 Excellent. So here we are with not only two philosophers, but two Roberts. And a few weeks ago, I had a conversation with Robert Corrington about, let's say, different views of the world, but mostly his extracted naturalism. And what we're going to do today is we are kindly going to ask Robert Cummings-Naveel, who listened to the recording and to our conversation, to choose an element from which we could start a conversation today. And doesn't have to be an element that we consider important. It's mostly one that Bob Naveel would like to put emphasis on. And I believe you have had some time to reflect upon that. So, yes. Well, I think that, first of all, by last name is not Naveel, though it was once. Now it's Neville. Okay. My family pronounces it. And I want to, first of all, express my deep appreciation for your previous conversation, especially for the fact that the two of you who seemed to be so much in agreement with the temporality of things. And I want to say that I agree with that also. Things really are temporal and in all the ways that the two of you discussed before. And what I would like to do is to add a new dimension to that discussion and talk a bit about eternity. I don't know that that would register much with either one of you. It's not very popular in metaphysics nowadays. And it's, well, it's a difficult topic to bring up. But the reason that I believe in eternity is this. Suppose that you have a moment in time, which is passing. And that's that's a present moment. It goes from the actualized past to actualizing the future, which of course shifts the future possibility somewhat. Those three modes of time past, present, and future are together. They have to be together, but they're not together temporarily. And that's the point that I want to stress. So they're not together temporarily, they're together, what I call eternally. Now, eternity here doesn't mean a huge present. It doesn't mean that the past determines the future completely. And so that there's a past eternity. It doesn't mean that nor does it mean anything in the future. Rather, it means that which is without time. And that I think creates time. Now, how could that be? What, what is it that can be said to create time? If it's a determinant thing, I think it's created. Not the creator, but created. And so the creator has to be in itself indeterminate. Except insofar as it creates determinant things. That's a complicated idea. But I believe that it means that eternity is the eternal act of creation. The products of which are not separable from the act, but are the determinant things. So if it's, if it's an act, it can be considered as not determinant. It just makes the determinant things be what they are with whatever kinds of indeterminacy are within them. So why don't I stop there and let you all ask questions about this. Well, that's, there's a lot to unfold there. Great. And I have noted references that echo in my mind, both with Platonism, Orthodox Christianism, this idea they have many discussions about the indeterminate. And the act of spurs, of course. But I will rather than comment because I'm not a specialist of theology, I would ask a question here. What is the difference between infinity and eternity? And perhaps before, perhaps you want to write that down. And then let Robert Corrington also make a comment and a question, then you can take them both together. What do you think? Sure. Yeah. Robert. Okay, well, I find the notion of an indeterminate ground of being. And you sometimes use that language very congenial. It makes sense to me. Is the act of creation equivalent to eternity 18. Yes, it is. Okay. And God does not have mind or archetypes in. It has no character. Right. Yeah, just indeterminate. Right. Which for me would be like nature natureing. And I would say intelligibility comes later down the road. Now, temporal language gets us in trouble sometimes. But the eruptions of the ground do allow for patterns to emerge in the determinate world and form is a very important potency or power in nature. And if a gestalt of meaning comes out of that, I would more than people see it. But I think you're right in the divine. There is no archetypal blueprint. There is creating and then the world has to make its determinate momenta in the flow of somebody. That does make sense to me, but eternity, as you rightly said, is not the most popular word in metaphysics today. But you're clear. It's not an eternal present. It's not. And it has a way of being responsible. That's the word for the various modes of time. But it's not in them. Is that correct? That is the divine is not temporal. