Ep. 20 - Awakening from the Meaning Crisis - Death of the Universe

Vervaeke traces how Aquinas split reason and faith into two worlds, and how Rhineland mystics like Eckhart reshaped spirituality into self-negation and inner descent, setting up later crises of meanin

Key Takeaways

Aquinas's separation of reason and faith solved one problem while creating the risk of losing the axial heritage.
The Rhineland Mystics shifted spirituality from ascent to self-negation and divine descent.
The mathematization of nature by Copernicus and Galileo reshaped what counted as real, often at the expense of meaning.
The cumulative separation of spirituality from science and love from reason set the stage for the modern meaning crisis.

What the video covers

Recaps Augustine's integration of the axial revolution into logical, normative, and narrative orders of meaning.
Explains the shift from participatory reading to silent, consumptive reading and the rediscovery of Aristotle as a challenge to Augustinian worldview.
Describes Aquinas separating the natural world (reason) from the supernatural world (faith), creating a chasm between them.
Introduces Meister Eckhart and the Rhineland Mystics, who reframed spirituality as a descent of God into the self rather than an ascent.
Explains the reframing of love as the will negating itself, making self-negation and inner conflict central to spirituality.
Discusses Neoplatonic and Gnostic influences, including the Cathar revival, on these developments.
Covers late medieval social and economic changes: labor shortages, trade, new institutions, and the spread of Hindu-Arabic numerals.
Examines Copernicus and Galileo, arguing that mathematized science made the lived world seem unreal and purposeless.
Argues that the resulting picture of an indifferent, purposeless universe contributed to a sense of existential trauma and loneliness.
Previews that the Reformation will intensify the collapse of the axes of meaning.

Chapters

Why does Vervaeke argue Aquinas's separation of reason and faith was risky?

Aquinas divided reality into a natural world known by reason and a supernatural world known by faith. Vervaeke argues this solved an immediate problem but risked separating love from reason and spirituality from science, threatening the axial heritage.

What change did the Rhineland Mystics introduce to spirituality?

They replaced the Neoplatonic ascent toward God with a descent of God into the self. Love was understood as the will negating its own self-assertion to make space for God, placing self-negation and inner conflict at the center of spirituality.

How does the video connect Copernicus and Galileo to the meaning crisis?

Vervaeke suggests that by treating mathematical properties as the only real properties, their approach made lived experience seem unreal. This left people with an image of a purposeless, indifferent universe, which he links to a sense of trauma and loneliness.

Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown

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[Music] you [Music] welcome back to awakening from the meaning crisis so last time we took a look at how Augustine drew all of this development this very complex sophisticated articulation of the actual revolution drew it all together into a

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noma logical order that brought with it the best of a wrist italian science a normative order that brought with it the best of photonic spirituality a narrative order that brought with it the best of right the christian process of

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moving through history and of course along the ride comes those some of the best psychotherapeutic techniques available from the ancient world all of this was integrated together these three orders that articulate the space of how we're connected to

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ourselves to each other and to the world the normal logical the normative and the narrative we saw however that while this does address our fundamental the fundamental axes of meaning even as it's understood by our best current cognitive science

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this historical legacy starts to come under threat initially it comes under threat and again way that doesn't seem very threatening people are just changing how they're using the cyclic technology of reading they're going from Alexio davina a participatory perspectival

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transformative form of rest citation into a silent consumptive model where I'm trying to consume information and what knowledge is is it is an inner coherence between my propositions rather than a transformative conformity to the world and that of course is born out of

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a slowing and then Excel slowly at first but an accelerating rediscovery of the Aristotelian corpus and the best science of the ancient world and there's the threat of how do we incorporate this authoritative figure into the worldview that was bequeathed to us by Augustine

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and that challenge is taken up by Aquinas and Aquinas does this and it's hard to see how else it could have been done by returning to the fundamental grammar of the actual revolution the two worlds mythology and reconfiguring it into two

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real worlds a natural world understood by reason and a supernatural world understood by faith we're now and faith is now understood as how love transforms the will and the will is primarily how I assert certain propositions to be true

