Why Wonder Is More Than Curiosity with William Desmond

29:13William Desmond:But very, very quickly, people realized that the verification principle itself is not subject to the verification principle. It just doesn't fit in. So this speaks to your point that something more is at work that is not acknowledged in the articulation itself. Right. And some reflection on what we have articulated brings something of that more to the surface and breaks it open. And of course, breaking it open can move in different directions. Just again, think of the early Wittgenstein, very, in one sense, positivistically oriented. But even the early Wittgenstein had a kink in his way of thinking because he made the distinction between what you could say and what you could show.

29:58William Desmond:Oh, yeah. And of course, the positivists loved Wittgenstein in terms of his logic, but they hated that sense of the mystical that he hints at towards the end of the Tractatus. And, you know, the later Wittgenstein is very interesting to see that something is opening up. But what's opening up is actually something already at work in our ordinary ways of speaking that don't fit into the propositional logic that he himself had developed in the Tractatus. So that's a revelation for people like Wittgenstein. But I think that many of the earlier philosophers didn't thematize these issues in quite the same way.

30:40William Desmond:But they thought, a thinker like Plato thought of an ethos which was already fermenting, so to say, or seeded with these possibilities. There's a univocalizing side to Plato when trying to get a definition and Socrates we see. But there's the operatic. There's so much more at work that actually, if you use the word, contextualizes the search for univocity, which is not itself univocal. And so it's kind of strange how the later Wittgenstein returning to the things that we say, what do we say? And we discover that there's a whole world at work in our words. I think that to me is a very platonic reflection, inspection of the log I.

31:28William Desmond:What do we say? What are the log I that we use to try and make sense of things? And there is a kind of overdeterminacy, I think, actually at work in the practice of platonic dialogue itself. that is not, that's a higher level of sophistication philosophically than some of the more univocal logicist practices of the 20th century, for instance. I think that's well said, William. I want to get back to that because like the two papers I sent you were attempts to, can we make this, in Pierre Hadot's sense, can we make this a spiritual exercise rather than just a proposition that we believe. Can we cultivate proper skills and stances and identities in relationship to it?

32:18I want to come back to that. But before I do, I wanted to point to something.

32:22William Desmond:You could also use your four Ps in that long paper, the positional as tending towards the univocal, but then not only the perspectival, but also the procedural as well as the performative, especially those last two bring us back into the living ethos of totally one of my arguments for has been that um the connectedness which i think you know you and i talked about that i think lines up well with your porosity the sense of religio of connectedness is the primary sense of meaning and that is not born well by our merely propositional knowing that our skills and even more so our perspectives and our identities bind us to the world.

33:11And that's where a lot of heavy lifting of meaning, the kind of meaning that makes life worth living is being cultivated. And I think the propositional tyranny therefore contributes to the meaning crisis by cutting us off from deeper sources of connectivity um so i'm sorry i interrupted you there you were going

33:32William Desmond:off in one direction no no i brought you back to yourself yeah but that brought you back to yourself that's fine i i mean that i i think that's i i appreciate the opportunity to make clear the connections between what you're saying about the contraction and what I'm talking about with propositional tyranny. So I thank you for that. Now, I wanted to go back to this issue. There's things swimming around here, the principle of sufficient reason and stuff like that, because one of the things I've seen, and this goes into my work, right um one of the i've seen uh i'll use cognitive terms right now i'm not claiming they're exhaustive or complete this is another doorway into plato versus aristotle i see i see a proper making space for and place for insight even non-propositional insight gonzalez and others have argued for that as central there's a noetic insight that is not in any way reducible to or capturable by inference.

34:41And I think this goes, whereas I see it tilting the other way in Aristotle. I see Aristotle giving priority to inference. What I'm saying is there's two aspects to intelligibility, if you'll allow me. And I think one thing that happens, well I'm going to tell me if this lands for you I think we think I mean I think there's something right about the platonic intuition about a deep religio between intelligibility and realness but then if that gets if intelligibility gets reduced to inference and then inference gets reduced to a kind of univocal logicism, as you said, then I think you get, well, you get what you have.

35:35You get a radical reduction. You get the most clearly generalizable must be the most real because it is the most clear. And that, of course, is one of the things that is at the heart of science. It's something I think you and I need to talk, wrestle with. I have proposed, Greg Enriquez and I have proposed that intelligibility actually isn't just generalizability, it's also acuity. It's also acuity. It's the ability to properly differentiate. And that what we're actually doing when we're making sense is we are integrating and assimilating, but we're also differentiating and accommodating. We're complexifying in order to more and more, and I use this next word in both senses, appreciate the complexity of reality, That that's actually what's going on in understanding.

36:24It's a process of complexification. And why that matters is complexification has a proper place in it for insight, because insight is the act by which things can be suddenly drawn together in an emergent fashion. And what happens when I do some of my psychological work is, right, the study on insight, even the psychology of insight, is like over here. And then everything else is going on as if inference is all we're using. Do you know what I mean? Right? Yeah. And because to me, I'm not equating insight with astonishment, but I'm thinking insight has astonishment in it. Because use your criteria.

