Deeper Yet Into The Weeds | Pageau & Vervaeke | EP 277
One of the things I really found striking about Tammy is like she did a very detailed picture of my daughter's surgical wound. That's not an easy thing to look at, right? Because you don't want to look at that. But that also ties in with the ideas we've been discussing about, well, I think that's the question, yes, the mystery of the crucifixion, right? All these images that we have, like the beauty of Christ's wounds, all these things which sound so completely pathological to many people, if you can understand them properly, you can understand that you have to gaze on that which most threatens you.
[Music]
So, hello everyone. I'm pleased here, pleased today to have with me Jonathan Pajot and John Vervaeke, people that most of you, many of you, not all of you, will be familiar with. I've been working on a new book entitled "We Who Wrestle with God," and it's been influenced by Jonathan's ideas and John's ideas. I developed an argument in part as a consequence of the public lectures I've been doing for the last three months, trying to push my ideas farther. I put forward a set of propositions that I'm basing one of the book chapters on. I wrote it as an outline and then I think it's solid; I've been testing it when I've been speaking at universities as well to diverse audiences of specialists to see if they'll object to it because I think it's actually quite radical. I sent this group of propositions, or this list of propositions, to Jonathan and John about a month ago, and we've been going back and forth. I thought I heard Jonathan was coming to town to do a talk with John, and I thought, "Hey, that's a good opportunity, we could get together and walk through these propositions," because I'd like to see if they're solid. Because if they're solid, well, that's good, and if they're not, I'd like to find out.
And so we're going to do this a little different. This is going to be a little different than many of the conversations I've had because it'll have a bit more structure, and I want to read the propositions. There's, I think, about 15 of them, and I want Jonathan and John to comment on them, to tell me where they agree, to tell me where they disagree, tell me what they don't understand, and to see if I can, well, learn something as a consequence. That's kind of the hope.
And so we'll start with this first proposition: "To see the world, we must prioritize our perceptions." So, John, I'll ask you about that first because that's a particular, I believe a particular focus of yours.
I don't think that's an exaggeration.
No, it's not. That's the core of my work. And so the main way I would respond to this is I would say I think the work that's coming out from artificial intelligence and the work that's coming out from attention lines up with this very well. I don't have any significant disagreement with that proposition and the "must" part of it as well because, so the "must" I took—well, let me tell you how I took the "must." I took it as what's called constitutive necessity. I took it to be if you are going to be a cognitive agent, then you must do this. I didn't take it to be a metaphysical necessity; I took it to be that kind of constitutional necessity. I think it's useful to start with what you describe as constituent necessities before you move into the realm of metaphysics.
Exactly. I think that's a good way to argue.
You should, right. And so I think—and I'm not going to recapitulate all these arguments—but a lot of work I think zeroes in on the idea that the core of what makes us intelligent and the thing that we're finding difficult to give to machines to make them artificially general intelligence is a process I call relevance realization, which is exactly— I think lines up with this very well. The amount of information available to you in the world is astronomically vast. All the things you could pay attention to, the amount of information in your long-term memory, especially if you think of all the ways it could be combined, is also astronomically vast. The number of options of potential lines of behavior—I could move this finger, this finger, I could move them, I could lift—the ways I could move around, that's combinatorial explosion— all of it. And then, right, and then you can also consider, you know, all of the options of different potential worlds you might want to consider trying to produce or moving into, right? And so the point is, in many different dimensions, we face combinatorial explosion.
And what's, um, what you can't do—and this is where it lines up with the "must" because we're finite beings, yes, with finite resources and finite time—you can't check all of that information. So you can't go and say, "No, that's not relevant, that's not relevant, that memory is not relevant." That will take, like, the rest of the history of the universe, right?
Right, right, right.
So we don't know how we do it, in fact, because of that in part.
Well, I mean I think there's getting some clues towards it, but we can talk about that later.
Okay.
Right, so the "must" and the prioritization on the perception side, you're fine with it?
It has to be, it has to be. And here, but here's the tricky thing, which is the fact that we can't check it means—and this sounds almost like a Zen koan—the prioritization is odd when you say it sort of like prima facie because it means we intelligently ignore most of the information, right?
So the prioritizing—the what I want to put—you don't want to misinterpret the necessity for prioritization as something like the necessity or our ability to make a numbered list of exactly the number of possibilities that lay out in front of us, because that's actually impossible, right?
So that isn't how we do it, however we do it.
Isn't that exactly so? When you, if you're okay with that reading—and it sounds like you are—prioritization doesn't mean what we normally mean by prioritization where we set things out explicit and focal and then choose.
Right, right.
It's implicit.
It's implicit and it's self-organizing, and our ability to think—and it's unconscious—yes, emerges out of it. We can influence it top down, but because it is an absolute requirement for our cognition, I would argue that our ability to do anything that we do consciously is ultimately dependent on it and presupposes it.
Right, okay, fine, so that's good. Jonathan, the only thing that I would add is you have to phrase it in a certain way. There you have to have a sentence, but there's a sense in which with perception, when we say we must prioritize our perceptions, I think the best way to understand it is that perception is already prioritization.
[Music]
An act of implicit prioritization, right? And to use the word implicit would be a good idea to avoid the idea that we are consciously doing it, but that in order to even perceive the world, there already has to be a given hierarchy that is making you able to focus on anything.
Yeah, or else we would be lost in a way, as you know, a sea of infinite details.
Okay, so I think that's a good corollary. And so we could also make a little technical case here quickly. So part of the problem that John referred to is that in some sense, it's the problem of the finite confronting the infinite and so we could make a neurological argument for that. So, for example, when you move your eyes around, or when they move around as a consequence of being directed by unconscious structures of prioritization, because that happens all the time, you move your eyes around because you want to direct the high-resolution part of your visual system to whatever you're attending to—that's the fovea. And the fovea is a very small part of your retina and it's a very high-resolution part. So each cell in the fovea is connected at the level of the primary visual cortex to 10,000 cells and then each of those have 10,000 connections. And so if your whole vision was foveal in its resolution, you'd have to have a skull like an alien to contain that much brain.
And so that's a real indication of that finitude, right? Is that you do have limited cognitive resources and limited means, practically and physically limited, but it also means metabolically limited. The cost of running your brain is already extremely high. And so you're going to shepherd your available attentional resources because they are finite, and they're finite in no small part because they are technically metabolically costly.
That all seems okay.
So I would add one thing to that, which is I would put an emphasis on how this process has to be self-organizing because we want to avoid a perennial problem which you and I know shows up in psychology, which is to posit the internal homunculus.
Yeah.
That actually doesn't explain the problem but just shifts it. The central executive is an example of this, et cetera. So we don't want to say that there's someone that's doing the prioritization because that someone is just as mysterious and is facing the very problem that we're trying to explain.
So, yeah, right, the process has to be dynamically...
