William Desmond and John Vervaeke: Strong Transcendence, Plato, and the Between

30:38William Desmond:That somehow divine madness, mania, raises our own adventures into the realm of a spiritual significance that they wouldn't otherwise possess. And I particularly pay attention to the dialogue called the Ion, which is about the Rhapsode. The Rhapsode is the person who recites the poetry given by the poet. But Ion basically gives a picture that the Rhapsode is wrapped. he's inspired by the poet and communicates that inspiration to the audience that is listening to him. So you have a chain of contagion, so to say, of inspired contagion from the poet to the rap, so to the audience. But you also have the implication actually that the poet himself is caught in a contagion of receiving some inspiration from ultimately a divine source.

31:34And it's a beautiful image in Plato, which is if you have a magnet and you suspend, let's say, nails from the magnet, the charge in the magnet will sustain

31:49William Desmond:the ladder of nails hanging from it. So what I try to say is that it's a picture of a communication from above down rather than by contrast with Eros, which tends to be a picture of a communication from below up. And I tried to say that Plato is a master at trying to mediate the metaxu from below up as well as from above down with eros and menia. And that also you can give an account of mimetics, which also has a kind of structural side to it, that it's not just a collapse into a kind of a pulpy and squishy sameness. differences are held in a poised relationship between what is imminent and what is transcendent.

32:40William Desmond:That's what I'm trying to do there and do it as a kind of a contrast to our modern, postmodern tendency to actually forget about this other sense of transcendence and run the risks really of collapsing. For all of our talk about differences in postmodernity, We end up actually all saying the same thing. So it is a strange kind of paradoxical inversion about our rhetoric of difference because it doesn't actually seem to uphold the difference it is so intent on doing. Okay, that's enough about that. But again, I would say that my own adventures in metaxology, Logos of the Metaxu, were inspired by a turn to Plato in response to the philosopher Hegel.

33:30William Desmond:I studied philosophy of Hegel very seriously from the start and felt that his dialectical way of thinking was very powerful. And I would defend dialectic, but not necessarily always in the Hegelian form. but dialectic is a play between self and others, same and different. So it has that kind of, I would call it a betweening character to it, but it tends to, in the end, resolve the interplay into an inclusive whole, which I think doesn't do justice to transcendence, in fact. And this is one of the reasons why I went back to Plato, because I thought that I could see in the notion of the metaxu a non-reducible mediation between imminence and transcendence.

34:16William Desmond:And again, right really from the beginning of my own sort of adventures in philosophy, that sense of metaxological thinking as opposed to Hegel's self-mediating dialectic is very much at the center of what I've been doing. But just one final word, a few words anyway on that other paper, Plato's Philosophical Art and the Identification of the Sophist, I studied the sophists with Stanley Rosen, someone who I admired and still continue to admire a lot. I didn't work with him, but we became very good friends. And he is so marvelous. He's got a book called The Limits of Analysis, for instance, something not irrelevant to John's own work.

35:01William Desmond:But the thing about the sophists takes us out of, strangely enough, it takes us out of the realm of abstraction. So I think it overlaps very richly with John's sense of participative knowing. Again, you see, one of the pictures of Plato is that he's looking for a nidos, he's looking for a form, and that he will articulate it with as determinate exhaustion in terms of attributes and aspects as possible. And in the dialogue of the sophist, there's an effort to define the sophist by this method called the diuretic method, where you have a category that then gets subdivided and subdivided and subdivided and subdivided.

35:47William Desmond:And at the end of the dialogue, it seems that we still haven't caught the sophist. Sophistry here should be taken as an image of the negative opposite of the philosopher. If the philosopher is in search of wisdom, the sophist is the figure of a kind of counterfeit wisdom. He looks wise, but in fact, there's a vacuity at the center. This theoretic method, which as a method seems very logically powerful, doesn't seem to be finally able to come down to identifying the sophist. And the word identifying is important in the sense that the identification isn't just simply the determination of a general concept with further specifying determinations.

36:38William Desmond:It's the kind of who of the sophist, so to say, that's at stake, rather than the what of the sophist. And again, that might seem a different thing to the standard Plato is in search of the essences, the eidos, the ide, and so on. But for me, it's always been so strongly to the fore that when you look at the Platonic dialogues, they're all almost, not all, but almost all first names. They're named after individual persons, sophists and others. So the strange artistic sense of singularity that's exhibited by the works of Plato themselves, to me, gives a lie to the reduction of Plato to just someone in search of merely abstract generalities.

37:30William Desmond:And I think that the turn, that participative turn, again, that John is getting at is central to Plato. As we advance in understanding the eidetic, the formal, the more general, the more universal side of things is absolutely not to be neglected as well. But this other side is a transformation of the soul, making it capable actually of being receptive to a sense of truth and wisdom that is not just simply produced by itself. The theme that, if you like, the anagogical that is present, just hinted at in John's paper, the notion of the platonic periagoge, the agogade. Periagoge means going around, but it means actually turning around.

38:24William Desmond:You know, there is that famous passage in The Republic where, in a certain sense, we have the potentiality to be oriented to the truth, but our orientation is not always oriented in a literal orientation as is towards the east to the light arising. So we have to be turned around in the right direction. And that's the discipline, I think, of philosophical education, a paideia of the philosopher, an initiation into the soul often turned in the wrong direction or turned away or turning itself away. So that's an idea of philosophical exploration, which doesn't fit into just a merely neutral, universal, non-personal sense of thinking, a rationalism that could be undertaken by everyone and hence by no one.

