 So welcome, and today I have the pleasure to have Robert Corrington with me for a conversation that will be partly focused on your ideas about what you call aesthetic naturalism. And I am going to pretend that I don't know much about it, which is partly true in fact, but I find it extremely intriguing for someone who doesn't, who has not heard about it, there's a claim that sounds very familiar. And that is that you write that nature is all that there is, and there is nothing divine or otherwise that is beyond nature. And that for someone who read a little bit of philosophy sounds familiar because we immediately think about Spinoza. My first question would be, how does your approach differ or is similar to Spinoza's one? I can understand equating God and nature in his sense. But if you do that and make them equivalent, you don't need both terms. The difference I have with Spinoza is that I'm very much concentrated on the churning depths of the unconscious of nature as filled with potencies and powers, and as the seedbed for archetypes, which govern and shape the human psyche and nature itself. So I'm adding Jungian psychoanalysis to Spinoza's bare bones pantheism. And so I call my perspective deep pantheism, which means that you still have some dualities, but they're overcome when the human process reaches the state of creativity, and you would find very congenial, I think, from your perspective. So nature-nature-ing, which Spinoza talks about and Aquinas talked about, and my mentor Justice Buckler talked about, is I wouldn't call it divine. I'd call it a perennial creation of nature out of itself alone. There's no one creative act. It's continuous. And I think the Big Bang Theory, whatever its future may be, can fit into that. It is a creative moment. Nature-natured is the indefinitely explorable orders of the world. What Schopenhauer might call the phenomenal piggybacking of Kant. And ecstatic naturalism is concerned with the eruptions of the unconscious of nature through the collective unconscious and the cultural unconscious and the personal unconscious into nature-nature. And these can crests in what I call sacred folds where you have this tremendous pressure and semiotic density, power and meaning come together as Paul Tillich would put it. And this produces what is traditionally called epiphanies. And these epiphanies are best dealt with in the aesthetic realm, because all of my work, and I'm sure your work is committed to nonviolence where possible. In cases where it's not possible, of course. I think the aesthetic sphere is freer from the rigidities and the emotional armoring and the shells were embedded in that you find in the religious sphere. So, Spinoza, for whom I have the greatest respect as a courageous thinker, it's quite grasped what psychoanalysis figured out early on through Freud and the Newman-Rank and Reich, Gustave, Kohut, that were sitting on churning potencies about which we often know very little. So they drive us. And then the question of freedom for me tilts heavily toward determinism. However, if you're riding on the back of a sacred fold and is penetrating you through your transference relationship to it, then you can burst forth with a modicum or more of creative energy to shape the self in process. So, those are some of the things I find lacking in Spinoza, but I prefer him to Leibniz, for example, who I see as a science fiction writer. So, there you go. We'll come back to Leibniz, whom I am really discovering lately or rediscovering. When I was listening to you, I mean, of course, it ringed many bells. The sacred folds seem to echo what Carl Jasper's called cyphers. But before we talk about that, I was also hearing an echo of Plato's Republic, when Socrates says, I want the guardians, the rulers of the city, to be both brave and wise. And he says, that's going to be very rare. And because these are almost like a dialectic tension, which seems to be a little bit the tension that you seem to point, correct me if I'm wrong, in the two faces of nature, the two aspects of... So, and you did talk about violence, right? Yes. Very interesting because, I mean, as humans, and this is also a conversation about philosophical health. So, being in the world and in modernity and yet having aspirations towards knowledge and some form of theosis, I think we would like to speak about that to a bit later. But we need constantly to negotiate, right, between these sort of impulses that are ambiguous. They are both manifesting a energy that is creative, but at the same time, something that can be perceived as violent. So what... Yeah, no, I mean, please. I think what happens, what I push for is if you're going to deal with strong men, strong women, social leaders, you have to embed yourself in psychopathology. Because they're often wrestling with forces in their unconscious and in the cultural unconscious, which feeds into them, kind of a zeitgeist phenomenon if you believe in that. You can't understand what a politician or religious leader would have you is doing, unless you know their personal complexes. That is neurotic disorders or exaggerations or projections. A lot of projection going on in American politics right now, which leads to pretty much nothing of value. So, violence is dealt with through the system. It's dealt with through the psyche. Because we all are addicted as a human being to some forms of violence, even verbal violence. It's not eliminatable, as far as I can tell. But it is shapeable. And