On the Practical Necessity of Having Demons (Session 7)

Hello and welcome to the seventh session on the practical necessity of having demons by Reza Nigharistani. I'm now going to pass the mic. Reza, please take it away. Thank you very much. So today we are going to talk about about what is usually considered to be the legacy of Neoplatonism, Christianity, from and other Platonistic philosophers to Augustine,

seeing the evolution of the problem of sin, defilement, evil, and how to live a life with demons. Now, the thing about, Before I give the mic to our guest, Cassio, what is actually curious about this legacy is that they are not your typical Christians. You know, they're not run-of-the-mill Christians. They obviously have a lot of, you know, Platonistic baggage with them, even Augustine.

But the thing is that then why is that when you read their texts, there is a certain kind of dogma. Dogma in the classical canonical sense of the Greek that comes with their philosophies. Is it about the problem of the sin or is it actually about the problem of knowledge? So, we are going to look at these issues more carefully and we are going to talk it over. Uh, but, Cassio, please.

Cassio Couture- Oh, okay. Everybody hearing me, right? Cassio Couture- Yes. Cassio Couture- Yes, sure. So, I'm going to present a brief text that I write in this week about the interrelations of Gruppo di Nù, that as you're probably aware of at this moment is a contemporary Italian group of research and practice on what they call to be a revolutionary demonology. So I'm going to, I'm going to... Cassio, would you be able, would you be able to very briefly talk about this movement or this entity?

Grupo de Inum, right? Yes. They were formed, I believe, in last year or 2018. I'm not sure, but they are very, they are very recent group of research and practice on these kinds of ritual, mystical activities. Does it have South American roots or is purely Italian? I believe it's purely Italian. I see, I see, I see. Because there is another one in Argentina. I have forgotten, but I can't...

I can find the name of it, but you can search it. It's, I think the English title simply translates to, we are all warlocks, something broke us. there is also something that, yeah, and of course that comes from CCRU legacy, Gabriel Catrin, and so many other people in Argentina. So there is something similar to that too. Yeah, I will search for this because I really am not familiarized with it,

but I got curious about it. So as you can see, I'm not very good at improvising words in English, and not a fluent speaker, so to speak. And as a consequence of that, I'm gonna read the text if you allow. But first of all, I would like to thank Zé for the invitation and for you all to having me here for this presentation and Reza for accepting the indication of that. Absolutely. So I'm going to read the text now. It is now largely acknowledged that there are clear boundaries between science and magic,

and it is impossible to fully conciliate these two fields of experience. However, I think it is possible that an extensive analysis of the differences and similarities between science and magic through contemporary lenses produces an enrichment of methodological frameworks. The two paradigms of science and magic chosen for this comparative analysis are in Reza's Intelligence and Spirits and in Grupo de Nun's Philosophical Mysticism. The thread connecting both approaches of reality is a common negation of the myth of the given. Whether it is manifested in the appeal for tradition,

in the so-called parochial humanism, the self or the subject as mainly individual, or in the possibility of full mastery of reality as a whole, as if it were totalizable under a given set of structure and elements. Grupo de Nun's definition and backstory work as a fiction, a fiction that enhances the fact that all we are dealing with is the infinite ocean of eternal recombination, which in Egyptian mythology is called Nun, a deity called Nun, which in intelligence and spirits emerges

as the unrestricted universe of discourse, which is disruptive because it doesn't allow any structure to be absolutely stable in its integrity. One of the main differences, however, is that world-building consists of a theoretical endeavor that has practical consequences, while Grupo de Nunes' activity can be thought of as a a mostly practical endeavor, taken here as a possible consequence of world building. Our models of reality, as well as our models of self cannot account for everything at once. They will always leave some loose threads,

the restricted universes of discourse, and therefore require constant revision and transformation. In the way I read it, and I might be wrong about this, AGI as conceived in intelligence and spirit furnishes a robust account of what intelligence is, that is, what it does, and what it should become once its relation to the intelligible dimension releases itself from its chains to illusions of totality, so that rational agents as a community bypass the prehistory of intelligence through emancipatory striving and moves. Recently, the rise of

fascist regimes all over the world is showing that at a macro scale or level, presuppositions, metatheoretical assumptions, and practical reasoning are are more than tied to the illusion of totality, to the point that it becomes even desirable. Grupo de Nun's philosophical mysticism is meant to be a counterpoint to the so-called right-hand path, of which the paradigm is the fascist magical practice of Grupo de Ur and Julius Evola, that today inspires, for example, Steve Bannon and Alexander Dugin's political activism and authorized mean magic.

For them, every doctrine is scripted in the tradition has the same reference in a single purpose, to experience a mediated access to the absolute subspecie aeternitatis, through a complete detachment of the sensible dimension, which is seen as evil par excellence. The examples mentioned above should not be seen as completely alien to the increasing emergence of fascist governments all over the world. In Brazil, for example, there is a direct link between the dominant religion, the fundamentalist evangelist Christianity of neo-Pentecostal religions, and the election of Bolsonaro, whose middle name happens to be Messias, Messiah.

This might relate to what I could say that is the main resemblance between Grupo de Nun and CCRU. And here I quote a passage from Lemurian Time War, a text from CCRU. In order to operate effectively, the One God universe must first, of all, deny the existence of magical war itself. There is only one reality, its own. In writing about magical war, Burroughs is thus already initiating an act of war against One God universe, mainlining contestation into primal unity.

One God Universe incorporates all competing fictions into its own story, the ultimate metanarrative, reducing alternative reality systems to negatively marked components of its own mythos. Other reality programs become evil, associated with the powers of deception and delusion. One God universe's powers works through fictions that repudiate their own fictional status, anti-fictions and unon-fictions. End of the quote. Grupo de Nun strongly states that it wants to change the paradigm of magic as a science of consciousness to a paradigm of magic as a relation to what is beyond human.

And I interpret human here as it appears in intelligence and spirits as a substantive concept of human as a natural species. Sure, it can be argued that it paves the way to unconditional accelerationism and these sorts of things. But I want to argue that in a functionalist framework, the existence of Grupo de Nun corresponds to that of magical practices that works as a fiction that spawns methodological fictions, circles without centers. This is because as a movement, something worth writing a manifesto, it's all about collective

rituals aiming to put demonic forces in motion in order to abolish previous presuppositions of how any ritual can be done. New demons means new constraints and new affordances. Instantiated as magical practice, Grupo de Nunes proposes a catastrophic attitude and here in catastrophic, I insert as a footnote that refers to, I will read the footnotes. I borrowed this term from the concepts of catastrophic rationalism that appears in Benjamin Norris' text, The Education of Kanzi and the Notion of Progress, Reza in Naganaristanis Intelligence and Spirits. The catastrophic aspect of Reza's neorationalism

consists in the use of reason as a revisionary tool for breaking with past and present constraints. Well, Grupo de Nun's philosophy proposes a catastrophic attitude towards methods and the constitution of a community within which the ideal methodology is the most encompassing possible, allowing different concatenation of actions to function as long as the ritual is realized without appealing to dogmas of any kind. And the ideal community is the most encompassing possible, since the very deity named as Nun symbolizes the infinity that exceeds and disrupts any achieved totality in the way of pursuing nothing but the outside,

seems as the apparent of datum yet to take form and to be navigated in. Here's a quote from a Manifesto for Revolutionary Demonology of Grupo Dinu. If we compare esoteric doctrines to scientific theories, we can imagine that each doctrine builds around its dogmas a mother of reality made of axioms and connections that allows a certain vision of the cosmos to sustain and expand itself. As in physics, there is no hermetic theory of everything. Each esoteric doctrine leaves a loose thread, an open circle. It forgets something, more or less willfully. More precisely, as it happens with sciences,

each model is not meant to be exact or complete, but rather to satisfy a specific human need of understanding and control." Grupo de Numes' aim is to show that magic or mystical experience as a whole are not really subsumed under the modes of organization of capitalism. A generalized scientific education does not necessarily produce a homogenic, atheist or non-mystic community. But yes, this doesn't mean that it should accept organized religion, precisely because mysticism is supposed to deal with what cannot be organized

organized due to the fact that it is what gives rise to all thinkable organization, and that therefore exceeds them. The statement that there is an outside does not necessarily entails that there is a concept of outside postulated a priori, and that it is entirely alien to us. The unrestricted universe of discourse is not tractable, but navigable, just like what is called the outside.

The practical necessity of having demons that leads to ritual performance is satisfied once demons are seen as concrete forms of ethical constraints, affordances of positive freedom. By performing actions that can be analyzed in ritual but still normative terms, left-hand path magicians recognize the local character of their practices. However, the concretization and consequently the inflation of the concept of demon in magic as opposed to the deflationary and properly rational accounts of demons is an exercise on seeing aspects in a Wittgensteinian sense,

Seeing X as Y. The connections established on way of comparison between demons as constraints and demons as concrete entities that interact with us increases in the extent that magical rituals become submitted to the constant framework revision in the same way the transcendental system is. The increase of chaos can be read as an increase in possibilities, but this inflation can, however, be signaled as an explicative retrocess. But the power of seeing as resides precisely in this shaking the limits between conceptual and perceptual dimensions.

And I believe that it shows clearly in ritual practices. As the self releases itself from its individual aspects as a necessary feature, local collectives engage in an active exercise of manipulation of the mediations that allow seeing acts as something else. This can be thought of as a kind of self-hacking that promotes local behavioral transformations, gradually bending connections in the multi-leveled and public space of reasons,

but that, on the other hand, does not know how to accurately calculate the mediations between these local practices and global agency. This scene as bending improves a certain cunning attitude towards artifacts, as well as some kind of proficiency in dealing with persuasion. The amplitude of this practice's scale is broadened by the idea of public rituals, in which the Nani, the High Priestess of Nuh, in her blog, identifies the problem of being misunderstood as performances. Even if, pragmatically speaking, it could be called a performance.

This is a quote from the text that I published in my blog that I believe that's sent to the class. If we read Grupo de Nun in the light of Negrastani writings, we could easily frame revolutionary demonology as a form of anti-humanism, But at least in my preliminary thoughts, I think any annihilation can be thought in a way that it is responsive to scale. So the question becomes, how to act in face of extinction, whether of humankind or of some specific way of conceive humankind or any idea whatsoever?