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and as I mentioned that separation while that solves the problem at the time brings with it the threat that as the super not world becomes non-viable to us that we will lose the axial revolutions heritage we will separate love from reason and

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spirituality from science in a particularly pernicious and dangerous fashion I want to keep going and if for those of you who want to pursue this some more depth I can recommend to you the book after God by Mark Taylor a

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tremendous influence on my thinking and I think it articulates a lot of or what I'm going to be talking about in a very clear and precipitations manner but some things are happening there's immediate consequences of people picking up on

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Aquinas and responding to it and we can see it in sort of two figures deeply influenced by Aquinas and they represent two particular lines of development that are going to influence each other one is Meister Eckhart and the other is William of Occam was

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where we get Occam's razor from a thing that is often invoked by various kept ARDS without a full understanding of what I meant by it akhom certainly didn't mean it to be how it's often used by people in a

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dismissive fashion so Eckhart represents a pivotal exemplary maybe even a culminating figure of a group of people within Germany and Germany is going to be central to all of this from now on and that is of course going to be a

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dangerous precedent to set for Germany but Eckhart represents a group that are called the Rhineland Mystics and others who bring about a transformation in the understanding of human spirituality they bring about a change in the normative order so

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Aquinas basically changes the normal logical order he separates it into these two worlds and now there's a chasm between them alright there's a chasm between these world they're right you can't write love can't lift reason up to here the reason has no

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home here right so a different meaning of spirituality now tends to be emphasized in the rhineland mystics now they're deeply influenced by Neoplatonism that cart I think is influenced in some way by the whole Neoplatonic undercurrent within Christianity there's of course the the

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the background history and still there of of the Gnostics there has been a the Last Crusade is actually not against the Arabs in the Middle East it is against the Cathars in southern France and the Cathars ri-right they are I well I would

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say it some people would argue but many people would agree with me the Cathars are a gnostic revival a huge revival of Gnosticism so there's a huge gnostic revival and of course there's a neo platonic tradition Eckhart picks

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this up and others the other Rheinland mystics and what they do is they bring about a we understanding of the normative order and it changes from being the Neoplatonic and agog a it changes from being that whole conformity

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that whole ascent in self transcendence self transcendence disappears from spirituality and it does the connection between spirituality and wisdom where wisdom is understood as your capacity for educating yourself in self transcendence to improve your meaning in life now what happens is instead of an

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ascent upward there's more right God's descent downward into you and there's there's important precedents for this in the ancient world there's the the--our G precedent within the ancient world but that being said nevertheless there's a fundamental difference here Aquinas had talked about

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love driving the will in faith and the rhineland mystics right they're gonna replace this ascent spirituality with a descent spirituality and what they're gonna do is they're going to say look what what what love is it's not that

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love moves the will love is a way in which the will moves it's that's an important change okay it's not that love moves the will is that the way the will moves right is love specifically when the will negates

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itself that's love so they pick up on and that's why I emphasized it earlier on in their series they pick up on the sacrificial aspect of love that to love is to sacrifice yourself so how is right how is the will moving in order to be

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loving well the will is negating itself you see when my will is self-centered and it's egocentric that of course is the opposite of agape I have to sacrifice this and we talked about this I have to sacrifice I have to negate my

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willful self assertion in order to become a conduit for agape or as a cart would say to make a space so that God can come to dwell within me so the idea is that what spirituality is about is

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about the will negating its own self assertion and making a space in which God will is not being resisted so here's the idea God's will is this a gothic love and right we are resisting that and what we need to do is we have to

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stop resisting we have to negate our own self assertion the way we're expressing ourselves to press outward and we have to make a space so that God can flow in now what this does right is it makes self negation and this right it makes

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self negation and inner conflict central to spirituality so what had been incidental and contingent in Paul and Augustine the fact that they have inner conflict it becomes much more valerie's in this new spirituality right I have to sort of be in perpetual conflict with

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myself I have to be negating this self so that eventually I empty myself now there are I don't want to misrepresent Eckhart is one of my favorite authors there there's beautiful wisdom about right how to overcome one's attachment

