Love, Attention & Meaning with John Vervaeke (and Iris Murdoch)

On Love, Attention, and the Good: Cognitive scientist John Vervaeke (University of Toronto) and philosopher Darius Parvizi-Wayne (Macquarie University) talk about love as a way of paying attention, starting from Iris Murdoch’s The Sovereignty of Good. They discuss John’s idea that getting out of the meaning crisis means “falling in love with being again,” Murdoch’s famous M and D example, what “unselfing” really means, Simone Weil, Heidegger, the Kyoto School, and pilgrimage as a way of knowing. They end with a personal conversation about mentorship, vocation and the love of wisdom. Introduced by Andrea Hiott from the Philosophers’ Way in Heidelberg. **CHAPTERS** 00:00 Introduction from the Philosophers’ Way, Heidelberg 02:30 Darius and John introduce themselves 07:00 “Falling in love with being again” 12:00 Love as volitional necessity 17:00 Murdoch’s The Sovereignty of Good 27:00 The M and D example 37:00 Can cognitive science explain loving attention? 43:00 Unselfing: Murdoch vs. Simone Weil 46:30 The Kyoto School: self-power and other-power 52:00 The two-worlds mythology and nihilism 1:08:00 Nishitani and absolute nothingness 1:20:30 Place, basho, and the sacred 1:23:30 Pilgrimage and theoria 1:27:30 Darius’s story 1:32:30 Mentorship, vocation, and the love of wisdom 1:38:00 Closing: dialogos and Middlemarch MENTIONED Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good · Harry Frankfurt, The Reasons of Love · Mark Wynn, Renewing the Senses and Faith and Place · Silvia Caprioglio Panizza, The Ethics of Attention · Taliaferro & Evans, Iris Murdoch and the Transcendent · Jeff Malpas, Heidegger’s Topology · Robert E. Carter, The Nothingness Beyond God · John Vervaeke, Awakening from the Meaning Crisis \* John Vervaeke and Darius Parvizi-Wayne \* How preferences enslave attention (Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences) \* What active inference still can’t do (Philosophy and the Mind Sciences) \* Iris Murdoch – Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Lawrence Blum) \* Iris Murdoch and the Transcendent – Taliaferro & Evans **TRANSCRIPT** **John Vervaeke and Darius Parvizi-Wayne** **Andrea:** \[00:00:00] Hello everyone. Welcome to Love and Philosophy. This is a conversation between John Vervaeke and Darius Parvizi-Wayne. They will introduce one another. Darius, who knows both of us, offered to put us in touch, but I thought that Darius and John might have an even better conversation, and wow, it’s a good one. And they talked about Iris Murdoch, who is one of my favorite philosophers. So, three amazing voices in this conversation. I just wanted to say something: so many students listen to this, but also a lot of professors and teachers, whether you’re an academic or a teacher in some other way. In a way, many people are teachers without even knowing it. Listening to this conversation, and also to some of the notes I get from you asking me to talk to John Vervaeke, I realize how important mentors are in our lives, whoever they may be for you. We all have different ones. \[00:01:00] We all come from different paths, and different people speak to us at different times. But that relationship in general is so important, and I really felt that in this conversation in so many ways. There’s an old story about Honi, who sees a man planting a tree, a carob tree, and teases him: it takes, what, seventy years to bear fruit, and you’ll never eat from it. And the man shrugs and says, “I found these trees when I came into the world, so I’m planting them for my grandchildren.” Then, I think, Honi lies down and goes to sleep for seventy years, and wakes up, and there’s the man’s grandson eating from the tree. Anyway, I think there’s even more to that story than that, but it comes to mind because, for one thing, if you’re watching the video, I’m up here on the Philosophenweg, the Philosophers’ Way, in Heidelberg. I’m at the university here. And so many people walked here on this path. Hölderlin, if you \[00:02:00] know the poet, was up here, and Hegel, who I talk about a lot, but also Karl Jaspers, who’s one of the reasons I came to this town. Hannah Arendt was his student, and both of them are so important. I could go on and on. Max Weber used to live nearby. Anyway, there’s a tradition in these hills of philosophers walking, and I think it’s a wonderful metaphor for this conversation between John and Darius and Iris Murdoch. So here we go. I hope you love it as much as I did. **Darius:** Well, I think we should just do this spontaneously, right? And then, Andrea, you can edit as you see appropriate. Well, John, this is a complete honor for me. On a public platform it’s been, what, two and a half years since we spoke for the Active Inference Insights podcast, in, I think, December ‘23. **John:** I think that’s right, yeah. **Darius:** So quite a lot’s \[00:03:00] changed. Just for the audience, people should know who you are. I imagine many people know who you are, but of course you can introduce yourself. Many people will not know who I am, though. My name’s Darius Parvizi-Wayne. I’m about to enter the third year of a PhD in philosophy here at Macquarie University in Sydney. I’m obviously not Australian, if you can’t tell from my accent. I’m originally from the UK, and I’m very inspired by John’s work, as well as other people’s, of course. My PhD is on active inference, or predictive processing, and the problem of relevance, which is something John has worked on extensively for decades now. But I have a range of interests that very much align with John’s: flow and insight and intuition and skillful coping and Heidegger, and someone I hope we get to touch on quite a lot today, which is Iris Murdoch. **John:** Yes. **Darius:** \[00:04:00] But John, is there anything you would want to add about yourself? **John:** I guess, if people don’t know me, I’m an associate professor at the University of Toronto in psychology, where I teach cognitive psychology and cognitive science. I’ve been the director, the associate director, and the assistant director of the cognitive science program, so I have a long history with that program. In psychology, I work on intelligence, rationality, wisdom, meaning in life, and mystical experiences. In cog sci, I work on, as Darius said, relevance realization, its connections to predictive processing, and its connections to what’s called 4E cognitive science. This is the idea that cognition is inherently embedded, enacted, embodied, and extended. I would perhaps add another E: it’s exapted, in an important way. And then both of those come together. I’m a \[00:05:00] long-term practitioner: 35 years of Tai Chi Chuan, Yiquan, Zhan Zhuang, meditation, contemplation, Neoplatonic practice. I’m also a facilitator. I facilitate various retreats and intensives. I co-facilitate with other people. All of this work is marshaled together towards wrestling with what I call the meaning crisis, which I’ve been talking about for quite some time. I have a YouTube series on it that’s become somewhat famous, Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. And by meaning I don’t mean semantic meaning; that’s a metaphor for what I’m talking about, which is this sense of existential, spiritual meaning. What makes life worth living even when we bump up against failure and frustration and futility. Many people are struggling, increasingly so: issues around loneliness, ideological capture. I could go on with an entire symptomatology. \[00:06:00] And more and more people have taken this up and are discussing it actively. So all of my work is basically aimed at trying to help people address and ameliorate this. Part of that is theoretical work, scientific work, understanding meaning better and all of these other processes I talked about. Part of it is practical, in the deep sense of practice: giving people an ecology of practices. Part of it is educational. I do that at the lectern, and on my online teaching platform. Right now we’re going through the Kyoto School: how can their integration of Zen and Heidegger, and through Heidegger, Neoplatonism, perhaps help us with the problems of nihilism and cynicism we face? So that’s a lot of what my work is. And I get to bump into some really excellent people, and one of them is Darius. I think of you as a friend now, and I hope you think so too. \[00:07:00] We talk quite often off camera. We’re collaborating on several things. He’s much faster than I am. I’m an extremely busy person. I’m sure he’s busy too, but I’ll use that as my excuse. We talk a lot, we share a lot, and I always enjoy his company. I know we’re supposed to be talking about love today, and I think that’s actually relevant to everything I said, and I’ll say something initially provocative. I have proposed, and this requires a really deep recovery of what we mean by love, and we can talk about that, and Murdoch will play an important role in that, but I have proposed that ultimately, awakening from the meaning crisis requires us being able to fall in love with being again. You can hear Heidegger in that proposal as well. So the topic of love has been very central to me because of that particular proposal. **Darius:** Good. That’s excellent. \[00:08:00] I think there’s a nice way of making a convergence here between someone like Heidegger and Murdoch. Just to add, of course, I feel exactly the same. I definitely see us as friends. You are in many ways also a mentor and an idol, in the least glorifying or sacrilegious way possible. And I think at the end of this chat it would be nice to talk a little bit more about the personal dimensions of this stuff. **John:** Happy to do that. **Darius:** But to go to the philosophy. One thing that Heidegger makes very clear is that we are beings that care. We are Dasein, and at the very foundation he wants to say Dasein’s constitution is temporality, but at least at the intermediary level he says it’s Sorge, it’s care. We are the beings for whom being is itself an issue. And one way you could cash that out is to say we are the \[00:09:00] beings who love things, who are projective, who care about things, who take things seriously, who give a damn, to use John Haugeland’s phrase. This brings us nicely to Murdoch. You’re trying to draw an interesting relationship, I think, between love and something like care, or love and relevance. And this isn’t just in Murdoch and Heidegger. Someone like Harry Frankfurt is very interesting here. **John:** Yes. **Darius:** In the beginning of The Reasons of Love, he says the more fundamental question is not “what is the moral life?” We need to pay attention to what we actually care about. We can only really get to the ethical context by first understanding what matters to us. So I want to start by asking: how do you view that relationship between love and care, or love and relevance? This is interesting in the case of Murdoch, because it seems like Murdoch’s sense of love, where she talks about it with respect to attention, is not just about \[00:10:00] accruing as much propositional information about another as possible. This is a point that’s really nicely made by