The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 149. Phenomenology： Heidegger, Binswanger, Boss

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00:00:51.040 Welcome to Season 3, Episode 38 of the Jordan B. Peterson Podcast.

00:00:58.680 I'm Mikayla Peterson, Jordan's daughter. I hope you had a wonderful Christmas.

00:01:03.160 In this lecture, titled Phenomenology, Heidegger, Binswanger, Boss, Dad discusses Heidegger's phenomenological philosophy of being,

00:01:12.040 interpreted through the eyes of the psychotherapists Ludwig Binswanger and Medard Boss.

00:01:16.880 I probably didn't pronounce any of those names properly. It's probably Ludwig Binswanger or something.

00:01:23.440 Doing intros for Jordan Peterson ain't easy, folks.

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00:02:35.540 I hope you enjoy this episode.

00:02:36.760 Next week's episode is a current one with Chris Voss, an FBI negotiator,

00:02:42.740 and will be available in audio format on this podcast and in video form on my YouTube channel.

00:02:49.160 I had Dad co-hosting that episode like he did with the Wim Hof episode.

00:02:53.660 It was great.

00:02:55.080 Talk to you next week.

00:03:06.760 I don't know if any other personality course in North America talks about Binswanger and Boss anymore.

00:03:17.920 Maybe not.

00:03:18.420 But I think their ideas are extremely interesting.

00:03:23.320 And so I'm going to talk about them.

00:03:25.740 They were influenced very much by Martin Heidegger, who was one of the 20th century's greatest philosophers.

00:03:34.420 I would say probably this school of this is part of the phenomenological school was more influenced directly by a philosopher than any other school.

00:03:43.980 And just to reiterate, because you might keep wondering why I discuss so many philosophers in this course,

00:03:51.960 it's because clinical psychology in particular is not strictly a scientific enterprise.

00:04:00.320 It's because it's oriented towards values, as far as I can tell.

00:04:05.720 And I don't see that there's any way of getting around that.

00:04:08.760 And that because what you're trying to do as a clinical psychologist,

00:04:11.740 and perhaps what you're trying to do with your own life is to figure out how to live properly.

00:04:15.940 Now, you can construe that as the absence of illness, which is that's about as close as you get to a scientific model of living well.

00:04:25.200 So you don't have any illnesses, but even the idea of illness is an idea that's not precisely scientific.

00:04:31.080 It's it's an it's an amalgam of scientific concepts and ethical concepts.

00:04:35.620 So there's no escaping it.

00:04:38.320 And if you're in the domain of ethics or values, then you're in what is more or less a philosophical domain.

00:04:44.380 But also, if you're a scientist, if you're a scientist who's interested in personality,

00:04:49.340 it's also something you have to grapple with conceptually because people live within an ethic.

00:04:54.360 And the ethic structures their perceptions.

00:04:56.040 And so even to study human beings as objects, you still have to take into account a ensconce themselves within a value system.

00:05:03.520 And you have to understand what that means.

00:05:05.380 So for me, it's easier and more straightforward just to get right to the root of the matter to begin with.

00:05:10.160 And these people also had insanely interesting ideas.

00:05:13.220 They're really useful to know.

00:05:14.860 And so this I would say maybe these the philosophy that underpins this might be the most complex of all the philosophies that we're going to.

00:05:22.860 That we're going to discuss and that's really saying something because there's no shortage of complexity, say, in Jung.

00:05:29.300 So and it's very difficult to to portray what these people were up to.

00:05:34.980 I started by telling you when we discussed Rogers a little bit that the the the phenomenologists were interested in the fact that people live within a self-defined perceptual world.

00:05:48.340 That's that might be one way of thinking about it.

00:05:50.200 And so part of the part of the way to to start to conceptualize what that means is to consider for a moment, just consider for a moment how many things there are in this room that you might look at.

00:06:03.000 And the answer to that is there's an infinite number of them, depending on how you're going to scale your perceptions.

00:06:09.600 You could spend if you were a painter, you could spend a month painting that tile, painting a representation of that tile, because it's it's infinitely complex to get the colors right, to get the patterns right.

00:06:20.360 But there's no end to it, really, because to make a representation that was accurate, it would have to be as detailed as the thing itself.

00:06:27.320 And that's it's crazily detailed.

00:06:29.440 And but you don't concentrate on that sort of thing.

00:06:31.360 So you think you're surrounded by an infinite number of potential things to apprehend.

00:06:36.160 But that isn't the world you live in.

00:06:38.180 The world you live in is a very, very constrained subset of those things.

00:06:43.140 And part of the question is, then, what's the nature of that constrained subset?

00:06:47.440 That's what you inhabit.

00:06:48.560 That's what makes up your experience.

00:06:50.360 And also, how is it related to the to the infinitely complex objects that are around you?

00:06:56.280 And that's really what these people were trying to figure out.

00:06:58.560 So you're in this perceptual frame.

00:07:01.440 That's one way of thinking about it.

00:07:02.900 That's the design, by the way.

00:07:04.680 That's the that's the existential frame or the phenomenological frame, because you can't think about it merely as perception, because it contains also all of the things that you experience subjectively.

00:07:14.560 Objectively, the emotions and the and the and the qualia that, you know, qualia is a as an element of being that, say, philosophers or scientists of consciousness have a particularly difficult time with.

00:07:26.700 And it's like it's the quality of pain, which doesn't seem reducible to a set of objective facts or the quality of color or the quality of beauty or the quality of love or the quality of sorrow.

00:07:36.500 Those things seem irreducible to some degree in and of themselves.

00:07:39.840 Like, what is what is pain made of?

00:07:42.180 It doesn't even seem like a reasonable question.

00:07:44.300 I mean, you can say, how do you decompose the neurological circuits that are involved in the experience of pain?

00:07:51.260 Fine.

00:07:51.700 But to ask what pain consists of or composed is composed of or what beauty is composed of or love seems to be there's something wrong with that, with the formulation of that question, because those things sort of manifest themselves as raw facts of existence.

00:08:06.440 And so they're constituent elements of this, of your field of experience, your phenomenal, phenomenological frame or this Dasein, which is the way that that Heidegger conceptualized that that's being there with you at the center of the center of your what realm of experience.

00:08:26.140 So now here's some characteristics of the Dasein, the thing that you, the thing that makes up you, the past and the present are implicit in it.

00:08:38.400 What does that mean?

00:08:39.960 Well, say you have a particular emotional response to something, maybe it's a negative emotional response.

00:08:46.760 And you see this very frequently with arguments with people.

00:08:49.640 You're having an argument with someone you love, like a family member.

00:08:52.040 That's a good example. 0.99

00:08:52.940 So let's say it's the same damn fight you've had with your mother 50 times. 0.99

00:08:57.740 Okay. 0.99

00:08:58.140 Well, that's interesting because what it means is that all of those 50 times that you fought with your mother are implicit in this fight.

00:09:06.140 So although it's taking place right here and now, the past has shaped it.

