Let me make another suggestion here. Um, so you mentioned Markx and what we see in Markx is a um an an overestimation a serious overestimation of the power of reason. Yeah.
And now reason understood as a productive and political principle. Um, and I mean obviously there's a religious background because it's a secularization of the Christian story, but I think there there are several elements here. And and by the way, this goes back to Plato's Republic as well.
We can talk about that. But okay, the idea is that okay, we're going to have a heaven on earth. We're going to have a paradise society where all men are brothers and so on and everyone's needs are met, right?
Whatever the hell that means. But here's the problem. It is going to be realized by human political productive action.
And the difficulty there is so so so first of all it's not emerging organically. Okay. It's a it's a political constructivism.
So the the best society will not emerge organically. Uh but it's to be brought into being by man. Now it's to be brought into being by man in a particular time and in a particular place by particular men, right?
By particular men. And when you put those constraints on it, you drastically limit the possibilities within that society because it's got to be producible, it's got to be sustainable, it's got to fit the particular parameters, all these kinds of things. Add on to that the delusion that um human beings are not in fact let's say radically local beings who form the most meaningful bonds in particular ways marriage family etc but we're universal right and finally you have this kind of divonization of man because after all you know um well if we I mean we're going to realize heaven on earth so well and as you said we can produce a centralized authority which falls out of the presumption just described that's going to have the computational power necessary to pull off the task.
Exactly. Which is well that just just that claim is preposterous. Right.
But but I like I like the way you formulate that because what what you're pointing out is that for the system that's proposed to make itself manifest, it has to meet a series of increasingly likely constraints. Yes. Exactly.
increasingly sorry increasingly unlikely constraints right it has to do this that's already hard well you add four more impossibilities to that it's like well right and um where I want to go with this is that that kind of hubris about reason uh is I think well first of all it's a characteristic of the modern era because you know you have deart saying we're going to be masters and possessions of nature and if you read the discourse on the method he's Yeah, we're going to we're going to do form our own values. Right. Right.
But that's sort of the end of the whole kind of decay. But if but if we go back to the early moderns, um he even suggests in the discourse on method that maybe medicine will will make all the infirmities of old age sort of disappear, which means we're not going to die. In which case, by the way, the religious question uh is gone.
Like from the I mean Deart's writing, he doesn't want his books to be placed on the index, which they were. nonetheless, you know, um and so they're read and they have to be, you know, the Roman Catholic Church has to has to has to look at them. Um but the fact is that Roman Catholicism is irrelevant if you've got if we're not going to die, right?
I mean, in some fundamental sense, but okay. Well, and whatever a human being is is something completely different than whatever it is now. But now I want to go back to Leo Strauss who talks about the permanent questions.
And what I've come to understand is the following. That the permanence of the questions arises from the necessity that Athens so to speak. And now let's just take that to mean reason like unaded reason.
Okay. Can't be separated from the biblical alternative which is the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.
How did you figure that out? Well, Strauss writes about this stuff. He writes about, this is not my ideas.
He writes about essence in Jerusalem. But what I'm claiming is this. In order for reason to function in a healthy way, it must conduct itself in the light of Yeah.
the alternative of religion, which is okay. So, so you know, like you can't understand everything on your own. There are massive mysteries, right?
Um, and there's this entire alternative way of thinking about things. So if you if you simply separate reason from that, you're going to get totalitarianism and kind of you know the lunacy that we see luciferian hubris. If you separate religion from the alternative that well man has reason and man is able to figure things out and there are things that we can understand about nature and the world and science that aren't in the religious tradition, then you're going to end up with say Islamic extremism or something.
You see what I'm saying? In other words, a healthy human existence is to dwell in the space of the permanent questions which must be informed by these alternatives. And Strauss is very good on this.
He says there's no philosophical proof that the Bible is wrong, right? Like there's like, you know, you could like you're always making assumptions that that are simply going to sort of, you know, prejudice the conclusions that you're going to. Yeah.
So, so we have to live in this space. And Strauss's claim which I really think is great is that the tension between Athens and Jerusalem is the coiled spring of the greatness of the west that we have to understand that but now what I've come to understand this is a kind of moderation right like don't because if you say no reason reasons it anything that's not rational you got some kind of positiveism or whatever you're you're going to go straight to that man god thing right you're going to go straight to that totalitarian you know the train's going to stop at at the you know at the death basically but if you also say well there's no re which is one more thing I just want to say about the my book on plato on the talmut I've already suggested that Socratic philosophizing begins with this revelation at Delelfi which talk Socrates stakes seriously who is Socrates what is wisdom but he's convinced that there must be an answer because the god can't speak falsely the rabbis there's a great book called rational rabbis by a guy named manakim fesh and believe it or not he talks about the rabbis of the telma the first 40 pages is about Carl Pauper's theory of falsification in science which is great humble theory right it's that we can't prove laws like the law of gravity we can only falsify them we can conduct experiments that if they turn out a certain way will falsify the you know formulation of the law of gravity look for new forms of our ignorance right so then this guy argues that the the rabbis are rational and they are in a sense they're playing the socratic game of rationality within the horizon of re of revelation so they Well, that's okay. I believe I think we know enough about both psychology and neuroscience now to move that from the domain of philosophical theory to the domain of established fact because one of the things that people who've studied perception and emotion have come to conclude is that well I asked Carl Fristen who's the world's most cited neuroscientist by the way.
I asked him is every object perception a micro narrative? Oh that's very interesting. He said, "Yes, for sure.
" He said, "Necessarily. " Right? Necessarily.