39:27William Desmond:And that kind of sense of singular venture, adventure, it seems to me, is very much present in the Platonic understanding of philosophy as bound up with living in a certain way, living in a thoughtful, mindful way. And that's an idea that has been noted by Pierre Hadot in the ancient world, how philosophy was not just an academic discipline in universities as we understand them in the modern world. But in fact, it constituted a way of life in sometimes a more solitary, not always, very rarely solitary, but often in a communal sense. Being a member of a school was also bound up with how one comported oneself in an ethical and religious sense.

40:18William Desmond:So these themes, it seems to me, are very central also to the latter part of John's paper. But he's trying to get out of the box, so to say, of the dominant presuppositions. You, I'm saying he, sorry. It's okay. Do you know what I mean? A good part of your paper is taking the terms that are quite widespread in our current intellectual culture among, let's say, more analytically, scientifically oriented thinkers and showing that there's not only an incoherence, but there's something lacking that is actually presupposed by the very practice of these limited forms of thought themselves.

41:07William Desmond:But you're easing yourself into a different space, it seems to me, towards the end of your paper, which is full of promise in other directions that perhaps are yet to come. And I was just saying that towards the end of the paper, you're easing your pathway into another space where many of these themes will be developed, it seems to me, outside of the frame. I mean, that's actually one of the ideas that struck me. You mentioned Charles Taylor early on there, but his notion of the imminent frame. When you think about that, it's not just merely his sense of the imminent frame, but there's a framing that shapes how we think about this, but doesn't appear within what we think about.

42:01William Desmond:Exactly. And you're taking a step back. out of the frame, so to say, in the arguments that you put in the first, let's say, three quarters of the paper. But that there are things that you show are at work, even in those who deny them as a what. They actually, this sense of a performative contradiction, for instance. What carries their thought doesn't appear in what they think about. And I think that that's a hugely important point against those who think that, for instance, thinking can be reduced to computational connections or outputs or however you want to put it. It's cutting off your nose to spite your face because you have very powerful and very impressive machines.

42:57William Desmond:Yeah, yeah. Undeniably, they are. And, you know, and they put, you know, tremendously dangerous and powerful technologies in our hands and things like that. William, by the way, am I interrupting you or is this a... No, no, no, no, no. I just started giving you a prompt, as it were. Yeah, there's a lot here. First of all, I'm sure you're aware there's a whole generation of scholars, you know, thinking of Drew Hyland and Ruchnik and people like this, who, you know, New Way, Platonism, who have been basically arguing against both the Enlightenment and sort of certainly certain versions of the romantic interpretations of Plato.

43:47in which, and I want to bring one of their themes that runs throughout all of this is that the dialogue form, and you already mentioned that, and it plays a very big role in the first paper, but also in the second paper you sent me. The dialogue form is not merely ornamental or merely instrumental. It is integral to Plato's philosophy that unless you understand what's happening in dialogos. You're not understanding Plato. Now, I was taught, and perhaps you were taught, what we did with Plato way back when is you extract the arguments, you put the arguments on the blackboard, and then, right, and so character and context and development and conflict and all of these things, what Drew Hyland labels, I think it's a good label, he calls it the drama of the dialogue is being left out, even though the drama is often taking a central role.

44:50Is it the lackeys where they're talking about courage? I believe it is. Or is that the license?

44:55William Desmond:It's the lackeys, right? No, the lackeys, yes, right. And, you know, you have the two generals, and they're trying to come up with a definition of courage, and one represents sort of unquestioning intuition, and one represents sort of third-person, you know, technical definition. and Socrates destroys both of them as he's wont to do. And then he proposes and he destroys it. And then you end in Aporia. Nobody knows. Now, and you can just read that as skepticism. But first of all, like I think Hyland points out, he said, but notice what happens. Both generals say they want their sons to live with Socrates, to spend some time with Socrates.

45:29The drama of them, and here's what I'm using, turning and seeing that there was something in Socrates' presence beyond their interior intuition and beyond their merely external technical definition that was about courage. He was participating in courage. He was an image of courage to use your, your, and I think for me, I think that, that, that's a crucial thing. And I, I was wondering because I, I saw you and so here's my question. I saw you in, in the 1979. I mean, you're kind of ahead of the curve on that whole wave. That wave really gets going later. So congratulations first to you. Right. Right.

46:16But like you're really contrasting. I'm going to use the Greek word because the English word is inadequate. I've made a practice of not using the English word dialogue because dialogue is situated within modernity as the exchange of information to contract an agreement. And I put it, so I use the dia logos by way of, right, where there's something like, like, yeah. And, you know, Socrates says the logo shows up and it's like a wind and we follow it wherever it's, wherever it goes kind of thing. And so you're making a contrast between method and dia logos in the first paper. It's very, very central.

46:51First of all, does that seem fair to you as a characterization? Right.

46:56William Desmond:I mean, but it's interesting, actually, about Dave Ruschnick and Drew Hyland were themselves. They worked with Stanley Rosen, in fact, you know. Yes, yes, yes, yes. So there's a kind of a line of inheritance there. There is. But, yeah, again, if you think of the title of that paper, Plato's Philosophical Art, normally we tend to think of Plato as the philosophical enemy of art. in poetry. But the implication here is that there is a philosophical art, which in its own way may have serious questions to ask about the practice of poetry, but has its own artistic character to it. And if there is an artistic character to it, it may not just simply be a method in the sense of the diuretic method.