00:09:10.580 And if you wanted to investigate the fight completely, you'd have to get to the bottom of that entire train of interactions you've had with your mother.

00:09:18.780 So it's implicit in your current, in your current, um, in your current experience.

00:09:24.260 That's one way of thinking about it.

00:09:25.420 But the future is implicit in it too, because what you're doing right now, it's as if the future is folded up in what you're experiencing right now.

00:09:32.960 And it unfolds as you interact with it.

00:09:34.760 And so the reason that it's conditional to some degree on you and your past is because it's your past and you that are determining the actions that you undertake right now that determine how the future is going to unfold around you.

00:09:48.320 Now, not, not completely, obviously, because you don't have complete control over how things unfold, but you seem to have some ability to determine how things unfold.

00:10:00.200 So one of the ways I've sort of conceptualized the phenomenological viewpoint, this is, this is one way of thinking about it, I believe, is that instead of thinking, and it does mean you have to reconceptualize your idea of objects.

00:10:12.960 Like an object seems like a unidimensional thing, in some sense, it's an object, but most of the things that people interact with aren't like that at all.

00:10:20.600 So, like, here's an example.

00:10:22.880 Let's say you have, yeah, let's say you get a, you're writing the MCAT, you want to go to medical school, you're writing the MCAT, you get the envelope in the mail, it tells you what your score is.

00:10:33.280 You hold the envelope.

00:10:34.640 What are you holding?

00:10:36.840 Well, if you think about it from an objective perspective, it's an envelope.

00:10:39.900 Who cares?

00:10:40.420 It's just a little piece of paper, right?

00:10:41.880 It's a little, it's a rectangle of paper, but that isn't what you're holding at all.

00:10:47.080 That's not what that thing is.

00:10:48.620 That's how you see it, but it's not what it is at all.

00:10:51.260 It's not even, and you know that your body knows that because you're shaking.

00:10:54.960 It's like, well, what are you scared of?

00:10:56.560 The envelope?

00:10:57.640 Well, the, the fact that you see it as an envelope is only an indication of just how narrow your perceptions actually are.

00:11:05.800 Because it's a portal, right?

00:11:08.200 It's a portal through which you're going to walk into one of two worlds.

00:11:12.140 One in which you're in medical school and the other in which you're not.

00:11:15.340 And it also actually contains the past, which is really strange because you think, well, you already know what the past is.

00:11:21.600 It's no, you don't.

00:11:23.680 Whatever that score is in there determines what your past was.

00:11:27.300 And you, you know that too.

00:11:28.580 You go watch a movie and a bunch of things happen in the movie.

00:11:30.800 And then something twisted happens at the end.

00:11:32.600 And all of a sudden everything that you thought about the movie was wrong and a whole new past for the movie pops into being, well, are you a pre-med student, a valid pre-med student?

00:11:44.480 Well, the score will determine whether or not you were very strange, very strange.

00:11:50.020 Because you think of the past as fixed, you know, and you think of the things that you're interacting with as the things that you see.

00:11:56.360 And they're not.

00:11:57.820 And your body is smarter than that, way smarter than that, because it responds to, you could say, this is sort of a Rogerian perspective.

00:12:04.340 Your body is more likely to respond to what the thing actually is than how it is that you see it.

00:12:09.800 So, okay, so the past is implicit in the current being, and the future is implicit in the current being.

00:12:17.180 And so the past and the future sort of folded up inside it, and you can unfold them and take a look at them.

00:12:25.480 Now, here's the next thing.

00:12:26.980 So, from a classic scientific perspective, there's the world of independently existing objects, and there's the world of subjects.

00:12:34.340 And the subject is really in a secondary relationship to the object, because the objective world is what's real.

00:12:41.240 But one of the things that the phenomenologists were concerned about that is that, well, you run into this problem again of exactly how it is that you define the object.

00:12:52.900 Because just as the envelope with the scores in it can't be reduced to the paper, so the object that you're interacting with only reveals what it is as a consequence of the way that you interact with it.

00:13:10.120 So, for example, if you take a complex object like another person, it's like, well, what is it that you are?

00:13:16.820 Well, a huge part of that is going to depend on exactly how I interact with you.

00:13:20.220 Because you could be a raging beast if I interacted with you one way, and you could be a perfectly, you know, cooperative entity that was very pleasant if I interacted with you the other way, in another way.

00:13:31.200 And so partly what's happening, you could think of what you're interacting with as something that's really multifaceted, truly multifaceted.

00:13:39.160 And you say, well, you're trying to determine what it is.

00:13:42.420 But the problem is, is that what it is manifests itself only in accordance with how you behave towards it.

00:13:48.360 And it's actually the case with even objects that you reduce right down to their constituent elements.

00:13:54.800 So you might say, like, let's talk about subatomic particles, hypothetically the most objective thing there is.

00:14:00.380 Well, it turns out that whether they're a wave or a particle depends on the way you set up the experiment.

00:14:05.580 Now, I don't want to make quantum analogies.

00:14:07.700 But what I'm saying is that the object is a very, very complicated thing.

00:14:11.960 And so even defining what it is means that you have to adopt a frame of reference with regards to it.

00:14:17.380 And you undertake only some procedures and not others.

00:14:20.300 So when you're defining an object, even scientifically, you actually don't define the object.

00:14:24.960 What you say is, here's a multidimensional entity.

00:14:28.520 If you approach it in this manner, that's the procedure, right?

00:14:31.820 The methods.

00:14:32.540 If you approach it in this manner, it will manifest that set of traits.

00:14:36.380 But the problem is, is that there's all sorts of other traits that it could manifest just as well if you treated it a different way.

00:14:43.600 And so the object itself is not something that, it's not something easily reducible to a single set of properties.

00:14:51.580 I was talking to one of my students yesterday.

00:14:53.720 He had a pretty smart thing to say about images.

00:14:55.600 We were talking about deep images.

00:14:58.380 You know, the sorts that you might see in a really high quality museum.

00:15:00.980 So maybe they're, I don't know, 15th century or 16th century Renaissance masterpieces.

00:15:08.180 They're inexhaustible to some degree, which is why they're in museums and people go look at them, you know, decade after decade.

00:15:15.140 And it's partly because every time you look at them, you're different.

00:15:20.240 You go in one week, you look at it, you see something.

00:15:22.980 You go in the next week, you look at it, you see something else.

00:15:25.160 Well, it's partly because you're bringing something entirely different to the situation.

00:15:31.020 And the image is complicated enough to allow it to reflect something new to you, depending on the stance you take in relationship to it.

00:15:38.740 And lots of things are like that.

00:15:40.480 Lots of things are like that.

00:15:41.700 A book you read when you were 16 is going to be an entirely different book when you read it when you're 35.

00:15:46.720 Say, well, the book's the same.

00:15:48.060 It's like, it depends on how you define the book.

00:15:51.460 Because it isn't even obvious where the book is exactly.

00:15:54.240 Well, it's on my shelf in the library.