Well, one of the ways I've realized how that problem works is in an attempt to solve the mind-body problem, because you can't solve the mind-body problem, but you can say, let's say you want to explore an idea and you decide to do that by writing an essay. So then you sit down in front of the computer, which is not an idea, it's actually that you're sitting and then you move your fingers on the keyboard, and so there's a hierarchy of transformation from mind, which might be the abstract intent, to body, and so the spirit hits the body in the finger movements, and then the spirit disappears in some sense under the finger movements because you can move your fingers voluntarily, but you have no idea what muscles you're moving to do that and you can't control the cells or anything like that.
Oh, I did that with my students in the lecture this morning. I was talking about this very fact. I said, "Put up your finger. Okay, bend your finger. What do you do to bend your finger?"
Right. Exactly. Exactly.
So interesting, it's so interesting that you have that level of consciousness at that level of detail, which is pretty detailed, but no more than that.
Yes, yes, yes, yes.
And so that's a mystery, man. That localization of consciousness between the body and part of the spirit, there's like a, there's like a, what would you call it? A bandwidth. There's a bandwidth of resolution for consciousness.
Yes.
And why that bandwidth—see, the social psychologist who's studied language sort of caught on to this because one of the things they realized was that short words, first of all, short words tend to be old words, so because as language develops, words that are used a lot get more efficient, but the short words also map extraordinarily well onto the self-evident level of perception.
And so, for example, a short word is "cat" because a cat presents itself for some reason to our perception. The species "cat" doesn't, and the fur of the cat in some sense doesn't—it's the cat. Yes, and you can see that primary object level recognition, basically basic level perception very well.
Yes, yes, yes, yes.
And so you see that with babies because they get "doggy" pretty damn fast, and that’s because the language maps on to the primary domain of perception that basic level perception quite nicely. And that is associated with something like the natural bandwidth of consciousness.
Yeah.
I would say that that lines up with if you Rush's explanation is, you know, you're getting the best trade-off between differences between category and similarities within categories. Right? And then the question is: What does "best trade-off" mean exactly? And for me, that would be a little bit of, I guess, a nuance I'd want to put on to the prioritization because the prioritization sounds very but sort of like an imposition, whereas I think what we're talking about is something more like what Merleau-Ponty talked about when he talked about optimal gripping. Right? So what's that? What's the correct, you know, distance to look at this? Well, it depends because if I zoom in, I lose the gestalt; if I zoom out, I lose the detail. It depends on what you want to do.
Exactly! Well, that’s it!
That's why I'm kind of attracted to pragmatism. It's like, well, to some degree, our theories of truth need to be embedded in the practicalities of action.
So is that a grippable object that I can drink from? Well, I want my perception to match that problem.
Yeah, but it doesn't—I think that if you understand that the prioritization, let’s say that you have heaven and earth—I'm going to use, sorry, these mythical categories—but you have these fines, you have heaven and earth, and that it’s the way in which heaven meets earth as a mutual relationship. Right? We always see it as a relationship of lovers, you could say. But it's not the prioritization isn't just about an imposition from above, but it's about the manner in which that which is above, let's say the hierarchy, is able to encounter the potential in which it's—
We were talking about that last night. So Jonathan made this funny joke last night. We were talking about Sam Harris, and Sam Harris has this line of argumentation, where—and he used this on me—where I interpreted a biblical story and then he interpreted a recipe.
Yes.
And he said, "Well, look at all the interpretations," and that is a problem of semiotic drift.
Yes, exactly!
Well, it's also a problem of this horizon of infinite possibility, there are multiple interpretive schemes. So Jonathan said he'd like to do a video where he shows that a recipe is actually necessarily embedded inside a mythological framework.
Yes, absolutely!
And we started to talk about that because imagine—well, the recipe implies that you need to make an edible meal, that you want to make an edible meal, that you're going to serve it to family and friends, that that's part of a kind of communion, that you think that's a good thing, that's worth spending time on, that serves your family and friends.
That’s maybe nested in something like an ethic of service to the community. Like there's a whole network of purpose.
I would add more to that. There's all kinds of implicit assumptions that I can capture in a sequence of propositions, procedural skills that are not completely capturable in words, and that those procedures and skills can also map onto the particular virtues and skills that people are bringing together. Like most things can't be solved by a recipe.
Right, right.
And yet, so a recipe is a significant cognitive cultural achievement and we don't recognize it. And we tend to over-generalize the things we think for which we can provide recipes.
This is one of them.
That's an algorithm issue! Yes! Exactly!
And so there's lots—yeah, even in the recipe itself, you will notice that the way in which we name things and the way in which we order things will be related to a normal prioritization hierarchy. Prioritization. But if you're making chicken, you'll have the chicken, and then you'll have the spices, and you'll understand that these elements that I'm adding are spices and that they're, let's say, something like a marginalia that I'm adding to the central meal.
It's actually the very—it’s like—the pattern of a church, actually, you know, where you have a movement towards the central identity that we understand and then we have the way in which it's complemented through other things.
Exactly!
And so even the actual recipe itself is like a little cup.
And also, the judgment you use is like, "Well, how much spice?" Well, the answer is, "Well, what function is the spice going to serve?" And you say, "Well, I want to let add a little zest and interest to my cooking."
And so then you have a philosophy of zest and interest that's associated with that because just predictable chicken isn't good enough.
And maybe you want to put a little more spice on because you want to, what would you say? You want to challenge your guests a little bit in an interesting way and you're thinking this all through, and for the same reason you'd wear funny socks or a tie that has just a little bit too much on it, you know?
Well, I mean, that's actually the future of general problem solving. Like when people are solving a problem, especially if they might get the wrong frame, moderately distracting you from the central concern is an optimal way.
Yeah, exactly!
You need to do that. So what I'm hearing both of you say is the prioritization is really a multi-dimensional optimal gripping.
That's right!
That's right. Okay, well then that—we can also expand on that to some degree because multi-dimensional and optimal brings a lot of other concerns into it. So imagine that one of the principles—and Can’t move towards this with his theory of universal ethic, in some sense—although I think you, you know, hesitate to criticize Kant a bit. But I think that there's a deeper explanation for what he observes is, "Well, how should I treat you?" Well, that's a complex question, but one of the constraints is, "Well, what if we meet a hundred times?" So, we're going to establish an actual relationship. So however I conduct myself in the present moment has to be in accordance with the value hierarchy that takes into account the desirability of our mutual interrelationship into the future, and that produces a very serious series of, I would say, often intrinsic constraints.
So I can't be too insulting, I can't be too unwelcoming, I have to offer you something approximating a true reciprocity for the thing not to degenerate.
So—and all of that—and I would say that also governs how you cook for someone if you actually want to make friends.
So, it's, like, treat other people as you would like them to treat you. And it's pretty funny that that's the intrinsic ethic in a recipe.
And so that's a good—that's such a funny argument.
