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[Music] you [Music] welcome back to awakening from the meaning crisis so last time I tramped it to draw together all the other theories and and I don't mean just the psychological theories although their most salient right now but also the
John Vervaeke concludes his series on the meaning crisis, integrating his theory of wisdom with enlightenment, religio, sacredness, and meaning in life, and surveys the 'prophets' of the crisis.
Key Takeaways
- Wisdom is an integrated ecology of cognitive processes that counteracts self-deception and foolishness.
- Aspiration must be treated as a rational process, requiring its own psychology.
- Wonder and gnosis are central affective and symbolic drivers of aspirational development.
- The wise cultivation of enlightenment enhances religio and access to the sacred, enriching meaning in life.
- Heidegger's phenomenology, properly grounded, helps reconnect humans to mystery and being.
What the video covers
- Recaps Vervaeke and Leo Ferraro's 2013 model of wisdom, combining inferential processing, insight, and internalization directed toward sovereignty and virtue.
- Identifies gaps in the model, including missing participatory knowing, transformative experience, aspiration, and gnosis, which need deeper integration.
- Discusses aspiration as a form of rationality (Callard's 'proleptic rationality') and notes the lack of an extensive psychology of aspiration.
- Proposes gnosis and serious play, including enacted symbolic behavior, as mechanisms that help bridge the leap from current values to newly valued ends.
- Argues wonder is the affective state most conducive to aspirational progress because it opens entities and triggers participatory knowing.
- Defines wisdom as an ecology of psychotechnologies/cognitive styles that dynamically optimizes relevance realization across inference, insight, internalization, and understanding.
- Connects wisdom to enlightenment as a counteractive dynamical system that overcomes self-deception and parasitic processing.
- Links the wise cultivation of enlightenment to the enhancement of religio, agape, and the encounter with sacredness as sources of meaning in life.
- Previews a roadmap for the closing material, including a survey of thinkers such as Heidegger, Barfield, Corbin, Tillich, and Nishitani.
- Discusses phenomenology, existentialism, and Heidegger's notion of Dasein, arguing for setting existential modes within a proper ontology.
Chapters
- 00:00Recap of the Wisdom Model
- 03:45Gaps in the Model: Participatory Knowing and Aspiration
- 07:30Aspiration, Proleptic Rationality, and Gnosis
- 10:45Wonder and Wisdom as an Ecology
- 16:40Wisdom, Enlightenment, and Religio
- 21:10Roadmap and the Prophets of the Meaning Crisis
- 27:30Phenomenology and Heidegger
- 35:30Ontology, Existentialism, and the Question of Being
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
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philosophical theories into an account of wisdom I presented a model to you a theory of wisdom developed by myself and Leo Ferraro from 2013 in which we are enhancing inferential processing through active open mindedness enhancing insightful processing through
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mindfulness and we're enhancing of the capacity for internalization by internalizing the sage and cultivating softer Sun by salience of our salient landscape naturally organizes away from self-deception and tempts us towards the truth or at least what's true good and
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perhaps beautiful that's perhaps a better way of putting it and that that coordinates the propositional knowing associated with the in inference the procedural knowing associated with insight the perspectival knowing associated with internalization together and that that as I said that is directed
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towards realizing sovereign and that that can help cultivate a more moral existence the connection to virtue mastery in the sense of coping and caring and meaning in life but of course one of the criticisms I made was that
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the notion of meaning in life there was too simplistic and it needs to be integrated which I'm with with a much more developed account that's already in the literature and I'm contributing to that by work I'm doing with others on
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meaning in life I pointed out that the verb akin for our model is missing participatory knowing it's missing the relationship between or at least I think it misrepresents miss aligns the relationship between the kinds of knowing understanding is missing
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transformational experience is transformative experiences missing aspiration is missing gnosis is missing so all of these things need to be deeply integrated together I tried to give you an account of what I think sorry that's too that's too grandiose I
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tried to suggest the beginnings of an account of how we turn basic understanding which is to grasp the relevance of our knowledge into profound understanding by integrating the account of understanding with the account of possibilities so that profound
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understanding is the generation of plausibility by having convergence onto a contextually sensitive optimal grip that is transformative ly transferable in a highly effective manner in problem finding in many different problem finding formulating and solving in many different domains
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I also brought out the idea that in addition to inspiration this is a term I'm giving for sudden more sudden insight insight Laden transformative experience you can have asked what Callard calls aspiration that's more it's more incremental it still can't be
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solved in an inferential decision theoretic fashion she agrees with Paul on that she does argue though and I agree with this argument that aspiration must be considered a form of rationality which he calls proleptic rationality because you're going to get a you're
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going to get into a performative contradiction if I if my aspiration for rationality and my love of wisdom are not themselves rational processes I'm kind of in in in trouble in my model of rationality then given all of that
