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[Music] welcome back to awakening from the meaning crisis so last time we were pursuing in depth trying to understand Heidegger's work as a prophet and the old testament sense of the meaning crisis we took a look at this notion of
Vervaeke explores Heidegger's concept of gnosis via Eckhart's 'live without why' and the Rose, linking non-teleological being to Corbin's imaginal and the meaning crisis.
Key Takeaways
- Remembering being (gnosis) counters nihilism more deeply than rejecting physicalism.
- A non-teleological, 'live without why' way of being may be a mature alternative to demanding grand purpose.
- Narrative provides practice in non-logical identity across time and frames.
- The imaginal, as Corbin describes it, is essential to gnosis and to experiencing the numinous as real.
- Transformation of self through aspiration involves a divine double or non-logical identity between who we are and who we become.
What the video covers
- Continues Heidegger as prophet of the meaning crisis, revisiting truth as aletheia (disclosure and withdrawal) rather than correctness.
- Describes the 'having mode' versus 'being mode' and how metaphysics as onto-theology drifts into nihilism by reducing being to a Supreme Being.
- Discusses Heidegger's commentary on Angelus Silesius, whose poem 'The rose is without why' is tied to Eckhart's maxim 'live without why.'
- Reinterprets physis as blossoming from itself and shining-withdrawing, challenging the view that the response to the meaning crisis rejects the physical.
- Argues the 'live without why' stance is not meaninglessness but a non-teleological, ontological way of being, perhaps applicable to the universe as a whole.
- Connects narrative to cognitive-existential practice in non-logical identity, linking it to the symbol's frame and transformation over time.
- Introduces Corbin's gnosis as remembering being through the imaginal (mundus imaginalis), and its role in recovering the numinous.
- Discusses Sufism and Persian culture's attraction to mystical Islam, Rumi, and the imaginal as necessary for gnosis.
- Introduces the notion of the divine double (angelic counterpart) from Hellenistic and Mediterranean spirituality, and the aspirational transformation between the self before and after transformation.
- Concludes with analogies to learning to love classical music and rationality as developed through practice and aspiration.
Chapters
- 00:00Recap: Heidegger, Truth, and the Meaning Crisis
- 04:00Having Mode vs. Being Mode and Onto-theology
- 08:20Angelus Silesius, Eckhart, and 'The Rose Is Without Why'
- 13:20Physis, Blossoming, and the Universe as Rose
- 20:00Narrative, Symbol, and Non-logical Identity
- 28:20Corbin, Gnosis, and the Imaginal
- 41:40Sufism, Persian Culture, and Rumi
- 55:00The Divine Double and Aspirational Transformation
- 65:00Closing Reflections and Analogies
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
Speaker A
the thing beyond itself and realness as simultaneously the shining into our framing and the withdrawing beyond our framing in a deeply inter fording inter penetrating manner we took a look at this deeper notion of truth not truth as
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correctness but truth is Alafaya that which grounds the agent a relief arena relationship in attunement and allows us the the potential to remember being by getting into an attunement with its simultaneous disclosure and withdrawal but we can forget that we can get into a
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profound kind of modal confusion and this is the history of metaphysics as the emergence of nihilism we can forget the being mode we can get trapped into the having mode in which the metaphysics is a pro a propositional project of
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trying to just use truth as correctness and we misunderstand being as a particular being we try to capture the unlimitedness right aspect of being but we only do it at the limit which Heidegger is deeply critical of and so
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we understand being in terms of a Supreme Being being at the limit and beyond the limit this is Anto theology we understand God as the supreme being and this is deeply amesh for Heidegger with nihilism because this Anto theology
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this theological way at least a version of theology from sort of classical traditional theism right this way of understanding being gets us into the deep forgetfulness and modal confusion that is the hallmark of nihilism but of course we could perhaps remember the
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being mode and this is what Corbin following Heidegger talks about as gnosis we can understand what this gnosis is what it what does it look like what would it be like to remember from the being mowed through Alafaya being so
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I want to pick up on this idea of gnosis this serious play in an in particular piece of work by Heidegger Heidegger discusses and this avens discusses this in his book and Caputo also discussed is this hid it in his
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excellent book the mystical element in heidecker's thought so both avens and computer talk about this heidegger's commentary on the poetry of angelus silesius angelus silesius was a poet who was basically trying to put into poetry and we can sort of think
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of or at least for see some things bar fields gonna say he's trying to put into poetry the work of meister eckhart who was one of the great neo platonic mystics within the Rheinland mystics that i talked about so long ago now it's
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important of course for meister eckhart and this discussion of gnosis as the remembering through Alafaya of the being mode that alleviates the forgetfulness alleviates nihilism right is that Eckhart of course is also experiencing this as a form of sacredness as
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something that is appropriate to a religious context so we also noted in conjunction with that that Tillich is going to be deeply influenced by Heidegger as critique of Anto theology but he's also going to set you it situated within although he's going to
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radically revised what this means a you know traditional religious term which is idolatry now let's think about heidegger's commentary on this poem so what's the poem here's the poem what's in translation so we unfortunately you lose some of the poetry the rose is without
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why it blooms because it blooms it cares not for itself asks not if it is seen right so it's interesting that when Heidegger is doing this he's actually talking about this word fuzes the Greek word which of course is the core of the