here we go back all the way back to Freud with civilization and it's this contents that you sublimate. You form an aggressive impulse into a creative act. And we can't be citizens in a hope for democracy. If we don't know psychopathology and of course civics, which they don't teach much anymore here. Right. Okay, so rewinding a bit, because when I hear psychopathology, I hear again using a platonic, I don't know why I'm so platonic today, probably because I'm also re-reading the Republic, but the correspondence between the microcosm, which can be represented by a one human being and a microcosm. You were talking about the unconscious of nature. So what is that unconscious? Is it simply the creating, the ongoing creation? Or is it something that is only one aspect of that dynamic? Yeah. Good question. I think it's an aspect that is that creative fecundity. You can't have creative fecundity coming out of nature, naturing without an equally strong account of entropy, the eating away of order and heat, so to speak, metaphorical heat. And when the unconscious is in motion, which it always is, but when it's especially active for whatever reasons science could figure out perhaps. And it's going to distort and shape what's in the conscious world or even general consciousness, Kant's, or Jasper's, Bavoussine-Uberhaupt, consciousness in general. Even that can be manipulated. And Kant didn't get. Kant did not do, understand the shadow in Jung's sense. That is this deep on subterranean movement that produces actions and thoughts that are really undesirable for the person and the species. Nature naturing is not good. It's not evil. It's prior to that distinction. It doesn't make sense to apply those predicates to Natura Naturans. The Plato part is very interesting. I haven't thought about that, but I admire Plato, mostly through Plotinus. Plotinus is extremely important because he has those mystical experiences of the one and that dictates his worldview. If you haven't had that experience, you can't really get inside Plotinus the way you can. That's good. So via Plotinus we're getting to the one and I was sort of waiting for that moment because so we've been very briefly discussing prior to this recording that we have similar views under different names. What I call Creolelectics and the cosmology of the Creole, supposes that there is at the core of the universe is this dynamic between the multiple and the one. It is actually two aspects of the same. But you can see that it's not really a dialectic because the multiple and the one are epistemologically and ontologically different in the sense that the multiple is indistinguishable from sort of a proto-matter, the matrix. If we use another Platonic, while the one is the logical aspect of it, right? It's the fact that, well, if you have a pure multiplicity, pure difference, it doesn't admit an exterior. Therefore, it's a whole. Therefore, there is a shadow of the multiple is the one. And perhaps we could say vice versa. I'm not sure. I like that. Yeah. So what would you say actually, should we say that in fact there are two shadows in dynamic, you know, vibrancy that generates these unequilibriums or disequilibriums, therefore, there for a phenomena. So a shadow at the bottom, which would be the matrix of things. Maybe the great mother archetype you could put in and the shadow at the top, so to speak, because you can't visualize this stuff. That's very interesting. That would, that would require some pretty careful reflection and experience to do that. Now a dialectic, if you're not haggle, doesn't have to go anywhere. I believe in cycles, not any linear history doesn't seem to change much. It just reiterates and reiterates and reiterates. Which is why I'm a little friendly to reincarnation as a theory in spite of the social injustices that theory has produced in India and elsewhere. So dialectic. I think determinate negation is in there and haggle sense. But I don't think there's a more and determinate negation within the shape of consciousness. There's gestalt and they self boost sign, the shapes of self conscious, the dialectic can almost be like a fractal. And branch in different ways. It's not own flip elevate. It's, it's, it's radiating out and doing all kinds of things, which may not be mappable by us. That is a mental structure of the one and the matrix. And what's in between the between zone, which is where we live. We don't often get to the great mother rate matrix, or to the, the one now the word one may not be the best word for that should be nothingness void. Well that's interesting because I, I, I don't like the term. There's nothingness and boy at very many friends who would take it seriously and, and we know it's your philosophy, both Western and Eastern right with Buddhist evacuity and I prefer as you know to call it Creel so the real with a C, which I mean, if Lacan, I think Lacan would have gotten it more right if he had called it Creel than rather than real, just for history of science and history of knowledge purposes. It's very delicate to, to, to call something real out of the physical list. I mean, the, the scientist discourse, but therefore if we call it, if we call it a Creel this this sort of multiple one. Janus face. We might be tempted and the reason I mentioned that is that you, you write that you have your writing or you've already written a book called minds Travay, which is an attempt to unite Darwin with in the Hindu metaphysics. And I have been thinking