L&P: the Love and Philosophy sub stream for science, philosophy, tech, poetry, nav mind and more

About L&P: the Love and Philosophy sub stream for science, philosophy, tech, poetry, nav mind and more

Exploring philosophical, scientific, technological & poetic spaces beyond either/or bounds. Deeply human, friction friendly, & daring to care. Past and future show hosts include Andrea Hiott, Mirko Prokop, Fotis Tsiroukis, Henry Kramer, and Darius Parvizi-Wayne. Regular podcast links at https://loveandphilosophy.com/ lovephilosophy.substack.com (https://lovephilosophy.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast)

Publisher

Conversations across traditional divides. Exploring philosophical, scientific, technological and poetic spaces beyond either/or bounds.

Category

science · society & culture

Language

en

Explicit

Yes

First episode

1 Sept 2023

Latest episode

11 Oct 2026

Latest episodes

114 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   11 Oct 2026

   Persona Fog, Passion, Estrangement, Endurance (and Carl Jung) with Patricia Martin

   By now we know that online life, with its endless content, algorithmic polarization, and pressure to present oneself publicly, is detrimental to our well-being; countless books and articles have dissected these angles. But after a decade of empirical research, Patricia Martin argues the damage goes deeper. We discuss her book Will the Future Like You?, which makes the case that the capacity to form and sustain an identity is itself being eroded by code built to keep us uncertain about who we are and cut off from our own inner authority. She calls this condition persona fog. In Jung’s model, the persona is the thin, outward-facing layer of the psyche. Patricia compares it to a user interface for social life: useful, but never meant to be load-bearing. Drawing on a three-year ethnographic study with roughly 100 participants and a decade of data on online self-presentation, she describes what happens when we pour our whole sense of self into multiple online personas: fragmentation, chronic self-doubt, and estrangement from a core self. The conversation with Andrea Hiott (https://substack.com/profile/226403388-andrea-hiott) moves through Patricia’s own “undoing” (divorce, three moves in 18 months, her mother’s sudden death, her child’s transition, and the loss of a major project), her path into Jungian psychology, and the difference between resilience and endurance. Passion, she reminds us, once meant the capacity to suffer and hold steady amid uncertainty. Along the way: Csikszentmihalyi and flow, social pain research, Winnicott’s attentive gaze, and why everyday attention to one another may be a form of love. About Patricia Martin Patricia Martin is a cultural researcher, author, and Director of the Institute for Psyche and Culture, a depth-psychology think tank based in Chicago. She is the founder and host of the podcast Jung in the World, now in its sixth season with over two million cumulative downloads. Author of four books, including RenGen, featured by the New York Times, and her latest, Will the Future Like You? (Karnac, 2026), which Kirkus recommended as an “incisive, fresh work.” For the past decade, she has led independent research on the erosion of selfhood through digital persona management, advancing her theory of persona fog. She completed postgraduate training in Jungian theory at the C.G. Jung Institute of Chicago and holds a certification in Medical Narrative from Duke University, an MA in Irish Literature and Culture from University College Dublin, and an MFA in nonfiction from Bennington College. She is a Research Affiliate of the National Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis.Chapters * 00:00 Introduction: persona fog, endurance, and the art of enough * 04:00 Missing the school bus and a childhood moment of transcendence * 08:00 What the persona is, and why it was never meant to be load-bearing * 11:30 The self as product and the post-identity era * 17:00 What changed since our grandparents’ generation; the three factors of identity * 23:00 From public libraries to the early internet * 25:00 Patricia’s personal undoing and the question “Who am I?” * 29:00 Fragmentation, resilience, and endurance * 34:30 Persona, brand, and optimization; passion as endurance * 37:00 Social pain online and the neuroscience of rejection * 38:30 Movement, the body, and the micro-singularity of the self with its devices * 41:30 Who listens to Jung in the World, and a yearning for depth * 44:00 How Patricia found Jung; Jason’s story * 48:00 Jonathan’s descent story and preparing to endure the AI era * 50:30 Csikszentmihalyi, flow, and 45 minutes offline * 53:45 The transcendent function, and the Jung lecture that inspired Csikszentmihalyi * 55:00 Why high achievers can be the most fragile; chronic self-doubt * 59:45 Janet’s story: auditing her “wardrobe” of personas * 1:05:30 Love, attention, and Winnicott’s good-enough gaze * 1:08:30 Why the self still matters; persona and romantic love * 1:11:00 Listening as love, participatory sense-making, and stewarding attention * 1:16:30 The spiral: returning to where we started, but anew Links Patricia Martin (https://patricia-martin.com/) Will the Future Like You? (https://patricia-martin.com/books/) Will the Future Like You? (Karnac) (https://www.karnacbooks.com/ProductReviews.asp?PID=98277) Jung in the World (https://jungchicago.org/blog/category/podcast/jung-in-the-world/) podcast C.G. Jung Institute of Chicago (https://jungchicago.org/) The persona in Jung’s psychology (IAAP): https://iaap.org/jung-analytical-psychology/short-articles-on-analytical-psychology/persona-2/ Robert A. Johnson: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_A._Johnson_%28psychotherapist%29 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_A._Johnson_%28psychotherapist%29) Claude Lévi-Strauss (https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Claude_L%C3%A9vi-Strauss) James Williams in The Guardian (2017) (https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/oct/05/smartphone-addiction-silicon-valley-dystopia) Vint Cerf: https://engineering.stanford.edu/about/heroes/2011-heroes/vint-cerf Naomi Eisenberger, The Neural Bases of Social Pain (PDF) (https://teams.semel.ucla.edu/sites/default/files/publications/Feb%202012%20-%20The%20neural%20bases.pdf) Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Singularity_Is_Near Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (https://www.cgu.edu/news/2021/10/passings-mihaly-csikszentmihalyi-the-father-of-flow-1934-2021/)(Claremont Graduate University tribute) Donald Winnicott, Mirror-Role of Mother and Family (https://academic.oup.com/book/1195/chapter/140034320) in Child Development Participatory sense-making with Hanne De Jaegher (https://loveandphilosophy.buzzsprout.com/2229994/episodes/17690194-68-loving-knowing-and-participatory-sense-making-with-philosopher-hanne-de-jaegher)(Love & Philosophy ep. 68) Love & Philosophy * Podcast and website: loveandphilosophy.com (https://loveandphilosophy.com/) * Substack: lovephilosophy.substack.com (https://lovephilosophy.substack.com/) * Andrea Hiott: andreahiott.net (https://www.andreahiott.net/) * Andrea’s book, Holding Paradox: A Navigational Approach to Mind and Consciousness: Simon & Schuster (https://www.simonandschuster.net/books/Holding-Paradox/Andrea-Hiott/9781917991636) * Support the show: Giving page (https://loveandphilosophy.com/giving-page) Transcript Andrea (Intro): [00:00] Hey everyone. Today I’m joined by Patricia Martin, a cultural researcher who has been tracking a big shift in our society over the last three decades, and especially over the last 10 to 15 years, relative to what being online has been changing for us. She was there around the beginning of the internet, working with public libraries in America as they began to implement the web. Today she hosts Jung in the World (as in Carl Jung), a podcast that applies Jungian psychology to contemporary living, and it has reached listeners all around the world. We’ll talk about that a little today, but mostly we’re going to talk about her book, Will the Future Like You?: Reflections on the Age of Hyper-Reinvention. It comes from research she’s been doing over the past decade, including a three-year ethnographic study with about 100 participants. She even created an early tool to help her analyze the data. The book also came from some [00:01] personal undoing, which we talk about: some really hard things she went through in her own life, in her relationships and her family. She woke up one morning thinking, “Who am I?” and set off to figure out what it really means to build a self in this digital age. One of the main themes this conversation revolves around is persona fog. In Jung’s model, the persona is a thin, outward-facing layer of the psyche. Patricia compares it to a user interface for social life, and it was never really meant to bear all the weight we’re now putting on it. We’re almost trying to put our bodies into this simulated interface online, and that is causing strange feelings for some of us, and for our society overall. We’ve created personas that are nothing more than a film or [00:02] a layer over us, or maybe a screen is a better way to think of it, and somehow that’s making us feel disembodied. We talk about a lot of that. It relates to some of my own work too, but it’s really interesting to get Patricia’s views on this, and on the way we end up talking about resilience and endurance: what matters, and what continues to matter in our lives. Holding steady even when the ground is moving, as she points out. I think that’s a skill we’re all trying to learn in different ways. It’s part of why we try to think beyond either/or here, and to develop a way of staying balanced and still connecting to what matters to us even as we connect with the world. This connects to flow a little, and ideas like that, which we also talk about. We even get to Winnicott at the end, [00:03] the idea of the good-enough parent or good-enough mother, the attentive gaze, and what it means to just be with “enough.” Enough is a word that comes up in a few upcoming conversations. The art of enough is something I’ll talk about with Jonny Thomson and his upcoming book. We’ve already recorded that, and I’ll be publishing it. So we’re trying to think about what it means to find balance, but also to feel excited, to feel the amazing consciousness that is our life. We talk about that here too: how to really notice each other and notice what matters, and what it means to be human. Those are the themes we’ll be exploring in these next episodes, starting with this one, thinking of the spiral of how we move through life and always return anew. I hope you enjoy this episode, and I hope you’re doing well out there and not experiencing any persona fog. But if you are, you’re not [00:04] alone, and we can get through this together. Missing the bus Andrea Hiott: Hi, Patricia. Welcome to Love and Philosophy. I’m so glad you’re here today. Patricia Martin: It’s my pleasure. Andrea Hiott: We’re going to talk about Will the Future Like You?, which is such a wonderful title, Reflections on the Age of Hyper-Reinvention. There’s a lot in this book I want to get into, but I also want to give people an idea of who you are. One scene that really struck me is when you were helping your teacher at school, I think in second grade, and you lost track of time. You came out of the school and realized you’d missed the bus home. The way you write about this moment, I feel like there’s a lot in it, because you sort of freeze, which reminds me a bit of things that come later, like persona fog. But the moment I want to start with is when you make the decision: “Okay, I missed the bus. I’ll just walk home.” Patricia Martin: Yes. Which took me miles out of my way, but it was what I knew. Andrea Hiott: Coming from this navigational [00:05] mind of mine, that’s interesting on so many levels. And then, having made that decision, at some point you saw the environment differently. You describe it so beautifully in the book, and I really hope everyone will read it, but it has to do with another level of consciousness, as you describe it. The trees suddenly came alive, and the water, almost like going through a portal and seeing life differently. For some reason I want to start with that moment. Could you tell me why that memory is important to you? Patricia Martin: The reason I used that example is that I wanted to make the point that I’m not anti-tech. I don’t think phones should be ripped out of teenagers’ hands, because once we culturally make something taboo, they want it more. I think what we’re facing now is an issue of consciousness, [00:06] of understanding how we contribute droplets of consciousness through attention, and then find out later that we’re not capable of some of the very types of consciousness we yearn for most, which is transcendence. What I describe in that scene is that as a little kid I had a moment of transcendence where everything around me came alive and scintillated. The air was thick, and I was part of this spinning world. I can still put myself back in that moment: standing at the top of the bridge, looking out at the river, a flock of birds taking off, and throwing rocks and hearing the gong as [00:07] they hit the water. I felt immensely alive. There’s a Jungian, Robert Johnson, who says that sometimes we have that moment of consciousness when we are part of the world and it is in us, when the psyche resonates within us (psyche in this case meaning soul), and we’re too young to really grasp what it means. We have to revisit it at another time in our adult life. I found myself writing about it because I was trying to convey to the reader what this level of consciousness is, and I believe everyone has these moments. You’ve probably had one yourself, I’m guessing? Andrea Hiott: Oh, yes. Patricia Martin: Where suddenly everything is alive. Andrea Hiott: Yes. I feel like I live more and more in that state. But this story is also metaphorical, [00:08] in a way, for the progress of the book, because there’s a kind of freezing with persona fog, which we’ll get into, and the stuckness. The word persona seems like a good way to start getting into these ideas. How should we think about what a persona is, or how it develops? The persona and persona fog Patricia Martin: First of all, in Carl Jung’s model of the psyche, the persona is the externally facing self, and it is the thinnest layer of the psyche. It’s like shellac. Or, to use a tech word, it’s your GUI, your graphical user interface, and it allows you to interact in the social world. It was never designed to be load-bearing. One of the problems of living in the digital age is that we are operating more and [00:09] more from the [persona], and we are asking it to be load-bearing. To use an oversimplified metaphor, it’s like trying to move a piano on a skateboard. It’s not meant to bear that weight. This is why people feel fragmented, and it’s also why people are starting to develop what I call persona fog. Persona fog is a set of signals from the psyche telling us that we’re losing touch with any sense of inner navigation. Because it’s been fogged over, we can sense the core self, but we can no longer feel it, nor can we hear its signals, because the noise floor we’re living in has muffled it. This is [00:10] creating a lot of pain for people, and I heard it over and over. I started with 200 participants in the ethnographic part of this study, and it winnowed down to a little under 100. There were 97 who stayed loyal over a three-year period. They revealed what was happening to them by spending so much time online, creating so many identities that they parceled out across various platforms, then having to mount personas for all of them, sustain them, and reinvent them. They were investing more and more identity into those personas and processes, and they were losing track of any [00:11] sense of a core self. It was like a hollowing out. This is where consciousness is demanded of us: we have to start paying attention to these symptoms, because they are signals. It’s the core self pounding beneath the noise floor, trying to tell us that something is radically wrong. Andrea Hiott: I love how you frame identity. I can see a contrast between generations. There used to be a kind of identity where certain things were more regulated, or there were fewer categories. But now, as you say in the book, there are so many options and we have to be so many people, and we’re also living in this persona, or it becomes very confusing what isn’t the persona. And as you said, it wasn’t made to take the whole weight of life. Could you talk about what I think you call [00:12] a post-identity era, where the old scaffolding of who I am, which was a little more containable, has become something different? The self as product Patricia Martin: Yes. It’s something we just have to be conscious of, because what’s happening to us is unprecedented. In the digital age, the self has become a product. It’s an economic unit for sale, and the supply chain is social media. The more positive selves you can generate, the more money you make. And when you generate an identity, a persona, that is less popular and has fewer likes, you tend to abandon it, even though it might hold promise for exploring who you really are. So we begin to [00:13] edit the self. The very definition of persona fog is when we have become so enchanted and entranced by the performance of the self, and the performance of multiple versions of ourselves, that we can no longer access the part of us that is genuine. This leads to a kind of self-estrangement. It’s interesting to me, because for 30 years I’ve been tracking the culture. I track big civilizational shifts, and that’s why I wrote about this. I had no idea this was going to become the psychological prepper’s guide for entering the AI era. But here we are: fragmented, fragile, shrouded in chronic self-doubt, and yet we’re entering an age that is about to blow everything [00:14] open. That’s how much force it’s going to have on the culture, and here we are fragmented. So we need to pay attention to these symptoms. Where I think this matters most is for people to understand a myth they have to let go of. It’s unspoken, and yet it’s so operational: the idea that what you put out there has no effect on who you are in here. It does. I tracked the data over 10 years. In fact, in 2016 I harnessed a rudimentary form of AI. I had a custom AI developed so I could gather large swaths of intent and preferences across 500,000 posts at a time, and have them bucketed and [00:15] analyzed, so I could see what people’s intentions were for themselves, what they saw in their future selves, and what they didn’t believe about themselves. So I feel I stand on good authority, in terms of the rigor of my research, in saying that we’re entering a part of the century where the self is not only productized, commoditized, and optimized. It has also become a performance, which is a degraded sense of self. We’re no longer in search of the self, as we were in the 20th century. We’re confusing ourselves, because we’re interested in the performance of a self, and that’s a very fragile place to be. Andrea Hiott: Yeah. I think a lot about this. Even when I think back to my [00:16] grandparents, they were definitely performing in a way. They would go to church, and that was a real part of them, maybe even the most important part. But there were always roles you played. I remember them not feeling like they could live up to that, and it was stressful. They wanted to always be the person they were in church, and they couldn’t always be. I’ve seen this in other ways too, with jobs and so on. You describe what’s happening now as different. You talk about an ambient uncertainty, and even the fog itself seems like a different condition, the way you describe it. Is it because of the medium itself, which seems so disembodied? I think now it’s almost paralyzing: we want so much to live up to who we are, and online we’re also supposed to create these worlds that nobody can live up to. There’s a natural peril in that. You’re creating a situation that can never feel satisfied in some [00:17] kind of way. But we don’t think of it like that, which is part of what you point out is the problem. It’s the consciousness of it, understanding