37:13Use your criterion. I can't make an insight. I can't say, okay, now, insight, go. Right.

37:19William Desmond:No, you can't project yourself into an insider. It is not an act of self-determination at all. Right. It is an act of being, right, I participate in an insight. It doesn't merely impose itself on me. I participate in it. There's a platonic notion. Whereas, right, I think inference seems to have a teleology in it that drives towards this self-determination that you're talking about. Right. I'll put it into question. If you understand, Aristotle says, okay, we understand inference as logic and we understand logic as validity. Is validity not exactly just formal self-determination? You obviously know I think validity is important.

38:08I'm not throwing it out. But I'm saying, not only is there a propositional tyranny, is there an inferential tyranny? I know this is an odd thing for two philosophers to say. Right. But I'm trying to get at something here.

38:23William Desmond:Yeah. Well, I mean, again, way back in the day, I was involved in the teaching of logic. and that's a day, which is many days ago. But I mean, there's something that tends towards self-containment about any logical system. And it wants to be self-determining in that respect, that there is nothing anomalous that can't be contained in, let's say, a chain of inferences, just to take a very simple example. But the thing, of course, is that a chain of inferences is itself impossible without insight. Yes, exactly. I mean, it's a very simple thing to say. And if you're in the company of logicians, you feel kind of small by just drawing attention to the fact that if you say, if A, then B, if A, B, B, then C, A, then C, you know, you're seeing connections.

39:27William Desmond:You're seeing connections. You can talk about making connections. You're making inference. But if you don't see the connection, in a living sense, there's no inference there, even though on the paper, the symbolism seems to be kind of self-contained articulation. So it's a mystery of that act of seeing. It's interesting, again, that you bring up insights. And just referring to my own early days, too, I cut my teeth studying Lonergan's insight. Oh, excellent. Way back as an undergraduate. I mean, just mentioning him, he's a great Canadian, and I think certainly honored by some Canadians that I know.

40:11William Desmond:But that notion of insight, that sense of the eureka moment, he makes reference to that in relation to, who said eureka? Archimedes. Archimedes. Archimedes, and so on. But there's something of a happening in the event of insight. And even though it's not passive, simply there is a patience to it that the illumination comes to one. You know, coming back to that issue of self-determination, that you're freed by an insight into a light that you had sought, but that you could not simply self-produce by activities of your own. And I think this is where, again, it's probably very relevant to AI, for instance, that you do have activities of computation which are extraordinarily complicated.

41:12William Desmond:But there's no insight that passes from one thing to the other in the machine that actually comes up with these combinations at the end of the response to the question. insight in that sense. That's living noasis. Yeah, exactly. To go back to the Greek. And I don't know what it is about modernity. Everything that we've produced is the outcome of living noasis, but the mystery of living noasis itself is something that we don't want to acknowledge at all. Yeah. You know, we want to produce machines that are void of living noasis. And we noetically seem to think that that's something superior to living noetic activity, which in the end actually is the origin of the whole enterprise.

42:06So this brings me up to something, again, that goes back to our first conversation. Because I think of insight as having to do with relevance realization. And I think that, and whereas computation, as you said, has the self-containedness, I mean, that is the essential feature of a formal system, is it self-containedness. And in the 2024 paper, I believe I sent you it, we argued that the process of translating the large world, which is inherently ambiguous, inherently complex, combinatorial explosive, I would say it's a good description, by the way, of what you mean by overdetermined. Yeah. Right?

42:51Yeah. You always have to translate that into a small world. This is Savage's idea. And that act of translation cannot itself be managed by a formal system because you get into a vicious third man regress. It was like, yeah, but how did that formal system come about that made the translation? Well, it had to have been translated and so on and so forth. And so we argue, therefore, that in a deeply ontological sense, relevance realization cannot be computational in nature. that things like insight, therefore, could never ultimately be captured. I mean, we can have sort of parasitic parodies of it, but it could never be captured by formal computation.

43:33Now, the problem with these arguments, just to say it, is people are very slippery about their terms. So the term computation has just meant something happening inside this thing that I point at and call a computer. and as soon as you're doing that the the irony there desmond william desmond is that you've got you know equivocation actually like like like with the logical positive a deep equivocation actually showing up in the position the position has to equivocate on what it means by computation it's all of its legitimacy out of the formal meaning but it actually has to step away for that in order to totalize, like in order to have the totalizing claim that everything can be captured by computation.

44:22So I just wanted to, I think something like what we saw with the logical positivist is happening with the computationalist.

44:30William Desmond:Right. The conquest of equivocity by a more powerful university produces new equivocities. Yes. Sometimes even more, more slippery than what we started out with. But just a simple example, again, from my earlier days engaging the sense data theorists and so on and the positivists. One of the words, again, it's an English word more than American, North American, wooliness. if you if you talk to uh analytic philosophers and come across as a more continental type a very a common word that repeated itself again and again was that this is all very woolly yeah i grew up with that you know i mean you you can understand the meaning that has been communicated but then when you turn around and ask the univocalists can you give me a univocal definition of wooliness, they can't do it.