47:47William Desmond:But again, if it's philosophical art, it could include something like the diuretic method without actually thinking that it's going to answer all the questions. But the dialogical, the dialogos, as a logos between two, dia, dia as a dyad, but it's more than that because dia is also that space of betweenness. Yeah, yeah. When we talk about something as diaphanous, the window is diaphanous. It allows a passage between one side and another. Beautiful. So the logos is in fact plurivocal. That's the language I would use. It's not just even two. It's not even two. But that entails, I think, the kind of attention to singularities.

48:32William Desmond:And singularity is not again in a merely irrational sense, but in an instantiating sense. You're getting at that about Socrates and courage that he himself, even if he can't give a conclusive definition. He embodies something that these older generals see as witnessed in his character. And that's why they trust their own sons with Socrates as a teacher, because he incarnates something. But that incarnation, it seems to me, can only be understood in a strongly singular sense. So the whole relation between the universal and the more singular is of course an ongoing philosophical issue. But I think that Plato, even if he doesn't make them a theme of reflection in a kind of separate sense, his very practice as a philosopher, a dialogical philosopher, a philosopher of theologos, it shows us things that in their own way witness to certain ideas also.

49:41William Desmond:The idea and the witness are never simply separated from each other. Again, for me, perhaps one of the greatest examples of that is either Gorgias in the Gorgias or Drasymachus at the start of the Republic. They are living incarnations of this might is right, this will to power. It's not only that they have the view that might is right, but they are presented by Plato, the philosophical artist, with marvelous genius. In the way that Shakespeare presents us with things, but in a way remains reserved himself. Shakespeare doesn't talk in his own voice. Most of the stuff in Plato is not directly in Plato's own voice.

50:29William Desmond:There's a reserve to Plato, but it's one that actually draws us into the process of mediation and interpretation. I think most standard ways of reading the dialogues, they tend to forget that. They just see them as, as you said, extracting a set of concepts and a set of arguments, and then just simply claiming that in the 20th century, we have superior logical techniques. That show that Socrates and Plato, that they were just schoolboys by comparison with the sophisticated logics that we have now. But that's itself very schoolboy-ish, I would say. Yeah. And I would also say, I don't see any theory in our modern sense.

51:17I see lots of theoria. And what's interesting for me is Plato has both senses. He has theoria as contemplation, transformative contemplation. And then as Nightingale and Ward make clear, he also adverts to the original meaning of Theoria, which is pilgrimage. And there's a notion of a metanoetic passage. You have to leave and look back to see how you're limited and move, like all that's going on. Now, I wanted to bring that up specifically with what you just said a few minutes ago, connect it because um like i don't know if you've seen any of after socrates but we also you know we've done workshops and informal presentation we've worked out like sort of inspired by a lot of this we've tried to work out a practice for people a dialogical practice we call it dialectic into dialogos in which yep and uh and basically first of all like one person first of all that they they to the singularity they don't say uh they don't give a definition of honesty they say i propose that honesty is and then they they say something and then there's somebody that's amplifying them asking them okay well say a little bit more or when you said honesty you did this with your hands go back yeah just do the gesture what's happening in that and you're trying to draw the person into deeper deeper participatory deduction now and then and then we have like a scribe and a vibe somebody who's noting different stages and how the proposal's changing and the vibe is picking up on all the drama independent from any argumentation.

52:55And then that gets reported. And then eventually the midwife who was asking the question, they pick it up. They can't throw away the original proposal. They have to jazz on it. And then they pick up a proposal and it circles and it goes around once. And then it goes into free speech where people just start speaking spontaneously. I just wanted to give the context because what happens is, of course, people say some amazing things. They say something that gives me a taste, a glimpse of maybe what Plato meant by anamnesis. They say, I've always been looking for this, but I didn't know, which I find such a strange thing, like what they encountered in this.

53:37And they talk about going from thinking about honesty to You've sensing the, they use spatial metaphors, the vast reality of honesty. Now, all of that, I think, is consonant with what we've been talking about and how they become, like they become participatory icons. They come to exemplify much more what they're talking about than their propositions. And they pick that up and they play with that in serious play. It's very imaginal. But one of the things that I wanted to ask you about is, and. I don't know. One of the things they become aware of, and this is, I've done quite a cross-cultural, like in cross-contextual study of this, very many different dialogical practice groups.

54:26They become aware of the logos as something above and beyond them. It is other than them, although it's not separate from them. They are participating in it, but it is also has, on my, we're speaking poetically here. It has a mind of its own and is leading them and guiding them and drawing them. Does that land for you as something that you also see in the platonic dialogues? Because I, for me, I think that is in some sense, what you were talking about before about that, you know, the circling around and the sense of people, you know, getting caught up in a dance together, right?

55:10William Desmond:Right, right. Yeah. No, no. I mean, one of the themes that came to mind as you were talking there was the, again, the anamnasis or memory. And I sense that we have actually, for centuries now in the West in particular, lost a feeling for deep memory. And I'm thinking of something like this, again, it coming back to that art origins and otherness theme, the originals. When we have stressed originality, we put the stress on imagination rather than memory. And over time, we tend to think of imagination as projecting something into the future. And again, I think it's all pervasive in our culture where the pedagogy of a creative imagination is pushed again and again.

