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DC Schindler - Story & The Dramatic Structure of Truth · Mahon McCann

• 0:01
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for joining me again, David.
• 0:04
  SPEAKER_00: It's a pleasure to have you back on the podcast for the second time.
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, very happy to be here.
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_00: And yeah, I appreciate you making time for this because I was kind of explaining a little bit before, but I'm questioning a lot at the moment, the ontological status of stories, maybe the epistemological status.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_00: But because I think in our society, stories are overvalued and also undervalued at the same time.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_00: Like we have more stories than we've ever had before.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: They're everywhere.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_00: There's, you know, movies, books, games, YouTube.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_00: Netflix, like everywhere.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_00: But at the same time, stories are just fiction.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_00: And there's this firm separation between fact and fiction.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_00: And that's almost a separation between truth and falsity under the current paradigm.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm kind of wondering, you know, where...
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_00: you know, what do you think of that distinction?
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_00: And is there, is there another way for us to think about stories as true?
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_00: I don't want to saddle you with the nature of truth in the first question, but maybe we could start there.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I'm sure I'll just, I'll just take a stab and then we'll pick it up and unfold.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_01: There would be so many things to say.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, just to, just out the gate, I think an important observation to make is, is the, the,
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_01: separation that you were just talking about, that sort of facile distinction between fact and fiction and so forth.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_01: You know, there are a lot of presuppositions built into that, but one of them is that
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_01: is really, I think, a profoundly controlling presupposition about the nature of truth that reduces it to, you might say, positivistic facts.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_01: There's a kind of materialist, empiricist reduction that, you know, if something isn't quantifiable, you know, available in a very obvious way and
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_01: principally in a way that can be quantified or at least verified through some kind of systematic sort of test.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_01: It really doesn't count as truth.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_01: It becomes it's not objective.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_01: It becomes subjective.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know, that's so I think that's a basic presupposition that would have to be challenged.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_01: Then, you know, the other side of it is, as you said, I think it's an excellent observation.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_01: You know, in a way, we're saturated with stories and and that's become a kind of a.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_01: a very common public gesture to listen to another person's stories, for instance.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_01: We want to give voice to people, let them tell their story and so forth.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_01: And all that is beautiful.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_01: But the problem is, you know, if that just becomes fiction, if that doesn't have any, if that's not a disclosure of the meaning of reality, but just becomes a kind of
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_01: form of subjective self-expression, we claim to be honoring a person by listening to them, but we're actually trivializing a priori whatever it is they might have to say to us.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_01: So that's another dimension.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_01: Both sides of those are related to each other, but both sides of those we could discuss further, but both of them need some scrutiny, I think.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_00: 100%.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_00: Because I think the correspondence theory of truth thing that you bring up at the start, which is a very logical positivist.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_00: I remember learning about it as an undergraduate with Wittgenstein and his picture theory of meaning and Bertrand Russell and all the attempts to kind of fuse this one-to-one relationship between our language and reality as this kind of mind-independent world of objects that just is there.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_00: Like truth is...
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_00: if you say the cat is on the mat and the cat is on the mat, that's truth.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_00: And that's all it is.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_00: And it failed miserably.
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_00: So I don't know why it's still hanging around so much in like, I see people doing it all the time.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's kind of the main divide between a lot of the conversations between like atheist religious thing is just like this theory of truth.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_00: That's still because it relies on person.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_00: Sorry, go ahead.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_01: Well, that's just why you said it's, it's a controlling method.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_01: It really does dictate the terms of so many of our conversations, mostly without our really paying attention to it.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, maybe because it relies on a perception, a theory of perception of naive realism that we just have this connection to a world that's out there unfettered in our observation.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_00: And I mean, Plato is very critical of this Kant and the science of perception now as well.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, in predictive processing and like, don't back that up at all that there is this, you know.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, that's the thing.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_01: It's as you say, I mean, in a way, any thoughtful person
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_01: has has immediately come to the conclusion that this is not a tenable approach, but it does seem to still govern.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_01: And maybe it's because in a way it's it's it's useful.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_01: And that that in itself is a is a is an interesting question.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_01: But but but it is a kind of a facile question.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_01: Now, part of the problem is that a lot of the forms of questioning this sense of truth, because I actually think there's a lot to be said for correspondence if you interpret it in a deeper sort of way and not in this kind of naive realist way.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_01: Part of the problem is when people begin to see through this view of truth, there are two things that often happen.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_01: One is you get this account.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_01: that ascribes that naive realism to the tradition.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_01: This is the traditional way of thinking about truth.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_01: And so we are somehow breaking from the tradition and uncovering this more radical, postmodern, more interesting view and so forth.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_01: That's one thing.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_01: And then the other thing that you get, and it's very closely related, is...
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_01: The idea that in order to critique that naive realism, you have to critique truth simply and and present in its place, you know, a certain sense of, you know, everything is there's no black, there's no white, it's all gray.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_01: You know, even though you can't really have gray unless there's black and white.
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_01: But and that somehow by blurring lines and and and rejecting objectivity and so forth.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, the thing is, that's just the flip side of the same problem.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_01: It's it actually depends on the problem.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_01: And that both of those, I think, problematic responses can be answered by a much richer recovery of the tradition, which was never naive realism.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know, never objectivistic in a kind of simplistic sense or subjective.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, you know, objectivism and subjectivism are flip sides of the same coin that depend on one.
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and they've been 400 years of philosophy has been largely obsessed with that question.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_00: And you make a move there of splitting it between where we have, okay, the materialist fundamentalist types that have the kind of logical positivism, very simplistic, just cat is on the map.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_00: But then going beyond that as well, you can end up with this post-truth, post-modern philosophy.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_00: Everything is everything.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_00: There's no absolute.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_00: It's all relative.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_00: As you point out in Plato's Critique of Impure Reason, the first chapter, that kind of relativism leads to violence.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_00: Everybody's perspective is just as valid as everybody else's.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_00: Hitler invading Poland is just his opinion, man.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_00: There's no way to differentiate between that.
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_01: It becomes so immediately incoherent.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_01: The thing is,
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_01: We need to just recognize that being faithful to the integrity of reality and the claims that reality makes on us that precede our own subjective judgments and evaluations and so forth,
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_01: None of that requires a naive realism at all.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_01: You know, even the very... In fact, I'm teaching a Ph.D.
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_01: seminar right now on perception and imagination.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_01: And we've been going through the classical tradition.
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_01: And right now we're reading Merleau-Ponty.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_01: You know, it's just...