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word physics which again right he's trying to get back to a rien stuff is achill as the important way of remembering the being mode this is a can why I think many people misunderstand and I've argued this elsewhere I'm gonna
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keep coming back to it the response to the meeting crisis is somehow a rejection of physicalism and the physical Heidegger's instead trying to show you how it can more deeply be remembered now he's picking up on the Greek for this term so again he's doing
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some etymological worker Fu's this means right you know you know blossoming forth from its fell springing forth from itself right very much like the Rose is being described right and think about what this means is what Heidegger says
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the blossoming of the Rose is grounded in itself has its ground in itself the blossoming is a pure emerging out of itself pure shining now what's going on there now of course Heidegger will never talk just about this shining even though he doesn't
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explicitly mention it here it's implied and shoot we should therefore remembered in the fruit phrase emerging out of itself that this shining is simultaneous with drawing we get a sense of the depth of the rose in its fuzes because as it
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shines it shines in a way the showing that it's shining out of itself shining out of its depths shining out of that you into which it withdraws as it presents itself to our phenomenological experience so here Heidegger is right he's picking
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up on one of Eckhart's Maxim's this is what Eckhart said live without Y right or what you could also translate it as live without a lie now that sounds to some people like what that sounds like a meaningless existence there's no why
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there's no purpose there's no grand unifying purpose right but think about it a little bit more carefully right is that quest for the grand culminating purpose is that is that maybe perhaps coming from the having mode and not from
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the being mode I thought it's not proposing meaninglessness he's actually proposing a non teleological way of being an ontological way of being it's to move beyond theirs right there's no narrative to the Rose the Rose is right it's not that right it's sort of lacking
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it's it's it's beyond above and beyond the narrative right so a way of thinking about this and I promise to come back to this earlier in the series and I'll come back to it now right right and we talked about this in
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a couple places we talked about it back with the Stoics and we talked too about when I was talking about perhaps we can't get back to a narrative in a sense of a teleological aspect - who's this -
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the physical universe but maybe the universe as a whole is like the Rose maybe it's blooming from itself grounded in itself blossoming shining from itself well always always withdrawn and think about how that well that actually comports with you know the physics of an
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ever expanding universe coming out of the Big Bang but grounded in the quantum like is that so far in a way of talking about the universe that it's very much like the rose and we get better at being
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connected to its losses if we drop the axial age requirement that there be a teleological narrative to it all right this horizontal narrative it look it's important the horizont narrative gives us practice in something it's just important practice in something right
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we're going to come back to this you see the thing about narrative is narrative gives you deep practice cognitive existential practice in non logical identity we've talked about this and the relationship right it has to the symbol so let's talk about it first of all in
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the symbol member here's a framing and then you transfer aim and then there's a non logical identity between the world inside the frame and the world outside the frame and a non logical identity between you here and you there remember
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this this non logical identity between who you are inside this frame and who you are after write a trance framing remember that when we talk about aspiration when we talk about aspiration remember that now the thing about narrative is that narrative is a way of
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representing through time symbolically we can often repres talking about a kind of transformation through time but one of the things that narrative does is through time it represents how you have a non logical identity to yourself look I was born in Hamilton in 1961 I'm not
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in Hamilton now I'm not you know nine pounds I'm 190 pounds that kid that was born in Hamilton can't speak English couldn't walk couldn't move around certainly couldn't teach this that kid is in so many ways different not identical for me
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but in another sense it's me and on him right narrative is a way of tracing out and training us in being able to work with non logical identity to work with this kind of fundamental transformation but what we can do what I think that cart is
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pointing to so we can exempt that ability for non logical identity we can exempt that symbolic identity and instead of thinking of it as unfolding narratively across time remember how the Stoics criticized this stop pursuing fame and glory and wealth and power
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instead of the horizontal narrative we can do the vertical onto law ontology we can do the vertical ontology in which we are connecting that depths of ourselves to the depths of being in a non teleological being mode this is I think
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is what Heidegger is pointing to and what Eckhart is pointing to so as I mentioned the pure shining what's blissful let's put this on here here's the pure shining the way the Rose shines phenomenon experience right I think that's shining I think we can
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talk about it as relevance realization the salience landscaping into intelligibility salience landscaping and two intelligible what the what about the pure withdrawal all right this is the independent exalt inexhaustable nosov a comet orally explosive reality right independent because it is inexhaustible we cannot