rather superficially yet about the correspondence between what I'm calling Creolectics and, and actually taking Darwin's ontology more seriously so is it what you're doing in a book. Yeah. It's combining Darwin with the Upanishads or from the Advaita Vedanta non dual perspective. And I like Swami Nikala Nanda's translation of the upon a shot which has Shankar's commentary in there as well. Reminding those two has proven to be extremely difficult I keep pushing on this project of minds to avail, but then I have to be pushed back, because of the difficulties of those issues how do you get finite emergent instrumental adaptability adapting consciousness. In a sense that such it ananda that you have being consciousness and bliss, as some point in the human process and I call that involution, which is not meant to contradict Darwin which would be a fool's journey. The involution is where the mind is grasped by Brahman or nature nature and it's very tricky terrain for me. Yaspers is a midpoint for me. And I served as president of the Carl Yaspers Society of North America for a couple of years and I really admire him I had been a high degree guy in my youth. But the demons came out of that I'm so okay I gave I actually gave my height of the books away to a graduate student. I had enough. I understand that. Yaspers was a moral person a good person, and just decent on all counts that I know of. And what he talks about is this evolution from the empirical to consciousness as such, or consciousness in general is the earlier translation to spirit to the encompassing or transcendence he sometimes puts in there. Consciousness in general is our attempts through logic reason experience and tradition to elevate our perspectives beyond projection, rage, manic bliss, and all these other things we pray to, to get a sense, perhaps for logically and jurisprudently to get a universal out of this that all human beings can affirm. Now the problem is that has to be very thin as to what general consciousness is it can't have a lot of boisterous content clashing. And then so we can do that we do that on a rare occasion. And then the Hindu perspective, and there are so many of them but Advaita Vedanta shows you that whatever the self is. It's immersed in both general consciousness and something beyond as a spatial term screw up philosophy bad but we need them, which would be the manifestations and the bliss of Brahman or the divine. You could use the word God but that word is so embedded in violence is the word God. It's a weapon word, right. Since the beginning and I'm thinking about this text from la camp called count with Saudi, Marquis the Saudi, who who wrote famously, you know, France is still an effort to be revolutionary that the French revolutionaries in the 18th century were not really radical. Because if they were radical they wouldn't stand that nature is as you were saying pre moral a more and therefore that it is it includes what would be perceived from a local perspective as cruelty. Right. Yeah. No that that's it that's a perspective. I mean I'm not here advocating in any way cruelty. I would I think kindness is underestimated but now if we map in the unconscious and Darwin in there, and even the self which we could say well the self is is is produced by the one mess polarity of the universe. And so we have this creel multiplicity that is infinitely dense energetical powerful in longing for manifestation, such that, and with the shadow of the one right with it which is it's it's inner duality. It's constantly branching just to limit its own power. So you have this branching, which for me it's very much the branching of evolutionary. Right, but in seen from another perspective, seen as a sort of a self limitation of overabundance. And, and so if you transpose that in the my crocosm of the individual. Isn't it what we need to do constantly right we have this. If we use the psychoanalytic language right this immature desire for for totality for for grasping. So randomly and chaotically whatever we can grasp. And then, thankfully, we can incorporate a faithfulness to some oneness, which can be called purpose, which can be called the self which can be called the value. And this is what philosophical health is saying via the creolectics methodology so if you have a creole then if you want to be able to sort of, you have this metaphor in your book of writing the horse. So you want to be able to do some both logos and an ectos like, you know, curating of the manifestation, such that you give it some order ideally an order that is going to be still alive so let's call it a sacred. fault, or sacred sacred world the micro world. And, and I think that's you write that that's what jaspers is saying but that's I think what a lot of that's what you're saying, in a way that's what also Friday same perhaps less excitingly or less creatively with more sort of moralism in him. So it sounds to me. And, and again I'm saying this a bit confusingly but it sounds to me that there is a unity behind all these discourses. There is. You need depth psychology but also object relations psychology in terms of the feet phenomenal field you're embedded in and how that works, but you can use to argue that individuation is a task. It's a travail I would say, and it's your wrestling with powers greater than yourself, and you often don't know that. And so shaping that into a, I would call it a living Gestalt is a morally strenuous activity. Because we are pulled by the objects