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_01: So there's no reason why one can't.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_01: In fact, I mean, it just becomes obvious when you think about it, that the colors of an object have their actualization as colors only in a recipient sense, sensorium, the sense organ.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_01: But that doesn't mean that it's not the color of the thing that's coming to actualization there.
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_01: You know, dependence on others is not in itself an absence of integrity.
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_01: And once you see that in a way, it's a simple point that things have their objective being in relation to some, you know, percipient subjects.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_01: That's, you know, a way, basically, I mean, it's got very interesting implications.
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_01: You know, we're all in it together.
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_01: We're all implicated in one another.
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_01: We don't exist as independent realities except profoundly relationally.
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_01: But that's, you know, the relations to the world are constitutive of us and constitutive of the world.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_01: You know, that complicates things, but it actually opens up such a beautiful sense of what reality is and what truth is and the proper ontological place for beauty and goodness even.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, there's a ton that's at stake in that.
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and that that is, I mean, because that's the claim, isn't it, in terms of the transcendentals, that that is the ultimate reality.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_00: We spoke about that last time, God as the ultimate reality.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_00: And, you know, in a materialist paradigm, the matter is the ultimate reality, in a sense.
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_00: It's like whatever is the bottom reductionist kind of dead reality.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_00: sand at the bottom of the universe.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_00: That's the really real thing.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_00: But this is a very different vision of what the really real is.
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_00: And so I wonder then, is there a reason why stories might be better mapping onto that really real than just the dead matter thing?
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_01: I think so.
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_01: It's interesting.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know if you're aware of this, but my dissertation, which became my first book, was The Dramatic Structure of Truth.
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_01: And I made the argument there that the coming to know something actually has the structure of the drama.
• 11:25
  SPEAKER_01: There's a beginning, middle and end.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_01: There's a kind of a surprise that is resolved.
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_01: And I mean, I have found that sense of drama incredibly illuminating.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_01: in terms of coming to see what it means to know and understand anything.
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_01: It overcomes both a static view that truth is just a bare fact, and you either see it or you don't.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_01: On the one hand, and on the other hand, that truth is pure flux, a pure kind of formless dynamism.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_01: And what a drama is, a drama has form, and it's got a certain definitive form.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_01: and a certain objectivity, therefore, that really imposes itself, but imposes itself in this really beautiful and rich way that includes the involvement of the subject, the whole involvement, and a kind of an interest and a receptivity and then a vulnerability to transformation.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_01: That is the case in every act of knowing.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_01: I think that the dramatic structure is just a really... That was sort of extrapolated from this theologian, Hans Urs von Balthasar, that uses it to talk about our relationship with God.
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_01: But I think, in a way, it explains every fundamental relationship.
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_00: But it's super in contrast or contradiction, I'm not sure, but to the typical idea that truth is the result of a method.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_00: Like you have this sifting process, you have a hypothesis and you do these tests.
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_00: And then what comes out is, I suppose, deductive reasoning or inductive reasoning.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_00: This is kind of like you have to go and do the journey to see the truth at the end of it.
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_01: You're exactly right.
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_01: So, yeah.
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_01: And the journey, I mean, so it's interesting when you say you need to follow out the journey.
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, you're actually bringing to light the etymological roots of the word method.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_01: The word itself actually is metahodos.
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_01: It's following the path.
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_01: And the journey is built into the very word.
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_01: And so what we need to do is actually acquire, you know, recover the depth and dimension of the word method.
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_01: The problem is we tend to think of it in like technological terms.
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_01: That method is this this one size fits all system.
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_01: that has a kind of coherence and perfection in abstraction from any content.
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_01: And once you've sort of mastered the system, then you can apply it.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_01: And in the same system, you plug something in and you get the result at the end.
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_01: And it's the same system, but a genuine method
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_01: is set by the destination.
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_01: It's a response to the beckoning of a destination that in a way, in one sense, you're moved by it, by the thing you want to understand.
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_01: So it's already present to you.
• 14:45
  SPEAKER_01: But I like to think of it, this is why I think beauty is really such a crucial thing.
• 14:51
  SPEAKER_01: Its presence to you comes first in the form of a dramatic surprise encounter that opens you up and you follow.
• 15:07
  SPEAKER_01: And at the end of the journey, as you were, I mean, I'm just elaborating the point that you just made.
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_01: At the end of the journey, now you understand.
• 15:15
  SPEAKER_01: But think about how the understanding at the end is so much richer because you have given yourself over to it and involved yourself in something that's bigger than you.
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_01: And then you're carried as much as you travel.
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_01: It's a very, it's very, I think, really interesting.
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know, I think Plato understood this better than just about anybody in history.
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_00: I was going to come to Plato.
• 15:41
  SPEAKER_00: Well, but just because the two, so there's one thing.
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_00: So with the scientific model of reality is that it's, you can have this method that people, it's person independent.
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_00: So it doesn't involve you having any personal transformation.
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_00: It's just like anybody can do it.
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, it's better if you're not involved in it at all.
• 15:59
  SPEAKER_00: Like the more we remove you from the process, the more truer it is.
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_00: Whereas this is like very different.
• 16:07
  SPEAKER_00: It seems.
• 16:08
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 16:09
  SPEAKER_01: And you're still looking, aiming for something universal, something that's subject transcending, but notice this,
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_01: In the one, you transcend the subject by trying to exclude any contribution of the subject.
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_01: You know, you want to sort of make the subject as impersonal as possible.
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_01: In the other, you transcend the subject by including the whole of the subject but going beyond.
• 16:33
  SPEAKER_01: The whole of the subject is included to see something bigger than the subject.
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_01: And that's very different.
• 16:39
  SPEAKER_01: You know, somebody who's really interesting on all this is, I don't know if you've read him, Michael Polanyi.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_00: I know the name, but I haven't actually read it.
• 16:48
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, P-O-L-A-N-Y-I.
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_01: Your listeners might be interested in exploring him.
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_01: He was a scientist, a doctor who became a kind of a philosopher of epistemology, but science, I mean, his interest really exploded.
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_01: But he wrote a book called Personal Knowledge.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_01: That was kind of his main work on this, but a number of really interesting articles and smaller books.
• 17:17
  SPEAKER_01: But that was his.
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_01: It was a critique from a from the perspective of a doctor, of a medical doctor, someone with scientific training, a critique of this empty objectivist perspective.
• 17:33
  SPEAKER_01: It's worth looking into.
• 17:35
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I mean, because it seems like our whole, a lot of the education system is set up on that premise as well, that an education is the acquisition of facts about the world.