00:15:56.300 It's like, no, that's a chunk of paper that's on your shelf in the library.

00:16:01.560 Where exactly the book is, that's a much more difficult question to consider.

00:16:06.600 So, it depends on how you define the book.

00:16:09.640 So, without a subject, nothing at all would exist to confront objects and to imagine them as such.

00:16:14.540 True, this implies that every object, everything objective, in being merely objectified by the subject, is the most subjective thing possible.

00:16:23.680 Well, you also know this again when you're in an argument with someone.

00:16:26.520 It's you.

00:16:27.360 No, it's you.

00:16:28.440 No, it's you.

00:16:29.520 It's like, you don't know.

00:16:31.160 Are you being biased?

00:16:32.360 Are you looking at the situation incorrectly?

00:16:34.820 The person you're arguing with is going to convince you, trying to convince you, that it's your problem.

00:16:39.660 You can think, no, you made me angry.

00:16:42.040 It's like, hmm, an interesting statement.

00:16:45.300 You know, as if you could do that.

00:16:47.120 But it does seem that way.

00:16:48.420 You were being provocative.

00:16:49.820 Well, you're just too sensitive.

00:16:51.320 It's like, hmm, how are we going to settle that?

00:16:54.760 Well, it's a continual argument.

00:16:56.400 And that, again, has to do with the crazy entangled dynamic between subjective perception and objective perception.

00:17:05.880 I've showed you this before.

00:17:07.340 I actually think this is a pretty good schematic representation of what's meant by Dasein.

00:17:12.160 And this is a complicated little diagram, although the diagram itself is quite simple.

00:17:16.640 But it makes, it's predicated on the following assumptions.

00:17:21.200 It's that you need to narrow down your world.

00:17:24.280 And what you're doing is narrowing it down from, let's say, an infinite set of possibilities to a finite set of manageable possibilities.

00:17:31.980 And you do that a bunch of ways.

00:17:33.440 Partly, merely, you can't, your senses aren't acute enough to detect everything. 1.00

00:17:38.940 So pure stupidity, in some sense, stops you from being absolutely overwhelmed. 1.00

00:17:44.120 You don't have eyes in the back of your head, for example. 1.00

00:17:46.080 So you don't have to worry about all those things you're not looking at behind you.

00:17:49.480 But then, it's far more than that.

00:17:51.460 You just can't handle that full complexity.

00:17:53.720 So there's a continual narrowing process.

00:17:56.120 And then you exist inside that narrowed reality.

00:17:58.860 Like, if I look at you like that, there's not a hell of a lot of difference between that and looking at you like that.

00:18:06.120 Like, I can't really see these people.

00:18:07.740 I can tell they're people.

00:18:08.940 That's all.

00:18:09.660 I can see your face.

00:18:11.540 I've got just about all of it right there.

00:18:13.240 So, that's a very narrow, and you know, you're moving your eyes around and inhabiting this constant narrow space.

00:18:20.720 Well, what's that space?

00:18:22.940 What does that space you inhabit consist of?

00:18:25.800 Well, that's Dasein, that space that you inhabit.

00:18:27.960 And so, we could say, it's something like this.

00:18:30.320 You have implicit in that perception a sense of where you are and what you're doing right now.

00:18:35.740 It's in the perception.

00:18:36.880 And then, in the perception as well is what you're aiming at.

00:18:40.600 Because you're not just sitting here passively.

00:18:42.520 Or you'd be asleep.

00:18:43.580 Or you'd be unconscious.

00:18:44.900 You're sitting here doing nothing, you know, physically.

00:18:48.180 But you have an aim in mind.

00:18:49.480 And the aim is what you're pointing your eyes at.

00:18:52.000 The aim is what's structuring your perceptions.

00:18:54.920 The aim is what's revealing that part of the world that is being revealed to you, to you.

00:19:02.340 That's the revelation of the world.

00:19:04.260 It also structures your emotions.

00:19:05.960 It also primes your behavior.

00:19:07.560 So, it's not a drive.

00:19:09.200 It's not a goal.

00:19:10.520 It's not a motivation.

00:19:12.520 And it's more than that.

00:19:14.460 It's all of that at once.

00:19:15.720 That's sort of what your personality is.

00:19:17.380 But, you see, the phenomenologists don't really think about personality.

00:19:20.760 They think about the manifestation of your reality.

00:19:24.280 It's not exactly your personality.

00:19:26.180 It's that you're the center of a reality.

00:19:28.400 And you constitute that reality.

00:19:31.060 But all your elements of experience constitute that reality.

00:19:33.800 And so, it's something like, it's simple.

00:19:35.200 It's something like where you are, where you're going.

00:19:38.460 And the embodied actions you undertake to relate those two things.

00:19:44.400 Which would include your eye movements.

00:19:46.060 Because, of course, perception is an active phenomena.

00:19:49.020 You are shaking your eyes back and forth unbelievably rapidly.

00:19:52.260 Otherwise, if you can make your eyes stand still, which you can do with great concentration, everything will black out.

00:19:58.960 Because you have to move your eyes back and forth so that the light hits different cells because the cells get exhausted.

00:20:06.480 And then they stop reporting.

00:20:07.640 So, you're just whipping your eyes back and forth in a micro way constantly.

00:20:12.980 And as well as moving them around voluntarily and involuntarily.

00:20:16.420 So, even perception, perception is a lot more like feeling things out with your fingers.

00:20:21.140 Even when you're using your ears or your eyes.

00:20:23.340 It's very active.

00:20:24.360 There's no passive perception.

00:20:26.340 It's a motor act to perceive.

00:20:28.380 And so, that motor act is determined by your hierarchy of values.

00:20:31.540 That's one way of looking at it.

00:20:33.040 So, another way of thinking about it.

00:20:34.800 That's also how the past and the future are implicit in it.

00:20:38.100 Your very active perception is determined by your entire value structure.

00:20:42.280 So, it's implicit inside of it.

00:20:44.840 It's folded up inside of it.

00:20:47.000 You can tell that too because if something violates it, again, maybe an argument with someone.

00:20:51.900 Because people are, it's good to think about people as the thing you interact with the most.

00:20:55.760 As the canonical object.

00:20:57.340 Because they're so damn complicated.

00:20:58.920 And they get in the way all the time.

00:21:00.320 And when someone gets in the way of what you're doing, you know, it isn't obvious what they're interfering with.

00:21:05.620 It might be the little micro routine that you're undertaking right now.

00:21:10.040 You know, maybe you go home and you make a nice dinner and the person you're making it for is all rude about it.

00:21:14.540 Okay.

00:21:15.020 Okay.

00:21:15.300 So, what exactly are they getting in the way of?

00:21:18.400 Well, they're certainly getting in the way of your expectations of having a nice emotional time for the next hour.

00:21:26.720 But you have no idea how indicative that is of some serious flaw in you or them or the relationship or the situation or the way you've conducted your whole life or the way they've conducted their whole life.

00:21:37.800 And all of that's packed in there.