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that that makes sense to me. I think my focus might be, and it's not a big difference on the potencies and powers of the ground or abyss. Because the abyss has to be there in a Barthian sense or Tolikian sense. That when the forms emerge, they have to earn their keep in a Darwinian world. And first would say the forms evolve. And that's a very tricky notion. I work worried about that a lot. What would that mean? But you can't have a determinate world without an indeterminate ground. I agree with you on that. So I think maybe the difference would be what types of metaphors and categories we deploy to get to this point. And in the end, I don't see a whole lot of difference. I'm just shy away from words that you feel comfortable with. Right. That's a minor point. Just the comfort factor and metaphysics. Yeah. Let me first answer Louise's question. What are the difference between indeterminacy and infinity. I think that there are indeterminacy is vague and can have two meanings. One of which is infinity. And that's that's like Thomas is a ground of being which is the full actuality that contains everything that gets trimmed down and the creation of the world. So the neoplatonic form of the one that gets expressed as the dyad, which presupposes a one and so forth. And I don't believe that I think that that requires too much. It suggests that there's determinacy already present in the antecedent. And I would rather say that the indeterminate is empty and makes something new. Now it's that emptiness that is what I mean by indeterminacy. It's the emptiness, which means that you don't have to have yet one more determinant thing relating to the determinant things and so forth. So I would say that the act is something that moves from nothing to something. Okay. We are moving. I mean, I'm thinking about an auditor who finds this dialogue. I'm an essay specialist who might have the feeling that he has been moved to the top of Mount Everest in in less than three minutes. So I would like to sort of have a little bit of compassion for those who might not be into the nuances of theology and who might just, you know, try to. Give words to the sense that they might find in themselves that they are not pure machines. There is this nail cosmology that is a nice story that says that well, in fact, given the the progress of. AI and and and the digitization of the world. It is likely that in fact, in some other world, this events already happen and we're living in this computer simulation. And I think that one valid counter argument to that is the sense of quality eternity or infinity but of course not the infinity that is a sum right the infinity that is a leap. Any human might feel in themselves and give it different names, love, anxiety, etc. So I think it's important to explain perhaps to these people that the reason why we are here talking about these things is not because we have some particular form of mental disease is that because we. Dare to put words. Onto that feeling without fearing. To be called abnormal and feet and adjusted. Or soon to be unemployed. And I think there's a lot of young people who aspire to study philosophy or even theology or some kind of. cosmological discourse and I think it's good to tell them that yes I mean it's especially today in the world that is. increasingly mechanized via digital forms. It's more than ever time to I think. Put these questions forward and. We are the three of us if we connect this with a previous conversation. The three of us are saying that. Creation is something important. I think this is how we, we can say things in a simple way, something important and something that transcends. Human industry, it's not just something that you put on. You add to the world where we say is that there's some form of inner act in a movement inner drive depending on what language. We'd like to use. That. Comes from the inside to the outside and contributes to the making of worlds. Now, I think what people would like to perhaps understand from both your perspectives is. I many things, but I would propose one. Which is the following. So we let's agree that there is this act of creation. It is often said that in order to be able to to shape to change to create. We need an obstacle. We need a material. So what's the material. Upon which this creation. Unfolds and acts on how would you call that material. Well, what I would call it is that it's just a mistake to think that there has to be a material through which creation takes place. I think the creation is really moves through nothing. It's immediate. There's no. Substantial non being that it has to over destroy. And that. The act of creation simply produces the things that are created. Now, could it be that this world is one where sort of like matrix. We're dealing with a fiction. Well, I don't know. You cannot tell that from my theory of creation. The theory of creation comes by saying that any two things are partly related internally because they condition one another. And are partly related externally. We have independent things. And this means anything. Anything. So I gave us an example of time. But you also have space. Or we have your thoughts and my thoughts. Or we have this conversation with the beginning and the middle. And sometime in the next hour and end. So. Anything can serve as the argument for. This act of creation. But what is created is something for us to determine in other ways. And so that means that we have to look around us and see was there's a common sense world that we both share. There's a scientific world. And perhaps you hold on much better than I. And so. It's, I would be quite willing to say that given our current cosmologies taking that in a general sense about what the nature of the cosmos. Any of our opinions now are likely to be mere hypotheses that are going to be amended in the future. Yeah. Well, I want us a little bit more. Yamination from the indeterminate ground on nothing. This is a word one can use. It's a very tricky word phenomenologically. Have you encountered what does it mean? How does it appear in creation? I don't like the word creation so much as the emanated product. And