• 17:48
  SPEAKER_00: Whereas in the Platonic sense that you brought up as well, it's education by transformation.
• 17:53
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 17:54
  SPEAKER_00: And I suppose we should probably touch on the cave in terms of it being the...
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I mean, you know, there's a connection between this sort of naive realism that we began talking about and this idea that –
• 18:12
  SPEAKER_01: basically that reduces... There's this passage I absolutely love from T.S.
• 18:17
  SPEAKER_01: Eliot.
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_01: Where has the knowledge gone in information?
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_01: And where has the wisdom gone in our knowledge?
• 18:27
  SPEAKER_01: I'm paraphrasing.
• 18:28
  SPEAKER_01: It's not exactly how he phrases it.
• 18:30
  SPEAKER_01: But the point is that wisdom is reduced to knowledge.
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_01: Knowledge is reduced to information.
• 18:36
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that's our...
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_01: Our educational system, it's also, I think it's something that's going to be reinforced in spades with AI, artificial, you know, we call it artificial intelligence.
• 18:52
  SPEAKER_01: And we've simply conceded that name to it.
• 18:57
  SPEAKER_01: But all it does is process information that's very different from AI.
• 19:01
  SPEAKER_01: intelligence properly speaking and we shouldn't use that word to describe these machines that was the original name of it from john mccarthy was something like complex information processing but he thought it wasn't very marketable so they changed it to artificial intelligence i mean that's that's it was more insightful you know um there's uh uh someone you may be familiar with john verveke uh um
• 19:25
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 19:26
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 19:26
  SPEAKER_00: I had a chat with John actually last week and I was really enjoyed your conversation on AI as well on Ken's channel with John and Jonathan.
• 19:35
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, that was.
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_01: It was that was a lot of fun.
• 19:37
  SPEAKER_01: I hope we can we can pick up some.
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_01: But, you know, he he makes the great point about he defines reason in terms of caring.
• 19:47
  SPEAKER_01: for reality.
• 19:48
  SPEAKER_01: And I, you know, I think that's very much in line.
• 19:51
  SPEAKER_01: That was the point that I tried to argue in the, in Plato's critique of impure reason that, uh, an interpretation of the Republic, you know, Plato, uh,
• 19:59
  SPEAKER_01: I would say, you know, this is a big statement, but I think I really would defend it.
• 20:05
  SPEAKER_01: It's one of the founding statements of Western civilization.
• 20:09
  SPEAKER_01: Plato's observation that the good gives the power to know to knowers and the power of intelligibility to the things known, that goodness is the cause of the good.
• 20:24
  SPEAKER_01: The transcendent good, this absolute first principle is the cause of truth.
• 20:28
  SPEAKER_01: Now, if that's the case, then you can't really know except if you care about the good, that the very...
• 20:36
  SPEAKER_01: the very path of knowing involves this kind of entering into the journey to use that language that you used earlier, you know, this, this giving oneself over and, you know, formation of the soul that, that really does learn to, to care about what's true and to, you know, care so deeply that one is, is willing to make the effort and the sacrifice for it.
• 21:01
  SPEAKER_01: But that's, that's the condition for objectivity, not,
• 21:06
  SPEAKER_01: Removing all interest, but deepening the interest all the way to the deep foundations of things.
• 21:13
  SPEAKER_01: It's a very different move.
• 21:15
  SPEAKER_00: Very different move.
• 21:17
  SPEAKER_00: I suppose there's two things there.
• 21:19
  SPEAKER_00: Because one, I suppose with science and scientists, integrity is very important.
• 21:26
  SPEAKER_00: Being willing to actually not falsify data or not report things that didn't happen for status.
• 21:33
  SPEAKER_00: So there is a level of that kind of moral character already baked into that that's a requirement for the process to work in the first place.
• 21:41
  SPEAKER_00: And part of the split...
• 21:45
  SPEAKER_00: because I'm very interested in what's happened to narrative from being the foundation of the whole society to there being this other thing going on and you talk about the good it's almost like they lost faith in the good guaranteeing the correspondence between mind and reality they just couldn't they couldn't justify it in some sense or it became in doubt and that's why we've ended up with
• 22:13
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, no, I, it would be really interesting.
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I, um, you know, what is it, why was that bond broken?
• 22:20
  SPEAKER_01: You know, what, that, that basic faith betrayed, where did it, where and how did that happen?
• 22:28
  SPEAKER_01: I, I, that's one of the deepest and most interesting questions, uh, about who we are and how we got to be who we are now.
• 22:39
  SPEAKER_01: And I don't know that there's a facile answer to the question, but I think it's really important for us to see that question in all of its dimensions, because that really is what I think accounts for so much of what we see around us and what we experience around us is we're trying to compensate for the loss of this basic trust.
• 23:02
  SPEAKER_01: At the foundation of things, you know, how can you deny that?
• 23:07
  SPEAKER_01: It just seems to me that so you see it everywhere, everywhere.
• 23:13
  SPEAKER_01: You see it on both sides of the of the various divides, you know, in the in the progressive.
• 23:23
  SPEAKER_01: Progressive nihilism and then the reactionary nihilism.
• 23:28
  SPEAKER_01: It's all nihilism.
• 23:30
  SPEAKER_00: It is.
• 23:32
  SPEAKER_00: Do you think it was the Enlightenment?
• 23:34
  SPEAKER_00: I've kind of had the idea that the Enlightenment was a very critical movement and kind of went really was very much based on criticism of established people.
• 23:45
  SPEAKER_01: um institutions paradigms right i mean they they didn't invent the idea of breaking with uh with the tradition but but you know it was probably the most um epic making instance of it that really did define you know redefine cultures but there you know that there were already um uh
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_01: beginnings of this, seeds of this.
• 24:12
  SPEAKER_01: You know, a lot of people point to, you know, so many have pointed to nominalism as an intellectual movement in the late Middle Ages.
• 24:23
  SPEAKER_01: So many people have pointed to that, that people are sort of tired of hearing about it.
• 24:29
  SPEAKER_01: But, you know, I have to say that that is, you just can't overlook the significance of the implications of that moment in history.
• 24:40
  SPEAKER_00: And that was within the church.
• 24:42
  SPEAKER_00: It was William of Auckland.
• 24:43
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that's right.
• 24:45
  SPEAKER_00: And that's important to see.
• 24:47
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 24:48
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 24:48
  SPEAKER_01: And it's, I mean, think about one of the, one of the expressions of this is that you have this gradual reconception of God, not as most basically good.
• 25:02
  SPEAKER_01: So that would be the sort of platonic view, but most basically powerful, you know, God in terms of absolute power.