However, this point connects Grupo de Nun's interest for disintegration with the catastrophic rationalism, accurately identified by Benjamin Norris in Reza's Intelligence and Spirit. This kinds of, end of the quote, by the way. These kinds of demonological practice, however, do not contradict or preclude functional analysis, but instead provides organizational frameworks that are spawned precisely by non-centrifugal multiplicity of all possible modes of organization, and at the same time submitted to the material drive for disruption.

They exist in the unrestricted universe of discourse and can be summoned, picked out, analyzed, but while they are not, they belong to the vast abrupt, the intractable state of the global. There is no equivalence between rituals and scientific methods, but there seems to be something in ritual normativity that can be seen as forms of interaction with fictional entities in order to achieve a goal or producing a concrete outcome in a given state of affairs. In this kind of dialogue, the words deployed are materially instantiated symbols and actions.

Therefore, the ritual procedure along with its goal can be at least explicated by some kind of formal apparatus and the goal or achievements analyzed under the point of view of subjective transformation due to the contact with demons, whether individual or collectively. There is this statement presented in the beginning of the Manifesto for Revolutionary Demology that says, for our current purposes it is not necessary to know all the equations that make up the model we are studying. It is sufficient to understand its goals and which axioms it is based on.

Grupo de Nuh is not interested in proceeding to a properly scientific method, but still at the same time they are using science as a kind of metaphor, or rather than that they make use of axiomatic methods. And at the same time their writing points to a possible organization of models whose only purpose is to disrupt tradition, the biggest given of history. Grupo de Nunes' idea of magical experiments doesn't have or intend to have testing protocols. Magic here is something that deals with some kinds of affordances and constraints, just

like science. In a more similar way, art. its dependence upon affordances and constraints in order to properly ground its discoveries that are in fact constructions and prove its existence. Magic and art here are not very different in the sense that they make use of affordances and constraints. In the criterion for the successfulness is a traceable and significant collective transformation of presuppositions, the simplest elements of forms of life, of those who are involved in the ritual somehow.

In fact, the main features of word making presented by Goodman, composition, decomposition, weighting, that is emphasis, ordering, deletion and supplementation could be encountered in ritual practices. If the distinguishing factor between hyperstition, in this case also that of magical ritual practices and science is the tractability of methods, I believe that it is so because in hyperstition and in ritual practice as treated here, there's no interest whatsoever in the exact causal links

between the realization of the procedures and the concrete consequence intended. But in what kinds of mechanisms are capable of collectively transforming representational contents in such a manner that it generates significant change in actions and behavior. These mechanisms, therefore, are fundamentally pragmatic and submitted to the relative contingency of everyday life grammar, to use a Wittgenstein terminology. Grupo de Nunes' emphasis appear to be immobilizing these mechanisms towards the annihilation of tradition

and of the idea of a circular, perfect, and unified cosmos as a given, and in favor of disintegration as a necessary limit to the stability of concepts. This move can be thought of as a radicalization of the conception of meaning as family resemblance, and also the pragmatic, gestaltic, and behavioral scale sensitive consequences of hacking into description frameworks. Here I quote a passage of Wittgenstein's lectures and conversation. Wait, wait a minute.

No, no, actually is a quote from the interview with Grupo de NUM, I've mistaken. But the concept of God is not an a priori knowledge being produced a posteriori by the hypostatization of our self-identity. Finitude, transgression, excess, and imperfection are essentially demonical. They belong to the realm of unbeing and becoming. In this sense, there is some sort of demonical presence even in the simplest of actions, such as deciding the position of a door. When it is too far to the right or to the left, too high or too low, this is an aesthetic judgment devoid of obvious causal links and ratio measure, or perhaps completely devoid of them.

End of the quote. Wittgenstein's lecture on ethics, a brief text from 1929, the author establishes a distinction between judgments of absolute value and judgments of relative value. The first kind consists, for example, in saying, I feel absolutely safe. I wonder at the existence of the world. you also want to behave better. These at the time were perfect example of ethical judgments here. The latter kind consists in judgments such as,

this is the right way to Grantchester. She is a good violinist. This is exactly the note you are supposed to play now, whether it is played from the sheet music or in an improvisation session. This is the wrong way to revolution. Every statement now mentioned are relative to certain criteria and can therefore be restated as mere description of facts. However, not any description of a fact can be seen as a judgment of relative value. It seems to me that the conditions required for judgments of absolute value,

a properly ethical judgment according to Wittgenstein to take place are that of when someone asks for a reason, the explanation might include specific descriptions of interrelated facts seen as having relative value and that happens to lead to this judgment. In this terminology, an analysis of the dynamics between relative values and their criteria of correctness is an analysis of the demonic mediations that produces ethical judgments or decisions. Well, the text ends in here. It's work in progress. So I'm really looking forward to hearing this.

Thank you so much, Cassio. There is a lot here. I'm afraid that I cannot simply answer right away. I think that there should be a certain kind of canalization in the sense that people should bring out certain issues and then you respond to it and I'll also respond to it people my friends I have a lot of questions

Can I This haircut What haircut Is the best It's the absence of haircut So I think that there has to be A certain distinction made I mean I'll admit that my Tendencies are more towards Rationalist and scientist Based background than the mysticism background. And so I had to research what left-hand path, right-hand path, and these distinctions were. So I will admit that when I speak, I am a bit ignorant of the mysticism bit. But to me, it seems that if there is a bridge between skeptical appeals to ignorance,

sophisticus appeals to ambiguity or indeterminacy, genealogical appeals to blind causal factors, phenomenological appeals to pre-ontological understanding or mystical appeals to the ineffable, they're always theory relative. And this is where Wittgenstein's limits of language can maybe serve as a bridge where one has to articulate demarcation by conceptual means and within a quote space of reasons. But to me, that's where it ends because the project of rationalism and particularly the neo-rationalist Promethean project, is one that comes with a certain understanding of an asymptotic project that while we can sort of admit that we will never

have a theory of everything, that the pluralism of any open-ended form of practical reason is guided by a historical model that we can research where there is a certain reason-guided framework that's not chosen by an individual, but revealed preferences for what allows for a scientific method to be more sharply carved. The sort of process that moves towards what A.W. Karras calls a regulative ideal. And this is, I don't understand how in mysticism this type of regulative ideal can be the product of any research. To me it seems that there is always an appeal to the ineffable and to limits and to the way those limits are articulated in language and

the limits of language, but that this underdetermination isn't granted a leeway by way of cognitive research and a systems theory-based program. Okay, superb. any person, Carl, any of you, my friends. I mean, come on, I don't bite. I do, but not in public. So can I respond to aching? Absolutely, absolutely. So I agree with you that that this is hard to take conclusions on a cognitive dimension, but I think that it becomes

more clear when we compare these kinds of function that I'm advocating for mysticism with that of art, that of works of art. That is, by producing certain kinds of pragmatic effects, with differences on emphasis, with differences on concatenation of elements, certain kinds of elements, certain kinds of aspects could be seen as something else.

And therefore, in a cognitive manner, this would approach with, I don't know, psychology, gestalt and that kind of thing. I think that I locate in this some kinds of behavioral triggers, but I'm not really sure about the tractability of it. Really, this is work in progress. I'm trying to figure it out too, but these were some of the conclusions that I draw and I don't know if I

get to respond the question but yeah Carl, Georgiou, I know some people are really like just like oh I'm going to respond now Wow. Go on, Carvel. Yeah, yeah. Sorry. I wonder a little bit, because I'm a bit in the same boat as Ekin here. I don't really know much about mysticism and magic at all, to be honest. And I wonder a little bit, I'm quite fascinated by what you're saying, but I don't quite get all of it either. And sort of the, how exactly the relationship is meant to sort of be articulated. now you sort of mentioned art, perhaps in the of science, and I wonder if you have a

concrete example that we can sort of try to pinch this comparison to, to make it a little bit more tangible. Well, you see, in the history, in art history, art history can be seen, can be saw or as a movement that, in the extent that some new artwork is presented in the art world, for this to be new, it has to change how an artwork should be conceived. And in a way, it is a way of manipulating

of manipulating the grounds of that which makes us figure out whether something is a fact or if something is not. I believe the main common feature is precisely in this activity of intentionally, intentionally in some degree, trying to non-theoretically perform a change in the presupposition that Wittgenstein would characterize as appearing linguistically as grammar propositions, that is, the description of a rule.

So I'm trying to advocate magic as well as art as a non-theoretical means of... I don't know... Carrying on doing the experiments. Yeah, yeah. It's kind of a play with rules. It doesn't have pre-established criteria, because it is precisely the criteria that are in play. There are no fixed determinations of how they're going to be

Descripted Can I I have a question Yes, any person who hasn't talked already Please, please Isaiah, do you want to go first? I have a question as well Yeah, sure, sure, sure Any person Yeah, absolutely Alright, I'm going to jump in then So one of the things that we've been talking about for the last few sessions is that demons are limit constraints on the self, basically ourselves orbiting another planet, all of these terms that you've used. But to get to ethics, we need to get into a more intersubjective field

of the collective. And one of the things that you had talked about previously, Reza, was that religion sort of traps people in the individual where they're not appealing to the collective, you end up with laws rather than rules. Rules are sort of in the domain of the intersubjective or the collective. Laws are in this domain of the organized religion trapping somebody into their own relationship with an externalized sin that's sort of corrupting them. Does magical practice, even if we can't say something to Ekans point about magical practice having some sort of history that we can go and sort of look back chronologically, is this thing evolving? Does it have rules that have like worked or not worked?

Can we say anything about it in relationship to religion as a more effective means of the communicability of demons moving from that self at the boundary of the unhuman into the collective in a way that it can be subjected to this intersubjective rule definition and rule. Yes, of course. You see, me being on the side of Akin, essentially, I just don't see any sort of profit,

intellectual profit in the projects of mysticism. But then there is a different kind of a story that could be told. And this is a historical story, not something that you can just simply shovel it up from the slums of philosophy. So what is this story? This story is that what is exactly magic from a historical perspective? I mean, have any of you read Lynn Thorndike, the history of magic and experimental science?