existentially, I think we're born with an ontological. We have a deep ontological wound, which is the birth trauma when we move away from the ground. And there's a gap in there that's filled with anxiety. And so we're trying to stuff that gap with some of the orders of the world. But that wound goes with us to the day we die. The effects of the ontological creative act of your language is the effects of emanation that push themselves into the human process. And these potencies and powers are not necessarily benevolent. They're just events hours. And you're chatter and reshape. But I think that's why I push psychoanalysis in ways that you bothered a comp uncomfortable. But I think we don't do metaphysics. Unless we are acutely sensitive to the ontological wound, which I would call coming out of my language the ontological birth trauma. There's a rip tear of break is deep down in our psyche and our souls. And everything we do is an attempt to fill it in. And usually these attempts fail. Almost always. Because we can't. It's a different ontological dimension that comes into us like a break, like an ontological difference, which you have in your system. That vibrates within us. Through a human process and all of its deep prevail. And so we're trying to recapture the myth of origin. The danger is his chili knew so well as we create these demonic gods of space, which are tribal competitive filled with negative energies. Identification energies which can have a positive side, as well as a negative side. But we're struggling. And metaphysics is one of the ways we can reorient our life around what is missing, which is a relation to the ground, which I think is correlated with eros in platonic and chronic sense. And emanation here I side with Emerson, not platinus. I'm not as interested in the big emanation, but in the William James sense emanations. And Emerson talks about emanations upon emanation. We're in that process we're an emanation. But there's a big loss to be put in a finite frame that we are. We crave infinity. We crave infinity. We have a lot of Aristotle's bad infinites and Hegel's sense. And we don't succeed fully. So living with the ontological wound is living with the fact that we're foundlings we humans in a world that turns out to be Darwinian indifferent. And that's a very hard story. So the comfort factor in metaphysics is knowing that the wound can't be closed. But it can be radically transformed. So that it can point toward what you would call the infinite. So that's how I would frame that. Right. I agree with what you say. Pretty much about human life and the sense of anxiety that's produced in in human beings. But I would also want to say that there are other spheres of life. So for instance, we live within nature. And nature is pretty big a whole lot bigger than the human world. So what what what happens when human life is no longer possible and the world is either collapsing together or expanding apart or whatever it does. Or we live in say an economic world where it's very important to the federal government to figure out how to control inflation. And there are lots of issues there that need to be worked into a larger issue about. Well, I'm not sure it's larger. But it might be larger than the issues of human life. So it's not that I'm uncomfortable with your psychoanalytic commentary. It's just that it's a it's a small part of the world in which we live. Yeah, the question is, how far can the metaphors or categories of psychoanalysis be pushed into cosmology or metaphysics. And I think one of the clues might be a connection between Darwin and Carl you, who I think was a cosmologist in a way that Freud wasn't. It might be a metaphysician some has argued. And the Darwinian model has tremendous scope even in astronomy. Right. So if there's a correlation there, where do the sizzling or dead end archetypes emerge to transform. Not only the human process, but everything within the one nature that there is to try to find form like stability outside of the human process. So when I say psychoanalysis I mean something very different from just a probing into our complexes. There's something in nature that is related to an ontological wound and a burst trauma now I'm stretching metaphors perhaps beyond where they should go. I don't know, but it's, it's, I find it interesting to try. It's psychoanalysis is too narcissistic to narrow to anthropocentric. I agree with that. It has to be a different kind of psychoanalysis. I call it ordinal psychoanalysis, but you don't need all that language. Just it's stretched beyond self reflective narcissism and tries to get the human process the self in the kind of rhythms that you see in nature, not in a romantic French fairly sense because that'll never happen, except for delusion. But in the sense that we feel the struggle of nature as it pulls out of or is pushed out of the indeterminate ground. And that that is a kind of ontological world in nature. I would say one of the big lessons of Darwin is extinction, extinction and entropy rule the roots in the long run. So we can be anti-entropic when we steal stuff like plants and animals we ingest. But that's short lived. So ultimate anti-entropy energy, just theft, which is tragic, but necessary. That's how we frame that. If I may try to recapture few things that we've said in epistemological terms, it seems to me that when we are saying that psychoanalysis