• 25:10
  SPEAKER_01: And that really changes the character of everything.
• 25:15
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that's one of the, you know, you can then press the question, well, why did that change happen and so forth?
• 25:22
  SPEAKER_01: And some of these, you know, in a way, they eventually trail off.
• 25:25
  SPEAKER_01: But it's really good to see, without trying to come to the very, very first point in which everything broke, the most important thing is to see these decisive moments
• 25:36
  SPEAKER_00: reframing moments of kind of reframing and think about the implications of them and that is clearly one of the most important yeah and i suppose that we're in this situation of how do we re-establish you know it's not reinventing the good i think it's seeing the good again and i do think that journey
• 25:59
  SPEAKER_00: Because some of the guys, I don't know if you know Donald Hoffman, he's a cognitive neuroscientist, but he writes a lot of stuff.
• 26:06
  SPEAKER_00: It's terrible taglines of like reality is an illusion and these kind of things.
• 26:10
  SPEAKER_00: But really what he's arguing is that it's the naturalistic or the evolutionary argument against naturalism, which is that...
• 26:18
  SPEAKER_00: we we're if we've evolved we probably didn't evolve to perceive objective reality directly we evolved for survival and for reproduction and he does a lot of maths and works out calculations about how likely it is that we have direct access to objective reality um and he says it's zero but he stops there um
• 26:39
  SPEAKER_00: Which is a very like the wrong place to stop, I think, because that just leaves us with, oh, well, OK, so we're just delusional all the way down.
• 26:47
  SPEAKER_00: Whereas I think Plato is making that argument in the cave that we start off in the world of shadows and echoes.
• 26:55
  SPEAKER_00: but that there's a way through that to the good.
• 26:59
  SPEAKER_00: That's like the realization that our perceptions of this are not 100% what they appear to be.
• 27:06
  SPEAKER_00: And then that can prompt a journey towards the really real, towards seeing the good, the ascent, the...
• 27:17
  SPEAKER_00: at the anagogic ascent.
• 27:18
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
• 27:19
  SPEAKER_00: What do you think of that?
• 27:19
  SPEAKER_01: Do you think that makes sense?
• 27:22
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know Hoffman's work, but just your characterization, and I'm sure it's very subtle and there are impressive arguments and so forth.
• 27:33
  SPEAKER_01: But just hearing your account there, I mean, it's just so strange how obvious an objection you can raise.
• 27:42
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, is he certain of this point?
• 27:45
  SPEAKER_01: And does he grasp it?
• 27:47
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and therefore it's a kind of knowledge.
• 27:51
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, right.
• 27:52
  SPEAKER_01: And the thing is, and that sounds like a facile, the famous retortion argument, but for me the point is that even...
• 28:02
  SPEAKER_01: Even to present the idea that all knowledge is an illusion, you present that as a kind of startling, kind of fascinating suggestion.
• 28:14
  SPEAKER_01: And why would it be startling and fascinating?
• 28:16
  SPEAKER_01: Well, it's because we recognize that that is contrary to what we believe and also what we want to believe entirely.
• 28:24
  SPEAKER_01: And then you ask, well, why would we want anything other than illusion?
• 28:28
  SPEAKER_01: If all things were illusion, why would that matter to us?
• 28:32
  SPEAKER_01: Why would that bother us?
• 28:34
  SPEAKER_01: And it seems to me all of these discussions take for granted that we already have a deep sense of reality.
• 28:44
  SPEAKER_01: that is at stake in these questions, that would make these even, you know, even the rejection of all truth something interesting and worth saying.
• 28:52
  SPEAKER_01: It's because we already have a connection.
• 28:54
  SPEAKER_01: You know, it's that somehow reality has already spoken to us, that we recognize the difference between illusion and reality, so that that statement even makes sense.
• 29:04
  SPEAKER_01: Or, you know, in other words, to put it in the platonic terms, none of this, even the rejection of all meaning,
• 29:15
  SPEAKER_01: None of it would make any sense at all if the good hadn't already, in a way, reached into us and made connection with us and sort of drawn us into the world.
• 29:30
  SPEAKER_01: We wouldn't care about these things.
• 29:32
  SPEAKER_01: So, I mean, even these rejections of truth presuppose what they're rejecting and become yet another witness to the fundamental human desire to know that can't be in vain, ultimately.
• 29:53
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, as you say in the book and Plato's Critique of Empires, that every argument presupposes our connection to reality.
• 29:59
  SPEAKER_00: Even if you argue against our ability to know anything, you're presupposing that we could know that.
• 30:07
  SPEAKER_00: It's still a key... So it's always self-defeating in a way or self-contradictory.
• 30:14
  SPEAKER_00: Some people seem to be able to do that, but...
• 30:18
  SPEAKER_01: Well, that's why for me, it presupposes that we recognize the difference between illusion and reality, right?
• 30:24
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, to say that all knowledge is an illusion means that it's not real, it's an illusion.
• 30:30
  SPEAKER_01: So we recognize that there's a difference.
• 30:32
  SPEAKER_01: But how could we recognize a difference unless we knew what reality was?
• 30:36
  SPEAKER_01: And the problem is, you know, nobody on the other, who is already sort of committed to a certain nihilism,
• 30:45
  SPEAKER_01: You never end up persuading them by pointing these things out.
• 30:47
  SPEAKER_01: I've always found that kind of fascinating.
• 30:50
  SPEAKER_01: And to my mind, and this is something I talked about at the beginning of the Plato book, it brings home the fact that the most fundamental point, you know, Aristotle at one point sort of indirectly makes this point that if you're going to argue with someone, you have to find, just ask them what they care about.
• 31:10
  SPEAKER_01: You need to begin with what people actually care about.
• 31:15
  SPEAKER_01: And that's where you can start making traction because, you know, if a person admits to caring about anything at all, that's already a concession of the grip that reality has on them.
• 31:29
  SPEAKER_01: And that's something that you can show to be able to care about that.
• 31:33
  SPEAKER_01: There are all sorts of other things you're going to have to concede.
• 31:36
  SPEAKER_01: But if you try to just make the intellectual argument that you're contradicting yourself, that tends to not have much traction.
• 31:44
  SPEAKER_00: No, it doesn't.
• 31:45
  SPEAKER_00: I find it pretty compelling, to be honest.
• 31:47
  SPEAKER_00: But it seems – yeah, I don't know.
• 31:49
  SPEAKER_00: A lot of people want to believe that there's no absolute – there's a kind of comfort to relativism, I think, that you don't have to fight for anything.