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philosophy what's missing as I argued is an extensive psychology of aspiration and I know one of my colleagues Jenson Kim is working on exactly that problem and he's of course doing it in connection with a psychology of wisdom I
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did suggest to you that we could see one of coloureds ideas of how we do this by right we create something that's double-faced or I argued ultimately symbolic having aspects of gnosis in it that allows us to make the the jump the leap even if it's
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an incremental one right from who we are now and what we value now to the place where I've acquired some new thing that I value for its own sake we use the example of music appreciation or etc alright
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but unlike colored I see that as inherently relying on our symbolic capacity or capacity for enacted symbolic behavior what I call gnosis serious play and because I mean in serious play it's always like when I'm playing with something I'm treating it
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as for example a sword but it's actually a piece of plastic that that kind of serious play that symbolic ability especially the enacted one that gives me an agave and analodjica that's really important I would also argue for
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aspiration at least for the placeholders that do important work within aspiration I also argued that aspiration also probably has an affective component to it and I suggested that wonder and we saw how central wonder is to the cultivation of wisdom that wonder is the
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is the is the affective state that's most conducive to aspirational progress because of the way it opens up right entity in our world triggers the transgender relationship and puts it into right that participatory knowing puts it into a developmental trajectory
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so all of that needs to be integrated together into an account of wisdom and then I suggested to you drawing it all together is that wisdom is an ecology of psycho technologies slash cognitive styles right that dynamically and that
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means recipient recipient reciprocal reciprocal optimization that dynamically enhances the relevance realization that's central to inference to insight and intuition to internalizing especially internalizing this age to understanding and gnosis and related to gnosis to the relevance realization at work within transformative within
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transformative experience and aspiration and then I already noted to you that that enhancement that way in which I'm talking about Wisman though that dynamic system that ecology is already overlapping and as it should right as it should it is overlapping with the
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account we gave of enlightenment where in light crucial element of enlightenment was to create a counteractive dynamical system that counteracts parasitic processing and I'm showing you that I think of wisdom I'm arguing that wisdom is a kind of
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dynamical system that is counteractive for overcoming self-deception and therefore would be counteractive for overcoming parasitic processing and foolishness this is a processing account you can see I think given what I've just said how it would ameliorate foolishness we've already talked about how it might
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enhance flourishing by and we did that were in connection with Sternberg how it's going to help you be better connected to yourself to other people and to the world but I would argue that especially where it's overlapping with
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enlightenment that what wisdom is doing in order to enhance meaning in life is it's enhancing religio so we've got wisdom here right and I'm sort of saying there's a significant overlap with enlightenment and one of the things that
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wisdom is doing that's also really important right is it's enhancing religio that's a way in which it can powerfully and we saw already the connection remember our delt the connection to agape right it's enhancing religion and I would say that the the
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enhancement of religio is already and we and remember the the role of wonder potentially even ah here it's taking us into sacredness the notion of sacredness that I already have argued and articulated for and so given this connection all right
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so this is how its enhancing meaning in life and of course this is also an enhancement these are all connected is what I'm saying it's enhancing sacredness I think it's plausible therefore to argue not to conclude decisively but to argue that
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I've shown i've explicate it and explained the deep connections between wisdom enlightenment the enhancement of religio and thereby the relationship to sacredness I want to draw that altogether right in this notion of the wise cultivation of enlightenment the
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wise cultivation of enlightenment what that carries with it of course the enhancement of religio the encountering with the sacred the enhancement of meaning in life etc the wise cultivation of enlightenment I think if the wise cultivation of enlightenment is situated
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within two things right if it's situated within a worldview that affords world view attunement if it's situated within a world and I've tried to do that but throughout consistently I believe at least making this account consistent with a scientific worldview by running
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it all off the machinery a relevance realization that can ultimately be given a naturalistic explanation right so and we've already argued how for cognitive science third-generation cognitive science can give us this worldview and and notice how much the discussion of
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wisdom was invoking a lot of the the theoretical machinery that we got from third generation for a cognitive science was all through it okay so that is situated into a basically an enabling and encouraging worldview and that it is