what’s happening, that actually makes an agential shift. Do you see what I’m saying? Then and now: three factors of identity Patricia Martin: I do. You’ve got a couple of questions in there. One is the before and after: what’s the generational difference? The other gets to the heart of how the coding has been engineered to create a sense of inner chaos, because that chaos is useful and can be monetized. Let me take them one at a time. First, what’s different from our parents’ generation. They played fewer roles than we have to play now. There was a communal clarity that was shared. [00:18] You mentioned your grandparents going to church: there were roles within communities, and there were ways communities saw each other. The famous anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss said this about any rite of passage: first you have to see yourself, and then you have to see yourself in community with others. That’s why there’s always some mirroring exercise in a ritual, and then you have to look out and see your community. That’s what church did for people. That’s what community did for people. That’s what going to school did for people. And now even the idea of going to school was tested through COVID; online learning has become a bigger and bigger approach. So there’s less community. We live more and more [00:19] virtually, and we work more and more virtually. We don’t go into an environment with others and test ourselves in that communal way that gives us a sense of who we are. So the virtuality of our lives is vastly different from our parents’. Then there’s the sociology at work. Women’s roles are radically different. We now have science that lets people change gender. We control our ability to reproduce, scientifically and biologically. These are big shifts that add up, and I’m only touching on some of them. I think this has created a current cosmos where there are just fewer ways to really understand who you are. And if I may, [00:20] I want to toggle over to the second piece, which is how the internet is programmed. I feel like I’m talking a lot, but you’ve asked some really provocative questions. There are three factors to identity. This is a little oversimplified, but I could get agreement from most psychologists on these three. One is how we see ourselves. The second is how other people see us. The third is our will to shape ourselves. How we see ourselves has become fogged, so it’s not holding us up the way it used to. What has become primary is how others see us, because we’re willing to hyper-reinvent in order to please an audience. [00:21] And the third, human will: James Williams, a former senior person at Google, admitted publicly, and it was quoted in The Guardian, that the internet has been coded to reduce human will. So some of this is just what we’re in. It’s not something we’re doing wrong. We’re just now starting to suffer the symptoms of what we’re in. Continuity, scripts, and breaking them Andrea Hiott: As you were talking, I was thinking about how far-reaching the implications are, as you show in the book. I was describing my family performing in a social environment, whether church or something else. Now it’s very strange, because a lot of us wake up and feel like we have to start performing online, or [00:22] check how our performances are going in all these different areas, which are very amorphous. We’re presenting all these versions of ourselves because each of those environments has been sculpted to work in a certain way, so you need to sculpt yourself to fit it. I don’t do any of this, by the way, and a lot of friction comes from that. It’s hard if you go against it, because you will see it and feel it in the likes or the lack of likes. I’m trying to get at how this started to matter to you. I think continuity is a word that’s coming up here too. It seems like this is a very continuous thing; we’re building our self-esteem through this sense of continuity. A lot of what we’re addicted to is the continuity, and that’s what many of the coders and builders have latched onto: we get on these scripts and we have to stay on them. We wake up and want to log back into [00:23] them. It’s a very physical, bodily thing that happens, beyond reflection. But sometimes in our own lives we need to break that continuity in order to realize we were stuck in those scripts. Patricia Martin: Yes. Andrea Hiott: You show this in the book, but how did you get to a point where you could do that? From libraries to the early internet Patricia Martin: Well, it wasn’t pretty, I’ll tell you that much. I’ve been researching big civilizational shifts, and what they mean for people in their daily lives, for 30 years now. I was the beneficiary of being in the right place at the right time. I was in my early 30s and working with libraries in America. The United States has been very blessed with a network of public libraries. Public libraries are a larger franchise than McDonald’s restaurants. Andrea Hiott: Wow, I [00:24] didn’t know that. I love libraries. I just have to say that, everyone. Libraries are so wonderful. Patricia Martin: They are so wonderful. It’s such a treasured resource in every community, and it is unparalleled anywhere in the world. So I was working in that function and, lo and behold, this thing called the internet came into being. We were the installed base for information sharing in America, and we became allies of the early internet. I found myself sitting in meetings with Al Gore’s team, figuring out how we were going to get people to use the internet. I know that really dates me, so I’m an elder stateswoman in some regards. And I worked with Vint Cerf, the father of the internet, on a project. So I was an early adopter, and I became more and [00:25] more intrigued by the internet as a cultural force and how it was going to shape us. I decided I wanted to research it and write about it. But I didn’t realize I was going to take this psychological bent until I went through a series of personal setbacks. It was really an undoing of everything that defined me. An undoing: “Who am I?” Patricia Martin: Within a short period of time, I went through an amicable divorce. I had to move three times in 18 months. Through this process, I heard from my brother that my mother had taken a fall and died immediately. Our mothers are really the anchor to who we are, in [00:26] many regards, so that got untethered. Then my youngest child, who was in college at the time, sat me down and told me he wanted a name change. He was no longer going to be Molly; he wanted to be Hank. I could never have anticipated how much investment I had made in the gendering of my child. I don’t feel shame around it now, but I’m kind of stunned at how much parents project gender onto their kids. Oh, and then a major project that was a lifeline to my bank account [00:27] got canceled, and I was going to have to reinvent how I made a living. All of this happened within a three-year window. I woke up one morning staring at the ceiling, asking the age-old question, “Who am I?” That’s when I decided I wanted to study what it means to build and rebuild our sense of self in a dynamic digital age. I lit out like Huck Finn, determined to go to every stop down that river to get to its mouth, where the big thesis lay. And that’s what I did. Andrea Hiott: You sure did. You really left nothing unexplored. I can feel the research. A lot of it is very bodily and in person, too. You did a lot of interviews with real people, not just [00:28] collecting and sifting through data, but actually looking at stories and narratives. That’s why the word continuity seems so important. That’s a lot of what you went through. I just want to give it a minute and respect that, because a lot of people have times in life where they wonder how they could possibly get through it, and you just keep getting through it. The continuity there is interesting, because in a way that was a break of continuity in your life in so many ways. Even spatially, moving between apartments: how that affects what we’re capable of being as thinking, feeling bodies is so disruptive. But at the same time, I feel like you were exploring paths in a way that brought something. You were almost covering the surface, finding a continuity that’s not about linear continuity. Does that make sense to [00:29] you? It’s almost like you start reaching toward what you thought were edges and fringes, because you’re now able to look at them. Maybe because you love the people in your life and you’re having to see them differently, you start to see the world differently. Fragmentation: resilience versus endurance Patricia Martin: Oh, yes. You’re making a lot of sense, and I want to talk more about your idea of continuity. What we keep as our core self and choose to expand, as opposed to what we discard: we’re organically building identity all the time in that way. That’s normal. But you’re hitting on one of my key findings, which was about fragmentation. Being so many selves, projecting them out on various platforms, enhancing them once they [00:30] get attention and discarding them when they don’t: this put us through a gauntlet of hyper-reinvention. And what was it costing us? One thing that relates to continuity is the sense of endurance. Over the last three decades we talked a lot about resilience, because there was a lot of disruption caused by the internet, and that disruption was episodic. Amazon took over the book world and sort of crashed publishing, to give just one example; there are many others. But now I think the [00:31] body politic, the collective, as Carl Jung would call it, is facing a different problem: endurance, being able to endure the chaos and the complexity. That’s different from resilience. Resilience is: I get the wind knocked out of me, I catch my breath, I pick myself up, and I march on. Okay. But now the ground is moving underneath you so fluidly and so quickly. Bounce back to what? You’re not standing in the same place once you stand up. What I was feeling in people was a yearning for what you might call continuity. I would call it being able to endure [00:32] the pain of deciding and sticking to what they understood as their core self, and letting that be self-determined. That’s harder and harder to do. Culturally, there’s a lot of messaging right now that all this discussion of the self comes from the self-help porn sold to us starting in the 1980s, and that it’s all just self-indulgent. There’s some truth to that. I’m not trying to take us back to the “Hey, go find yourself” age. I’m merely reporting what I found out in the field. People felt [00:33] like a box with a bunch of fragments inside, and they couldn’t get the fragments to cohere in a way that let them endure difficult situations, like having their entire careers upended. So as we enter the age of AI, I’m sounding the alarm: we can’t just abandon the self, because it’s our operating system, and something has happened to the operating system. It needs coherence so we can endure what’s about to happen. Andrea Hiott: Yes, that makes a lot of sense to me. You talk about entering a new period, and you start talking about identity more as a movement, and that we’re realizing it’s a movement. I’m still not sure how to talk about the persona here, [00:34] in the Jungian sense of the social mask, or how it relates to what you’re saying about endurance, because endurance is such an important word. For me, it puts things back in the body. Continuity is almost more like a measurement, and endurance is how it feels to try to keep going and persist. What role is the persona playing in that? It’s a social mask, and it’s necessary, as you’ve said, but it’s only a veneer of the self. Patricia Martin: Yes. Andrea Hiott: It’s not what’s enduring. But we’ve somehow misplaced endurance, so that now we think the persona is what has to endure. We’ve created all these personas that we’re trying to keep going, but we don’t feel them as the self in our body. Passion as endurance Patricia Martin: Yes. We’ve relegated the self to the persona, and then the persona has been relegated to a brand, [00:35] and we’re either on brand or we’re not. We’ve accepted optimization instead of development and growth, because it’s easier to have a listicle of five things to do to make the psychological pain go away than to endure. I want to lean into this idea of endurance, because I think you and I are on common ground with your notion of continuity. The idea has ancient roots. It comes from the Latin pati, which is to be able to suffer amid uncertainty and hold oneself stable. [00:36] And the word for it wasn’t actually endurance; it was passion. We think of passion as an emotion, and the internet is full of a lot of fake passion. But passion really meant endurance. That’s where the phrase “the passion of Christ” comes from: he was willing to endure for some greater transcendence to occur. Each of us, in our own ways, needs to be able to endure uncertainty, and to endure what comes of deciding, in a self-determined, sovereign way, who we are, and of [00:37] coming forward with that self in a way that’s self-loving and honest, and enduring whatever hardship comes of that. Social pain online Patricia Martin: We’re not willing to do that. There’s a fascinating set of studies from UCLA’s Naomi Eisenberger, a social psychologist who studied social pain. She found that social pain, which also translates to social pain online, when a persona you’ve put out there meets rejection, travels the same neural network as physical pain. So when you’re rejected or bullied online, it’s akin to a punch in the face. So we’ve become very worried about erring online with the wrong persona, [00:38] and meanwhile we’ve put our core self out of reach. And it’s not leading us anywhere good. That’s the conclusion I come to in the book. Movement and orientation Andrea Hiott: So many exciting things in there. Two things are so important to what I’m doing philosophically, and to why I even do this work. One is what you brought up about being able to sit in ambiguity, or holding paradox. It’s not about trying to dissolve things. It’s sitting with what you were describing as the passion, or the suffering, in a way. The other is movement. We’re learning how to orient within what is already moving. It’s almost like feeling into the movement enough that we can then orient ourselves, instead of always being oriented by the algorithms or whatever is [00:39] getting our attention. Does that make sense to you? I’m thinking of those moments when nature becomes alive. There’s a kind of presence, or consciousness, that comes through being able to sit with the suffering or see the world differently, and that can maybe help us feel that movement and orient within it. Patricia Martin: When you say movement, do you mean a sense of physicalization? Andrea Hiott: Well, that’s another point you raised. For me, we are bodily moving in a lot of spaces at once. The online world, like in those studies you mentioned, is one world we’re moving through, and our bodies are affected by its set of regularities just as they would be in a geographical space. But we don’t think of it like that. Because these regularities are so different, when we’re online our bodies are experiencing it the same way, but the actual [00:40] regularities are so different that it can feel isolating and strange. If you get off your computer or put your phone down, it can feel like you’ve given up a part of your body at this point, because the body is so literally part of it. But we don’t think of it that way. So when I say movement, I really mean it in all these spaces, psychological, emotional, and bodily: the way we make our way through them, or encounter them, and the scripts we build with them. Patricia Martin: This is reminiscent of Kurzweil’s theory of the singularity, but at a micro level. The singular self now has attachments. It has a phone, it has earbuds, it has technology in order to be whole. So when we set our phone down, we don’t feel [00:41] whole. There’s a micro-anxiety about that, which many people don’t want to experience. I think you’re onto something. I didn’t write about that per se, but I think we’re riffing on where this is going. These are my early sensations as I continue to research these topics. Jung in the World and a yearning for depth Patricia Martin: Here’s what I’m seeing. I have a podcast called Jung in the World, where we apply Jungian theory to contemporary living, and I have a wide variety of guests. When we studied who was listening, we found listeners from around the world, which isn’t unusual. But among those 2 million, we had [00:42] mostly 18- to 30-year-old men. What this said to us is that there is a yearning for depth. Jungians are depth psychologists. They’re not about small behavior changes that add up to something. They take you deep into your dream world, into the symbolic journey of building a self, and into your shadow work. This was a big signal to me, and I’ve started to follow it. Now I’m studying what it means, in digital culture, to reintegrate the pieces, [00:43] what symbols and myths we have around that, and what self-mythology we have about wholeness in the midst of the singularity. I know this is all very ethereal, but this is what does it for me. Andrea Hiott: Oh, I love it. Patricia Martin: It makes me really boring at a cocktail party, I might add. Andrea Hiott: I would say the opposite. You’re the one I’d want to talk to. I think it’s exactly what I’m trying to get at with endurance, and the way you linked it to passion. There’s a depth there, and there are already paths that connect us, that we want to feel back into, especially a lot of younger people. Jung has that archetypal quality. And the chronic self-doubt, the cascading crossroads: there’s a lot of movement and navigational metaphor in your work. All this feels a little detached from that, but if you feel into it, [00:44] it shifts how you see those things. I also seem to remember that, although you have this wonderful podcast about Jung, you discovered Jung through having to endure, and through doing this research. I remember it was snowing and you were going into the archive or something. When did Jung come into your life? Finding Jung Patricia Martin: Yes. I had to endure the shame of not knowing. As I started talking to the cohort of participants I’d built for the study, and we live in a very confessional time, it didn’t take long for them to start confessing to me their agony, their confusion, and their anxieties. [00:45] I was in over my head, and I felt some shame around that. I decided I didn’t want to feel that shame anymore for not fully understanding, and I didn’t want to be a passeur and just say, “Well, I’ll figure out a name for this.” So I decided I would have to anchor myself in a school of thought in psychology. At its foundation, psychology has two founding fathers, if you will: Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. That was kind of a no-brainer, because Jung advocated for the soul in a way Freud did not. I also found Freud less friendly to women in general; that was just my take. So I signed up for a two-year course of study at the C.G. Jung Institute in Chicago, where I live, [00:46] and I became hooked on Jung’s work as a way of living and a way of seeing the world. Jung was a scientist. He was an MD, as was Freud. But Jung took his work toward understanding that the self is a seed. The self has its own sense of direction. The psyche is self-healing. I studied the canon of Carl Jung for two years, and that gave me a basis. It also gave me the courage to start listening differently. People were telling me their woes about having lived online for so long, with such intensity. Take [00:47] the story of Jason, who wakes up one morning and his beard is falling out in handfuls. His anxiety is cranked up to such a pitch that he’s afraid he’s dying. He’s 27 years old and has a big online life. This is not normal. And it was case after case of this. When you hear cases like that lined up one after another, just from this random cohort, you have to start saying to yourself, “There’s something civilizational happening. There’s something happening in the collective,” which is also accounted for by Carl Jung. That’s when I became a Jungian. Andrea Hiott: Is Jason the one who decided not to take the big VC [00:48] deal, changed