• 31:59
  SPEAKER_00: You don't have to stand up to people.
• 32:01
  SPEAKER_00: You don't have to martyr yourself for the truth because there is no truth.
• 32:05
  SPEAKER_00: It's just –
• 32:06
  SPEAKER_01: It is what it is in a way are left free to do whatever you want in any moment.
• 32:12
  SPEAKER_01: But I mean, even the problem is that even that just turns out not to be true.
• 32:16
  SPEAKER_01: Once you start pressing, you know, what is it that anybody wants it to be?
• 32:20
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I mean, there's no way, you know, as Bob Marley is saying, you know, there's no place to hide from the father of creation.
• 32:32
  SPEAKER_01: You know, in the end, you just you can't get outside of the good.
• 32:36
  SPEAKER_01: You just can't.
• 32:38
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 32:40
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know, the kind of so so even the desire to be free from it.
• 32:45
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, this absolute relativism that would seem to at least leave me in peace.
• 32:51
  SPEAKER_01: It doesn't leave you in peace.
• 32:54
  SPEAKER_01: Even that is not a hiding place.
• 32:56
  SPEAKER_01: It actually doesn't work.
• 32:58
  SPEAKER_01: And so, you know, no one of us can ever really come to rest.
• 33:05
  SPEAKER_01: in nihilism and that's you know um that's a sign of hope i think that's actually a positive thing that don't work yeah the french poet whom i absolutely love uh charles piggy um he talks about this sort of gnawing bad conscience as as something good and hopeful it won't leave us alone and as troubling as it might be to us at any given moment in the end
• 33:32
  SPEAKER_01: We're very grateful for it because without it, you know, we would never we would never get out of the, you know, the various prisons that we can't help putting ourselves in.
• 33:46
  SPEAKER_00: And we do get caught, because I'm trying to bring it back to narrative, because the gnawing conscience is reminding me of Pinocchio and the bug, Jiminy Cricket, JC as well, an allegory for maybe somebody else, who is constantly harassing Pinocchio with, you know, the things he's doing wrong, to encourage him a little bit further, but Pinocchio doesn't want to listen to him, and there's this back, because I kind of, yeah, I'm trying to relate, there's a
• 34:15
  SPEAKER_00: A lot of these stories seem to be on the level of the universal, but how do they connect to the particular?
• 34:22
  SPEAKER_00: I think the mass overconsumption of stories as escapism is an inability to actually implicate the universal good ones in our actual lives.
• 34:33
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 34:34
  SPEAKER_00: it's a failure.
• 34:35
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe it's a failure of ritual or just like, it doesn't have any purchase or something, but you know, I'm trying to draw the connection between those universal stories.
• 34:46
  SPEAKER_01: Um, thing to reflect on that, that,
• 34:50
  SPEAKER_01: So first of all, so story, I would say, I mean, what's the difference?
• 34:57
  SPEAKER_01: When we hear narrative and story, we just think that you're telling a sequence of events.
• 35:03
  SPEAKER_01: But what we mean by story is actually more than that.
• 35:06
  SPEAKER_01: And for it to really be a story, it's a meaningful sequence of events.
• 35:10
  SPEAKER_01: It's not like a sheer history in a banal sense, you know, as the famous quip, just one damn thing after another.
• 35:23
  SPEAKER_01: History is just one damn thing after another.
• 35:25
  SPEAKER_01: But, you know, a story is more than that.
• 35:27
  SPEAKER_01: It has a point and it's in a story has a kind of dramatic structure.
• 35:32
  SPEAKER_01: It seems to me to be to be effective.
• 35:35
  SPEAKER_01: Now, one of the things when I was working on my dissertation that it was an observation that that Hansus from Balthasar made.
• 35:44
  SPEAKER_01: that really stayed with me and um i'd be interested your your experience you know if if if i could have one talent in the world um that i chose for myself it would be the capacity to write drama
• 36:01
  SPEAKER_01: um write a write a good play and i i just i you know i just will have to live without that but you you are a writer of drama well i've written some i don't know about being good or not but yeah i mean and i want to come back because you you you graciously sent me one um after our last conversation and um it actually is a beautiful illustration of the point that i want to make
• 36:25
  SPEAKER_01: But Balthazar said that drama requires the transcendent, the effective presence of the transcendent principle of goodness.
• 36:39
  SPEAKER_01: Now, that might seem like a strange thing to say, but it was interesting.
• 36:43
  SPEAKER_01: Right when I was working on this, the movie Gladiator had come out.
• 36:47
  SPEAKER_01: And I went to see it with some friends.
• 36:50
  SPEAKER_01: And I saw the truth of what Balthazar was saying.
• 36:53
  SPEAKER_01: There's something about the, you know, characters are not simply just interacting with each other in a story.
• 37:02
  SPEAKER_01: There tends to be a central character somewhere.
• 37:05
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, they're ordering principles.
• 37:07
  SPEAKER_01: And that central character really wants to achieve something, is seeking something.
• 37:13
  SPEAKER_01: And in tragedy, it's often something that he can't, it's greater than he could possibly ever achieve.
• 37:22
  SPEAKER_01: And so, but even that kind of failure becomes a kind of dramatic presence of this good.
• 37:28
  SPEAKER_01: And I've noticed in stories in which there's absolutely no goodness at all, if you ever have a drama in which not a single character has the slightest nobility about him,
• 37:41
  SPEAKER_01: It tends not to engage your imagination.
• 37:43
  SPEAKER_01: It's hard to, you know, people will often say, you know, critics of drama and film and so forth will often say, you know, there's no character that you could care about.
• 37:57
  SPEAKER_01: You need to have somebody that you care about.
• 37:59
  SPEAKER_01: And it's hard to care about somebody who doesn't.
• 38:02
  SPEAKER_01: who doesn't in some sense reflect goodness as a sort of driving principle.
• 38:08
  SPEAKER_01: And it seems to me it really is true when you have a transcendent good that is somehow driving a plot that does make it a much more dramatic plot.
• 38:23
  SPEAKER_01: One one one experiences it as something really happening.
• 38:26
  SPEAKER_01: And so the story that you said to me with this drama of forgiveness, you know, when that moment arrives at the end, it is such a pure expression of this point, this, you know, what would seem to have been an impossible thing.
• 38:47
  SPEAKER_01: You know, that a father whose son was murdered, who's faced with the perpetrator.
• 38:55
  SPEAKER_01: And when he overcomes that in a way that's totally a surprise to offer forgiveness and to, in a way, accept the other in the place of his son.