or the orders in nature nature in so many ways that shaping the self is very difficult. And we have the province certainly in our in America of extreme narcissism. We're very narcissistic culture. And it's not global I think I think we are on that. Yes, yeah. So that narcissism. I like your word that it's trying to create a false totality around the imperial cell. And here I like Yostra's notion of shipwreck or foundering, where that bloated shell of self worship can crack. Maybe through another human being getting inside of you and helping you see how messed up your narcissism. Yeah, so it's the quest for the talent. I'm thinking of Levin us here to has this real danger. Right. But this is so interesting. I need to interrupt you because otherwise, there is so much there to unfold. And I won't be able to grasp. And I'm not able to grasp all the fruits but I see to here. We're going to leave the second for later it's it I want to speak about the person through Levin us. The first one is that you talked about the travail of let's say of self curation or self edification and use the term moral but you previously talked about creation and the artist and there's another French word which is over. Why not talk about over rather than Travay. More niche in right, I would say. Right. So the, you're creating a structure, an emotional field, a framework within which these pulsations from below, again a spatial term are shaped and contain. And that's the hardest human task was impulses rule the world. And those impulses are kind of like a bad infinite. They just keep going. And they don't go anywhere. And anywhere important except maybe leads to a misery. Yeah. Right. Right. So the artists in a way as always proposed a model for that. And God knows artists have impulses and actually need impulse. So I tend to say that they are throwing each work of art is a message in a bottle like in the in the song and they say they send SOS. But SOS as a an acronym for system over and style. So through through the ideal of style, which can be very painful to attain the artist is sort of creating an analogy I believe with with what a philosophically healthy person might try to do is some sort of coherence, right. And that style can only manifest in a nerve or so. That's sort of the functions, I would say as a protection against narcissism because you need to show in the world that unity you can just not fantasize it right. And ideally that idea, ideally, ideally and dangerously that might lead at least in the horizon to a system. And by that I mean that it can. And that's perhaps the limit of art. And that is bad art is that at one point you need to start theorizing you need to start transposing the aesthetic into the the epistemological right so SOS that we are. I mean when we healthy we're constantly sending the SOS to the others into ourselves right. That's what philosophical health is trying to do to sort of in dialogue like we're doing today. Yeah, give some some parents of shape or point to some co-creation of worlds and I'll finish on that. This this moment is intervention by saying that I think that philosophy since Plato with sometimes bad answers I mean the Republic at some moments it sounds like it sounds worse than then Stalin and Hitler put together but nevertheless it philosophy is this almost mutation of the mind that says wait a minute, we can have paradise on earth, not in the afterlife and and let's build it together as a world. Now philosophy is very hard to do because it goes against all of our impulses, which can be narcissistic thinking generically is a struggle. But I think, and you would strongly agree with this philosophy has a great healing function. And I have this weird theory that a lot of philosophers don't do psychoanalysis, because they want a cleaner universe where they don't have to pay attention to what's going on below. So it's like a chess game for some, whereas it should be a modeling for others and yourself and your family and whatnot of what a transfigured person will look like, who adds novel creative products to the cultural world. Even if it's in action and not writing, you can go through dance painting and so on music. But it's, it's attempt to heal yourself, which is the hard part and then make that as a template or model for all of us. It's kind of ambition, but here I think Socrates Trump's play though, whatever we know. Socrates is through play though, but is not building an empire. Play though was. What is the truth in what you just said, which could be rephrased in the following manner is that it's already healing to start speculating without having all the answers, which is what it's about right. It's when you enter that when you practice that it's it's like a natural drug, I think and it actually I think we can show probably and, and I think there's, there is quite a lot of emerging quantitative science about the effects of purpose in life. And just the fact of thinking about universals and manipulating concepts in your mind. It's probably for the for the chemistry of the brain, although I don't like to do this kind of. So, so and indeed so play to being more systematic and propositional, sometimes fails to a knowledge that is easy, it is enough to be on the way towards knowledge, rather than to be already there, right. That's why I prefer to use the term sense making when I speak of philosophical health rather than me making because we want to avoid fetishizing meaning, which is sometimes been