We'll get right back to Jonathan Pajot and John Vervaeke in just a moment. First, we'd like to tell you about Elysium Health, founded by Dr. Leonard Guarente, a renowned MIT researcher and 30-year student of the science of aging. Elysium Health is on a mission to translate critical scientific advancements in aging research into accessible health products and technologies. Their flagship product, Basis, replenishes youthful levels of NAD+ activating what scientists call our longevity genes to promote healthy aging and keep you feeling younger longer. Many customers report benefits such as sustained maintained energy levels, less general tiredness and fatigue, more satisfying workouts, and support in recovery from workouts, healthy skin, and general health and wellness.
Elysium's brain aging supplement was developed in partnership with the University of Oxford. Matter does what no other product does: it slows the shrinking of our brains. For most of us, brain shrinkage begins in our 30s and impacts memory, learning, and even physical activity. Lifestyle factors such as alcohol consumption, smoking, and poor sleep habits accelerate this process. Matter is patented and clinically proven to slow the age-related loss in the brain's memory centers by an average of 86%. Many Matter customers have reported improvements in memory and cognition.
Go to explorematter.com/jordan and enter code JBP10 at checkout to save 10% off Matter prepaid subscriptions as well as other Elysium Health supplements.
Okay, so let's move to the second presupposition: "To act in the world, we must prioritize our actions." I don't think we probably have to cover that right because perception is an action already because you have to move your eyes and orient your head and optimal gripping is an action. Yes, exactly!
So, I think that goes with it. Yeah, okay. So, this is the next—this is a nice switch I think—"Any system of priorities is a structure of values." And then I sneak something in, an ethic. So I'm kind of defining ethic as something approximating perhaps an internally consistent hierarchy of value, but it's also, it's going to have to be iterable in the sense that we already discussed. So that's kind of what I'm defining an ethic as, and then you could also think of it as something that's embodied.
So when you're watching someone on a screen in a movie, say a character, they embody an ethic—that's what makes them interesting. It's a whole structure of value, and they're acting it out.
And it's a system of priorities of perception and action, and that's a value structure. The reason it's a value structure is because, well, what's the difference between prioritization and value? You prioritize what you value.
And so I think the difficulty I have is if you use the word ethic because the word ethic is so charged with morality and also to the way that we're supposed to act between each other, then I think it can be a little bit misleading because value is great.
Why is good?
It seems to, well I think good is fine. Good in the sense that there’s also a good glass, which has no moral bearing at all. There’s a good way to walk down the hall which is not a moral question. There’s, you know, the good way to fish.
But these are not ethical. Maybe they are; maybe—you know, maybe, but I think that that’s maybe the little place where I would wonder about it.
Yeah, so that's a terminological problem in some sense, right?
Well, it is—
I don't know, what do you think?
It seems as though the word ethic seems to imply interpersonal relationships, yeah?
The word ethic has been reduced to the moral interaction—ethical, yes, yes. Whereas typically philosophers will use the term normativity to be a much more general term for the idea that there's a governing principle for your behavior.
Okay, so I’ll have to make sure I clarify that when I read about this. But I was also thinking about, you know, common fictional tropes in popular culture. So if you're watching a mafia movie, one of the things that's interesting about a mafia criminal as opposed to just your ordinary criminal is that he's not entirely chaotic.
Right, he abides by the mafia code.
So he's loyal to a certain code, so it makes him a quasi-ethic actor.
And I would say, well, the mafia character does embody an ethic, and I’m kind of struggling for a word that isn't ethic.
You might disagree with me, but I think it’s because, I mean, I think you can actually take this a lot further than just a mafia person. I think there's a way that you can be a good mass murderer.
That in the sense that you can—you have discovered the hierarchy of values, things you need to value in order to become a good mass murderer, and now you're engaging in them towards that hierarchy of values.
You can say, like, they are satanic hierarchies. Like this, for example, we're doing exactly that, and most of the mass shooters, there's a contest going on, they know about each other. They're often—in fact, one of them, one kid who was planning to do this, wrote me like really six months ago; he had a 50-page manifesto ready and the weapons, and he watched this YouTube video discussion I did with Warren Farrell, where we touched on this issue, and he decided that there was seriously something wrong with him and that he should get some help and not do this.
But he was in contact with one of the people who went out and shot up a high school. They'd been contacted online, so he was like that far away from it.
Yeah, but so there is this—it’s not a com— you can have a chaotic criminal who’s completely unpredictable, but then you don’t have much of a plot.
Right, he’s not an interesting character; he’s gonna get caught really fast.
Well, there’s that too, right? The far more interesting ones have a—they have a moral code that they’re abiding by.
Well, I’d say they have an ethic. Now, it’s not an ethical ethic, right?
So that’s why the word ethic is difficult because you could say that ultimately what you're going to—what's going to happen is that there will be a hierarchy of value systems that will be more related to the good in the classical sense. That is Plato.
Yeah, exactly, exactly, and this is Plato's argument, that nobody willingly does evil. Everybody does what they conceive to be good in some fashion.
Yeah, you see that in Dante. You see the same—his whole movement. He even talks about how the people in hell—everybody who is there is there because of love for a good, even if they love the good too much, or they're mistaken about, let’s say, the actual ultimate value of that good.
Everybody moves towards the good even if you’re doing something which is completely reprehensible.
Yeah, the proposal that sin is actually failing to love wisely.
Yeah, I have some problem with that viewpoint because I think that happens. I do think that happens. And I think many of the—you know, I've talked to people like my friend Greg Hurwitz, who writes thrillers, and he crafts pretty evil characters, and we've talked about that a lot.
An evil character with an ethic, so like a misplaced love is a very interesting character, but then there’s the other sorts of characters that are more Cain-like because Cain, his spirit, that spirit that's expressed in that story, he isn't aiming at something that's good; he's aiming at getting away with lying to God, he's aiming at getting away with making insufficient sacrifices, he's aiming at getting away eventually with murder.
It's not a perversion of the good, and I think that we underestimate the problem of evil if we assume that it's merely a consequence of worshiping false idols, say, because the idol can be so—it's like I talked to you last night about the reports that Michel Foucault raped boys in graveyards.
It's like, okay, he argued even formally, culturally to abolish or at least radically reduce the age of consent, and a lot of intellectuals went along with him. And maybe you can have a discussion about that and what the age of consent could be, and maybe you can't; there's room for differences in opinion there.
But when your pedophilia involves graveyard sex, then that's not a misplaced good.
Like that's, that's, but why not, Jordan? Why isn't that pleasurable? Is it a good?
Right, and, well, it’s so specific. You know why the graveyard? Like there's something so dark; I don't think there's—I think that's a place that’s so dark that you can't go there without knowing that it's dark, and I do think that I really do believe—and you know, I've done my best to study the thought of people who've done truly reprehensible things—is that there's a level of reprehensibility where you are going there to cause the most trouble you can, and I don't see if there's any good left in that.
It's such a time—I’m really gonna be like, I’m really gonna be the devil's advocate here, knowing that there are some that do it better than others and some of them don't do it as well, even recognizing that the good that they're aiming towards is not really transcendentally their memory has to be working their problems right.