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to one's thinking and one's self image that are drawn from the Neoplatonic heritage and of great value in ecker but nevertheless this model of right spirituality being ultimately a battle of wills your will against itself and so it's not against God's will becomes a

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central idea for what's going on in the spirituality of the time now that's overlapping with a new a new emerging worldview so Ockham sees God's will as his primary faculty now some of you may be saying well why do we have to talk

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all this God talk look you have to understand how this God grammar developed and how it has woven its way into the very grammar of our culture and our cognition whether or not you believe in a God or

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not is actually quite irrelevant to what I'm talking about right now the fact is people have and they have so on ways of thinking and being into your heritage so for Occam unlike for Augustine and I would say the whole Neoplatonic

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tradition it's not God's reason his intelligibility that is the source of his being for all commits his will and you can see how this lines up these two these two sides because Aquinas has made will the Faculty of access to the

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supernatural right the Faculty of will becomes central to spirituality and to God here now what does that mean why does that matter why would he say that because he sees see again here's the change it's not God's topic love that is

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his creativity God's will is the source of his ability God speaks the world into existence this as an act of assertion thought asserts the world when he creates it and you say okay so what so remember your model of God whether or

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not you believe in God's irrelevant your model of God has a tremendous influence on how you understand yourself and reality God's will supersedes his reason now that's very very important it means that God is not bound by rationality

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he's not bound by how things who hear in a rational fashion reason is not in any way central to God that's why the rational the ascent through reason is gone that means that any order that we find in existence is

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arbitrarily imposed on it by God's will right God speaks it he it's an act of will he's not bound by any rational principles of organization it is just raw power and Fiat on his part you say okay so what what does that have to do

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well as I forewarned your model of how God is is a paradigmatic model of how you understand yourself to be again this is regardless of whether or not you believe in God right now so akhom concludes that we are like God we don't

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find an order in that look you look at here's my desk here's a book here's a book here's a book is a book these are all books they all belong to the category of books right that's part of

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what they are they're books and akhom says no they're not whatever order or pattern you find in there you're making it by how you're speaking about it this is called nominalism the way God speaks and wills whatever order there is we're

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making whatever patterns we find by how we're speaking about them they're not actually there this isn't really a book there's nothing in reality that groups these together it is only my mind by using the term that groups them

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together now because it's automatic for me in it I can't help but see this as a book but problem is there is no universal book ness forgive the language I'm speaking and by using language language gathers things together in the mind forms these

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patterns in the order but all that's really out there are raw individuals all that's really there are raw individuals and perhaps causal relations between them so notice what's happening I'm reading and I'm not reading inside my head knowledge is just how all the

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different signs of language go here together and whatever order there is is only in here it's in here it's in how I'm using the language it's all inside the language there's nothing out there in the world the world is now in a very

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real sense absurd it is not in itself inherently intelligible it's only intelligible insofar as I speak about it or insofar as God speaks it into existence now notice what this is that this is doing this is creating a radical the

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supernatural world is now right not a source of reason and rational order now all of this is slowly unfolding spirituality is being changed right this self negation of will the world is being changed it's the nominal world in which

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well it's out there are raw individuals and whatever pattern or order comes from how we speak about them while all of that is taking shape something disastrous happens shortly overlapping Ockham's just I think just dead overlapping with some of the later

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Rheinland mystics but what happens is right well most people think it is but what happens is right the black death we think it's the bubonic plague most people think it is and this is a disaster right it lays waste to a third

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of Europe's population so in the Bible the end of the world is predicted by the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse death war pestilence famine all these things start happening there's a ebonic plague massive pestilence there's famine because the there's an extended

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wet period and the crops are dying there's huge war hundred year war the Crusades there's the battle against the Cathars as I mentioned and what happens is the church creates the first secret police the church creates the Holy

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Inquisition try and root out the last of the Cathars because this there's this Gnostic revival and the Holy Inquisition is created to find the Cathars that have escaped defying the heretics and bring them to trial imagine imagine how this

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feels analogous to the Hellenistic domicile people are dying villages are going out of existence social order is being radically disrupted there's war and then the church is not helping you it's actually sending out people to try and find if