made. Yeah. And so which leads us to the second point that I left in the air a few minutes ago which is the person. So, this is interesting because I think that's what you spoke about Levin as and the face I think the face of the other in front of you I think that represents his person would or her person would and that being a term that cannot never be pinpointed defined very clear and it's a blurry space, which leads me to a provocative question I don't probably not provocative for you but for our listeners in our times and that since you're a Jungian part or at least partly and since we're talking about personhood. It seems to me unavoidable to speak about the difference between woman and man here. See what I'm getting at. So they seem to be more attentive to the person within the other cultural training. It doesn't matter. Well man seem to be more focused to towards the function of the entity in front of you. And therefore if you are a functionalist, you might actually sometimes consider some humans at the same level than this glass for example. Yes. I think that happens in warfare. Well, I think one of the interesting questions is with gender is the role of empathy. Schopenhauer saw empathy. It's a phase transition it's an ontological event empathy it's not. Oh I see your head or I see your heart or feel it. It's more a process of stripping away the shells between individuals so that there's a not fusion in the borderline personality sense, but a deep connection that has being to use that ultra slippery word. And if women are more empathic. That can be an extremely important moment in social political life that we're not getting. Now I don't want to speculate about male energy female energy that's endlessly complex is not lots of different positions on it. But I think I just look at my childhood male energy was always competitive to create the challenge to beat out people and to be the best. And that can produce a lot of misery for a lot of people. That's what you do. Right. Which can be found today both in men and women by the way. Yeah, yeah, sure, sure. And I think Freud's right that we have creative energies but there is a death drive. It's not instinct in German. It's a drive. And when I look at war. And when I look at human being self destructive powers which are amazing. I think there is something like a death drive. I was very resistant to accepting that. I think he's right. Right. Go ahead. Sorry. Here, perhaps we should be a bit. There's also ecstatic naturalists or creolectricians or. And say, well, death is a perspective right. That's our thumb thing is the reverse of something else. So, in fact, that doesn't exist per se. We have an ontology of becoming. So the problem in calling it death drive is that we've, we might fall into white head. I know you read or white had to call simply a fallacy of misplaced concreteness. Right. So, I mean, that's against me sound like I'm justifying cruelty, but I'm trying to be a moral here and say that there will be always a perspective from which. Anything that you do is cruel. There could also be a perspective from whichever anything that you do is just a, the ecstasy of becoming. Right. And I wanted to come go back to the term ecstasy which is in, in the very center of your let's call it quasi system which is a compliment. So, and we completely agree on this, I think, without knowing each other, we were writing the same things. I think that the real the real is the ecstasy of the creole. And so, by taking the etymology of ecstasy is exteriorization, right. Yeah. So, who are we to, I mean you said yourself, good and evil come after who are we to decide what is ontologically bad or that's a very difficult question and I know that Plato thinks that the good is, is what we all pursuing. But is it is, is the, is the, the creole source is ecstasy nature pursuing the good, or is it just exploding in all directions and containing in itself the negation of that explosion, which creates this constant. You know, branching, which is an attempt, we see it as branching, but it's an attempt towards unification that never really happens. Unification and multiple and expansion or difference. They are amoral. If you take that ontology. So, we, having said that, if, since we are living in the world we want to create some sort of order therefore we want to create some sort of morality, perhaps. How do we, how do we combine both, how do we combine a amoral ontology with a moral politics. Yeah, I agree with purse that aesthetics grounds ethics and ethics grounds logic. The aesthetic is after the sumum bonum or the ultimate good, but there is no ultimate good on this earth for sure, and maybe even after if we do survive bodily death and so on. It's an aesthetic project to balance what we're inclined to call good versus evil. For often good reasons. And it's a shaping toward a whole that remains fragmentary and embedded in the many. And one of the best accounts of the one in the many is in William James is pluralistic universe, where there are many many's and many ones, and you don't have to choose. Both operating ontologically, and I admire his, his way of coming through psychology into philosophy from the principles of psychology to his later writings. And by way that's that's going to be hard for a philosopher to accept right that there are many ones. The multiples. Okay, I like a girl as the French say, we could perhaps let it pass, but many ones that anti philosophical. One's are also subject to