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also situated within some of the things I suggested where we have a co-opt network of communities of practice let me and I already talked about what that is and that that is in a reflective equilibrium a dynamic ongoing one with a
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wisdom wiki and this has both a top-down like there's researchers like the researchers on wisdom that I've talked about here and then drawn from here of course is right we want to talk about the practitioners all right people are practicing and of
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course this is a bottom-up top-down relationship so we have the practitioners we have the researchers top-down bottom-up relationship and they are in that fashion contributing to the wisdom wiki the wisdom wiki is acting as a it's taking on a creedal function
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right but it's always in service of religio and therefore it's being created in a large part by these communities of practice now I think if you put this all together here it is this is how I think we can awaken from the meeting crisis I
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think that we can draw all of the machinery together for overcoming the perennial problems dealing with the historical issues how to connect right how to connect wisdom and enlightenment together in a comprehensive fashion and to connect that with enhancing and
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meaning in life and overcoming self-deception etc all of that machinery and then situating it within this kind of socio-cultural framework I think that's how we can individually and collectively awaken from the meeting crisis and why I want to one more time
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and that's what part of this emphasized that all of this has been explained and can be engineered from within a secular scientific worldview it's not a view that is in any way I think hostile to religion try am genuinely and sincerely
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respectful throughout but it is a way that is not dependent on religion nor is it dependent on a political ideology a lot of this this part of it is already nascent it's already coming into existence we have some existing examples
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of this that are being developed we can apply it right I've tried to give you an account of this and I've tried to give you an account of how the cognitive science resituated a scientific worldview what I now want to do is to
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put this into I hope a constructive dialogue with other responders to the meeting crisis I would even call them prophets in the but in the Old Testament sense of people that were telling forth the meaning crisis trying to awaken us
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to it and trying to galvanize us in response to it so what I want to do is take everything that I've done it's summarized by this schema all right I hope it's not oversimplified by the schema its summarized and I want to put
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this into dialogue I hope like I said constructive dialogue with some of the central prophets of the meaning crisis especially in the 20th and 21st century now inevitably I cannot do everybody and write your favorite philosopher might not make it here I both for lack of time
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and lack of expertise I'm not going to talk for example very much about Vic and Stein although I think he's important I've taken a lot I've taken a lot of undergraduate courses graduate courses read a lot on Vic and Stein Dickinson
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has deeply influenced me the notion of a cultural cognitive grammar is vacant in Ian through and through in important ways but trying to connect Vic and Stein to the meaning crisis it is not something that I feel I have the
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requisite expertise Whitehead is a philosopher I am currently again trying to understand he is somebody who's wrestling very deeply with the meeting crisis and trying to come up with a way of resituated us within a scientific worldview I've read quite a bit I'm
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reading quite a bit I'm not confident about that whitehead of course has been terrifically relevant to process theology and some of the new theological innovations in the 20th century and part of that could be I'd seen I could are I
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could argue I'd say many people could argue is a way of that theological innovation is is designed to respond to the meeting crisis there's other people those are just two clear examples it's the but what I'm want to offer is
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instead I've chosen two people have chosen for two reasons I've chosen them because I think I have some relevant knowledge relevant expertise to bring to bear and secondly because they're they form a network there they're the I don't
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want I don't need to present them sort of in a piecemeal fashion they have relations of contrast connection causal influence with each other so there's a network of people I want to talk about their dinners are in a sense harbingers
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of the meaning crisis but again in that prophetic sense they're trying to awaken us and arouse us to respond so what I want to do is first of all put up what that network is going to look like to
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give you an overarching roadmap of where we're going an overarching roadmap of where we're going and then what I'm going to be doing throughout is presenting that material and then as I said trying to put it into constructive
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dialogue with the argument I have made my attempt is not to sort of say that they are all the my account is better or they're all just saying what I was saying but what I want to show is that
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the account I've made can be I can argue that it is deeply responsive and responsible to the work of these prophets of the meaning crisis so the figure that it's and he is a controversial figure and I think it's