• 39:05
  SPEAKER_01: You see, I haven't read it since you sent it to me a year ago, but it made a strong impression on me.
• 39:10
  SPEAKER_01: It's a really beautiful story.
• 39:12
  SPEAKER_01: The drama of that is overwhelming.
• 39:15
  SPEAKER_01: Why is it?
• 39:16
  SPEAKER_01: Well, it's the transcendence of the good that's coming to expression here.
• 39:22
  SPEAKER_01: Through the particular actions of characters, not as an abstract idea, but as a real reality.
• 39:31
  SPEAKER_01: And it's deeply moving.
• 39:32
  SPEAKER_01: And that gives the whole thing structure.
• 39:34
  SPEAKER_01: It gives it order, but it's a dramatic order.
• 39:38
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's so... Thank you for the kind words, because I really am... I've studied that structure so much in terms of how it actually works.
• 39:47
  SPEAKER_00: Like, there is a kind of... Because it's about a decision, fundamentally.
• 39:52
  SPEAKER_00: Even a whole story, often an entire movie, is about one moment where it all builds to where this person...
• 40:00
  SPEAKER_00: reveals who they are really and they might not know who they are i mean there's usually two forces at play like the theme of that story obviously is forgiveness so then you have on the other side revenge or self-destruction and forget so you have these forces these antagonists against each other and sometimes within one character sometimes they're dramatized but it's really about that yeah what
• 40:22
  SPEAKER_00: the action that they're going to choose to take that reveals their character changes their character.
• 40:27
  SPEAKER_00: And I suppose that's the good comes into that in a sense, because the goal of action that's proper is the good.
• 40:34
  SPEAKER_00: It's a good action.
• 40:35
  SPEAKER_00: Like that's always there.
• 40:37
  SPEAKER_00: And when we're,
• 40:39
  SPEAKER_00: choosing to act, we're always making value judgments.
• 40:42
  SPEAKER_00: We're always choosing one good over another.
• 40:45
  SPEAKER_01: That's important to point out.
• 40:46
  SPEAKER_01: And maybe, you know, with your listeners, there's a lot of confusion.
• 40:49
  SPEAKER_01: If you say the good, we can't help but think of it as like the morally good.
• 40:53
  SPEAKER_01: And like, it has to be, you know, you have to do things for the right reason.
• 40:57
  SPEAKER_01: And then, you know, there's a rolling of eyes and so forth.
• 41:01
  SPEAKER_01: But if you understand that, you know, in the classical sense of the good is that which all things desire.
• 41:08
  SPEAKER_01: Anything that motivates action is an expression of goodness.
• 41:11
  SPEAKER_01: So you simply can't have action without the good somehow being present.
• 41:19
  SPEAKER_01: And it's going to be more dramatic the more truly good it is.
• 41:23
  SPEAKER_01: I think that would be then one of the points.
• 41:25
  SPEAKER_00: And even in the absence of a really bad character, we can get really into them as well because you want them to be good or like Breaking Bad where he's getting worse as the plot goes on, but...
• 41:39
  SPEAKER_00: it's nearly better for him to be this lunatic than such a coward.
• 41:42
  SPEAKER_00: And there's a weird kind of, you're like, oh, well, like I didn't know that about myself that I thought that like it reveals this kind of subconscious valuing of things that were otherwise just, you know, it brings it to the forefront almost.
• 41:57
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, you know what?
• 41:58
  SPEAKER_01: It is interesting.
• 41:59
  SPEAKER_01: One of the chapter titles when Balthazar talks about this is The Good Slips Away.
• 42:05
  SPEAKER_01: There is something about that.
• 42:09
  SPEAKER_01: You can see it expressed in these particular characters.
• 42:12
  SPEAKER_01: You feel the good slipping away.
• 42:14
  SPEAKER_01: There's something so dramatic about that because of the necessity of the good and all sorts of things.
• 42:21
  SPEAKER_01: But you bring in a really beautiful word here that might connect this part of the conversation with the earlier part, and that is the revelation part.
• 42:31
  SPEAKER_01: That, you know, who a person is is revealed in this decision that's made.
• 42:38
  SPEAKER_01: Revealed in the way, not just as, you know, something has been true all along and now you're just showing it.
• 42:45
  SPEAKER_01: But in this dramatic decision, you know, it's being decided and revealed at the same time.
• 42:56
  SPEAKER_01: That's a very different sentence.
• 42:57
  SPEAKER_01: Truth is disclosure as revelation, as the more basic form of truth than correspondence of knowledge and fact.
• 43:08
  SPEAKER_01: Truth is disclosure, this is obviously a big theme in Heidegger.
• 43:13
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 43:14
  SPEAKER_01: Without mentioning his name.
• 43:17
  SPEAKER_01: And he's, you know, he's a complicated figure and his philosophy is very obscure and complicated in all sorts of ways.
• 43:24
  SPEAKER_01: But, you know, this theme is just it's a it's a real contribution, I think.
• 43:30
  SPEAKER_00: And because you see it, I mean, I'm thinking of Harry Potter now in terms of the last, the Philosopher's Stone, where he has this, he's looking for the Philosopher's Stone.
• 43:39
  SPEAKER_00: He looks into the mirror that tells you, you know, your heart's desire or whatever.
• 43:44
  SPEAKER_00: And he can look into it and get the Philosopher's Stone because he doesn't want to use it to control people for power.
• 43:50
  SPEAKER_00: Whereas Voldemort can't get it because he wants to use it to give himself a mortal life.
• 43:56
  SPEAKER_00: So there's an idea of like this, you get...
• 43:59
  SPEAKER_00: you know, if you sacrifice the immortal life control thing for love, you get, you know, your heart's desire.
• 44:10
  SPEAKER_00: You get this.
• 44:11
  SPEAKER_00: And so I suppose it models, I'm kind of thinking that these are modeling patterns of adaptive human adaptation that we've kind of looked at people for so long throughout history and time, aggregate them together into these optimal patterns that we then
• 44:29
  SPEAKER_00: on a behavioral level actually can embody and act out.
• 44:37
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 44:37
  SPEAKER_00: They become guiding lights.
• 44:38
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 44:39
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, I, you, you, the, the principle.
• 44:46
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 44:47
  SPEAKER_01: Is, is again, the, the, the, the meaning of the act, it seems to me, one can, one can make the meaning a sort of function of, of,
• 44:57
  SPEAKER_01: adaptation and evolution um and i would want to just affirm the relationship but put the anyway this is sort of an abstract point that's maybe not directly relevant here would be relevant later on if the conversation unfolded but um you know insist on the the the meaningfulness as the as the principle
• 45:20
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and that it's oftentimes a loss of meaning in a sense, like you'll see this kind of motif of the village where something goes wrong and then there's a dragon, there's some problem emerges and the hero has to go and fight the dragon and then they get the gold and they bring it back to the village and things are in a better shape than they were before almost.