entropy and change. And if you don't grasp the ubiquity of entropy you don't see what's surrounding us and within us. Entropy is overcome by theft. So any food I eat is stolen from a life form whether it's vegetable or meat, whatever your choices are there. I can't get through the day without stealing energy from living systems. They die. So I don't. But I will and then the worms will get me so pay back. So it's a nature is really a brutal business. What is it's enjoying itself. Lacan said that if God exists, then he is really sauce as you as you know right so resource being that French term. I'm saying that for the for the listeners. So some might know that a it's sort of extreme enjoyment. It is used in sexuality. Yes, as orgasm, but so if we see nature as as in that ecstasy as a is a process. We might assume that this is a form of resistance and that's that's again that's not considering necessarily how does it feel for the localities right you I so wouldn't a form of divine attainment of knowledge be one that fuses with the fact that this ecstasy is enjoyment and if and if I'm about to die in the next minute. That's still part of the enjoyment. I agree thoroughly with that it's a good corrective to an over emphasis on entropy, because we saw is in nature not just the human psyche. When you blast through the name of the father and get into proper use of the symbolic and so on. There is joy everywhere as well. I've been to India three times and I've seen horrors and I've seen an expression of resource that's almost unmatched in the world. And it's there. And I think we, we seek it. And we get it. Yeah, you're right. And that leaves the silence because we would like it to be distributed locally such that there are no local perspectives that say, I am suffering. I'm lonely. I've been betrayed, etc, which is a a factor of human experience, whether it's an illusion or not, is it is something. I mean, even if it's an illusion, it's, it's a problem, even a philosophical problem, right, the famous problem of evil for theology, which leads me to, I also said that I was leaving the world, the word Theosis in suspense. I want to come back to that. Because I mean, when you speak of jaspers, and I agree with you that is even philosophically I think he is underestimated compared to Heidegger. And but I think things are changing. Some people are starting to reconsider him, even in, in fields that are unexpected, unexpected like AI, and where the cypher can be compared to what is happening in the black box of machine learning and etc. But I'm back to the idea of Theosis. Okay, so we know, and again, this is for the listener that there is a Orthodox tradition in Christology that takes seriously the fact that we in this life, we can become godlike. Theosis. Right, Theosis. And, and so this is a sort of a through its spiritual process of purification, both behavioral and an epistemological. But I was wondering here, if that Theosis is not a, a sort of answer to the problem of evil. And I'll give a very simple example to illustrate that, which is gandhi's non violence. I think gandhi's non violence is a very interesting moment in history were, you see, you see what I mean right where the, the, the problem of evil is, is, is countered by an embodied epistemology of Theosis which is, you know, I disregard the illusion of suffering by submitting myself to it in way that is without resistance. I do it. I don't do it by adhering to some sort of to some sort of nihilism that would say, you know, everything, whatever happens, it's, it's enjoyment. I'm doing it in a way that recognizes that the multiple and difference need the one. And therefore, that there might be a horizon, even if we never reach it, where you some sort of unification is desirable. And therefore in the political sphere and domain. It is not ontologically, ontologically false to claim, well, union is possible, whether it's union of India union of today of the earth, right around the shared cosmology. So, I do think in the ontology that we are proposing if we accept that there is not only multiplicity and difference in this nature and utterance but just by the fact to speak your language. If we say nature, we are supposing a unity, we're not saying that they're three natures. They're there for the politics are there. There is actually a book called the politics of the one with several texts were the question of the one and the many is taking seriously for contemporary politics. And I think that the English on that point to give a very schematic and simplified a explanation of the last 3000 years, ontologically speaking is that we have been under the region under the regime of the one. We have an American revolution with the king, the church monotheism, at least in the Western world. And then we sort of shifted dialectically to, or creole, electrically to its opposite to a discourse of the many right the democratic discourse of pluralism. Which I think as a 10 and now we're going to be able to talk about the US right or the US that we all became in a way, maybe Russia and China that will talk about that to me but so I think this, this moment of multiplicity as reached is the definition of contradiction is that I don't believe in, like Shant al-Mufin agonistic pluralism I don't believe that you can have all these communities and just let them fight for for their own little totem or absolute and anyway, some sort of order will emerge of their fight, and by the way it presents itself as