Chris Cordner. I want to read out the famous M and D example to put meat on the bones. But before I do that: Chris Cordner and others have made clear that love is not just this excruciating acquisition or extraction of as many details about someone as possible. That can actually be used, as I think he puts it, to turn the screws of humiliation, right? If I pay attention to every fine detail of you. But that being said, that acquisition of fine detail does seem to mirror or reflect how relevant you are to me. So there does seem to be a slight disjunction between what’s relevant to me and what I love. How do you see that relationship? **John:** Well, first of all, you and I both, and if we need to we can go into the \[00:11:00] detail, think that relevance realization is primordial. You and I are also on the same page that we think it’s even deeper than the framework of predictive processing. This is some of the work I’ve done with Dan Chiappe: that fundamental orientation that makes any predictive processing possible. So we’re talking about something very primordial. And I want to say that because it’s clear that Heidegger is talking about care in this primordial sense. He’s not talking about it the way I care about ice cream or something like that. At least not initially. Because it is, as you say, bound up, and this is why it relates to the meaning crisis, with the fact that we are the beings for whom being is in question. It really goes to the guts of our existence. This is why I want to say that relevance realization can meet Heidegger’s notion of care, because it is \[00:12:00] equally, to my mind, primordial, and has to do with our fundamental orientation and connection to reality. We don’t need to get into the mechanics. I want to make a connection first to Frankfurt. This is a notion he uses, although I think you see equivalent notions in John Searle and in Hans Jonas. Jonas talks about needful freedom, and John Searle says that in a good argument we find the conclusion compelling, but it’s not compulsive. There’s this weird state, and Frankfurt has a great term for it: volitional necessity. This is the idea that when I’m loving something, I feel very bound to it. There’s a necessity to it. If you were to ask me, I cannot help but love Sara. She’s my beloved. But I don’t feel like I’m losing my agency \[00:13:00] in this. I feel like my agency is flourishing. And there are other examples of this. Like I said, for Searle, reason seems to be a volitional necessity. Many people have talked about beauty as a kind of volitional necessity. And as I said, Hans Jonas talks about something very similar, at least when he talks about life itself as a needful freedom. In the needful there’s a kind of necessity, but there’s a freedom in there too. And I think all of these plug into something central. I think relevance realization is exactly like that, because of the way it works. It’s not algorithmic; it doesn’t work according to standards of necessity. You know this: for technical reasons, that would often commit us to a combinatorially explosive search of the information. So we’re not working according to logical or causal standards of necessity, but neither are we just arbitrarily picking what we will pay attention to, what we will remember, how we will act. So it’s that volitional necessity. And I think there’s something really \[00:14:00] powerful here, and I’ll get to your detailed question in a second. There’s something about love and relevance realization, care, being caught by beauty. And I remember talking to Bishop Maximos about this, and I said, “Is that perhaps what was originally meant by people like Clement when they were talking about faith?” Faith as more of a faithfulness, almost a fealty, a loyalty to something, a volitional necessity, the way I feel this tremendous loyalty to Sara. And he said, “That’s exactly right. Faith isn’t about believing things without evidence. It’s this sense of being committed to something because it appeals to you as fundamentally good.” And I think that’s important, because I want to bring in this notion of commitment to supplement care: that love has an aspect of commitment to it, \[00:15:00] because something appeals to us as good. And then one more point. Somebody I find very helpful around this is Wynn. Mark Wynn, in Renewing the Senses. He’s often almost explicitly influenced by 4E cog sci. He talks about what’s happening in religious conversions, in which people feel deeply committed to a new way of life. They go through a transformation, and they recommit their identity in a fundamental way. And he says, “People talk about seeing God, but they’re not seeing a focal object in an adjectival way.” What’s happening, and this is language you and I both like, is a change in the salience landscape and its hue, and in the sense of connectedness. It’s very adverbial. And the way he explains it, which I found personally very helpful, is that “the universe goes from being a container of things to being something that faces us.” Because in a \[00:16:00] face, it’s not that we’re picking up on every detail, but wherever we focus on a detail, the whole is present. It’s pregnant in that face. And it’s present in a way, and this is a Heideggerian thing, that is also withdrawing. We get a sense of the mystery of the person in their face. So that’s how I’m trying to bring it together. When we’re in volitional necessity, we are called because something appeals to us, and that’s Smith’s work: appeal actually means to call to us, right? And with volitional necessity, when we’re called, the care is called into commitment, and I think that means we start to face someone. It’s not that we’re picking up every detail, but we are facing them. We are experiencing them as facing us, rather than as a thing in Cartesian space just filling up space in the universe. So that’s a proposal I would give back to you. \[00:17:00] **Darius:** Yeah, this is excellent. There’s plenty of convergence here, I think, with stuff that I’ve been thinking about. It brings me nicely to my little bit of a battered copy. **John:** Beautiful book. Just for people who are only listening, he’s holding up The Sovereignty of Good by Iris Murdoch. **Darius:** This is probably about the fourth time I’ve read it, in preparation for this, and I think it’s the first time I’ve felt its more spiritual dimension come to the fore. **John:** Excellent. **Darius:** What I mean by that is I would want to add that there’s a volitional necessity, at least for Murdoch, though I wouldn’t go fully fledged myself, although I was quite convinced: it’s one’s orientation to the good. **John:** Mm-hmm. **Darius:** Murdoch interestingly says, and I made a note of this in preparation, “The idea of a patient, loving regard, directed upon a person, a thing, a situation, presents the will not as unimpeded movement but as something very \[00:18:00] much more like obedience.” **John:** Mm-hmm. **Darius:** So she talks about the necessity of the good, as a form of reality, as constraining you, right? It’s not that I’m just open, in an existentialist, Sartrean way, to interpret things on the fly. Actually, my orientation to the good is a form of volitional necessity. It draws me in, and yet, as you say, it’s not an impediment to my freedom, my agency. And what I found particularly spiritual about this reading of The Sovereignty of Good is the notion, which I think you’re getting at when you bring up Wynn, of excess, of concealment. In “The Idea of Perfection,” she says a fundamental aspect of being a human being is that there’s always this orientation towards improvement, towards bettering oneself, recognizing that there is a standard towards which \[00:19:00] one can always aim upwards. That strikes me as another form of volitional necessity, and it also makes me think of Merleau-Ponty and the notion of an optimal grip. Our existence is in many ways normatively structured, even at the most deeply pre-reflective level, towards something better. And she’s very careful not to reify this betterness. **John:** Oh, yes. **Darius:** She talks about how it has to be a small seed that is formless, but that has to continue to occupy more of a role in our life. This “there is more than this,” as she puts it. And so for her, ultimately, to love something is to be, as she puts it, confronted with an endless task. So I’m wondering whether that resonates with you, for us in this world where things are transient and changing, which I think is \[00:20:00] also important to pick up on, right? We do not exist in the Platonic realm, and Wynn wants to do careful work at dismantling that dichotomy. It’s not as if love is an effort-free orientation. It requires work, and it may never come to total fulfillment. **John:** Oh, that’s very rich. Let me try to pick up on various threads. First of all, I think there’s a potential connection between Wynn and Murdoch that you pointed me towards. I mentioned that for Wynn the sense of the sacred is adverbial, not adjectival. And I think that’s maybe also the case for Murdoch: the good isn’t an adjectival, focal object. It’s an adverbial thing that is constantly transforming what we find salient and how we understand ourselves. And I think that comes out in Wright’s notion, which he derives from the M and D example, of what he calls sensibility transcendence. I think \[00:21:00] that’s deeply right. I think this notion of facing up is really important. John Russon does some work on this, right? This is our primary metaphor for maturation, and notice it’s got the facing language. When we face up to somebody, again, we’re not just confronting an object in Cartesian space. I am proposing to integrate this with a Vygotskian perspective. There’s an awareness, and this is the Callard idea of aspiration, right, as in religious conversion. Think of a child. They have an awareness that the adult has a perspective they do not have. So from their perspective, what the adult is doing doesn’t make a tremendous amount of sense, and there are some classic experiments showing that kids will imitate even when it doesn’t make any sense to them. But they do it because that individual is trustworthy, and they imitate the perspective-taking, and then that gets internalized \[00:22:00] as metacognition. The child eventually can take the adult’s perspective on its own. So there’s a lot packed into this facing up to reality. It brings in the facing again. But the other thing is, if we understand Murdoch as proposing that the aspiration towards the good, the adverbial aspiration, is maturational in nature, because we are facing up to something we don’t completely understand and yet we’re trying to internalize it, it sounds a lot like that Vygotskian machinery. And if that’s the case, that might help to explain another important component of what we typically understand by love that’s not addressed that directly. But correct me if I’m wrong, because I’m very open to that. I mean, she’s not very familiar with it, because it comes towards the end of her life. \[00:23:00] This is the psychological notion of attachment. Maturation and psychological attachment are deeply bound