00:21:40.020 It's sort of like the unconscious of the psychoanalysts.

00:21:43.100 But it's more, it's more, it's not the same conceptualization.

00:21:47.100 It's another way of looking at the same phenomena.

00:21:49.720 So, all right.

00:21:51.980 So, the two people we're going to talk about most are Maedard Boss.

00:21:55.700 And he was influenced by Martin Heidegger, who was a great philosopher.

00:21:59.440 Taken to task often because he turned out to be tangled up with the Nazis more than he should have been. 0.54

00:22:05.420 And Husserl, that's Edmund Husserl, who was actually, if I remember correctly, Martin Heidegger's teacher.

00:22:11.560 That's Ludwig Binswanger.

00:22:13.060 And they were, both of these two people were influenced both by Freud and Jung.

00:22:18.900 Okay.

00:22:19.440 So, here's one of Binswanger's claims.

00:22:21.340 I love this claim.

00:22:22.180 It's such a cool idea.

00:22:23.340 And I think there's neurological support for it, neuropsychological support.

00:22:26.960 What we perceive are, first and foremost, not impressions of taste, tone, smell, or touch.

00:22:32.500 Not even things or objects, but meanings.

00:22:35.420 Well, that's an interesting idea.

00:22:37.560 Because, you know, it's been said that every person is an unconscious exponent of some great philosopher's presuppositions.

00:22:44.760 Well, mostly the way you think about the way you perceive is that there are objects in the world.

00:22:49.880 You see the objects.

00:22:51.300 You think about the objects.

00:22:52.680 You evaluate the objects.

00:22:53.860 You decide how to act on the objects.

00:22:55.520 And then you act.

00:22:57.000 Right?

00:22:57.240 It's from object, sense, perception, emotion, cognition, action.

00:23:03.240 That's wrong.

00:23:04.940 That isn't how it works.

00:23:06.280 It's partly not the way it works.

00:23:07.780 Because you're actually, the way that you interact with the world exists at multiple levels.

00:23:12.480 So, for example, you have reflexes.

00:23:15.520 So, if I, if I, if I poke you hard, you'll react like that.

00:23:21.280 You'll jerk back.

00:23:22.520 And that, you do that without thinking.

00:23:24.440 That's part of a neurological circuit that's very deeply embedded.

00:23:28.880 And that's virtually automatic.

00:23:30.840 It's reflexive.

00:23:31.580 It doesn't require conscious perception at all.

00:23:34.100 It's too slow for starters.

00:23:36.280 And so, you have multiple, there's multiple levels of you interacting with the world.

00:23:40.660 And at one level, you're seeing objects.

00:23:43.040 You're thinking about them.

00:23:43.960 You're planning what to do.

00:23:45.160 But you're doing all sorts of other things that are way faster than that.

00:23:48.260 And other things that are way slower at the same time.

00:23:51.620 Now, what, what Bindeswanger claims is that what you see in the world are meanings.

00:23:57.080 And that, so it's the meaning detection first and the object recognition second.

00:24:02.560 Now, that's a hell of a claim, that is.

00:24:04.360 But, but there's definitely levels of your nervous system that operate in that manner.

00:24:09.060 So, for example, here's a good example.

00:24:11.720 People have blind sight.

00:24:13.680 Their, their core, visual cortex is damaged.

00:24:15.840 They can't see objects.

00:24:16.940 So, they think they're blind.

00:24:18.340 But if you show them an angry face, they'll manifest a change in their skin conductance. 0.74

00:24:23.500 They'll orient. 0.97

00:24:24.080 And it means that the eyes are still mapping the face onto the amygdala.

00:24:29.560 And the amygdala is mapping the pattern onto the body.

00:24:32.920 No object perception.

00:24:34.680 Pattern, pattern, pattern.

00:24:37.280 No object perception.

00:24:39.100 And so, the meaning is what's, what's, the meaning is what's being perceived first and foremost.

00:24:43.920 And you have to perceive meanings first because you actually want to stay alive.

00:24:48.240 That's the trick.

00:24:49.120 So, the world is full of these things that have meanings to you that are relevant to your survival.

00:24:54.460 And what you're, what you're perceiving first is the relevance of the pattern to your survival.

00:24:59.900 And the idea that you can conceptualize that as a set of objects.

00:25:03.380 Well, first of all, that's a pretty new idea.

00:25:06.100 Technically speaking, right?

00:25:07.480 Because technically speaking, we didn't really start to conceive the world as subject in an objective world.

00:25:13.540 Until we really formalized science.

00:25:16.320 Now, science was implicit long before it became explicit.

00:25:19.380 But it didn't become explicit until about 500 years ago.

00:25:22.940 So, you react to meanings.

00:25:25.140 So, here's an example.

00:25:27.040 Babies.

00:25:28.460 If you, if you have two surfaces and you put a piece of glass between them.

00:25:32.520 You know, they're elevated.

00:25:33.560 And you put an eight-month-old baby on the, one surface.

00:25:37.240 Or, so they can crawl.

00:25:38.600 The baby can crawl.

00:25:39.420 It won't crawl across the space.

00:25:41.820 And you might say, well, it sees a hole and won't walk, won't crawl across it.

00:25:46.580 But that isn't what it sees.

00:25:47.640 It sees a place to fall off.

00:25:50.620 Direct.

00:25:51.260 That's direct perception.

00:25:52.420 So, when I see this, for example.

00:25:55.020 My eyes see that as a pattern.

00:25:58.520 That pattern's on my retina.

00:26:00.220 It's propagated through my optic nerve.

00:26:02.160 It's propagated into my brain.

00:26:03.980 It's propagated onto my motor cortex.

00:26:06.400 And the propagation is this.

00:26:09.420 That.

00:26:10.860 Right?

00:26:11.220 So, I can pick it up.

00:26:12.720 And as soon as, when I look at that, this is implicit.

00:26:16.920 That's implicit in the perception.

00:26:18.980 You think, well, why do you see that at the size and resolution you see it at?

00:26:22.800 That's why.

00:26:24.480 So, the fact that you see it that way has this implicit in it.

00:26:27.800 And isn't that you see the object and match your hand to it.

00:26:30.340 It's that matching your hand to it is part of the perception of the object.

00:26:34.080 It's what gives the object meaning.

00:26:35.440 And so, you see, actually, you perceive the meaning of the object.

00:26:39.280 It's part of the perception.

00:26:40.900 And you can't not see the meaning of the object.

00:26:43.580 Well, you can.

00:26:44.800 If you're a scientist, you can sort of separate out the object from its meaning.

00:26:49.140 That's actually what science does.

00:26:50.880 It tears the object away from its meaning.

00:26:53.800 And then, of course, there's nothing meaningful left.

00:26:55.660 And so, science ends up value-free.

00:26:57.900 But that's because the meaning has been torn out of it.

00:27:00.740 Now, there's technical reasons for doing that.

00:27:02.580 But Ben Swanger's point is, don't kid yourself.

00:27:05.100 You see the meaning first.