No. It is one of the greatest works of all time, really. magnificent, magnificent historical work. So the problem that Lind Horndyke tries to pin down is that you see, magic at some point ceased to be magic in the cultish sense. magic became the idea of experimentation or diversification of methods of the experimental sciences. I mean look at Al-Azan, Ibn Sina, all the greatest scholars of optics and medicine in the Middle East

so as the Hellionistic philosophers who are doing this stuff precisely because they have a certain kind of healthy skepticism about the mythological dogmas that have been handed over to them. So in that sense magic is nothing but science itself. It is healthy science but of course it always comes with a certain kind of

back drop of dogmas. But why then to say that magic in that context sensitive sense is lower than science because science also comes with those kinds of dogmas. You see, I think that Cassio is talking about a certain kind of great age, the great age of experimentation. That is unfortunately behind us. You can no longer do that anymore. Science is an organ of experimentation at this point.

But then you can also be a little bit more generous and ask why is that? The transition between antiquity to Middle Ages to Renaissance happened and that was a really revolutionary transition. But way of these kinds of approaches to science, that we should diversify the methods, diversification of methods became the very idea of magic and science at that point. Like alchemists doing

shit and there is hardly any scientists at that point. But nevertheless, we learn, we learn from our methods. And that's how we can make better theses, better theories about the furniture of the world. And I do tend to agree with Cassio that I think what is missing in science and philosophy today is experimentation the will to experiment

and to with and the will to experiment is not merely scientific yes science has massive amounts of understanding of how something ought to be experimented but then And then to simply buy that, to simply entertain the hegemony of science, is merely to forget that science is being made in the fairness of counterfactual scenarios, world buildings.

I was going to ask, and I think this kind of connects with what you're saying, whether even though there is something specific and I think it would be a nice... Would you be able to slightly turn up your volume? Maybe like this is better. I think my mic was too far away. Okay. So, I would be interested, I think, in hearing more about what it, like, more exactly the the definition of the differential that appears with science about the capability of testing the

frameworks. But even before that, I wanted to ask whether there isn't necessarily a moment, not necessarily the whole process could be reduced to magic, of course, but isn't there mystical moment in science in the sense that if there is no given... It used to be, it used to be, it used to be, but it is no longer the case. It is no longer the case. You see, that's the whole point. But then that doesn't mean that we should actually get rid of the ambitions of what magic used to be.

But I don't mean like a screw, this whole libidinal materialism, so on and so forth, magic, body magic, and so on and so forth. no what i am talking about is magic in the way that it paved the road for science but i mean it in a specific sense that um if you can't get your you're not going to get your conceptual framework from experience because you there is no like given no no so experience is not going to give you its form. So you have to, at some point, you have to, it would seem,

you have to conjure up a form in a way that's kind of arbitrary. And I wonder if that isn't what's essentially magical about the problem. Well, you see, any sort of form at the beginning of investigating experience is going to be arbitrarily, right? But the thing is that it's not just merely forms, it's also an engineering problem. So the real question that is at stake here, also with regard to the problem of ethics, is that how can you logically reconstruct experience, human experience? Yes, you need to have some sort of formal tools and stuff,

but then reconstruction of experience is not merely a formal mission. It requires methods, and these methods can be diversified. And you can get huge amounts of leeway as what kind of method you can make. That's the whole point. That is what really sets apart ethics from morality. Because ethics, at the end of the day, is an engineering problem.

Just like, so I see that there is a river with high torrent, right? And I am going to, I'm supposed to carry heavy logs across the river. How can I do that? Well, that simply comes to the idea of what you actually want to do. With the kind of constraints you have, you can build a bridge on every point of the river, but that is not really an engineering problem.

The engineering problem is actually about, how about this? I'm going to find the best directional torrent in the river, put the logs in the water and let them by themselves come to the other side. Not everything is about creating a formula, a law. To create a law is most probably a man's desperation.

To create a rule is man's bliss. Reza. Yes. I'm wondering if this has something to do with the difference between logic as a canon and logic as an organon. Yes, of course. In logic as an organon, that is infantile schematism, that is a play with rules, right? With laws. Yes, yes, obviously, yes. I mean the whole point is that ethics is an organon of human practice, but organon not

in the kind of sense that we philosophers usually apply to it. it is not made of laws, it is not made of gravity, it is not made of you know this and that. Yes it is constrained by all those laws in the universe in the cosmological sense but then they can be re-engineered. You see You see, humans, we sapiens, I won't call it humans, we sapiens, and sapiens can be any sort of thing as long as it responds to certain kinds of concept using principles, are not

consumers of the food. We are the chefs. We are the people who cook the laws. Because otherwise it would be just the myth of the given, one on one. How do you know that there is such a thing as this kind of law there, if you haven't cooked it, brooded up in your historical struggle. I can maybe

I can maybe offer a way from construction or engineering into Plotinus. I made this diagram of his cosmology if you want to see. Sure, sure. Absolutely. Absolutely. We'd love to. I think it says host disabled screen sharing. Let me look into this a second. Sure. Meanwhile, I was going to offer an example to see what you guys think, which is very

classic, very omnipresent example of how mysticism is bullshit, is like astrology, right? you're going to say that someone's behavior is you oh i'm going to block you on twitter this is cancelled this is this is why z is cancelled i i'm no but i'm going to finish um like this doesn't make any sense because because you're a Pisces because like people people don't correspond to like there is no correspondence between people's personality and the the stars and all that but what I always

say to that is that the way people use it pragmatically is not really the way it works for people is not, I mean, if you're, if you're not dumb, like, of course, some people do that. I'm totally dumb. So go on. Do you see it now? Yes. this is my god what is this radiation yeah I don't know if it's too much of a sharp turn you can just

oh sorry go ahead say yeah just to finish what I was saying like I think you can use this kind of model in the moment where you're trying to formulate questions. So when you're trying to analyze someone's behavior and you don't have anything in your mind, you don't ask the right questions and you don't get any, you don't pay the right attention to new information. And I think people use this kind of archetype that's kind of magical to acquire an attitude in relation to an object in which you have certain questions and certain forms that you can impose and ask questions. So that's the kind of thing that I'm thinking is a kind of a first step

in every scientific paradigm, that you have to have some set of questions. And that's what I think could be related to the magical part. So, yes, you see, you're essentially talking about something as simple as that, that every Every source of human, even scientific human, dictum is basically carrying a lot of dogmas,

a lot of biases. But yes, we already know that. The problem that arises in this idea as science versus magic is that, so let us pretend that we do actually begin with biases and dogmas of human beliefs. But then how are you going to get rid of them? What is the actual method? Can it be replicated or can it be not? You see, these are the questions that I think make science better than magic.

even though I am not so keen on basically derailing the idea of magic, because I think magic is a kind of experimentation, is a kind of world building that ought to be taken seriously, as long as it's tractable. But the tractability is really the issue here. You know, everything that we say, we practice, can be part of these diagrams.

But then what would be the difference between magic and science, between human psychology and impersonal objectivity between ethics and morality Answers? Answers? Heckling? Are we going to get an explanation for this diagram?

Yeah, I think now it's time for the diagram. It's taken, it's very funny. I love the diagrams. They look like goddamn polonium radiation sphere, the kind that Putin used to assassinate the British agents. Sure you can get an explanation. I didn't realize that Carl was going to talk about Plutinus, so I made this and I'm not going to make an entire presentation of it. But but you can you can if you want to Uh, I can't No, no, no, no time but you go go on and see and we can see how much time we sort of I can I can just explain it real quick. I mean first

You have if we start over here. Do you see my cursor also? Yes, yes, yes, yes. Okay, so there's the one and then we have intelligence, soul, universe, matter all emanating what do you mean by the one i mean the uh what what the plotinus called the the good or the the king of all he goes back and forth between the one and the good and what eventually becomes god but but you really but is it like uh what you might think about an epistemological problem or a metaphysical problem because this whole idea of the one is extremely slippery in the history of philosophy. I mean even commentators of Plato are not taking it as this or that. So would be

really fantastic if you can actually say what the one is in the metaphysical or epistemological sense i mean in the metaphysical sense it would be um as i said the i mean i guess that's kind of where where i'm going to round up so maybe i should just go go through this and i'll end up there Sure, sure. If that's okay. Sure, absolutely. So it was just to give an idea of how this, the cosmology of Plotinus kind of easily translates into the Christian theology. So there's the inner three parts, the one intelligence and the soul, which eventually becomes the Holy Trinity. and this whole cosmology or worldview is then, he says, he talks about when

Narcissus looks into the mirror of Dionysus and so this worldview is reflected and becomes this false inverted POV, the human point of view, where we have the opposite instead of matter in the outer circle and the one in the middle Now it's inverted. So matter is here in the middle and we experience the one or God as the furthest away from us. And just as there was before emanation going out from the one, the logos or news. now there's instead we have the epistrophe or the potential realized by affordance of the good which in the

platonic sense would be leaving the cave in Christian theology would mean worship and he talks about it as desire and I guess it's desire in kind of a negative sense just like evil is absence of good then desire is more of a pull from the one then it's then it's a push from the, from inside the subject matter. A question, a really brief question. My apologies to interrupt you. No problem. So remember that in the cave analogy, there is a certain moment that Plato challenges the reader to go back in the cave once it has surfaced.

okay bad dude no that but but that that's plato that's not about you yes but he talks about it a lot every time he talks he talks about going back yeah yeah yeah well he just it really does let's not talk about bad news idea of plato but simply the matter is as simple as that that what happens when you actually see the light the truth right do you simply bask in it or do you export it in a revolutionary sense back to the cave

I mean, I guess Plotinus would consider it as just stop being evil. And you become sort of influenced by intelligence. But what does it mean about the cave people? those who are still chained. You mean whether this is an individual or a collective experience? Yes, but also more importantly, simply the understanding that,

you know, okay, so you as an enlightened individual, by way of the collective faculties managed to get out of the cave. But then what happens to all those poor people who are still chained in the cave? What should be done about them? Are you going to blow up the cave and get it done with? Or are you going to do some sort of a sneaky meshem

and get them out? Plato actually is quite, very, very quite vague about this idea. You just brought up an interesting point, Reza. So the concept of bodhisattvaism and Buddhism is all about not jumping off of the wheel of reincarnation, but once you've achieved enlightenment, helping to usher other people who haven't yet achieved enlightenment over to the other side before you finally go. Yes. And where Platonism hit Buddhism in Gandhara, you know, where Alexander the Great slammed into the Hindu Kush, you know, hard enough to shake loose statues of the Buddha, is potentially where you end up with an answer to the question.