can be a form of cosmology. We are, we are basically, I hear a neck of my voice, unfortunately. But we're saying that there is an epistemology that seems or cosmology of knowledge, because basically psychoanalysis is about knowledge, knowledge that is not conscious, conscious. And for knowledge to process, then it's to be data. And if we connect that to the Darwinian model, it's still data. It's chemical, biological data. So it seems to me that I'm going to use your last name since you're both called Robert, but if you don't mind. It seems to me that Corrington is saying, answering my question about what is the substance that creation is using seems to me here that the real is made of data. And it's a world, it's a pan epistemological world. It's all about knowledge and data, but knowledge that can be unknown. While what I heard from Neville, so to use the American pronunciation, not the French is that it seems to me closer to the vacuity of the Buddhists. So we have to imagine that the real upon which that creation advances is actually a nothingness, but a nothingness field perhaps with potential, correct me if I'm wrong. But what is very interesting there is that through Jacques Lacan, you could be reconnected since Lacan had this idea of the real as being the numinom, this non presence, this indeterminate that holds everything together. So Robert Corrington, would you agree that perhaps there is a connection between, not that we necessarily need a connection, but between you two and would you both agree with this analysis regarding the real, perhaps you might want to say there is no real there is, there is only illusion, and even this world that we think our worlds they are illusions. The reason with that, and I will end here is that is that, and this is the Nietzschean critique on religion and theology is that if we say that the what appears to us as different worlds and different domains of the real is an illusion, it devaluates life on earth, and then it's just, it becomes a narrative where the strongest story wins, and it doesn't really matter because it's just, it's just a story. Well, to raise the question of AI before, because that's a high anxiety problem for most of us that look into it, for good or ill. The real is very real, I hate the word real because everything's real in the way that it's real. So Tinkerbell is no less real than the Atlantic Ocean just differently real. We have to have a sense of the real otherwise you're right it's Nietzsche's will to power where perspectival shining determines what's true. And AI has to somehow understand the real as a touchstone of any epistemology of any theory of life of any human horizon has meaning swirling around and competing with each other. And there's also a sense about nothingness that it's in the interstices of the world that we also encounter nothingness. There's the lesser nothingness, as first put it in the bigger nothingness, these spatial terms don't help that much, but we encounter these shivering potencies of nothingness. I think so I've got some of that very right. And they're not blows of all. There's this kind of a shipwreck. Yaspers talks about our meaning horizon collapses when nothingness is inserts itself to give it purpose in a way into nature and the cell. Now where I see a Lacanian move and I come to conflict with Stava, who I take very seriously. There's momentum within the unconscious of the self that is the depth unconscious and the unconscious of nature. So when I dream, I'm not only dreaming complexes and maybe archetype, I'm dreaming the dreams of nature nature and as they come into nature nature. So psychoanalysis can get down into the unconscious of nature, albeit in a different way than it deals with the collective unconscious in you sense. So that's how I put it. I think what I would like to do is to deny Louise's comment that the object of knowledge is all data. I think data are aspects of the past and finished facts. But most of the time we're in present conversation or thinking. And that's a matter of stretching ideas of moving ideas of program always of creating. So there are no, no data and consciousness accepted abstraction from the past. And I think that the future is a kaleidoscope of forms. But that changes with every decision made in every place where decisions are made in the present. And the way the temporal way that past present and future relate. That's a pretty complicated scientific matter that I sort of want to avoid myself. So, if you ask what a person is. I think the most important thing to say about a person is how they're obligated. And obligation of course has to do with values. So I'd say that we are obligated to tell the truth under most circumstances of speaking. We are obligated to make good moral choices. We are obligated to improve the world in so far as it's affected by our own actions. And that gets into politics and so forth. And then I think we're obligated also to make of ourselves full people where we integrate the others. Now, those are the things that make for a person. What about a baby who's just on the way to that. Or a person who's a bit more senile than you and me and doesn't have obligations anymore. I would say that the structure of the self is a harmony. In fact, there are many harmonies. And among the most important are those of the go from our birth through our life to our death. And that harmony is not is not