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drink it dry the tout HN right then the towel is a way of understanding fuzes the way Heidegger's talking about right look at the book a Heidegger an Asian thought or Heidegger secret sources where it talks about the connection to Taoism he might
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have been directly influenced by it right and the talented Qin talks about you know how the Tao is a well that that is never used up it it is in exhaust it is the inexhaustible mother right so the
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independent inexhaustible nurse of a combinatorial explosive reality the things the thing and the things beyond themselves I think we can draw these two together as I've already argued into this I want to say this very carefully right we can see this right we can
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experience this from within the being mode in the following way H a trajectory a trajectory of trans framing that is always closing upon the relevant while always opening to the morning the trajectory of trans framing that is always closing upon the relevant as it
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is simultaneously always opening to the morning when we recognize that Alafaya remember it from within the being mode so that we can accentuate it and celebrate it that's what I've argued sacredness is and that seems to line up
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very well with what Eckhart is saying now one of the things I have about Heidegger is he's reticent to talk about this in terms of sacredness Tillich is it Heidegger is and that's part of why I think he goes astray in certain ways so
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we can think of realness as a tonus this creative pension it's something that Barfield brings out tremendously and clearly in his work right we can think of realness as a as a tonus as a creative polar tension between you know
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look the other word confirmation coherence right and more Ness and remember you need both if the virtual reality just has the confirmation and the coherence it falls flat if it can't provoke a sense of open wonder if there's no element of surprise
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if if it's all a simulation and no accommodation if it's all right assimilation and no accommodation remember accommodation is experiences all in wonder if it's all of that if it's just assimilation sorry they're not accommodation if it's just the
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foreclosure and never also the opening if it's just the home in and never the numinous see these themes then it's not real it's not experienced as real and that being able to attune and this is where the Dow is so like Taoism is such
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a powerful symbolism right you have you have the yen which is the confirming right drawing down right and the yang is the opening up and both of those interpenetrate think of the classic Tao symbol within the white is the black dot
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within the block is the white dot and they're sinuous because they're interpenetrating interleaved together and all of that is the disclosure of the inexhaustible nosov the Dow I'm trying to make a convergence argument here all right Taoism is all about the serious play the
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serious play with the serious play of being and that's how Corbin describes it right when you talking about gnosis he talks about the play of being so does avens when he's talking about Corbin so I'd like to pass now
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explicitly leaving Heidegger behind now and moving into Corbin I've already noted how deeply Corbin was influenced by Heidegger but he's also you know he's deeply influenced by Platonism and that leads him into probably his deepest influenced him so all of these things
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are important to Corbin Heidegger the Neoplatonic tradition but most especially Neoplatonism within persian Sufism so Sufism is the mystical branch of Islam and Corbin is particularly focused on Persian Sufism and I think that's very something important that we should pause
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to note one of the gifts of Corbin's work is to help us remember and thereby overcometh no centrism how central and I use that term decidedly how central Persian philosophy is to the history of philosophy in the world Persia plays a
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pivotal role and I don't mean it as a neglected middle well it is by us but it shouldn't be a neglected middle Persian Persia plays a central role between for example between right again the the Arab world the European
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world and the world of India and China the Asiatic world and what's really important about Persian Sufism and I can't that the history of Persia is a fraught one right we sort of think of now and this is because of you know the
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history in this since the 70s we think of you know Iran is sort of rapidly Muslim and something like that and in that into a significant you know and that's played up by propaganda it is not to deny that there is a there's an
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Islamic fundamentalist a tallit Aryan regime in controlled in Iran but what it is to what I'm trying to do is challenge that as a monolithic representation of all of Persia and all of Persian culture instead you have to remember that Persia
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was made Muslim via an Arab invasion that was nothing less than a genocide and I know Persians they remember this deeply to this day so the attitude towards the Arab overlords is something that has become deeply woven into
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Persian culture why am I saying that because that means that the Persians were especially attracted to at least for huge periods Rumi and others right right they are deeply attracted to Sufism they're attracted to a mystical interpretation of Islam
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precisely because they are trying to find a form of liberation from an oppressive Arab right Empire so that means that it's important that it is Persian Sufism and this is deeply has an impact on corbin he's really taken up by
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this and how that Persian Sufism has a much more I'm trying not to be dismissive here has a much more flexible relationship to Islam then you might think of when you think of Iran today in the world okay