My answer to that would be, have you watched the man who thought he's a king? Sean Connery. Absolutely. The man who would be king. It's a Rudyard Kipling. Who would be a king. Yes. Who would be a king. Michael King. What a great movie. so i can just finish up real quick and we can yes yes absolutely absolutely um so what i was going to say that this uh the false inverted uh point of view is uh on a side note uh very easily

comparable to the Christian medieval geocentric cosmology as you can see down here. I put it in world-encompassing parenthesis and these two, what he says is that these two points of views exist simultaneously. So that's the result we see down here, the super imposition of the two point of views, both states exist simultaneously. And that was I was going to try to answer your first question, what I call the one as a synecdoche in a sense. I was thinking this idea of the two worldviews superimposed on top of each other made me think of Leibniz Monad,

where you have this simultaneity of an all-creating entity, this one that everything comes from, which is also all-encompassing, all-containing, all-consuming at the same time. So it's both transcendental and imminent. And I guess from the discussion we had last time about feedback loop, you could talk about this transcendental and imminent going on at the same time as the feedback loop between emanation and epistrophe. Superb, superb. You see, so the bottom left diagram.

Yes. The question arises here is that how can you do actually achieve it? You see... I guess that's what, sorry to interrupt, but I guess that's where the problem of evil comes up, that it's essentially a potential unrealized. Well, when you're saying potentially unrealized, would you be able to elaborate a little bit about that? I guess that's maybe Carl's territory, because that's where the chapter we read for today starts.

I see. So I know that you brought up Leibniz and the monads. The thing is, with the monads, is that they are windowless. You know, they're fragments of humanity. It's just like you. Kids, do they call them unconditional accelerationism, patchworks. So it is as if you are trying to integrate by some sort of means the patchworks that do exist, like lost tribes of Judaism, lost tribes of humanity.

But then the question would be, as a Marxist, I would ask you, are you actually integrated? I'm sorry, I'm not sure I understand exactly. Essentially, think about this. So Leibniz think about windowless monads, but he also thinks of a method that can chain together these windowless monads. And you can also go further into contemporary politics

and say that there are certain kinds of what you might call to be tribes or fragments of humanity what would be the exact method to bring them together such that you don't just get the one and the multiple or the multiple and one Yeah, it's a huge question, but I guess in Leibniz, I guess there is an inner force in the monad, but without vitalism.

So the force within is intersubjective, but without what you could say, like a religious affordance i see i see so yes i i do agree uh there comes a certain moment in leibniz where the implicit presupposition is religious affordance but let us take this out of the equation so if religious importance is no longer part of the equation

then what happens is the revolutionary task of the integration ethics in the revolutionary sense how are we going to simply put these fragments together if we don't have a certain kind of religious ideal or something like that I guess that's what we've been so far has described as what would be cunning intelligence or that would be the goal to use cunning intelligence instead of religious morality

your religious law does that mean that we can get at the end of the day to have some mongulaks sorry i just have to make a lxai host again and i'm not sure exactly how to do it uh you see my segment and where you can turn off my sound let's let's have let's have a a break at this point and then we come back. Oliver?

Yes, I just wanted to find you. Oh, there you are. Yeah, and then write top and then make host. Okay, great. Thank you Okay, Cassius back

Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. So,

what's going on who did gossip against me um so let's think about augustine's the no-Platonistic problem of the problem of sin. Well, the problem of sin and other sin no-Platonists comes from the problem of knowledge.

You know, a certain kind of sense that I mentioned with regard to demons in earlier sessions. You see, Augustine is not your typical Catholic or Christian at all. He denies the fact that there is anything more to human knowledge than the ordinary knowledge. You know, that sounds really cool. Solarsian thesis. You know, you could actually land a great career in an analytic philosophy department.

But then, when you look at Augustin's thesis, it becomes a little bit sordid at the end of the day. You know, why is that? Precisely because he thinks that any sort of knowledge comes with certain kinds of givenness. And that givenness is not really the kind of givenness that we actually talk about the ordinary knowledge of the human beings, a lot of categorical given, but rather God-givenness.

that God or God's faith in God is the core of knowledge. As simple as that. So he's a rationalist at the end of the day but he's a kind of a rationalist that he makes a house of cards on top of a certain kinds of what you might call to be rather questionable assumptions. Well, we can all make

such house of cards on top of questionable assumptions. But then And Abbasin turns it into a pillar that if knowledge at the end of the day, the most rudimentary kind of knowledge, at the end of the day is given to you by a certain kind of diamond. then that's all you have and you should build upon it. It is very interesting that Augustine at the end of the day

is not really your kind of run-of-the-mill Catholic. is actually more of a naturalist. You know, because this is exactly the thesis of a kind of bad naturalist that we usually, you know, gossip about. So imagine that there were certain kinds of constraints upon your knowledge and they were given by nature. How are you going to move forward? What kind of ethics can you put together? What kind of laws can you detect?

Question and answers. Why do we need a certain kind of hardcore presumption? if we do need them actually then how can we tone down their what you might call to be negative properties

because as I mentioned the problem of ethics at this time converges upon the problems of nationalist ethics. People like, I don't know, think about neo-etheism, all sorts of people like that. So they all come with this idea that there are certain kind of entrenched constraints and you cannot move against them ultimately. You always respond to them as opposed to working against them.

And it's actually quite a really interesting idea that people think that religious people are anti-naturalists, but no. The mechanisms by way of which they do work are shared across the board. So, thoughts?

don't let me ask your individual prisoner inmate numbers now I'm thinking about the right hand path versus left hand path. Zay, I can't hear you. I don't think any. Yes, yes. Would you be? Yes. Can you hear like this? Yes, yes. Much better. I'm thinking about the right hand left hand path distinction. I think, I have the impression at least, as I said in the chat, that the diagram that

Oliver did for Plotinus is a good example, I think, of what Grupo di Nune are criticizing as right hand path. Plotinus is, of course, a big figure in Western mysticism. And in that sense, I feel like there's a distinction maybe there between whether you think your Gnostic practices are being guided by a center, are being guided by a center

of attraction that's going to lead them towards a progressive process of reforming your conceptions, or whether the Grupo de Noon approach, and that's why I'm unsure about Casio's approximation between that and Reza's project, it feels more like tending towards disintegration, They have this kind of Landian aesthetic of disintegration, not into the conjunction, the integration of your knowledge towards this kind of center, but rather as moving into singularity in all different incommensurable kind of directions.

So I guess what I'm asking is, Reza, do you think you would fall into right-hand path? Or if that's a valid parallel to make? Is the right-hand path a kind of universalist enterprise or not? I'm not sure, but I'm relating it to... this has to do with the question that I asked last time to this idea that you have a kind of a guarantor you have this idea this platonic idea of the goods that is a guarantor that your process is good because otherwise I'm also thinking like what is it because I feel like it's a bit of a circular

distinction when you're asking about the just like the difference between magic and science like science is better than magic because science you can know you can test your your assumptions and you can know that you're making progress while magic seems to be randomly just asserting random things but that's the distinction precisely so to look at the practice and to know whether it's supposed to be taken to be magic to be called magic or to be called science it's either like either it's it is it either you can trust that your reformation of that practice is going to move you forward somehow or you can't. But what is it like that makes some practices amenable to that and others

not? And is that something that's intrinsic to the practice or is that something that's intrinsic to your more broad cosmological, ontological universe? No, I think that when it comes to practice, everything that we can ever say, and that's what separates ethics from pure morality, and the problem of the good from the problem of evil, is that it ought to be tractable. is what we need. If you don't have tractability of certain kinds of principles by which you connect certain kinds of premises to certain kinds of consequences, then obviously I think

that's what evil looks like. Evil is a logical problem rather than a human problem at the Plato understood that. But the thing is that either no Platonists or Augustinians thought of Plato as this kind of, really, this kind of, what you want to call to be philosopher par excellence. The way that they looked at philosophy's doctrine was sterilized.

It was static to begin with. For example, why is that that Augustine thinks that Plato's idea of the soul in the making is something that is already there. It is pre-existent. Well that's just a lot of religious gerrymandering. Plato doesn't think about that. Plato actually thinks that any sort of pre-existent soul,

The idea of pre-existent soul is fundamentally a kind of tyrannical idea because a soul is always in the making and that making, that productivity without the product is called the good, Platonic terms. It's simply the idea that you can't craft the soul without the kind of historical struggle

between forms and senses, between episteme and ideas. But it seems to me that the problem of evil, and that's why I think the problem of evil at the end of the day is a fundamentally religious idea. Because they do think that there is something out there, either in the soul or in the world. But the thing is that philosophy shows us there is nothing out there as a given, right?

So, this is why I always think that theology always piggybacks philosophical doctrines. And that's why we have a certain kind of moral laws, and there is nothing wrong with morality, by the way. Moral laws, however, in this case, which are misguided, they don't answer the questions of either sensory human beings or the ideating, cognating human being.

And that's why you get the problem of evil. There is always a certain kind of bipolarity toward either of these two poles. But these two poles are dialectical. They do not exist without the third term. And that third term is what you might call to be the problem of the good, the problem of integrating that which I know and that which I have sensed, which is the problem of ignorance in Plato really. The idea that ignorance is something that can be mitigated,

but can never be put in the trash bin is the very idea of ethics. Ethics is at the end of the day is ignorance. What kind of ignorance? An ignorance that can be mitigated while being preserved. So, yes, with the essence of monotheistic religion in Zorozarianism, Christianity,

We get this extreme dichotomy between knowledge and ignorance, and that creates a lot of problems. problems which are not even tractable hence they are not problems they are merely problems in the speculative bad speculative sense of religion Thoughts, questions, answers, heckling.