That is that they—that it's like if I—yeah, so they’re still driven by a coherent spirit.
Well, that's what I think the spirit of Lucifer and Mephistopheles and the spirit of Cain—that's a description of that ethic.
It is.
It is a coherent personality, and that's why there's so much—and Milton as well, there's been an attempt to delineate the ethic of evil, and it's not merely chaotic.
And the reason—one of the reasons why it's important—and maybe it's hard to see that right away—but one of the reasons why it's important is I find it important to formulate it this way, the way that Dante formulated it or that Plato formulated it—is that if you don't go in this direction, you end up with a dualism, and then they end up acting as like two opposites, whereas there's the more Platonic way of setting it up. What ends up happening is that the evil always ends up just being a perversion of the good.
Right, parasitic.
It’s always parasitic, and so what it does is that it makes the good truly good and makes it all-pervasive in a way in which it can actually fill up the entire cosmos. You know, this is right.
So that even in the death of hell, the love of God is there. Like you see that in a lot of the Christian mystics, that there is no place that is...
Okay, so let me ask you about that on the grounds of Christian theology. So, and I'm probably going to mangle this, and so correct me.
Well, there's an idea that in the Book of Revelation that Christ is the eternal judge, but that he's also a judge who comes back at the end of days and separates the wheat from the chaff, the damned from the saved, and the implication in that book is that many are called, but few are chosen.
The judgment is pretty damn harsh, and most spirits are damned.
And then is that eternal, or is there a reconciliation?
And so I don't know the answer to that. So the Christians—the best way—this is gonna—that's the type of thing that could actually get me in trouble—but like the best way to formulate it I think that we're seeing in the orthodox tradition right now is to say that we live in the hope of a final restoration, but that we cannot posit it because, like you said, there seem to be two traditions in the Christian world.
There's a tradition of final restoration, which you find in Revelation, as well, by the way, because it says the last thing to die is death itself.
Right, there's the sensor where death is thrown into the fire, and so the last—that’s what exactly is that referring to?
The sense in which the heavenly Jerusalem descends and embodies and fills up the entire world.
So you have these images, and then you also have an image of evil being completely, let's say, cast off.
And those two kind of exist in—well, I was thinking about this the other day when I was thinking about making a video address to the Islamic world, as preposterous as that might sound, because one of the things you want to do when you're talking to people is you want to distinguish between them as of intrinsic value and redeemable in some final sense, just as you are, and ideas that might be possessing them that have either this misplaced good element to them or this vengeful element.
And so, you know, you don't want to throw, to use a horrible cliché, you don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
And so maybe the separation of the wheat from the chaff is a spiritual discrimination that doesn't throw out the entire being along with the judgment.
You understand it fractally? Then I think that makes sense. If you read, like for example, C.S. Lewis is a great example of someone who kind of was going in that direction, was hinting at some things. He talked about how, like this notion that the key to hell is hell is locked from the inside, right? No matter what, even, like I think C.S. Lewis said, “Even in the depths of either the death of hell, if Satan wanted to repent…”
Well, that’s what Milton's—but that’s not—it’s like it’s not happening because that’s the role—that’s in the story. This is the character that's helping you understand this part of the cosmos, that or the part of the way that the world is laying itself out.
And you see that in some of the Syrian fathers, for example, said from the Syrian—he says things like that where he says, as the fire in hell, it's the same fire that was at Pentecost. The fire in hell is the love of God, and it's only that to the extent that you reach your distance to be transformed, and you hold on to your, let's say, parasitic good that is what the fire of hell is.
Well, right.
Well, part of that is that as you become more divorced from, let's say, what constitutes a sustainable and valid good, the farther you get away from that, whether it's merely by pursuing a misplaced good or it's by conscious design, the more that elevates itself up as the harshest possible judge that will do the most damage to your current ethic and then destabilize your whole perceptions.
And so that's so interesting because as you deviate, speaking spiritually, as you deviate from God, he becomes more tyrannical in some sense to you and more judgmental.
And it's also partly because—this is why the Catholic idea of confession isn't what's often pilloried because, you know, people laugh, "Well, you're a Catholic; you can sin your whole life and on your deathbed you can repent." But, yeah, but you have to face the magnitude of everything you did wrong.
So repentance isn't just, "Well, I'm sorry." It's like you're actually sorry, and if you've stacked up a whole lifetime of sins, what makes you think that you're going to have the moral wherewithal on your deathbed to confront that without anything?
Well, it's just absolute existential terror.
Yes! So there's no easy out from that!
So, I mean, I thought the discussion was important, and what you just said, Jordan, is important. I, for one, would not want immortality because when I look back at the foolishness and the vices of my past, it’s hard.
It's hard. And so people who think they could just sort of sin in mouth of repentance—I don't think that's—
Well, they also think they can in some sense pull one over God.
Yeah, but—
We could abide by this rule that we’ll never use religious language when we can use any other kind of language.
No, no, but I know—
I know you weren't objecting to that, but I think it's a good principle, but I'm happy to talk about it.
I'll—
Let me say, there's something underneath the religious discussion that is sort of a central concern to me at this point, and I'll invoke Kant. Kant writes the three critiques, right? The critique of pure reason, practical reason, judgment, right? And Habermas makes a great point of this.
I'm coming to the point, which is we don't see—since Kant we don't have an integrated normativity. We have three autonomous spheres of normativity around the true, the epistemic, the good, and the beautiful.
And what Kant did—and one of the problems of modernity—and this is Habermas's point—is he made a very strong case for the autonomy of each, right? Beauty is beauty.
So that's partly why you objected in the way you did when you emailed me back because I was talking about an ethic that would unite.
And you said, "Well, it's differentiated: the true, beautiful, and good."
My response to that would be something like: “Well, whatever God is, fundamentally ineffable.”
So we'll make that clear to begin with. But I would say that one way of thinking about the way we think about God is that God is what's common to the good, the true, and the beautiful.
So this gets us into the discussion that I think is for me sort of the deepest levels of the phenomenology and the cognition, which is—I mean that Jonathan would know this—is the classical doctrine, the classical way of putting this is the convertibility of the transcendentals are convertible into each other.
So somehow, the true, the good, and the beautiful are one, but not mathematical identity. This is really important; it's not right—you can—right, and you know, Aquinas wrestles with this.
I’ve been reading Maximus, by the way.
I think you see a reflection of that in the idea of the Trinity too.
Well, of course, right? And so the issue there is—and I've been reading D.C. Schindler on the Catholicity of reason, and he talks about this, he gets it from Balthasar.
He talks about the primacy of beauty, the centrality of goodness, and the ultimacy of truth. They are superlative but in different ways.
So what he means by that is there's a primacy to beauty, and this is a classic Platonic argument. If you don't have beauty, all the other normativities are not available to you.
Right?
So why—
That's not so—I wrote a chapter in my last book on the necessity of beauty, but I don't understand why that—that, why primary?