45:31William Desmond:There's no non-wooly definition of wooliness. So they're working with pussy themselves, in fact. They're in the mire of equivocation, but they're crediting themselves with superior insight because they're not woolly. But of course, they are woolly because if you're measuring something and it kind of keeps on changing its shape, and they can't tell you what the measuring rod is like in a more univocal sense, then what's the purchase of their critique of the so-called woolly thinkers? Yeah, exactly. So, I mean, for me, the crux of that came, there was a really fun movie a while ago called Time Bandits.

46:13I don't know if you ever saw it, but the Demi-Urge satanic figure, he's basically Satan. He pronounces, we'll do away with all this woolly thinking.

46:22William Desmond:uh was that done by one of the monty python yeah uh john cleese is in it and terry gilliam uh terry gilliam yeah terry gilliam michael powlin's in it too yeah i met john cleese by the way we hit it off yeah so still still annoying people well as he should um so given everything we've said about the non-computational insight aspects of intelligibility.

46:56And to some degree, we're separating intelligibility from determination. Yeah. What is intelligibility? I'm sorry, this becomes sort of the pivotal question. And I know I'm not trying to trap you and to give me a univocal account, But I want to sound like, can we wonder together about what is intelligibility then? What is it we're trying to more properly participate in at least? Yeah.

47:27William Desmond:Well, I mean, I wouldn't see myself as an enemy of determinability, but it would be, again, a relativization of it in respect of those who want to have a kind of, again, totally univocal sense of what is determinable. So I do think that there is an intimate relation between determination and intelligibility. But in the way that I tried to talk about this is that what is forgotten by that equation is the process by means of which the determinant becomes determinate. Well, that's very much like the argument I just made about relevance realization. Exactly. What becomes determinate has become determinate.

48:07William Desmond:So there's a determination process. And I would say also that the determination process is itself not another determination. There's something about it that exceeds determination. So any determination of intelligibility is immediately implicated in something that exceeds determination as such. And that is not a rejection of intelligibility. I think it's actually an opening to reflection on a richer sense of what it means to be intelligible, And indeed, a richer sense of what the process of determination is also. So again, within the sciences, as they become more complex, and sometimes, of course, they do reach certain thresholds where new wondrous things, so to say, almost force themselves on the scientific community, as has happened in the early part of the 20th century and so on.

49:01William Desmond:And again, there would be many people that want to pull back into this more comfortable space of determination and determinability. But again, I think the adventurous side of the scientific enterprise is precisely to be on that threshold. Yeah. Where the more than determinant continues to challenge us. But again, at those thresholds, I think very old metaphysical questions begin to emerge about why is there something rather than nothing, for instance? You know, the very being there of the universe as itself intelligible. What makes intelligibility itself intelligible? What makes it to be at all?

49:42William Desmond:And these are questions that also are neighbors to the religious sense of things. And again, I would just... You know, when I think of art and religion, for instance, I don't think of them as merely indeterminate. I think that they address indeterminacies, but they have also resources of rich determination that allow us to live with a less reductive and contracted sense of intelligibility. I can just take a work of art has a certain determinate character to it, but in that character, there's something more than can be exhaustively determined. So it's a sign of the over-determiners, so to say. Those questions were asked in some of the responses of the people in that book, Astonishment from Science also.

50:38Very much. which, well, I mean, you're reminding me a lot of Eric Pearl's work.

50:47William Desmond:Right, Eric, right. Yeah, and he's like a pure Platonist, whatever that is. Well, I think he's more a Neoplatonist because… Neoplatonist, right, yeah. Because especially the influence of Plotinus. And I think of his, you know, the Neoplatonic argument that he's sort of, I think, very well refurbished, which is, you know, and I'm rendering it oversimplified just for the purposes of conversation. But like that, that, that, that the source of intelligibility can't itself be intelligible, which is like, because like we get into that, well, then there might be, then there has to be that by which, that which affords that intelligibility.

51:37William Desmond:And you get an infinite regress, a vicious infinite regress. And the idea is that what actually is being disclosed is an inexhaustibility, an inexhaustibility. And that's what I wanted to get at. And the one is not a merely privative notion. It's a superlative notion, overdetermination. determination. The one is a quantitative and qualitative, people often forget the qualitative, inexhaustible source of intelligibility. The DAO is a well that cannot be used up. We can't exhaust it. And I'm wondering, I'm trying to bring back the notion of that. Like Polanyi talks about that and Esther Lightcap meet in her contact with reality.

