Love and the Postmodern Predicament with D. C. Schindler

[@PaulVanderKlay]

We should definitely take a collection and get Schindler a better camera and microphone. :)

[@Joeonline26]

Oh come on Paul, it isn't that bad! Have you tried watching an interview with John Milbank? Now that's poor mic/camera quality 😂

[@WhiteStoneName]

Presents always love your stuff, Karen. And Michael is a fav. I wish I could interact with him more. So…I see Michael, I click.

[@hanskung3278]

I have tried for years to understand the Transcendentals, the one, the true, the good. I have yet to read anywhere that a real life example of the transcendentals is explained,I truely wish someone could help me out here, please.

[@bobdmb]

I am currently reading the book and it is wonderful. What a treat Karen that you put this conversation together. thank you!

[@Terpsichore1]

Yes, keep on wondering. Such a soothing conversation. Thank you all.

[@MrHwaynefair]

Awesome - can't wait to hear this one!

[@ManuelPost]

About suffering and healing at the same time. I think this has to do with the Telos. So if you suffer (I'm using this undergo without valence). That is either turned towards the good and therefor validated or redeemed. Or it is turned towards something else and therefor found lacking. That is the state that we most often find ourselves in at least when we are conscious of it. Because you can easily say that is is a great miracle that we are not continuously in that state by every event. When we realize the inevitability of suffering and are unable to bring that under a Telos (why?) we spin off into nihilism. But if we do find a way to make that unification we find meaning (through Honour). There is a justification that shifts the valence. And that will allow us to make the sacrifice and make it even seem natural.

[@Jacob011]

47:40 Regarding perfection Iain would probably react by telling you that the Latin "per + facere" from which we get "perfection" means literally "done to completion, finished" which triggers the left-hemisphere connotations.

[@_ARCATEC_]

That which contains continuity and unity. Quintessence

[@ManuelPost]

"There is not a human being alive that doesn't respond to beauty." There is the implication that you can show beauty to people and they respond to it. I don't know how you can make such a statement. Unless you compare beauty to gravity. But then gravity would make more sense because gravity actually has a predicable effect. But it is just stating either a universal (necessary prerequisite for being) or it is wrong. Then the conversation moves to an description of awe that seems to be equated to beauty. There seems to be a lot of equivocation going on and this Idea that we have an absolute experience of Beauty. (Even if that is true, what does that say about Goodness and Truth in that moment)

[@TheTimecake]

I've always thought of the Good as the most central of the three transcendentals as opposed to Beauty. I think Schindler also says something akin to this in the Catholicity of Reason, where he notes the "Primacy of Beauty, the Centrality of Goodness, and the Ultimacy of Truth". This is also supported by one of the most important lines in Plato's Critique of Impure Reason (another book by Schindler) sourced from the Philebus: “[T]he difference between the nature of the good and everything else is this. . . . Any creature that was in permanent possession of it entirely and in every way, would never be in need of anything else, but would live in perfect self-sufficiency.” I'm also tempted to bring in Forrest Landry's framing of the transcendentals, where Beauty and Truth would be conjugate and the Good would be their relation and that in terms of which they are defined, even though Beauty comes first. Similar to how, more generally, the relation between two things can be more fundamental than the things related, even though the things arguably exist before they come into relation. This is something McGilchrist is fond of pointing out.

[@TheMeaningCode]

Interesting thought…

[@ManuelPost]

The idea of having selfhood when experiencing beauty. I think connects to when you experience beauty it makes sense to you so there is an intelligibility that you intimately connect to. And since the intelligibility is profound the connection is profound and therefor your sense of self inherits this quality from your relationship since you are pointed towards the Beauty. That goes into Vervaekes point of you assume an identity towards something in order to relate to it. And if you have a 'perfect' (I did use that word) relationship then you are perfected in some sense by the same action. But this is highly susceptible for delusion because if there is no interaction and you are just a consumer of this Beauty. It is not grounded in truth and it will not have the capacity to participate in the Good either. It wil be just a validation of you solipsism. A seeing yourself reflected in the world like Narcissus. And that will capture you staring at your own image isolating yourself from the world.

[@ManuelPost]

Perfection always has to be in a context and it is on the one side of a spectrum. A term I like better is fulfillment because that implies good enough and not lacking. I don't think perfection makes much sense in daily life because the perfect is the enemy of the good. If you aim for perfection you end up reciprocally narrowing necessarily because you've constrained the world to a subset. Why is perfection that important or even possible? It seems to be a quality of the timeless not manifest.