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you're a heretic so first of all people's confidence confidence in the worldview that they had been born into is being radically undermine eighth they literally think it's the end of the world most of the interest institutions and social

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structures are broken or at least put under significant strain something else happens that's really important of course there's a disruption in social order people move around and more importantly there's a labor shortage so many people die there's a labor shortage

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and because some of the order has broken down people are free to move around more than they were leave the land it's like a bit of like the Bronze Age collapse or the end of the Roman Empire people can now engage in some

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experimentation now what does this mean well it means that there's a labor shortage and there's more freedom right of geographical motion and social change people start to be able to sell their labor for more money and to even to sell

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their labor they start to be able to change their status through their own efforts before like you were locked into a quite you know rigid social structure feudal structure but now you because of the chaos around you you can actually

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make a difference to your own life through your own effort and strangely enough all of this is forms a weird kind of consistency the world actually isn't fundamentally ordered the order is just given by God they could just be removed

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and then their true of things is revealed we impose an order like God does and by my willpower I can change my status I can make my son myself into something different so what's happening here is alright a new

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view in which reality is primarily being seen as a chaotic backdrop against which a battle of wills is occurring and God is starting to less and less be a source of rational order and more and more to be a source of arbitrary power

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now many historians argue of course some disagree that the Black Plague also opens up new social experimentation people start to as I say sell their labor start to become more entrepreneurial are willing to move around more and you get a rise of

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commercialism commercialism starts to ascend now commercialism is really really powerful right you can make use of disparity in demand to accrue wealth so I've got a lot of wool here how much do you want for my wall not very much I

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got a lot of wool - I'm gonna go sale or travel over here do you have any wool no what will you give me for this wool lots of gold oh okay wow I go back here you know what I can

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buy with this gold more wool I can go back here and I can get wealthy and look what's happening here I'm doing it through my own effort has nothing to do with the church has nothing to do with

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the aristocracy has nothing to do with raising grain farming the land nothing this is like magic now there's problems of course with that one of the problems is political the aristocracy is is in the way and so this emerging middle class is

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going to more and more challenge the aristocracy but also the problem with trade especially I see is your ship sinks so what do you do well first of all you're going to create some new institutions you're going to create

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banks money to lend you so you can finance such expeditions you're gonna create insurance companies in case your ship sinks now you're gonna do something really important what you're gonna do is say look I'm not going to take all the

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individual risk what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna get a bunch of my a bunch of friends of people together and like the way the church is the body of Christ the body corpus I'm gonna make one body out

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of all these people I'm going to incorporate I'm gonna create a corporation and what we're going to do is we're gonna have shares in the risk we'll share the risk we'll have shares in the corporation and when we get a

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profit we will divide the profit in the end we will have dividends will create corporations and financial institutions and then what we'll start to do is put pressure on the government the state to not just be working for the church and

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for the aristocracy one of the things the state is going to start doing is it's going to start protecting contracts and enforcing rules on these social institutions and you get the emergence of corporate capitalism and the corporate state now that's important

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because it means that now people have a place in which they can look for power the ability to change their life and for norms to govern their behavior that have nothing to do with the church or the aristocracy

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now that's very important already because what that means is people are creating a secular alternative now they're not setting out to do that but that's what they're doing they're creating a secular alternative a secular source of power and wealth and prestige and they're

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beginning to secularize the state in order to safeguard those secular endeavors and think about it the supernatural world is largely irrelevant to all of these secular projects now this commercialism and trade also means something else really important I

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got to get better at my psycho technologies because I'm not process information a lot better so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna import a new psycho technology always the new secular technologies look for it what happens is

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people are replacing Roman numerals with the hindu-arabic numerals you know these right you take it like one two three four five six seven eight nine zero right the hindu-arabic numerals if you ever done calculations with Roman numerals it's cumbersome and long and

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slow and stupid this speeds up it empowers you it's a cyclic technology that makes your ability to process and calculate information way faster and of course comes through right the Arab world because of increased trade but also because of the Crusades etc what