56:02William Desmond:But I would make the argument that even if you want to talk about projecting imaginatively, you have to ask what sources out of which this projection comes. And I think that in earlier peoples, and I think it's present in Plato, it's also present I think in the notion of memoria in Augustine, that memory is deeply mysterious and memory is bound up with the muses. I find this very suggestive for myself that the muses are the daughters of Memnesunae, memory, and Zeus. So there's a divine origin to the muses' true memory. And again, Plato, this is not directly in Plato himself. It's certainly in Greek culture.

56:58William Desmond:But it's also the case in the ancient world that the muses were often associated with places where you found water, springs of water, fluidity. And my kind of reading of this is that if you're living in the midst of nature and a spring of water, it comes up from the earth. sometimes in unexpected places, but there's a source that has a certain hiddenness in the earth itself, but it surfaces on the earth and makes itself available for cooking, for washing, and so on and so on. And the hidden depths of the sources always retain a certain hiddenness, so to say. They're not just matter of projections into the future.

57:48William Desmond:And if we don't, as it were, make contact again or open up those memorial sources in our very being, then the very sources of creativity or so-called creativity will just, it's just a matter of kind of cranking ourselves up, trying to crank ourselves up and claiming that that is creative imagination. And I think that that's kind of a bust, so to say. But again, that's the thing that I think about a lot in terms of our own culture, where that deep sense of memory is now outsourced to our memory sticks. how much memory we have on our computer and so on. And the development of AI, I think, will raise serious questions about the further emptying out of deep memory in that ontological, existential, theological sense even also, you know.

58:47William Desmond:But again, just a last point on that. the way we have stressed projective imagination has privileged the future in a way that I think is not good in a full economy. But again, I don't think memory is a matter of the past, simply. And this is what you were getting at, I think. That memory has something to do with the ontological depths that are hidden in the human being itself. I mean, we're just talking about the human being now, that there is a kind of an inward abyss, an inward otherness that characterizes the human being, out of which surprising possibilities emerge. Some of them are very dark too, of course, you know.

59:31William Desmond:But if we, as it were, can't return into that in an authentic way and draw from it in our creative ventures, we're really mutilating the promise of the human being. But again, our own stress on future temporality has tilted us away from thinking about this deep sense of memory, which to come back to the theme of transcendence again, I think memory is a kind of a portal between imminence as we experience it in this sublunary world to use an old fashioned term, and a sense of the divine otherness that somehow is communicated on this threshold between this ultimate otherness and our own inward otherness.

1:00:18William Desmond:You see what I mean? It's a kind of a platonic point of view. It's a kind of an Augustinian point of view that memory is deeply mysterious, but the sense of time and what is the other to time. Yeah. I mean, the ancients talked about time and eternity. In modernity, we've kind of locked off eternity. in modernity. So I talk about the other to time, and we need to rethink what is the other to time in a way that I think the ancients were onto and that we have turned away from, our many moderns have turned away from. So there's two points that come up for me, and you decide which one or both you want to pick up.

1:01:03One is, I think what we've done is we've reduced eternity to a merely logical understanding of eternity. And then we wrestle with that around nominalism and pure and abstraction and stuff like that. And so one of the things I'm hearing is, is there, and I'm not saying illogical, I'm saying, is there a non-logical or a trans-logical way of relating to eternity? I still like the term because I think it doesn't.

1:01:32William Desmond:Right. And then There's that. And what you just said, and what came to my mind was actually a Christian text. You know, the Holy Spirit within us is praying so that we can talk to the Father. And what I meant by that is that, and I do not intend to be in any way sacrilegious, when people are doing these practices, that inner sense of, like you said, the memory, but the memory isn't only inward directed. it's no no no it's it's other directed to other people and it's also there's something about the inexhaustible within allows them to recognize the inexhaustible but like without in a profound way and it and they feel like like they feel like here's where mark wins work is helpful they feel like reality goes from being a universe that contains things to a face that is presenting a mystery to them.

1:02:40So there's two points there, that sense of the memory being resonant rather than just internally directed. You seem to be agreeing with that.

1:02:52William Desmond:Yeah, when I talk about internality there, I don't mean this is all in a Cartesian sense. I just mean that we're in one sense worlds unto ourselves Yes. And have a certain wholeness. But there's a porosity to that being ourselves. And again, that could bring us back even to Plato's sense of one of the parents of Eros is poros. Yeah, yeah. Not just Plania. Yeah. So the inward otherness is actually intimately open to some sense of more ultimate otherness, the strong sense of transcendence. But the normal spatial determinations of up, down, inside, outside, such as we fix, these are ways of talking about something that is both up and down, in and out.

1:03:45William Desmond:Yeah. And hence, we have to, as it were, enter a space where this porosity is reopened in our thinking also, so that we're actually not fixating on anything. But again, that's very hard to put into words because when we put things into words, we tend to make them more determinate and create determinist ideas of what we're talking about. But I don't see that. That's why, for instance, you know, Augustine is very fascinating about memory. When he enters into memory, he talks about it as a kind of an abyss. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a kind of a treasure house of infinite resources. and these are clearly metaphors for the, and again, it's not a merely subjective thing at all.