up. And I would say that the commitment I have to Sara is not only conjoined to care; it’s also reaching into my attachment system, the very machinery by which I internalize other people in order to mature. I’m facing up to them, they face me, and I interface with them. The language here is really quite proper. And I think it does feed over into Murdoch, because I wouldn’t know if it’s exclusive, but I think that’s the proper way, meaning most of the way, in which we achieve the particular kind of metacognition we call conscience, where the normativity of our world and of other people becomes a part of how \[00:24:00] we direct and understand ourselves. What do you think about that? I was trying to play with... **Darius:** Yeah, good. So she certainly doesn’t mention attachment. There’s been a complaint, or a concern, in the secondary literature that Murdoch doesn’t take enculturation seriously enough. **John:** Yeah. **Darius:** I think Blum mentions this, perhaps in the SEP entry on Murdoch. There are slight mentions of it in the book, but there is very little on what someone like Gibson would call the education of attention. For Murdoch, what matters is that we mature in our attention such that we can look on the world with a just and loving gaze, but there’s very little on how we might do that. I think she’s aware of that, and she’s aware of the predicament she’s in, which is that we can’t now resort to capital-G God to guide us. She does invoke things like prayer, and questions whether that \[00:25:00] might be our route to purifying our attentional schema. But there’s very little by way of others training us. That doesn’t mean she’s not aware of the import of the other. To go back to the attachment point, one thing she’s very clear on is that just and loving attention is not about consumption. It’s not about getting the other as a kind of commodity that you can exploit in your scheme. And again, this comes back to Heidegger and the notion of standing reserve. There are interesting questions there about what kind of attention that is. This is a tension I try to pull out in some of my work that’s under review, about Murdoch and attention: attention does seem in many ways to reflect our individual preferences. So there’s this continuous tension in Murdoch, I think, between this notion of unselfing, but also **John:** psychological commitments. We’ve got to talk about that, because I think there’s a lot of misunderstanding \[00:26:00] about unselfing. And we’ve got to talk about the fact that self-reference isn’t a single phenomenon. There’s a big difference between narrative, egocentric self-reference and the kind of self-reference I need in order to get up and walk around the room. So I think we’ve got to tread very carefully there. But I do want to come back to the point you made about non-consumption. I have tended, and I’m prepared to defend it, although we can talk about it, to map that onto a Frommian distinction between the having mode, which is needs of consumption, and the being mode, which is needs of maturation: we need to become honest, we need to become wise, we need to become, right? Many people have said it should have been named the becoming mode rather than the being mode. And then you talk about a different kind of attention, and this is where I think of... \[00:27:00] I want to come back to enculturation, because it’s odd that a woman who writes dialogues, who actually writes Platonic dialogues and considers herself a Platonist, doesn’t really bring in the dialogical aspect of this. **Darius:** Well, and even if we look at the M and D example... **John:** Well, the M and D... **Darius:** Let me just read it out. I hope it doesn’t take too long. I’ll just read it and then we can see where we go. **John:** Please, please do. **Darius:** It’s a classic moment. “A mother, whom I shall call M, feels hostility to her daughter-in-law, whom I shall call D. M finds D quite a good-hearted girl, but while not exactly common yet certainly unpolished and lacking in dignity and refinement. D is inclined to be pert and familiar, insufficiently ceremonious, brusque, sometimes positively rude, always tiresomely juvenile. M does not like D’s accent or the way D \[00:28:00] dresses. M feels that her son has married beneath him. Let us assume for purposes of the example that the mother, who is a very ‘correct’ person, behaves beautifully to the girl throughout, not allowing her real opinion to appear in any way. We might underline this aspect of the example by supposing that the young couple have emigrated or that D is now dead: the point being to ensure that whatever is in question happens entirely in M’s mind. Thus much for M’s first thoughts about D. Time passes, and it could be that M settles down with a hardened sense of grievance and a fixed picture of D, imprisoned (if I may use a question-begging word) by the cliché: my poor son has married a silly vulgar girl. However, the M of the example is an intelligent and well-intentioned person, capable of self-criticism, capable of giving careful and just attention” (that’s in italics) “to an object which confronts her. M tells herself: ‘I am old-fashioned and conventional. I may be prejudiced and narrow-minded. I may be snobbish. I am certainly jealous. Let me look again.’ Here I assume that M observes D or at least reflects deliberately about D, until \[00:29:00] gradually her vision of D alters. If we take D to be now absent or dead, this can make it clear that the change is not in D’s behavior but in M’s mind. D is discovered to be not vulgar but refreshingly simple, not undignified but spontaneous, not noisy but gay, not tiresomely juvenile but delightfully youthful, and so on. And as I say, ex hypothesi, M’s outward behavior, beautiful from the start, in no way alters.” So this comes off the back of her critique, or her scrutiny, of Wittgenstein: Wittgenstein’s argument against private language, and that argument ultimately being expanded to concepts and all forms of behavior writ large, which only make sense in the context of public ceremony, of the ways of going about the world. Because ultimately her interest is in reinstating the importance \[00:30:00] of the internal constitution of a person to one’s ethical life. So it’s not just about outward behavior. It’s not, in a pure utilitarian sense, just what happens in the world that determines your moral life. There’s almost a Kantian element here, about the intention to treat another with dignity, as worthy of one’s respect. So she wants to say: if that’s the case, then we have to look at the internal constitution of people. And so she gives this example of M, for whom seemingly nothing has changed in terms of external behavior, and yet everything has happened internally. Now, as you probably know, I too have a slight problem with the pure Wittgensteinian picture of externalism, basically. I think it’s unfair to pin this entirely on Wittgenstein, because I take the quietistic picture of something like the Investigations quite seriously. What he’s trying to do is talk to us about our use of \[00:31:00] language and tell us about the role of therapy. It’s a much more therapeutic text than an expository one. So I think she’s right to invoke something like internal mechanisms. But the reason this becomes problematic comes back to this point about enculturation, and the lack of anyone influencing M in her decision to change her mind. I think it runs into classic issues like circularity: does M not already have to be good to recognize her deficiency? So is just and loving attention making one good, or is it a marker of one’s already-established goodness? If it’s not a difference-maker, if it’s just an epiphenomenon of one’s already established goodness, there seems to be an issue of essentialism, right? It’s as if M was always already good, and this was always going to happen, and that doesn’t quite seem right either. \[00:32:00] Sorry, I’ve gone on for far too long. **John:** No, no, you haven’t. Not at all. I’ll let you know if I think you’re going on too long. **Darius:** Okay, thanks. **John:** So first of all, Davidsonian charity to Murdoch. She’s writing at a time when behaviorism is the dominant psychological paradigm, and even the dominant philosophical one. Ryle and so forth are very active. And she’s trying to make a case for the inner life, and in that I agree with her. But I do think she’s sneaking some stuff in. She does talk about this, and other people talk about it quite naturally, as an inner dialogue taking place inside of us. And that is already to smuggle in something that we acquire, presumably both the knowing how to do it and the normativity of it, from our interactions with others. And this is in fact a central Platonic claim. Somebody asks \[00:33:00] Antisthenes, “What did you learn from Socrates?” “I learned how to talk to myself,” right? It’s only by practicing, with shared meaning and mutual correction, that we get good at external dialogue, to the point where we can feel comfortable applying it internally, to different temporal states of ourselves. So I think she’s smuggling something in there. I completely agree with the rejection of the behaviorist rejection of the inner life of the mental. But I think she’d be a more consistent Platonist if she acknowledged that the inner dialogue is inseparable from the outer dialogue. Those two are constantly playing off against each other. And if she did that, she could avail herself of something like Buber: what we’re talking about is not I-It attention but I-Thou attention, and the I of the I-Thou \[00:34:00] is a very different I from the I of the I-It. And I think that’s actually what she’s trying to put her finger on: that the I is changing in a fundamental way. That’s an inner change, but I think it’s happening dialogically and relationally. And what’s always bothered me about the example is that she says, “Well, what if D is dead?” For me, I’d want to know if any of those insights land or track, because insights can be wrong. This comes up a lot in practice. People will be in a dialogical practice and they think they have an insight about the other person, and the other person will say, “No, sorry, that’s not landing. That’s not what’s happening.” Right? And other times they’ll go, “Yeah. Yeah.” And then you can feel the I-Thou just spring up between them. **Darius:** Yeah, there’s a lot there. I think the first thing to say \[00:35:00] is that you’re right that she would actually be not only more faithful to Plato, but more faithful to her own notion of loving attention as recognizing the alterity of the other, **John:** Yes. **Darius:** if she recognized the dialogical aspect of self-improvement, right? Recognizing that the other has something to teach you that you may not already have known, and that is a lifelong, endless task, as she puts it. And it comes back to the notion of the face, and this notion of excess. The other is beyond my consumption. It makes me think of Levinas, right? **John:** Yeah, of course. **Darius:** So the M and D example here is almost doing violence, one might say in the Levinasian sense, to the constitutive role of the