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and so like reading the poetry of ancient purr of ancient Persia and alright well not even ancient Persia what the the the the the poetry from purchase since the Arab invasion and genocide I think is an important thing
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to do to remember these aspects now Corbin did all of that he read this stuff deeply profoundly repeatedly extensively now there's ways in which he suffers there's ways in which as you know a Frenchman he will fundamentally misunderstand some of this literature
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and I'm not going to say that he is a perfect interpreter but I will say he is an insightful and important interpreter so he draws all this in he's drawing in the Heidegger and the neoplatonism and aspect and this is something that you
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have to and right and the Persians who first know this the deep influence of neoplatonism on Sufism right so there's neoplatonism then there is a mystical form of Islam right deeply influenced by neoplatonism and then Corbin is bringing
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that into understanding higher and then he's bringing all of that as a way of trying to explain this gnosis and how this gnosis can ultimately be salvaged and redemptive in the face of the meaning crisis remember he talked
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about gnosis as transformative selves ik participatory knowing a deep at one mint attunement at one mint to see how all these things are resonating with each other now what does Corbin bring to this that we don't have in Heidegger and
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here's a where I think you can see the influence of Sufism and the rich world of Persian poetry upon him and I think it this is an important thing Corbin sees there and argues for reading Corbin is very different than reading
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it's like Heidegger in the sense that it's it's difficult but and because he's trying again to break out of the cognitive a cultural grammar but it's but it's it's very lyrical it's very beautiful but sometimes the you you pick
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up the beauty and that's again the Persian the influence of the Persian poetry on him you pick up the beauty without and then you you you should pause and say yeah but did I really understand what he just
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said so you have to read you almost have to recite Corvin and repeat Corbin now he uses that kind of argumentation to make a claim that the recovery of gnosis is bound up with imagination in an important way and you may think oh no
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John is just going to jump off into some decadent reform of Romanticism no korban is doing something very interesting about this I recommend the Lachman book that I've recommended for Corbin see also avens book the new gnosis that
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I've just mentioned see all of Chatham's work the world turned inside I would imagine all of the the third one was all right at the end I think what's that the angelic nature of being I can't remember the third title anyways we'll put all
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the panels up she'll thumbs work on Corbin is a fact I reckon I recommend reading avens and reading Chatham before you read Corbin so if you take a look Corbin is doing something very important with this he's not using this word in
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the way we typically use it and in order to bring that out he actually makes a distinction a distinction that's going to be important especially when we turned to talk about young he makes a distinction between the imaginary and
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what he calls the imaginal and it's the imaginal that is bound up with gnosis so imaginary the imaginary is what we typically mean when we invoke the word imagination we meet we mean the purely subjective experience of generating
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inner mental imagery which we know is not real and that we can sort it's sort of completely in our control and we can play with it as we wish that is explicitly clearly definitively not what Corbin is talking about Corbin is
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talking about the imaginal and to try and convey the imaginal I'm going to try and schematically represent it to you because if you don't get the imaginal you don't get what Corbin is talking about I also would say you ultimately do
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not get what Jung is talking about when he's talking about active imagination because you'll just misunderstand imagine active imagination as a purely imaginary experience as opposed to imaginal experience and as I'll point out later korban and young are deeply influential
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of each other Corbin is much more open about that relationship young doesn't Corbin talks about in and works young often critically but at least clearly and explicitly and with credit way more often that I see young talking about
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Corbin which i think is a criticism I have of young okay so let's try and represent this so first of all think of two ways in which you sort of try and can't you know represent come into cognitive contact with reality one is
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right through abstract representations abstract the abstract intelligible world the world that you get through your intellect right so you you you know you grasp reality as a mathematical formula or something like that or you know you grasp reality as a purely formal entity
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and then in contrast there is of course the concrete and of course concrete and abstract are always relative terms or not absolute terms the concrete sensible world all right at the bottom here so one thing the imaginal does is it
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actually mediates between these two right it bridges between them it allows them to come together in meaningfully structured experience because in my phenomenological experience of course there's both an intelligible order but right that I can abstract intellectually but they're that intelligible order also
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affects the way I come into sensual contact concretely with things okay so the imaginal mediates between these and one of Corbin's arguments is and you see what he's doing here he's arguing that the cartesian cultural grammar right that