a leftist discourse but is actually a reactivation of Adam Smith's invisible hand applied to to communities so when we read a bit of Lacan even psychoanalysis, we know that there's no such thing as the good community all communities are imperialists. So, knowing that we're going to stop, you know, giving candies to the good communities and, and blaming the bad communities for being fascist. They are all fascist. And the problem is that they, if there is only the attempt or the belief that we will let the micro is pre the core inter shark each other and that's going to create some sort of pluralistic order without a shared cosmology I think this is totally wrong and this is what I have now. And now, thankfully the earth is calling us to a cup and saying no we need to return to some form of oneness by negating the plural moment. Okay, so it's oneness in otherness oneness in diversity oneness in multiplicity. Oneness needs to come back in the equation. And what I would suggest here is that, and there is actually a proposal on that, you know, very often you probably know that we come up with an idea then we do a little bit of search and realize that someone already had it. And that's fine. I was playing with the term ecotheosis, ecotheosis the other day. So, so a theosis that would be not just individualistic right the I'm God like and, and I despise all the, the ape humans. No, it's, it's like a collective. Including non humans. So, and I realized that Roland favor from Claremont University I don't know if he moved but he has this chapter called ecotheology ecoprocess and ecotheosis, James to to go in the same direction so I'll stop here very long winded digression but you can pick any element that you wish to bounce and and and perhaps let me know if this answers in in a in a way that seems satisfactory to your concern it seems to be concerned about suffering and violence and I find your perspective very congenial to me. I think I'm a little nervous about any chiliology after Darwin but humans have tell away they have goals. And seeking the one through a common cosmology can be a powerful creative healing urge in our species. So I would be very happy with that as a theory and hopefully a fact because communities I talk about community natural communities and communities of interpreters and natural communities are fascist. They operate through the fewer principle their signs and symbols are locked in there's all kinds of censorship and control mechanism within that ubiquitous not those natural communities that we all inhabit. There is a moment where as Josiah Royce talks about it community of interpreters can emerge and he talked about in terms of spirit the spirit interpreter bouncing off St. Paul a bit, but the spirit pulls you toward a much more pluralistic use of science and symbols and power structures and has a critique in Foucault sense built in to undermine, at least on a micro level some of these demonic structures of power. So, but the quest for the one. If it's not filled with very specific tribal content. My tribe. If it's not wallowing in that or trapped in that. Then the emergence of a real engaged dialectic with other horizons of meaning and shapes of self consciousness can happen. It's a fitful process it's not. We're done. That's not ever going to happen. Because of inertia and laziness and all kinds of things. So the one is there. There's no one one I would say unless it's in the tiniest sense. There's no cultural one this worldwide. Never happen. Do you want to explain to the listener a bit more about the. About platinus is one. The one in Plutinus has no treats. It doesn't create. It doesn't cause. It's not filled with a person hood or an emotional structure or intervening in history. It's the place of overflow. And the question is, does the one plan. To produce a world soul or actually news first mine. Or is it just an emergence. And if so why mine the way it's structured universal mine. Why does world soul come out and then my soul come out and then matter at the bottom of the list. Which proclas corrected. Come out. So the one isn't doing anything. Just there overflowing. So if you are trying to write to it, you don't get platinus. So that is, is what's the relationship between that one and the one. I'm making it as a sort of a very artificial connection here just to get you to talk about the US but you know we know that the motto of us is out of many one. So that oneness. The US. What is it now. It's, it's, it's a would be a could be a want to be. Not a fact. In fact, the whole system is geared toward turning people against each other. And it's, it's almost like a wrap a rabid infection culture. I have to hate somebody to get through the day. Right. I'd like to suggest something that the American one is the virtual in, in, in the sense of the metaverse right in the sense of digital virtual is that. Yeah, they. And that's probably because of their deeply ingrained. Catholicism or, or, or christianism right the idea that paradise is not on earth. I mean we had a moment where we thought Americans were saying oh we're actually paradise you know is on earth it's us we're creating, but very quickly and very slowly. At least seems to me that they're more interested in artifacts and virtual images of paradise. The Hollywood, and now all the, the digital world, while I would argue that China and Russia are still very interested in embodied reality. And so and we might criticize and then say, and yes, I mean, of