1:04:31William Desmond:This notion of it being subjective is a very Cartesianized version of what the infinite inwardness of the human being is. And I think, you know, like for instance, you mentioned Plotinus, but even if you go back to Plato when he talks about the sun as his name for the good, I mean, the sun casts its light, but the light is as if it were almost nothing. We don't directly see the light. Yeah, we see everything. It's biblical also, yes, right. It's a powerful metaphor that it's only in terms of what the sun shines on that we begin to see determinacies. But for itself, it has something that transcends just determinacy, but it's not a mere indeterminacy.

1:05:14William Desmond:It's an enabling power. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that enabling power, call it in some traditions, the spirit, for instance, or this notion of inspiration. I mentioned the Greek Memnesuna and so on, but again, within the Jewish Christian tradition, I'm not as familiar with the Islamic tradition, but certainly breath itself is often a metaphor for this absolutely indispensable enabler of all life, but that can never be just pinned down to this or to that. and as I say it's very very hard to put that in a kind of systematic philosophy unless one philosophizes in a manner that somehow is also porous to interruptions of maybe a different more poetic discourse well yeah I think that is to use some of the language that I've been trying to bring to center stage like you get into a very powerful performative contradiction if you try to talk about porosity from the buffered self.

1:06:24I think that's kind of doomed. Now, picking that up, you said something, you know, and I think it's right, you know, it's not up or down, it's not in or out, like it's somehow, you know, non-dual to use just a label for it. Now, to me, that gives an opportunity not to cage, but to point towards a sense of eternity that is not merely this merely logical sense of eternity. Yes, right. That's the point you were making a while ago. Yeah.

1:06:58William Desmond:I mean, I think the logicians and the philosophers can talk about logical possibility, that is overall possible worlds, and it's non-temporal. But I think that that is a derivative sense of a general possibility. And it also is a certain evacuation of the notion of possibility. It makes possibility into just simply something like a logical form, rather than seeing that possibility must be connected with some possibilizing power, something that enables. I mean, living possibility is potency in a powerful sense of enabling certain possibilities and perhaps even also bringing them to realization.

1:07:53William Desmond:So philosophers, and I think, at least I find this, are often attracted to logical possibility in that sense, but it produces on its own just simply a dead kind of eternity. Because on its own, logical possibility can't generate anything beyond itself. So I think that with the Platonists and the Neoplatonists, if the divine is more than finite possibility built into that possibilizing power is dynamic. Yeah. Energizing. It's an energia of possibilizing rather than just simply a logical form that floats above all particular instantiations. Do you think that possibilizing that you're talking about here, this dynamic making of possibilities rather than just the static, cold, logical form.

1:08:59Well, let me pose it as a question. What's the relationship between that possibilizing and transcendence itself? When we're starting to talk about eternity and transcendence itself, we're often moving towards pointing towards God. Do you see them as different pointers towards towards God, like eternity and transcendence itself in the way we're talking about it here? Yeah.

1:09:27William Desmond:No, I do. Yes, yeah. I mean, for instance, like you could, as a kind of an entirely imminent philosopher, talk about possibility. And you can extend the sense of imminence to include possibility that isn't realized now. But the question still would then be what makes possibility itself possible. You could see the whole universe as given, as governed by possibilities, some of which are realized. But the very, if you like, fact of possibility itself, that there is possibility in the sense intended itself raises the question, what makes possibility itself possible? I don't think that you can simply answer that it's imminently self-possibilizing unless you already invest self-possibilizing with something of the power that at least within theological traditions is attributed to God as the ultimate possibilizing and indeed creative power.

1:10:25William Desmond:So the question of possibility, I think, actually opens into a sense of something more ultimate than possibility itself. I want to press you on this point. Oh, sorry. Did I interrupt you? Go ahead. No, no. I mean, I don't want to do it. I mean, for instance, the question of intelligibility that you ask in your paper, I think the question is, there's an analogous question, and maybe they're a family of questions, but even granting intelligibility, you have to then ask what makes intelligibility itself possible? What makes intelligibility itself intelligible? Is it just intelligibility itself, or is there again some sense of an origin out of which intelligibility, such as we know it, comes to be?

1:11:10William Desmond:And that that origin isn't just simply the human mind or the transcendental ego, as the idealists talk about it and so on. So the question of what traditionally was called God inevitably, it seems to me, comes up when these questions are raised. Yeah, I agree. So, I mean, and you have these interlocking notions, the essential canatus, the canatus ascende, and the passio ascende, the essential possibilizing. And I want to bring that up because I think I mentioned this before. This sounds very much like this sounds very Taoist, right? The Tao is an inexhaustible well, right? And it springs up, to use your earlier metaphor.

1:11:54I mean, that's clearly, and of all things, water is most like the Tao, right? Now, one of the stark differences, and this is not just my observation. Many people have observed this, and I want you to, where do you land on this? Is there's a difference between Asian Eastern and European Western philosophy in that Asian philosophy seems to prioritize or at least regard as equally real and dynamic possibility. Whereas in the West, and for example, certain readings of Thomas, you know, God is pure act. Actuality is treated as equivalent to reality and possibility is in some ways fallen or parasitic or subservient.