Because you don't have to think about it, is that part of it, is that you apprehend it?
I don’t understand.
Well, a way of thinking about it is, Scarry wrote a really beautiful book called Beauty and How It Prepares Us for Truth and Justice.
And the idea—so let's do—let's take something that's very culturally relevant and something I've been talking about. So we are immersed in what Ricœur called a hermeneutics of suspicion.
The hermeneutics of suspicion is that appearances are always distorting, distracting, deceiving us from reality. That's the human expression.
And the moment of truth is when you reveal the hidden cabal, the conspiracy, right? This is the hermeneutics of suspicion, and it’s—you know, and Ricœur's point is we got this; that's what Freud does.
It's the uncovering.
That's right.
It's like, "Here's what's really going on," the deconstruction is, "Here's what's real."
Exactly, exactly everywhere now, right?
Exactly!
Yeah, yeah.
Now here's Merleau-Ponty’s point about this, right? His point is—but wait! The hermeneutics of that—the hermeneutics of suspicion is always dependent on this. If I say that's unreal, oh, look, I do that because I say that's real.
Realization is always a comparative judgment; this is his point. So—
And so does he accept the notion that there is something—because one of the things you see in the post-modern types—and I was looking at Richard Rorty’s work the other day, and he seems to buy the post-modern idea that everything is just a network of linguistic representation and that there is no real beyond that.
Yeah!
That's Dilleron's critique of that—being semilogical reductionism. All you do is transfer all the markers of reality onto properties of the text, and then you prevent the text from being subject to the very criticisms you're making of reality.
Yeah, well, that seems credible to me. Okay, so it was Pop Merleau-Ponty who accepts the reality of beauty, right?
Exactly! Because think about what this means. If the hermeneutics of suspicion is right that appearances distract us, deceive us, there has to be something under that, right? And beauty is when appearances disclose reality.
Right!
Yeah, that's the—that's what I mean, that's the artist's take, or that's the liturgical take, or it's the beauty of a church or the beauty of an icon.
Or it's the notion that God or ultimate reality, or however you want to phrase it, is disclosing itself to us and that appears to us as the connection between that which we encounter, these patterned beings that we encounter, and what they reveal to us about the other transcendentals.
Well, when I wrote this chapter, which is my favorite chapter in both books, it's try to make one room in your house as beautiful as possible.
And so it’s this sort of step behind—well, order your room first, so that it's just not cluttered and idiotic and running at counter purposes to whatever your purposes are.
Reflection of your internal chaos.
Get it orderly. But that’s not good enough. The next thing is see if you can make a relationship with beauty, which is really—it's really, people are afraid of that, eh?
Because I've watched people try to buy art and they're terrified of buying art, and the reason is because their choice puts their taste on display.
And if their taste is undeveloped, then their inability to distinguish between a false appearance and the genuine reality of beauty is immediately revealed to people, so they're terrified of it. But they're also equally terrified of beauty.
So let me tell you a story about this, if you don't mind. I bought some Russian Impressionist paintings for my father, and I liked them a lot. This particular artist—the Russian Impressionist style is like the French impressionist style, except it's a lot rougher. The brush strokes are thicker, so it's lower resolution, but it's equally beautiful in terms of palette.
I have a variety of paintings. If you get some distance from them, they just snap into representations.
So lovely!
And so I sent my dad like eight of these paintings, and my mom took one look at them, and she said, "Those are not coming out of the basement."
And so my mom is a conservative person, so she's not high in openness. She's not that interested in ideas, and her aesthetic sense isn't sophisticated.
Now my mother has a lot of lovely attributes, but—and my dad and her differ in that. So he loved these paintings, and then he made these frames for them, and then he brought one up, and my mom tolerated that.
And then he brought another one up, and then she tolerated that. And then, like, all eight of them eventually made it upstairs.
And then a few years later, I was there, and she told me how much she loved the paintings, but that really, they really set her off.
And I think it was partly because, well, if you're—imagine you have—you're comfortable in your canonical perceptions of objects in some sense, and then the impressions come along and say, you know, you could look at that whole landscape as if it was nothing but the interplay of color.
And that’s—we forget how radical that is! I mean, those paintings caused riots in Paris when they were first shown. Impressionist paintings.
And that’s what my mother was reacting to. It’s like, “Oh, my God! There’s a whole different way of looking at the world. I don’t want to see that.”
And it's an invitation to that which is beyond the triviality of your perceptions, let's say.
But it's to think that there’s nothing about that that’s worth being frightened of or challenging you don't understand conservatives if you don’t see that.
But in terms of judgement, one of the things that especially now—you want—the problem or the way that beauty can kind of overwhelm us is that we feel as if if we give ourselves, we're afraid of the suspicion of the hermeneutics of suspicion.
We’re afraid that if we see reality discloses itself to us and we can see the connection between that which is appearing to me and something behind it, then I'm afraid that if I jump, if I make that leap, then I'll be betrayed or that it will—it won’t turn out to be real.
Or sometimes, sometimes it’s not.
Like, so there is a—it is possible to be tricked by appearances, and this gets you to Hans, you know, Saving Beauty.
His critique of what you see going on right now is he argues, if you read ancient texts, if you read Platinus, one of the features they'll say about beauty is it's striking and disturbing and disrupting.
Right!
So I want to come back to that about the transformative aspect of truth, but the transformative theory of truth, but—and Han talks about now what we've done, right, and he talks about it in other books too—is we've reduced—we try to reduce the beautiful to the smooth, which is the ease at which we can consume something.
Yeah!
Like the smoother cover of a car, right?
Exactly!
One pixel resolution.
Yes, yes!
And because what that does is it gives you—and I'll use this word deliberately—the veneer of beauty, but while protecting you from the horrors.
Oh, that's a suspicion!
Yeah, right! You see that?
And then he says, and pornography is the primary example of that because what you do is you remove all threat, all mystery, all otherness up from the person, so there is no way they can strike you or disturb you; there’s no rejection, right?
Yes, exactly!
And so pornography is an example of the smooth completely overtaking the beautiful and being misunderstood as the beautiful.
But if you're—both of you gentlemen are in agreement with it, what that means—
That's my answer to why the primacy of beauty.
Because if you do not get that ability to—and I want to use this word, sorry, please go ahead, then I'll ask— I want to say through the way I'm saying, like through my glasses, beyond and by means of, if we can't properly get a moment where we can see through appearance into reality, we are locked into solipsism and skepticism.
You need a primary, and if you do it, it’s called to you, then you are trapped.
Right, you need something that calls you from beyond the appearances so that you can properly align appearances to reality.
And you realize that, that’s why the primary minister is that the ontological calling you out of epistemology.
I would argue that—that’s Plato's argument for what—the beauty—so when you say, okay, so I’ve thought a lot about the relationship between love and truth, and I think love is primary, and the truth is the handmaiden of love in some sense.
But…so, but so there's a primacy there. I would say the primacy of love, but you're making an argument for the primacy of beauty.