Sophie, Asia, you too. Reza, I'm just wondering about the ignorance part. Okay, pose a question, pose a question. Pose a question then. I don't know how ethics,

Because ignorance means to not be aware of an issue, no? Or not being interested into it. So... Not being aware of the issue. Not being aware. Not interested. Yeah, no, no, no, no. Not the interested part. Not simply being aware of the issue. Not being aware. But to not being aware of the issue is not simply the idea of that I can never solve this, or I can never be aware of the issue, right? So there is a set of kinds of historical modesty, and that's the problem of ethics.

that comes with the problem of ignorance. We are all ignorant. In fact, human knowledge can never progress by way of anything other than ignorance. So, if that is the case then, what does it mean to ascend from one level of ignorance to another level? and that's why i called ignorance knowledge as a problem and so as ethics the problem of ignorance mitigation and ignorance preservation because

you never get rid of ignorance so there comes a certain kind of trick with this kind of religion religious idea about ethics, which is something of a problem of knowledge. That they say, for example, with Augustine, they say that, okay, all we do have is the ordinary knowledge. We don't have godly knowledge. But then Then someone may ask, what is the root of this ordinary knowledge and why is that a guarantor

to converge upon the godly knowledge? Well, Augustine tells you that, you know, the roots of the ordinary mundane knowledge that we humans do have is essentially something that has been given to us by the Divine. humanistic ethics completely changes the formula also it says that just like i was saying there is no final attractor

essentially all we do have is ordinary knowledge But in contrast to the religious dogma, it does something more by saying that, no, your knowledge, your even most rudimentary manifest kind of knowledge of the world is not rooted in any sort of what you might call to be divine or godly. It's just your own imposition on the senses, on your own senses.

Reza, aren't we presenting plotness today? There's a second plot in this presentation. Yes, let's plot in this plot in this it is. Plotinus actually, to be honest with you, how many of you have read plot in this works? Okay, good, good. Plotinus is actually far more exciting than Augustine. Augustine. Augustine is, you know, in 21st century, if there was a meme about

Augustine, it would be that, you know, I'm merely an insult, but I have swam across the oceans of time. This is what Agustin is. It's just merely a kind of, you know, person who used to be secular, who used to do all sorts of stuff that ordinary people do, do, but for some reason he believes in certain kinds of axiomatics of thoughts.

And those axiomatics are not really formal axiomatics, they are substandard axiomatics in the religious sense. like your next door Catholic boy. Okay, let's hear about Plotinus. Before Carl jumps in, can I just tell you an historical detail about Plotinus and I think you'll find amusing, and your hatred of the Romans. Yes, yes, please do that. Plotnes was basically like a door-to-door salesman that decided to get into philosophy late, and he studied it for 11 years. At the age of 28, he decided that he wanted to study Persian

philosophy, and that the way that he would do that was he joined the army of Gordian III to invade Persia so that he could get there and get access to the books. That was going to be his GI Bill funded postdoc, but Gordian got killed. Plotinus had to spend the next year on foot trying to escape Persia, basically like a neoplatonic version of the naked prey. Do you know, so essentially from what I understand from his historical time frame. He lived during the time where Persia had made many many no-platonistic schools across the land. So this is post Khosrow Paris, Khosrow

the second, the king of Persia in the Sassanid after the Christianity kind of thing. Precisely because Khosrow the second had a Christian wife, a Christian wife and he was so in love with him, with her. And through this kind of cultural exchange, Persian Empire created many no-platronistic schools to such an extent that some of the Romans always wanted to join these schools because that was like you know the hot bed of non-Platonistic discourse.

But I just don't know what happened to the goddamn plot. He probably was too scared of the Persian beard. The other cool anecdote was that he tried to convince the emperor to rebuild Elia, the ruins where Parmenides and Zeno had done their work so that he and his buddies could all move in together and live according to Plato's laws in the Republic. And the emperor was like, no, I don't think I could do that, guys. Actually, I've heard these kinds of stories about no Platonists. Essentially, no Platonism, for a good part,

lived in a time of strife and in a time that the glories of Hellionistic and the Greek philosophy had already been diminished. So they had these funny ideas of utopia. It's not just Pelotonists. So many of the No-Platonists actually have these kinds of ideas. But that's because of the time where they emerged. And it was absolutely one of the most savage times.

They were caught between crossfire of Christianity, secularism, Zorozharanism, Iran, Roman, Greek, all of that stuff. They absolutely had no chance to get a foothold. The only foothold that they had, however, is to make a grift, a scheme for Christians. Hey, Christian buddies, haven't you heard of no-Platonism?

We are so cool. So, that's what Noblatonism became even more of a power at the end of the day than, you know, for example, Zoroastrianism or Druidistic cults, precisely because they fundamentally and organizedly manage to assimilate in early Christian cults. I would say that there is a Twitter lesson to be learned here.

Always manage to create a cult. no matter how much stupid that cult is. Can I ask a question regarding their relationship or Agustin's relationship to Neoplatonism? I think it's quite obvious what he took from Neoplatonism, but is it right to say if it's mostly his concept of sin which makes him differ from Neoplatonism? Or how do you see the... How is it that he changes it?

You see, I think that they're both Agassin and the Neoplatonists like Plotinus are both great readers of Plato. But you should understand that during this time, To read Plato means to read Plato by way of Aristotle. So there is a kind of Aristotelian core in both factions. While I know Platonists, we're thinking more about the idea of forms, you know, trying

to formalize it. as, for example, Plotinus' book on numbers, which is fundamentally a great book. Augustine, or later no Platonists who were converted to Christianity, they were not that interested in forms anymore. But in the idea of what knowledge comes from. So you see in Plato in Republic and that is

what Plato called the most vulgar work that I have ever created. It's just like Cyclonopedia, the most shittiest book that I have ever written. So the problem comes to this, that in Republic, Plato creates a certain kind of a spectrum or gradient between the sense and the form, between that which is a confused flux and that which is you know a stable, right?

Augustine thought of this as a great example of Christian mindset at that time. Why? Precisely because he thought that Plato is actually talking about the fundamental question of Christianity, how to integrate the idea of God with the idea of primitive instincts or senses.

Isn't it the very idea of Christianity to begin with? He just didn't understand that what Plato means by the senses and by the forms is not actually any sort of religious or godly idea. It is merely a human conundrum that cannot be relegated or delegated to gods. Why? Precisely because neither forms nor senses belong to the realm of gods.

They are merely human problems. Just deal with them. And that was Plato's idea. Just deal with them. Reza, I was talking about the concept of participation in Plato. In Oliver's diagram, the movements of emanation was described as the correct move from the one to the multiple, but the contrary was depicted as a false movement. Whereas in, I,

I always read the concepts of participation as a symmetric relation. I don't know. Is a symmetric relation. You're talking about methexis, right? I also don't think that the idea of worship or reaching for the intelligible, I don't see that as a negative or as... that's not the idea of... that's not what he says is false. That it's the point of view is false, but then what to do? Then you worship. You see, with Plato, if you're talking about Plato, Plato

So, simply, he's a very peculiar kind of philosopher. He's either an atheist or atheist. He simply tries to talk about the mechanisms by which the cosmos works. And by cosmos, he means the intelligible cosmos, such that we can actually look into the mechanisms by which this cosmos works, right? So he's not an atheist in any sense, or atheist in any sense.

He's just a butcher, as he put it forward. You know, the task of a philosopher is to carve at the joints. Nothing more, nothing less. So with that sense, you can get this from the analogy of the line in Republic, later on in Philippus, that there is a certain kind of what does it mean for me to be part of the cosmos as a human. When it requires a task, this task is dialectical.

Stas is also at a lower level epistemological. What does it mean to integrate rather than aligning the distinction between sensory apparatus and forms? That's just Plato one-on-one, the analogy of the line in Republic. Thoughts, curses,

Durshnam, Well, okay. I guess I was meant to present something on Plotinus then, which... Well, you are going to do it. How about doing it now? Yes, exactly. That is my idea, too. I can't get my eyes off the chat. Stop it. Okay, no, as everyone who has ever been in one of these seminars with me knows, I usually make these strange presentations that I haven't

really prepared and this is going to be exactly like that. And as, well, some might know, sort of in the past week. I saw this sort of link to Pete Wolfendale's talk about Prometheanism and rationalism that has been uploaded on YouTube, again, quite recently. And at some point he sort of mentions the sort of Gnosticism as an alternative approach and identifies as a kind of eschatological mysticism of some kind. And then I started reading, preparing for this presentation, and I sort of stumbled upon Plotinus' refutation or attack on the Gnostics,

which I find quite interesting, especially with, as can be seen in the footnote on the version, that had the porphyry provided an alternative title to that treatise, namely, against those who say that the demiurge of the cosmos is evil and that the cosmos is evil. But some background to this, because I'm going to sort of just quite briefly talk about Plotinus' attack on the Gnostics and some of the things he deems wrong with them, and contrast that with his own sort of New Platonist interpretation, I guess, of Plato and particularly of evil or matter or not being. And then I'm

going to ask a couple of questions, primarily to Ressa, but I think it would be interesting if someone else would ask you. So anyway, in a previous section at the end of the first Stanyard, Plotinus talks about evil, and I think it's very interesting because he sort of prefaces, okay, so to know, instead of just talking about where evil is, we also need to talk about the nature of evil, because that in itself is situating evil. And evil from Plotinus here is identified with not as an independent principle, but precisely that which is farthest away from the one, or from the good, namely, matter, or not being. And I think

there's a whole sort of... I'm a discount philosopher, right? So my readings of Plato are not that amazing, and I'm a bit curious about, sort of, because I know there's this sort of long discussion in the sophist about being and not being, and it also sort of goes into a little bit into Parmenides and also such as that to Aetetus, I think. And I would sort of be interested in hearing about this notion of not being as Plato may have conceived it and as Plotinus may have interpreted it. Because interestingly enough, I was thinking of I'm just trying to sort of tease out some connections here, but I was thinking about

sort of the Nietzsche and Deleuze project of overturning Platonism and particularly Deleuze's sort of discussion of not being answered this question mark being and Nietzsche and Deleuze being, I mean from Plotinus' point of view, probably sort of the agents of some kind of pure evil. So, interestingly enough, I find it quite interesting. So, what Plotinus' critique against the Gnostics basically amounts to is that they are, or one of the parts, and the one I will focus on, is that they sort of harbor a kind of hatred against matter. one has to escape from matter, one has to unbind the spark, this sort of divine spark that has been imprisoned in the body,