1:12:38Whitehead makes the same move. He states this as an axiom for anything to be real, it has to be actual. Right? And so, like, where do you, like, whereas I do see in Eastern thought, like Dionysius theory, Appogaita Ionaris, evaluation of the way, like you're saying, possibility is real and it's dynamically real. Right.

1:13:03William Desmond:Yeah. Well, I mean, I would say that the kind of protocols for addressing the question of God not to be neglected here. And our normal way of understanding, let's say, potency in act derives from an analysis of becoming. Again, I'm just thinking, again, the paradigmatic example of that seems to me to be Aristotle. Of course. But that's within a given imminent frame. And in my own work, I try to distinguish between coming to be and becoming. So something has to already have come to be before it becomes. Yes. So I'm not separating coming to be from becoming. But I don't think that, where I think the question of God then has to be asked is, what gives coming to be?

1:13:58William Desmond:And in that sense also enables becoming. So if I could put it this way, I certainly want to avoid just a simple dyad of being and becoming. One of the questions that I've had for process philosophy, and I used to meet lots of the process philosophers at the Metaphysical Society of America. They were very present there. They often did work just with a kind of a dualism of being and becoming. And they claimed that earlier philosophy was a philosophy of being, and we now had a philosophy of becoming. Now, again, I take the contrast in one sense, but I just don't think it's adequate to the question itself.

1:14:39William Desmond:And that brings me back on one prong to Aquinas, the actus purus. That's a phrase that's trotted out by Thomists as well as by those who don't like Thomas. But what it might actually mean is extraordinarily mysterious. And again, one of the difficulties that we have here, I think, is that we tend to contrast act with potency. I fear that we're projecting our imminent sense of becoming in relation to God, and hence just simply saying that God is beyond all becoming. Whereas I would say there's a beyondness there, all right, but it's in a way beyond the simple dyadic contrast of being and becoming.

1:15:31William Desmond:and one figure that I find very intriguing is Cousanus, Nicholas of Cousa. Nicholas of Cousa, yes. And he has this idea of God as possessed. He tries to create one word from passe as, let's say, enabling possibility and est. Right, yeah, yeah. Possessed. So he's often famously identified with the notion of the coincidence of opposites. But again, I think that that's a really important line of investigation. But if I'm not mistaken, his sense of God more truly is even beyond the coincidence. God is not the coincidence of opposites, simply. There's still a kind of a transcendence that doesn't get fully articulated in the sense of the coincidence.

1:16:22William Desmond:I agree with you. I read him as the coincidence. He talks about, he often uses images like we're in a garden or something and there's a wall and the coincidence of opposite is like Eckhart's breaking through the wall but but that's what it is but yes I agree that for him God is like God is beyond that sorry that language is kind of clumsy but you know what I'm trying to gesture towards right well I mean sometimes even in the ancients they would just say there you know I find, strangely enough, I have a kind of a Taoist side. Not that I'm an expert in the knowledge of Taoism, but this notion of the Wu Wei, acting by not acting.

1:17:07William Desmond:When I talk about God as agapeic origin, I talk about the origin as giving what is other its own being for itself. Yeah, yeah. But in a way, releasing it into its own being for itself. It's not that the divine origin is congratulating itself on its great power to produce things, but rather it's releasing what it gives into its own being for itself. And a phrase that I use on and off is something that the origin gives a way by giving way, or makes a way by making way. So that sense of giving way, that sense of making way, in one sense is a certain—I mean, these are spatial metaphors, so they're not perfect, but letting that open space be that place of a gifted endowment for the beings that are not just identical with the origin itself.

1:18:06William Desmond:So I think that that is not far from an insight that is, as I understand it, central to the Taoist understanding. Well, I've been a Taoist practitioner for 35 years. So, I mean, I'll be a little bit harsher. Like, unless you're doing Tai Chi Chuan or things like Qigong and other practices, you really don't get the Tao Teichen in the same way that if you've never made love to a woman, you won't get the Kama Sutra. Right? There's something missing. And I wanted to say that in addition to the spatial metaphors, and these are also just metaphors, there's maternal metaphors are consistently used and the giving birth.

1:18:57And for me, that opens up a real possibility of this is not historical. This is merely cross-cultural. But Socrates regularly described himself as a midwife. He described himself as helping people not to come up with ideas, but to give birth to themselves in a powerful way. And when I hear that, I hear something very Taoist in Socrates, because that's this notion of, like you're saying, this maternal source that gives something. Because when you give birth, you're giving yourself to something that will have an independent life, but it'll be related to you. But like you said, you're giving it its own existence.

1:19:41And so I actually see the possibility of these two types of discourse. And Taoism is equally the line between the poetry and the philosophy. You can't draw any demarcation line. It frustrates a lot of modernist philosophers because it's like, well, this is just poetry. No, it's poetry that's philosophy and it's philosophy that's poetry. And it's also, it's philosophy and poetry, and this goes back to our point about courage and Socrates, that has to be iconically enacted for you to actually get it. You have to be doing Tai Chi to really get what's going on there. But I think like, so this is a project that really fascinates me and intrigues me in the philosophical Silk Road, because I like there seems to me to be fertile ground for kind of a.

1:20:30I hope this doesn't sound too grandiose, but like a cross-cultural, cross-philosophical dialogos to happen in a way that could that could disclose things to us that we might not see because of the ways we are still parochial, if I can put it that way. It's strange.