And so are they contradictory?
No, no, no, not at all because Plato's view of love—and you have to be careful because Plato is taking the Greek notion of Eros, and he's trying to bend it.
And I think he's trying to bend it towards what the Christians are going to eventually talk about in agape.
Right, okay, so take that as a caveat on what I’m saying.
But nevertheless, what’s going on, right, is Plato says, “No, no, no, what love is, is that you are called to beauty.”
And let me just try to show you, give me a sec. Because a lot of this will sound like, "Where is he?" Out of left field, but right, truth, rationality. Most of the cognitive biases, in fact, there's a growing argument that a lot of the cognitive biases—confirmation bias, blah blah blah—a lot of them are actually versions, aspects of the my side bias, egocentrism.
I won't make that argument here; I think it's a good argument, but let's say even if it's only partially true, this is an important point, and Spinoza got this right: this orientation of self-relevance, how things are relevant to me, is that sort of fundamental egocentrism, a fundamental way in which you're prioritizing your perception on the world, right?
You can't reason your way out of that.
Spinoza, the most logical of the philosophers says, “No, no, the only thing that will invert the arrow of relevance is love.”
This is Murdoch’s point. Love is when you recognize something other than yourself as real.
Right!
Okay, so let’s okay, let me ask you about that because I’ve been thinking about the idea of being selfish.
Yes! You know, well—psychopaths are selfish, but they also betray themselves, yes?
Because they’re psychopaths.
Because they don't learn from experience, and they doom their future selves.
And so I kind of wonder if the love that lifts you out of this self-orientation, what it does in some sense is that it's the way you see the world. If you see beyond this narrow selfishness—because I don't really think there’s any difference technically in me taking care of the multitude of future selves that I will become and me treating you properly.
I think it's a great—I think your relationship to your future self is ultimately an agapic relationship, and I think that’s the only way you can deal with a lot of empirical research.
Okay, so you do?
Yes!
Why the empirical research?
Because I think the empirical research shows that, like I mentioned it in the Cambridge talk that I sent you a little bit, right? What if you do this? This is one instance among many experiments. You go into a bunch of academics at a university, the people who are supposed to be the best at taking data and processing it.
You present them with all the evidence that they should start saving for their retirement right now.
Right!
And they won't do it.
You come back six months later; you ask them at the time, "Is this solid? Solid argument, great evidence," yeah?
Come back six months—have they changed? Not at all!
The behaviors? Behavioral therapists know that perfectly well.
Right!
But if you do the following, you say, “I want you to imagine your future self as a family member that you love and care about.” Right?
Right!
They will start to save, and more importantly, the vividness of that imagery predicts how well—that's so cool.
Look, you know this program that we worked on, the Future Authoring Program?
Well, it’s predicated on the idea of developing a love for your future self.
So it’s an exercise—it's a real sense, it’s like here, and it's the ethic that's underneath it, although this wasn't particularly conscious in my mind when I built it, was knock and the door will open.
It's like, okay, let’s play a game. You get to have what you want and need, but the rule is, first of all, you have to accept it, and second of all, you have to specify it.
And so but let’s just play it as a game, yeah? If you could envision a future that would justify your suffering—that’s a really good way of thinking about it—justify your suffering, what would that entail?
And then people—and then I make it practical. It's like, well, what do you want for an intimate relationship? How do you want to treat your family members? What sort of job or career? Like I break it into seven practicalities, you know, to nail it down to the ground.
And I do believe that, see, one of the things we found—we thought, well, what predicts whether or not this works? Because it really works. We dropped the dropout rate of young men at Mohawk College.
It's fifty percent—it should—it should, yes! And it had the biggest effect on those who were doing the worst, which is not very common for psychological interventions.
But one, the only thing we could find content-wise that predicted how well it would work was the number of words written.
And so my sense was, well, that just was an index, a rough index of how much thought they put into it and how vividly, and then it would be, did they treat their future self with some love, like genuinely, and then did they differentiate that so it wasn't just an abstract, mountaintop conceptualization.
So, but let’s add one wrinkle that brings the beauty thing back because you go back and ask them, “Why didn't you pay attention to your future self before?”
Well, sometimes people don't think they could—they have no idea that that's even a possibility.
That's—
That's exactly.
Yeah—but overwhelmingly people said, “I don't want to look at that person because that's me old and ugly.”
They’re afraid of it!
And it’s an aesthetic judgment!
It’s an issue—an aesthetic judgment!
And what you have to do is get them to re-form it.
But what if that was an old family member? Always?
Look through and see that those appearances are—that's somebody who's been there, right?
That you care about, someone you love!
Exactly!
And so you beautify them.
So you love them, and the love and the beauty, they reinforce each other.
So for me to answer your question, the—you’re saying the primacy of love, and I think you ultimately mean agapic love, right?
That and beauty are—if you're incapable of turning the arrow of relevance and saying, "I want that to exist," rather than "I want that to exist for me," right?
That's what beauty does.
And that's also the central move, I would argue in love.
Okay, so do we want to detour into the true and the beautiful?
True and the good?
Do you have something equally revealing to say about the good and the true?
Yeah, I do!
Okay, well, let’s go there, and then we’ll continue through this because I thought that was really useful.
Well, and I would like us, if I request, that we return back to whatever this discourse—whatever.
I love following the logos. I aspire to be like Socrates, like a true Christian.
Well, that's supposed to be like a true follower of Socrates too, right? Fair enough, right? And but I’m hoping that in this deal, logos, if we get into the depths of the true, the good, and the beautiful, that we can address my criticism of you.
Yeah!
Which is—I’m making a criticism on behalf of the Enlightenment, and cause—you see!
Yes, yes!
Which is the fracturing of the normativities into three autonomous spheres.
Yeah, and this argument, if it's going to go forward, needs something that would—
Yeah, I see, I see exactly what you're doing. You better believe it!
Yeah, that's alright. Okay, so for me, the thing I want to say first about the good is there's two readings to make about this.
And one is—and this is what the Enlightenment did: we can reduce—and Jonathan's already challenged this—but we can reduce the ethical—we can sorry, we can reduce the good to the ethical good so that when we're talking about goodness, we're asking how moral a person is in the standard modern meaning.
Now, what Plato argues is that is actually a derivative form of goodness.
It’s kind of an algorithmic form.
It's kind of an algorithmic form.
But so here's the—the central sort of at least I would argue now, of course, there are going to be ten thousand Platonists who will disagree with everything I was saying because Plato's been around so long, right?
But I think I can make a good case, and I think this lines up with the best book I've ever read on Plato, D.C. Schindler's "Plato’s Critique of Imperial Reason," the best book hands-down in my whole life.
D.C. Schindler’s astonishing!
But here’s a proposal, right? We—and you can see Descartes wrestling with this in the Enlightenment and sort of failing—we need intelligibility to be wedded to reality, right?
Right, right!
The structures of intelligibility have to be not identical to, because that's impossible—you try idealism, that fails.