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basically you know replicates the axial to worlds but within us right so so right the here's the world of mind write the abstract intelligible world put your mind and the concrete sensible is the world of pure matter right this is the
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the Cartesian division and what right what Corbin is arguing is yeah but we've lost the imaginal that bridges between right those two worlds between the mind and the material now of course Descartes split things in another way and the imaginal mediates
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between those and these of course they're not the same that's why I represent them with different axes but they are not independent that's why I'm putting them together within the schema the imaginal also bridges between the purely subjective and the purely
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objective so to use the term I've been trying to develop with you and we saw it all through Heidegger the imaginal is deeply transgender so it mediates and it's trans jan what you have to do is you have to see this whole thing sort of
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in motion like which I can't draw for you right because the imaginal isn't a static relation it's it's also a constant transformative trance framing there's a movement to the imaginal it is vibrant and vital in that way there's a
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movement to it okay so this is what Corbin means by the imaginal it's a use of images but not using them subjectively using them transductive lee will try to come back to that right in a way that mediates bridges right
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integrates the abstract intelligible world and the concrete sensible world together but again not just statically but in this ongoing octave sorry in this ongoing transformative trance framing so because of the centrality of the imaginal to korben korben and he explicitly
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understood himself as doing this and stated this right he was deeply opposed to fundamentalism and here you can of course see the connection to the Persian history I was relating to you he's deeply opposed to fundamentalism and literalism why because fundamentalism
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and literalism right first of all they Ralph I this they make it static right and they put things into right either the abstract intelligible world or the concrete sensible world or just into subjectivity or just into objectivity they freeze this and then they fracture
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it and thereby they completely lose the Nexus of the imaginal and for Corbin right if you lose the imaginal you lose the capacity for gnosis and then if you lose the capacity for gnosis you lose the capacity for waking up within the
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being mowed through Alafaya to be it and the ground of being in sacredness this is going to be something we're going to keep seeing and again something that Heidegger doesn't make explicit but it's it's explicate it in Corbin the deep
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ongoing criticism to fundamentalism and liberalism it's a deep component of young as well right young sees fundamentalism and little and little ISM as the antithetical movement of thought and being in the world to everything he is trying to promote as a response to
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the meaning crisis it is also deeply antagonistic to what Barfield is talking about when he's talking about poetic participation so we're seeing again a potential way in which we can understand Heidegger's critique of Anto theology because there is a tendency right and all of these
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thinkers keep pointing to it if we get into the halving mode and we get into Anto theology and we have the Supreme Being and we have our propositions about this ultimate being right that we can think that the way in which we should be
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is to have these propositions in a fundamentalist literalist fashion and we lose all of this and what we and what you'll hear right is you'll hear the invocation of this symbolic as a dismissive term yes oh that but yes yes
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yes you can read this symbolically but you know it's just symbolic meaning it has no real relevance or importance to you Corbin is trying to argue exactly the opposite if you have an attitude towards the symbolic as that is
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dismissive then of course you have lost the capacity for gnosis which means you have lost the capacity to remember to forget like to overcome in Alafaya the forgetfulness of being to come out of the deepest kind of modal confusion I
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see somebody as exemplifying this although I don't think he's directly influenced by Corbin I see Jonathan pazzo is trying to bring us back to this gnosis of the symbol and how we should not be dismissive of it we should not
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try and slide it into either that a conceptual world or a sensual world we should not interpret it as merely subjective or reject it because we can't make it clearly objective for us look at all the ejected going on subject reject
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okay so now to try and bring out the imaginal in a way that connects has design your being in the world because remember your self knowledge and your participatory knowing of being or interpenetrating and knowing together I have to bring out
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something of Corbin that if you read it and you haven't done all of this work you I guarantee will miss read it and misunderstand it and it's a part that's difficult for me because it pushes my buttons in ways that I don't like which
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is where I keep reading this stuff right because I have a tremendous sense that it's pushing my buttons in a way that they need to be pushed so that I could perhaps where free from them at least to
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some degree and here's where Corbin is different from Heidegger where he really does pick up on the sense of sacredness that is going on within the imaginal okay let's talk about how Corbin understands the symbol the imaginal understanding of the symbol as opposed
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to the imaginary understanding the dismissive understanding of the symbol okay so let's what are these features so the feature that was brought out when Kris and I had that excellent discussion the translucency of a symbol you look at