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fair to say my philosophical attitude towards him is one of ambivalence but sort of a pivotal figure in this is Heidegger so I want to take a look at Heidegger right now I'm not going into discussing these people I want to draw
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out some important connections we'll have to go behind Heidegger a little bit and talk about hosts role and phenomenology and that's important Heidegger is I would argue also deeply influenced by sort of the the the gnosis underground running through Germany
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especially in the 20th century and especially like between the wars and that comes through at least explicitly and you can see this in John Caputo's book on the mystical element and Heidegger thought this comes through the Rhineland mystic of meister eckhart has
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a huge impact on on Heidegger so so those are definitely important aspects important influences another of course titanically important because he just influences everybody is caught and behind count of course is Descartes so many of these people I'm not going to
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have to I'm not going to talk about at length because I've already talked but I'm trying to map this out because I'm trying to show you what I'm going to invoke and then what I'm going to discuss in order to try and draw this
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all together so another really important figure and you've heard me mention him several times and he directly gets into that connection with theology but he is one of the I think one of the great writers about the meaning crisis is of
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course Paul Tillich and his masterpiece the courage to be is all about you know a prophetic announcement of the meaning crisis and an attempt to seriously revise you know theology to take that into account and there's also and it's I
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think both this way and it's not clear if it's also independently but there are Gnostic element deeply Gnostic elements so I'll put that is sort of a dotted line in Tillich Tillich famously argues that we need to get to the God beyond the God
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of theism which is about a gnostic a statement as you could possibly make so Heidegger also has a lot of influence on somebody you've heard me mention especially with ideas of trans jacked it but he has a lot to say about symbolism
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and the meeting crisis and this is Corbin and so I'm gonna have to talk a lot about Corbin because I haven't discussed him at length but his work is again very pivotal in trying to respond to the meeting crisis and the work that
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Chatham has done at trying in his trilogy of books or maybe there's four books maybe but I've read three I've read two and I'm currently reading the third books on Corbin really helped to make a good case for how important it is
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many people don't know about for example the deep connections between somebody else that we're going to talk about Corbin and Yonge and of course Jung is directly influenced by the Gnostics and directly influenced by Conte this allows me to bring out another
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important connection which is the work of Dooley because what he does which is really impressive right is he shows the deep similarities between Tillich and Jung no doubt because of their sharing well I'm arguing the sharing of the
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gnosis background I would also argue that both Tillich and Jung are an important sense non theists and we'll talk about what non-theism is as we get into that but the one of the core shared idea and this is actually the title of
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one under Lee's book is the psyche as sacrament both Tillich and Jung view the psyche in a sacramental fashion and that is part of the way in which they attempt to respond to the meaning crisis both of them have profound things to say
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about about symbols and the relationship to the spiritual life broadly construed so we're going to talk about young now somebody that's also here directly influenced by gnosis influenced by caught through the romantics which we've talked about at least the early German
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romantics people like Slagel for example and therefore through Coolridge right and the person I'm drawing in here this is going to be Barfield and you've heard me mention him a couple times and bar fields notions of participation have a
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lot to say so you can see how they're there there's sort of a network here and then there's there's another one that of course we need to talk about and this is the connection between Heidegger and what's been sort of I don't like this
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term but and and people abuse it those post-modernism as if everybody who's a post modernist were saying the same thing we should more carefully look at individual thinkers and their individual arguments one potential connection here is we'll take a look at it Derrida
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now whether or not we should call the these these two other people postmodern it is not clear they're they're deeply responding to post-modernism and that's grand Parman and the terrific work timothy Morton are also doing and this is what's known as speculative realism
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it's also knowing a Hartman's particular version of it is known as triple o this stands for object-oriented ontology this is the attempt to deeply bring back a profound kind of realism and contact with reality another person that's influenced by is Han the current
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philosopher and cultural critic will talk a little bit about I can't give all of these people equal work I'm gonna talk about Barfield young Corvin until ik and Heidegger but extensively Hartmann not as much Han not as much