52:26If we understand intelligibility as contact with reality and not just explainability then what we get polani said that our sense of realness is exactly this sense of the inexhaustibleness of intelligibility that's what makes the wooden stick more a real stick and the shadow stick not because there's we can we can learn so much more about the wooden stick and we and that's why there's an asymmetry that is what actually affords explainability because there's more because of that i can use the stick to explain the shadow but not the shadow to explain the stick yeah so explainability is afforded by inexhaustability and that should be a more proper place in our understanding of intelligibility what

53:15William Desmond:what do you think of that as a proposal well i mean it's there are many things uh the that are suggested by what you say, I think that we don't have to give up on intelligibility, but are forced to talk about what's hyper-intelligible, what makes intelligibility intelligible, is hyper-intelligible, which doesn't mean that it's unintelligible, but it means certainly that we have to negotiate the threshold between what is more measured to our own finite intellect and what is more, what is beyond in that sense. uh inexhaustible in the language that you're using there again we can take up the language of hyper i i like the notion of the hyperbolic it's it's present in my own work yeah but um uh i i was thinking of um what was it there was a second thought i had there which uh i as as as kind of fled me now for a second let's do that um what was it um

54:20William Desmond:I'm sorry. It was a good thought, actually. I love it when you get mad at memory like that. I have a memory of my thought. Just think of this. I mean, the very event now of forgetting the thought is an instance of something that exceeds us. Yes, yes. I had the question of the hyper-intelligible, and then I had something else, and it fled me. Now, where did it go? You know, it's not that I didn't have it. So there's something about certain thoughts that come to us. But is the hyperintelligible sort of the cognitive comportment towards the overdetermined? Well, again, the notion of cognitive has a too determinate character to it, I think, in the way of our current usage anyway.

55:10Okay.

55:11William Desmond:The cognitive orientation carries some kind of proportionality between the nor and the known, whereas I think the hyper-intelligible has a disproportion of sorts. Now, the disproportion doesn't have to be something that actually issues in a dualism between the different levels, so to say, between the higher and the lower if one wants to talk that way. but some of the older languages of pre-modernity are sometimes more supple, more open we've tried to kind of corral ways of talking about subject and object, cognition and so on in such a way that we act as if we have the measure of them and I don't think that we do at all.

56:01William Desmond:I have a feeling that the ancients were much more they're much much more, I don't know what the word is, but they had a kind of a tolerance for openness in their really fundamental concepts. And the very tolerance itself opened up avenues of exploration that our own efforts to pin things down cognitively don't actually help us in the end. But again, one of the points certainly was this, I like in your work the emphasis upon asymmetrical relations. I've had a lifetime of engagement with the Hegelians, for instance, and Hegelians will always, and Hegel himself, he'll acknowledge perhaps at the beginning something asymmetrical between, say, A and B, but as he walks through the dialectic, it becomes such that A and B mutually determine each other.

56:53William Desmond:So the telos of the analysis often turns out to be a mutual determination in which any asymmetrical relativity disappears from the picture. And I think that's very relevant to the question of Plato and the Thinus. Again, one of the thoughts, if it's coming back to me, our talk last week about image in the original, in the shadow and the stick, the original stick has more ontological substance to it than the shadow. And I think that that's a deep ontological insight in the platonic way of looking at things. There's always more to the original, the truly original, than the images that do manifest it, but don't absolutely manifest it.

57:40William Desmond:And that we live somewhere in this middle space, this metaxu, between the image and the original.

57:49So, all of this, I mean, we're very much on the horizon here. And I appreciate your challenge around the adjective cognitive. Because I have four kinds of knowing, I don't think of the cognitive just as a propositional inferential.

58:10William Desmond:I'm expressing more. yeah no no no that's fine uh the same prudeness but that's i mean i've you know different the intellectual communities will use uh certain words well no i i i'm not really pushing back on you william because the way the the notion the the notion attached to the term that you're criticizing is still the predominant notion i'm fighting an uphill battle you're breaking a lot You're trying to break out of the box, as we talked about last week. Yeah, very much. And that brings me to the two smaller papers, one more of the philosophical vision about the superlative sense of no-thingness, which I think is in the same ballpark as what you talk about as the overdetermined.

59:00And then a particular way of trying to practice platonic dialectic interdialogues. We emphasize, we always use the two terms. because dialectic is something we can do. Dialogos is something we can merely participate in. Just like there are things you can do with your attention to provoke or make yourself more prone to insight, but you can't self-determine yourself. Dialectic is the self-determination of the participants, if I can put it that way. Dialogos is when over-determination shows up and they come to properly orient and appreciate. and and because and this is how people talk in the practice they talk about they go from a determinate sense of a virtue not to an equivocal sense but to to use your phrase they have a hyperbolic they feel like they're expanding towards something that is now sort of you know well inexhaustible to use my term uh moreness right um but but but what's interesting And here's where some of your other work comes in.

1:00:08That mornis doesn't sever them from intimacy. It doesn't make them feel like they have been sort of torn asunder from themselves. Because they also do another platonic thing. They also do anamnesis. They say things like, I've always been looking for this, although I didn't realize it. So that's a profound statement of intimacy. That's profound intimacy. even though they have a sense of opening up the ultimacy. And one of the powerful, like this has happened multiple times, but one instance I was at a three-day retreat, taking people through these practices, and one woman, she expressed the astonishment at the virtues, which I think is one of the functions of the platonic dialogues, especially the aporetic ones, where you don't get a definition of the virtue.