[@TheMeaningCode]

My recollection of the conversation was that David brought up the Perfect as relating to God as Perfect, as in Being is Perfect in the beginning and only becomes in the sense of becoming more perfect. I don’t believe anyone mentioned it as a goal to work towards. Although, there is that thorny verse, “Be ye perfect as I am perfect.” But I do believe in that case perfect can also be translated complete or fulfilled.

[@ManuelPost]

I think it is dangerous to reduce Beauty and separate it from Good and Truth. Beauty has to do with discernment. Goodness with direction. Truth with grounding in reality. They are always all present and rely on each other you cannot separate them. Because then they're not their in their fullness and you're being deluded. This idea that if you experience a lack you know what the whole is that you're lacking from is incorrect. The lack allows for the contrast that gives you the potential for the discernment of the whole. But we cannot start from the whole. The whole has not been revealed to us yet. We can only get this revelation by right participation. In the conversation there seems to be a lack of attention to a sequential necessity. You can have the puzzle pieces. But the way you relate to the puzzle pieces is from your constraints and is not discernible within the puzzle pieces themselves.

[@TheMeaningCode]

It was a difficult conversation in the sense that his book is very sequential but also extremely complex, And in my attempts to bring out aspects that I was interested in, the sequential nature of his writing was not evident. It was, after all, a conversation, not a book review or a lecture.

[@jamespercy8506]

proleptic aspiration towards better relevance realization (John Vervaeke) becoming out of being?

[@marklefebvre5758]

Lovely conversation indeed. Quite the crew you have here. Just a few notes in case the are helpful. Philosophy is (by definition) truth first, not beauty first. The claims to two of the three transcendentals is done through 'that which is true is always beautiful' which is observably false. This idea that logic provides beauty is nonesense. Through logic you might find beauty but beauty is larger than logic and is orthogonal to truth and goodness. Goodness and truth aren't crystaline at all. All the transcendentals are all subject to the perspective of the viewer and none are objective. I don't think conflating being and becoming is a good idea, you need having mode, being mode and becoming mode (transformation). You should start with the neutral state - being is good, then the reduction is having - the concrete state, finally becoming, the process of transformation. I think it is dangerous to talk about becoming as mere direction, that is two dimensional. We become bigger. If you are using direction, you are reducing, likely the better way to speak about these things is orientation - you can always become evil. I'd argue that evil is becoming lesser, orienting towards narrowing rather than broadening. Being doesn't contain the idea of change, that is why it is both changing and unchanging. Becoming has nothing to do with want. You are all assuming some positive ideal which people can sense and not accounting for the reality that most people get worse, not better. Giving them a reliance on themselves and their 'sense' is not a good idea. First you must have a framework with an ideal of the true, the good and the beautiful, otherwise it corrupts. Submission to this framework is required even if the understanding is lacking - another flaw. The intersection is a reduction, the fullness of combining truth, goodness and beauty is the expansion to God. Apparently you aren't aware of depression. People long for truth, goodness and beauty but the focus on inequal measure is a problem. Consider that some people get the feeling that you describe from beauty instead from truth, or goodness. Then look around, observe people for a while, I think you'll see this quite clearly. This is analogous (but not the same as) having a highest value, it's more than that. We have different highest values (I have a video on that, see Navigating Patterns) and we have different responses to the three transcendentals. The post moderns don't get anything at all, the best way to deal with them is to ignore their obvious errors - which is all of their 'work'. The only possible interaction with post modern thought is destruction, it is incapable of creation and therefore goodness. This point about the difference between happiness and gratitude is key. Do not wish for happiness, be grateful for gratitude. The difference is submission, interstingly enough.

[@TheMeaningCode]

Thank you for the comment. There is a lot here to ponder. However, I would say that the idea that the transcendentals depend on the perspective of the viewer is a very post modern concept. Aren’t you saying then that everything is relative? I said crystalline about goodness and truth, because I believe that there is such a thing as the good and the true. When I mentioned a different perspective on beauty, that was not to say that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I don’t really believe that’s true. I believe that there is such an ideal as beauty, but that beauty has a flexibility in its construction.

[@marklefebvre5758]

@@TheMeaningCode People find different things beautiful. That is a reality, it's easy to verify, they have different preferences, different vision entirely! This isn't to say that they couldn't be somehow changed to see something similar, but until that happens, the assumption is never going to work. In other words, the individualistic idea that everyone has their own perspective is correct, observably. It doesn't solve a problem, because it's aimed across the world, not UP at something higher. Those higher 'things' are not simply 'beauty' or 'truth' or 'goodness'. I think this is how defenders of post modernism can live with themselves, they 'see the point' or something. However, it creates the situation of not being able to address the problem(s) that are pointed out. This is why I think you need to differentiate the idea of perception and those unchanging ideals. The issue here is that starting from the supposition that there is a 'beauty' gives people the idea that they have access to it, then they get into the fighting for their view of beauty rather than seeking it with others. I remain strictly in the camp of post modernism is a bad way to think about the world and has no goodness. It's just individualism that leads to less cooperation and ability to cooperate to seek these things above us.