00:27:06.160 Here's an example.

00:27:07.580 You watch the trade towers fall.

00:27:10.220 What did you see?

00:27:12.820 Well, you could say, well, you saw the towers fall.

00:27:14.760 It's like, why are you in shock for two days afterwards then?

00:27:18.360 Well, because the towers aren't.

00:27:19.960 What are the towers?

00:27:21.060 Exactly.

00:27:22.300 As long as they're standing and operating, they're towers.

00:27:25.560 As soon as they fall, God only knows what they are.

00:27:28.360 Maybe they're the beginning of the next war. 0.61

00:27:30.820 You know?

00:27:31.900 Who knows what they are?

00:27:33.940 And so, everyone was in shock for three days.

00:27:35.900 Because what they saw was the indeterminate meaning of that event.

00:27:41.000 And it opened all sorts of gateways.

00:27:43.040 It's like, well, the towers fell.

00:27:45.460 There's gateways open everywhere.

00:27:46.700 We don't know what's going on.

00:27:47.820 We don't know what's going to happen next.

00:27:49.180 We don't know where we are.

00:27:50.700 And that's direct perception mapped onto your body.

00:27:53.380 Bang, you're in shock.

00:27:54.660 You see the meaning first.

00:27:56.480 And, well, you constrain it down to, well, why are you so upset?

00:27:59.640 Well, the towers fell.

00:28:00.740 It's like, that's the best you can do for a verbal utterance.

00:28:03.760 It's what your perceptual systems reported to you.

00:28:06.380 But God only knows what happened.

00:28:08.680 We still don't really know what it meant that they fell.

00:28:12.120 Now, most things have put themselves back together.

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00:31:06.040 And then you think, well, what does it mean?

00:31:08.040 What does it mean that what you see first is the meaning?

00:31:11.060 And that's a really tricky question because you might say, well, that's when you get back to the problem of what constitutes real.

00:31:18.500 So I could say, well, you've evolved to see the meaning.

00:31:23.160 Well, then we might ask, well, if you've evolved to see the meaning and that's kept you alive, is there anything more real than the meaning?

00:31:30.180 Because somebody who's a materialist would say, well, no, the object is more real.

00:31:33.320 It's like, no, it depends on how you define real.

00:31:35.900 It might be that the most real thing about the visual cliff is that that's a falling off place.

00:31:42.060 And that it's secondary description as a, you know, an object, a hole or something like that.

00:31:46.160 And that's just a, that's something you paint over top of the primary reality.

00:31:50.120 And so, well, here's, and here's a practical application of it, or at least one of the things that I think is practical.

00:31:58.660 You know, you can have experiences that did differ in their, let's call it high quality meaning.

00:32:04.160 You know, so you get engaged and engrossed in something and you're happy about that.

00:32:07.660 It's not that you're happy.

00:32:08.960 So you're engaged and engrossed in it.

00:32:10.620 You would do it again, even though it might take, take effort.

00:32:13.740 You can tell that where you are is meaningful.

00:32:16.680 Well, I think what happens in that situation is that you're in a Piagetian place where many of the games that you're playing are stacked sort of isomorphically on top of one another.

00:32:27.860 And the experience of meaning is the fact that you're playing the small game properly, nested inside a larger game, you're playing it properly, nested inside a larger game, you're playing it properly too, et cetera.

00:32:38.360 All the way out, past is balanced, future is balanced, everything is stacked up.

00:32:43.940 And there's a report coming from your being telling you that that's why you're engaged.

00:32:49.620 Might say, well, maybe that's real.

00:32:51.500 Maybe it's more real than anything else.

00:32:53.900 It's a strange thing because if you think that meaning is separate and secondary from the real objective world, then the reality is the object.

00:33:02.260 But it isn't obvious that the reality is the object.

00:33:05.700 It's certainly, it's certainly not how we act.

00:33:09.120 It's not how we perceive.

00:33:11.180 And so did we evolve to perceive reality?

00:33:15.220 It depends on what you mean by perceive.

00:33:17.860 Perceive might mean, did we evolve mechanisms that allowed us to survive in the face of that reality?

00:33:24.380 Yes.

00:33:24.980 Is that what's real?

00:33:26.360 What enables you to survive in the face of reality?

00:33:29.640 It's a definition.

00:33:31.440 It's a perfectly reasonable definition unless you can come up with a better one.

00:33:34.860 Meaning, meanings are primary.

00:33:38.260 Now, that brings up a strange issue.

00:33:41.220 So what determines the meaning of what it is that you're perceiving?

00:33:44.540 Well, this is where Binswanger and Boss disagree.

00:33:49.240 Binswanger says, it's the a priori ontological structure, the world design or matrix of meaning.

00:33:56.540 Okay, so what does that mean?

00:33:57.600 Well, you have a particular history, biological and cultural and individual.

00:34:03.320 And you're viewing the world through the lens of that, of that set of particularities.

00:34:09.680 So it's almost as if you're behind a curtain and the curtain has certain holes in it.

00:34:14.220 And you can see through the holes in the curtain.

00:34:16.740 And, but the curtain is your construction.

00:34:18.900 So the curtain with the holes determines what you see.

00:34:23.680 Well, Boss would say, no, it's the opposite in a very strange thing.

00:34:27.540 It's that the meaning of the world manifests itself to you more or less of its own accord.

00:34:33.660 And that's, it's a tougher one to explain.

00:34:37.140 Disclosure of meaning, Boss, the revelation of the object, the emergence of the phenomenon, the numinous, the very word phenomena is derived from famous thigh, to shine forth, to appear, to unveil itself, to come out of concealment or darkness.

00:34:53.760 Okay, here's an example.

00:34:54.960 You see someone beautiful.

00:34:57.900 Your perception or, is it your perception or does the beauty exist?

00:35:02.980 That's the difference between Binswanger and Boss, because Binswanger would say, well, the reason that that thing appears to you is beautiful is because of the way you're filtering it.

00:35:12.320 And Boss would say, no, the beauty is, inheres in the object itself and manifests itself.

00:35:18.900 It shines forth.

00:35:20.520 And so I really like this concept, this, this concept of phenomena.

00:35:24.280 That's why they're phenomenologists.

00:35:25.960 Phanis thigh means to shine forth from, from the phenomenological perspective, you pursue those things that shine forth.

00:35:32.980 Now, you remember, ha, this is kind of a parallel idea.

00:35:38.620 I suppose it's a parallel of Jungian ideas.

00:35:41.320 You remember in Harry Potter that when they're playing Quidditch, he's always chasing the snitch?

00:35:45.720 And you remember how, if I've got this correctly, Quidditch is basically two games at the same time, right?

00:35:51.560 There's the standard game and then there's the game that the seekers play. 0.99

00:35:54.480 Yes, I've got that right.

00:35:56.120 What happens if the seeker gets the snitch? 0.99

00:35:58.820 Game's over, right?

00:36:00.160 They win.

00:36:01.380 Very interesting.