1:01:00You're just left, right? You're opened up. Yeah. But you are opened up. Yeah, yeah, you are. And she expressed all of that. She expressed the intimacy and the inexhaustibility. And then she just sort of, she was silent, and then she turned and she said, I'm going to lead a more virtuous life.

1:01:17William Desmond:Right. The metanoitic moment. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yeah. And so, I mean, and the difficulty we face with people is exactly something you keep putting your finger on in the critique of scientism. People want to reduce, like, we are very clear that this isn't a method. This is a way that then, a way of orienting yourself to something beyond that has to show up of its own accord, right? Or that's dialogos. That's not dialectic, right? That's why we call it dialectic and ideologous. But people want to make it a method. Right, they do. Yes, right. Right. They want to make it. There's a sense of, and here I think of Taylor, Charles Taylor, another great Canadian thinker.

1:02:09You've mentioned Lonegrin. I think Charles Taylor is another great Canadian. The sense of the buffer itself, the sense of there's a – that if you want that sensitivity to the overdetermined, there's an inherent vulnerability in it that is somehow deeply unpleasant for us in modern – I mean, vulnerability is always unpleasant for all organisms to some degree. I'm not trying to demonize anybody. But I think there's something right with Taylor's notion that we've got a hypersensitivity. It's a weird turning in on itself. We've got a hypersensitivity to vulnerability, which actually reduces our sensitivity to astonishment, if I can put it that way.

1:02:57William Desmond:Right, yeah, right. Yeah, the buffer itself is strangely self-contradictory in one sense. Yeah. And produces internally that kind of contradiction that you're in, in, in its flight from vulnerability, it makes itself hyper vulnerable, so to say. Yeah. And sometimes even hyper vulnerable to ghosts and spooks that emerge within the buffering itself. But I, I, I, I, I have, Charles Taylor has a kind of sort of soft Higgy in background. I think, I think I'm more kind of, It's sort of, I have been very engaged with Hegel, but a little bit more kind of, and that book that you have referred to elsewhere, Ryan Dunn's.

1:03:48William Desmond:Yeah, yes. Taylor sets the question for transcendence in our modern times and makes some use of my work. I did have an engagement with Taylor many years ago. It's on YouTube, I think. It was in Rome. there was this conference. He was the big speaker finishing the conference, and I responded to him. But my question about the buffered self is the following. In the secular age, the way it's presented is a kind of historical genealogy in a certain sense, but the implication sometimes seems to be that medievals and early years, they were porous selves. We have become buffered selves. And I try to say that the sense of porosity that I develop in my own thinking is not something that is peculiar just to the medievals or the ancients.

1:04:44William Desmond:I think we're all constitutively porous beings, and it can be shaped and configured and reconfigured differently, perhaps under the pressure of different worldviews. But there's a kind of an ontological claim made about our porosity, which I think brings us into the space also of a kind of, I mean, to be porous is to have an openness that has a certain kind of emptiness to it, as well as the possibility of something passing in and through it. Being porous does bring us into the constitutive nothingness, if one wants to talk in that way, that is at the heart of the human being also. And we do want to secure that.

1:05:27William Desmond:I think that happens in every age, but how we secure it is the question and how we allow its promise actually to remain, even if we do have to secure ourselves against external enemies, for instance, and so on. So I think that the most closed, my image of hell at times is a little bit like Dante at the end of the Inferno, where when Dante and Virgil reach Satan, he's completely frozen. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And to me, that's a certain way of communication. The porosity has been closed down absolutely. You have a kind of an absolute being who's absolutely for himself, but totally lacking in this porosity that would be open to what is other to self.

1:06:18William Desmond:And hell is something like the absolutely buffered being, because an absolutely buffered being is not in any living relation to anything beyond itself. But again, that kind of satanic closure into self.

1:06:37I agree. I think that's constitutively impossible. But could it nevertheless be the case that while we are constitutively bound to porosity, to participatory, perspectival knowing, which are inherently porous because they're inherently participatory in nature, we could nevertheless have an official story that denies them. I mean, your critique of scientism, I think, seems to point to that. Because I do think there's – so I would often say this. This might not be the same thing you're saying. Let me try it. I think meaningless is always a problem for human beings. Meaninglessness.

1:07:30William Desmond:Yeah, absolutely. Look at Ecclesiastes, look at others. There's even a sense of it in the Epic of Gilgamesh, right? So this is a perennial problem. I do think, however, right, the degree to which we've created all of these, you know, disastrous dichotomies, delusional dichotomies, of the absolute dichotomy between the subjective and the objective, between fact and value. You argue that, for example, that drives us almost inevitably to default atheism. I do think that that configuration and the way it severs art and philosophy and science and religion from each other, which has been, I think, extremely detrimental to all of them because of the role.