other in something like self-formation. And I think it runs into... Bergson has this really lovely example. He directly counterposes his notion of becoming to, and it’s very much of the time, \[00:36:00] the model of the French ladies with their fans, where everything is contained right at the first fold and then it ultimately unfurls and shows up. In some Laplacian sense, it was always already there, just waiting to be revealed. And that doesn’t allow for genuine change or genuine transformation or genuine novelty, right? If it’s always already there, just waiting to be **John:** Yeah. **Darius:** catalyzed. That’s not what we’re talking about. And I think that runs into some of my issues around what I’ve been calling the diachronic problem of relevance: how we develop idiosyncratic preferences, and the problem of grounding that in a first-prior story of always up-weighted homeostatic priors. I think that’s true both of active inference and of autopoietic enactivism, so it’s very cool to see these things converging. So there’s plenty there. But I want to come to this thing about attention, and \[00:37:00] Buberian attention, the I-Thou attention you mentioned. Murdoch makes it very clear, and it’s clear here that she’s influenced by someone like Anscombe, that moral philosophy needs what she calls a philosophical psychology. It needs to make sense in the light of what we know about mentation and cognition. And she uses Freud, although at one point she calls Freudianism an “embryonic muddle,” and in some ways she’s probably right. **John:** That’s wonderful. She’s such a good writer. **Darius:** She is a good writer. She is. So my project in one of these papers was to think about whether the reconciliation of Murdochian ethics and philosophical psychology is still licensed. **John:** Mm. **Darius:** And I look at that from a predictive processing angle. I’m not sure I’ve sent you this paper, but I can if you’d like. **John:** Please. **Darius:** And one of the issues there is that \[00:38:00] in our taxonomy of attention, we have exogenous and endogenous attention, although I think that dichotomy is worth dismantling, feature-based attention, spatial attention, and so on. We don’t have receptive attention. We don’t have orientational attention. We don’t have opening-up-to-the-moral-worth-of-others attention. So one question I would have for you, as someone who is interested in naturalizing phenomenology and, in this case, ethical philosophy, but who also has an eye to the transcendent, is how far can our accounts of cognition and our scientific worldview, when it comes to... I’d say the closest we can get to what Murdoch is talking about, in terms of our scientific account, is feature-based attention. I’m going to love someone differently depending on what part of them I focus on. Do I focus on the aggression in their face, or do I focus on the vulnerability in their face? But even then, that still seems to be a very \[00:39:00] object-centered, detail-oriented, extractive process. So I’m wondering what you think about the prospects of cognitive science even getting close to explaining the type of attention she’s interested in? **John:** Yeah. Dan Chiappe and I were doing a lot of work on orientation, and we’re both also reading Panizza’s book right now. **Darius:** Yeah. **John:** On the ethics of attention. She mentions Wu’s theory, but she seems to be most in line, as far as I’ve read so far, with Watzl’s idea of attention as prioritization and the structuring of consciousness. And I think that’s getting very close to relevance realization and the kind of orientation that Dan and I are talking about, that Stegmaier is talking about. And Kant bumps into it famously in the critique, where he realizes that when I list all the features of my left and right hand, all the propositional descriptions, there’s nothing that distinguishes them, and \[00:40:00] yet my orientation clearly picks them out as different from each other, because I orient to them. It’s completely adverbial, and that’s the point I want to make. It’s an adverbial kind of qualia rather than an adjectival qualia. And I think that’s really important, because Kant realizes that you can’t reason, you can’t do anything until you’re oriented, and then he panics a little bit and says, “Well, it must be a feeling,” and he puts it aside. But we’ve got the work of Stegmaier, Sass, and others, and I think it plugs in nicely to the work Panizza is doing on Murdoch and Weil on the ethics of attention. And I think the orientation language just lands very naturally in Murdoch, really, really well. So I think there is work being done on what’s going on in orientation. Now, I think it has \[00:41:00] something to do with prioritization, but it also has to do with other aspects of relevance realization. The thing I would want to put here, though, gets me back to Wynn and his proposal for a more adverbial understanding of the sacred. When you move to orientation, you’re moving to this adverbial sense, to hereness and nowness and valence and connectedness and foregrounding and backgrounding, the kinds of things that I think are actually really relevant to describing a lot of the phenomenology people experience when they’re having very transcendent experiences. And I proposed this argument to you, and we’ve been bashing it back and forth: even in things like mystical states, where we might think that something like relevance realization goes quiet, no, you still find the adverbial aspects of \[00:42:00] orientation at work. In fact, you find them enhanced. Enhanced presence, enhanced nowness, enhanced orientation, to the point of at-one-ment, and things like that. So I think we can connect the cognitive science to the phenomenology, and to some of the work people are doing on the phenomenology of the sacred, in a way that I think is very viable for amplifying a lot of what Murdoch is trying to put her finger on. The way she talks about the magnetic pull of the good seems to fit really well with that adverbial alteration in salience and orientation and hereness and nowness and connectedness, and my sense of being called into volitional necessity. So I think 4E cognitive science, allied with phenomenology, can actually say a lot about attention, and especially attention to \[00:43:00] the sacred. I would make that argument. **Darius:** Yeah, nice. You’re mentioning plenty of researchers, and I like that. I very much align myself with this. I’ve got very minor critiques of Watzl’s view, **John:** Me too. **Darius:** but I really loved his Structuring Mind book and all the articles as well, so I think he’s great. And Wayne Wu as well. But I think Watzl’s picking up on something. Wayne Wu’s view is a selection-for-action view: what attention is doing is selecting a datum for action. I think what Watzl’s picking up on is that that might be true, but at a more fundamental level, attention is picking up what is most relevant to you. **John:** Yeah, exactly. **Darius:** Because that actually acts as a kind of condition of possibility for action in the first place. And what I also like about your notion of adverbial orientation is that it doesn’t extricate or annihilate the self. Not the “fat relentless ego,” as Murdoch would talk about it, but the kind of pole, let’s say, \[00:44:00] that is stretched. As you’ve also talked about, a pole that is stretched, a mind-world fittedness. I know you like that term as well. So there are plenty of researchers here, and I think it’s right, as you mentioned, that it’s worth unpicking some of the misconceptions about what Murdoch means by unselfing. **John:** Yes. **Darius:** You mentioned Panizza, but there are other people I think are worth flagging. She wrote a paper with a researcher called Fredrickson, but there are other people like, it’s a Finnish name so I’m going to get it wrong, Hämäläinen, I think in Hypatia about ten years ago. **John:** Yeah. **Darius:** Chris Mole, who’s also done fantastic work on adverbial attention. **John:** Yeah, exactly. **Darius:** And they all point to the fact that what Murdoch means by unselfing is not that, at a process level, there is no receiver or receptor of the world, right? **John:** Yeah. **Darius:** Panizza talks about \[00:45:00] how Murdoch offers, and I wonder whether this is slightly unfair or a poor term, a tamed version of Simone Weil’s notion of décréation, decreation, or unselfing, right? And I’d love to talk about this, because you will be much more in touch with the more mystical, spiritual tradition that Weil talks about, where for her to receive God is to undergo kenosis, right? It’s to self-empty and become a receptacle. Murdoch doesn’t think that, right? Murdoch thinks the self is still an important thing that is going to be engaged, at a processual level, with the objects of just and loving attention. It’s just that, as you were saying right at the beginning, we need to be careful about distinguishing the levels at which we talk about the self, right? What she wants to say we should not be paying attention to is the self as object, as I’ve called it in certain places. The self as the object of self-concern. These are the kinds of things that go away in flow states, without flow completely eradicating consciousness, right? \[00:46:00] Weil, on the other hand, seems to really want to talk about not being there. So the self is removed not just from the content of consciousness, but from the process of engagement wholesale. And I wonder about the feasibility of something like that. **John:** Yeah, I think that’s right. And you’re right to invoke the flow state. You and I both do work on that. Obviously not all forms of self-reference go away in the flow state, or you’d be really bad at sparring and getting into the flow state while you’re sparring. So we have to go here very, very carefully. I don’t know about Weil; I haven’t read her deeply. I know about other mystical traditions. I’m going through the Kyoto School right now, people like Nishida and Tanabe and Nishitani. And I’m finding Tanabe is actually very helpful for understanding Murdoch, and vice versa, \[00:47:00] because Tanabe talks about the fact... and you can see this is even relevant to the M and D example. Tanabe is very concerned, because he’s influenced by Pure Land Buddhism rather than Zen, and this is one of Shinran’s concerns. Shinran is the founder of Pure Land. One of his concerns, and it sounds very much like Kierkegaard and Augustine, and Tanabe is very influenced by Kierkegaard, who also talks a lot about love, is that we can have such complex and powerful forms of self-deception, and super-salience of a kind of narrative egocentrism, and our attempts to get out of it can feed back into it. That can become extreme, like perhaps in Luther or Calvin, and I don’t think Tanabe goes there. But the reason I’m talking about it is that Tanabe talks about the need for what’s called tariki, other power. And the lens for \[00:48:00] me, and I don’t think this is foreign to his understanding, is that when you’re having an insight, you don’t just make an insight. You don’t manufacture it. You do stuff. You redirect your attention, but