I'm sorry that was too fast for some people, but I'll just let that go—but so we—I—we—the map has to correspond to the territory. More than correspond, it has to—there has to be a conformity, there has to be contact and a wedding to them together.
There can't be a space between them like there is between map and territory, because as soon as there’s a space, there’s—what guarantees and what manages the space.
And at some point, this is Taylor’s point: you need a contact epistemology.
Right, okay, right.
So now there’s nothing you can do that will show me or give me an argument for why intelligibility shall not conform that way to reality because what you’ll do is get locked in.
And this is what Plato saw, right?
But what Plato's basically saying is that if I can put it this way, I'll try and put it in a way that's more narrative—it's like there's a perpetual promise that intelligibility will track reality, and that we find that to be inexhaustibly the case.
But there's no argument we can give that will ultimately explain that because every argument presupposes it.
Does that track?
I'm not sure why the last part of that is true, although I agree that it's true.
Although and what's running around in the back of my head while you're laying that out is I think, well in some sense, that's the problem that evolution solves in a technical sense.
So, you know, let's say a mosquito lays a million eggs in its lifetime, and so that's a million mosquitoes whose epistemology better track ontology, but almost none of them do, so they all die.
Yes!
And so that mapping—I think because it's philosophically important to an extent, in some sense, I think that the process of evolution is actually what solves that.
And then our cognitive architecture emerges out of that evolved base.
And so, it's taken 3.5 billion years to produce the solutions that we have to mapping intelligibility onto.
I totally agree with you about this. I agree that—so let me agree and then tell you what I think it goes deeper.
Okay, so just very quickly, I think relevance realization basically does that same thing that evolution does. It has this—it’s a self-organizing system in which you would introduce variation and then selection.
Your attention is doing it right now.
There’s a drive to open up, mind wander.
Right!
Right, and what you're doing is constantly evolving your fittedness, your optimal gripping position toward some end, which is the dialogue of the conversation.
Yes! Yes! Yes!
Yes!
Exactly!
And whatever that’s embedded in, exactly.
Yeah, right so you're doing this, exactly.
So you're doing this, yes!
Okay!
Yeah, so—I think that there is a—so imagine this.
Imagine that—I would say you have this notion in the Old Testament, there’s a sequence of stories.
So it’s an aggregation of stories, and there’s an idea that the meta-narrative of Christ is implicit in that set of narratives.
Yes!
And so then I have this idea, well—and Jung talked about this as well—said imagine you take any random sample of narratives, comprehensive random sample of narratives, and you attempt to extract out the common story.
It's going to be an image of something like Christ, you could even say that's what Christ is in some sense.
So—and we can argue about that, but it's a—it’s like saying that the hero narrative is archetypal; it's the same idea.
If you have 25 narratives and you see what makes them interesting, adventure stories, it's the hero archetype.
So the reason why you can recognize it as a through line in the first place is because it has a pattern, but that's my point.
My point is just like the through line of all the aspects is not an aspect, the through line of all the stories is not itself a story.
Yeah, but see, I'm not so sure that is—
That is definitely what we're arguing about.
And I'm not saying I know this; there may be a distinction between a story and the pattern of all stories, and maybe that's something we can think about too.
Because in my work at "Maps of Meaning," I called just a narrative a story, but the story that unites all narratives is a meta story.
And Piaget caught onto this too, in some sense, because he started to try to find out what kids regarded as true.
And then by the end of his career, he said, “Well, what we really want to know, if we're studying truth, isn't the nature of the contingent truths—so any representations within the system, narrative or otherwise—but the process, we need to specify the process by which all truths come to be as the ultimate truth.”
And then I would say that the meta-narrative that constitutes Christ from the symbolic perspective is the story of the process by which—what would we say?—the process of adaptation itself which is the manifestation of the divine word, let's say, in its ability to call order out of chaos.
It's got this hierarchy of narratives, and there's something at the pinnacle.
And so then imagine that you have a set of corresponding facts, and each specific narrative would give you a set of proximal facts, but there's an abstraction from the facts that approximates universal scientific truths.
But I would say that maybe they exist in relationship to the application of that meta-narrative.
Because it isn’t the case—now I don't know, I can’t figure this out—is it the case that we abstract out commonalities like force equals mass times acceleration because we want to further our adaptation to the world?
Yeah.
Yes?
Simultaneously?
And so we're exploring the intrinsic logos of ontology but we've already agreed to some degree that there's a similitude between that ontology and the epistemology.
And so maybe as we abstract out from scientific truths towards the universal, we not only—must we simultaneously move up the abstraction level in a narrative sense?
Jung's point would be we better or we'll misuse the nomological to destroy ourselves.
Wouldn't that also be the case if we abstracted up the narrative without also going up the nomological?
Well, he believed that the problem with the first millennia of Christianity was that we did exactly that, was that we emphasized spiritual redemption to such a degree—
Try to reduce redemption itself to the spiritual.
Then the world was still crying out because of its ontological suffering.
It's like, "Well, if we're all redeemed by the sacrifice of Christ, what's with all the poor and diseased people?"
That call for the unredeemed material was part of what he saw as the motivational foundation for the systematic investigation, say, that led to the development of medicine.
Yeah, so there was an insufficiency.
There was an insufficiency.
Maybe it's the insufficiency of getting lost in epistemology if it's just a narrative—it's just a narrative.
Well, it's not! It has to refer to the world!
Okay, so, well, that complicates things, right? Because part of what we're stuck on here to some degree is—in that ontological realm that's outside any given narrative, there is also a logos.
And then the question is, is that ontological logos, the nature of the world itself, somehow a narrative?
And the Christian idea, to answer that, would be, see, well, that I don't know because creation is separated from God.
Yeah!
Right, speaking on behalf of Christianity.
Yeah, but I think Christianity makes the claim that the logos is ultimately a person.
It’s not a story!
Yeah!
That's very important. Right, not a story.
Everything culminates into, into, into the person.
And personally literally means, originally means hypostasis, that which stands under.
Yes, right!
Yes! Well, it has to be a person, right?
Yes!
Right.
Well, that's why I also said though that it's the description of a structured values is a narrative.
So as an embodied ideal, Christ isn't a story, no.
But the description of his embodiment—that's a story, and the images are a story, and the reason we want the story is because the story calls us to the ethic; that's why we value the stories.
That's right!
I would like to see the world the way you see it because you have a whole set of tools that I don't have.
And so if you can tell me a story and I can enter into your world, then that is truly redemptive because the facts now array themselves in a slightly different way that might be very valuable to me if I run into one of these objects that you described.
You know, I'm running an algorithm, and something objects—I don’t know what to do!
What would you do?
Tell me what you did in a similar situation, and so I don’t think the story isn’t—the story isn’t nothing, that’s for sure.
I'm not saying that.
I know you're not. I know you're not; I'm saying that at all.
I was trying to answer Jonathan's question, right?
And we're running into the difficulty that I see, whether or not I'm right or wrong, there's a difficulty.