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also comes in is algebra the use of letters to represent variables rather than numbers what comes in is this zero and with that almost immediately the ability to use negative numbers because sometimes when you're running your business you're running in a deficit

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you're running in debt notice what's happening you're getting a powerful upsurge in the kind of mathematical psycho technology that is available for people what else are people going to do well they're going to improve their celestial navigation because if I can sail the

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water is faster and better there's less chance I will lose all of my profits where my ship sinks well how can i well I'm going to more carefully observe the Stars and I'm going to apply this new way of thinking this Aristotelian

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logical coherent propositional way of thinking and I'm going to use the new math and the new algebra so I got this new way of thinking I've got the new psychic technology I'm going to put them together and observe the heavens way

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more carefully and something that had been known for a while it's going to become much more prominent the heavens don't behave in this nice orderly fashion the way Aristotle and Ptolemy said they do for example if you look at

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Mars in the heavens right Mars will do this over time it goes really it's called the retrograde of Mars it's because of where the the Martian and Charon orbits intersect and don't like as you they don't intersect but like

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when the Earth passes by Mars that's what I meant and as you get this way more careful observation this Aristotelian propositional inferential way of thinking trying to get clear definitions and that's allied to this new math mathematical sacred technology

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people start to discover how chaotic the heavens actually are and of course what they try to do is they they start trying to fiddle with the system right okay so the Earth's at the center and stuffs going around it

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but on these spheres there's other things spinning in opposite directions and you get all this epicycles and it gets convoluted and complex and then Copernicus comes along and says and this is really crucial what he actually the way he actually says it he says the math

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is better if you put the Sun at the center right now notice we talked about this before Aristarchus had said the Sun could be at the center and there was all these arguments against it and Galileo sorry Copernicus doesn't have any answer to

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any of those arguments but he doesn't need them now because people are committed to this new way of thinking they're committed to this new mathematical psycho technology they're committed to this new Aristotelian way of thinking and if it makes the math

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better that's good enough and we all talked about this oh yeah it's the Copernican revolution - ha ha and we titter over our coffee and tea look you have to understand what this means you have to really get it let's go

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back you're using this Aristotelian way of thinking right remember what was Aristotle's marks of how you determine if things were real okay is the organ relevant organ functioning yes is the medium not distorting the information yes do other people after rational

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discussion agree with you yes remember we did the example if you hear somebody over somebody says oh I heard that Susan said she loved you at the party that's how you determine if things are real watch this it's morning we are all

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stone-cold sober we all have perfect 20/20 vision I don't but let's say we all do we all watch the Sun rise in the East pass overhead and seek in the West we all agree that that's what we all see

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we talk about it we argue about it we come in agreement and we're all wrong the air is clear we're stone-cold sober our eyes are working perfectly we rashly discuss it we all agree and we're all wrong it's

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an illusion now here's the thing that should immediately occurred put yourself back there if that's an illusion what else isn't an illusion how do you know any of this is real because all you have be honest all you have is oh well my

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mind and my senses are working normally everything seems clear there's no distorting fog or not and people agree with me that's what they see that's what most of your sense of realness is based on that's why Aristotle's view was so

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powerful and yet what Copernicus is saying is that can all be satisfied and it's still not real because the Mac says it isn't real and that also all of a sudden means all of this all of this experience all of it isn't real remember

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we had the theory that we were in touch with the world we're in conformity with the world that's gone now what's happened is the following here's the world out here and here's our mind and in between is this

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barrier experience your sense experience isn't you being in touch with the world notice I'm using a sense term it's not putting me in touch with the world it's actually a veil between me in the world the only thing that cuts through all of

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this illusion this is very narrow channel of math everything else it's a move all of a sudden you are mostly out of touch with the world this is terrifying it's terrifying so you've got all this chaos going on around you and then you've got

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this view that suddenly says to you well how do you know this isn't an illusion how do you know that this table is here how do you know that your mother actually loved you you really have to go

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back see this is we're protected we're protected by our loss of participatory knowing a perspective on oil we assert merrily in our minds the proposition yes yes there the earth is not at the center blah blah blah but we don't actually