there’s this other spontaneous thing. There’s an other power at work. It comes to you. It beckons to you. The light flashes. It’s got a spontaneous self-creation aspect to it. And the same thing with some of our spontaneous intuitions, our sense of our deep intelligence. Where did that come from? Plato talks a lot about that too, in ideas around anamnesis, and inspiration, and aspiration. We have this relationship to something calling us. And Paul Ricoeur did an excellent thing on that in The Symbolism of Evil, when he says, “When you’re being tempted, who’s tempting you?” Right? So it’s this idea that there’s self-power and other power, but they’re not substantial entities that are \[00:49:00] separable from each other. I like the way you put it: they are poles within a pulsating polarity. They’re interpenetrating in a significant way. And I don’t see how Weil can get rid of that, because what is bearing the relationship to God? What is bearing the call to responsibility? What is bearing the call to virtue? What is bearing the call to love? When I talk to people in the Eastern Orthodox tradition about kenosis and theosis, there isn’t the sense of that happening. It’s not that there’s the eradication of the ability to be in relationship to God. That would actually be a profound heresy, right? There’s a sense in which we never stop being a lover of God. And I think Murdoch is being more \[00:50:00] consistent. Murdoch is really emphasizing that love requires a lover as well as the beloved. And as I started with, love is a virtue. It’s not an emotion or a feeling. It requires commitment and loyalty, right? That requires self-direction of some kind. There has to be some kind of self-machinery, not a substantial self or a soul, but some kind of self-machinery at work, because agency and self-direction are being invoked by both Murdoch and Weil throughout all their work, as far as I can tell. And I think Tanabe is very clear about that. The self-power and the other power: we have to take them both into account. We can attribute the origin of our metanoia, of our conversion, to the other power, but that doesn’t mean there’s other power without self-power receiving it and being called by it. **Darius:** Yeah. And I like your invocation \[00:51:00] here of responsibility. **John:** Yes. **Darius:** The self is also implicated in its past activity, right? We have to credit it with all it’s done to have come to the state where it has purified attention. So ask me where I’ve come from, you know? It’s the Jungian thing of being suspicious of unearned wisdom. The self is not just responsible as a synchronic whole, in that pulsating polarity, but also in a diachronic sense. There’s work that’s been undertaken to get to a point where you can be receptive. Yeah, that’s good. Excellent. Yeah, I mean, **John:** And also on the other side, if I could just say one thing. **Darius:** Sure, sure. **John:** From the theological side, God’s agapic love is not that which annihilates that towards which the love is given. It is creative of it, right? And that’s also part of the notion of theosis. So I really would want to challenge her interpretation of the Christian notion of kenosis \[00:52:00] very, very strongly. **Darius:** Yeah. She may well not advocate this view, so I don’t want to speak unfairly. But one thing one might want to charge her with is an excessive reliance on the two-worlds mythology. So this brings us back to Wynn, **John:** Oh, yeah. Very much. **Darius:** and Renewing the Senses, right? For Weil, one certainly gets the impression that this world is the one... And one understands it with Weil, because she was in the Spanish Civil War and wanted to fight on the front line, and she had oil burned on her, and then she had to go home, and then she worked in the factories. And all of this she’s actively bringing upon herself, right? She wants to suffer in order to purge herself and allow God in. There’s a sense there that this is the world of transient corruption and impermanence, and \[00:53:00] if only I can purge myself of that, then I will become receptive to, or at one with, the higher realm. And I think Wynn’s work on this is very meaningful. With Murdoch, one senses that it’s happening here, you know? The spiritual dimension is happening here. Wynn has all these beautiful examples from James, where it’s not as if, after their spiritual transformations, people like Tolstoy think, “Oh, actually I should commit suicide and await salvation.” It’s like, no: this world, the gestalt, the all-things-shining world, is alive once again, right? That’s what he had lost: the sense of color and vibrancy. And again, it’s what you said: the sacredness of the world is contained even in its smallest morsel. One thinks of William Blake, and seeing heaven in a wild flower, and all that stuff. And I think Iain \[00:54:00] McGilchrist has done really careful work on the relationship between diversity and unity, and how that is also at play here. You know? Right here. **John:** I think that’s excellent, because... I’m trying to think of where I want to go with this, because I’m at this optimal point of multiple paths. I guess the first thing is that I’ve been a staunch critic of the two-worlds mythology, even though I’m a fan of the Axial Revolution and all the legacy religions that came out of it, and how it gave us the notion of transcendence, and wisdom as transcendence, and things like that. I won’t go into those arguments. However, I do think Nietzsche is right. As the two-worlds mythology ossified, and it strands God as \[00:55:00] completely and absurdly separated from the world, that’s a driver of nihilism. Because if this world only exists instrumentally for the upper world, and we come to find that our connection to the upper world is absurd, then of course we’re thrown into nihilism. This world has no value, because its only value was to get us to the upper world, and there is no longer a passage to that, because the upper world has been rendered absurd. I think that’s nihilism. Now, I would point out, and I’ve argued this elsewhere, that the vertical absurdity has just been displaced in modernity, and I think Heidegger is responding to this. We try to recapture what the vertical dichotomy did with the one and the many, and where normativity comes from, and appearance and reality, and we displace that into an equally absurd dichotomy of the inner subjective world of value and the outer objective world of fact. And we \[00:56:00] know that Murdoch is a deep critic of the fact-value dichotomy, right? As are other people, like William Desmond, who I have had the great good pleasure of having several discussions with. I got to meet one of my heroes, and he lived up to it. So I think that’s right, but I think both the vertical and the horizontal two-worlds mythologies have to be called into question in a very, very serious way. And I think this is where Ursula Goodenough’s notion of transcendence into comes in, or Wright’s notion of sensibility transcendence, which is not transcendence to some view from nowhere, but this sense of the opening up, the reciprocal opening of depth, between two people. I think that’s what I’m proposing here, and what Murdoch was perhaps reaching towards. There’s a book called Iris Murdoch and the Transcendent, by, \[00:57:00] is it Taliaferro and Evans? I can’t quite remember. It’s a new book. It’s one of those wonderful little Cambridge Elements books. **Darius:** Right. Cool. **John:** And I think Murdoch is coming to do, at least implicitly, what people like Goodenough and Wright are doing. We’re trying to give ourselves, I don’t know what to call it, a post-axial grammar, leaving behind the axial grammar of transcendence understood in a two-worlds mythology, **Darius:** Mm. **John:** vertical or horizontal. Can we recover transcendence in all of its richness, its philosophical, existential, spiritual, even phenomenological richness, without adopting either a vertical or a horizontal dichotomy? I experience and read Murdoch as a precursor, for me, of that project which \[00:58:00] I have undertaken. I’m trying to deconstruct the vertical and the horizontal in a paired fashion, because I think that is what is needed if we’re going to recover the sacredness of the world, such that we love it in a way in which nihilism no longer seems to be a default we will descend to if we don’t keep ourselves distracted and busy. **Darius:** Right. Yeah, that’s good. That’s interesting. And of course, this interest in dismantling the dichotomy is not just in the continental tradition. Putnam, you know... **John:** Well, Catherine Pickstock, in her book Aspects of Truth, goes through Quine and Putnam, and there’s Case Beer, and all the... It just keeps happening. And all the work on relevance realization: I’ve argued, you’ve heard me, that relevance is a transjective phenomenon. It’s before, beneath, between, and beyond the subjective and the \[00:59:00] objective. I think that dovetails perfectly. I would argue that, in order to be consistent, Murdoch has to move to that transjective domain, if she is really talking about love in the way we’re talking about it: as something that’s plugging into the volitional necessity of relevance realization itself. **Darius:** Right. Yeah, good. To do some self-promotion, I’ve also tried to push this. One of my earlier papers, in 2024 in Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, is an attempt at dismantling the endogenous-exogenous dichotomy in the attentional literature. **John:** Oh, yeah. **Darius:** That’s from an active inference perspective, but the epigraph at the start is from Simone Weil: “Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer.” **John:** Right. **Darius:** And that’s something I really want to hold on to, and it’s interesting given that we’re critiquing her: prayer involves active \[01:00:00] orientation on the part of the one praying. **John:** Totally. **Darius:** And so even something like “pure” exogenous attention, and for those listening I’m putting that in scare quotes, evinces a kind of relevance-realizing orientation on the part of the agent. It makes sense why I’m suddenly attracted to the sound of an alarm going off, right? It’s not that staggering. And yet, at least in the empirical work, they’re desperate to hold on to this dichotomy, because it allows them to slice nature at its artificial joints, I would say. **John:** Yeah. I get to speak as a psychologist, because I’m officially one, and I love psychology and I’m grateful for how it has homed me, so I don’t want this misinterpreted. But the philosophy of science in psychology is really moribund. Their model of science is a kind of Machian interpretation of Newtonian \[01:01:00] physics. It’s really not in proper relationship to all the work being done in biology right now. **Darius:** Yeah. **John:** Philip Ball’s excellent book How Life Works is a great canvas of all of that work. The work of Michael Levin, the work of Denis Walsh at the University of Toronto, and all that sort of stuff. And this comes up a lot. There are endless courses, and there should be, by the way, I’m not saying