Oh, definitely!
And that's the difficulty I'm putting my finger on in the meaning.
Well, it's also the difficulty that I'm trying to address with this set of propositions.
It's definitely a difficulty, okay?
But we got somewhere; we got somewhere in that.
I would say I think it was very valuable.
Okay, so I'm gonna skip to number five here. Every set of values is hierarchical; otherwise there's no prioritization. I think we agree on that.
Because we've already agreed that there has to be a prioritization and there has to be—that implies a hierarchy.
So the one thing I wanted to ask there—sorry, I seem to be the devil's advocate.
No, no!
Right? But it is, again, let's go back to embodied living, and this is actually something you see in narratives, and I would also say that it's something that some of the parables of Jesus point to, because parables, I think McFague is right—parables are narratives that destroy themselves as narrative structures.
They're kind of like the way Coen's destroy themselves as questions.
And so what I want to say is, let’s say that there is—we seem to have, like there's the true, the good, and the beautiful, or we have the narrative, the nomological, and I'll call it the normative in terms of betterment or something like—let’s say—is it the case—the thing is, is the hierarchy stable?
What I mean by that is you get narratives, you get stories, you get works of art, great works of art—in which it looks like they're picking up on something that is true to our embodied experiences, sometimes we sacrifice the truth for the good, or the good for the beautiful, or the beautiful for the true.
Like we seem to be making—we don't seem to have a stable what's on top.
We shift the prioritization around, there's a lot of great art at least proposing that, so I think it’s a reasonable thing, right?
Well, I think that's partly a consequence of the confusion about what constitutes the unification.
So part of the project I have here is that I'm beginning to view all the narratives that are laid out in the biblical corpus as their snapshots of the different idea of what should be at the top.
They're like the through line! Yes!
Well, they're representations of the through line.
We still don't know what the through line is, so to speak, right?
But there's snapshots. So I, for example, in the earliest chapter, the beginning of Genesis, God—so we'll say, by definition, God is what is at the top.
We'll just start with that, and I'm not going to make an ontological claim about that, just an epistemological claim: God is what's at the top of your value structure.
Okay, so what should that be? Well, let's say that's a mystery.
Okay, so the Bible is an attempt to represent that mystery from a variety of different narrative perspectives.
And so I'll give you a couple of examples. So in the opening lines of Genesis, God is the word that derives habitable order that is good out of chaos and potential.
Okay, so that whatever God is, that’s part of it.
Okay, so that's—and God is a creative force.
And then there's the next thing, is that God is whatever it is that human beings are made in the image of that also provides them with a worth that transcends the merely material in some sense because God is outside creation.
And if man is made in the image of God, then there's something about man that's valuable that's outside of the mere material.
Okay, so that's the next proposition.
And then God is rapidly that which forbids and allows, so that happens in the garden.
And then God is that spirit that you walk with when you're unselfconscious and not ashamed.
So that's the story of Adam in the garden.
And then in Noah, God is that which calls you to batten down the hatches and prepare when, if you're wise in your generations, you see that chaos is coming.
And then in the Abrahamic story, God is that which calls you out of the comfort of your family into adventure.
And so it's like, click, click, click, click—who knows what the union of all those things are, right?
Because they're quite multiplicitous.
Very.
But I think they're very sophisticated.
And you might say, well is that God?
It's like, well do you follow the call of adventure?
Do you take your own intuition seriously when you think that the flood is coming?
The answer to that generally is, well, you either follow that or you're in trouble. People sure know that.
And is God the divine word that generates habitable order, the habitable order that is good out of chaos?
Well, do you believe that truth has that power?
So I think—okay, so these are all ways of pointing to that which might unify the disunity that you see.
Now, you can't boil it down in some way, the same way that you boil down beauty.
You know, it's harder to specify, and I think that what the Bible is attempting to do—and I think this is true of religious writings of many sorts—is to—what is it?
It's a characterization of this. It's first of all an insistence that the thing at the top is a spirit, right?
It's not an idea.
It's not even, like, beauty; it's not an abstraction.
It’s a spirit that can inhabit, which is kind of the incarnation idea.
So it's a spirit that you can embody or they can seize and possess you, so it's really something that's living.
And so it's not merely an abstract idea, and it's not just a normal logical construct; it's something you enact, and it's something that in principle you might think—well, if you're—and this leads to the next point: any hierarchy that is not unified produces confusion, anxiety, anomie, aimlessness, and conflict—psychological and social.
Well, why? Well, it's not unified; you don't know your priorities, and if it isn't pointing to something valuable, there's no hope, because hope is to be found in the movement towards something of value.
So, okay, well, sorry, that's a lot.
No, no, no.
Okay, well, I thought that—I thought that was very clarifying, too, because that—what that ultimately ends up suggesting is that any hierarchy that's unified is made so by the dominance of a superordinate principle.
So something has to bring everything together and has to be at the top to unite.
That principle is most effectively what is common to all that is deemed of comparative relative value within the hierarchy.
So we talked about the commonality between the good, the beautiful, and the true—the common principle of value must necessarily be elevated to the highest place in the hierarchy.
Well, that's the abstraction of the good, maybe.
It wouldn't matter if it was Neoplatonic or the more Christian notion of the logos.
And then this is something that you really influenced me in relationship to bringing to the highest place personal subordination.
So that's above me, and I serve it imitation.
I want to become that faith, I believe that that principle prevails, celebration, which is it's worthy of what would you say?
There's joy in relationship to the recognition of its superordinate place.
Adulation—a variant of that—in worship, which is sort of maybe a worship is what combines all of those.
And so those are propositions which I would like to unpack with you guys.
And then there's something that's more specifically Judeo-Christian after that, which I won't get into now because I think it would be a distraction.
So, well, that was a—that's quite a conversation!
I'll come to Toronto anytime for this.
Yeah!
Okay, okay, well, I think we should think about doing it again.
Well, we'll start halfway through and see if we can get to the end.
I think that would be very good.
Yeah, well, it's really, really see a lot of what we're doing is we're differentiating the propositions.
Right? It's like, "Well, here's the proposition, here's its complexity," and there's some real utility in just seeing the full complexity, walking through it.
I mean, this is also—I think a genuine act of fellowship or even friendship.
Because the more you do that, the more responsive you can make your argument to people who want to engage with it.
Of course!
Of course!
That's exactly—well, I mean, we're trying to get to a diverse range of tools that are grounded on something as rock solid as we can manage.
Yeah!
So, thank you.
I don't need a hermeneutics of suspicion.
Yeah, that’s right, actually!
Yeah!
Hey, my pleasure, man!
I'm so glad you guys could come and that we could be together finally in person, and I think the conversation was a lot more dynamic and deeper than we would have managed on June.
Totally!
Yeah, I totally agree with that.
Yeah, I totally agree.
Alright, great!
Thanks, Eric!
Thank you for all you who are watching and listening, and more to follow on many fronts with any luck.