to something really boring like let's say you apply it to something like putting on socks in the morning right so you yeah but you get up in the morning and then there's a good there's a good that you identify, right?

1:00:15Which is that you have to, you have to put on socks that, that good is embedded in all these other goods. It's, it, it is a good in itself, but it's not only a good in itself, because if you just have socks on, who cares what, what are you doing? But it is a good that you notice. And so then you, then the, the, the, your room gets mapped. It gets mapped, certain things become salient, uh, and certain things get organized in a, in a, in a direction to accomplish that goal. And so it happens in time. It happens in memory. It also happens in place. I can hear myself for some reason now. What's going on?

1:00:58Did he have some kind of something happen?

1:01:09Dr. John Vervaeke:He's coming. You're back. I'm back. I'm back. Sorry about that. When somehow my power cord was disconnected, I didn't realize it. And the camera was was like running out of battery or something. Yeah. Yeah. So now we're fine now. We're fine. Right. Finish the last thing. So I was just saying I was just saying that you could like it applies to something very, very small. Like all of a sudden, if you if you if you're putting on socks, there's something there's something sacred will happen. right where space will organize itself towards the the the goodness and certain facts facts will become salient certain truths will be will fit together in a beautiful pattern of what it is you need to do in order to accomplish that goal and that will be that will be embedded in these other goods and these goods also that are this way right that that that connect to all these other goods um yeah does that make sense like does that it does it does and for me that that That can go on as it does in your mundane example in a mundane fashion in the background.

1:02:11Dr. John Vervaeke:Or we can have a moment where we see a world and a grain of sand. Yeah. Lake. Right. And it's like, here's a grain of sand or here's my socks. Or as Heidegger said, Van Gogh, and here's some old shoes. And it goes from being just old shoes to doing what you just did. You can explicate. Every moment, everything is impregnated in the way you just talked about. And you can allow that to give birth in your consciousness. Like you can't do that all day long because you'll starve. But, right. But, or perhaps you can, perhaps that's what, that's what a saint is. I think that's probably what a saint is.

1:02:48You realize that every moment, every, everything that has being is like a little sacred space. Like it's a little, it's like a little tabernacle. It holds all of this together. It holds heaven and earth together. It's, it's, it's embedded. um and and uh and it's not like that it's not that there aren't more important ones that hold more world more of the world together but that every single thing that exists has a has that same structure that's why i'd say maximus talks about the logi you know he talks about how the all the purposes that you notice that you can engage with in the world ultimately they are the divine logos there's no separation between the yeah i i think of it like a hologram

1:03:34Dr. John Vervaeke:i think i i i wish i had that had happened a couple minutes ago because this is actually where we need to to stop the public presentation and we'll switch over to um the community uh so that uh the people that have been watching can ask us some questions but first of all i want this has been very fruitful it's been very helpful uh you know because when you're in your head and you're doing stuff you go is this right because it seems right to me but you know sometimes that's that that's a good uh mark and sometimes it's and so talking with somebody you know um from the outside of your head uh was very helpful so and i think i think john like if you're able to come to a point where one of the biggest things we need to do now is to is to reconnect ontology and epistemology because that has been it's been ripped apart and you'll you're you You function in certain circles where to try to connect them together is like the worst, you know, it's the most egregious thing you can do.

1:04:33But that is what we need to.

1:04:36Dr. John Vervaeke:That's what this project is doing. Yeah. Jonathan, I mean, explicitly. I mean, I didn't bring it up, but in my mind. Yeah. Right. That's what I'm trying. I think separating all of them, the epistemology, the ontology and the ethics has been a disaster. You know, and Habermas and others have agreed with that. And so this is, can we fit them back together again so they form a living system that is both truer to our deepest phenomenology and to our highest aspirations. Love it. That's what I want to do.

1:05:56Dr. John Vervaeke:We'll be right back. Rise Flash Deals July 6th. Don't wait. Shop Wayfair's 4th of July clearance now through July 6th at Wayfair.com. Wayfair, every style, every home. Hey, it's Ryan Reynolds here for Mint Mobile. Now, I was looking for fun ways to tell you that Mint's offer of unlimited premium wireless for$15 a month is back. So I thought it would be fun if we made$15 bills. But it turns out that's very illegal. So there goes my big idea for the commercial. Give it a try at MintMobile.com slash switch. Upfront payment of$45 for three months,$90 for six months, or$180 for 12-month plan required.

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