00:36:02.160 She has a brilliant imagination, that woman, Rowling.

00:36:05.960 So the idea is that in every game, there's two games going on at the same time.

00:36:09.680 There's the ordinary game and there's the game that the seekers play. 1.00

00:36:12.620 And the seekers chase the thing that shines at them.

00:36:15.860 And that's what that little thing is, the snitch. 1.00

00:36:17.840 It's a round circle with wings.

00:36:19.560 It's a very, very old, old, old symbol.

00:36:22.500 It's a symbol of what?

00:36:24.000 It's a symbol of reality before it's fractionated into its parts.

00:36:29.060 I don't know how to say it any more clearly than that.

00:36:31.160 It's a symbol of, it's a symbol of what, imagine that there are things that move forward to make you curious.

00:36:37.300 And you were trying to figure out what was common among all the things that made you curious.

00:36:42.120 That thing that Harry Potter's chasing, that's a symbol of that.

00:36:45.400 It's golden like the sun.

00:36:46.900 It flits around and attracts your attention.

00:36:49.260 And it's always moving.

00:36:50.420 And if you're seeking, you chase it.

00:36:53.120 So that's the phenomenological idea.

00:36:55.240 That's the disclosure of meaning.

00:36:57.060 You say, well, when you're curious about something, why are you curious about that?

00:37:01.940 Is it calling to you?

00:37:04.100 Or is it something that you're interpreting?

00:37:06.480 Well, I would say it's both.

00:37:07.900 I think that's the way to resolve this puzzle.

00:37:10.700 It's that there isn't a perceiving entity without a structure.

00:37:15.620 And your structure has been evolving itself for three and a half billion years.

00:37:19.880 There's no perceiving entity without a structure.

00:37:22.540 But by the same token, the thing that's being perceived also shines forth with its own potential manifestation.

00:37:29.700 And you need to think of it both ways at the same time.

00:37:32.220 But the curiosity issue is a really, it's a fascinating one.

00:37:35.880 Because curiosity pulls you forward.

00:37:38.900 It's not random.

00:37:40.380 That's the thing that's so cool.

00:37:41.920 You can't really control it.

00:37:44.300 But it's not random. 0.99

00:37:45.300 If your curiosity is random, you're schizophrenic. 0.95

00:37:47.760 And I mean that technically.

00:37:49.360 Because one of the things that happens to schizophrenics is that the mechanisms that establish relevance become pathologized.

00:37:56.140 And they see meaning everywhere, randomly.

00:37:58.380 And that's partly why they generate delusions.

00:38:00.420 Because the incoherent manifestation of meaning calls out for a representation.

00:38:06.000 They develop a paranoid delusion if they're intelligent enough to put everything together.

00:38:10.280 But, so you're curious and something pulls you forward.

00:38:13.560 Well, you can't, you can interact with the curiosity and you can follow it.

00:38:17.420 But you can't really direct it.

00:38:19.040 The question is, where is it taking you?

00:38:21.400 So that little ball, that was a manifestation of what the Greeks referred to.

00:38:27.540 Greeks, is that right?

00:38:28.700 Mercurius.

00:38:29.260 It's Roman and Greek God.

00:38:31.320 Mercurius.

00:38:31.860 The spirit Mercurius is this thing.

00:38:33.580 It's the messenger of the gods.

00:38:34.760 The winged messenger of the gods.

00:38:36.240 It flits around.

00:38:37.860 You say, well, the curiosity pulls you forward.

00:38:40.420 To where?

00:38:41.500 Well, to wherever it wants to take you.

00:38:44.460 That's a Jungian idea as well.

00:38:45.940 Is that your curiosity is like the manifestation of yourself to the ego.

00:38:51.440 Right?

00:38:51.720 It's, it's, it's the thing that you could be in the future calling you forward.

00:38:56.600 Something like that.

00:38:57.840 Very strange ideas.

00:39:00.140 Very interesting.

00:39:01.420 See, when you start to understand that you're not in control of what makes you interested in things, the whole world shifts around on you.

00:39:09.340 Because the question is, if you're not in control of that, what the hell is directing it?

00:39:14.740 What's going on?

00:39:16.360 It's not you.

00:39:17.400 It's not under your control.

00:39:19.220 It's not random.

00:39:20.560 It's alive.

00:39:21.540 It's dynamic.

00:39:22.240 It has an orientation towards something.

00:39:25.020 That's the Jungian self.

00:39:26.660 Or that's the manifestation of meaning.

00:39:28.860 Yes.

00:39:29.540 Very strange.

00:39:31.460 I told you this already.

00:39:32.600 See, there's a, there's an old representation.

00:39:35.000 A very old representation of the snitch right there.

00:39:38.140 Now, this is old symbol.

00:39:39.880 You've got this dragon of chaos here.

00:39:42.740 It's kind of like an octopus as well.

00:39:44.180 That twist in its tail refers to infinity.

00:39:46.680 Dragons almost always have an infinite tail like that.

00:39:49.620 It's got the claws of a bird, maybe a bird of prey.

00:39:52.320 The body of an animal and the head of a snake.

00:39:55.620 And then down here, you see, it's got the sun up there.

00:39:58.600 So it's sort of aiming at upward towards the sun, this thing.

00:40:01.840 And then down here is this thing called the round chaos.

00:40:04.860 It's an old alchemical system.

00:40:06.060 And if you look, the dragon is fertilizing this.

00:40:09.380 And that has potential in it.

00:40:11.260 It's like an egg.

00:40:12.300 It's full of potential.

00:40:15.200 And so it's matter and spirit at the same time.

00:40:18.380 It's sort of like, it's, it's a, it's a representation of that, which you're exploring because you could say, well, the thing that you're exploring, sort of a constructivist idea.

00:40:27.400 You explore something new.

00:40:29.280 What do you generate from the exploration?

00:40:31.740 You, because as you explore it, you learn things that changes you.

00:40:35.440 So you generate psyche out of the exploration, that spirit.

00:40:38.720 And you also generate the world out of it.

00:40:40.720 But the thing to begin with is psyche and world at the same time.

00:40:44.240 And that's what this thing represents.

00:40:46.140 And that's what Harry Potter is chasing.

00:40:48.620 That's what makes him a seeker.

00:40:51.500 Very strange ideas.

00:40:52.780 Now I'm going to tell you a dream.

00:40:54.380 And there was a dream I had when I was working on these ideas.

00:40:56.840 And I'm going to tell you the dream for two reasons.

00:40:58.880 One is because it bears directly on these ideas.

00:41:01.320 And two, because, well, we just covered psychoanalytic thought.

00:41:04.580 And I want to show you how a dream can work.

00:41:07.180 Because it's not easy to find a dream that you can interpret in a way that's public, that makes sense.

00:41:11.500 Because they're usually so tightly defined contextually.

00:41:14.420 You can define them in the therapeutic context because you know so much about the person.

00:41:18.860 It's very hard to pull that out and make it meaningful outside of that context.

00:41:22.980 But this dream works okay.