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Derrida not as much but I'll at least touch upon them okay because I want to do this as a way of trying to connect the meaning crisis to what's been called post modernity broadly very broadly construed and offer an alternative
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response to post-modernism to to both sort of wholesale adoption of it or the the wholesale demonization of it I think these are both over reactions that we should have a much more nuanced and careful response to now Heidegger has a
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huge influence in an area many people don't know about and part of this influences also James and part of this influence is also Buddhism and you've heard me mention this and this is the kyoto school and they are deeply about
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responding to the meeting crisis and especially the work of Nishida who really is the pivotal figure in founding this and then the person who I think wrote one of the masterpieces on responding to the meeting crisis and this is nishitani his book religion and
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nothingness I've read that book twice I would put that book in the top five books of responding to the meeting crisis it is not an easy book that's why I have not yet put it into the Twitter record book recommendations
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I've recommended the kyouda school and some of Robert Carter's excellent work introducing you to these people directly reading nishitani is very difficult you need to know Heidegger well James well Buddhism well alright and then the Kyoto School people
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and I won't talk about like Maserati they they put this into dialogue with people like Tillich and Whitehead so this is what I want to try and address again I will be giving some of these people much more priority I only have
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four four lectures left after this so right four hours so I'll be giving some people much more priority than others obviously Heidegger is taking a a central role here but we'll we will be spending quite a bit of time with
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Barfield young Corvin and Tillich and with nishitani okay so those are the ones that I'm gonna give priority to these other people I'll try to do my best to represent them but I will have to prioritize I want to keep my
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commitment to you that I finished this in the 50 episodes I also do not want to drag my video crew through some kind of video version of a death march until they are exhausted beyond all recognition so where to start on here
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well I'm going to start at the the center so this is very complicated and this is not meant to be an explanatory schema this is meant to be a road map to show you where I'm going how are things
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connected you can take this down and like I said then you can use this to retrace the connections as I try to explicate and explain them all right so before we get to Heidegger we have to talk about I don't have to
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talk about Eckhart and the rhineland mystics because I've already done that or gnosis because I've already done that quite extensively right or caught because I've done that but when a person that I haven't discussed but it has Titanic influence on Heidegger is
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Husserl Edmund Husserl and who's well of course is famous for founding a whole philosophical movement called phenomenology existentialism comes out of phenomenology via Heidegger by the way that's when you get existentialism Heidegger does something to phenomenology and it leads to
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existentialism but it also leads to deconstructionism post-modernism bla bla bla bla I've already pointed out now again you need an entire course to get clear about what phenomenology is I really recommend the introduction to phenomenology by Sokolowski Sokolowski
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and the book experimental phenomenology by Don ID this is sort of gives you an idea right of what phenomenology is a very good very clear-eyed and this gives you sort of ways of practicing some phenomenological techniques to get a
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more inside feel of what phenomenology is like now phenomenology and hustled even writes a book where he invokes the word crisis of crisis and European sciences right phenomenology was host Earl's attempt to try and I would argue the following thing the it's an attempt
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to try and get us back to a contact epistemology and that's why you can see people who are deeply influenced by the phenomenological tradition like Dreyfus and Taylor talking about the loss of a contact epistemology because they're aware of the idea of a contact
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epistemology I would argue from their phenomenological heritage what's real famously argued about getting back to the back to things getting back to the things that we had gettin so abstracted and removed we had lost contact with the world we were out of touch in a profound
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way and that's why phenomenology has had such a big influence on those aspects of cognitive science that are trying to show how deeply embedded embodied and connected we are to the world so the attempt to get get back contact
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epistemology was really central and one way of understanding that contact and to put it into dialogue with the language we've been using in this course right is that you get this contact by the phenomenology shouldn't be confused with
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merely introspecting that's that's the everyday or common sense stance the phenomenological attitude is not the same thing as your common sensical everyday introspection right instead phenomenology is a much more disciplined practice in which you're trying to pay reflective and following ID kind of an
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experimental attention this probative attention to the way in in which we are in contact with the world so let's say that what I'm doing in phenomenology is I'm playing this reflective experimental exploratory probative attention attention to contact and then how can we