according to some Gnostics or some Gnostic teachings. And there is almost an imperative to break free using a particular set of mystical or sort of a particular set of methods, a kind of a set of practices. He doesn't really go into any details of these and as far as I know it's not necessarily sort of none of the specifics of sort of what these Gnostic rituals would be are sort of not known or not extant. someone might be able to correct me on this. But I think what Plotinus mentions earlier is, however, that even for him, he admits that, well, Plato does indeed sort of say that matter or not being or that which is sort of farthest from the good is,

in a sense, evil. But that doesn't mean that we can disrespect or sort of that we should actively try to escape it, our imprisonment, but we must sort of accept or sort of deal with matter and try to respect it while using other means of trying to go beyond it. And I think there are sort of, there is mysticism in Plotinus, certainly, and sort of there are this sort of between of of merging with the one and so on, but it's of a different order and it's not an active anger against that which appears to be, but which is in fact false. And then I was sort of, on the other hand, I was thinking of, you know, Bataille's kind of statement in the Gnosticism of Basic Theory,

is an essay where he identifies the Gnostics with, or particular Gnostics, with a fundamental love of darkness. Perhaps one could also, I would perhaps rather say that it is an enchantment with darkness, or perhaps an enchantment with darkness as such which is to be transcended. But I think these things are interesting, and I wonder, and now we sort of So I have two lines of questioning here. One sort of moving a bit further into our seminar because we have mentioned sort of schizophrenia and we have mentioned sort of, and I know we'll be looking at sort of Porenzi and Spielrein in coming sessions. And I think, you know, there is some sort of work being published in a

about sort of the phenomenology of schizophrenia from a sort of phenomenological tradition too about sort of the relationship between mysticism and schizophrenia and I think that that can be an interesting sort of point to discuss and sort of certainly one can have all kinds of critiques of this kind of tradition which is perhaps you know headlined by Dan Sahabi and people like that not sort of meaning any disrespect, but just to indicate who's publishing there. So, and the other question is, so sort of what is there a relationship between the sort of, well, the practical schizophrenia, as we talked about in the previous seminar, and the sort of

mystical sort of experiences and the sort of attempts to denigrate evil and see to something and see unification with one or something of the kind or moving away from the demagogically originated world of appearances to something else. And on the other hand, what is the relationship between this entire sort of nexus and Prometheanism and rationalism? especially insofar as we're talking about a set of practices and a set of techniques to work upon the present or what appears to be given to us now. And are you really a Gnostic, Reza, in some sense?

I'm skeptical. Yes. And if you are, in what sense would that be? perhaps. The very last part is more of a joke than anything else, but I think those might be some things I would like to be happy to hear something about from either Ressa or anyone else who's not inclined to... This was absolutely majestic. Fantastic questions. Well, Well, I don't know, should I actually start or people want to jump in? Yeah, I had some comments and some things that I wanted to mention.

Sure, absolutely. The first thing, two things mostly. One, I think that Carl has touched upon already. And the other, the other is this, the first, well, the first is this sort of comment on the really, really purest uh uh uh quality of plotaneous works like his his uh he has his insistence in some logical very purest logical strings uh one i could highlight is the one on the 12th paragraph where he writes that evil is not the the absolute privation of good but precisely the partial

prohibition of good. So a partial evil would be worse than a whole evil. So like an evil which is 99% good would be more evil than an evil which is 50% good for example. Yeah but okay I'm not going to get cancelled for this, I hope so. I think that there is a certain kinds of reasoning that is put into these kinds of formula by people who have been traumatized, you know, literally have been decimated to death, Muslims and Jews.

but when you really look at the problem is it really the kind of problem that muslims and jews talk about probably not i don't think so no i think the problem is far more severe it's not a problem of percentage. You know, 300 of us, 700,000 of us got decimated. Yeah, no, no. Just the fact that the more the evil is mixed

within the good, the less it is accidental to it. So the more substantial is the vice, like but this is what i wanted to say i didn't want to say it out of the fear of cancellation that this is exactly how people who are traumatized interpret the problem of evil yeah and kind of it's kind of paranoia called you towards the level of like toxicity or the level of contamination that the good can suffer. Yes, yes. Especially since Plotinus himself doesn't define evil as the opposite of good, but rather as an absence of measure or an absence of

limit. And also because he clearly believes that evil necessarily has a degree of participation in all things. So like he says, evil is always bound to the good. It always comes with beautiful chains. And so I think it's kind of, I don't understand why he's trying to unmix the good and the evil so much. Yeah, yes, yes. I mean there is a certain kind, you know, when Nietzsche calls Zarathustra implicitly the evil prophet, precisely because he does something good. He does something good

in the mythological sense. So what does Arthur Thurad do? He simply refuses to mingle the problem of the good with the problem of evil. There is a certain kind of Manichaeanism in him, right? But then when you actually do mingle the problem of good and evil, you can just fucking Hannah Arendt. But isn't it more boring, I mean anything more boring than Hannah Arendt's idea of banality of evil?

someone who slept with a Nazi and still goes on and trying to come up with certain kind of idea of how the universe revolves. No. Evil is real, my friends. Evil is good. But what is evil? Evil is not the kind of stuff that Nazis do. Evil is what nature do. The problem of ethics was invented to keep the forces of nature at bay.

And that's really scary. Because who are we, if not naturalistic entities? And then we suddenly decide to keep the forces of nature at bay. Well, that's a paradox. That's where evil comes from. Evil is not Nazi. it doesn't have a leather face or this or doesn't have the face of Khomeini or beard like me it's something more sinister it is something

that we humans have actually have never talked about coherently because we always put under the carpet evil is what we are that's the whole point why do you think Augustine writes confession because he suddenly realizes that we are evil but is the problem of evil means that it is something that we are bad totally we are beyond the

reprieve no he actually thinks that we all can be saved but of course his solution to this problem is a goddamn fucking Catholic solution. But then comes Marx and Engels. Oh, or Uncle Stalin. You still can be evil and be a good person. You can argue that that solution is already important, right? This like ascetic sort of, because if evil is matter, you know,

uh that really guides you towards some sort of assetism which is uh entirely contrasting with with the materialism that will come out of like Marx and Engels uh both both like ontologically and as well as really though i mean in what sense do you say that it can actually be in contrast with Marx and Engels' thesis. The whole idea of Marx and Engels' thesis is that any sort of totalization in history is evil. We as humans can make so much evil in this world, but the worst

kind of evil that we should never take into the revolutionary enterprise is totalization. Communism is a self-consciousness of capitalism and nothing more. I was confused about a point that you just made. You just said evil is matter. When I was reading Plotinus, it felt like it was the sort of the inversion of that, that matter was evil. That starting from the one, the principle of intelligence, there's this emanative creation of the material existence, part of that is the birth of a consciousness, which is sort of a

shadow of the principle of the one, a consciousness which is capable of intellectual inquiry. The more it's bound up with the material context, the more evil it is. But its ability to consider the forms, the sort of the non-material is the thing that is the escape hatch that ultimately allows it to make its way into this other sort of transcendent realm. And from that standpoint, it's like entropy, it might as well be described as evil. It's like the fact that the universe is set in motion and that it's always sort of like decaying, it's corrupting in this sort of energetic thermodynamic sense is evil from the Platinian standpoint. And to the extent that we participate-

There is, I would say that there is a different interpretation of Plato, and that comes in much later dialogues such as Philegas, where he actually poses is the greatest thesis that he could ever come up with. What is that thesis? The thesis on the good. This is after his scandal of his public lecture, you know, that reportedly Plato never talked in public, unlike Badiou who talks in public quite often.

So Plato got this funny idea that, oh, maybe I should actually go talk to the public. The first sentence of his lecture was that the good is the one. One, that immense number, not one in the Badiouzian sense. And everyone said the same thing that they had told him when he defended Socrates, Kataba, table, namely, get the fuck down, get the fuck down. But Plato, at that time, was not

that kind of impressionable young person who used to be when defending Socrates. He at that time was a true philosopher. He elegantly gets the fuck down. But next day he starts to write a new book. That book is Philippus, the thesis on the good. What is the good? The good is a certain kind of harmony in a Platonic sense and not

in a Confucian sense about the sense and the form, the material and that which is beyond the senses. This is really, I think, one of the greatest moments in philosophy. So, yes, there is such a thing as distinction between senses and matter and so on and so forth, which all battles of philosophy are being launched, empiricism, positivism, rationalism, so on and so forth.

But the way that Plato envisioned it was something far more modest, far more practical. It was in the sense that neither matter is evil, nor the form is good. What is good? That's the idea of the good in the Platonic sense, in Philippus. It's how to integrate that which is dirty, that which is pure, that which is of the sense, and that which is of the form. And here my friends, where philosophy starts.

I'm waiting for swearing at this point. If you can't swear at me, you most probably are not good students. Yeah, I think the contrast I found between materialism and Platonism Maybe that's because I've never, I'm not really familiarized with Badiou and anything like that and I don't really get it. Badiou is a great philosopher, but to be honest with you, his understanding of Plato is channeled

through a certain kind of French philosophy is almost way too ambitious. Plato's ambitiousness comes with modesty. its presupposition is modesty. But Badiou starts with immodesty. I mean, look at the logic of the world. I mean, I, okay, I'm not going to gossip about other kind of philosophers.

gossiping about philosophers on the chat i said larwell is the biggest idiot philosopher but you know and it's a big battle you know for the most idiotic he is he's a sweet guy i have met him I actually think that his wife is a really good philosopher. Sometimes. On Françoise, she meets her English just isn't very good. So when she writes in English, it loses a lot. I've translated some of her works from French to English. But can we

actually punish philosophers? because they don't have a good English. But this happens with Badiou too. You know, he'll like... Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. He'll give a talk in English and it'll almost be as if there's something lost between what I read in his work. No, with Badiou, with Badiou, it's a different idea. You don't think that he's more simplistic when he speaks and when there's... He's vulgar. He's actually quite philosophical. vulgar in my sense. You see, his ideas of morality ethics are like simpleton ideas.