00:41:23.960 So I was dreaming that there was a small object.

00:41:28.820 It was a circle, a sphere about this big.

00:41:31.320 And it was floating on top of the Atlantic Ocean.

00:41:34.460 And I was, I had a kind of a bird's eye view of it.

00:41:37.300 And I was following it along.

00:41:38.680 Like maybe, you know, like a drone would follow behind an object.

00:41:42.220 And it was floating.

00:41:43.100 And it was really zipping along, man.

00:41:44.840 It was really, really fast.

00:41:46.560 And then the scene shifted to a bunch of scientists.

00:41:50.400 They were sitting inside a room full of television monitors.

00:41:53.740 And they were watching this thing move across the ocean.

00:41:56.100 And so it was here.

00:41:57.260 And then it had four hurricanes beside it.

00:41:59.800 One here, one here, one here, and one here.

00:42:02.400 So it was in the center of four hurricanes.

00:42:04.460 So whatever it was, was like some bloody potent thing.

00:42:07.200 It was zipping across the, it was zipping across the ocean.

00:42:11.080 Then the scientists got a hold of it, I guess.

00:42:13.840 And the scene shifted.

00:42:14.760 And I was in a museum, like an old Victorian museum.

00:42:18.160 And this thing, this ball was now inside a wood.

00:42:22.400 So imagine a wood stand with a glass case on top of it.

00:42:26.060 It was inside the glass case and it was floating.

00:42:28.400 It was sort of pulsing a little bit.

00:42:29.940 And so inside the room, there was Stephen Hawking.

00:42:34.460 And the American president, I don't remember who it was.

00:42:39.420 He was sort of faceless.

00:42:40.600 But Stephen, I thought, Stephen Hawking, what the hell? 0.95

00:42:43.620 Disembodied intellect. 0.80

00:42:45.500 That's Stephen Hawking.

00:42:46.600 So that's what that meant.

00:42:47.980 And the president, well, he's just a symbol of order.

00:42:51.820 And so this thing, whatever it was, that was surrounded by these winds,

00:42:55.740 had been placed into a category system, right?

00:42:58.060 It was in a museum.

00:42:59.140 It was boxed in.

00:43:00.320 It had been conceptualized and categorized, partly by disembodied intellect.

00:43:04.260 That was Stephen Hawking.

00:43:05.480 And partly by social order.

00:43:07.120 And so there's a Binswanger boss thing going on there.

00:43:10.120 The thing pulses and is alive.

00:43:11.980 So it's got its own power.

00:43:14.000 But it's also encapsulated in a category system.

00:43:17.700 So I'm a third-person observer in there.

00:43:19.780 I'm not in the room.

00:43:20.420 I'm just seeing this.

00:43:21.520 So that was fine.

00:43:22.660 So the next thing that happened, oh, yes, one of them described the features of the room.

00:43:26.900 Its walls were seven feet thick.

00:43:28.720 They didn't want this thing going anywhere.

00:43:30.740 And it was made out of titanium dioxide.

00:43:33.100 And I thought, what the hell is that?

00:43:34.700 Well, it's a paint.

00:43:35.720 It's a paint substance.

00:43:36.880 But it's also what the hull of the Starship Enterprise is made out of.

00:43:39.900 So my dream was saying, well, what's the hardest substance there is as well?

00:43:44.540 It's titanium dioxide.

00:43:45.980 It's not getting out of that box.

00:43:48.180 The walls were designed to permanently constrain the object.

00:43:51.000 Okay, now the next thing that happened was this object was, it was, you could tell it was kind of alive.

00:43:55.460 And it kept shifting around.

00:43:57.100 And at one point it turned into a chrysalis, you know, a cocoon.

00:44:00.280 And I thought, what the hell does that mean?

00:44:03.000 And then, so it turned into a cocoon.

00:44:05.880 And I don't know if you've seen a chrysalis when it's just about to hatch.

00:44:08.460 But it twitches around, eh?

00:44:10.720 It's alive, that thing.

00:44:12.300 So they're very strange things.

00:44:14.240 And then at the end, it turned itself into a pipe.

00:44:16.620 Like a meerschaum pipe.

00:44:18.280 And I thought, then it reformed itself into a sphere and just shot right out of the room.

00:44:23.200 Like the walls weren't even there.

00:44:25.140 It was just, it decided it was gone.

00:44:27.140 Bang, it was gone.

00:44:28.300 And I woke up and I thought, what the hell?

00:44:30.780 What the hell does that mean?

00:44:32.220 It took me forever to figure this out.

00:44:34.420 So then, about two years after experiencing this dream,

00:44:37.420 I was reading Dante's Inferno.

00:44:40.160 In the ninth canto, a messenger from God appears.

00:44:43.260 So Dante goes down into hell, right?

00:44:45.300 And it was Dante's attempt to describe.

00:44:48.640 It's brilliant.

00:44:49.680 So imagine that you go to a bad place psychologically, right?

00:44:53.620 So your life is collapsed.

00:44:55.740 That's terrible.

00:44:56.560 But then you're trying to figure out what you did wrong and how you're to blame for it. 1.00

00:45:00.380 And so what you do is a descent, a descent into your own foolishness and stupidity, 1.00

00:45:06.220 level by level by level. 1.00

00:45:08.020 And that's what Dante was trying to explain.

00:45:09.960 That's what that hell was.

00:45:11.640 Levels of catastrophe.

00:45:13.500 And there's something right at the bottom.

00:45:15.180 And he found that it was betrayal that was at the bottom.

00:45:18.380 So, in any case, I was reading that.

00:45:21.240 And there's a line in there that made me remember the stream.

00:45:24.000 Because I tried to figure out the stream for years, hey?

00:45:27.240 In the ninth canto, a messenger from God appears in hell to open the gate of Dis,

00:45:31.140 which is barring the divinely ordained way of Virgil and Dante.

00:45:34.840 The approach of this messenger, an angel,

00:45:38.580 is preceded by a great storm described in the following manner.

00:45:41.840 Suddenly, there broke on the dirty swell of the dark marsh,

00:45:45.000 a squall of terrible sound that sent a tremor through both shores of hell.

00:45:49.160 A sound as if two continents of air, one frigid and one scorching,

00:45:53.440 clashed head-on in a war of winds that stripped the forest bare,

00:45:57.380 ripped off whole boughs and blew them helter-skelter along the range of dust.

00:46:01.460 It raised before it, making the beasts and shepherds run for shelter.

00:46:05.360 So that was like a herald of the arrival of this messenger.

00:46:08.300 It's a very powerful scene.

00:46:09.400 And I thought about this dream with this thing with the four storms.

00:46:12.040 So, the pipe thing, that really, that really, that took me forever to figure out.

00:46:18.960 And I finally remembered this painting by Magritte.

00:46:21.860 This is not a pipe.

00:46:23.840 Right.

00:46:24.600 So what does that mean?

00:46:27.600 Well, what it means is, the representation is not the thing.