• 45:40
  SPEAKER_00: It's like there's a sense of disharmony which creates a meaning crisis.
• 45:45
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 45:47
  SPEAKER_00: maybe nihilism and then uh a redemptive act a sacrifice a challenge yeah and then you know bringing that back and lots of ways that that can go wrong along the way but it's kind of bringing me thinking about christianity as the ultimate story uh which is kind of a meta story in a way as well of a story about you know how we get new stories um that's nice you
• 46:15
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, like I won because I've heard people describe Christianity as like a limit case story.
• 46:21
  SPEAKER_00: It's like the best possible person had the worst possible thing happen to them.
• 46:26
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I mean, you know, it's funny that you put it those terms.
• 46:30
  SPEAKER_01: That's exactly what Plato says in the Republic.
• 46:34
  SPEAKER_01: We need that.
• 46:36
  SPEAKER_01: In book two of The Republic, that's exactly what he says.
• 46:39
  SPEAKER_01: You know, the perfectly just man experiences perfect injustice, is treated as perfectly unjust, you know, and suffers the consequences.
• 46:51
  SPEAKER_01: And he says that we need that to have meaning.
• 46:53
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it's pretty amazing.
• 46:56
  SPEAKER_01: And then it actually happens.
• 46:59
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, no, exactly.
• 47:00
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it's pretty stunning.
• 47:01
  SPEAKER_01: But that's a point that I find really interesting with all of this is that the things that you are recounting there make for...
• 47:13
  SPEAKER_01: a good experience of drama and good, you know, this is what a good drama would consist in.
• 47:17
  SPEAKER_01: And I would affirm that and then say also, in ways that I think we don't tend to realize, we need these kinds of dramas, these kinds of stories to open up the horizon of truth more generally.
• 47:35
  SPEAKER_01: In a culture that is formed around a story like that, that really has captured our imagination in a really profound way, we actually just spontaneously are much more open to the meaningfulness of things.
• 47:56
  SPEAKER_01: the meaningfulness of relationships.
• 47:58
  SPEAKER_01: We don't sort of question, you know, you mentioned in the very beginning, this trust that the good is holding together the knower and the known, you know, that happens.
• 48:10
  SPEAKER_01: in the horizon set by these dramatic events.
• 48:14
  SPEAKER_01: But if we don't believe in any of the stories and if these mean nothing to us, that actually encourages a distrust.
• 48:24
  SPEAKER_01: And we start to wonder whether words mean anything and whether we are really communicating.
• 48:30
  SPEAKER_01: You know, the idea that we could actually be, you know, characters in a cosmic video game or something like that.
• 48:39
  SPEAKER_01: becomes like a plausible hypothesis, you know, because we've lost all moorings in the good, to use the platonic language.
• 48:52
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and it becomes a Gnostic kind of Matrix-type thing that we're trapped in this some sort of weird illusionary game.
• 48:59
  SPEAKER_00: Because the opposite vision, I mean, the Christian vision, also Plato's is very similar, that the reality somehow at bottom is good.
• 49:08
  SPEAKER_00: Like, that's what it is.
• 49:09
  SPEAKER_00: And if you go far enough on the journey, you'll see that.
• 49:14
  SPEAKER_00: And even, you know, the guy who was the best possible guy who had the worst possible time was...
• 49:23
  SPEAKER_00: didn't didn't succumb to it in a sense he was still you know he still embodied the good
• 49:31
  SPEAKER_00: He conquered it.
• 49:32
  SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
• 49:35
  SPEAKER_00: I think with my generation, there's such a hunger for stories, but so much of it has become entertainment as opposed to something deeper.
• 49:47
  SPEAKER_00: I think it's that disconnection from the good that, or maybe a watering down of it, it creates a distance from
• 49:58
  SPEAKER_00: from the really moving aspect.
• 50:01
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 50:02
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 50:02
  SPEAKER_01: And it, but you know, and there's a hope we want people to want stories, you know, and, and the very desire for entertainment itself is, is indirectly, subtly an expression of this desire everyone has for, for meaning.
• 50:22
  SPEAKER_01: But I think, I think you're right that it is really interesting to think about the
• 50:27
  SPEAKER_01: what you know what happens um when you know what does it mean to say what you know so what's here we go maybe this is a way the question i could put to you you know what would be the difference between a story in the proper sense and a story um received simply as entertainment what exactly is the difference
• 50:52
  SPEAKER_00: I think it's the meaning, which is really maybe another word for relevance.
• 50:59
  SPEAKER_00: The best stories, the ones that really get to the bottom of it, have this incredibly deep relevance in a kind of universal human way.
• 51:12
  SPEAKER_00: They're not necessarily... Maybe they exist within cultures, but they hit on...
• 51:18
  SPEAKER_00: Something really fundamental about reality and about our connection to it.
• 51:24
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that often comes as like symbols, things like I'm thinking of Harry Potter again, where she managed to capture so many really.
• 51:35
  SPEAKER_00: like deep ancient symbols and things, but somehow put it into a children's book in, you know, the 21st century.
• 51:43
  SPEAKER_00: And so I think it's that relevance to the human journey and what it means to be a human being that separates the art from just entertainment.
• 51:53
  SPEAKER_00: And there's probably a little bit of that in the entertainment.
• 51:56
  SPEAKER_00: I'm sure.
• 51:56
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 51:57
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 51:57
  SPEAKER_01: Or it wouldn't be entertaining even if there wasn't a trace of it.
• 52:02
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 52:03
  SPEAKER_01: But that's the thing, yeah, that the meaningfulness of it.
• 52:07
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know, you mentioned the ancient symbols.
• 52:09
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I think that...
• 52:14
  SPEAKER_01: One of the dimensions of the meaningfulness is just that, that it connects us to these bigger stories, as it were, you know, these bigger, this bigger order of things that precedes us in time and space.
• 52:31
  SPEAKER_00: a tradition as well.
• 52:33
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, cause there's part of the obstacle with, I suppose for younger generations, I think is this we're raised with a very entry anti-tradition model.
• 52:43
  SPEAKER_00: A lot of the time we're looked at that there was tradition and people, but again, I think it is the conflict between the kind of story fact thing.
• 52:51
  SPEAKER_00: It's like, okay, people in the past were somehow delusional.