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translate that existentially into what does that mean prospectively what does that mean about your participation in reality put yourself back into what it would be happening for you to just learn this for the first time and you can see

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the terror we're becoming radically disconnected from the world you can see the influence of Occam here we're trapped behind our experience is now just something that we're talking about but it's not what really is the case now galileo comes along and says ah but I've

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got an answer to Arkham this is what Copernicus is showing it this is what this new scientific way where I put Aristotelian logic and I put the new math together and I put careful observation together what it's telling

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me is that the math yeah spoken language and Sense experience can't trust those that the math mathematics is the language of the universe he's very influenced by that old Platonic view about abstract the medical things being what's real now

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what Galileo does is he starts to put that new way of thinking about math that new way of observing that new way of reasoning into practice he does something really unusual so of course math up until that time had

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been and still primarily was understood via geometry so the quintessential math text is Euclid's elements right math and geometry are pretty much synonymous now there's arithmetic in calculation we already talked about those new mathematical tools but Galileo does

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something really really interesting he starts using the geometry in a completely abstract fashion because look my sense experiences can't be trusted right the way I'm the way I am thinking of things doesn't have to in any way look like what it's representing there

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doesn't have to be any sensual no sensual no experiential similarity between my thoughts and and the world let me show you what I mean here's a triangle I'm gonna use geometry and he's using it to represent the relationship

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between you know distance and time and that gives me speed now there's nothing triangular about speed he's using the geometry to represent abstract mathematical relations these have nothing to do with how I'm actually experiencing the world there's no conformity between this and

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the way the world is in my experience so he starts to use math in a purely abstract symbolic way so he starts to observe things like he sees a chandelier swinging in a church and he measures it by tracking with his Paltz he's rolling

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balls down inclined planes and what is he what is what comes out of all of this well Galileo kills the universe because what Galileo realizes is inertial motion things don't move because there's an inner drive and they're trying to get

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where they belong that's a purposeful narrative way of understanding the world things don't move for that reason things move because they've been hit by a purely random arbitrary external force and they will continue moving like that until another

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random external force before Galileo everything is alive everything is driving trying to get where it's belong where it belongs to make the universe a more beautiful ordered place after Galileo everything is dead there's no inner life to matter nothing is moving

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on purpose at all now that is really important because before Galileo you were like everything else because you act on purpose and so does everything else when Galileo kills the universe you're now a little island of purpose in

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a vast desert of purposelessness you're alone you're a oncological castaway all by yourself you're weird and strange and you don't belong and the universe is an indifferent machine notice notice what that notice that's what this does look at this we talk about it again pay

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attention to the words you're using oh yes inertial motion what's at the heart of inertia inert inert dead lifeless not capable of moving itself and what happens is Galileo starts to understand matter differently in the old world matter old world view

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it was the potential for information but now matter goes to being that which resists matter resists my will it's defined in terms of my resistance why does why is that so important why do I want matter to be inert and resisting me

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look it's actually a beneficial thing if the world is resisting me because what everybody is telling me is no it's all chaos up and I'm in I'm deceiving myself I'm creating all these illusions the only hope I have is if the world pushes

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back on me if the world resists my will everything is defined in terms of will and the resistance to will so now what you have is you have this lifeless universe and a battle between isolated wills largely creating illusions and

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this vast inert Wilma Willis but nevertheless resistant machinery of the universe it has another function by making matter an actual substance rather than the potential for information gal Galileo removes their being any basis for evil before we had an we had a

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cosmological explanation for evil evil was a hole in being a pure like pure potential pure chaos there is no such thing now matter is just this resistant inert stuff which means we've lost something and it's telling to us we

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don't really have a way really of talking about evil we don't know we don't have a metaphysics of what evil is we think of evil as just excessive immorality but what is evil well people used to have a very coherent

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fistic ated answer to that now they either say well ultimately there is no such thing or I don't know or it's just a way of talking about great immorality now Galileo gives us the scientific method notice how it's a legacy from the

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axial revolution the scientific method is a way for overcoming our willful generation of illusion and self-deception the whole point of the scientific method is to get the resistance of the world the inert purposeless world to resist our purposes in our will to show us how