00:46:33.120 It's a very famous painting, right?

00:46:35.480 The representation is not the thing.

00:46:37.340 Well, even the perception is not the thing.

00:46:41.220 And that's what the dream was trying to get at.

00:46:42.860 It's like this thing, this thing that was so powerful and so capable of transforming,

00:46:48.120 could be encapsulated temporarily within a conceptual system.

00:46:51.380 But whenever it decided to leave, it was just going to leave.

00:46:54.700 And so, what it was referring to was the potential that there is inside objects.

00:46:59.860 So, for example, and it's such a complicated thing to explain.

00:47:03.860 Nobody knew what cell phones were going to do.

00:47:06.980 You make the cell phone, you think you know what it is.

00:47:09.980 You don't know what it is.

00:47:11.520 No one knew what the birth control pill was going to do.

00:47:14.320 You make it, you think you know what it is.

00:47:15.900 You have no idea what it is.

00:47:17.320 And it's going to do some of the things you think it will do.

00:47:19.560 And it's going to do a bunch of things you have no idea about.

00:47:23.100 And that's because the things are more complex than they look.

00:47:26.760 They're multidimensional.

00:47:27.640 And they have, I wouldn't say a life exactly, but they have an intrinsic complexity that tends to unfold across time.

00:47:34.640 And it's only somewhat predictable.

00:47:36.520 And so, you have things under your control and in your grasp to some limited degree.

00:47:41.120 But at any point, it's like the switch in the yin-yang symbol.

00:47:44.840 At any time, chaos can collapse into order.

00:47:47.360 Or order can collapse into chaos.

00:47:49.420 And that's what that dream meant.

00:47:50.700 Another painting by Magritte trying to express the same thing, right?

00:47:56.580 All men in suits, all uniform, all thinking the same way, same haircuts, completely socialized, blinded by their own perceptions.

00:48:05.700 That's us.

00:48:06.660 Because you think, well, your perceptions illuminate and bring you information.

00:48:10.500 It's yes and no.

00:48:12.320 They also constrain to equal degree.

00:48:16.060 I dreamed much later, about a year later.

00:48:18.680 This was a very cool image, too.

00:48:20.120 You know that image that, I think, is it Da Vinci or Michelangelo, of the man inscribed in the square, inside the circle?

00:48:26.820 It's a very famous image.

00:48:28.180 Well, it was like that, except it was a cube and not a square.

00:48:32.560 And so, there was a kind of a faceless person, almost like a mannequin, inside this cube.

00:48:38.100 And he was suspended about two feet off the ground.

00:48:40.700 And on the front wall, it was like wallpaper designs.

00:48:44.880 There was these little squares, about this big.

00:48:47.220 And they were Mandela's, square with a circle inside them. 0.59

00:48:49.860 And then inside the circle, there was a little snake tail that was out.

00:48:53.940 And the whole wall was covered with these snake tails.

00:48:56.720 And the person, when the person walked forward, the wall would move forward.

00:49:00.620 And when he walked backwards, the wall would move backwards.

00:49:02.920 It was always this far away.

00:49:04.740 And he could reach out and pull any of those snakes into being.

00:49:09.060 And so, that was another dream of the same sort of idea.

00:49:11.900 What do you have in front of you?

00:49:13.420 A world of objects.

00:49:14.740 No.

00:49:16.400 You have a world of potential in front of you.

00:49:18.840 And you can interact with any aspect of that potential.

00:49:22.720 And while you're doing so, you realize it.

00:49:24.480 You pull something into being that wouldn't have been there before.

00:49:27.640 And what you see in front of you is a wall of potential.

00:49:31.660 The potential is not infinite because you're constrained.

00:49:34.620 But it's still, it's for all intents and purposes, it'll do you just fine.

00:49:39.060 It's more potential than you could ever need.

00:49:40.780 And so, the dream, see, dreams, dreams are at the forefront of thinking.

00:49:49.760 They get there before you. 0.96

00:49:51.740 The creative imagination is at the forefront of thinking.

00:49:54.660 It's trying to, if you think that you're moving out into the unknown to gather new information,

00:49:59.320 what gets there first is the imagination.

00:50:02.000 Obviously, that's what Piaget said about children as well.

00:50:04.800 You imagine it first.

00:50:06.460 Then maybe you can represent it in speech.

00:50:08.580 And the dream is part of that imaginative process.

00:50:11.760 That's what artists are doing.

00:50:13.280 They're going out into the unknown and representing it imaginatively.

00:50:17.900 And so, well, what does that painting mean?

00:50:19.400 Well, if the artist knew that, he'd just write it down, right?

00:50:23.020 The art is beyond what's articulable.

00:50:26.420 Otherwise, it's not art.

00:50:27.500 It's just propaganda.

00:50:29.160 So, the artist and the dream, they're out on the frontier, right?

00:50:32.220 That's the open imagination.

00:50:34.080 And so, when you're conceptualizing new things,

00:50:35.980 the dream and the imagination can bring you places that you don't even know that you can go.

00:50:41.140 And it's a mystery, too.

00:50:42.320 It's like, I don't know how I figured this out.

00:50:44.160 It didn't?

00:50:44.540 It was as if the figuring out manifested itself inside me.

00:50:47.960 Because that's the experience in a dream, right?

00:50:50.020 You don't feel, I dreamed this up.

00:50:52.720 You feel, I had a dream.

00:50:55.820 Where did that come from?

00:50:57.460 It springs out of the unknown and offers something to you.

00:51:00.720 Man's option to respond to this claim or to choose not to do seems to be the very core of human freedom.

00:51:10.040 Here's pathology as conceptualized by the phenomenologists.

00:51:14.220 It's a very interesting way of thinking about it.

00:51:16.740 Existential guilt and fear as debt to possibility.

00:51:20.000 Well, so there's this idea.

00:51:21.400 It's like an existential idea that you have some problems.

00:51:25.180 That you have some problems in your life.

00:51:26.940 Well, part of the Dasein is the sense of responsibility that you have to address those problems.

00:51:33.060 It's part and parcel of the way that human beings manifest themselves in the world.

00:51:36.920 So part of your pathology would be failure to bear the responsibility for your being.

00:51:41.760 And the sense that you have a debt to existence.

00:51:44.360 And according to the phenomenologists, that's built right into the sense of your being.

00:51:48.380 Failure to shoulder existential burden results in neurotic guilt and fear.

00:51:53.000 It's a remarkable conceptualization.

00:51:54.920 Unpaid debt to existence.

00:51:58.020 Clean up your room.

00:51:59.420 Right.

00:51:59.860 Well, that's a good place to start.

00:52:01.580 Stop.

00:52:02.420 Okay.

00:52:02.980 Good.

00:52:03.380 We'll see you in a week and a half.

00:52:04.940 Good.

00:52:14.000 Good.

00:52:27.400 Good.

00:52:28.440 Good.

00:52:29.080 Good.

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The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - December 27, 2020

149. Phenomenology： Heidegger, Binswanger, Boss

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