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understand contact well what his role emphasized emphasized intentionality right that's one pole of this relation okay now I've got to explain this normally when we use this word it's it's correct but it's a species of the broader sense of intentionality when we
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say you do something intentionally it means you're doing it on purpose intentionality here in phenomenology and philosophy in general is much more broader it means any mental directedness any mental directedness so when my perceptions are are of the bottle or my
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actions are towards the book right or I'm thinking about Paris those are all intentionality in that I have a mental directedness so there's the intentionality and it's in this reciprocal relationship with the way in which a world is disclosed we're a world
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doesn't mean a planet it means something that we've been talking about throughout right it means a meaningfully structured environment a meaningfully structured environment what I've tried to often capture by this notion of an arena this is kind of a core kind of agency this is
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at least mental agency this mental directedness so and this is important this is how did you use the word noesis here for this and the new EEMA is here and there's of course all kinds of debates about what this does this refer
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to just something in my consciousness or something in the world that we're going to come back to some of this we're gonna come back to it when in order to get to Harman and we are going to look at
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Sparrows critique of phenomenology because he's going to argue that the very goal of phenomenology which was to get back into contact with reality and therefore to be a kind of realism is forted by this this set up so he's gonna
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argue that phenomenology ultimately fails as a form of realism and that it's ultimately a kind of idealism and therefore doesn't give us what it purported to do we'll come back to that that's just some forewarning what I would argue using this is what
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phenomenology using what I mean by this is the language and some of the conceptual vocabulary in theoretical grammar we've developed together using that I would describe phenomenology as this reflective experimental exploratory probe rhetoric probative attention on right the trans jet and the fact that
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he's invoking this term remember noesis right this is prospective unknowing so putting it together it's this reflective meaning all of these it's this reflective attention paid to your prospective of knowing of the transgenerational and in that sense it's deeply consonant with
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and that's no coincidences has had a huge influence on me and my thinking and many of the people in third generation cogs i4ii cognitive science have been deeply influenced by this because they're trying to understand meaning in this transactive way making sense now as
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I said we're going to come back to criticize that but right now in order to make the bridge to Harman but what I want to do now into speculative realism what I want to do now is what did
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Heidegger do with this what did Heidegger do with this well my way of putting this that I think draws together two of its criticisms is to well know maybe a better way let's do the two criticism then draw them
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together one of heidegger's main criticism is that hugs will work and that this is going to be developed by Sparrow and the speculative realists is that hustlers work had not really given us contact now one way I would put it is
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because it had not really developed an account of participatory knowing it had not really developed an account of how the agent and the arena were fundamentally related together so that this perspectival relationship could unfold now I don't think that's the case
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for all of phenomenology I would make the case that Marlowe pontes I and we talked about this Marlowe Aponte's ideas about embodiment and embeddedness are trying to get at the connection between the perspective of knowing of her Elian
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phenomenology and the participatory knowing nevertheless what Heidegger was innovating and this is how he was bringing in an existential aspect he he was trying to bring he was trying to point out that the modal relationship between the agent in the arena using our
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terms was not properly accounted for within the historian framework so participatory knowing was deeply missing and that's right that's sort of our fundamental way in which we're connected in contact with being and then in connection with that that that
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participatory knowing had not been set within an ontology that this right this needed to be set within participatory knowing existential modes right existentialism comes out of Heidegger and that in turn needed to be set into a proper ontology and a proper account of
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the structure of being to use our language how does the translation ship sit within an overall overall account of the structure of being itself when and we don't have that then we don't have a we have not really got contact back
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because we're still out of touch with our being and through our being of being itself we're out of touch with our being and through our being of being itself this is Heidegger's main criticism a related criticism that is pervasive
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although for a long time implicit and and i don't like the way Heidegger of course eventually turned on host well for despicable reasons but one of the criticisms hydrators making as Heidegger Husserl was still trapped within the Cartesian cultural cognitive