stop doing this, on how we get measurement right and how we set up our experimental design. And then I’ll ask my students, “Okay, where do you go to do good theoretical psychology? Where do you go to get an education in that?” Because coming up with a really good, clear idea that has been properly placed in relationship to the landscape of other ideas \[01:02:00] is a hard, difficult task. That’s why physics has theoretical physics as well as experimental physics. And something like that is taking shape in biology. And they have no answer. There’s this almost purely Lockean empiricism that I think bedevils psychology. And I think that’s actually what’s at work in that distinction about attention. Lockean empiricism: a commitment to it being completely from the outside or completely from the inside. You and I are both involved with 4E cog sci, and rejecting that in-out model is one of the core things that 4E cog sci argues for. Because it’s just not adequate to the data, both the empirical, experimental data and the phenomenological data. It’s not adequate to it at all. **Darius:** Right. But I guess I sympathize, \[01:03:00] in the sense that holding the dichotomy of subject and object is so easy. **John:** Yes, yes. **Darius:** And I think here about Charles Taylor and Sources of the Self. It’s built into our, as you would say, cognitive grammar, **John:** Cultural cognitive grammar, yeah. **Darius:** this Cartesian detachment, this Cartesian split. And it serves us in some sense as a modeling tool. But it’s reifying the model at the cost of misunderstanding the phenomenon. **John:** Well, it’s powerful. I’m teaching a fourth-year seminar course on consciousness, and I’m talking about when all these dichotomies came online, and I’m saying, we’re going to criticize this at length. But I said, “Stop and note,” and here you can hear the Heidegger in me. “Look around you. Look at all the technology. Look at all the empowerment.” Because if we take \[01:04:00] meaning and value and everything out, and all we leave in the world is measurement and manipulation, whoa, does that ever orient you and empower you towards technological conquest, right? And I don’t want to do without all this technology. But like Heidegger says, the enframing, right? It’s insidious. That ontology, that onto-epistemology, just gets woven into us. And this is Desmond’s work, and Taylor uses the same language, and you see it in the mystical traditions. There are other cultures, other ways, in which there is not this dichotomy. Instead, and this is a term used by both Taylor and Desmond, there’s porosity. And there isn’t truth as correspondence; there’s truth as participation, truth as disclosure, and participating in that disclosure that Heidegger talks about. **Darius:** Yeah. **John:** So it’s powerful, but we have to remember \[01:05:00] that, both cross-culturally and cross-historically, it is aberrant, which means it shouldn’t be given the unquestioned status it’s given, for example, in psychology. Because we should ask: why is it aberrant? Why is it problematic? And I buy Desmond’s argument that if you separate fact and value, back to Murdoch, you get what he calls the argument for default atheism. Because the external world, the objective world, the real world, has no values. The only values are subjective, and I’m projecting them, but projection is illusion, so meaning and value are an illusion. And objectively, I’m just a meaningless thing inside a meaningless universe. You get this default argument. Of course, it’s more sophisticated, and he builds it out, but that’s his basic point. **Darius:** And Taylor critiques this as well, in **John:** Sources of the Self. Yeah, the buffered self. The buffered self is extremely problematic, because... \[01:06:00] just think about this phenomenologically, you know? This is Kearney’s work, and others’, right? It goes back to Merleau-Ponty too. We use touch as our primary metaphor for a proper relationship to reality. Are you in touch with reality? Are you in contact with it? And there’s a reason for that, right? Because touch is the sense in which, while we’re realizing, we’re always being realized. It’s inherently porous, by its very nature. And so the phenomenology, I think, is calling us back: no, porosity is actually our primordial experience of realness. **Darius:** Good. It strikes me that part of the issue is holding the tension. And again, I think of McGilchrist, and these metaphors, which don’t come from him, of the bow having to be taut for it to actually be efficacious, right? It’s \[01:07:00] so easy for us to let the slack out and end up in that dichotomy. And for all of the problems with Heidegger, I’m rereading Being and Time for a paper I’m writing, and I could go on for days about Heidegger and Being and Time. But one of the things I’ve written about, and this is in print, and Heidegger is so central to my PhD in many ways, is that Heidegger is wrestling with that tension. There’s a reason he calls Dasein “Dasein” and not “man,” right? In the earlier works, he doesn’t use the word Dasein. It comes in, I think, in ‘23, and initially it’s only hyphenated, Da-sein, Being-There. And there’s this constant tension about not wanting to do what he calls vicious subjectivizing. It’s not idealist. It’s not all the projection of Dasein, right? Dasein is at the same time Being-with, and das Man, the “they,” is a kind of superordinate force, \[01:08:00] and yet the fundamental sense of normativity is also a kind of purposive, temporal, projective one. So for me, that tension one sees in Heidegger is in part why he’s so damn difficult. Of course you can talk about Dewey and Dewey’s notion of the situation, but Heidegger, I think, is really wrestling with holding that tension when it comes to the essential question of being, which is porosity, right? Being is porous. And so this was going to come to a question I wanted to ask about Tanabe, because I don’t know enough about the Kyoto School. I’ve only heard you talk about it, read about it in different places, and listened to other people talk about it. Particularly Nishitani. If I’m correct, Nishitani has this critique of Nietzsche that he doesn’t go far enough, right? **John:** That’s right. **Darius:** He doesn’t recognize the productive aspect of nothingness. **John:** That’s right. He \[01:09:00] doesn’t get to absolute nothingness. He only stays within a kind of relative nothingness. That’s how Nishitani would put it, yes. **Darius:** So how can you square that all is nothing? Murdoch talks a little bit about this: we can’t just throw up our hands and say, “Well, all is vain nothingness,” **John:** Yeah. **Darius:** but recognize that that’s not a reason for despair, but perhaps a reason for creativity. And I think you see some of this in people like Deleuze and Simondon and that French tradition. And yet how do we hold on to what we want to say about the importance of... We’ve already spoken in this conversation about the importance of the self, and the self’s reception of alterity, and not doing violence to the other, and not doing violence to the self. And I know Dan Zahavi is really pushing this view as well: that being we does not mean we are subsumed into the they, and does not mean the they is a projection of us. **John:** Exactly. **Darius:** How do we hold that tension, if all is nothing? **John:** Okay. \[01:10:00] So absolute nothingness is different from relative nothingness because, for Nishitani, relative nothingness is still within the subject-object dichotomy, and it hasn’t discovered the porosity. And the porosity actually gives us what we are seeking, which is participation. And this is the thing I think Heidegger was wrestling with, but he never quite... You know Heidegger perhaps better than I do, though I’ve read Being and Time too. And this is a point that Desmond and other people make, right? And this is the Platonic point, or the Neoplatonic point. With participation, you replace a correspondence model of knowing with conformity. You are taking on the form, and form doesn’t mean the shape; we use shape as a metaphor. Eidos meant aspect, look. And \[01:11:00] what Plato’s trying to get at is: here are all the aspects, and you can never get all the aspects, yet they’re not cacophonous. Somehow there’s a through-line running through them. Russon talks about musical intelligibility. And somehow when I know the bottle, I have that music in my head as much as it’s in the bottle. It’s a conformity. It’s a co-instantiation rather than a representation. And Nishitani’s point, and this is Zen too, is that if you push into the great doubt, you follow it all the way down, what you start to doubt is the very subject-object dichotomy that’s making you suffer nihilism. And what happens is you open up, through the porosity, to the possibility of a profound participation. I take it that this is the argument: that is the affective and existential need that is not being properly met. Nishitani’s definition of religion is the \[01:12:00] real self-realization of reality. We actually participate. I would put it this way, and you and I have been playing around with this in our conversations: it’s when our relevance realization is completely at one, completely in conformity, with the self-realization of reality itself. And for us, this satisfies what I call an onto-normative need. This is what you see in the work of Yaden and others. When people experience the really real, they will change their relationships and their lives, often for the better, by the way, because they want to enhance this participation in realness for its own sake. And this is what I think Murdoch can mean by why we love the real. We don’t love the real for this or that. We love it the way we love a Thou. We love the real for its own sake, for being real. Just being real. And so I think that realization is actually the alleviation of nihilism, and it moves you from this relative nothingness \[01:13:00] to a kind of no-thingness. Why is no-thingness being used? Because they’re trying to point to something like Desmond’s notion that being is communal. A moment of technicality here for people listening. You can have a substance ontology, Aristotle, and obviously there’s a lot more to Aristotle, so I’m doing a slam-dunk compression here just to make a point. So give me some charity on this. You’ve got substances that own their accidents, that own their properties, right? Things that in some sense independently exist and can be understood on their own terms, à la Spinoza, and that own their properties. It’s an ownership model, and it comes back to center again in the Scientific Revolution. But Filler and other people have argued that’s a very problematic model, because you can’t get relations out of substances. Relations are not properties or accidents or acts of substances. They have a non-reducible \[01:14:00] existence. And you should think relations are real, if you want to think information is real, and intelligibility is real, truth is real, meaning is real. And I did this with Filler. I know James, and I said, “James, you’ve got these great arguments that you can’t get relations