his life, and started looking for smaller things that made him happy? Jonathan’s descent story Patricia Martin: No, you’re thinking of Jonathan. Andrea Hiott: Jonathan, okay. Patricia Martin: He had built an online community where people could tell stories, and he could track the patterns in those stories. He was a data genius as well as a computer scientist, and a venture capitalist offered him a big deal to buy his online community. He woke up the next day and realized it wasn’t who he was or who he wanted to be, and he canceled the deal. That won him no favor with people, who thought he was nuts for doing it. [00:49] Then he had to undergo his own descent story. He lost his girlfriend. He lost his apartment. Andrea Hiott: Yes, I remember. Patricia Martin: It was one thing after another. These descent stories also started adding up. Andrea Hiott: A hero’s journey kind of thing. Patricia Martin: Yes. But here’s where we’re asked to endure. I worry that these descent stories are going to be really common in the next five years, once we become a world operated largely by artificial intelligence, and we’re not equipped the way we should be. So what can we do about that? I don’t have a set of listicles; the algorithms love those. [00:50] I can only say what I know after studying this for 10 years. Number one, we have an obligation to ourselves and to others to be conscious of how we use AI and what it does to us. That’s on us. The other thing I’d say is to drop the myth: whatever content you’re putting out there affects you, and whatever you give your attention to is a droplet of consciousness. Flow and 45 minutes offline Patricia Martin: I had a profound meeting with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi during this research. He developed the theory of flow, which is about entering a state of heightened consciousness. He studied [00:51] artists, musicians, and athletes, who entered a place of transcendence in their work where time disappeared and boundaries disappeared. They became the best versions of themselves, and they did that through focus. His worry was that we were entering a world where his theories would become irrelevant, unachievable even, because we had so tampered with our ability to focus by dribbling out our consciousness without knowing it. So being conscious is really important, and so is attending to our ability to hold consciousness. That gets to the third point we’ve touched on: the ability to endure what it feels like to [00:52] not be on the internet for 45 minutes. I think we should all be able to do that. It’s like sit-ups. I practice it every day. I’m not on social media, and people think that’s a joke, as if I’m being insincere. No, it’s a choice. I understand what it’s doing to me. I think we ought to be able to bear that. It’s good for us to be able to bear it. Andrea Hiott: I absolutely agree. I think this is the skill of the future: being able to stay with the tension. Not even sit, because you’re still moving, but stay with the trouble, hold the tension, hold the paradox, whichever way you want to say it. Then, of course, we want to reorient, because we’re always moving; we don’t just stay stuck in there. But first you have to come into it, as you show in the book with your own examples and with the research. You also talk about how attention is something we [00:53] channel. I think there’s a quote, maybe yours or maybe Christof Koch’s, about attention being something we channel ourselves into. It becomes action; it’s actionable. So reclaiming your attention, noticing that it’s been taken by all this stuff you maybe don’t care about, is uncomfortable and not easy. I think it’s good to know that it’s okay that it’s not easy, and that we can help each other. That’s why your book is so helpful: “Okay, this is hard, and maybe I’m going to go through some hard stuff, but other people are there too.” Just knowing you’re not alone can be so helpful, can’t it? The transcendent function Patricia Martin: Yes. And this gets back to Jung and the passion of endurance. It’s holding that tension that births the transcendent function. [00:54] If you can just hold it long enough, and feel the discomfort of it, something else emerges that is completely of its own creation. This is where Csikszentmihalyi started to write about flow. It’s really interesting to me, by the way, that when Csikszentmihalyi was very young, he sat in on a lecture Carl Jung gave. Andrea Hiott: Oh, I didn’t know that. Patricia Martin: Yes. He went home and decided he wanted to be a psychologist. Andrea Hiott: Wow. I hadn’t thought of that. I think everything we’re touching on is very connected: flow, his work, the role of attention, Jung as the source, opposites that aren’t really opposites. It’s all in this kind of movement we’re talking about. There are two or three [00:55] other things I really want to talk about, but we don’t have a lot of time left, so I’ll put a few out there and you can take whatever you like. One is fringes and edges. You explored all these different things that hadn’t been central in your life before, talking to a tattoo artist and so on. I’m not sure how it connects here, but it seems to. The other is something so interesting in your book: the people with the most self-esteem are often the most fragile. We usually think it’s the opposite. We think that if we become the super-person online, or in whatever world we want to become great in, then we’ll have confidence. But I’ve definitely seen in my own life and in others that you actually become more fragile. That’s a really [00:56] interesting point in your book. And I think it connects, because once you’re in that space, it becomes harder to explore and be messy. Those two things kept coming up, especially the second, which is a really important insight. The self-esteem paradox Patricia Martin: The idea of self-esteem was very much in vogue in the 2000s: the notion that most psychological problems could be boiled down to self-esteem issues. Culturally, it made its way into television, storytelling, and schools. People believed that if you could just raise someone’s self-esteem, they could self-correct, [00:57] not only socially and economically but psychologically. I found that the opposite was true. I was talking to people you wouldn’t describe as having low self-esteem. They were high achievers with every reason to be confident about who they were, and they had a lot of agency in the world. These were people who could make things happen: entrepreneurs, artists, people who could manifest physical things. And yet they suffered from an inability to create a sense of a future self. When I asked them, “How do you see yourself in the future?” I was met with silence. Andrea Hiott: Hmm. Patricia Martin: This stunned me. They were uncertain. Following this chronic self-doubt issue, I sensed that what had seeped [00:58] into their mindsets was a shadowy sense that failure could be around the corner at any time. They had built worlds upon worlds inside the internet, and somebody was at the switch with the algorithm, and the bottom could fall out of everything at any minute. Because we’re all workers on the plantation; we don’t own the plantation. It’s not collectivized. And that has real economic, cultural, and creative consequences for people. That’s when I really began to see how much of ourselves (our aspirations, how we see ourselves, who we want to become) has been invested in how we’re perceived by others, and this is unprecedented. [00:59] There’s nothing in history like it; I looked. So this isn’t a self-esteem issue. In fact, people felt a lot of discomfort around it: “I can solve all these other problems, and I have all this agency. Why don’t I feel better about myself? What’s not working?” They had no understanding of what these signals meant, and neither did I. We had to figure it out together, in many ways. Andrea Hiott: Yes, you were moving through it too, discovering these things and now sharing them, which is part of this wonderful journey. You also present self-regulation, and you talk about prototyping. As you said at the beginning, you’re not saying technology is terrible. [01:00] It can be used for terrible purposes, but it’s about being conscious of it, what we want people to create, and what we choose. Maybe you could talk about Janet. There are people in this world who are getting tons of followers and making it, and they start to realize they’re losing that endurance, that passion, that will. The persona becomes like a balloon floating over there, no longer connected to them. And they decide, “Okay, I’m going to sit with the friction. I’m going to sit with this not being comfortable.” Somewhere you have the idea that doubt is the ego’s language of rebellion. So: “I’m going to go against the grain and see what I can discover for myself.” Then they start using these online tools to do that, which might mean [01:01] fewer likes, or bad comments, because they’re not fitting the algorithm. In a way that becomes a rebellion, a beautiful rebellion, if you’re doing it from your own movement, from what really moves you and what you care about, having been able to sit in the discomfort and reorient. That’s a very positive part of the book we haven’t gotten to yet, one that offers a path forward. Janet’s story Patricia Martin: Yes, and I’m so glad, because this is a great place for us to end, on the high note of what we can do. This is the story of Janet. Very quickly: Janet was a rock star online. In high school she was a STEM student, so she learned to code early. I can’t even number the platforms she was on. She adopted every new platform as it came along: Instagram, [01:02] Facebook, the typical ones, but also multiplayer games. She had all these archetypal identities: her avatars, all her different social selves. Now she’s 17, she has a very promising future, and she has to apply to college. She has to write an essay about herself, and she draws a blank. She doesn’t know how to talk about herself. And this isn’t a writing problem; it’s a self-image problem. So she decides to spend a weekend looking through every single persona in her wardrobe [01:03] and assessing each one on how true it feels to her, not to anybody else. She set the boundary that it didn’t matter how many likes something got. That was not her benchmark. Her benchmark was, “Is it true to me?” If it wasn’t true to her, she decided to get off that platform. Andrea Hiott: Thank you, Janet. What a smart young woman. I just love it. Patricia Martin: Right? So smart. At 18 years old, she’s hitting no, or pause. Then she looks at the parts of herself she had negated. Self-negation is a big part of persona fog: you begin negating parts of your true self that hold a lot of promise for who you might become, because they haven’t gotten a lot of likes, reinforcement, validation, popularity, or shares. This is where the title of [01:04] the book comes in: Will the Future Like You? She decides to take her future into her own hands. If something was true to her and it fell on deaf ears, she was going to bring it into the wardrobe and keep it there. Then she sat down and wrote a sovereign paragraph saying, “This is who I am now.” She had clarity, and from that she built her essay. Needless to say, she got into an elite university with a merit scholarship. The rest is history. But what stunned me about her was that she was taking command of her identity at such a young age, because she had the consciousness to see what the internet had done to her sense of self. And she took control. Andrea Hiott: That’s what I was about to say. For me it’s not about the [01:05] credentials and getting into college, which is wonderful, and I’m happy for her. It’s such a powerful thing because she was able to reorient her attention at such a young age, and at such a crucial time, and feel her power again as herself. So many people want to do that, and it’s so hard, especially at that age, when you’re literally going against what you think everyone is telling you is cool, or what they like. It’s such a powerful thing to be able to do that and continue. I think it also connects to caring and mattering and love, which is important to me and part of all this. It’s definitely part of the story you tell; I feel it in your story. It also seems to have directed your story, whether with your family or otherwise. So I want to ask you about that word, and whatever comes up for you. Love, attention, and the good-enough gaze Patricia Martin: [01:06] Are you asking me about the word love? Andrea Hiott: Yes. What role does it play in these themes? Maybe in writing the book, but also when we sit in this tension: is love there too? Is it a kind of attention? What do you think? Patricia Martin: Oh, yes. Absolutely. Love has always been tied to what we attend to, what we give our gaze to. I love the work of Donald Winnicott, who was a Freudian psychiatrist. A little tidbit: I find that psychiatrists tend to be Freudian in their early years and then mature into Jungianism. They rise to Carl Jung’s work after they’ve lived enough and seen enough to say, “Oh, he’s onto something.” [01:07] And so he became a Jungian later in his career. He was a child psychologist, and his was the theory of the good-enough mother. The good-enough mother is one who can put her gaze on the child and see the child for who the child really is. This isn’t about cheering the child on. It isn’t about praise or validation. It’s strictly giving one’s attention to the child as a nurturing form of love and sustenance, and that gaze builds in the child the confidence to endure, the confidence to become who they really are. I’ve really taken this on in my daily life, in everything I do. Before sitting down with you today, I picked up a [01:08] cup of coffee at my local coffee shop, and I consciously made eye contact with the person taking my money and pouring my coffee. I attended to them with a sincere gaze, because that’s what I can do as a human being to make the world go round. If we all understood the power of our gaze and our attention, I think there’d be more love in the world. Why the self still matters Patricia Martin: I may have drifted off course, but what I also want to say about love is this. There’s the Lacanian idea that [01:09] there really is no self: that we’ve over-invested in the self, over-indexed on it, and we shouldn’t worry about it so much; what we should worry about is how the self gets translated into the world, what we can do for others. There’s truth to that. But this negation, the idea that the self doesn’t matter, is very convenient, because the internet would love you to believe it. Then, when you start to lose your sense of self, you won’t notice. You have less at stake. I’m telling people it’s time to update our sense of self, and why it matters, for the 21st century. Because if we can’t do that, we can’t genuinely love anybody, and we certainly can’t love ourselves. And the science [01:10] bears this out. People who had over-invested in persona also faltered at love, because they didn’t believe the other person really loved who they were. They believed the person they were in a romance with had fallen in love with their persona, so the love couldn’t be trusted. I think that’s so sad. And I often wonder, Andrea, whether that’s part of what’s at play in all the tension online around heterosexual romance and love, with the genders widening the gap of understanding. I wonder what role persona, and the lack of real, [01:11] genuine human attention and focus, has played in that. What do you think? Listening as love Andrea Hiott: I think what you just said is so important. You said you were meandering, but I think you’re right on point with listening as love. Listening is such a gift, if someone is attentive to you. It’s one of the greatest gifts we can give each other. Attentive in the sense of not asking what you can get out of this person, and not looking because something is cool and everyone else is looking. It’s your bodily, full, enduring, uncomfortable self orienting and mattering toward someone. That’s how I think of it. Your very life force [01:12] is moving toward the person, or able to sit with and listen to them. When you can just be there and not be trying to get something or shift something, what a gift that is. For me it’s very connected to what love is, in a bodily, caring, mattering, becoming sort of way. I think that’s the hard puzzle: how to let each other matter in that way without first looking at each other’s stats. Patricia Martin: Their [unclear] scores. Andrea Hiott: Yeah, all of that. I do think everyone is hungry for it, but everyone’s afraid to do it, partly because we don’t see it modeled. And it is hard. It takes a lot of energy to be present. Patricia Martin: It does. But you’re wasting that energy [01:13] someplace else, so be a steward of your own attention resources, is what I’d say. And by the way, this is incremental identity development. This is identity formation you have chosen. This is your will being reclaimed. Remember, you’re living day to day on an internet designed to upend your sense of will. So I’m practicing, in small ways, deciding who I want to be: when I pick up my groceries, when I pump gas, when I meet someone on the street, when I get a haircut. Wherever I am, I’m deciding who I want to be by giving [01:14] my gaze to another human being and making a connection. Because, just like Janet, that’s who I want to be, and I won’t become that unless I take back my will. And we do it in small ways. Andrea Hiott: That’s very beautiful, and thank you for that. It’s a wonderful way to live, isn’t it? It’s actually much more satisfying than what we’ve seen modeled and confused ourselves into thinking is the goal. What you’re describing is very sustaining. It’s a wonderful way to be alive, especially if you’re in community. You talk about belonging as a kind of survival, this nestling-in feeling. When you’re in a community that supports that, it feels like a great life. It seems kind of strange: why would [01:15] we... we don’t even need all the online stuff. Patricia Martin: If you go back to where we started in this interview, you were talking about your grandparents having a sense of belonging to a community that was ritualized, maybe through going to church or other kinds of belonging. That’s how they saw each other: I see you, and you see me, and that is very confirming. This is what we reclaim when we give our gaze in a meaningful way. And the bonus is that you unlock the flow of life force in the other person. Andrea Hiott: It resonates with participatory sense-making. Patricia Martin: Yes, exactly. [01:16] Now you’re in the generative flow of it. And what are you doing? You’re buying a coffee and having a moment. It only has to last three or four minutes, but it’s going to get you through your day. This is how we’re going to rebuild what it is to be human. I believe this to my core. Closing: the spiral Andrea Hiott: I believe it too, and I thank you for your work. I think we don’t even know what’s possible when we really do that. We’re not going back. We’re coming back to where we started, but it’s a spiral, so it’s never really where we started. We have Jung now, and all these things, and maybe we can sense into the world even more than we thought possible. It’s not that we want to become like our grandparents, because they also had a lot of pressure and conflict. But even in this conversation, we’ve come back to where we started, and it’s a very different place, right? Patricia Martin: Right. It’s been a [01:17] great journey. Thank you for taking it with me. Andrea Hiott: Thank you. Thank you for your book and for all that you’re doing. I’ll point everyone to your wonderful podcast and, of course, the book. If there’s anything else you’d like to share before we go, please go ahead. Patricia Martin: I look forward to your book coming out too. Andrea Hiott: Oh, thank you. Patricia Martin: Yes, I’m eager to read it. This has been a great connection to make. I appreciate that the two of us are intellectual omnivores who see the big picture. It was really fun to be in conversation with you, Andrea. Thank you. Andrea Hiott: Same, Patricia. Thank you. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit lovephilosophy.substack.com/subscribe (https://lovephilosophy.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2)