• 52:54
  SPEAKER_00: They believed weird things.
• 52:56
  SPEAKER_00: They were superstitious.
• 52:57
  SPEAKER_00: They, you know, we're now enlightened and we're beyond that.
• 53:00
  SPEAKER_00: And so it's,
• 53:01
  SPEAKER_00: It creates a separation for modern people from a lot of the values, morals, stories that make sense of us and our connection to reality and our own lives.
• 53:14
  SPEAKER_00: I think Nietzsche made that point where he was like, we'll no longer be able to justify our morality, but we'll still have our morality.
• 53:20
  SPEAKER_00: But the story and metaphysics that made sense of it is now off limits.
• 53:24
  SPEAKER_00: So we're in cognitive dissonance.
• 53:27
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 53:27
  SPEAKER_01: And that's and and as he says, in a way that one of the first symptoms of this is that we insist on morality even more obsessively.
• 53:39
  SPEAKER_01: You know, it's kind of it's kind of interesting.
• 53:42
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, there is a profound insight there, I think.
• 53:48
  SPEAKER_00: The less we understand, the more we double down.
• 53:50
  SPEAKER_01: Nietzsche said that about the English.
• 53:52
  SPEAKER_01: He said that they no longer believe in God, and that's why they believe in morality so strong.
• 53:59
  SPEAKER_01: Wow.
• 54:00
  SPEAKER_01: But that was in the 19th century.
• 54:02
  SPEAKER_01: Who knows what he would say now.
• 54:05
  SPEAKER_01: but you know i think i think the word tradition is a crucially important one i'm i'm right now working on a book i'm very excited about authority and and connecting it to a lot of these themes i think that's um you know we tend to have a a very narrow sense of what that means but um you know i think um
• 54:27
  SPEAKER_01: It's very much tied to the things we've been discussing.
• 54:29
  SPEAKER_01: But one of the things that has struck me in thinking about all of this is, in my own culture, how much of the American project was founded on breaking off from the tradition and sort of, you know, starting over.
• 54:45
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, that in a way is the whole thing.
• 54:48
  SPEAKER_01: That's the whole theme of the American spirit.
• 54:52
  SPEAKER_01: So I think this anti-traditionalism is very deep to us.
• 54:57
  SPEAKER_01: People want to recover tradition.
• 55:01
  SPEAKER_01: It's becoming a fad now to recover tradition.
• 55:04
  SPEAKER_01: But it's no longer as a tradition.
• 55:06
  SPEAKER_01: It's sort of
• 55:08
  SPEAKER_01: Because a tradition is something we all share necessarily.
• 55:11
  SPEAKER_01: But when tradition is like, you've got yours, I've got mine, this becomes just kind of like the ornamentation of our particular lives or our own special way of doing things or something.
• 55:23
  SPEAKER_01: And that's just a very truncated sense of what tradition is.
• 55:28
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it can be kind of new age spirituality and, you know, you can take on Buddhism and be a Buddhist and, you know, you can do it in LA.
• 55:36
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't... I think in Ireland, you know, it doesn't, yeah, it doesn't matter.
• 55:41
  SPEAKER_00: You just get the bumper sticker.
• 55:45
  SPEAKER_00: But I think it's...
• 55:46
  SPEAKER_00: so universal to America but also to the modern world that there's this particularly in the West Ireland's pretty similar to be honest in the idea of having a secular state secular democracy the secular world has to try and break from the tradition of and like if you go back far enough like there isn't a secular world like it's based on nothing like there isn't you know and also everything I've learned about ethics is like
• 56:15
  SPEAKER_01: even the word is a religious idea and it just means it means the way religion is lived in time that's what that's what the word really means i mean this idea that it's defined as over and against religion is just a bizarre uh invention that ultimately becomes incoherent too just like these other things but you know i mean we are so far from grasping
• 56:40
  SPEAKER_01: that fact and then the implications of that fact as a culture that you know there's we're going to be facing quite a bit of drama in the next you know next few years you know
• 56:58
  SPEAKER_01: And then generations.
• 57:01
  SPEAKER_01: And you're in a younger generation than I am.
• 57:04
  SPEAKER_01: You've got a longer journey there.
• 57:07
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, well, we're definitely doing the AI storyline anyway, trying to create the robot overlord that's going to sort everything out.
• 57:14
  SPEAKER_00: It always goes so well in the movies.
• 57:17
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, we all sort of face together.
• 57:21
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and I think that's such a good point, David, as well, in terms of the trust issue, that we're disconnected from a lot of that wisdom and the deep stories that the good is connected in.
• 57:34
  SPEAKER_00: Those people, I mean, it's crazy that we had a civilization based on the good, and that somehow we managed to lose that.
• 57:44
  SPEAKER_00: That really seems to be, the recovery of that seems to be so key to the...
• 57:49
  SPEAKER_00: The recovery of what we've, you know, this, yeah, meaning crisis or the nihilism.
• 57:55
  SPEAKER_01: And there are a lot of people that see that and are working on it in their different ways, whether it be in philosophy, whether it be by writing stories and transforming the imagination, you know, and building culture.
• 58:09
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know, unfortunately, we need more of this among our statesmen.
• 58:14
  SPEAKER_01: And one finds very little of it at that level of discourse, unfortunately.
• 58:21
  SPEAKER_01: But, you know, there are signs of hope.
• 58:26
  SPEAKER_00: Well, thank you very much, David.
• 58:27
  SPEAKER_00: This is one of those signs of hope, I think.
• 58:29
  SPEAKER_00: I feel a bit more settled now in terms of the ontology of stories, but many more questions as well.
• 58:35
  SPEAKER_00: And I'll include a link to all your books as well.
• 58:39
  SPEAKER_00: I encourage people to read all of them.
• 58:40
  SPEAKER_00: I would love to chat to you about the new one as well whenever that's finished.
• 58:46
  SPEAKER_00: Sounds super interesting.
• 58:48
  SPEAKER_01: I'm about 95% done.
• 58:52
  SPEAKER_00: So that's brilliant.
• 58:53
  SPEAKER_00: I thought you were going to say it was you were 5% done.
• 58:55
  SPEAKER_00: So that's even better news.
• 59:00
  SPEAKER_01: Well, thanks.
• 59:02
  SPEAKER_01: I really, really enjoyed speaking to you.
• 59:05
  SPEAKER_01: This has been, again, another good conversation.
• 59:08
  SPEAKER_01: I enjoyed our previous one, too.
• 59:11
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you so much, David.
• 59:12
  SPEAKER_00: I really appreciate making time.