That's quite the claim because what we've come to understand is that there's no object perception independent of motivational frame. And the description of a motivational frame is a narrative. Mhm.
Okay. Now, you you made a comment earlier that well, you need to know where you've come from and where you're going. Okay.
So, let's What is a narrative? Well, yeah. There's an aim.
There's a starting place. There's a voyage. And then you might say, well, their world's made out of objects.
And you overlay a value laden narrative on top of it. But then you might say, well, where's the interface? And so you might say, well, let's look at how perception works.
What do we see as objects? Well, we do not see we do not see what the enlightenment mind conceptualized as the object when we see an object. That's not right.
what we see. So what it seems to be the case, it's very cool. So once you establish an aim and it and this is in the most trivial of circumstances, the world reveals itself to your perception as a pathway to the aim.
Okay? As a set of obstacles, that's produces negative emotion. A set of facilitators or tools that produces positive emotion.
And so and that's with every glance you take because every glance specifies an aim for action right because otherwise why look okay so aim pathway right so that might be the straight narrow pathway uphill for example tools and obstacles okay positive emotion negative on the social front friends and foes same thing almost everything is defaults to the realm of the irrelevant right because if specified aim, most things are now irrelevant. So your aim makes most of the world irrelevant. Some things stand out as phenomena that the phenomena that stand out are tools and obstacles or friends and foes.
There's also, and I just figured this out this year, there's also agents of magical transformation in narratives. They change your aim. So imagine every aim brings a set of constraints and rules.
So that's like the metaphysics of the aim, the rules. But if you switch the aim, the metaphysics change and that's a magical shift. And if someone comes along whose aim is four stages higher than yours, we'll say, then they appear truly magical.
But the reason I'm making this case is like and and and there is I think we are are we're at the end of the enlightenment and I think it died like Nietze claimed Christianity died at its own hand because it turns out that there is no level at which what we see are dead objects. Yes. Not at any level of perception whatsoever.
Every object is actually you cannot dissociate value from object in perception. It's not possible. Yeah.
In fact, if anything, it's tilted towards value and not object. And there's another terrible plague for the enlightenment types as well who think the world is a place of objects. Is that well, there's an infinite number of objects because Yes.
Well, so then which objects? Right. Right.
Which objects? That's a terrible question because as soon as you say that, you have to prioritize. Well, there's no difference between priority and value.
Yes. So another way of thinking about a narrative, when you go to a movie, you watch the protagonist. What you are embodying is your observation of the protagonist structure of value.
You're incorporating that that you you match his emotions because you match his aims. And so when we're storytelling, what we're doing is we're exchanging information about the substrata within r within which rationality has no choice but to operate. See, so the metaphysics of the enlightenment were wrong.
Rationality is at the base because the world's made out of objects and you can calculate your way forward with valuefree objective knowledge. Like none of that's right. Yeah.
So, so the story is the thing. Now, you said, well, we need a story. We need to know where we've been.
Now, that has to have something to do with why you got interested in the telmmet, I would presume. You said you saw a similarity with the dialogues. So, but what else caught your attention?
You've obviously developed extreme familiarity, for example, with the story of Exodus. Why do you think as a philosopher you started to presume or understand that these ancient stories shed light on the world in a way that philosophical theories abstracted away from narrative don't? Well, look, what you just said is very rich and I think uh very very attractive and interesting.
Um so let me start with a question I guess. Um doesn't this all mean then that uh we have to find the proper aim and if we find the proper aim then our questions are going to be helpful and productive to us as human beings. So let's go back to the very first commandment.
I am. This is why Christ in the sermon on the mount for example which is a guide book for revelation says okay how do you pray? How do you orient yourself in the world?
Same question. Aim at the highest thing you can conceptualize. That's number one.
Presume that other people are made in the image of that highest thing. Okay. So now you've set the frame.
Got it. Exactly. Exactly.
Now pay attention. Right. Having done that, pay attention to the moment because what'll happen is if you specify your aim properly.
The path, the proper pathway will appear. The proper tools will make themselves manifest to you. The proper revelations will come to you.
Well, that is how perception and thought work. So in the the Tower of Babel is a story of misaligned aim, you know, and it's the engineers who build the tower. Yeah.
Right. It's I mean well that's a great story too because if you read it carefully they say let's bake bricks. So they bake the bricks and that's fascinating because they break it out of adam which is the the soil that man has made out of Adam etc.
Right? And then they say let's make a tower. Now if you this may be over interpreting but first we'll develop the bricks and then we'll figure out what to do with them.
Like the technological thing comes it actually reminds me of like the CIA discovers LSD. I mean, they don't discover it, but they they're like, "We got LSD. " So, now their question is, "What can we do with it?
There's a book about this. " And so, there's they say, "Well, is it a truth serum? " So, they give LSD to this CIA guy.
No, it's not. You know, well, maybe it's an anti-truth serum. We give it to our agents if they're caught and stuff like that.
No, it's not. But this kind of reasoning, right? Like, this is potent stuff.
This is super potent stuff. What can we do with it? Right.
But, but anyway, you're absolutely right about the the misaligned aim. Yeah. Well, you know, people end up unable to communicate because the aim gets so misaligned.
Words themselves lose their meaning. And that's a reference to exactly what we're describing is that if you if you mess up the underlying narrative substrate enough, rationality becomes impossible partly because words don't mean the same thing to this to different people. Well, that's true.
Well, we can see that now. Yeah. I mean, and so what you said about the sermon on the mount is anticipated by God in the very first commandment.
I am the Lord thy God. Thou shalt have no other gods beside me. Right.
Exactly.