course, it's, it's fascist it's in the sense that it, it doesn't allow for much, I mean, it doesn't always allow for freedom of thought those are I don't want to enter into cliches about China because But, but still, I mean, we can criticize their passion for order, but we can also We can also acknowledge that they are still attached to the real to reality, not the real in the Lacanica but to simply reality. And the world as and paradise on earth with all the problems that it might suggest while America seems to have. I wrote a novel called paradise which is sort of a duplication on the earth a virtual duplication on the earth so when you do that is like you totally give up on on on reality and then you have this chaos. So which is falsely ordered in in the clone reality of the virtual be one explanation. Yeah, the one of the perennial human curses is apocalyptic is which some religions uses a weapon to control. apocalypticism is all over the place and certainly in America, partly because of millennial Protestantism and other forces. And apocalypticism is driving our economy. There's a panic purchasing say of gold and silver right now. And silver and coin shops, because of an apocalyptic apocalyptic sense that fiat currency is going to fail. But it's a bricks currency from the East Brazil India China Russia South Africa, and maybe Saudi Arabia that will compete with the dollar. So there we have a lot of what they call preppers that on YouTube about how to protect yourself for when the world collapses. And it's, it's shaping and distorting people's lives. But it seems to be an addiction. Right and embedded in the very form of capitalism that America is producing right now if you take Elon Musk is at the same time. Yeah, the AI and claiming that a lot AI is going to be the end of humanity this can be done in the same gesture by the same person so is that apocalyptic capitalism or Yeah, the AI scares growing, even among scientists and some politicians, but it would I think it'd be more like challenges to specific regions of human activity. I can't imagine AI could replace a good therapist for example, although that they're working on that. And science fiction, going back to as a mouse I robot has been wrestling with what's going to happen when they attain self consciousness and autonomy and make decisions that aren't programmed by us. So if you want to understand the future science fiction is often called speculative history. And there's a lot of work, very high level work being done in that genre that over to wrestle with so many of the implications of AI in our lives jobs will be lost. The stakes have come out of AI recently, and people have written about that it's been on YouTube. So, that's another apocalyptic word, and I think it's going to be more piecemeal challenges rather than an i robot rebellion to conquer our species and get rid of it. I mean that's an extreme apocalyptic scenario. But it's a mystery. What's going on inside of one of these things. Right. And so how do you articulate with it because you say there's nothing outside of nature so AI is nature. Everything is my thought is nature. Rocket your brother's nature tinkerbell is nature. And they're all real, but differently real. So they're different. What do you call it levels states of the real. And how does that relate to two states of consciousness. Levels of consciousness levels of the real. Is that what you're looking into. And because you did say that they were different. Everything is in nature but it differently. Yeah, yeah, it prevails differently. So you could say a Shakespearean character is real, but not as a physical space time unit. What is embodied by a physical space time unit is Shakespeare more real than his plays are his plays more real than his rotting body. Real can be a weapon word. My world is more real than yours. And I would say I very much appreciate the principle called ontological parody, whatever is and whatever way it is, is real. It's an ontological priority which was very strong in the Middle Ages and philosophy, but you have degrees of moving from potentiality to actuality to octopus purus and Aquinas pure actuality and with some Aristotle in there. But there aren't degrees. They're just modes or dimensions. My desire to eat some ice cream is no less real than World War two. But it's very differently real. In terms of effects. That sounds like a good title. I might use that for. I suggest that we perhaps pause here not not that we don't have much more to say but I think maybe will. We'll do several episodes. I will, though, and with one question. If this were and I mean you're still young and I'm sure we can have this conversation for another decade or two. But if this were your last question, last question of your last interview, what would you like me to ask you. The relationship between nature, nature and nature nature, symmetrical or asymmetrical. That's a puzzle. So, nature, natureing affects nature nature does what happens in nature nature that is the orders of the world affects nature nature. I don't have an answer. But I think about it a lot. Great. That's a great speculative last point to to end on, you know, a lot of love to end his sessions on this moments of puzzlement because they, they facilitate the digestion of what was said, I think it's a great question. I'm going to think about it without brushing into an answer now. So, well, thank you very much. We will stop the recording here. Okay, great. Thank you so much.