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it but you look through it in both meanings of the word by means of it and Beyond it like the way I'm looking through my glasses the symbol is translucent I can look at it but I can also simultaneously look through it and
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I can put those two into a an important dialogue why do I want a dialog between looking at it and looking through it why is it so important to have those in dialogue with each other because that is
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how the symbol can help you to capture the non logical identity between your agent arena now in this frame and the agent arena in a more comprehensive encompassing frame so symbols are translucent as I've already argued they're trans ejected
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trying to make them either subjective or objective is aligned with a having mode dismissal of how the symbol is trying to challenge you to transcendence if you look if you are not transcending in response to a symbol you really haven't
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understood a symbol if you just treat it as an allegory that you can replace with other literal terms then you haven't really remembered through the symbol there has been no Alafaya in your pursuit of the correctness of truth you
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have forgotten the Alafaya of the symbol this is why I'm so critical of people who are so dismissive of symbolism right the symbol is not only trans ejected it's tragic t'v it's putting you on a trajectory of transformation as I was
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just articulating the symbol is transformative remember the transformative of the inner man it's it's transformative view at a fundamental level and the sense that symbol is ultimately trans-temporal town trans facial because it has to do with with this movement between worlds which
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really isn't a narrative temporal spatial movement it's an ontological movement between you know a smaller frame and a larger frame I represent it with an arrow but it isn't movement through space and time it isn't a narrative change
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it's an ontological shift so I'm trying to pick all of these up the translucency of this symbol it's transformative and it's trans temporal spatial Alafaya through the symbol that's how you do gnosis now let's give the troubling example that is central to
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korban and I found it disturbing in ways and some of you will too and I hope so what I ask for right now is be patient because I want to unpack this I don't want to try and be dismissive but I want
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to show you that Corbin is not using this notion in a way you standardly will and it like I say hesitate to do so the the most important symbol of this for Corbin is what he calls the angel and
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that's why chethan puts it in the title of his book and alvin's puts it in the title the subtitle of his book on the new gnosis and soon as I put that up there many of you are now rolling your
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eyes as I did and I said there's a part of me that I can feel there's tension behind my eyes wanting to roll them all right oh no angels oh it was silly superstitious idea you know cherubs and
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only New Age people that you know swing crystals and you know they're angels and all that stuff and it's like oh no what a disaster and I i I deeply appreciate that okay I'm not being dismissive of that I
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would say that that's an imaginary understanding of angels one that Corbin himself repeatedly and deeply rejects what's he talking about and why is he using this term okay he's using it because it's a term that is filled that fills some of the literature
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of the Persian Sufism that he reads I want to propose to you an alternative way of understanding this - what right are sort of cultural imaginary way of understanding this let me let me go back in our history first to try and get a
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right a different way of leading into this notion and then take it into some current cutting-edge analytic philosophy believe it or not and show how that well and comports well with the cognitive science we have been doing throughout this response to the
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for-profits of the meeting crisis okay so this is now I'm making use of the seminal work of staying staying wrote a book called the divine double which is a follow-up to a book he wrote on pseudo-dionysius and he's written some
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brilliant articles in pseudo-dionysius that brings all this out now so the book is called the divine double and he's pointed to a particular motif that was prevalent in the Mediterranean world during and right remember we talked about the Hellenistic Dom inside and
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thereafter and you have the rise of narcissism in early Christianity so during this period and across many different groups you see it within Gnosticism he makes a clear case and you know I again did some people are going
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to know no but he makes a clear case for this motif showing up within early Christianity you can see it Americanism you can see it clearly in Neoplatonism and platanus this notion of the divine double I'm spending time on this because
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you you won't understand young also if you don't understand this divine double okay so what's the what's the notion of the divine double it becomes prevalent through the Mediterranean spirituality of the Hellenistic and post Hellenistic period and I didn't talk about it that
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much when I talked about the Gnostics and the Neo plainness because I wanted to talk about it here because here what I think it belongs this is this was the idea and again part of this is how this
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is so antithetical to our way of thinking especially our to our decadent romantic way of thinking so the decadent romantic way of thinking you know and that sort of goes back to Rousseau is you know you're born with your true self
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and you have to be true to your true self and and you have to express it and that's what it is to be authentic so this and so and this has become pervasive in our culture right in in