2. 

   4 Oct 2026

   Love, Attention & Meaning with John Vervaeke (and Iris Murdoch)

   On Love, Attention, and the Good: Cognitive scientist John Vervaeke (https://johnvervaeke.com/) (University of Toronto) and philosopher Darius Parvizi-Wayne (Macquarie University) talk about love as a way of paying attention, starting from Iris Murdoch’s The Sovereignty of Good. They discuss John’s idea that getting out of the meaning crisis means “falling in love with being again,” Murdoch’s famous M and D example, what “unselfing” really means, Simone Weil, Heidegger, the Kyoto School, and pilgrimage as a way of knowing. They end with a personal conversation about mentorship, vocation and the love of wisdom. Introduced by Andrea Hiott (https://substack.com/profile/226403388-andrea-hiott) from the Philosophers’ Way in Heidelberg. CHAPTERS 00:00 Introduction from the Philosophers’ Way, Heidelberg 02:30 Darius and John introduce themselves 07:00 “Falling in love with being again” 12:00 Love as volitional necessity 17:00 Murdoch’s The Sovereignty of Good 27:00 The M and D example 37:00 Can cognitive science explain loving attention? 43:00 Unselfing: Murdoch vs. Simone Weil 46:30 The Kyoto School: self-power and other-power 52:00 The two-worlds mythology and nihilism 1:08:00 Nishitani and absolute nothingness 1:20:30 Place, basho, and the sacred 1:23:30 Pilgrimage and theoria 1:27:30 Darius’s story 1:32:30 Mentorship, vocation, and the love of wisdom 1:38:00 Closing: dialogos and Middlemarch MENTIONED Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good · Harry Frankfurt, The Reasons of Love · Mark Wynn, Renewing the Senses and Faith and Place · Silvia Caprioglio Panizza, The Ethics of Attention · Taliaferro & Evans, Iris Murdoch and the Transcendent · Jeff Malpas, Heidegger’s Topology · Robert E. Carter, The Nothingness Beyond God · John Vervaeke, Awakening from the Meaning Crisis * John Vervaeke (https://johnvervaeke.com/) and Darius Parvizi-Wayne (https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=ahuMDH4AAAAJ&hl=en) * How preferences enslave attention (Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences) (https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11097-024-10028-5) * What active inference still can’t do (Philosophy and the Mind Sciences) (https://philosophymindscience.org/index.php/phimisci/article/view/12118) * Iris Murdoch – Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Lawrence Blum) (https://philpapers.org/sep/murdoch/) * Iris Murdoch and the Transcendent – Taliaferro & Evans (https://mitpressbookstore.mit.edu/book/9781009631570) TRANSCRIPT John Vervaeke and Darius Parvizi-Wayne Andrea: [00:00:00] Hello everyone. Welcome to Love and Philosophy. This is a conversation between John Vervaeke and Darius Parvizi-Wayne. They will introduce one another. Darius, who knows both of us, offered to put us in touch, but I thought that Darius and John might have an even better conversation, and wow, it’s a good one. And they talked about Iris Murdoch, who is one of my favorite philosophers. So, three amazing voices in this conversation. I just wanted to say something: so many students listen to this, but also a lot of professors and teachers, whether you’re an academic or a teacher in some other way. In a way, many people are teachers without even knowing it. Listening to this conversation, and also to some of the notes I get from you asking me to talk to John Vervaeke, I realize how important mentors are in our lives, whoever they may be for you. We all have different ones. [00:01:00] We all come from different paths, and different people speak to us at different times. But that relationship in general is so important, and I really felt that in this conversation in so many ways. There’s an old story about Honi, who sees a man planting a tree, a carob tree, and teases him: it takes, what, seventy years to bear fruit, and you’ll never eat from it. And the man shrugs and says, “I found these trees when I came into the world, so I’m planting them for my grandchildren.” Then, I think, Honi lies down and goes to sleep for seventy years, and wakes up, and there’s the man’s grandson eating from the tree. Anyway, I think there’s even more to that story than that, but it comes to mind because, for one thing, if you’re watching the video, I’m up here on the Philosophenweg, the Philosophers’ Way, in Heidelberg. I’m at the university here. And so many people walked here on this path. Hölderlin, if you [00:02:00] know the poet, was up here, and Hegel, who I talk about a lot, but also Karl Jaspers, who’s one of the reasons I came to this town. Hannah Arendt was his student, and both of them are so important. I could go on and on. Max Weber used to live nearby. Anyway, there’s a tradition in these hills of philosophers walking, and I think it’s a wonderful metaphor for this conversation between John and Darius and Iris Murdoch. So here we go. I hope you love it as much as I did. Darius: Well, I think we should just do this spontaneously, right? And then, Andrea, you can edit as you see appropriate. Well, John, this is a complete honor for me. On a public platform it’s been, what, two and a half years since we spoke for the Active Inference Insights podcast, in, I think, December ‘23. John: I think that’s right, yeah. Darius: So quite a lot’s [00:03:00] changed. Just for the audience, people should know who you are. I imagine many people know who you are, but of course you can introduce yourself. Many people will not know who I am, though. My name’s Darius Parvizi-Wayne. I’m about to enter the third year of a PhD in philosophy here at Macquarie University in Sydney. I’m obviously not Australian, if you can’t tell from my accent. I’m originally from the UK, and I’m very inspired by John’s work, as well as other people’s, of course. My PhD is on active inference, or predictive processing, and the problem of relevance, which is something John has worked on extensively for decades now. But I have a range of interests that very much align with John’s: flow and insight and intuition and skillful coping and Heidegger, and someone I hope we get to touch on quite a lot today, which is Iris Murdoch. John: Yes. Darius: [00:04:00] But John, is there anything you would want to add about yourself? John: I guess, if people don’t know me, I’m an associate professor at the University of Toronto in psychology, where I teach cognitive psychology and cognitive science. I’ve been the director, the associate director, and the assistant director of the cognitive science program, so I have a long history with that program. In psychology, I work on intelligence, rationality, wisdom, meaning in life, and mystical experiences. In cog sci, I work on, as Darius said, relevance realization, its connections to predictive processing, and its connections to what’s called 4E cognitive science. This is the idea that cognition is inherently embedded, enacted, embodied, and extended. I would perhaps add another E: it’s exapted, in an important way. And then both of those come together. I’m a [00:05:00] long-term practitioner: 35 years of Tai Chi Chuan, Yiquan, Zhan Zhuang, meditation, contemplation, Neoplatonic practice. I’m also a facilitator. I facilitate various retreats and intensives. I co-facilitate with other people. All of this work is marshaled together towards wrestling with what I call the meaning crisis, which I’ve been talking about for quite some time. I have a YouTube series on it that’s become somewhat famous, Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. And by meaning I don’t mean semantic meaning; that’s a metaphor for what I’m talking about, which is this sense of existential, spiritual meaning. What makes life worth living even when we bump up against failure and frustration and futility. Many people are struggling, increasingly so: issues around loneliness, ideological capture. I could go on with an entire symptomatology. [00:06:00] And more and more people have taken this up and are discussing it actively. So all of my work is basically aimed at trying to help people address and ameliorate this. Part of that is theoretical work, scientific work, understanding meaning better and all of these other processes I talked about. Part of it is practical, in the deep sense of practice: giving people an ecology of practices. Part of it is educational. I do that at the lectern, and on my online teaching platform. Right now we’re going through the Kyoto School: how can their integration of Zen and Heidegger, and through Heidegger, Neoplatonism, perhaps help us with the problems of nihilism and cynicism we face? So that’s a lot of what my work is. And I get to bump into some really excellent people, and one of them is Darius. I think of you as a friend now, and I hope you think so too. [00:07:00] We talk quite often off camera. We’re collaborating on several things. He’s much faster than I am. I’m an extremely busy person. I’m sure he’s busy too, but I’ll use that as my excuse. We talk a lot, we share a lot, and I always enjoy his company. I know we’re supposed to be talking about love today, and I think that’s actually relevant to everything I said, and I’ll say something initially provocative. I have proposed, and this requires a really deep recovery of what we mean by love, and we can talk about that, and Murdoch will play an important role in that, but I have proposed that ultimately, awakening from the meaning crisis requires us being able to fall in love with being again. You can hear Heidegger in that proposal as well. So the topic of love has been very central to me because of that particular proposal. Darius: Good. That’s excellent. [00:08:00] I think there’s a nice way of making a convergence here between someone like Heidegger and Murdoch. Just to add, of course, I feel exactly the same. I definitely see us as friends. You are in many ways also a mentor and an idol, in the least glorifying or sacrilegious way possible. And I think at the end of this chat it would be nice to talk a little bit more about the personal dimensions of this stuff. John: Happy to do that. Darius: But to go to the philosophy. One thing that Heidegger makes very clear is that we are beings that care. We are Dasein, and at the very foundation he wants to say Dasein’s constitution is temporality, but at least at the intermediary level he says it’s Sorge, it’s care. We are the beings for whom being is itself an issue. And one way you could cash that out is to say we are the [00:09:00] beings who love things, who are projective, who care about things, who take things seriously, who give a damn, to use John Haugeland’s phrase. This brings us nicely to Murdoch. You’re trying to draw an interesting relationship, I think, between love and something like care, or love and relevance. And this isn’t just in Murdoch and Heidegger. Someone like Harry Frankfurt is very interesting here. John: Yes. Darius: In the beginning of The Reasons of Love, he says the more fundamental question is not “what is the moral life?” We need to pay attention to what we actually care about. We can only really get to the ethical context by first understanding what matters to us. So I want to start by asking: how do you view that relationship between love and care, or love and relevance? This is interesting in the case of Murdoch, because it seems like Murdoch’s sense of love, where she talks about it with respect to attention, is not just about [00:10:00] accruing as much propositional information about another as possible. This is a point that’s really nicely made by Chris Cordner. I want to read out the famous M and D example to put meat on the bones. But before I do that: Chris Cordner and others have made clear that love is not just this excruciating acquisition or extraction of as many details about someone as possible. That can actually be used, as I think he puts it, to turn the screws of humiliation, right? If I pay attention to every fine detail of you. But that being said, that acquisition of fine detail does seem to mirror or reflect how relevant you are to me. So there does seem to be a slight disjunction between what’s relevant to me and what I love. How do you see that relationship? John: Well, first of all, you and I both, and if we need to we can go into the [00:11:00] detail, think that relevance realization is primordial. You and I are also on the same page that we think it’s even deeper than the framework of predictive processing. This is some of the work I’ve done with Dan Chiappe: that fundamental orientation that makes any predictive processing possible. So we’re talking about something very primordial. And I want to say that because it’s clear that Heidegger is talking about care in this primordial sense. He’s not talking about it the way I care about ice cream or something like that. At least not initially. Because it is, as you say, bound up, and this is why it relates to the meaning crisis, with the fact that we are the beings for whom being is in question. It really goes to the guts of our existence. This is why I want to say that relevance realization can meet Heidegger’s notion of care, because it is [00:12:00] equally, to my mind, primordial, and has to do with our fundamental orientation and connection to reality. We don’t need to get into the mechanics. I want to make a connection first to Frankfurt. This is a notion he uses, although I think you see equivalent notions in John Searle and in Hans Jonas. Jonas talks about needful freedom, and John Searle says that in a good argument we find the conclusion compelling, but it’s not compulsive. There’s this weird state, and Frankfurt has a great term for it: volitional necessity. This is the idea that when I’m loving something, I feel very bound to it. There’s a necessity to it. If you were to ask me, I cannot help but love Sara. She’s my beloved. But I don’t feel like I’m losing my agency [00:13:00] in this. I feel like my agency is flourishing. And there are other examples of this. Like I said, for Searle, reason seems to be a volitional necessity. Many people have talked about beauty as a kind of volitional necessity. And as I said, Hans Jonas talks about something very similar, at least when he talks about life itself as a needful freedom. In the needful there’s a kind of necessity, but there’s a freedom in there too. And I think all of these plug into something central. I think relevance realization is exactly like that, because of the way it works. It’s not algorithmic; it doesn’t work according to standards of necessity. You know this: for technical reasons, that would often commit us to a combinatorially explosive search of the information. So we’re not working according to logical or causal standards of necessity, but neither are we just arbitrarily picking what we will pay attention to, what we will remember, how we will act. So it’s that volitional necessity. And I think there’s something really [00:14:00] powerful here, and I’ll get to your detailed question in a second. There’s something about love and relevance realization, care, being caught by beauty. And I remember talking to Bishop Maximos about this, and I said, “Is that perhaps what was originally meant by people like Clement when they were talking about faith?” Faith as more of a faithfulness, almost a fealty, a loyalty to something, a volitional necessity, the way I feel this tremendous loyalty to Sara. And he said, “That’s exactly right. Faith isn’t about believing things without evidence. It’s this sense of being committed to something because it appeals to you as fundamentally good.” And I think that’s important, because I want to bring in this notion of commitment to supplement care: that love has an aspect of commitment to it, [00:15:00] because something appeals to us as good. And then one more point. Somebody I find very helpful around this is Wynn. Mark Wynn, in Renewing the Senses. He’s often almost explicitly influenced by 4E cog sci. He talks about what’s happening in religious conversions, in which people feel deeply committed to a new way of life. They go through a transformation, and they recommit their identity in a fundamental way. And he says, “People talk about seeing God, but they’re not seeing a focal object in an adjectival way.” What’s happening, and this is language you and I both like, is a change in the salience landscape and its hue, and in the sense of connectedness. It’s very adverbial. And the way he explains it, which I found personally very helpful, is that “the universe goes from being a container of things to being something that faces us.” Because in a [00:16:00] face, it’s not that we’re picking up on every detail, but wherever we focus on a detail, the whole is present. It’s pregnant in that face. And it’s present in a way, and this is a Heideggerian thing, that is also withdrawing. We get a sense of the mystery of the person in their face. So that’s how I’m trying to bring it together. When we’re in volitional necessity, we are called because something appeals to us, and that’s Smith’s work: appeal actually means to call to us, right? And with volitional necessity, when we’re called, the care is called into commitment, and I think that means we start to face someone. It’s not that we’re picking up every detail, but we are facing them. We are experiencing them as facing us, rather than as a thing in Cartesian space just filling up space in the universe. So that’s a proposal I would give back to you. [00:17:00] Darius: Yeah, this is excellent. There’s plenty of convergence here, I think, with stuff that I’ve been thinking about. It brings me nicely to my little bit of a battered copy. John: Beautiful book. Just for people who are only listening, he’s holding up The Sovereignty of Good by Iris Murdoch. Darius: This is probably about the fourth time I’ve read it, in preparation for this, and I think it’s the first time I’ve felt its more spiritual dimension come to the fore. John: Excellent. Darius: What I mean by that is I would want to add that there’s a volitional necessity, at least for Murdoch, though I wouldn’t go fully fledged myself, although I was quite convinced: it’s one’s orientation to the good. John: Mm-hmm. Darius: Murdoch interestingly says, and I made a note of this in preparation, “The idea of a patient, loving regard, directed upon a person, a thing, a situation, presents the will not as unimpeded movement but as something very [00:18:00] much more like obedience.” John: Mm-hmm. Darius: So she talks about the necessity of the good, as a form of reality, as constraining you, right? It’s not that I’m just open, in an existentialist, Sartrean way, to interpret things on the fly. Actually, my orientation to the good is a form of volitional necessity. It draws me in, and yet, as you say, it’s not an impediment to my freedom, my agency. And what I found particularly spiritual about this reading of The Sovereignty of Good is the notion, which I think you’re getting at when you bring up Wynn, of excess, of concealment. In “The Idea of Perfection,” she says a fundamental aspect of being a human being is that there’s always this orientation towards improvement, towards bettering oneself, recognizing that there is a standard towards which [00:19:00] one can always aim upwards. That strikes me as another form of volitional necessity, and it also makes me think of Merleau-Ponty and the notion of an optimal grip. Our existence is in many ways normatively structured, even at the most deeply pre-reflective level, towards something better. And she’s very careful not to reify this betterness. John: Oh, yes. Darius: She talks about how it has to be a small seed that is formless, but that has to continue to occupy more of a role in our life. This “there is more than this,” as she puts it. And so for her, ultimately, to love something is to be, as she puts it, confronted with an endless task. So I’m wondering whether that resonates with you, for us in this world where things are transient and changing, which I think is [00:20:00] also important to pick up on, right? We do not exist in the Platonic realm, and Wynn wants to do careful work at dismantling that dichotomy. It’s not as if love is an effort-free orientation. It requires work, and it may never come to total fulfillment. John: Oh, that’s very rich. Let me try to pick up on various threads. First of all, I think there’s a potential connection between Wynn and Murdoch that you pointed me towards. I mentioned that for Wynn the sense of the sacred is adverbial, not adjectival. And I think that’s maybe also the case for Murdoch: the good isn’t an adjectival, focal object. It’s an adverbial thing that is constantly transforming what we find salient and how we understand ourselves. And I think that comes out in Wright’s notion, which he derives from the M and D example, of what he calls sensibility transcendence. I think [00:21:00] that’s deeply right. I think this notion of facing up is really important. John Russon does some work on this, right? This is our primary metaphor for maturation, and notice it’s got the facing language. When we face up to somebody, again, we’re not just confronting an object in Cartesian space. I am proposing to integrate this with a Vygotskian perspective. There’s an awareness, and this is the Callard idea of aspiration, right, as in religious conversion. Think of a child. They have an awareness that the adult has a perspective they do not have. So from their perspective, what the adult is doing doesn’t make a tremendous amount of sense, and there are some classic experiments showing that kids will imitate even when it doesn’t make any sense to them. But they do it because that individual is trustworthy, and they imitate the perspective-taking, and then that gets internalized [00:22:00] as metacognition. The child eventually can take the adult’s perspective on its own. So there’s a lot packed into this facing up to reality. It brings in the facing again. But the other thing is, if we understand Murdoch as proposing that the aspiration towards the good, the adverbial aspiration, is maturational in nature, because we are facing up to something we don’t completely understand and yet we’re trying to internalize it, it sounds a lot like that Vygotskian machinery. And if that’s the case, that might