1:20:47William Desmond:I mean, it's inevitable that we're shaped by the dominant culture within which we find ourselves. And that goes very deep. It seeps into who we are. And I think, you know, even just within one culture, I think part of the struggle to be a philosopher in the West is to actually free ourselves from certain presuppositions that have been fraying us for for hundreds of years so that, for instance, we can begin to read some of the ancients with a freer mind and realize that they were in the world, in the midst of things differently. And so they're kind of in your own paper, for instance, that sense of incomprehension that some of these intellectuals have in relation to opening up to thoughts that have a more platonic flavor, that doesn't become an issue in the same way anymore.

1:21:41William Desmond:So that's one culture, but fine. I mean, I have written things that are, I feel like, I don't know if it's cross-culture or intercultural. I think I mentioned to you that student I had, Takashi. Oh, yes, you did. Who worked on metaxology and metanoetics in Tanabi. Right, Tanabi, yes. The Yortle School. But in a book called Godsends, I have a chapter which is also on what I call the intimate universal and intercultural philosophy. Again, the sense of the intimate universal that isn't just, again, a construct of Western rationalism, but that at a certain level of considerations, There's an elemental idiocy or intimacy to the human being that has a cross-cultural character.

1:22:36William Desmond:And there's also a chapter in which I explore the contrast of Arobindo, the Indian guru, with the sermons of nuns in a convent in the Netherlands in the 14th century, just comparing their different senses of the soul and the mind and so on. So I have made efforts to try and broaden my palette, so to say. But I do have this deep feeling that I worry about Western intellectuals that take a trip to the East. Oh, no, yeah. And they come back after their tourist visit, experts on world philosophy. So I have had Chinese students here in Leuven working under me. I've had Indian students, some Koreans.

1:23:39William Desmond:There's actually a book about to appear in Korea, which is an introduction to my work. Congratulations. So I just was the person who had written it. Just let me know recently that it's on the way. So there's something about what I'm doing. I found that in my own experience, that people from Korea, Japan, India, China, they more easily take to non-objectifying forms of thinking. Yes, yes. They don't have to kind of break out of the box, so to say. They often actually are put into a box by their Western mentors because they're told that that's not real philosophical thinking. But I found the opposite, in fact, that there's a kind of a conaturality, if I could use the medieval term.

1:24:28Oh, yeah, I like that term.

1:24:30William Desmond:Between the thinking of the between and the dominant or interested, you know, inherited patterns of thinking in some of the Eastern cultures. Yeah. Again, I have to apologize. I mean, a person who I know very well is a person called Robert Neville. Yeah, I know of him. He's written an awful lot on, I think he sees himself as a Boston Confucian, but he has written on Taoism and Eastern thought very generally. But he was very much also very into the process philosophy thing. So process philosophy was very attractive to people also in places like China and elsewhere in the East. But I just, you know, it's tough enough understanding, if you like, one's own inherited tradition.

1:25:23Yes.

1:25:24William Desmond:But I think that if you can go deep enough, there is a level, so to say, of this intimate universal where the normal sense of cultural exclusions is softened. And a kind of more elemental porosity can come into our conversations. I agree. I'm very much, yeah, that's why I invoked the earlier notion of pilgrimage. Pilgrimage is about a porosity, not a tourism. And true pilgrimage involves practice. You have to, like, I think, like, you know, I've done Vipassana meditation for 35 years. I've done Taoist practices. And so I think the difference between the pilgrim, who's interested in genuine theoria, and the tourist is the degree to which they have taken up practices, both individual and dialogical practices with others.

1:26:29I think that's right.

1:26:31William Desmond:No, I mean, you know, the most recent book that I published is called just this November now, Wayward and Homebound. That's the title of the book. And the subtitle is, it's Irish betweenings, philosophical thought and writing, but the sense of being on the way. Yes. Has this doubleness about it being on the way. Wayward, it means you're on the way, but also wayward means you go off the way. Right. Talk about a wayward. Oh, yeah. A wayward and homebound. Homebound can mean bound for home, but it also has the kind of suggestion of being bound by home. Yes, secure attachment. Yeah. And so there's a bond of belonging there, but also, again, the rich equivocity of it, someone who's just housebound.

1:27:20William Desmond:Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's confined. So I'm playing around, but that sense of being on the way and being off the way and finding oneself surprisingly back on the way, I think it's very central to the betweening of philosophy, as I understand it. I'm going to get that book. That book sounds like it's deeply relevant. I'm working on a book on the philosophy of pilgrimage as the grounding of the Orion. The pilgrimage thing, I think I have a page or two where I think I noticed how the Protestant Reformation was very hostile to pilgrimage. And the monasteries, right? And you see, they didn't want people to be going to places and as they took it then venerating or worshipping the statues of the saints and so on.

1:28:14William Desmond:So they cut it all out. And of course, there's one of the most famous books in English is called Pilgrim's Progress. Yes. So the impulse to go on pilgrimage is very strong here in Europe where people go to Santiago de Compostela. Yeah, yeah. Even if you're not a believer, people go on this trek. So I think it's being on the way. And even in medieval cathedrals now, if you go to Chartres, for instance, they have the labyrinth. Yeah, the labyrinth, yeah. If you can't go to Jerusalem, you can do it spiritually by going in the labyrinth itself. So it seems to be constitutive of the deep sense of being ensouled creatures.