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this Mediterranean spirituality the motif is very different it's this idea that here I'm here and I have a self right now or they might say a su K right a spirit or a soul I have myself right now
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but it is bound to the divine double there's a double of me right that is archetypically more important than me and that what I am doing my true self is actually this divine double and my spiritual path is to reunite this
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self with that divine double and to bring it right bring the two together and that realization of their interdependence culminates in right a kind of mystical union between them now this is still all very fuzzy language I'll grant you that but first of all
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notice how this is very interesting think step aside from the mythos for a minute and think about the conception so you see how this is Nasik gnostic right not in the sense of Gnosticism but in it well a little bit in the sense of
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Gnosticism because there's this transgresseth it's trying to break grammar it's trying to break the grammar of thinking of your true self as something you have your identity is something you have that you're born with it it's in you and what you have to do
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is express it authentically and that grammar is being subverted and transgressed by the idea that your true self is beyond you and you have to aspire to it and only and you see there's a bit of the Socratic element
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there right then your true self is something you aspire to rather than something you have it is the true self is something realized through the being mode of self transcendence not through the having mode of inner possession and
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so the divine double right it is pervasive it's a pervasive mythos and what I'm first of all I recommend is and I think this is a very fair recommendation you understand Corbin's use of the age as a symbolic way of talking about the
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divine double and you may say okay that's great and I see why it challenges the grammar but I don't care about this because all right I didn't believe in angels and I don't believe in divine doubles so telling me about angels in
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terms of divine doubles what does that gave me that gives me nothing well I want you to be very I want to be very careful here I want to start a problem I want to start you on a deep analysis of
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this right let's put aside the mythos let's put aside the metaphysical claims right and let's focus in on this very process of ass of aspiration towards a better self towards a more angelic self right please it goes back to the
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Socratic project but you can also see it in the depths of right our current sorry not that's too broad sorry you can see it you know this process of aspiration towards a greater better fuller self is of course all the way
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through Maslow is all the way through and young right this aspirational process is central to a lot of the mythos that we have about talking about right how we are going to normatively improve not our situation but our self
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so is is the divine double a crazy idea well in one sense it is again if you just sort of literal eyes the mythos into some sort of axial to world mythology right or metaphysics sure but maybe it's not a crazy idea if we go
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back and try to ask this question instead of asking the question look and this one I meant about real dialogue Philo Sophia not father nokia instead of asking the question should I believe that first ask yourself the question why
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did so many different groups of people in that world believe it what was going on there what was it doing and here is where I think I can immediately invoke the important work which we have discussed repeatedly throughout this
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entire the entire argument of this entire series the important work of La Paul and transformative experience and that was bound up with the way we talk about gnosis now I alluded to somebody else's work work that was influenced and
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from the same sort of like I don't know what to call it school has la Paul's work and this is the really important work of right of Agnes call art and her book is entitled aspiration and she's arguing for a neglected form of
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rationality that is best understood through aspiration any rationality what remember I don't use rationality to mean management of the just the logical management of argumentation rationality means any systematically reliable internalized psycho technology that reliably and systematically affords you overcoming self-deception and afford
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you cultivating enhanced connectedness enhanced meaning in life that's why the notion of rationality I've argued for is bound up with the right it can culminate it can point towards the cultivation of wisdom so there's let's talk about yourself
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before the transformation or before you launch into the aspirational process and the self afterwards s-one and s-two now la paul tends to represent the this as a much more sort of rapid transition and I think there's important truth in that
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the insight where as colored is representing it much more not incrementally that's not the right word but much more developmentally having a much more extended developmental trajectory and I you can reconcile those I think quite readily by seeing
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qualitative development as a sequence of insightful transformations so I don't think there's any deep inconsistency here ok so what's the problem here well as I've already pointed out with any genuine quantitative sorry I used exactly the wrong word I apologize as
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they've pointed out with any genuine qualitative development quantitative - Gela means you just get sort of more things more beliefs more experiences qualitative development is why I am so different in kind from that kid that was born in Hamilton it's a fundamental