help to explain another important component of what we typically understand by love that’s not addressed that directly. But correct me if I’m wrong, because I’m very open to that. I mean, she’s not very familiar with it, because it comes towards the end of her life. [00:23:00] This is the psychological notion of attachment. Maturation and psychological attachment are deeply bound up. And I would say that the commitment I have to Sara is not only conjoined to care; it’s also reaching into my attachment system, the very machinery by which I internalize other people in order to mature. I’m facing up to them, they face me, and I interface with them. The language here is really quite proper. And I think it does feed over into Murdoch, because I wouldn’t know if it’s exclusive, but I think that’s the proper way, meaning most of the way, in which we achieve the particular kind of metacognition we call conscience, where the normativity of our world and of other people becomes a part of how [00:24:00] we direct and understand ourselves. What do you think about that? I was trying to play with... Darius: Yeah, good. So she certainly doesn’t mention attachment. There’s been a complaint, or a concern, in the secondary literature that Murdoch doesn’t take enculturation seriously enough. John: Yeah. Darius: I think Blum mentions this, perhaps in the SEP entry on Murdoch. There are slight mentions of it in the book, but there is very little on what someone like Gibson would call the education of attention. For Murdoch, what matters is that we mature in our attention such that we can look on the world with a just and loving gaze, but there’s very little on how we might do that. I think she’s aware of that, and she’s aware of the predicament she’s in, which is that we can’t now resort to capital-G God to guide us. She does invoke things like prayer, and questions whether that [00:25:00] might be our route to purifying our attentional schema. But there’s very little by way of others training us. That doesn’t mean she’s not aware of the import of the other. To go back to the attachment point, one thing she’s very clear on is that just and loving attention is not about consumption. It’s not about getting the other as a kind of commodity that you can exploit in your scheme. And again, this comes back to Heidegger and the notion of standing reserve. There are interesting questions there about what kind of attention that is. This is a tension I try to pull out in some of my work that’s under review, about Murdoch and attention: attention does seem in many ways to reflect our individual preferences. So there’s this continuous tension in Murdoch, I think, between this notion of unselfing, but also John: psychological commitments. We’ve got to talk about that, because I think there’s a lot of misunderstanding [00:26:00] about unselfing. And we’ve got to talk about the fact that self-reference isn’t a single phenomenon. There’s a big difference between narrative, egocentric self-reference and the kind of self-reference I need in order to get up and walk around the room. So I think we’ve got to tread very carefully there. But I do want to come back to the point you made about non-consumption. I have tended, and I’m prepared to defend it, although we can talk about it, to map that onto a Frommian distinction between the having mode, which is needs of consumption, and the being mode, which is needs of maturation: we need to become honest, we need to become wise, we need to become, right? Many people have said it should have been named the becoming mode rather than the being mode. And then you talk about a different kind of attention, and this is where I think of... [00:27:00] I want to come back to enculturation, because it’s odd that a woman who writes dialogues, who actually writes Platonic dialogues and considers herself a Platonist, doesn’t really bring in the dialogical aspect of this. Darius: Well, and even if we look at the M and D example... John: Well, the M and D... Darius: Let me just read it out. I hope it doesn’t take too long. I’ll just read it and then we can see where we go. John: Please, please do. Darius: It’s a classic moment. “A mother, whom I shall call M, feels hostility to her daughter-in-law, whom I shall call D. M finds D quite a good-hearted girl, but while not exactly common yet certainly unpolished and lacking in dignity and refinement. D is inclined to be pert and familiar, insufficiently ceremonious, brusque, sometimes positively rude, always tiresomely juvenile. M does not like D’s accent or the way D [00:28:00] dresses. M feels that her son has married beneath him. Let us assume for purposes of the example that the mother, who is a very ‘correct’ person, behaves beautifully to the girl throughout, not allowing her real opinion to appear in any way. We might underline this aspect of the example by supposing that the young couple have emigrated or that D is now dead: the point being to ensure that whatever is in question happens entirely in M’s mind. Thus much for M’s first thoughts about D. Time passes, and it could be that M settles down with a hardened sense of grievance and a fixed picture of D, imprisoned (if I may use a question-begging word) by the cliché: my poor son has married a silly vulgar girl. However, the M of the example is an intelligent and well-intentioned person, capable of self-criticism, capable of giving careful and just attention” (that’s in italics) “to an object which confronts her. M tells herself: ‘I am old-fashioned and conventional. I may be prejudiced and narrow-minded. I may be snobbish. I am certainly jealous. Let me look again.’ Here I assume that M observes D or at least reflects deliberately about D, until [00:29:00] gradually her vision of D alters. If we take D to be now absent or dead, this can make it clear that the change is not in D’s behavior but in M’s mind. D is discovered to be not vulgar but refreshingly simple, not undignified but spontaneous, not noisy but gay, not tiresomely juvenile but delightfully youthful, and so on. And as I say, ex hypothesi, M’s outward behavior, beautiful from the start, in no way alters.” So this comes off the back of her critique, or her scrutiny, of Wittgenstein: Wittgenstein’s argument against private language, and that argument ultimately being expanded to concepts and all forms of behavior writ large, which only make sense in the context of public ceremony, of the ways of going about the world. Because ultimately her interest is in reinstating the importance [00:30:00] of the internal constitution of a person to one’s ethical life. So it’s not just about outward behavior. It’s not, in a pure utilitarian sense, just what happens in the world that determines your moral life. There’s almost a Kantian element here, about the intention to treat another with dignity, as worthy of one’s respect. So she wants to say: if that’s the case, then we have to look at the internal constitution of people. And so she gives this example of M, for whom seemingly nothing has changed in terms of external behavior, and yet everything has happened internally. Now, as you probably know, I too have a slight problem with the pure Wittgensteinian picture of externalism, basically. I think it’s unfair to pin this entirely on Wittgenstein, because I take the quietistic picture of something like the Investigations quite seriously. What he’s trying to do is talk to us about our use of [00:31:00] language and tell us about the role of therapy. It’s a much more therapeutic text than an expository one. So I think she’s right to invoke something like internal mechanisms. But the reason this becomes problematic comes back to this point about enculturation, and the lack of anyone influencing M in her decision to change her mind. I think it runs into classic issues like circularity: does M not already have to be good to recognize her deficiency? So is just and loving attention making one good, or is it a marker of one’s already-established goodness? If it’s not a difference-maker, if it’s just an epiphenomenon of one’s already established goodness, there seems to be an issue of essentialism, right? It’s as if M was always already good, and this was always going to happen, and that doesn’t quite seem right either. [00:32:00] Sorry, I’ve gone on for far too long. John: No, no, you haven’t. Not at all. I’ll let you know if I think you’re going on too long. Darius: Okay, thanks. John: So first of all, Davidsonian charity to Murdoch. She’s writing at a time when behaviorism is the dominant psychological paradigm, and even the dominant philosophical one. Ryle and so forth are very active. And she’s trying to make a case for the inner life, and in that I agree with her. But I do think she’s sneaking some stuff in. She does talk about this, and other people talk about it quite naturally, as an inner dialogue taking place inside of us. And that is already to smuggle in something that we acquire, presumably both the knowing how to do it and the normativity of it, from our interactions with others. And this is in fact a central Platonic claim. Somebody asks [00:33:00] Antisthenes, “What did you learn from Socrates?” “I learned how to talk to myself,” right? It’s only by practicing, with shared meaning and mutual correction, that we get good at external dialogue, to the point where we can feel comfortable applying it internally, to different temporal states of ourselves. So I think she’s smuggling something in there. I completely agree with the rejection of the behaviorist rejection of the inner life of the mental. But I think she’d be a more consistent Platonist if she acknowledged that the inner dialogue is inseparable from the outer dialogue. Those two are constantly playing off against each other. And if she did that, she could avail herself of something like Buber: what we’re talking about is not I-It attention but I-Thou attention, and the I of the I-Thou [00:34:00] is a very different I from the I of the I-It. And I think that’s actually what she’s trying to put her finger on: that the I is changing in a fundamental way. That’s an inner change, but I think it’s happening dialogically and relationally. And what’s always bothered me about the example is that she says, “Well, what if D is dead?” For me, I’d want to know if any of those insights land or track, because insights can be wrong. This comes up a lot in practice. People will be in a dialogical practice and they think they have an insight about the other person, and the other person will say, “No, sorry, that’s not landing. That’s not what’s happening.” Right? And other times they’ll go, “Yeah. Yeah.” And then you can feel the I-Thou just spring up between them. Darius: Yeah, there’s a lot there. I think the first thing to say [00:35:00] is that you’re right that she would actually be not only more faithful to Plato, but more faithful to her own notion of loving attention as recognizing the alterity of the other, John: Yes. Darius: if she recognized the dialogical aspect of self-improvement, right? Recognizing that the other has something to teach you that you may not already have known, and that is a lifelong, endless task, as she puts it. And it comes back to the notion of the face, and this notion of excess. The other is beyond my consumption. It makes me think of Levinas, right? John: Yeah, of course. Darius: So the M and D example here is almost doing violence, one might say in the Levinasian sense, to the constitutive role of the other in something like self-formation. And I think it runs into... Bergson has this really lovely example. He directly counterposes his notion of becoming to, and it’s very much of the time, [00:36:00] the model of the French ladies with their fans, where everything is contained right at the first fold and then it ultimately unfurls and shows up. In some Laplacian sense, it was always already there, just waiting to be revealed. And that doesn’t allow for genuine change or genuine transformation or genuine novelty, right? If it’s always already there, just waiting to be John: Yeah. Darius: catalyzed. That’s not what we’re talking about. And I think that runs into some of my issues around what I’ve been calling the diachronic problem of relevance: how we develop idiosyncratic preferences, and the problem of grounding that in a first-prior story of always up-weighted homeostatic priors. I think that’s true both of active inference and of autopoietic enactivism, so it’s very cool to see these things converging. So there’s plenty there. But I want to come to this thing about attention, and [00:37:00] Buberian attention, the I-Thou attention you mentioned. Murdoch makes it very clear, and it’s clear here that she’s influenced by someone like Anscombe, that moral philosophy needs what she calls a philosophical psychology. It needs to make sense in the light of what we know about mentation and cognition. And she uses Freud, although at one point she calls Freudianism an “embryonic muddle,” and in some ways she’s probably right. John: That’s wonderful. She’s such a good writer. Darius: She is a good writer. She is. So my project in one of these papers was to think about whether the reconciliation of Murdochian ethics and philosophical psychology is still licensed. John: Mm. Darius: And I look at that from a predictive processing angle. I’m not sure I’ve sent you this paper, but I can if you’d like. John: Please. Darius: And one of the issues there is that [00:38:00] in our taxonomy of attention, we have exogenous and endogenous attention, although I think that dichotomy is worth dismantling, feature-based attention, spatial attention, and so on. We don’t have receptive attention. We don’t have orientational attention. We don’t have opening-up-to-the-moral-worth-of-others attention. So one question I would have for you, as someone who is interested in naturalizing phenomenology and, in this case, ethical philosophy, but who also has an eye to the transcendent, is how far can our accounts of cognition and our scientific worldview, when it comes to... I’d say the closest we can get to what Murdoch is talking about, in terms of our scientific account, is feature-based attention. I’m going to love someone differently depending on what part of them I focus on. Do I focus on the aggression in their face, or do I focus on the vulnerability in their face? But even then, that still seems to be a very [00:39:00] object-centered, detail-oriented, extractive process. So I’m wondering what you think about the prospects of cognitive science even getting close to explaining the type of attention she’s interested in? John: Yeah. Dan Chiappe and I were doing a lot of work on orientation, and we’re both also reading Panizza’s book right now. Darius: Yeah. John: On the ethics of attention. She mentions Wu’s theory, but she seems to be most in line, as far as I’ve read so far, with Watzl’s idea of attention as prioritization and the structuring of consciousness. And I think that’s getting very close to relevance realization and the kind of orientation that Dan and I are talking about, that Stegmaier is talking about. And Kant bumps into it famously in the critique, where he realizes that when I list all the features of my left and right hand, all the propositional descriptions, there’s nothing that distinguishes them, and [00:40:00] yet my orientation clearly picks them out as different from each other, because I orient to them. It’s completely adverbial, and that’s the point I want to make. It’s an adverbial kind of qualia rather than an adjectival qualia. And I think that’s really important, because Kant realizes that you can’t reason, you can’t do anything until you’re oriented, and then he panics a little bit and says, “Well, it must be a feeling,” and he puts it aside. But we’ve got the work of Stegmaier, Sass, and others, and I think it plugs in nicely to the work Panizza is doing on Murdoch and Weil on the ethics of attention. And I think the orientation language just lands very naturally in Murdoch, really, really well. So I think there is work being done on what’s going on in orientation. Now, I think it has [00:41:00] something to do with prioritization, but it also has to do with other aspects of relevance realization. The thing I would want to put here, though, gets me back to Wynn and his proposal for a more adverbial understanding of the sacred. When you move to orientation, you’re moving to this adverbial sense, to hereness and nowness and valence and connectedness and foregrounding and backgrounding, the kinds of things that I think are actually really relevant to describing a lot of the phenomenology people experience when they’re having very transcendent experiences. And I proposed this argument to you, and we’ve been bashing it back and forth: even in things like mystical states, where we might think that something like relevance realization goes quiet, no, you still find the adverbial aspects of [00:42:00] orientation at work. In fact, you find them enhanced. Enhanced presence, enhanced nowness, enhanced orientation, to the point of at-one-ment, and things like that. So I think we can connect the cognitive science to the phenomenology, and to some of the work people are doing on the phenomenology of the sacred, in a way that I think is very viable for amplifying a lot of what Murdoch is trying to put her finger on. The way she talks about the magnetic pull of the good seems to fit really well with that adverbial alteration in salience and orientation and hereness and nowness and connectedness, and my sense of being called into volitional necessity. So I think 4E cognitive science, allied with phenomenology, can actually say a lot about attention, and especially attention to [00:43:00] the sacred. I would make that argument. Darius: Yeah, nice. You’re mentioning plenty of researchers, and I like that. I very much align myself with this. I’ve got very minor critiques of Watzl’s view, John: Me too. Darius: but I really loved his Structuring Mind book and all the articles as well, so I think he’s great. And Wayne Wu as well. But I think Watzl’s picking up on something. Wayne Wu’s view is a selection-for-action view: what attention is doing is selecting a datum for action. I think what Watzl’s picking up on is that that might be true, but at a more fundamental level, attention is picking up what is most relevant to you. John: Yeah, exactly. Darius: Because that actually acts as a kind of condition of possibility for action in the first place. And what I also like about your notion of adverbial orientation is that it doesn’t extricate or annihilate the self. Not the “fat relentless ego,” as Murdoch would talk about it, but the kind of pole, let’s say, [00:44:00] that is stretched. As you’ve also talked about, a pole that is stretched, a mind-world fittedness. I know you like that term as well. So there are plenty of researchers here, and I think it’s right, as you mentioned, that it’s worth unpicking some of the misconceptions about what Murdoch means by unselfing. John: Yes. Darius: You mentioned Panizza, but there are other people I think are worth flagging. She wrote a paper with a researcher called Fredrickson, but there are other people like, it’s a Finnish name so I’m going to get it wrong, Hämäläinen, I think in Hypatia about ten years ago. John: Yeah. Darius: Chris Mole, who’s also done fantastic work on adverbial attention. John: Yeah, exactly. Darius: And they all point to the fact that what Murdoch means by unselfing is not that, at a process level, there is no receiver or receptor of the world, right? John: Yeah. Darius: Panizza talks about [00:45:00] how Murdoch offers, and I wonder whether this is slightly unfair or a poor term, a tamed version of Simone Weil’s notion of décréation, decreation, or unselfing, right? And I’d love to talk about this, because you will be much more in touch with the more mystical, spiritual tradition that Weil talks about, where for her to receive God is to undergo kenosis, right? It’s to self-empty and become a receptacle. Murdoch doesn’t think that, right? Murdoch thinks the self is still an important thing that is going to be engaged, at a processual level, with the objects of just and loving attention. It’s just that, as you were saying right at the beginning, we need to be careful about distinguishing the levels at which we talk about the self, right? What she wants to say we should not be paying attention to is the self as object, as I’ve called it in certain places. The self as the object of self-concern. These are the kinds of things that go away in flow states, without flow completely eradicating consciousness, right? [00:46:00] Weil, on the other hand, seems to really want to talk about not being there. So the self is removed not just from the content of consciousness, but from the process of engagement wholesale. And I wonder about the feasibility of something like that. John: Yeah, I think that’s right. And you’re right to invoke the flow state. You and I both do work on that. Obviously not all forms of self-reference go away in the flow state, or you’d be really bad at sparring and getting into the flow state while you’re sparring. So we have to go here very, very carefully. I don’t know about Weil; I haven’t read her deeply. I know about other mystical traditions. I’m going through the Kyoto School right now, people like Nishida and Tanabe and Nishitani. And I’m finding Tanabe is actually very helpful for understanding Murdoch, and vice versa, [00:47:00] because Tanabe talks about the fact... and you can see this is even relevant to the M and D example. Tanabe is very concerned, because he’s influenced by Pure Land Buddhism rather than Zen, and this is one of Shinran’s concerns. Shinran is the founder of Pure Land. One of his concerns, and it sounds very much like Kierkegaard and Augustine, and Tanabe is very influenced by Kierkegaard, who also talks a lot about love, is that we can have such complex and powerful forms of self-deception, and super-salience of a kind of narrative egocentrism, and our attempts to get out of it can feed back into it. That can become extreme, like perhaps in Luther or Calvin, and I don’t think Tanabe goes there. But the reason I’m talking about it is that Tanabe talks about the need for what’s