1:29:10Well, I want to talk to you. So we're going to have two more conversations, so I'm going to bring this one to a close. But I do want to talk to you about this, this, this sense about this toing and froing between the embodiment and then it gets lifted up, exacted and repurposed. And the way I see that, first of all, you're constantly invoking that. But when I take to be also part of theoria, like I physically move through time and space because that causes a metanoetic passage of some kind, which I take to be what Taylor is trying to talk about. That is the only style of argument that works against somebody who's still within the in framing of modernity.

1:29:54You have to encourage them to make that metanoetic passage in some fashion. But the way that seems to show up in your work, and one of the things that I really love about your work, I mentioned to you this the last time, is you often, I call it a symphonic sense of terms. You'll often invoke a plurivocal. You'll invoke multiple meanings. things, you just did it with wayward and homebound, and you're not being univocal, and you're not being merely equivocal and falling into fallacy. You're trying to say, no, no, I want to invoke the concert of all of those terms together, because that is the only way I can convey what I'm trying to communicate.

1:30:36Yeah.

1:30:38William Desmond:Again, I think it has grown, as I've gotten older and thought about things more, When words come out of me, they have levels. Yeah, me too. Which are not, they're not kind of sort of like, I'm not bootstrapping myself up into a kind of plurivosity. It's just something that has become part of my being in a certain sense. And I know when it's, I have the feeling when it's there. I can write very unificantly also, but I feel more joy really when the language has this. Well, I find when there's pivot points in your more universal argument, those pivot points are often those porous, you know, symphonic terms.

1:31:24Like you'll come to a point and this is like when Nishitani, he says, I'm using the word realization and I'm meaning this and this and this. But all right.

1:31:36William Desmond:I do get a bit of pushback from people who say that they find it difficult to understand me. Yeah. But then, well, but you know, and I don't know if I mentioned this in our last game, very often when they hear me and then read my books, they can hear me in reading and it is more intelligible to them. Yeah, yeah, I agree. And that's an example of what I'm talking about, about how the physical sound then becomes this imaginal that then affords the abstract, kind of like the way Harry Corbin talks about. But I think for you, for me, sorry, about you, that for me is an instance of you enacting the dialogical as not merely the Hegelian dialectic, right?

1:32:20Because the way you're not trying to resolve, you're not trying to say all of these are mediations that return back to this primary, final, univocal meaning or something like that. It's not just a self-determination. determination. Instead, I get a sense of a vibrancy within a field, and the field is inexhaustible in some sense.

1:32:40William Desmond:Yeah, that's a very good way to put it, yeah. I'm a liar. Not a liar. The wind blows through me sometimes. Yeah, yeah. L-Y-R-E. Yes. Yeah. Very Socratic metaphor also for the soul. So, William, you and I are slated to talk two more times. And this has been wonderful. I hope you've found my questions helpful. Oh, very much so. I thank you for your work also. I really appreciate what you're doing. And thank you. You have boxed your way out of the box. Yeah. Yeah. I know there's much more than just boxing out of the box and you're, you're, you're on the way. Yeah. I hope so. Thank you. Yeah. Anyways, um, I, I always let my interlocutor have the last word, anything you want to say to anybody who might be listening.

1:33:46It can be summative. It can be provocative. Um, but, um, but I, I, I thank you and you have the, you have the last word before I hit, uh, stop record.

1:33:56William Desmond:No, I don't really. I mean, we've touched an awful lot of topics and there were lots of other themes that were raised by your paper. One thing that would be of interest, and we can perhaps in future occasion talk about it, is a theme which in the phenomenological tradition is talked about as the life world. Yes. And to me, it's a platonic theme, but also a very relevant modern theme that what we call science itself actually is an emergence out of the life world, the labels felt. Yeah, yeah. And a lot of our philosophizing today, we have made this bubble above the life world of our analytic concepts and dialectical concepts and so on.

1:34:39William Desmond:And I don't think that we have actually been freed back into the richness of the life world. I think that your work is moving in that direction. I think my own work is also trying to escape the framing that hovers above the life world. And that sense of transcendence is not itself something that hovers in that way, but it's something that we come to begin to appreciate by a deeper and richer dwelling in the midst of things themselves. So that to me is very much the kind of practice of metaxological philosophy. Let's pick this up. I don't know if you're familiar with the Frank Gleiser and Evan Thompson, a friend of mine, book called The Blind Spot, and that's their core argument.

1:35:31Oh, yeah.

1:35:31William Desmond:You mentioned that in the paper. Yes, Rachel. Yeah. Right. And so there's a lot of us, if I can group us mentally into a community, There's a lot of us who are trying to reject the view from nowhere and that logical dead notion of transcendence as completely missing the mark. And that it – well, we'll come back to it. The pronounced performative contradiction that you get scientific statements that deny the world in which science exists. They deny that the world that affords the very practice of science and the presence of scientists. I find that just a ridiculous proposal. And the fact that it has been so entrancing for modernity for so long, I find that a historically very curious thing.

1:36:22William Desmond:I mean, it's even absurd when a thinker tells you that thought itself is an illusion. Okay. Thank you. Thank you very much, William. I look forward to our next two. Thank you, too. And always thank you, Ben, who's in the background dealing with the imp of the perverse, the technology sometimes gets possessed by. So thank you, everyone. And we'll see you again soon.

1:37:08And I will go