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grammar HUS role is deeply Cartesian he entitles one of his books Cartesian meditations so in that sense Heidegger feels that puss roll is still bound within the Cartesian grammar and he sees that that Cartesian cultural cognitive grammar for ways we've
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articulated radically cuts us off from the world and this is of course a way of saying that we're still sort of trapped within our subjectivity and in that sense we'll we'll see what sterile means by Hosur Elia and phenomenology is maybe
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still understandable as a kind of idealism which doesn't get us back to realism as much as the phenomenologist claim and wanted it to do so so how do we get to this deeper contact in an organized fashion how do we do
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those two things how do we open up participatory knowing situated within an ontology and break free from the Cartesian ultimately he would say platonic I think that's incorrect maybe Aristotelian but how do we how do we escape the strictures the
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restrictions of the Cartesian cultural cognitive grammar that keep us out of contact with reality so what we need to do is phenomenologically not just theoretically but phenomenologically right within participatory knowing by transforming it in a reflective experimental exploratory probit or way
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our attention right by directing our attention in this fashion and opening up our perspective on knowing so we're going to phenomenologically realize but we're gonna direct that phenomenological realization towards something important we're gonna direct it towards our being
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who and what we are that's how we're going to connect to the participatory knowing what's that going to do well we're going to have a phenomenological realization which of course is then going to become an existential realization that we are the beings who
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beat whose being is in question we are the beings whose being is in question now if you heard the weird being and you you think well that were this you're a homo sapiens and you've got DNA that's not what's being meant
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here okay it's not what's being meant here so be patient because it's what's grounding this that is our being now talking about a biological phenomena at least in any direct sense although I think it's ultimately grounded biologically right we're talking about
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what owns this historian framework in a participatory knowing what does it mean to say we are the being whose being is in question well you can even get a sense of this from the term existentialism remember we talked about
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this that existentialism says human beings don't have an essence like other creatures other things so you know a gazelle is born it is a gazelle its identity is set it's gonna develop into a gazelle right but for us at least
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insofar I would argue as we are persons are who and what we are whether or not it means sense to call it our essence because essence should be a widely shared property but our being then maybe that's a better word to use right now
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who and what I am as the person genre vague that has been in question I existed before right before who and what I am has come into being and in fact it's still unclear to me who and what I
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am and that's also the case but you are in question you exist before you have an essence before you have who and what you are that's what existentialism ultimately points to that your existence precedes your essence that's that's one
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of the things existentialism takes out of Heidegger but the key idea is that you are this thing's being is not in question to it or even ultimately to us I mean we can sort of do philosophy on it but there's from within phenomenology
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from within a front of a nomological perspective I'm sorry phenomenological stance is perhaps a better word we are in questioned to ourselves who right Who am I what am i what is it to be a person what kind of person am I
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and these get and you see you see why this is relevant this question goes fundamentally it's bound up with this question what is the meaning of my life in this right not in the sense of destiny but like how is my life
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meaningful what makes it meaningful what makes it meaningful to me what is its meeting now notice and we've already talked about hydrators connection to this Heidegger is trying to get you into something like an aporia and he's trying to get you to remember
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the being mode the mode in which you're not trying to manipulate even yourself and solve problems you're stepping back and confronting mystery because you're invent you're engaged not with control controlling things and satisfying you're having needs you're engaged within a process of
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development of becoming and so you're confronting mystery because you're going through transformative experience you are the being who's being is in question and he's trying to wake you up not theoretically phenomenologically he's getting wanting to get you to
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phenomenologically realize that you are the being who's being is in question that's what we all are so instead of referring to us as persons or human beings or things like that he crashed this new word Heidegger is famous for
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neologisms and and part of what he's trying to do with the neologisms is break us out of the familiar terms and thereby break us out of the Cartesian grammar he comes up with this word design which means being there it has to
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do with you know I I exist being there being there I'm sort of throwing into the world throwing into existence and my being is in question that design being there so what's interesting is my my participatory knowing right the way in