called tariki, other power. And the lens for [00:48:00] me, and I don’t think this is foreign to his understanding, is that when you’re having an insight, you don’t just make an insight. You don’t manufacture it. You do stuff. You redirect your attention, but there’s this other spontaneous thing. There’s an other power at work. It comes to you. It beckons to you. The light flashes. It’s got a spontaneous self-creation aspect to it. And the same thing with some of our spontaneous intuitions, our sense of our deep intelligence. Where did that come from? Plato talks a lot about that too, in ideas around anamnesis, and inspiration, and aspiration. We have this relationship to something calling us. And Paul Ricoeur did an excellent thing on that in The Symbolism of Evil, when he says, “When you’re being tempted, who’s tempting you?” Right? So it’s this idea that there’s self-power and other power, but they’re not substantial entities that are [00:49:00] separable from each other. I like the way you put it: they are poles within a pulsating polarity. They’re interpenetrating in a significant way. And I don’t see how Weil can get rid of that, because what is bearing the relationship to God? What is bearing the call to responsibility? What is bearing the call to virtue? What is bearing the call to love? When I talk to people in the Eastern Orthodox tradition about kenosis and theosis, there isn’t the sense of that happening. It’s not that there’s the eradication of the ability to be in relationship to God. That would actually be a profound heresy, right? There’s a sense in which we never stop being a lover of God. And I think Murdoch is being more [00:50:00] consistent. Murdoch is really emphasizing that love requires a lover as well as the beloved. And as I started with, love is a virtue. It’s not an emotion or a feeling. It requires commitment and loyalty, right? That requires self-direction of some kind. There has to be some kind of self-machinery, not a substantial self or a soul, but some kind of self-machinery at work, because agency and self-direction are being invoked by both Murdoch and Weil throughout all their work, as far as I can tell. And I think Tanabe is very clear about that. The self-power and the other power: we have to take them both into account. We can attribute the origin of our metanoia, of our conversion, to the other power, but that doesn’t mean there’s other power without self-power receiving it and being called by it. Darius: Yeah. And I like your invocation [00:51:00] here of responsibility. John: Yes. Darius: The self is also implicated in its past activity, right? We have to credit it with all it’s done to have come to the state where it has purified attention. So ask me where I’ve come from, you know? It’s the Jungian thing of being suspicious of unearned wisdom. The self is not just responsible as a synchronic whole, in that pulsating polarity, but also in a diachronic sense. There’s work that’s been undertaken to get to a point where you can be receptive. Yeah, that’s good. Excellent. Yeah, I mean, John: And also on the other side, if I could just say one thing. Darius: Sure, sure. John: From the theological side, God’s agapic love is not that which annihilates that towards which the love is given. It is creative of it, right? And that’s also part of the notion of theosis. So I really would want to challenge her interpretation of the Christian notion of kenosis [00:52:00] very, very strongly. Darius: Yeah. She may well not advocate this view, so I don’t want to speak unfairly. But one thing one might want to charge her with is an excessive reliance on the two-worlds mythology. So this brings us back to Wynn, John: Oh, yeah. Very much. Darius: and Renewing the Senses, right? For Weil, one certainly gets the impression that this world is the one... And one understands it with Weil, because she was in the Spanish Civil War and wanted to fight on the front line, and she had oil burned on her, and then she had to go home, and then she worked in the factories. And all of this she’s actively bringing upon herself, right? She wants to suffer in order to purge herself and allow God in. There’s a sense there that this is the world of transient corruption and impermanence, and [00:53:00] if only I can purge myself of that, then I will become receptive to, or at one with, the higher realm. And I think Wynn’s work on this is very meaningful. With Murdoch, one senses that it’s happening here, you know? The spiritual dimension is happening here. Wynn has all these beautiful examples from James, where it’s not as if, after their spiritual transformations, people like Tolstoy think, “Oh, actually I should commit suicide and await salvation.” It’s like, no: this world, the gestalt, the all-things-shining world, is alive once again, right? That’s what he had lost: the sense of color and vibrancy. And again, it’s what you said: the sacredness of the world is contained even in its smallest morsel. One thinks of William Blake, and seeing heaven in a wild flower, and all that stuff. And I think Iain [00:54:00] McGilchrist has done really careful work on the relationship between diversity and unity, and how that is also at play here. You know? Right here. John: I think that’s excellent, because... I’m trying to think of where I want to go with this, because I’m at this optimal point of multiple paths. I guess the first thing is that I’ve been a staunch critic of the two-worlds mythology, even though I’m a fan of the Axial Revolution and all the legacy religions that came out of it, and how it gave us the notion of transcendence, and wisdom as transcendence, and things like that. I won’t go into those arguments. However, I do think Nietzsche is right. As the two-worlds mythology ossified, and it strands God as [00:55:00] completely and absurdly separated from the world, that’s a driver of nihilism. Because if this world only exists instrumentally for the upper world, and we come to find that our connection to the upper world is absurd, then of course we’re thrown into nihilism. This world has no value, because its only value was to get us to the upper world, and there is no longer a passage to that, because the upper world has been rendered absurd. I think that’s nihilism. Now, I would point out, and I’ve argued this elsewhere, that the vertical absurdity has just been displaced in modernity, and I think Heidegger is responding to this. We try to recapture what the vertical dichotomy did with the one and the many, and where normativity comes from, and appearance and reality, and we displace that into an equally absurd dichotomy of the inner subjective world of value and the outer objective world of fact. And we [00:56:00] know that Murdoch is a deep critic of the fact-value dichotomy, right? As are other people, like William Desmond, who I have had the great good pleasure of having several discussions with. I got to meet one of my heroes, and he lived up to it. So I think that’s right, but I think both the vertical and the horizontal two-worlds mythologies have to be called into question in a very, very serious way. And I think this is where Ursula Goodenough’s notion of transcendence into comes in, or Wright’s notion of sensibility transcendence, which is not transcendence to some view from nowhere, but this sense of the opening up, the reciprocal opening of depth, between two people. I think that’s what I’m proposing here, and what Murdoch was perhaps reaching towards. There’s a book called Iris Murdoch and the Transcendent, by, [00:57:00] is it Taliaferro and Evans? I can’t quite remember. It’s a new book. It’s one of those wonderful little Cambridge Elements books. Darius: Right. Cool. John: And I think Murdoch is coming to do, at least implicitly, what people like Goodenough and Wright are doing. We’re trying to give ourselves, I don’t know what to call it, a post-axial grammar, leaving behind the axial grammar of transcendence understood in a two-worlds mythology, Darius: Mm. John: vertical or horizontal. Can we recover transcendence in all of its richness, its philosophical, existential, spiritual, even phenomenological richness, without adopting either a vertical or a horizontal dichotomy? I experience and read Murdoch as a precursor, for me, of that project which [00:58:00] I have undertaken. I’m trying to deconstruct the vertical and the horizontal in a paired fashion, because I think that is what is needed if we’re going to recover the sacredness of the world, such that we love it in a way in which nihilism no longer seems to be a default we will descend to if we don’t keep ourselves distracted and busy. Darius: Right. Yeah, that’s good. That’s interesting. And of course, this interest in dismantling the dichotomy is not just in the continental tradition. Putnam, you know... John: Well, Catherine Pickstock, in her book Aspects of Truth, goes through Quine and Putnam, and there’s Case Beer, and all the... It just keeps happening. And all the work on relevance realization: I’ve argued, you’ve heard me, that relevance is a transjective phenomenon. It’s before, beneath, between, and beyond the subjective and the [00:59:00] objective. I think that dovetails perfectly. I would argue that, in order to be consistent, Murdoch has to move to that transjective domain, if she is really talking about love in the way we’re talking about it: as something that’s plugging into the volitional necessity of relevance realization itself. Darius: Right. Yeah, good. To do some self-promotion, I’ve also tried to push this. One of my earlier papers, in 2024 in Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, is an attempt at dismantling the endogenous-exogenous dichotomy in the attentional literature. John: Oh, yeah. Darius: That’s from an active inference perspective, but the epigraph at the start is from Simone Weil: “Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer.” John: Right. Darius: And that’s something I really want to hold on to, and it’s interesting given that we’re critiquing her: prayer involves active [01:00:00] orientation on the part of the one praying. John: Totally. Darius: And so even something like “pure” exogenous attention, and for those listening I’m putting that in scare quotes, evinces a kind of relevance-realizing orientation on the part of the agent. It makes sense why I’m suddenly attracted to the sound of an alarm going off, right? It’s not that staggering. And yet, at least in the empirical work, they’re desperate to hold on to this dichotomy, because it allows them to slice nature at its artificial joints, I would say. John: Yeah. I get to speak as a psychologist, because I’m officially one, and I love psychology and I’m grateful for how it has homed me, so I don’t want this misinterpreted. But the philosophy of science in psychology is really moribund. Their model of science is a kind of Machian interpretation of Newtonian [01:01:00] physics. It’s really not in proper relationship to all the work being done in biology right now. Darius: Yeah. John: Philip Ball’s excellent book How Life Works is a great canvas of all of that work. The work of Michael Levin, the work of Denis Walsh at the University of Toronto, and all that sort of stuff. And this comes up a lot. There are endless courses, and there should be, by the way, I’m not saying stop doing this, on how we get measurement right and how we set up our experimental design. And then I’ll ask my students, “Okay, where do you go to do good theoretical psychology? Where do you go to get an education in that?” Because coming up with a really good, clear idea that has been properly placed in relationship to the landscape of other ideas [01:02:00] is a hard, difficult task. That’s why physics has theoretical physics as well as experimental physics. And something like that is taking shape in biology. And they have no answer. There’s this almost purely Lockean empiricism that I think bedevils psychology. And I think that’s actually what’s at work in that distinction about attention. Lockean empiricism: a commitment to it being completely from the outside or completely from the inside. You and I are both involved with 4E cog sci, and rejecting that in-out model is one of the core things that 4E cog sci argues for. Because it’s just not adequate to the data, both the empirical, experimental data and the phenomenological data. It’s not adequate to it at all. Darius: Right. But I guess I sympathize, [01:03:00] in the sense that holding the dichotomy of subject and object is so easy. John: Yes, yes. Darius: And I think here about Charles Taylor and Sources of the Self. It’s built into our, as you would say, cognitive grammar, John: Cultural cognitive grammar, yeah. Darius: this Cartesian detachment, this Cartesian split. And it serves us in some sense as a modeling tool. But it’s reifying the model at the cost of misunderstanding the phenomenon. John: Well, it’s powerful. I’m teaching a fourth-year seminar course on consciousness, and I’m talking about when all these dichotomies came online, and I’m saying, we’re going to criticize this at length. But I said, “Stop and note,” and here you can hear the Heidegger in me. “Look around you. Look at all the technology. Look at all the empowerment.” Because if we take [01:04:00] meaning and value and everything out, and all we leave in the world is measurement and manipulation, whoa, does that ever orient you and empower you towards technological conquest, right? And I don’t want to do without all this technology. But like Heidegger says, the enframing, right? It’s insidious. That ontology, that onto-epistemology, just gets woven into us. And this is Desmond’s work, and Taylor uses the same language, and you see it in the mystical traditions. There are other cultures, other ways, in which there is not this dichotomy. Instead, and this is a term used by both Taylor and Desmond, there’s porosity. And there isn’t truth as correspondence; there’s truth as participation, truth as disclosure, and participating in that disclosure that Heidegger talks about. Darius: Yeah. John: So it’s powerful, but we have to remember [01:05:00] that, both cross-culturally and cross-historically, it is aberrant, which means it shouldn’t be given the unquestioned status it’s given, for example, in psychology. Because we should ask: why is it aberrant? Why is it problematic? And I buy Desmond’s argument that if you separate fact and value, back to Murdoch, you get what he calls the argument for default atheism. Because the external world, the objective world, the real world, has no values. The only values are subjective, and I’m projecting them, but projection is illusion, so meaning and value are an illusion. And objectively, I’m just a meaningless thing inside a meaningless universe. You get this default argument. Of course, it’s more sophisticated, and he builds it out, but that’s his basic point. Darius: And Taylor critiques this as well, in John: Sources of the Self. Yeah, the buffered self. The buffered self is extremely problematic, because... [01:06:00] just think about this phenomenologically, you know? This is Kearney’s work, and others’, right? It goes back to Merleau-Ponty too. We use touch as our primary metaphor for a proper relationship to reality. Are you in touch with reality? Are you in contact with it? And there’s a reason for that, right? Because touch is the sense in which, while we’re realizing, we’re always being realized. It’s inherently porous, by its very nature. And so the phenomenology, I think, is calling us back: no, porosity is actually our primordial experience of realness. Darius: Good. It strikes me that part of the issue is holding the tension. And again, I think of McGilchrist, and these metaphors, which don’t come from him, of the bow having to be taut for it to actually be efficacious, right? It’s [01:07:00] so easy for us to let the slack out and end up in that dichotomy. And for all of the problems with Heidegger, I’m rereading Being and Time for a paper I’m writing, and I could go on for days about Heidegger and Being and Time. But one of the things I’ve written about, and this is in print, and Heidegger is so central to my PhD in many ways, is that Heidegger is wrestling with that tension. There’s a reason he calls Dasein “Dasein” and not “man,” right? In the earlier works, he doesn’t use the word Dasein. It comes in, I think, in ‘23, and initially it’s only hyphenated, Da-sein, Being-There. And there’s this constant tension about not wanting to do what he calls vicious subjectivizing. It’s not idealist. It’s not all the projection of Dasein, right? Dasein is at the same time Being-with, and das Man, the “they,” is a kind of superordinate force, [01:08:00] and yet the fundamental sense of normativity is also a kind of purposive, temporal, projective one. So for me, that tension one sees in Heidegger is in part why he’s so damn difficult. Of course you can talk about Dewey and Dewey’s notion of the situation, but Heidegger, I think, is really wrestling with holding that tension when it comes to the essential question of being, which is porosity, right? Being is porous. And so this was going to come to a question I wanted to ask about Tanabe, because I don’t know enough about the Kyoto School. I’ve only heard you talk about it, read about it in different places, and listened to other people talk about it. Particularly Nishitani. If I’m correct, Nishitani has this critique of Nietzsche that he doesn’t go far enough, right? John: That’s right. Darius: He doesn’t recognize the productive aspect of nothingness. John: That’s right. He [01:09:00] doesn’t get to absolute nothingness. He only stays within a kind of relative nothingness. That’s how Nishitani would put it, yes. Darius: So how can you square that all is nothing? Murdoch talks a little bit about this: we can’t just throw up our hands and say, “Well, all is vain nothingness,” John: Yeah. Darius: but recognize that that’s not a reason for despair, but perhaps a reason for creativity. And I think you see some of this in people like Deleuze and Simondon and that French tradition. And yet how do we hold on to what we want to say about the importance of... We’ve already spoken in this conversation about the importance of the self, and the self’s reception of alterity, and not doing violence to the other, and not doing violence to the self. And I know Dan Zahavi is really pushing this view as well: that being we does not mean we are subsumed into the they, and does not mean the they is a projection of us. John: Exactly. Darius: How do we hold that tension, if all is nothing? John: Okay. [01:10:00] So absolute nothingness is different from relative nothingness because, for Nishitani, relative nothingness is still within the subject-object dichotomy, and it hasn’t discovered the porosity. And the porosity actually gives us what we are seeking, which is participation. And this is the thing I think Heidegger was wrestling with, but he never quite... You know Heidegger perhaps better than I do, though I’ve read Being and Time too. And this is a point that Desmond and other people make, right? And this is the Platonic point, or the Neoplatonic point. With participation, you replace a correspondence model of knowing with conformity. You are taking on the form, and form doesn’t mean the shape; we use shape as a metaphor. Eidos meant aspect, look. And [01:11:00] what Plato’s trying to get at is: here are all the aspects, and you can never get all the aspects, yet they’re not cacophonous. Somehow there’s a through-line running through them. Russon talks about musical intelligibility. And somehow when I know the bottle, I have that music in my head as much as it’s in the bottle. It’s a conformity. It’s a co-instantiation rather than a representation. And Nishitani’s point, and this is Zen too, is that if you push into the great doubt, you follow it all the way down, what you start to doubt is the very subject-object dichotomy that’s making you suffer nihilism. And what happens is you open up, through the porosity, to the possibility of a profound participation. I take it that this is the argument: that is the affective and existential need that is not being properly met. Nishitani’s definition of religion is the [01:12:00] real self-realization of reality. We actually participate. I would put it this way, and you and I have been playing around with this in our conversations: it’s when our relevance realization is completely at one, completely in conformity, with the self-realization of reality itself. And for us, this satisfies what I call an onto-normative need. This is what you see in the work of Yaden and others. When people experience the really real, they will change their relationships and their lives, often for the better, by the way, because they want to enhance this participation in realness for its own sake. And this is what I think Murdoch can mean by why we love the real. We don’t love the real for this or that. We love it the way we love a Thou. We love the real for its own sake, for being real. Just being real. And so I think that realization is actually the alleviation of nihilism, and it moves you from this relative nothingness [01:13:00] to a kind of no-thingness. Why is no-thingness being used? Because they’re trying to point to something like Desmond’s notion that being is communal. A moment of technicality here for people listening. You can have a substance ontology, Aristotle, and obviously there’s a lot more to Aristotle, so I’m doing a slam-dunk compression here just to make a point. So give me some charity on this. You’ve got substances that own their accidents, that own their properties, right? Things that in some sense independently exist and can be understood on their own terms, à la Spinoza, and that own their properties. It’s an ownership model, and it comes back to center again in the Scientific Revolution. But Filler and other people have argued that’s a very problematic model, because you can’t get relations out of substances. Relations are not properties or accidents or acts of substances. They have a non-reducible [01:14:00] existence. And you should think relations are real, if you want to think information is real, and intelligibility is real, truth is real, meaning is real. And I did