obligated except in the middle part. On the other hand, it's because we have that harmony that has a genetic code that lives in an environment and affects the environment and is affected by it and so forth. So, I would say that the full fledged meeting of a person is that at some point they take on obligations. They have the obligations whether or not they take them on. The continuity of a person has to do with say biological matters or say one's place in history. So forth. It's interesting because for the listeners who might be born in the last years of the last century or early years of the 21st century, they might not understand what's going on here is that there is a continuation of debate about psychoanalysis and the responsibility of the person. What we can note is that today psychoanalysis has lost a lot of its social importance and its power. So, I mean, people go to cognitive behavioral therapists and all sorts of new therapist or even to philosophical counselors in my case, but psychoanalysis doesn't seem to be so influential and in some cases like where I live here in Sweden, it has been violently combated for its lack of evidence and I'm not saying that we should be in the evidence base or humans practices, of course. But so my point is that someone who might not be informed by this debates and by the fact that psychoanalysis like Marxism where where the two are dominant discourses of the 20th century, they might not really understand why suddenly we're talking about the person. Now, since you talked about the person and since correct me if I'm wrong, both of you are Christian, correct? Would you agree with that? No, I'm not. Okay, so you're not. Okay. So, so I'm going to come back. So I cannot attack your the question of the real via the personification of Christ, whether we believe in it or not. But I'm going to insist on having you realize that you have the obligation to tell me or not. What is what is real in a world that is at its core creation because we could imagine that if creation is so powerful and so ever going, we could imagine that things never really get to fully exist. And that would be interesting. I think it might even be true. And I would have actually, that would explain for the point of view of the person that you're bringing, why people might feel constantly incomplete. Is that instead of having the traditional and ancient cosmology of the multiple or the one to which you refer to, we would have a cosmology of the quasi one. Things never get that's quite bad using just to drop a name here but things never really things can never really get real in a world that is constantly creating itself, because if if they got real it would mean that they would be finished. You know, that makes a lot of sense to me that wholeness is extremely elusive in the human process. The nature with all the competition and struggle for survival. Wholeness, if you want to use that word is very difficult to attain so the self is a project that's underway at all times, and it gets kicked and lured by the potencies of nature, which force us to grapple with the fragments. The difficulties being completion the longings the desires that end up dying purposes end up dying before they're fulfilled and so on. And I think one thing I stress is psychopathology. It's a funny view in a way but I don't think you can do metaphysics. I think my degree without self analysis, not necessarily in a formal sense with the therapist, but probing where your complexes might distort your hermeneutics, or your way of looking at things more directly, and how to pull back from those negative projections. And develop a cleaner, if you will, relationship to the human community and the orders of nature. It's a, it's a task as nature said, and that's that. Robert Neville. Well, I want to distinguish between the ontological act of creation and acts of creativity within the human realm, or acts of creativity and any determinant order of the earth or all the planets or wherever. The ontological creative act starts with absolutely nothing and produces something. Our finite acts of creation start with the past. And from that create a new future, which of course then becomes the past as time moves on. So, that perhaps is like a domestic distinction. But it's is one that makes a whole lot of difference for me. Robert has used the phrase existence, or the existential creativity. It has to be analyzed. Take a moment of human experience. The creativity that comes from the actual creative act is manifest in just a small determinant way within that act. There are lots of places where this is present. Of course, also in our present moments, there is the past, which when it was present also had creativity in it. So we can locate the ontological creative act in finite places, all through time. But it's not the case that the ontological creative act itself is in time. It creates the time that that makes for finite creativity. Now, I've said all that without mentioning psychoanalysis. But you can take psychoanalysis as one of the main forces of order within at least the human sphere of the Earth. And I share with Robert the concern for when that is limited and how far can you extend it. But that would be just characterizing human experience at least in ways that express the movement from the unconscious, the collective unconscious to the determinant world. Okay, so we have a creation of time out