1:08:26Like Catherine Elgin has made an excellent case for how much science depends on art. She calls it felicitous fictions. The solar system model of the atom, curve fitting, all ideal thought experiments. These are all works of art, and they're absolutely integral to the practice of science. Right. So I'm not going to go on about that. The point I'm trying to make is that I do think we're in a meaning crisis. While I think there's a perennial problem around meaninglessness, I think our culture is very poor at providing people philosophical practice and other spiritual exercises individually and in community that actually can alleviate or at least ameliorate the threat of meaninglessness.

1:09:18Many of my students have a kind of domicile. They have a homelessness. They don't know where they should go to look for role models, practices, institutions that can help them recover a sense of deep connectedness, deep participation, astonishment, reverence, and the cultivation of wisdom as the appropriate response to that. So this is how, in my mind, I put you and Taylor together. That's how I try to.

1:09:48William Desmond:Yeah, I'm not separating myself from him, except that I think I'm more of a kind of metaphysician than he is. Yes. And I think I have probably a more systematic impulse, as well as, I think, also a more poetic side to what I'm doing. I mean, his most recent book is full of exploration of poets, but I explore poets also. but in the kind of form of writing that I do, the poetic side comes out. I want to give you a compliment around that. I'll take it. Okay. I suffer from the usual vanity of professing. Well, here's the compliment. When I read Plotinus, I was struck by something. I was struck by something that there was this interweaving, interleaving of argument and artistry.

1:10:46I was both being carried through an argument and I was being conduced through a spiritual exercise. And I had never seen that. there's aspects of that in Plato but in Plotinus it seems to have come into this really I find I found it extremely beautiful I feel the same tenor in your work I feel that there is there's a lyricism that is a metanoetic as well as an argument that is properly you know a conceptual endeavor and I find the two of them woven together you remind me in that way I mean, there's other differences. But you remind me in that way of reading Plotinus when I'm reading you.

1:11:34William Desmond:Thank you. There is a section in God in the Between where I talk about the kind of marvelous dialectic of Plotinus. Certainly in the 20th century, for much of it, I don't think it's as closed against Plotinus now, but the dismissal, especially in Anglo-American circles, I mean, there's a mere mystic. It's crazy, you know, crazy. And that mingling of a kind of eros, a noetic eros, and there's an energy that carries you. But it's not just an abstract theory. He embodies, he incarnates, I think, often in his writing something of that energy. so i'm very happy to to be um associated with platinus in that sense so so i mean there's there's there's a way of you know it's to my mind it's closer to hado's sense of i i'll sometimes use the ancient word philosophia rather than philosophy that in order to where where it's about the cultivation of wisdom and the proper comportment towards what's most real and these practices that I've been, and the work trying to share.

1:12:54Because I do think that, I think one of the conclusions I came from reading is the dearth of astonishment, and you even go to the death of astonishment. I think that is a significant component of what I've been talking about as the meaning crisis. And I think a lot of what I've been trying to do in terms of trying to be more like Plotinus in my theoretical endeavors and like Socrates in terms of spiritual exercises is about trying to reawaken astonishment as a real phenomenological possibility that is put into a framework that won't just be like the problem with experiences is we we commodify them and then put them on the shelf of our ego and look i look at my experience i you have to you have to not only afford these realization of astonishment you have to you have to have an integrative framework so that people are conduced into transforming in order to transfer it into

1:14:01William Desmond:their life and so um but but tell me i mean you you the practices are ones that you and guy socially embody i mean you have you know you this isn't just a theoretical account no no no we do we have workshops and we we have courses and we have retreats and and and where we can uh we are we've got you know we've got one or two grants and we're we're trying to scientifically study them which is like, it's qualitative analysis. It's not merely quantitative. Yes, we're doing all of those things. I had a chair at Villanova, which I retired from last May. But I've stayed on there in connection with the Augustinian Institute.

1:14:50William Desmond:And the person who's in charge, by the way, Jim Wetzel, the marvelous person, he made this thing, he called it the Kasichiacum Fellow. I'm the Cicciac. Cicciac was the place that Augustine went to just after the experience that he describes in the confessions where Tolo leg in. He decided to be baptized as a Christian. But they went, it's just outside Milan. They're not absolutely certain there are two places, but he wanted to set up their philosophical community, philosophical Christian community. They were to a degree bankrolled by a rich guy back from Hippo. And he actually had these dialogues there, they're called the Kesikyakum Dialogues, in which his son was there, his mother was there, but then there were a certain number of young men and some older men where they talked about various things.

1:15:46William Desmond:So last fall when I was at Villanova, I gave some seminars on the first Kesikyakum Dialogue, which is called Contra Academicosa, about the academics were the skeptics of the time. Yes. But this was a communal thing. This is therapeutic in a certain sense. This is performative in relation to a community exploring radical skepticism as found in ancient society. and it's a i i saw it very much as a kind of an analog an analog to the loss of meaning and the nihilism yep that's we experience in in western countries very often and the skepticism the kind of the lack of confidence or trust that truth is possible for us and so on you know so but it was responded to not by just offering a theory in a set of well-defined propositions, but by a practice dialogos as you're following it and so on.