this with Filler. I know James, and I said, “James, you’ve got these great arguments that you can’t get relations out of relata. But isn’t there an exactly symmetrical argument that you can’t get relata out of relations? And isn’t it the relata that actually distinguish one relation from another?” And he went, “Whoa,” he was kind of taken aback. But that’s exactly Desmond’s notion, and he uses community as a metaphor. There are no persons without communities, but there are no communities without persons. They co-dependently arise. So the relations and the relata emerge out of something more primordial. That’s no-thingness. It’s no kind of thing, and it’s not just a relation. It is kind of the pure, primordial ground of porosity itself. [01:15:00] And that’s why the realization of absolute nothingness ushers us in, into profound participation, and that is what alleviates the relative nothingness of nihilism. That’s the argument, as I understand it. Darius: Yeah. Splendid. I’m hearing resonances with James and radical empiricism, and the importance of patients in consciousness, John: Of course. Darius: and Husserl and the notion of the co-presence of the other side of an object. But just on Heidegger, I don’t know enough about the actual history here. Nishitani definitely went to study with Heidegger, right? John: In Germany. So did Tanabe. Darius: And Tanabe. John: So you’re right. Nishida is directly influenced by Husserl and by James’s radical empiricism, Darius: Right. John: and obviously Tanabe and Nishitani are influenced by Nishida. But Tanabe is deeply influenced by [01:16:00] Heidegger, and through Heidegger, by Kierkegaard. Nishitani studies with, and is influenced by, Heidegger, but through Heidegger, by Nietzsche. So you get this interesting progression. In Nishida, it’s about consciousness and abstractive intelligibility. In Tanabe, you move into existential meaning, like in Heidegger, right? And then, almost like in Jean-Luc Marion, you move to givenness, right? Darius: Yeah. John: That’s what Nishitani is talking about. Darius: And Merleau-Ponty and the flesh. John: Yeah. Totally. Darius: But Heidegger is interesting here, because I wonder whether there’s an influence here on Tanabe and the Kyoto School more broadly, in the sense that... The book I would recommend here is Jeff Malpas’s book, which is an amazing book, called Heidegger’s Topology. John: Oh, yeah. Darius: It’s from 2006. Malpas has this argument that what Heidegger is really interested in is place, not [01:17:00] space. Heidegger has his critique of Kant’s use of spatiality, but it’s place. John: Wynn makes a similar argument, by the way. Darius: Right. John: He’s got a book called Faith and Place, but go ahead. Darius: Oh, cool. Awesome. So the argument would be that in Being and Time, Dasein’s ultimate constitution is this threefold temporality, which is the condition of possibility for care, and bish bash bosh. And then he scraps the project, right? He does the first two divisions, and then doesn’t do Division III, or the second part with its three divisions. And there’s been a lot of work on Heidegger’s temporality. William Blattner has his great book, Heidegger’s Temporal Idealism, where he thinks Heidegger fails in doing a form of idealism. And Malpas says, “Well, actually, what happened to Heidegger is that he realized place was more fundamental than time.” The [01:18:00] risk that time posed was, again, that Dasein becomes a kind of vicious subject, that Heidegger falls into a vicious subjectivization. And so the later Heidegger, post-Kehre, or post-Turn, as they talk about it, is one where Dasein takes very much a backseat. He stops talking about Dasein, and he talks much more in terms of disclosure, aletheia, the unconcealed coming out of the concealed, the Lichtung, the clearing. Dasein plays much more of a participatory role John: Yes. Darius: in the disclosure of what he calls the fourfold, right? Which is the earth, the sky, the gods, and the mortals. And I think that’s getting very close to what you were talking about with respect to participation. And that’s also where his critique of technology comes in: that Dasein is exaggerating its role, you know? We have to let things disclose themselves as they are, and that was, of [01:19:00] course, his account of phenomenology: letting things be seen as they are, from within themselves. So there’s loads here in Heidegger where I think you can trace that history quite nicely. In Being and Time, yes, Dasein is participating, and there’s this story about Dasein’s disclosure of intelligibility, or its contact with intelligibility, and that’s not this Cartesian leaping out of an internal sphere into an external one. Rather, Dasein is in the world as a unitary phenomenon. But it’s still quite Dasein-centric, compared to the later Heidegger, where these different components of the unconcealed are much more on an equal playing field. And then behind all of that is the concealed, right? John: Yes. Darius: The lethe out of which you have aletheia. And I’ve been thinking a little bit about how this is also very resonant with relevance realization, right? The concealed and the unconcealed is, [01:20:00] for me, a beautiful description of the relationship between relevance and irrelevance. They only make sense in a symbiotic relationship. Something is only relevant insofar as you are, as you would put it, intelligently ignoring something else. So there’s a whole strand there. John: No, that’s great. I want to pick up on that. I really want to reverberate and resonate with that. And since we’re mentioning resonance: Hartmut Rosa says resonance requires both self-power and other power, the uncontrollability of the world. So that’s another Darius: Yeah. John: connection. But the connection I want to go to first is Wynn, and then back to Nishida. Wynn has got Faith and Place, and he makes the argument throughout that place is another kind of thing we have a personal relationship to, even though place is not a person. We give places proper names, we bind our identity to them, we have attachment relationships to them. We are homesick, which is an attachment relationship. And he says, “Look, this is a good example of how something can be personal without being a [01:21:00] substance.” And then he makes the bold move. He says, “I want to propose that we should use place, rather than thing, as a metaphor or symbol for God or the sacred.” And then there’s the way I think I can amplify that. Wynn doesn’t do this, but I’d like to know what he thinks. I’m trying to get Wynn on my channel, so hopefully I’ll be able to ask him directly. Darius: That would be awesome. John: Yeah. So Nishida’s central notion is basho, which means place. It’s the place where intelligibility takes place, and it is a no-thing. Carter, in his The Nothingness Beyond God, gives a great example. You have the intelligibility of the color system. You have all of these differences and identities, all swarming around, and you can participate in that in relevance realization. But then he says: is that intelligibility itself a color? [01:22:00] No, it’s not. So with respect to color, it is a no-thing. And then what you do is keep opening up the place in which intelligibility takes place. And then you have the place of no-thingness. This is basho. This is Nishida’s summative idea of how we understand intelligibility, sacredness, God, reality: the basho, the place of intelligibility. Of course, he doesn’t mean spatiotemporal place; he means the way color takes place within the basho of the color system, right? And so place is very central to the Kyoto School all the way through, because of Nishida’s notion of basho. Darius: Right. And it also makes me think of “being is not a being.” John: Oh, of course. Totally. Darius: [01:23:00] This idea... That is the question, and Heidegger never comes around to answering it, right? Answering the question of the meaning of being. But one thing he’s very concrete on is that being is neither a being nor some hidden substance that emanates through all beings. John: Nor the abstract property shared by all beings. Darius: Or the abstract property, and so on and so forth. He does the negative, apophatic cutting away, and then never actually tells us what it is in the end. But I think it gets close to that thing of, well, it is no-thing, and that’s okay. John: And you said, as we’re moving towards the end, and I think we should start doing that, we’d make it a little bit more personal. So here’s a personal connection for me. I’m taking this notion of place, and Wynn does talk about it in Faith and Place and elsewhere. As you know, I’m doing a pilgrimage right now, the Philosophical Silk Road, in which I [01:24:00] go from place to place, in this profound sense of place we’re talking about here. That’s how pilgrimage is different from tourism. In tourism, you go to a space and you consume it, and then you go back home. In pilgrimage, I go to a place and I have a personal relationship with it. I am vulnerable to it, and I make myself available to it appealing to me, so I can fall in love with it. And what that gives me is what Taylor’s talking about, right? If you’re trying to argue somebody out of a paradigm, you can’t do it within the paradigm. You have to move them to a different place. That’s what he often does. He moves you to a different place. He calls it an ad hominem argument, which is a very bad naming. It’s one of the most infelicitous namings in the history of philosophy, because everybody jumps to the wrong conclusion. So I call it a metanoetic passage. You go to a different place, you get different glasses, you know? And you do the recovery, the [01:25:00] T.S. Eliot or Tolkien recovery. I can see how I was biased and limited, and that allows me to start to internalize a credible perspective other than my automatic one, like we were talking about earlier. That’s pilgrimage. And what’s really interesting is the word theoria. We get our word theory from it, and many people know that theoria doesn’t really mean what we mean by theorizing. It means something more noetic, more perspectival. But Nightingale and Ward have argued that’s right, but the deepest, ancestral meaning of theoria is pilgrimage. It’s used for pilgrimage. That this is the deepest way in which we can come to know things, and know things at their depth: that we can go on pilgrimage. We can commit ourselves to falling in love in a highly personal way, undergoing that transformation, reflecting, looking up to the place in an important way, and then going [01:26:00] on and looking back, and trying to find a through-line, and letting that whole through-line, that eidos of all these places, come alive and start to call to you. And so this is how a lot of this work is being translated into something like a meta-practice for me: how you take an ecology of practices and put it into a theoria, in order to afford a more profound transformation, and hopefully a better ability to orient to the way sacredness is trying to be born in the world, past the constraints of modernity or even postmodernity. So you wanted a personal connection. That is a personal connection for me. Darius: Awesome. Just to resonate again with that, the one thing I would add is that I love the invocation of Eliot, and the Little Gidding bit where [01:27:00] he talks about not ceasing from exploration, but returning to the place and knowing it as if for the first time, right? That might be a butchering, but what I think is important not to lose there is the sense of returning. And I know you talk about this with respect to Plato, and recovery, and remembrance. John: Yeah. Darius: And that’s not to say we’ve made no progress. That’s why the image of the spiral is useful here. And I think McGilchrist, again, is useful here; he talks about this spiraling. And of course this is in Orpheus and Dante. I could go on for hours about Dante, so don’t get me started. Dante’s amazing on all of that. John: Oh my gosh, yeah. Don’t get me started on the reciprocal narrowing and the reciprocal opening... Oh my god. Darius: Right. Well, I guess, a personal reflection on my part, and Dante will play a role in this. In many ways, speaking with you feels like this kind of recollection, because [01:28:00] it’s probably very evident to the listener that you have played an extremely central role in my intellectual formation. Everything I say is Vervaekean, which is awesome. Again, it’s a volitional necessity that I’m quite willing to endorse. And it’s not just you, it’s everyone... John: I do want to interject. Darius is quite capable of criticizing, and frequently will criticize, arguments and points I make. Darius: I will, yeah. Well, we should say, actually, that probably the text I’m happiest about having published, or most proud of, is the critique of active inference and its capacity to resolve the frame problem, and that does involve a critique of your paper with Mark and Brett. So yes, I’m not just an acolyte, just to make that clear. And hopefully that’s coming out in texts where I’m becoming far more critical than I thought I had the capacity to be, and I think that might just be courage. But of course, it all comes from a place of love and respect. John: Yes. Darius: But on a [01:29:00] personal level, I don’t think I’ve told this story before. I’ve told you this story, but I haven’t told it publicly. I was very, very lucky that I studied philosophy at school. In the UK, it’s quite rare to study philosophy at school. We have A-levels, and philosophy is a kind of rarefied one, but I was very lucky to be able to do it, and it was awesome. Now that I’m teaching philosophy to undergrads, I kind of wish they had more of what I had: classes with three or four people, with extremely passionate teachers, reading the texts, reading Kuhn, reading Feyerabend, reading Descartes, reading Berkeley, and really getting down to earth. And I loved philosophy, I really loved it. And I wanted to go to Oxford. If this is all too self-referential, let me know, but it’s an interesting story. John: No, no, please, please. Darius: I wanted to go to Oxford, and they don’t do a pure philosophy course. Cambridge does, but Oxford doesn’t. So I thought, “Well, I did a lot of Latin at [01:30:00] school, so let me do an ab initio language.” I wanted to do Italian, because I really liked Virgil and I wanted to read Dante. So I applied for Philosophy and Italian, and I went into my philosophy exam, and two things happened. One is that I just choked, which is interesting now that I work on flow, since it’s the opposite of choking in many ways. And also, it was a style of philosophy I wasn’t used to. It was very analytic. Transitivity relationships, I remember, was the test. And it wasn’t in that spirit of open curiosity. It was very much: if you make a mistake, you’re out, you know? John: Yeah. Darius: And it just freaked me out. Then I went to my Italian interview, and that went really well, and we actually spoke a lot about philosophy. Nicola Gardini, who won’t be watching this, a professor of Italian at Oxford, is another hero, and he was my tutor. Anyway, I went to Oxford. They didn’t offer me philosophy, but they offered me linguistics, and I did Italian and linguistics. Then I had some mental health troubles, and off the back of that I did a [01:31:00] master’s in psychology. And then I was really very unclear about what to do with my life. And all this time, from Oxford on, it wasn’t just you; it was people like McGilchrist and Jordan Peterson and others I was watching and paying attention to, listening to their philosophy lectures. And I didn’t know what to do with my life. And I remember very much being on the train to Edinburgh. I probably hadn’t watched any of Awakening from the Meaning Crisis for a couple of years, and I just put it on. The train from London to Edinburgh is four years... four hours, not four years. Feels like it. And I watched four of the lectures and I went, “That’s what I want to do.” John: Ah. Darius: And I was very lucky, having not actually studied philosophy as an undergrad or master’s student, although at Oxford they were very generous with what we could look at, to now be doing a philosophy PhD. And I get to speak to you. In many ways, you were a conduit to living this life, which is extremely fulfilling and [01:32:00] nourishing. So it is a kind of return in many ways, as we were talking about, but seeing things from the spiraled ascent. For me, it’s totally remarkable and a kind of dream come true that I get to work with you. So thank you again. And that’s not just from me. I know plenty of people, even in this office, which is currently empty, who admire your work, and admire you and your intellectual spirit and curiosity and openness and supervision and all of this. So yeah, it’s a massive thank you from me, really. John: Well, I had heard this story before, and when you first told it to me it touched me very deeply. It still touches me very deeply. That’s what I most want to do in terms of my vocation. I want to do what I seem to have helped do for you. I want to afford you coming into a [01:33:00] philosophical life, which doesn’t necessarily mean academic philosophy. It does for you. And this is where I’m influenced by Pierre Hadot. Everybody is in some sense called to a philosophical life, because we are all beset by self-deception, by vice, and we need to cultivate wisdom and virtue, and we need to interact in dialogical I-Thou relationships and all that sort of thing. And in that sense, we need to be lovers of wisdom. This is my allegiance to that guy right there, Socrates. To the degree that my work can call people to philia sophia, right? The community, the fellowship, the love of wisdom that people get called into, the kind of partnerships you’re talking about, the fellowship and shared orientation towards the cultivation of wisdom. If I do that, that’s what makes me [01:34:00] feel that I’m living as I am called to live. And that is what I most want to do. So you thanked me, but I’m telling you as sincerely as I possibly can: I’m very grateful for the way hearing that from you affords me a deep sense of my life, at least my vocational life, being a meaningful life. Because that’s the measure by which I measure whether it is meaningful or not. So I want to thank you for that. More and more, I try to hone and craft my professional work, whether it’s dialogical or theoretical or practice, to be the person who can do that. Many people come up to me and say things like, “You know, I disagree with a lot of your ideas, but your language and your way of thinking and your manner have been so helpful to me.” And I’m very happy [01:35:00] with that. I’m really very happy with that. So thank you for sharing that. It means a lot to me. It makes a difference for me. It’s not the case now. You know this: there’s now a lot of professional interest in my work, and a lot of public interest in my work. But that’s only since about 2018, so the last eight years or so. Before that, it was a very lonely kind of existence for me, Darius: Mm. John: wrestling with this. I was working on the meaning crisis and trying to do this kind of work with my students, and I was helping them. And, God love them, many of them have written to me, because people are hearing that I’m retiring from the university, and they want to thank me for stuff from ten, fifteen, twenty years ago. But the fact that now it seems I’ve been [01:36:00] gifted, blessed, with the opportunity of affording the call to a philosophical way of life to a much greater number of people, and I get to hear... Darius, you’re going to be a superstar. The quality of your work... Darius: Well, thank you. John: No, I mean it. I’ve been teaching a long time. I’ve had something like 30,000 students. There are certain students I recognize. Mark is another one. I’ve told Mark, Mark Miller, he’s going to be a superstar. And the fact that my work can be taken up, not only by a lot of people, and I’m very grateful for this too, and their lives are getting better, but that my work might help lift people like you into your proper calling, which I think is going to be a series of masterpieces. Of course, I just find that so rich and meaningful [01:37:00] and valuable. And I think I’m going to have at least five or six more productive years, but I’m starting to face the Galadriel moment. At some point I’m going to have to fade and go into the West. So if you’ll allow me, and I hope this isn’t condescending, it’s not intended to be: if I can Socratically help to give birth to people like you, that is so, so enriching for me. Darius: It’s not condescending at all. And I think you have more than five or six years in you, but that’s your call. But I think the nourishing of that community, where we are all oriented towards something beyond us, and, as Murdoch, who we started with, talks about, “there is always more than this,” you know? That constant progress, [01:38:00] the pilgrim’s progress, is just a joy and fun and a complete pleasure. So we should wrap up, because I’ve got, unfortunately... well, not unfortunately. I have undergraduate students to teach, and I will try to facilitate a love of wisdom in them. Thank you so much, John, and Andrea as well, for hosting this. I know we’re going to do this kind of partnership. Total pleasure on my part. John: Well, it’s been an honor on my part, Darius. Every time we’re together and get into what I call dialogos, mutually transformative dialogue, Darius: Absolutely. John: I find it deeply enriching, maturing. I’m reading Middlemarch right now, by George Eliot. And the reason I’m reading it is that I’ve read so many reviews of it; many people say it’s the best English novel ever written and all this sort of stuff, [01:39:00] and it is incredibly well written. And several times the review said, “Read Middlemarch; it will make you a better person.” And I think these moments of dialogos are also like that. They make us better people in a really profound way. So I thank you for that. Darius: Wonderful. Thanks so much. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit lovephilosophy.substack.com/subscribe (https://lovephilosophy.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2)