[@metaphysicsincarnate5824]

Schindler's book is a tour de force of reasoned discourse so prob worth engaging with. I think Schindler would likely argue that Beauty comes first in philosophy because we don't engage with anything as disinterested, objective observers. Something has to first manifest itself to us as attractive so that we can truly engage with it to know it deeply which leads to the Truth. Schindler argues that there is a "before-ness" to Beauty (and to Love which it closely relates) which sets the conditions and context whereby this reception of Truth is even possible.

[@marklefebvre5758]

@@metaphysicsincarnate5824 I hope no one would dare link philosophy with transcentals other than to recognize items outside the purview of philosphy. I don't buy any of this, it all doesn't work without eyes to see, which is the primary problem to resolve, beauty takes care of itself, as does truth and goodness. Right now, we are stuck in truth mode, but that isn't becasue we know truth, we know beauty and truth equally poorly, the skills to engage the transcendentals are missing entirely. That is the larger issue in my opinion, no solution around 'more beauty' or 'right beauty' or 'focus on beauty' is going to do any good, it'll just cause more argument, as the focus on 'truth' did, we live in a 'post truth' world, that is the admission that truth didn't have the intended impact. Beauty will suffer the same.

[@metaphysicsincarnate5824]

@@marklefebvre5758 I wouldn't say Schindler is making the claim that philosophy should be conflated with the transcendentals just that their relation to Being is a proper pursuit of philosophy. Also, he's not making an argument for "more beauty" or "right beauty"; instead he's arguing that Beauty is there completely independent of and preceding the propositions about it. Which is great given to how our propositional systems tend toward error. I think maybe the argument is just to perhaps notice Beauty more, and be more grateful for it, and to have reasons to hope it is more ontologically significant than we moderns seem capable of imaging.

[@ManuelPost]

Talking about completeness is again drawing in absolutist language. We are living on a spectrum and joy will manifest when the spectrum is oriented outside of ourselves and we are identifying with our surroundings. Joy is a consequence of this state because the state is prerequisite. This obviously implies that the relevance of the egoic state is reduced and submitted to the present. I think it is wrong to frame that the completeness of the egoic state is what allows that. That implies we are stepping out instead of drawn out. We have different aspects of our consciousness warring/cooperating (depending on mental health) for our attention. So if we are solopsists. The narrative about being completed egoicly makes phenomological sense. And even if it would be true (I contest this) it is not helpful language. I think this is what you get if you focus on being over becoming. You do not register the process (and therefor necessary preconditions) and skip to the end. That is a flattening of the world.

[@kbeetles]

Why are some of these conversations often undigestible to me??? :o( (Tell me narratives, metaphors, allegories, give me mental pictures and I skip along ..... but words that stare at me - and I am turned to stone ....It must be my age! Maybe I am better off "just" praising the Lord....?)

[@TheMeaningCode]

I hear you. This was an especially complicated one because his book is so very difficult for me to understand, and I was grappling with that while at the same time trying to get to know him as a person and understand the underlying premises. Conversations that tell the stories of our lives are always compelling and easier to relate to. Part of my challenge in speaking with someone like D C Schindler is that I’m super conscious of his time and the fact that he is the one who has something to tell me, and that the people watching want to hear from him. I still struggle with how best to make that happen and still make it understandable to people like me.

[@kbeetles]

@@TheMeaningCode Thank you for your kind response. I do appreciate the difficulty you are describing and each time you ask for clarification or slow someone down or rephrase something, I am relieved that it is not just me: being too old, too dumb, too unacademic .... I think it is my problem with many other channels, too, which is frustrating as I am genuinely interested in people's ideas and insights etc.... and yet, the way these ideas are presented make them almost inaccessible for someone like me! It could be a left-right brain hemisphere struggle or old age or a different kind of processing going on..... I will still keep returning to your channel as your guests speak to things I would like to understand better.

[@_ARCATEC_]

Its an interesting 🙃 flip the left and the right brain 🧠 politic.

[@Mhm5213]

Why cannot horror save the world?

[@Mhm5213]

The mushroom cloud is beautiful.