1:16:55William Desmond:So it's something that I think the ancients understood this much more than we have done because we've turned philosophy, for instance, into an academic discipline. And these other sides, which are just more essential really in the end, because even if you're attracted to the academic discipline, you're mostly attracted to it because some teacher has epitomized something of the seeking, searching mind. It's not just, I mean, perhaps there are individuals who are just sort of so in their head that they're just fascinated by argument as such. But usually it's an embodiment, an intimate embodiment in someone who practices thinking and so to say performs it to be as a kind of something that's attractive within, let's say, a classroom setting, a seminar setting, to kind of epitomize thinking, not just simply to talk about thinking, if you know what I mean.

1:18:01Yeah, I do. I mean, I had a, I was going through, I mean, I had left a fundamentalist Christianity and I was very much in a nihilistic, angry state of going through my own sort of personal version of the meaning crisis. And I was taught, it wasn't particularly the professor. It was, the professor didn't embody it, But he also didn't just, he moved away from just presenting Socrates as the voice, not even the voice, just sort of the placeholder for propositional arguments that we will extract and evaluate. We did that later. But in this initial course, I met, that's why he's right there. I met Socrates.

1:18:53And Socrates had exactly that impact on me. And my whole of my life, I went through and I got a PhD in philosophy because I appreciated the critical abilities it gave me to reflect on science and culture and ethics, which I think it made me a better scientist. and I appreciate that. But I was always hungry for that Socratic element. And that's why these, I've returned to try to put all of the cognitive scientific education I've received and participated in, into trying to, I'm not claiming that what we do is anything like exactly what was going on around Socrates, but I'm trying to recapture the spirit of the Dialogos for people today.

1:19:43So it was very much, like you said, it was very much a deeply personal encounter. There's only a couple figures that have had that impact on me in that way. I mean, because of my upbringing, but also because of the person Jesus of Nazareth has that. I keep returning to him. And then Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, those three figures have, there are many philosophers I think very highly of. You are one of them, for example. I do think very highly of you. I think one of the things I endeavor to do with this work is to make more people aware of your excellent work. But I knew what you mean. And so I have a great deal of affection and respect, please don't misunderstand.

1:20:33But there are other people, there's like, for me, there's Socrates, Jesus, and Siddhartha. They do something more. They do what you're talking about. They embody something. Perhaps that's part of what it means to be enlightened. You fully embody something and you make it vibrantly. They all are transfigured in away like you know jesus obviously is it goes through the transfiguration and matthew the buddha after enlightenment he's walking down the street and people approach him and his visage is somehow like and they're trying to like what are you are you a god are you and that's when he says i'm awake right uh and of course and socrates and plato admitted that he transfigured socrates in the seventh letter i've given you a socrates more beautiful and younger yeah yeah yeah yeah i mean

1:21:26William Desmond:I mean, I totally agree that there are certain extraordinary individuals that embody something that, you know, or thinking and articulations try to catch up with them, but they in a way never do because it's the living of a wisdom that itself is living in them. Yeah. And, yeah, but I do think that certainly ancient philosophy was not devoid of a desire for a kind of metanoetics. I know that's often associated more with Christianity, but I think that certainly the early Christians, Justin Martyr, for instance, they thought of Jesus as a philosopher. I agree. And I think there's lots of good work.

1:22:18Mark Wynn is doing it. where Christianity is being connected to Haddo's notion of philosophy as a way of life. I'm reading a very good book on the philosophy of Jesus as a way of life, using that kind of framework.

1:22:35William Desmond:Well, I would say that all of my work in some senses, even when it's not overtly said, it's companioned by a sense of the religious. Yes, me too. It doesn't have to be said in order for it to be actually fermenting, so to say, in what I'm trying to say. And I would say that my own experience, for instance, with the more atheistic strand of continental philosophy, they see things very interesting in what I do. But I think that once they begin to get closer to it, the way I've sometimes put it is that they smell God. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And they don't. They don't. I don't know if you've had this experience.

1:23:16William Desmond:You're walking along the sidewalk and there's a person further up and that person doesn't want to meet you. So the person goes to the other. So I found that some of my atheistic friends, they go a certain direction, and then they know that if they keep going in that direction, they might have to raise questions of this sort, and they cross to the other side of the road and pass me. That's okay. Yeah, well, I mean, I was, I came, it's funny, I came to sort of this, the realization after I did at the Philosophical Silk Road pilgrimage that, I mean, I am a scientist, and I love doing science, and I am a philosopher, and I love doing philosopher.

1:24:03And I'm not trying to separate these, but it was existentially important for me to admit that underneath it all, and this is something I resonate with you about, I'm fundamentally a religious person. Yeah. Yeah. And that motivates me quite powerfully. But I know what you mean. I'm teaching a class and, you know, your work plays a significant role in it on the cognitive science of religion. and I'm not trying to give like, I'm not starting with the definition of religion. I said, I'm going to try and take apart all the delusional dichotomies of modernity and then try to return you to the phenomenology of your experience and see if anything strikes you spontaneously as sacred and a new way of realizing what sacred might be.