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difference of competence of what I can know and what I can do and what I can be rather than just how much right so I've already pointed out that you have an issue here of non-logical identity okay so this is not an identity relation
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that they can be captured by the fundamental right identity theorem and logic that a is identical to a meaning that they share all the same properties we do not John in Hamilton and John and Toronto John and Hamilton men and John
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in Toronto now we are not we we are not this right we have a non logical identity and I've brought that out and how much gnosis is about their difficulties trying to overcome the difficulties that this pose is because
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of this non logical identity and I'm not going to repeat these arguments go back and look at them when I talk about gnosis we cannot reason our way through this we cannot infer our way through this and colored is the disease colored is the
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deeply in agreement with this aspect you cannot deliberate your way through it you cannot decide your way through it right so what is the nature of the relation right well colored thinks it's aspirational it involves what she calls
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aspiration but she's at pains to point something out that la Paul doesn't which i think is very important right you can't if you don't include this process as part of what you mean by this term you're gonna get into a deeply
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self-refuting position because my relationship to rationality and my relationship to wisdom are aspirational I am aspiring to become rational precisely because I am NOT currently that rational and if the aspiration to rationality is not part of rationality you're getting into a weird kind of self
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refutation the aspiration of rationality is constitutive of the ongoing process of being rational therefore it must be included in your notion of rationality and notice how we're getting back towards the Platonic idea of the deep interpenetration of love and reason took a long time they
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took a long time to circle round back to them of course this is also the case for wisdom it's also look think about this this way one of the things I need to do to become rational is to become more
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educated and but colored off argues explicitly right a genuine educate well there's different weaning so that word now one is just the accumulation of facts and skills and stuff like that but for many and this is what this was
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supposed to be maybe it still is the defining feature of a liberal education liberal liberal to liberate you gnosis to save you to liberate you from existential entrapment a liberal education is designed to make you into a better self a better person which is why
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it seems so useless to people who want to manipulate and control you think about that when you side with all liberal education ah haha silly you're a bottom your sight I think you're getting on the wrong side because you Lou we're
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losing something there right so a liberal education and this is what it classically meant when you go back into the Middle Ages is gnosis it's it's aspirational it's it's and you don't know what it's going to be like remember
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all that stuff about La Paul so let me just leave you with the example from color and then we'll come back and talk about this in the next episode and expand this whole what is that what am I
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trying what am i leading you towards I'm leading you towards that this is the relationship between the existing self and the divine double or another way perhaps of putting it the divine double is a symbol in korban sense that allows
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you to move from yourself now to yourself then to the better self one of the examples that Keller gives an aspiration is and think about how this fits in with a liberal arts education somebody who wants to come to appreciate music and
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notice a plate and that how that word appreciation means both understanding and a gratitude it has an akan not've right emotional aspect and as a denote inception alas spective i well cognitive aspect I should say I will understand
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music so I wanted let's say I don't currently get classical music but I have an inkling and it's really important I think that that you know Charles Williams and Barfield and Tolkien and CS Lewis called themselves the Inklings I
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have an inkling that there's a there's a self and a world there remember we talked about right the person trapped in this world but a sense that there might be a better self in a better world over there I have an inkling that right
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I should like classical music but I don't currently like classical music I have to come to be the kind of being that right appreciates classical music how do I do that how do i bridge from me now not appreciating not getting not
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liking not enjoying classical music to somebody who can sincerely say I love classical music I really get it now how can i we use this phrase in it it's notice how it's so rich and resonant with you know contact epistemology right
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right that now I have a taste for music I've an acquired taste for it let's get behind the metaphor how is it right and notice when you taste something you're putting it into you you're putting it into your being it's not only contact
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right it's even consumption not in the having mode sense but taking it deeply in right what is it to move that way what I'm trying to show you is that Corbin's talked about the angel is a way of him invoking and bringing into
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activity all of this stuff about symbolism that we've talking about and integrate it with this process of aspirational rationality that is so central to self transcendence and so central to us becoming more rational and more wise thank you very much for your
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time and attention [Music] you you
Topics:HeideggerCorbingnosisJohn Vervaekemeaning crisisMeister EckhartAngelus Silesiusimaginalonto-theologynihilism