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which I try to connect to how I'm situated in being has an operatic element to it aporia right in which I realize that central to me according to Heidegger is that my being is in question now if my being that's my participatory
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knowing my groundedness and being is in question that is how I can link participatory knowing to ontology itself do you see because and this is why it's participatory knowing myself knowledge will also get me into my knowledge of
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ontology because by knowing myself as the being who's being in question I can put ontology itself into question I can put sorry I mean no I'm sorry I can frame an ontological question of putting being itself into question I know myself
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as a being whose being is in question and knowing myself that way is also to put being into question right and so I've got this deep participation in the mystic the Co determining mysteries of who I am and what being is so by Phenom
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illogically exploring that being the being of design we can simultaneously come into contact with our mortal existence we can remember the being mode we can be opened up to the wonder of our own being that we are ultimately self
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defining at least in some important aspect were ultimately self defining self making things but of course we don't do that egotistical Eeyore egocentric Lee because we're bound to the world for freeze ins I've already given you multiple times
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so by phenomenologically exploring the being of design we can simultaneously come into contact with our own modal existence and the mystery of being itself so this is starting to take us right into the core of how Heidegger is
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trying to deepen what he thinks was missing the ultimately the contact with ourselves right but not with our autobiographical ego but with our being the contact our participatory knowing of our self though the connectedness to being and he's found this I mean it's that's
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why he's Heidegger there's brilliant insight that because we are the being whose beings in question we can deepen the contact by phenomenologically exploring this so that's really central to what Heidegger is trying to do reading Heidegger is very hard because
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it's filled with all this neologisms it's filled with all of this constant right qualifying with this constant self-criticism which of course is good this constant refinement but also this this constant acknowledgment statement that it's not quite getting it we're not
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getting the answer so it there's it's it's it's it's like going on the walk through a really gnarled forest with somebody if this is a metaphor that Heidegger himself would use and you get a sense of progress but it's not clear
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if you're actually making progress you you come into clearings and you you get openings an insight but then there's also but yet we haven't arrived we haven't arrived until you go on again and so there's this long process so what
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I want to do instead with you is instead of trying to do something audacious to try to summer I want to try and go in and get some I'm going to do some exposition with you I want to read some
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key quotes from Heidegger and what I then want to do is try and unpack them following this idea of how he's trying to deepen contact trying to put into dialogue with the very tremendous help of Dreyfuss with the machinery the
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theoretical machinery we have developed and also along and that will also afford me a critical response to Heidegger I'm not going to start those quotes now because we're almost out of time what I want to do is just foreshadow what
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Heidegger is going to argue how did there is going to argue that the history of metaphysics there what that whole philosophical history coming out of the axial revolution is actually the history of nihilism this is why he is a prophet of
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the meaning crisis that that whole historical development though that that that that framework that cognitive that cultural cognitive grammar right that we've inherited from the actual revolution that whole metaphysical framework has developed inexorably towards nihilism it has driven us into
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the meaning crisis and of course that's already deeply resonant with the historical analysis that we pursued in the first half of this course so if we can understand that cultural cognitive grammar of metaphysics that's a pejorative term for Heidegger we can
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link it to this project of the phenomenological investigation of design and break free from that grammar and deeply reestablish and this is not just theoretically this is phenomenologically existentially our contact with being and that deep participatory knowing and
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remembering of being and the realization of being and how it's not a being not a particular being and our status with respect to being that's the response Heidegger is recommending to the meaning crisis and what next time what I would
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like to do with you is explore what his thinking is by going through the quotes unpack it more what link it to the argument that the history of metaphysics is the history of nihilism see what we can glean in a cooperative dialogue
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between this course and Heidegger about responding to the meeting crisis and and draw what important or at least relevant conclusions we can from that thank you very much for your time and attention [Music] you you you
Topics:meaning crisiswisdomrelevance realizationenlightenmentaspirationgnosisreligiosacrednessphenomenologyHeidegger