Like, for example, you know, yes, let's pretend that we are great philosophers, right? And we do go and make a lecture. But then, Babiou says something like this, that, hey, guys, I have discovered a new trick that every time there is a conflict between two terms I introduce a third term. My god Uncle Baddew, don't you understand this is the very idea of dialectics? That

you don't get to introduce a third term. The third term is a vibe that arises from the conflict within two terms. So he talks about these kinds of stuff and to be honest with you, if he wasn't this kind of philosopher, I mean, he would have been simply annihilated on Twitter. But there it comes. You see, this is why I'm I am asking you sincerely to think about the real problems of ethics and morality.

Where do they come from? What is the process that is involved, so on and so forth? We are not going to be that kind of big shit analytic philosopher or big shit content of philosopher. We are just inquiring. That's all we are doing. Any person who is opposed to that kind of principle is a charlatan.

do you want to be a bad view i can no you know who i want to be on social media i'm not talking about the real bad view bad view on social media does he have any social media aside from like making a post on a personal book? No, the mention of Badiru on social media. It's very divisive. We have some people who will, you know, if JP could speak, I'm sure he would be yelling right now.

And he would be defending Badiru. I have zero. He's all right. Zero enmity toward these kinds of philosophers. I understand that they have gone through a lot of thinking, but that is not good enough. This is why I always say to you, to other close students, would call so on and so forth. That the philosopher should always have a modest life. A modest life in the sense. Well, does Padraig not have a modest life?

Doesn't he like? Ah, duh, duh, duh. In his documentary, he seems to host the illegal aliens from Africa Africa and such in his house. He seems to have a modest life. He says, there is also a- I mean, he has a documentary. Yes. And then there is also a line where he says that, you know, I always wanted to be this great man philosopher because I wanted to seduce my mom. Well, it's because his brother, like, got all the answers. He always wanted to be glorious. Glorious.

Jesus. No, to be honest with you, a philosopher's task is simpler. It's to create or contribute to rules of ethics. That's all I need to know. Anything other than that is just my apologies to use this term, is onanism, macho onanism, males masturbating. That's all there is and we should know about philosophy.

So, sorry to interrupt the gossipping with something far less interesting, or maybe it can lead to some gossiping too, but I think it was Regis who wanted me to ask again about sort of the, since I sort of joke question about are you agnostic Ressa, but perhaps rather if a better question, a better way of sort of framing. No, I'm not agnostic. I think agnosticism is the poor man's fear. Yes, yeah, not agnostic, but agnostic. But the question is rather...

Isn't that worse? Isn't agnostic worse than agnostic? perhaps. The question is what exactly would set the Promethean projects apart from a kind of Gnostic desire for redemption or to have sort of made one-time free from this world? Systematic and skepticism. Systematic and skepticism equipped with technicality. but that's the way of science but the thing is that that it's it's isn't it simply replacing one technique for another technique this is like saying oh religion is a science is a religion

you know i mean no no no no no no i don't think that call asking that no i think i think I think that any sort of method, choosing between one over another, also requires skepticism. A skepticism not in the kind of modern cynical sense, but in the sense of the inquiry. what techniques are actually open to inquire? Well, once that we can give and ask for reasons and confirmations are up for inquiry,

because there's a certain type of, put it crudely, system of peers and reviewing one another's discoveries and testing them out. But if we do this with Gnosticism, if I cry into the sky and say, give me the- Ah, no, no, no. I think the problem is actually more severe than that. So you say that, you know, I'm that kind of person, this kind of person, and I would be able to withstand certain kinds of inquiring. But who is the inquirer? That kind of question is where the question of agnosticism

a la skepticism begins. You see, you don't see the conditions of possibility of your own faculties in the first place, the problem of skepticism goes far more deeper than that. It is a problem that any sort of transcendental condition that we do in fact have might be essentially monkey shit. And that's quite a very scary scenario.

It's something out of the worst Cronenberg's nightmares. thoughts from my friends. Asia, Georgia, Georgia, you have been like smiling like every two seconds. So if you are smiling two seconds, then maybe you have something to say at this point. The party is at the chat section of this course.

I was thinking there's a question that's kind of complementary and opposite to Carl's question, which is, you had been saying, I haven't heard you say it that much recently, but some months ago, So, like around that time in the beginning of the year where there was that conference in New York, you were insisting that the concept of reality wasn't really useful or that you were kind of moving away from any notion of reality, right? Yeah, yes, yes.

And I would ask if that, like, if you don't need any idea of reality, then doesn't that make your concepts into all there is in the universe or whatever? or whatever so you're kind of creating it makes you it makes you kind of a part simply a participant in in in thought itself creating itself so it kind of makes you the creator of your own reality so wouldn't that be something that could you know uh mix itself with either gnosticism or black magic

but in any case you know like that's a good question your knowledge corresponds like your knowledge would be attached directly to whatever it is that is known. No, that's a superb question. You see, when I'm talking about reality, I'm really talking about reality as it is conceived within 21st century philosophy, or 20th century philosophy, most particularly. So when we are talking about reality, reality actually doesn't give us a lot of data,

a lot of what you might call to be tiktats as how we should move forward. You can get the same thing with speculative realism. I mean, what the goddamn fucking shit aspect of the realism is. But yes, I understand that the sparks behind them were important. We can still talk about reality, but we should be careful. We should be systematic. We are

You are not mystics, you are not cultists, you are goddamn fucking philosophers. So what does a philosopher or how does a philosopher deal with the concept of reality? Is it something that is given to you by God or nature, or is it something that you made it and through that making you can now make it practical? a step by step you can say that this is how I made it.

This is coming back to the question of morality and ethics. What is ethics really? Is ethics in nature, is ethics in some sort of bloated human idea of morality, law, or so on and so forth? No, it is not. We do construct ethics. Just we do construct nature. But then there comes certain kinds of explanation with it, such that you have to explain the

steps you have taken for this to be a reality and not simply an illusion. Risa, is there a way, I don't know how to make ethics tractable, I mean, is there like a you know what i'm saying i still don't oh yeah yeah yeah well the problem the main problem here

is that as long as you are a german you cannot make ethics tracks yeah i can imagine love you but yes that's a good question I would say that why do you say this so Lawrence Puntel makes ethics quite tractable and he's German he's brazilian my god what do you he's uh he's a german guy he no he's brazilian oh my god

uh jp's like all caps like he's brazilian i don't know he uh teaches in munich i call that german I also taught a course in, you know, with Peter Sloterdijk. Does it make me a German? Probably not. Where did you teach me? Korean blood makes you German. Resil. You taught a course with Slaughter Dyke? Yeah.

I know that you guys had chicken together, but I didn't know you taught. Where did you teach a class together? That's cool. Design school. Oh, design school. Oh, boy. No, I think this is a really good question. But then you might ask yourself, okay, all of these are real constraints, but then what What does it mean for me as an individual?

To be a person is not simply part of the engineering problems of telus, of the end in itself. You see, Sophie, what is actually going on here is that I'm not going to make German jokes, but I'm going to make German jokes. is that Germans always think about the ends instead of the methods.

The method is what is important. Do you know why the fuck Heidegger was canceled? because he didn't have a good method. You only had ends. Okay. We can say he's Viennese then. How about that? The Viennese are more Nazis than Germans.

People who never actually paid for the war crimes. Where was Lawrence Puntel born? Brazil actually. Brazil. Then why does everywhere say he's German? No, he writes in German. And he studied in Germany. Okay, here. Everything that I've ever written officially is in English. Am I a goddamn American? I don't know. Do you identify as like American?

Yes, I do. I identify with American, but does it make me an American? It's a very existential question. I don't know. I would say your philosophy has become like Anglo. So, yes. Sorry. okay i guess you disagree you're gonna kill resa eakin i mean cyclonopedia is a very uh very very persian book i guess but uh intelligence and spirit that's that's an anglo

that's an anglo analytic tradition sort of so one philosophically situated in traditions you know I mean, people who are always bastards in the civilizational sense should never ask these kinds of questions. We can make any sort of work. To say that this book is that versus that is a question that can only be posed by certain

kinds of prejudice. But we are not part of that, are we? We have always been in the dark, in the hyper-camouflage. We have parasitizing on Western civilization. And now we want our reward. That's what we are.

By the way, parasitizing Western civilization is not a bad thing, it's a good thing. Yeah, Reza, what are we reading for next class? Jesus, fuck. So can someone please help me on this? I guess it's Spinoza and... Oh, Spinoza. Oh, fuck Spinoza. That's just a headache. okay poor spinosa nobody ever reads the first two books it's always the third one in the ethics to be honest with you

i don't want to say that spinosa is boring but let me be actually quite crass and say that he's as boring as Proust oh please Proust is nobody I have never met anyone who's actually read Proust everyone acts like they have read Proust but It's like the biggest joke ever. The last time. If I meet someone who really has met Proust, I know not to like talk to them or give, you know, that's an insane person.

You know that Proust had this habit of eating cooking. Really rewriting his manuscripts right the moment that it goes to the publisher. like his publisher were so fed up with him that they told him that just fucking stop he was just the most annoying writer known to man He also paid newspapers to publish reviews of his books that he himself wrote.

Oh, that's even worse. Jesus. No, we are not going to go the path of French writers. We are better than that. Even Scandinavians, such as Collins. So my friends, who is going to present next session?

If we're doing Spinoza, I would like to do that, but I don't know, you seem to not want to do Spinoza. No, you can do a Spinoza, but please keep it under 10 minutes. Okay. What part of Spinoza should we look into? So, in ethics, there are different axioms about the mind. I would say that those axioms are really good. Maybe you should search, you know, just Google the mind and Espinosa in ethics.

And those are good places to start. because espinoza is not really your kind of rob the mill ccr you person now. And what about Bruno? Oh, Giordano Bruno, I would say anything by Bruno would be great. I mean, Bruno

is the ultimate martyr what we in Persian call Shaheed person the greatest man ever existed on this planet so bad he was burned at the stake we actually have like a statue of Bruno here in Bogota it's like the most random thing. Yes. Yes. There is actually also a statue of him in, you know, I forgot the square in Italy.