1:24:50And the class is very popular and people are really wrestling. And I have a particularly good student in there and that student though is doing exactly what you talked about. but there's that, I can smell God in this. And, and it's like, and.

1:25:10William Desmond:Yeah. I mean, it's. I want to be fair to, I want to be fair to that person before you reply. No. Part of it is God has been identified with certain institutions and those institutions have lost trust to some degree. They've betrayed that trust. We know there's historical things they've done. There's political things they've done. And I do, I don't want to be merely dismissive. I do want to say that that requires a reckoning. But I also wanted to say that I think there's also the smelling God going on too. Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't be dismissive, but I do think that our culture for a number of centuries now has been, you know, there's always a taint of mockery on the part of certain enlightened intellectuals in relation to, I think, was it that Schleiermacher talked about the cultural despisers, the cultural despisers of religion.

1:26:03William Desmond:They're very present in some parts of the Western Academy. And okay, fair enough. And again, there are all these questions to be raised about religion, but the questions are themselves inseparable from a serious consideration of what we are as religious beings. And I mean, that's the level at which I think the thing, you know, just a kind of a basic honesty about our humanity, as finite, as vulnerable, as longing, as seeking, as desiring, as failing, as frustrating, and so on, as taken up into a sense of mystery, as perplexed and vexed and somehow also frustrated with trying to make sense of things, all those things.

1:26:57William Desmond:and sometimes meeting evils that are done by people that one would anticipate would be carriers of some virtue. You know, the disillusionment with the hypocrisies, all those kinds of things enter into the picture, I think. But that's the canvas of the human condition that I think if religion has to have its significance, must also have the amplitude of that canvas, including all of these darker sites that we're talking about here. And the thing is, the Promethean fables of modernity of saying that those sins are only to be found in religion, that fable has been completely eradicated. There is no institution that is not capable of great sin.

1:27:57And in fact, that now shows up. One of the hallmarks of the current period we're in is what's been called by, oh, I forget his name, Kieran's last name, the trust apocalypse, in that all the institutions, science, journalism, any institution, an all-time low sense of trust.

1:28:18William Desmond:Yeah, the trust apocalypse, that's an interesting phrase, R.H. But the trust was there, but it's been lost and is recovered. That requires a kind of a cultural metanoia, I think, myself. It does. It does. And it requires a proper replacement of forgiveness. Yeah. I mean, one of the things I like about Hegel, I do appreciate all your criticisms, But, you know, the deep interconnections he draws, Brandon brings this out between trust and forgiveness. Yeah. I think that's… No, the most significant discussion that I've been hearing is towards the end of the phenomenology. Forgiveness is a hugely important transition into religion.

1:29:10William Desmond:But I give an analysis of that ultimately as a form of self-forgiving and that it doesn't do justice to being forgiven and the irreducibility between the person forgiving and the person forgiven. But in one sense, that looks like a kind of just Hegel scholarship stuff. I don't think it is. I think the logic of self-determination in the end actually is contrary. It intrudes. It intrudes. In the end, it counterfeits something about forgiveness that entails this release. I mean, he uses language of release in one sense, but it's the release of the Spirit back into its own unity with itself. And I think I would give a different account of forgiveness, which isn't the opposite, but the betweening of the forgiving and forgiving.

1:30:05William Desmond:Yeah, yeah. But it's hugely important. And again, that shows the kind of the seriousness of Hegel in trying to make his acknowledgement that without understanding what's at play in religion, we're not going to have philosophical science in his sense either. You know, so it's, I'm not saying it's in a hostile sense to Hegel. No, no, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not getting that, William. I'm not getting that from you at all. I'm getting, you always, I mean, I, Here's another compliment. I think you take Hegel more seriously than many Hegelians that I've met or read.

1:30:46That's why I pay attention to your criticisms of Hegel. We're going to have to wrap it up for today, William. We're going to talk again. This has been wonderful. I just want to again recommend this book, especially the first chapter by William. good introduction to his work and you've got some really good thinkers wrestling sort of in public with William's work and then William responds it's a good introduction it's a good introduction to my mind so I'm going to thank you William for being here and then as always I give my interlocutor the last word anything you want to leave us with

1:31:30William Desmond:yeah I think that just as we've come to the question of religion at the end. I would find it interesting if we took up that as a question. I would love that. So much of our discussion has been epistemology, science and philosophy. Not in any narrow sense, certainly. But I would feel that without addressing that sense of the absolute, so to say, that religion carries for many people, that we wouldn't be doing justice to really a very important thing, perhaps the most important thing. Well, I'm happy to do that. I sent you the link. I taught a whole course on God about your work. So I'd be happy to talk to you about that.

1:32:22Very, very happy. We'll make that the focus of our next talk then.

1:32:25William Desmond:Great. Looking forward to that. So thank you very much. Thank you.

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