3. 

   19 Sept 2026

   Sophie Strand and Henry Kramer on Imaginal Empathy, Consciousness and Re-Enchantment

   Sophie Strand and Henry Kramer explore consciousness, mind, and the porous boundary between inner and outer experience. The conversation ranges from panpsychism and animism to imaginal empathy, ecology, myth, and why modern life makes it so hard to stay open to mystery. Sophie (https://linktr.ee/sophiestrand) brings a wide ranging perspective shaped by writing, spirituality, ecology, the history of religion, and Eros. The two ground the discussion in consciousness, reenchantment, and the question of how language and labels can flatten lived experience. 00:00 Andrea Sets the Stage00:33 Meet Host Henry02:14 Why This Episode Matters05:41 Henry Introduces Sophie09:43 Sophie on Being a Lover10:31 Re Enchantment and Mind12:15 Symbiosis and Selfhood14:23 What Is Consciousness18:35 Myth Archetypes and Reality25:29 Language Labels and Weirdness27:37 Conspiracy and Ontological Shock34:13 Species Humility and Long Story38:31 Crab Universe Joke38:53 Disorientation Teaching Tactic39:53 Nacirema Defamiliarization42:12 Taliesin and Shapeshifting45:44 Spiderweb Mind Ecology46:55 Imitation Builds Empathy48:52 Against Anthropomorphize52:36 Utility Addiction and Mushrooms56:28 Inner Biodiversity and Stories01:00:47 Panpsychism Resurgence01:04:43 Hard Problem of Consciousness01:07:47 Trickster Ending Farewell Find Henry here (https://www.instagram.com/henry.r.kramer/) on Instagram Find Sophie here (https://www.instagram.com/cosmogyny/?hl=en) on Instagram Find Love & Philosophy here on Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/waymaking23/) Some references: On empathy and imagining the lifeworlds of other beings: Sophie Strand, “Supracellular” through (https://youtu.be/05lVh66aEeY?si=qKhuvpYfovQLvv29)Emergence Magazine (https://youtu.be/05lVh66aEeY?si=qKhuvpYfovQLvv29), Stephen Harrod Buhner, Taliesin, Paul Shepard On challenging the individual self: Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation, Emanuele Coccia, Metamorphoses, Amitov Ghosh On the imaginal and its relationship to reality: JRR Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings and William Blake, “Double Vision” On panpsychism: Philip Goff, Galileo’s Error, Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception, Michael Pollan, A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness On trickster pedagogy and weirding the ordinary: Horace Miner, “Body Ritual Among the Nacirema” and Viktor Shklovsky on “defamiliarization Sophie Strand is a writer based in the Hudson Valley who focuses on the intersection of spirituality, storytelling, and ecology. Her poems and essays have appeared in numerous projects and publications, including Spirituality & Health, Atmos, Braided Way, and Art PAPERS. She is the author of The Flowering Wand, The Madonna Secret, and The Body Is a Doorway as well as the creator of the popular Substack “Make Me Good Soil.” You can follow her work on Instagram (at) cosmogyny Henry Kramer is a scholar, educator, and artist exploring wonder, imagination, and our relationship with the more-than-human world. [Name] teaches in the Program in Religion at CUNY Hunter and is Academic Dean of the Strother School of Radical Attention, where their Radical Imagination course was featured on the New York Times’ Hard Fork. Henry is also a ritual and immersive theater designer, songwriter, storyteller, and (most recently) a bit of a puppeteer. full video is for yt members first, then goes live to everyone sept 20th This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit lovephilosophy.substack.com/subscribe (https://lovephilosophy.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2)

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