out of relata. But isn’t there an exactly symmetrical argument that you can’t get relata out of relations? And isn’t it the relata that actually distinguish one relation from another?” And he went, “Whoa,” he was kind of taken aback. But that’s exactly Desmond’s notion, and he uses community as a metaphor. There are no persons without communities, but there are no communities without persons. They co-dependently arise. So the relations and the relata emerge out of something more primordial. That’s no-thingness. It’s no kind of thing, and it’s not just a relation. It is kind of the pure, primordial ground of porosity itself. \[01:15:00] And that’s why the realization of absolute nothingness ushers us in, into profound participation, and that is what alleviates the relative nothingness of nihilism. That’s the argument, as I understand it. **Darius:** Yeah. Splendid. I’m hearing resonances with James and radical empiricism, and the importance of patients in consciousness, **John:** Of course. **Darius:** and Husserl and the notion of the co-presence of the other side of an object. But just on Heidegger, I don’t know enough about the actual history here. Nishitani definitely went to study with Heidegger, right? **John:** In Germany. So did Tanabe. **Darius:** And Tanabe. **John:** So you’re right. Nishida is directly influenced by Husserl and by James’s radical empiricism, **Darius:** Right. **John:** and obviously Tanabe and Nishitani are influenced by Nishida. But Tanabe is deeply influenced by \[01:16:00] Heidegger, and through Heidegger, by Kierkegaard. Nishitani studies with, and is influenced by, Heidegger, but through Heidegger, by Nietzsche. So you get this interesting progression. In Nishida, it’s about consciousness and abstractive intelligibility. In Tanabe, you move into existential meaning, like in Heidegger, right? And then, almost like in Jean-Luc Marion, you move to givenness, right? **Darius:** Yeah. **John:** That’s what Nishitani is talking about. **Darius:** And Merleau-Ponty and the flesh. **John:** Yeah. Totally. **Darius:** But Heidegger is interesting here, because I wonder whether there’s an influence here on Tanabe and the Kyoto School more broadly, in the sense that... The book I would recommend here is Jeff Malpas’s book, which is an amazing book, called Heidegger’s Topology. **John:** Oh, yeah. **Darius:** It’s from 2006. Malpas has this argument that what Heidegger is really interested in is place, not \[01:17:00] space. Heidegger has his critique of Kant’s use of spatiality, but it’s place. **John:** Wynn makes a similar argument, by the way. **Darius:** Right. **John:** He’s got a book called Faith and Place, but go ahead. **Darius:** Oh, cool. Awesome. So the argument would be that in Being and Time, Dasein’s ultimate constitution is this threefold temporality, which is the condition of possibility for care, and bish bash bosh. And then he scraps the project, right? He does the first two divisions, and then doesn’t do Division III, or the second part with its three divisions. And there’s been a lot of work on Heidegger’s temporality. William Blattner has his great book, Heidegger’s Temporal Idealism, where he thinks Heidegger fails in doing a form of idealism. And Malpas says, “Well, actually, what happened to Heidegger is that he realized place was more fundamental than time.” The \[01:18:00] risk that time posed was, again, that Dasein becomes a kind of vicious subject, that Heidegger falls into a vicious subjectivization. And so the later Heidegger, post-Kehre, or post-Turn, as they talk about it, is one where Dasein takes very much a backseat. He stops talking about Dasein, and he talks much more in terms of disclosure, aletheia, the unconcealed coming out of the concealed, the Lichtung, the clearing. Dasein plays much more of a participatory role **John:** Yes. **Darius:** in the disclosure of what he calls the fourfold, right? Which is the earth, the sky, the gods, and the mortals. And I think that’s getting very close to what you were talking about with respect to participation. And that’s also where his critique of technology comes in: that Dasein is exaggerating its role, you know? We have to let things disclose themselves as they are, and that was, of \[01:19:00] course, his account of phenomenology: letting things be seen as they are, from within themselves. So there’s loads here in Heidegger where I think you can trace that history quite nicely. In Being and Time, yes, Dasein is participating, and there’s this story about Dasein’s disclosure of intelligibility, or its contact with intelligibility, and that’s not this Cartesian leaping out of an internal sphere into an external one. Rather, Dasein is in the world as a unitary phenomenon. But it’s still quite Dasein-centric, compared to the later Heidegger, where these different components of the unconcealed are much more on an equal playing field. And then behind all of that is the concealed, right? **John:** Yes. **Darius:** The lethe out of which you have aletheia. And I’ve been thinking a little bit about how this is also very resonant with relevance realization, right? The concealed and the unconcealed is, \[01:20:00] for me, a beautiful description of the relationship between relevance and irrelevance. They only make sense in a symbiotic relationship. Something is only relevant insofar as you are, as you would put it, intelligently ignoring something else. So there’s a whole strand there. **John:** No, that’s great. I want to pick up on that. I really want to reverberate and resonate with that. And since we’re mentioning resonance: Hartmut Rosa says resonance requires both self-power and other power, the uncontrollability of the world. So that’s another **Darius:** Yeah. **John:** connection. But the connection I want to go to first is Wynn, and then back to Nishida. Wynn has got Faith and Place, and he makes the argument throughout that place is another kind of thing we have a personal relationship to, even though place is not a person. We give places proper names, we bind our identity to them, we have attachment relationships to them. We are homesick, which is an attachment relationship. And he says, “Look, this is a good example of how something can be personal without being a \[01:21:00] substance.” And then he makes the bold move. He says, “I want to propose that we should use place, rather than thing, as a metaphor or symbol for God or the sacred.” And then there’s the way I think I can amplify that. Wynn doesn’t do this, but I’d like to know what he thinks. I’m trying to get Wynn on my channel, so hopefully I’ll be able to ask him directly. **Darius:** That would be awesome. **John:** Yeah. So Nishida’s central notion is basho, which means place. It’s the place where intelligibility takes place, and it is a no-thing. Carter, in his The Nothingness Beyond God, gives a great example. You have the intelligibility of the color system. You have all of these differences and identities, all swarming around, and you can participate in that in relevance realization. But then he says: is that intelligibility itself a color? \[01:22:00] No, it’s not. So with respect to color, it is a no-thing. And then what you do is keep opening up the place in which intelligibility takes place. And then you have the place of no-thingness. This is basho. This is Nishida’s summative idea of how we understand intelligibility, sacredness, God, reality: the basho, the place of intelligibility. Of course, he doesn’t mean spatiotemporal place; he means the way color takes place within the basho of the color system, right? And so place is very central to the Kyoto School all the way through, because of Nishida’s notion of basho. **Darius:** Right. And it also makes me think of “being is not a being.” **John:** Oh, of course. Totally. **Darius:** \[01:23:00] This idea... That is the question, and Heidegger never comes around to answering it, right? Answering the question of the meaning of being. But one thing he’s very concrete on is that being is neither a being nor some hidden substance that emanates through all beings. **John:** Nor the abstract property shared by all beings. **Darius:** Or the abstract property, and so on and so forth. He does the negative, apophatic cutting away, and then never actually tells us what it is in the end. But I think it gets close to that thing of, well, it is no-thing, and that’s okay. **John:** And you said, as we’re moving towards the end, and I think we should start doing that, we’d make it a little bit more personal. So here’s a personal connection for me. I’m taking this notion of place, and Wynn does talk about it in Faith and Place and elsewhere. As you know, I’m doing a pilgrimage right now, the Philosophical Silk Road, in which I \[01:24:00] go from place to place, in this profound sense of place we’re talking about here. That’s how pilgrimage is different from tourism. In tourism, you go to a space and you consume it, and then you go back home. In pilgrimage, I go to a place and I have a personal relationship with it. I am vulnerable to it, and I make myself available to it appealing to me, so I can fall in love with it. And what that gives me is what Taylor’s talking about, right? If you’re trying to argue somebody out of a paradigm, you can’t do it within the paradigm. You have to move them to a different place. That’s what he often does. He moves you to a different place. He calls it an ad hominem argument, which is a very bad naming. It’s one of the most infelicitous namings in the history of philosophy, because everybody jumps to the wrong conclusion. So I call it a metanoetic passage. You go to a different place, you get different glasses, you know? And you do the recovery, the \[01:25:00] T.S. Eliot or Tolkien recovery. I can see how I was biased and limited, and that allows me to start to internalize a credible perspective other than my automatic one, like we were talking about earlier. That’s pilgrimage. And what’s really interesting is the word theoria. We get our word theory from it, and many people know that theoria doesn’t really mean what we mean by theorizing. It means something more noetic, more perspectival. But Nightingale and Ward have argued that’s right, but the deepest, ancestral meaning of theoria is pilgrimage. It’s used for pilgrimage. That this is the deepest way in which we can come to know things, and know things at their depth: that we can go on pilgrimage. We can commit ourselves to falling in love in a highly personal way, undergoing that transformation, reflecting, looking up to the place in an important way, and then going \[01:26:00] on and looking back, and trying to find a through-line, and letting that whole through-line, that eidos of all these places, come alive and start to call to you. And so this is how a lot of this work is being translated into something like a meta-practice for me: how you take an ecology of practices and put it into a theoria, in order to afford a more profound transformation, and hopefully a better ability to orient to the way sacredness is trying to be born in the world, past the constraints of modernity or even postmodernity. So you wanted a personal