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we are deceiving ourselves now that means that you're going to give huge priority to the scientific method and to the mass so what Galileo is going to say is look the mathematical properties are the real properties of the thing the

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length of this right and its mass anything that I can measure mathematically about this is going to be real it's gonna be right in the object as we will come to say it's going to be objective the mathematical properties

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are objective those are real so we're about where are all these other properties what about all the things I can't measure mathematically what about how sweet the honey is how beautiful the sunset is how meaningful these words are

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what is all that meaning where's all that meaning well that's non mathematical so it's not in the world it must be inside that that mind remember we've developed a mind as this internal chamber that manipulates language and propositions inside there

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in trapped inside your mind that's where all the meaning is that's where all the value is that's where all the beauty is all of that non mathematical stuff that's subjective it's only in the mind it's an you experience the illusion of it being in

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the world the world is not meaningful the world is not purposeful the world is not filled with beauty the world is not filled with truth the world is not filled with goodness the world is not even filled with chairs cops tables

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because those are not mathematical entities those are all illusions created by your meaning making mind in its willful self-deception the way it asserts itself on the world what's happening the orders are breaking down see one of the great strengths of

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the Aristotelian worldview was that your view of knowledge and your view of the world mutually supported each other but the great weakness of that of a worldview is as one starts to unravel so does the other and the unraveling accelerates as if

Speaker A

like as the Aristotelian world breaks down you wish to Tilian theory of knowing breaks down and as that breaks down the Aristotelian model the word and this starts to spin very fast in an accelerating fashion notice where we are

Speaker A

already we're we're disconnected from the world we're trapped inside our heads we've lost respectable and participatory knowing self transcendence all the meaning all the beauty all that that was out in the world that's all gone it's all trapped inside of our heads all

Speaker A

that's out there is a purposeless inert chaotic absurdity and all that's here within me is inner conflict and a battle of wills with other human beings it's no wonder that many people were experiencing this as a trauma now here's

Speaker A

the thing none of us are immune to this trauma we just don't think about it anymore or what we do is we'll wake up at 3:00 a.m. in the morning laying on our bed and think these thoughts and

Speaker A

realize how disconnected we are from reality we believe in a scientific worldview in which our meaning and purpose ourself and the objects we interact with the tables and chairs and cars and everything of that ilk is all ultimately

Speaker A

not real and all the purposes we're striving for are not real all the meaning we're making is not real and then fundamentally I'm not real you're not real I mean do you ever awake at 3:00 and think I'm just very complex pattern of

Speaker A

atoms that's all that's really there everything else it's just an illusion and everything I'm doing I'm doing for things that aren't real for a self that isn't real in a universe that doesn't give a damn about me is completely

Speaker A

indifferent it's not that it hates me it's completely inert and indifferent to me so as you can imagine this is not going to leave religion in the spiritual life untouched there are individuals who are going to be affected by akhom and

Speaker A

the rhineland mystics and the rise of the new science and are going to try and reconfigure Christianity to deal with this crisis that is emerging and so as the Scientific Revolution is picking up steam as the commercial and corporate

Speaker A

revolutions are picking up steam as the secularization of the state is picking up steam the Protestant Reformation occurs of course it occurs in Germany because that's where everything is occurring it's gonna keep occurring so what I want to investigate with you next time is the

Speaker A

Protestant Reformation and how it furthers the dissolution of the nomological order the normative order and the narrative order notice how they're already all under significant stress this new scientific worldview the normal logical order is one that I don't

Speaker A

fit into the normative order of ascent and self transcendence that's gone the narrative order of their being a story and a life and a purpose to things that's gone Luther's going to come and he's going to bring about a process of

Speaker A

reformation that it's going to exacerbate this collapse of the oxys of meaning and the ways in which we are connected to ourself each other in the world we'll take a look at that next time we're together thank you very much

Speaker A

for your time and attention [Music] you you

Topics:meaning crisisAquinasMeister EckhartRhineland MysticsAugustineCopernicusGalileoaxial revolutionspiritualityNeoplatonism

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