of time. So therefore it's not located in the past. Like sometimes we might try to accuse theology for putting the creation of the world in the past. It's not in the past. It's outside of time. I mean, we say it's a continuous creation or not even because how does it? What are the connection points between the eternal because I think this is actually important for every and because we're going to conclude soon for both of you is okay. There is a divinity that we can describe in slightly various ways. But I think what is important is how do we get in touch with it, keep in touch with it, nurture our connection with it. First of all, someone might ask very simply, what are in our eminence, the points of connection with divinity call it eternity or call it the wound. For both of you. Robert Neville, you would like to start and then Robert kind. Okay. I would say that within time. The divine act, if you want to call it divine or the act of the ontological creative act, which is actually characterized in in Chinese philosophy, much more commonly than Western philosophy. The act is present at every moment in time. And it connects up the past, the present, the future in ways that a theory of time would explain. But the act itself is not in time, it creates time. And so it's immediate. And simply not in time. And that's a big difference. Now, I think what Robert Corrie 10 wants to say is that what's interesting is how that act is manifest in time. So there's creativity in the past and in the present and hopefully in the future. That's fine. And I would, you know, write a cosmology about that. But the eternal act of creation is one that embraces all these things ontologically together, not at the same time. So within time, we see that there's a past and present and future for God, if you like that language, or for the dial that cannot be named. But within time. There's plenty of connections. And I would find that congenial certainly creativity is, in my view, extremely rare, certainly in the human process. However, if we're 95% determined and roughly thereabouts. How do we get that leap into creative act. Right. I stress the aesthetic sphere a lot. The artist broadly defined not just a painter or sculptor musician. The artist rides on the back of creative impulses from, let's say the indeterminate ground. There's a kind of gestalt of grace where the artist can move above the deterministic or antecedent structures which can often encompass creative work and dead knit a bit. So you push beyond that but I don't think that's a human achievement alone I think that's really coming from outside of this. So I like the notion of natural grace that there's just something within nature that allows for this brief and important eruption of creativity, which then adds to the cultural unconscious certainly, and maybe the depth to mention. I agree with that I think that the aesthetic character of great achievements is very rare. It could be in all fields. But I'm also concerned with the passage of time. Like sitting here not doing anything except listening to the what the other is saying. That requires some kind of creativity also. It's a creativity of interpretation may not be very great, but it's just a little bit and if, if, if I understand you correctly, then that is a duplication of your intent and my understanding. Now I do something more with that but you know, usually not much more. I think that provides us with a good conclusion, we could say that I don't know if it's going to be faithful to what you both said in the end but I think people today are preoccupied with the world that is more and more arithmetic. And I think that they can feel in themselves, not only by engaging with the discipline of the artist, which is quite demanding for many, but I think it's a good point. But, but I think that every one of us, you know, of our listeners can feel in certain aspects of their lives sort of moments, certain glimpse a sense of non arithmetic infinity to which then it is up to each of us to give an interpretation. And, and that's where I think there is a powerful echo of the ontological act of creation in the very present moment. It's this capacity for interpretative creation sense giving, or at least, or at least perhaps just an impression of infinity. And, and perhaps I would like to conclude by as an exercise because I'm, I'm interested in what I call philosophical health so other people can nurture and practice the this form of health on an everyday basis. In the Middle Ages, there were this long scholastic discussions to which perhaps what we did today was an echo but about realia, right, the elements of the, our world that are real or not real, universal, not universal. So I would propose to call crealia this points or moments of experience, impressions, perceptions of non arithmetic infinity that could that can call for interpretation, then I think we don't have to be normative here. I think what our dialogue demonstrates is that the curiosity of listening to the other, whether that father is human, or, or non human is what keeps the the generous exchange of interpretations and interpretations going. I would like to thank you. I think this is just another moment of a long conversation. I think it would be quite nice and pleasant and very interesting if we could now invite a fourth person into this conversation. I will discuss that of the record. But thanks again.