connection. That is a personal connection for me. **Darius:** Awesome. Just to resonate again with that, the one thing I would add is that I love the invocation of Eliot, and the Little Gidding bit where \[01:27:00] he talks about not ceasing from exploration, but returning to the place and knowing it as if for the first time, right? That might be a butchering, but what I think is important not to lose there is the sense of returning. And I know you talk about this with respect to Plato, and recovery, and remembrance. **John:** Yeah. **Darius:** And that’s not to say we’ve made no progress. That’s why the image of the spiral is useful here. And I think McGilchrist, again, is useful here; he talks about this spiraling. And of course this is in Orpheus and Dante. I could go on for hours about Dante, so don’t get me started. Dante’s amazing on all of that. **John:** Oh my gosh, yeah. Don’t get me started on the reciprocal narrowing and the reciprocal opening... Oh my god. **Darius:** Right. Well, I guess, a personal reflection on my part, and Dante will play a role in this. In many ways, speaking with you feels like this kind of recollection, because \[01:28:00] it’s probably very evident to the listener that you have played an extremely central role in my intellectual formation. Everything I say is Vervaekean, which is awesome. Again, it’s a volitional necessity that I’m quite willing to endorse. And it’s not just you, it’s everyone... **John:** I do want to interject. Darius is quite capable of criticizing, and frequently will criticize, arguments and points I make. **Darius:** I will, yeah. Well, we should say, actually, that probably the text I’m happiest about having published, or most proud of, is the critique of active inference and its capacity to resolve the frame problem, and that does involve a critique of your paper with Mark and Brett. So yes, I’m not just an acolyte, just to make that clear. And hopefully that’s coming out in texts where I’m becoming far more critical than I thought I had the capacity to be, and I think that might just be courage. But of course, it all comes from a place of love and respect. **John:** Yes. **Darius:** But on a \[01:29:00] personal level, I don’t think I’ve told this story before. I’ve told you this story, but I haven’t told it publicly. I was very, very lucky that I studied philosophy at school. In the UK, it’s quite rare to study philosophy at school. We have A-levels, and philosophy is a kind of rarefied one, but I was very lucky to be able to do it, and it was awesome. Now that I’m teaching philosophy to undergrads, I kind of wish they had more of what I had: classes with three or four people, with extremely passionate teachers, reading the texts, reading Kuhn, reading Feyerabend, reading Descartes, reading Berkeley, and really getting down to earth. And I loved philosophy, I really loved it. And I wanted to go to Oxford. If this is all too self-referential, let me know, but it’s an interesting story. **John:** No, no, please, please. **Darius:** I wanted to go to Oxford, and they don’t do a pure philosophy course. Cambridge does, but Oxford doesn’t. So I thought, “Well, I did a lot of Latin at \[01:30:00] school, so let me do an ab initio language.” I wanted to do Italian, because I really liked Virgil and I wanted to read Dante. So I applied for Philosophy and Italian, and I went into my philosophy exam, and two things happened. One is that I just choked, which is interesting now that I work on flow, since it’s the opposite of choking in many ways. And also, it was a style of philosophy I wasn’t used to. It was very analytic. Transitivity relationships, I remember, was the test. And it wasn’t in that spirit of open curiosity. It was very much: if you make a mistake, you’re out, you know? **John:** Yeah. **Darius:** And it just freaked me out. Then I went to my Italian interview, and that went really well, and we actually spoke a lot about philosophy. Nicola Gardini, who won’t be watching this, a professor of Italian at Oxford, is another hero, and he was my tutor. Anyway, I went to Oxford. They didn’t offer me philosophy, but they offered me linguistics, and I did Italian and linguistics. Then I had some mental health troubles, and off the back of that I did a \[01:31:00] master’s in psychology. And then I was really very unclear about what to do with my life. And all this time, from Oxford on, it wasn’t just you; it was people like McGilchrist and Jordan Peterson and others I was watching and paying attention to, listening to their philosophy lectures. And I didn’t know what to do with my life. And I remember very much being on the train to Edinburgh. I probably hadn’t watched any of Awakening from the Meaning Crisis for a couple of years, and I just put it on. The train from London to Edinburgh is four years... four hours, not four years. Feels like it. And I watched four of the lectures and I went, “That’s what I want to do.” **John:** Ah. **Darius:** And I was very lucky, having not actually studied philosophy as an undergrad or master’s student, although at Oxford they were very generous with what we could look at, to now be doing a philosophy PhD. And I get to speak to you. In many ways, you were a conduit to living this life, which is extremely fulfilling and \[01:32:00] nourishing. So it is a kind of return in many ways, as we were talking about, but seeing things from the spiraled ascent. For me, it’s totally remarkable and a kind of dream come true that I get to work with you. So thank you again. And that’s not just from me. I know plenty of people, even in this office, which is currently empty, who admire your work, and admire you and your intellectual spirit and curiosity and openness and supervision and all of this. So yeah, it’s a massive thank you from me, really. **John:** Well, I had heard this story before, and when you first told it to me it touched me very deeply. It still touches me very deeply. That’s what I most want to do in terms of my vocation. I want to do what I seem to have helped do for you. I want to afford you coming into a \[01:33:00] philosophical life, which doesn’t necessarily mean academic philosophy. It does for you. And this is where I’m influenced by Pierre Hadot. Everybody is in some sense called to a philosophical life, because we are all beset by self-deception, by vice, and we need to cultivate wisdom and virtue, and we need to interact in dialogical I-Thou relationships and all that sort of thing. And in that sense, we need to be lovers of wisdom. This is my allegiance to that guy right there, Socrates. To the degree that my work can call people to philia sophia, right? The community, the fellowship, the love of wisdom that people get called into, the kind of partnerships you’re talking about, the fellowship and shared orientation towards the cultivation of wisdom. If I do that, that’s what makes me \[01:34:00] feel that I’m living as I am called to live. And that is what I most want to do. So you thanked me, but I’m telling you as sincerely as I possibly can: I’m very grateful for the way hearing that from you affords me a deep sense of my life, at least my vocational life, being a meaningful life. Because that’s the measure by which I measure whether it is meaningful or not. So I want to thank you for that. More and more, I try to hone and craft my professional work, whether it’s dialogical or theoretical or practice, to be the person who can do that. Many people come up to me and say things like, “You know, I disagree with a lot of your ideas, but your language and your way of thinking and your manner have been so helpful to me.” And I’m very happy \[01:35:00] with that. I’m really very happy with that. So thank you for sharing that. It means a lot to me. It makes a difference for me. It’s not the case now. You know this: there’s now a lot of professional interest in my work, and a lot of public interest in my work. But that’s only since about 2018, so the last eight years or so. Before that, it was a very lonely kind of existence for me, **Darius:** Mm. **John:** wrestling with this. I was working on the meaning crisis and trying to do this kind of work with my students, and I was helping them. And, God love them, many of them have written to me, because people are hearing that I’m retiring from the university, and they want to thank me for stuff from ten, fifteen, twenty years ago. But the fact that now it seems I’ve been \[01:36:00] gifted, blessed, with the opportunity of affording the call to a philosophical way of life to a much greater number of people, and I get to hear... Darius, you’re going to be a superstar. The quality of your work... **Darius:** Well, thank you. **John:** No, I mean it. I’ve been teaching a long time. I’ve had something like 30,000 students. There are certain students I recognize. Mark is another one. I’ve told Mark, Mark Miller, he’s going to be a superstar. And the fact that my work can be taken up, not only by a lot of people, and I’m very grateful for this too, and their lives are getting better, but that my work might help lift people like you into your proper calling, which I think is going to be a series of masterpieces. Of course, I just find that so rich and meaningful \[01:37:00] and valuable. And I think I’m going to have at least five or six more productive years, but I’m starting to face the Galadriel moment. At some point I’m going to have to fade and go into the West. So if you’ll allow me, and I hope this isn’t condescending, it’s not intended to be: if I can Socratically help to give birth to people like you, that is so, so enriching for me. **Darius:** It’s not condescending at all. And I think you have more than five or six years in you, but that’s your call. But I think the nourishing of that community, where we are all oriented towards something beyond us, and, as Murdoch, who we started with, talks about, “there is always more than this,” you know? That constant progress, \[01:38:00] the pilgrim’s progress, is just a joy and fun and a complete pleasure. So we should wrap up, because I’ve got, unfortunately... well, not unfortunately. I have undergraduate students to teach, and I will try to facilitate a love of wisdom in them. Thank you so much, John, and Andrea as well, for hosting this. I know we’re going to do this kind of partnership. Total pleasure on my part. **John:** Well, it’s been an honor on my part, Darius. Every time we’re together and get into what I call dialogos, mutually transformative dialogue, **Darius:** Absolutely. **John:** I find it deeply enriching, maturing. I’m reading Middlemarch right now, by George Eliot. And the reason I’m reading it is that I’ve read so many reviews of it; many people say it’s the best English novel ever written and all this sort of stuff, \[01:39:00] and it is incredibly well written. And several times the review said, “Read Middlemarch; it will make you a better person.” And I think these moments of dialogos are also like that. They make us better people in a really profound way. So I thank you for that. **Darius:** Wonderful. Thanks so much. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit lovephilosophy.substack.com/subscribe