But the thing with Bruno, he's, You know who Bruno is actually from biographical timeline. He's obviously not that kind of martyr that you think about. He's a womanizer to ultimate degree. I would say that I wash my hands from the sin. But he's also a great idealist.

Nevertheless, I think that one of the greatest movies that can capture the very idea of Bruno, Being this kind of person is demons. Have you watched, any of you watched that movie? There's a movie about Bruno by who? No, no, no, demons by, let me see. Reza, while you're searching, I made an assumption, I don't know if that's correct,

the way you mean by martyr, you mean like similar to the figure of Halaj? With regard to Bruno. Well, you see both Hal Lodge and Bruno were half Shultons and half men of science, right? But they didn't deserve that. But I think that Hal Lodge suckered more than fucking Bruno. So it's called Jesus.

Who was the actor in, you know, Gladiator. Krull? Russell Krull? Oh, Jesus. What the fuck are you guys talking about? Well, which gladiator? Oliver Reed. Oliver Reed. So Oliver Reed. Okay. Let me see.

I can't find it. He has so many movies that it's just like incomprehensible. Is it the one directed by Ken Russell? Yes, that's the one. That's the one. Yes. Yes. Thank you. I'll put it in the chat. I haven't seen it. Devils, right? Not demons. Devils, right? Devils, devils, devils. Yes, yes. Ken Russell. Ken Russell. These people don't even know who Anilor Reid was.

Unbelievable. So, we shall finish the session. And do, is there anything, is there anything we should read by Bruno? Yes. Um, I would say that, um, okay, let me, let me, let me send you this.

um um I would say that the art of memory is a good one.

The art of memory. The art of memory. The reason that I'm suggesting this is precisely because, you know, You know, Agrestin actually attacks Plato's idea of recollection. That is one of his greatest ideas of how to move from secularism, Plato, to Catholicism,

to reconstruct certain kinds of, you know, this is what it is. Certain kind of idea of, what you may call to be, how to make a new human. So, this is being reverted by Jordana Braun in that work, in that particular work.

So, any questions before we... So, any questions before we go out? and Reza sorry I don't know maybe I missed it but what are we reading from Spinoza

it's book three right yeah okay sorry thank you don't worry just read some shit about Spinoza Okay, you too. So, a couple of people who haven't been talked and they are still here. Spank them. Regis, Asia. Yeah, yeah.

Don't let me come after you personally. Say something. I'm just being nice and waiting till the end of class. Me too, yeah. Okay, my friends. I think it's time probably we didn't actually cover the stuff that we should have covered but we will do it in time I promise

in time don't friend Nick Land where oh because of what he said about car nap I just know. He's been saying such idiotic racist stuff about like what's going on with the protests. It's hard. No, no, I mean, no, that was just, that was, that was, that was, I think that that was

a certain kind of bad thing for me to say. But, nevertheless, he says that, why do I need to care? And then he talks about hyperstigials and all sorts of kinds of stuff. Well, my friend, what the fuck does all of this even mean? This is a problem with these people. There is a certain kind of mystique they always want to preserve.

By saying things, other things are boring. boring. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's because he's not smart enough to understand Karnap. No, he's smart. He's smart. I bet he couldn't solve a single proof. I bet he couldn't do any type of symbolic logic. But are we going to actually execute him because he can't solve a differential equation? No, we are not. Just a truth table, a basic truth table.

We are good people. We are not going to simply kill people because they can't simply solve a differential equation. Just a truth table is all I ask from him. And we can't even do that. But simply, the whole point is that you know, I really think of him majestically, even though he's racist. You know, I'm not that kind of person who simply turns an enemy into a demon, right?

but I think I have seen him for what he is after all these years. Someone who tries to manipulate impressionable is students. nothing more nothing less and that kind of person gives me a little bit of creep What did he say about Karnap? Don't worry, Karnap is a Nazi. You don't need to think about it.

So Karnap was not a Nazi. No, Karnap was one of the greatest men ever lived. I mean, it's true that like he wasn't totally into Marx, but he was into socialism and he just had a more positivist When he came to US The first thing that he did was to join the ranks of the proto-BLM He basically became one of the greatest, what you might call to be defenders of anti-segregation.

He was a great man, truly a great man. But of course he was boring, yes, sure. But so what? He's not really like, if you read Kara Sander later, I mean, I get that it's an interpretation a rationalist turn that he has towards the end, but that stuff's pretty interesting. He does not stay very boring if you look at the more late part of his work. I do agree. From a continental perspective, he's boring. From a continental perspective, up is down and down is up. Yeah, no, that's why I think of Karnav as my great uncle.

No, he was a great man. He was truly a great man, both in philosophy and in social activism. Truly a great man. Those kinds of philosophers hardly ever come. calm. Sellars was another great philosopher. My kind of philosopher. Always filthy drunk. literally going to the class trying to teach his students after drinking almost

three liters of whiskey what goes wrong with it nothing that's what's ours I mean Brandon however is man fucking liberalist you don't he's got great politics I emailed him what he thought about Black Lives Matter and he sent me a reply it was very cool To be honest with you, I think that Brandoom is just the very definition of American no-liberalism.

You know, the kind of man who sees that, oh, there is a kind of a struggle. How about turn pragmatism toward that? I might actually sell more books. you really think so I used to think that no no no no random is not that kind of person random is absolutely not political in that kind of sense Sellars was political Quine was political in the wrong direction in the right wing of stuff

but Brandon is just yucky he's a good philosopher yes but he's just so fucking yucky well I got very confused with like why he seemed to be a little bit allergic to any type of Marxist doctrine despite he flirts with it in his most recent text so I sent him an email And I asked him, like, do you find some problems with fully embracing a more radical Marxism? Because in one of his interviews, he says something very interesting. He says that all the time. Oh, the interview. I mean, do you remember that interview where he says that, you know, I had to actually do some really good humanitarian stuff.

You know, when I was a student, I actually went down the streets and chanting about anti-racism. Fuck you, Brandon. If that is the very idea of your politics, then please do shut up. No, he's not. The thing is that he's not a political person. But the thing is, his philosophy applies. He's just literally the very pinnacle of American neoliberalism. But here's the problem with him, and this is the problem with really the entire Richard Rorty school of pragmatism, is that if you take their philosophy to its logical ends,

it would imply something equivalent to either a logical positivist style socialism or Marxism. Either one is fine, but not they don't commit to either one. So I get no no. Yes, yes, absolutely. They don't they don't ever come into either one. This is why I think that sellers, you know, I think that Brandon is actually a better philosopher than sellers. but Sellars was a better person so was Karnad I like Johanna Seip Johanna Seip yeah I think she's doing some, I mean it's the right Sellars no I think these are just like Scandinavian shit Protestant

politics no they are not really good they are good philosophers but they are not what you might call to be pinnacles of leftist politics now. Does it matter though as long as one can appropriate their philosophy to do something better with it? It does. I think it does. After all these years, I would say it does. So great politics comes with great methods and great ideas. Some people have great ideas, are lacking the great methods.

Some people have great methods, are lacking great ideas. I think that either or doesn't really work in this scenario. What do you think of Graham Priest? because he's one of the interesting guys who does logic. No, no, no, no, no. You don't like Grand Priest's Marxist work in logic? Like he does make logic political, but he's a very good logician. He's a good logician, but no, actually majority of logicians are actually reactionists, to be honest with you. I think we should make our own stuff at this point, you know.

Having the grand ideas and having the grand methods is something to go with. But for the most part, this is not really what is happening in the world of philosophy today. I mean look at this. Who are these people you can call good Marxists? But good Marxists, I don't mean even traditional Marxists. It's just simply someone who has a certain kind of sensitivity to what is going on in the world. Is it fucking Zohanna, Zohanna Zip? Is it random?

Definitely, these are not the kind of people. I think you can make their, like, I think we can take some ingredients from their philosophy, the best parts of their philosophy. Yes, yes. That's the whole point. We have to, you know, hijack certain pieces of their philosophy and assimilate them through certain kind of ambitions but otherwise these people are bland as fuck. Yeah it's unfortunate because on the other side I know that there exists disciplines today called cultural studies, critical theory,

media studies, and these people talk a big political game but their philosophy is weak. So they have the other problem, they have the inverse of... Yes, yes. Yeah, I mean we are literally kind of what you might call to be be put under the press from both sides by the forces, the titanic forces of Idiasi, of the continental side and the analytic side. And simply because we are on the side of continental or the side of analytic doesn't make us to

make a final decision. I think they are both idiotic at the end of the day when it comes to such issues. I mean, when Brandon talks about that, oh, the best thing that I've ever done, you know, I chanted for black people when I was 20 years old. Fuck you, Brandon. I mean, what the fuck are you talking about? Really? It's not too late. You know, I was pretty pessimistic about some of what was going on.

But now that I see that there's actual changes being made to laws and police departments are actually being defunded. Like there seems to be an opportunity for philosophy and philosophers to do something. But I think that your idea of philosophy is way, way too generous. Philosophy is unfortunately a very, very lazy discipline. it's not going to happen anytime soon i mean there's people occasionally who pop up that do but you're uh i mean overall yeah

i mean uh for example um you know James Ladyman, which I actually have a huge amount of respect for him, tries to talk about politics. But when he talks about politics, what the fuck are you talking about, you idiot? Stick to ontic structural realism. Yes. I mean, it's just It's like bad philosophy, bad philosophy.

Sometimes philosophers should exercise a certain kind of modesty, and that modesty is a key to ascension to practical self-consciousness. But unfortunately philosophers, as you know, are a bunch of fucking narcissists. I mean, it's like doing what they accuse continental philosophy of doing, you know, like making generalizations and saying something when they have nothing to say. Yeah, absolutely.

That's true. I really have zero idea how to deal with this problem. I think that there's a kind of problem that you should deal with it step by step. First you load them into the spaceship, then you load them to the moon, then you give them the shovel. Yes, and then say, hello, my comrades. You are now in the moon gulags. Okay. Love you all, you guys. I have to go.

We'll see each other. Sophie, what is it? What? Nothing. No, no. I want to say bye. Okay. Thank you. Love you. Love you all. Bye-bye. Let's see each other next week. Bye, everyone. Thank you for this. Thank you. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.

Thank you.